One wonders how long the United States can afford to deny struggling farmers the opportunity to grow industrial hemp like their Canadian and European competitors.
Cannabis laws are often exploited by estranged couples and former friends as a weapon of intimidation, extortion and revenge. Sometimes they are abused by cops against activists who get under their skin.
Last month a Californian appeal court ruled that medicinal cannabis plant and weight limits imposed by individual counties are unconstitutional, leaving the determination of how much is too much to the discretion of reluctant doctors, ignorant police officers and uninformed prosecutors.
]]>Meanwhile in the Canadian province of British Columbia, a prison guard's coffee was apparently spiked with what was thought to be heroin, resulting in the man's hospitalization. Prohibited drugs like heroin are often more plentiful inside of prison walls than outside. Drugs "are smuggled into prisons by new inmates who put the narcotic in a balloon and swallow it. Sometimes the substances are put in hollowed out tennis balls and tossed over the fence." So much for prohibition.
In Ireland, Trinity College psychologist and criminologist Paul O'Mahony declared in a new book that the war on drugs had "failed catastrophically". Claiming a "human right" to take drugs, O'Mahony noted that prohibition, while failing to halt drug use, may have instead increased the use of drugs. To end prohibition, "the concept of a human right to use drugs can fulfil this role of providing a meaningful, inspiring and unifying idea which can guide the transition to a fully non-prohibitionist system."
And in the Philippines this week, the scandal of the country's top narc openly admitting that, yes, cops there do plant drugs (but only to get a conviction they couldn't otherwise obtain), has been met with a deafening silence from Philippine press and president alike. "It is as if she [the Philippine president] is in fact in agreement with the practice [of planting drugs to get convictions]... If the president cannot deal with Santiago, then she is just as guilty as hell."
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