Bill Bratton blames drug violence in NYC on pot

Police Commissioner Bill Bratton on Sunday ripped states that have legalized marijuana for recreational use, saying pot is responsible for “the vast majority’’ of violence in the city.

“Here in New York, the violence we see associated with drugs, the vast majority of it, is around the issue of marijuana, which is ironic considering the explosion in use of heroin now in the city,” Bratton said Sunday on John Catsimatidis’s radio show.

“Interestingly enough, here in New York City most of the violence we see – violence around drug trafficking – is involving marijuana and I have to scratch my head as we are seeing many states wanting to legalize marijuana, and more liberalization of policies,” he said.

His comments came two years after Mayor de Blasio introduced an NYPD policy mandating that a person possessing less than 25 grams of marijuana get a ticket instead of being arrested, as long as they have ID and no outstanding warrants.

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First of all the problems associated with marijuana are legal not medical. If New York State legalized marijuana the same as Colorado has they wouldn't have this problem. Take the criminality out of it take the problems out of it. But of course if they did that the cops could no longer make weed busts which pads their resumes. If Bratton is serious about safe streets in New York City then he better tell Albany to legalize it or allow medical marijuana or else nothing is going to change.

Marijuana legalization help needed on 4/20

Today, April 20, is widely recognized as a day to celebrate marijuana and the fight for legalization. We hope you have fun, if you partake, but we also need your help right now to stop an outrageous attack on legalization from an unexpected source:

ActBlue, an organization that claims to be a "progressive" leader, is actively raising money to stop marijuana legalization in Massachusetts.

ActBlue is well-known as the donation processor for politicians like Bernie Sanders and others who support marijuana law reform. So it's especially unacceptable for them to be actively promoting the continued prohibition of marijuana, which leads to mass incarceration and racially discriminatory arrest rates. There's nothing progressive about that.

Please take a second to sign the petition to ActBlue now:

Click here to sign the petition.

Make the DEA commissioner resign over medical marijuana comments

Last week, the acting chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration called medical marijuana "a joke" during a Q&A with reporters. Now, medical marijuana patients are calling for his head, with an online petition demanding his resignation attracting over 10,000 signatures on change.org.

Here's what administrator Chuck Rosenberg said about medical marijuana, via CBS News:

"What really bothers me is the notion that marijuana is also medicinal -- because it's not," Rosenberg said in a briefing to reporters. "We can have an intellectually honest debate about whether we should legalize something that is bad and dangerous, but don't call it medicine -- that is a joke."

"There are pieces of marijuana -- extracts or constituents or component parts -- that have great promise" medicinally, he said. "But if you talk about smoking the leaf of marijuana -- which is what people are talking about when they talk about medicinal marijuana -- it has never been shown to be safe or effective as a medicine."

Rosenberg's argument that smoking marijuana "has never been shown to be safe or effective as a medicine" has been contradicted by numerous studies. A meta-analysis of 79 medical marijuana studies involving 6,462 patients, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association earlier this year, found "moderate-quality evidence to support the use of cannabinoids for the treatment of chronic pain and spasticity." There was low-quality evidence suggesting marijuana had therapeutic applications for other conditions as well.

The finding that marijuana is effective at treating chronic pain is a big deal. High-caliber prescription painkillers are highly addictive and potentially deadly when misused -- they killed over 16,000 people via overdose in 2013, according to the CDC. Numerous studies have found that at the state level, the availability of medical marijuana is associated with a significant reduction of painkiller abuse rates and overdose deaths -- presumably, as patients opt to treat their pain with marijuana rather than painkillers.

Rosenberg's statements about medical marijuana aren't surprising when you consider that they comport with the official position of the DEA. The Administration considers marijuana a "Schedule 1" controlled substance, which among other things means it has "no currently accepted medical use." Most researchers reject this claim, however, with organizations including Brookings Institution, the American Medical Association, and the ACLU arguing that the current designation is inappropriate.

Given all this, marijuana advocates are furious at what they see as the DEA's dismissal of the science behind medical pot.

"My mom is a legal patient in Rhode Island, and she uses medical marijuana to deal with the severe pain she experiences from multiple sclerosis," said Tom Angell, chairman of the group Marijuana Majority, which started the petition. "Medical cannabis is no joke to my family or the millions of other American families who have seen its real benefits."

In an e-mailed statement, a DEA spokesperson sought to clarify Rosenberg's remarks. "To clarify, Acting Administrator Rosenberg indicated that marijuana should be subject to the same levels of approval and scrutiny as any other substance intended for use as a medicine. DEA supports efforts to research potential medical uses of marijuana. To this end, DEA has never denied a registration request from anyone conducting marijuana research using FDA approved protocols."

The spokesman added, "acting Administrator Rosenberg was also clear to point out there are a number of marijuana components and/or extracts which appear to show promise as medicines, but have not yet been approved as safe and effective. His comments reflected the fact that FDA has not approved any medicinal uses for smoked marijuana."

This wouldn't be the first time Rosenberg has courted controversy over marijuana during his tenure as DEA administrator. Over the summer, he said that marijuana was "probably not" as dangerous as heroin, and then one week later clarified that "heroin is clearly more dangerous than marijuana." For the record, over 8,200 people died from heroin in 2013, compared to zero known marijuana overdose deaths.

The previous DEA chief, Michele Leonhart, had a rocky relationship with the Obama administration as well -- especially when it came to drug policy issues, which she often criticized the administration on. Leonhart left her post under a cloud of scandal earlier this year, prompting cheers from drug policy reform advocates and hopes that her successor would change the DEA's tone on certain drug policy issues.

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On Chris Christie

I was watching Fox news tonight and they say Chris Christie is slipping in the polls. In fact on the next GOP debate on Fox Business Channel Christie is going to be sitting at the kiddie table along with the rest of the candidates with low poll numbers. Fortunately Rand Paul got enough votes to be on the main stage. Then they also show a month old video in which Christie discusses drug addiction. That is good and all but then Christie calls himself "pro-life",he states that he believes that life is valuable at all stages of life not just in the womb. Nice try,Governor but I'm not buying it. I remember you telling a desperate father,who's only concern was saving his child's life,that you would deny his child a medical marijuana CBD medicine that would cut down on the child's seizures. You chose to potentially sacrifice a child's life for some stupid law that was founded on racial bigotry (Harry J. Anslinger,whom helped make marijuana illegal at the federal level believed that blacks and hispanics shouldn't have access to marijuana because it would make them insane because Anslinger considered them to be degenerate races to begin with). Christie is talking about compassion for drug addicts. Fine,what about medical marijuana or a form of it to save a child's life. Christie has stated that if he becomes President he will sic the DEA on medical and recreational marijuana dispensaries. He doesn't care about state law. He is going to close them down with the ruthlessness of a zealous federal prosecutor. I guess when Christie states he is "pro-life" he doesn't mean everybody. If you are a child in need of a CBD form of medical marijuana Christie will abort you.

The mad doctor

Ben Carson Wants to "Intensify" the War on Drugs
The Iowa frontrunner is spoiling for more drug war.

Katherine Mangu-Ward|Oct. 22, 2015 4:50 pm

Presidential contender Ben Carson told Glenn Beck that he wants to "intensify" the war on drugs.

Robby Soave blogged Carson's controversial remarks about using the federal Department of Education to eradicated political bias from the academy yesterday, but elsewhere in the same Blaze interview (starting at about 1:30) the brain surgeon/book writer/Iowa poll leader reiterated his intention to double down on drug prohibition:

Beck is conducting a lightning round of questions. He asks Carson:

Beck: Do you continue the war on drugs?

Carson: Absolutely

Beck: You do?

Carson: I would intensify it.

(Reason readers may recall that our own Jacob Sullum helped usher the talk show personality onto the anti-prohibition bandwagon earlier this year.)

Then, bless his besweatered heart, Beck drops a wee, snarky little pause on the candidate and then follows up:

Beck: Let me ask you a question...

Beck: How...

Beck: I mean, it doesn't seem to be working now.

Carson: Yeah well, go down to the border in Arizona like I was a few weeks ago. I mean, it's an open highway and the federal government isn't doing anything to stop it.

Beck then asks the candidate if he would legalize marijuana and Carson replies "I disagree with it." He has previously said that he considers pot a "gateway drug."

This concludes today's harshing of your buzz.

P.S. Tune into Kennedy on Fox Business tonight to hear me talk about this, Benghazi, the Kardashians, and much, much more.

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Marijuana prohibitionists getting desperate

The Anti-Marijuana Lobby Is Enlisting Scientific Mercenaries
SAM BECKER GOOGLE
AUGUST 30, 2014

It’s an age-old play that has been used in several different industries over the past several decades, and now marijuana is the new target. One incredibly popular method for garnering support against a cause is to attack the science and facts supporting it, even if it is a virtual certainty that you’d be fighting a losing battle.

According to a new report from Vice, that’s precisely what’s happening to the cannabis industry, despite the fact that marijuana has only been legalized in two states for recreational use and a handful of others for medicinal purposes. It’s been well-known for a while that there are plenty of groups with vested interests in keeping marijuana illegal, including prison guard unions, law enforcement agents and officials, private prison companies, and more. But the group Vice focuses on is the painkiller industry.

One would think at first that pharmaceutical companies would be ecstatic about marijuana prohibition finally coming to an end, as it could possibly supply them with a relatively cheap and easy resource to study and apply to their products. But as with any entrenched special interest group, they instead see it as a threat to profits.

So instead of embracing the end of prohibition, many companies have decided to pay academics to develop research that instead leads to the conclusion that marijuana is a health hazard and should remain outlawed. Vice cites the claims of Dr. Herbert Kleber of Columbia University, who has published work and has been quoted as saying that marijuana is a ‘gateway drug’, is addictive and will hurt society as a whole.

Of course, he’s also a paid consultant to several large pharmaceutical companies that manufacture painkillers, which could lose their appeal if marijuana is adopted en masse in coming years.

As with anything, marijuana does most likely pose some health risks. Smoking anything isn’t really good for your health, and there is plenty of research to be done focused on the long-term effects of cannabis use, particularly in younger people. But even with those concerns in mind, marijuana use is not even remotely close in terms of danger and damage to products like cigarettes, alcohol and yes, even prescription painkillers — all of which have been linked to thousands, if not millions of deaths per year.

Marijuana has still yet to kill anyone, although it could play a factor in things like auto accidents. But as far as overdoses? Zero.

The truth is that the ploy boy these painkiller manufacturers is tired and played out. We saw it from the cigarette companies during the 1960s and ’70s, claiming that cigarettes were harmless when they are one of the most dangerous products available. We’re seeing it today in the climate change debate, in which 98 percent of scientists have come to the conclusion that man-made climate change is a serious problem. Yet, there are still a handful of scientists (many of whom on the payroll of large, entrenched energy corporations) who feel otherwise.

Perhaps the most important question of all regarding these paid academics is relative to the worries they’re adopting in the first place. For those opposing marijuana legalization, the arguments are usually centered-around health concerns and public safety. Yet, we already have far more dangerous products available on the market, which actually do lead to increased instances of violence and crime and nobody has a problem with it.

So why would they have a problem with marijuana?

There’s always the chance that these people genuinely hold these concerns, but it has to be understood that the ties they hold to these companies compromises their opinion in many aspects, especially in the eyes of the public.

Take what the paid ‘experts’ are saying with a grain of salt. This is the same tactic we’ve seen the energy and cigarette industries use over the years, and until some concrete evidence surfaces that marijuana is indeed a public threat, there’s really no reason to think so.

After all, do we really want to keep putting people in jail to bolster the profits of pharmaceutical companies, private prison organizations, and prison guard unions?

Probably not.

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