News2020.com - The Drugs War under Scrutiny

Miracle Grow worked for me the first year
BudBurner
May 15th 2007

In the early nineties cannabis cultivation had dramatically changed,
indoor hydroponics chemical grown cannabis was now readily on the
market, many mature cannabis users complained that the hydro grown
cannabis, made them feel quite ill the next morning, others maintained
hydroponicly grown cannabis caused a form of psychosis, this being
due to the amount of chemicals used when growing indoors. Yes, a
public health hazard

Prohibition has created a health risk to many Victorians, as organic
grown cannabis is now only a small part of the commercial market,
hydroponicly grown chemically enhanced adulterated cannabis holds the
major share of the market. Unfortunately, the younger generation of
cannabis consumers know no little difference between the two, as
organic cannabis is now a thing of the past.

Hydroponics is just a culture method. Hydroponics can be
done either with chemical or organic fertilizers, such as
worm pee. Also, chemical plant foods such as Miracle-Gro
work poorly with hydroponics but (I know everyone’s gonna
flame me) quite well with soil.

Well, Miracle Grow worked for me the first year I grew. I
know many growers who use it; if it is withheld at the opportune time
before the harvest the bud will taste and smoke quite well. I have a
grower neighbor that uses Miracle Grow’s Muracid to charge the soil
media with a big blast of nitrogen and acidify the soil, the rest of
the time he uses commercial tomato fertilizer. His herb seems a bit
harsh but I think he doesn’t let it cure long enough; his buds are a-
burning before the plant has even realized it’s hanging upside down.
I use organics such as bat shit because I like the way
organics seem to bring out the earthy flavor so lacking in hydroponic
media. Even organic hydroponics don’t seem to match the flavors from
soil organics.
BudBurner

Student activists are accusing University Police of violating students’ privacy with overly aggressive drug enforcement tactics in the wake of several incidents in which officers posed as students or drug dealers.

Undercover officers frequently patrol hallways in dorms searching for would-be narcotics buyers, University Police spokeswoman Maj. Cathy Atwell said. But the activist group Students for Sensible Drug Policy said police crossed the line when an officer attempted to join their Facebook group under an assumed name. The students discovered the officer when they cross-referenced her e-mail address in the university directory.

Atwell said she did not know of the Facebook incident SSDP mentioned, but she defended officers’ approach to busting students for drugs in student housing.

“This has always been a tactic that we’ve used,” she said, noting that drug enforcement is a particular priority for University Police because drug use often leads to other types of crime. “Our police are committed to upholding the drug and alcohol policy. … What’s unreasonable about upholding the law?”

Why would the police want to give up nice, safe and easy drug busts? They might be forced to fight crimes that have victims.

Police infiltrating organizations is a great political tactic. It is a barrier to building trust between members. After all, if narcs infiltrate student organizations, they are capable of infiltrating any organization. For all that I know, narcs have infiltrated the Saskatchewan Marijuana Party. Maybe the president is a dirty narc, ready and willing to report us if we dare pass joints around. I heard that he doesn’t even smoke marijuana. How can we trust him? Infighting and a lack of trust can be a real barrier to achieving the goals and aims of activist organizations. If members of Students for Sensible Drug Policy are busy pointing fingers and trying to figure out who the narc is, they will have a much more difficult time raising money, printing and handing out flyers, organizing rallies, blogging or writing letters to the editor. Militant drug legalizers will be less effective. Divide and conquer!

I wonder if Martin Luther King or Ghandi had to deal with narcs.

Study: Alcohol, Tobacco Worse Than Drugs Study:

Alcohol and Tobacco More Dangerous Than Some Illegal Drugs Like Marijuana or Ecstasy By MARIA CHENG The Associated Press

LONDON - New “landmark” research finds that alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than some illegal drugs like marijuana or Ecstasy and should be classified as such in legal systems, according to a new British study.

In research published Friday in The Lancet magazine, Professor David Nutt of Britain’s Bristol University and colleagues proposed a new framework for the classification of harmful substances, based on the actual risks posed to society. Their ranking listed alcohol and tobacco among the top 10 most dangerous substances.

Nutt and colleagues used three factors to determine the harm associated with any drug: the physical harm to the user, the drug’s potential for addiction, and the impact on society of drug use. The researchers asked two groups of experts psychiatrists specializing in addiction and legal or police officials with scientific or medical expertise to assign scores to 20 different drugs, including heroin, cocaine, Ecstasy, amphetamines, and LSD.

Nutt and his colleagues then calculated the drugs’ overall rankings. In the end, the experts agreed with each other but not with the existing British classification of dangerous substances.

Heroin and cocaine were ranked most dangerous, followed by barbiturates and street methadone. Alcohol was the fifth-most harmful drug and tobacco the ninth most harmful. Cannabis came in 11th, and near the bottom of the list was Ecstasy.

According to existing British and U.S. drug policy, alcohol and tobacco are legal, while cannabis and Ecstasy are both illegal. Previous reports, including a study from a parliamentary committee last year, have questioned the scientific rationale for Britain’s drug classification system.

Along with our weekly in-depth Chronicle reporting, DRCNet has since late summer also been providing daily content in the way of blogging in the Stop the Drug War Speakeasy, as well as Latest News links (upper right-hand corner of most web pages), event listings (lower right-hand corner) and other info. Check out DRCNet every day to stay on top of the drug reform game!

Chronicle editor Phil Smith was traveling most of this week, and so most of this week’s blogging was done by content editor Scott Morgan. Scott contributed “ONDCP Admits Exaggerating Marijuana Potency,” “Wanna Beat a Drug Test? Switch From Pot to Oxycodone,” and “False Positives: The Dark Secret of the Drug Testing Regime.”Also joining us this week was Univ. of Las Vegas professor Randall Shelden, who contributed “Review of Lies, Damned Lies and Drug War Statistics by Matt B. Robinson and Renee G. Scherlen (SUNY Press, 2007).”

Check them out at http://stopthedrugwar.org/speakeasy — we encourage you to post comments.

Also check out our “In the Trenches” activist feed for a plethora of press releases, action alerts, job listings and other interesting items reposted from many allied organizations around the world. And please join our Reader Blogs where you can become an author in the DRCNet community too.

A report published by the Lancet on the Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse calls for the UK government to change the way that it classifies drugs. Currently the UK government, the UN and many major industrialised countries have drug classification systems that are supposed to be based upon the risks and harms associated with each drug. However, the report claims that the methodology behind the current classification systems is flawed and there is no satisfactory correlation between the harm the drugs cause and the ranking by which they are classified.

The report found that alcohol and tobacco, both currently legal drugs in the UK, fall into a category of risk and potential harm that is ranked only a little below that of heroin and cocaine. Whereas drugs such as ecstasy and LSD are illegal and pose less risk of harm.

The report states that the methodology determining the current classification system is “ill defined, opaque and arbitrary” This is due to a variety of reasons such as the complexity of factors necessary to assess the harm of drugs and the lack of evidence available. There is therefore a necessity to establish a new system of determining harm based more fact and scientific knowledge.

This idea that the current system of assessment is flawed supports ideas discussed in Richard Fielding’s lecture where we determined that perception plays a role in the determination of risk. In his lecture he quoted Mary Douglas stating “the effect of culture is to focus attention on certain dangers thereby transforming them into moral indicators” i.e. that the risk is not just a physical danger but rather a moral one. The report states that ‘discussions based upon formal assessment of harm  rather than the prejudice and assumptions may help society to engage in a more rational debate about the relative risk of harm of drugs’ Also the report noted that ‘it surely must be worth considering that two most widely lie in the upper half of the rankings of harm and that it is necessary for this to be taken into account when discussing misuse of drugs’

Heroin on the NHS - Cannabis back to Class B?
Dailyreferendum.blogspot.com
April 19th 2007

The Problem

The UK Drug Policy Commission has issued a report stating that the UK has the highest level of drug use and the second highest number of drug-related deaths in Europe . Drug addiction rates in the UK are double those in France, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands.

The UK illegal drugs market is worth about £5bn/year, drug-related crime is estimated at more than £13bn. About one in five people arrested is a heroin addict. There has been a 111% rise in drug-related offences between 1994 and 2005. This is not surprising when you consider that the heroin street price has dropped, falling from £70 a gram in 2000 to £54 in 2005.

The Commission said: “Tougher enforcement should theoretically make illegal drugs more expensive and harder to get. The prices of the principal drugs in Britain have declined for most of the last 10 years and there is no indication that tougher enforcement has succeeded in making drugs less accessible.”

More addicts are being treated than ever before, but the UK Drug Policy Commission said that: “the benefits were limited, and there was little evidence education schemes had had an impact.” More…..

Pot Politics, Marijuana Myths, and Cannabis Culture
Associatedcontent.com
April 18th 2007

First things first: For those of you who have no idea who William Randolf Hearst, Andrew Mellow, or Harry J. Anslinger were, do a google search including ‘marijuana’ or ‘hemp’. The simple fact of the matter is, most people are ignorant of the facts behind Marijuana prohibition. Unlike alcohol’s one hundred thousand or big tobacco’s more than four hundred thousand killed a year, Cannabis Sativa Indica Ruderalis also known as Hemp or Marijuana, has killed no one.
Apart from the fact that more people go to jail for marijuana than for violent crime, you’d think that the government was on to something. You’d think that, because more than five hundred thousand people a year die from using marijuana, the government would have to do something about it. You’d probably think that going to prison for five years or more as a minimum would be great for the drug pushers dealing in such a dangerous drug, and you’d be right.
As least as far as MADD, SADD, DADD, and tobacco activists might be concerned. But the fact of the matter is, marijuana is more beneficial than crude oil, provides more protein than soy beans, and has more versatility than both combined. Acre for acre, it provides more paper of a higher quality than any tree using a far less toxic process.
Its plentiful-and renewable-seed provides more than enough natural, non-toxic oil to eliminate the need for any other energy source for all of mankind’s foreseeable future. It is the solution to all of humanity’s problems. It is the single greatest hope for the starving of mankind. It can be made into home building materials and turned into fabrics that produce clothes that are almost indestructible, More….

Independent on Sunday and cannabis - on it goes
Transform-drugs.blogspot.com
April 17th 2007

In March we posted two detailed blogs responding to the Independent on Sunday’s two-week long canna-pology and retraction of support for their 1997 campaign for decriminalisation of the drug in 1997. How the Independent on Sunday got it horribly wrong on Cannabis

The Independent’s born-again war on drugs: Round Two

To summarise: the basis for their new stance was the new evidence they ‘revealed’ about the potency cannabis today, and its terrible toll on the mental health of Britain’s youth. The blogs highlighted how the claims they were making were bad science: exageration, cherry picking and good old fashioned lazy sensationalist journalism, and also how there new editorial position totally misunderstood the issue, confusing the debate around drug harms with the debate around policy responses to those harms. (look, just read them).
The IOS has argued itself into a corner. After making such a big deal of retracting their support for progressive law reform there is no way they can back down now without considerable embarrassment and humiliation (it would certainly prove a poser for the headline writers next time around, although they could arguably reuse the first ‘Cannabis: an apology’ ). On the other hand, to support their case for prohibition – on the basis of the dangers of cannabis – they now feel obliged to produce a constant stream of shock-horror cannabis coverage which, given that they have very clearly nailed their franken-pot colours to the mast, will inevitably be un-bothered by scientific or journalistic objectivity. And, surprise, surprise, this is exactly what we have seen over the last three of weeks. Here’s a quick guided tour:
The April 1 edition saw a front page teaser apparently borrowed from their tabloid colleagues, Full Comment….

“homespun cottage industry” News2020.com March 3rd 2007 Vietnamese organised crime is behind a sudden explosion of cannabis cultivation in Scotland in the past year, with more than 40 factories producing £5 million of the drug in the past nine months. Graeme Pearson, head of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA), will today tell a drugs conference that cannabis cultivation in Scotland has gone from a “homespun cottage industry” to mass production lines overseen by Far Eastern “Mr Bigs”. A network of Vietnamese gangs, responsible for mass cannabis production in North America and the south of England, is understood to have recruited members of the Chinese community in Scotland to set up dozens of factories across the country in recent months. A big rise in cannabis cultivation in parts of England has already been witnessed in recent months, with the proceeds reinvested in other aspects of organised crime, including heroin, cocaine and firearms. Last week police disclosed the results of Operation League, a major cannabis-production crackdown, mainly in the west of Scotland, which has seen about 20 factories shut down. Police made several arrests during the operation, including Vietnamese and Chinese nationals, along with Scots, Full Crime….