USA VOTING TO LEGALIZE MJ IN Colorodo

[Skunkxxx]

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Dear Supporter,

It is done. Official. Signed (more than 90,000 times), sealed, and delivered.

 

The Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol initiative in Colorado has qualified for the November 2012 ballot! In a little more than eight months, the voters of Colorado will have the opportunity to make the state the first place in the world with a fully legal and regulated marijuana market for all adults. The battle to end marijuana prohibition starts now.

 

MPP – which provided more than 90 percent of the funding for this signature drive, including direct contributions from our supporters to the state-based issue committee – would like to thank the campaign team on the ground for its hard work on the signature drive. In particular, we salute the nose-to-the-grindstone dedication the team demonstrated while collecting more than 14,000 signatures in less than two weeks earlier this month with the temperature rarely, if ever, topping 40 degrees.

 

We are now moving to the second phase of this campaign – the persuasion phase. The campaign needs volunteers reaching out to Colorado voters and helping them understand that marijuana is not as scary as they have been led to believe. The goal is to convince voters on the fence that it is utterly irrational to punish adults who choose to relax or socialize with marijuana instead of alcohol.

 

Even if you are outside Colorado, you will be able to help throughout the year by making calls to swing voters. If we all contribute, this initiative will pass and the course of history will be changed.

 

Please visit the campaign website today and sign up to volunteer for just a few hours or more. And if you are not able to volunteer, please consider making a financial contribution to support the campaign's efforts. With your help, we will end marijuana prohibition this November.

 

Best,

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[Cerberus]

That's awesome news even if it's a duplicate thread

 

 

Colorado was on my travel list in near future and this only makes me want t o visit it more.

 

THanks for the news Skunkxxx

 

[jadcla]

WOW!! that is fantastic news!! and if all goes well there, wont that make for a better mind sent for governments around the world? for example, australia might see that "oh its not so bad" and then maybe work towards legalization here!

 

hope that makes sense haha

 

peace,

 

Jadcla

[Freakbrother]

WOW!! that is fantastic news!! and if all goes well there, wont that make for a better mind sent for governments around the world? for example, australia might see that "oh its not so bad" and then maybe work towards legalization here!

 

Now that would be good news, but Colorado is a start. Has there ever been a debate in Australia about legalisation?

[Skunkxxx]

Now that would be good news, but Colorado is a start. Has there ever been a debate in Australia about legalisation?

 

 

This is not exactally what you speak of, but I bet you can learn something about whats going on in your country.

 

WAYNE HALL IS former director of Australia's National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC), and now a professor at the school of population health at the University of Queensland. Australia hasprobably done more research on marijuana than anywhere else: a result of its high rate of use and ample research funding, Hall tells me. He has pondered the harms of marijuana for the last 13 years and his commentaries appear in prestigious journals, like a recent one on cannabis and schizophrenia in the January 2006 issue of The Lancet.

"It's hard to get the real message out because the debate is so polarised. If it is perceived to be harmful, people want to go to war and lock up every user; if it is perceived to be harmless, they want to legalise it completely. The truth is that cannabis is a drug like any other – some people will experience difficulty," says Hall.

It seems that after all the textbooks, the scientific papers, and the front-page headlines, it's still the same old story: marijuana used in moderation is a relatively harmless drug. Pharmacologist Les Iversen, now a visiting Oxford scholar, tells me, "Marijuana is somewhat more harmful than aspirin." Iversen should know; he spent 10 years assessing the risks of drugs for pharmaceutical giant Merck & Company, and recently served on Britain's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.

On the scale of harmful substances, marijuana ranks fairly low. Tobacco and alcohol exact a far greater toll, between them accounting for some 12 per cent of global deaths. Even aspirin is credited with causing in the vicinity of 50 deaths a year in Australia alone. No deaths are attributable to marijuana.

Yet in the war on drugs, marijuana continues to be singled out as the principal scapegoat. In 2005, some three quarters of a million people in the U.S. alone were arrested on marijuana-related charges, about 89 per cent of these just for possession. Even cancer patients who were using marijuana to ease their symptoms were among those arrested.

In Australia, the state of New South Wales recently toughened its laws, and Prime Minister John Howardhas called for more to follow: "I will ask [the state premiers] to agree with me that part of the solution to the mental health problem is a tougher line on marijuana, and I imagine they will agree with me," he said, ahead of a forthcoming summit with the states.

Marijuana has been demonised, says Castle, to the point that even its considerable medicinal and agricultural uses have been disavowed. The plant is extremely hardy, and has as much to offer the environmentally challenged world today as it did in times of old, when 'Indian hemp' provided the mainstay for ship sails and rope.[/sizePaul Dillon, a spokesman for Australia's National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC): "If you talk about a drug of dependence, that heightens attention and the chance that the legal ramifications will be upped. A lot of people simply don't consider marijuana to be that harmful."Paul Dillon, a spokesman for Australia's National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC): "If you talk about a drug of dependence, that heightens attention and the chance that the legal ramifications will be upped. A lot of people simply don't consider marijuana to be that harmful."

 

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/files/jun07/marijuana_imagethree.jpghttp://

The Mardigrass Festival campaigns for the legislation of marijuana as well as offering five days of cannabis-based activities in the New South Wales town of Nimbin.(Image: Nimbin Hemp Embassy)

In Australia, according to the 2004 National Drug Household Survey, about two million people used cannabis during the previous year; that's about 10 per cent of the total population. Clearly, cannabis use is entrenched in developed nations like Australia

 

 

F WE ARE TO BELIEVE LORD BIRT, prohibition doesn't work. And there are plenty of compelling arguments that prohibition does harm: cannabis users are stigmatised by a criminal record – although states in Australia mostly issue warnings or fines to users, occasionally they go to jail. They are also exposed to drug pushers, who also peddle highly addictive amphetamines, cocaine and heroin.

 

There is also the harm caused by having a substance used by millions easily available, without any testing of its strength or quality. Then there is police time and resources trying to enforce a law that a great number of citizens regularly flout. And cannabis prohibition is a notorious driver of police corruption, as four Australian royal commissions since 1986 have all concluded.

 

ith the release of the document, the Australian Parliamentary Secretary for Health, Christopher Pyne, exhorted the nation, "We have to treat it [cannabis] as an illicit drug as dangerous as heroin, amphetamines or cocaine."

 

In contrast, the National Alcohol Strategy, released around the same time, had a positively chirpy tone. Its opening paragraph read, "Alcohol plays an important role in the Australian economy. It generates substantial employment, retail activity, export income and tax revenue. Alcohol also has an important social role..."

 

Nick Walsh, a family doctor at the Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre in the state of Victoria, shook his head at the National Cannabis Strategy. "Disappointing, not progressive, but expected. It's hard not to be cynical and see that this document is trying to fulfil our obligations to the international narcotics control board rather than address the underlying issue that the cannabis industry is unregulated and uncontrollable because it is illegal."

 

Hall is less critical: "The Australian federal government would like to recriminalise marijuana, [while] the states are divided. Given the disagreements, this document is a sensible compromise." Though Hall advocates legalisation of cannabis, he says "there's a snowball's chance in hell of that ever getting up."

 

As far as law reform or the medical use of marijuana (currently illegal) goes, this was not part of the terms of reference for Australia's cannabis strategy – the authors were not even permitted to address the issues.

 

Why do countries such as the U.S. and Australia seem increasingly prohibitive? "In the debate over drug policy, rationality and evidence is a small factor," says Wodak. "It's about winning votes by being hard on drugs", a strategy he dubs "political Viagra" for politicians. Although, he adds, "it's not as reliable as it used to be."

 

A stunning example is the Shafer report. In 1970, then U.S. President Nixon wanted an investigation into marijuana to back his war on drugs. He appointed Raymond Shafer, a Republican former governor of Pennsylvania with a reputation as a 'drug warrior' to lead it. Shafer's committee conducted the most wide-ranging review of marijuana ever undertaken by the U.S. federal government. And Shafer did a complete about face.

 

In his 1972 report, Marijuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding, he said: "Marijuana's relative potential for harm to the vast majority of individual users and its actual impact on society does not justify a social policy designed to seek out and firmly punish those who use it." As Watergate revealed, Nixon was appalled, and waged his war regardless. Since then, 15 million Americans have been arrested on marijuana charges.

 

Notwithstanding the current hardening of Australia's cannabis policy, Wodak is surprisingly optimistic. "It's a winnable battle. The arguments are so compelling. The policy has got to be based on rationality and evidence, not fearmongering and angst."

 

Wodak draws some cheer from Britain's recent decision. In December 2005 Michael Rawlins, the chairman of the U.K. Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, recommended that the British parliament not upgrade its punitive laws on cannabis from Class C to Class B; a recommendation that was accepted. "While cannabis can, unquestionably, produce harms, these are not of the same order as those of substances within Class B [the more punitive category that includes amphetamines, barbiturates and codeine]." He recommended education programs to discourage use and more research.

 

Despite his two decades in the trenches, Wodak shows no signs of battle fatigue. "What keeps me going? Every day I see people and their families damaged by these costly and ineffectual and counter-productive drug laws and policy. There is the excessive permissiveness to alcohol – we regularly see women bashed by drunken husbands – while marijuana remains criminalised.

 

"In thoughtful circles, the debate is over: harm reduction wins. Now the task is to get this through the political maze."

 

I know its long and some its old but its all the good news I could find from the subject.

 

Peace Out

SKUNKXX

 

Go Hemp or Go Limp!

Edited February 29, 2012 by Skunkxxx

[daemon]

There is a weekly mini-series being aired on the Colorado MMJ industry.

 

List of episodes and air dates:

http://www.tvrage.com/shows/id-30426/episode_list

 

Youtube Channel where the episodes are freely available:

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheBuddernut

 

Hopefully it'll be legalised but with the US Federal Mafia I think the ramifications will be huge on the state.

[Cerberus]

Colorado is definitely on my to do list

 

South Park and now this, you can't argue with that

Edited March 12, 2012 by Cerberus