government

By DONNA JONES

 

SANTA CRUZ - Local governments could cash in on legal pot to the tune of $7.5 million, a new Santa Cruz County Grand Jury report concludes.

 

The analysis of the financial impact of Proposition 19, a measure on the Nov. 2 statewide ballot, which seeks to legalize, regulate and tax marijuana, is one of several reports released Tuesday by the Grand Jury - and no doubt the most unusual.

 

As is typical, the Grand Jury spent the past year studying various government agencies, and in its final report raises issues and makes recommendations for the studied programs and groups, including the County Jail, the public defender's contract, a drug treatment website and the Watsonville Personnel Commission, as well as for public libraries and the Lompico Water District, sections that were previously released.

 

But the pot report aimed to scrutinize the finances without weighing in on the issue. Read more »

By. Chris Vanderveen

 

DENVER - It hasn't exactly fixed Denver's budget woes, but it certainly hasn't hurt either. Medical marijuana.

 

"They are making a lot of money off of us," Brian Wiley said. Wiley helps run Patients Choice of Colorado on South Broadway.

 

Ever since the Colorado Attorney General gave cities permission to start taxing medical marijuana late last year, cities across Colorado have seen an extra shot of cash infused into their ever-tightening budgets.

 

In Denver, it has resulted in an extra million dollars of sales tax revenue.

 

The numbers are from a period stretching from December to April. During those five months, the city collected $1,023,308.67 from the various medical marijuana businesses scattered around the city. In March, the city collected $226,492.56, the highest reported collection to date. Read more »

By Dionesis Tamondong • Pacific Daily News

 

Chris Halligan, who suffers from a rare genetic disorder that causes pain around his knees and joints, said he's happy a measure has finally been introduced to allow for the medicinal use of marijuana.

 

But Dr. Jan Bollinger, an orthopedic surgeon who would treat people with Halligan's condition, said he's not convinced medical marijuana is the answer for the chronic pain that afflicts many people with debilitating conditions.

 

The debate over the legalization of medical marijuana has been sparked by Sen. Rory Respicio's introduction of Bill 420 on Tuesday. Read more »

By. Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet

 

The next time you struggle to comprehend how someone could spend their time trolling the Internet in order to defend and downplay whatever government cover-up or abuse is in the news this week, consider the fact that they may be on a government payroll.

 

The Canadian government has been caught paying a media group to monitor online political discussion and respond to “misinformation,” in order words to spread state-sanctioned propaganda, in the latest scandal to hit the Harper administration.

 

“Under the pilot program the Harper government paid a media company $75,000 to monitor and respond to online postings about the east coast seal hunt,” reports News1130.

 

“The government has a lot of power, that it feels the need to monitor public bulletin boards, or places where people express views and then to respond to that, seems to me going beyond a reasonable action the government should be taking,” said UBC Computer Science professor and President of the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, Richard Rosenberg. Read more »

By. Jane Tabe, Globe and Mail

1. A breathtaking shift. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives would lose 33 seats if an election were held today and only maintain a tenuous hold on minority government, according to a new EKOS poll.

“From comfortable majority and kudos in October to the razor’s edge of losing government altogether,” says pollster Frank Graves, whose new survey finds that Canadians simply don’t like the Parliamentary shutdown.

“Clearly it has a significant impact. It has become a proxy and a catalyst for a whole bunch of broader frustrations and anxieties that the public are feeling about the government.”

Indeed, the EKOS data is consistent with two polls released yesterday showing the Tories and Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals effectively tied for support and that Canadians are displeased with Mr. Harper’s decision to prorogue Parliament.

Read more »

By STEVEN GREENHUT

To the extent that anyone still thinks about the former Soviet Union and its satellite communist states, they understandably think about the suffocating oppression – the Berlin Wall, the gulags, the KGB, the political prisoners, the persecution of religious people and minorities. Yet, in talking to refugees from that nightmarish world, it's clear that one of the worst aspects of communism was the endless waiting in line, the ceaseless bureaucracy and the incomprehensible rules and regulations that governed every aspect of everyday life.

 

Despite some real assaults on civil liberties in America (by Republican and Democratic administrations alike), Americans aren't facing too many serious dangers of the first kind mentioned above. But, as government expands its reach, we are facing bigger lines, additional nonsensical rules and more bureaucracy. You can barely do anything these days without getting approval from the authorities these days, and this touches on even the smallest, most inconsequential areas of our existence.

  Read more »

The government keeps pushing the BS that pot is addictive and has serious health consequences. And no wonder -- lying about pot is a lucrative business.

 

By Paul Armentano, AlterNet

Marijuana's addiction potential may be no big deal, but it's certainly big business.

According to a widely publicized 1999 Institute of Medicine report, fewer than 10 percent of those who try cannabis ever meet the clinical criteria for a diagnosis of "drug dependence" (based on DSM-III-R criteria). By contrast, 32 percent of tobacco users and 15 percent of alcohol users meet the criteria for "drug dependence."

Nevertheless, it is pot -- not booze or cigarettes -- that has the federal government seeing red and clinical investigators seeing green. As I reported for AlterNet last year, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which overseas more than 85 percent of the world's research on controlled substances, recently appropriated some $4 million in taxpayers' dollars to establish the nation's first-ever Center for Cannabis Addiction. Its mission: to "develop novel approaches to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of marijuana addiction."

Read more »

Johnson: I did not mislead the House

By Ian Dunt, Politics.co.uk

Alan Johnson is facing serious accusations of misleading MPs when he explained why he had sacked the government's chief advisor on drugs, Professor David Nutt.

He received a letter from Dr Evan Harris, Lib Dem science spokesman, over the weekend, saying he had been made aware of an article and presentation on Prof Nutt's views on drug classification and harm before they occurred.

When the home secretary told MPs about the sacking in the Commons last week, he stressed he was unaware of the paper, published in January, and a speech Prof Nutt then made in King's College London.

Read more »

By Steve Fox, AlterNet

Professor David Nutt didn’t play the game. As the chief drug policy advisor in the British Government, an unspoken part of his job description was to help maintain a public fiction about marijuana – or cannabis, as it is known in the U.K. and other parts of the world.  Specifically, he was expected to further the misperception of cannabis as a substance worthy of being classified and prohibited in a manner similar to more dangerous drugs like heroin and cocaine.  

He made a big mistake at the end of last month. In a lecture at King’s College in London, he spoke honestly – and truthfully – about the fact that cannabis is less harmful than alcohol and urged the government to factor the relative harms of substances into their policy-making.  Moreover, he accused the British government of ignoring the evidence about the true harms of cannabis in order to reclassify the drug and increase penalties for possession. 

Read more »