(Sorry it’s just mainly copy/paste again…)
“On Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo ordering Justice Department staff to charge criminal suspects – specifically low-level, non-violent drug offenders – with the most severe crime possible and pursue the toughest sentences allowed, rolling back progress made under the Obama administration.
The two-page memo, released to the public Friday morning, requires federal prosecutors to pursue the toughest possible charges and sentences against suspects. “It is core principle that prosecutors should charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense,” he wrote. “This policy confirms our responsibility to enforce the law, is moral and just, and produces consistency.”, rollingstone.com
This is the pdf of the memo; the Rolling Stone version’s hard to read:
FROM: THE ATTORNEY GENERAL~
SUBJECT: Department Charging and Sentencing Policy
This memorandum establishes charging and sentencing policy for the Department of Justice. Our responsibility is to fulfill our role in a way that accords with the law, advances public safety, and promotes respect for our legal system. It is of the utmost importance to enforce the law fairly and consistently. Charging and sentencing recommendations are crucial responsibilities for any federal prosecutor. The directives am setting forth below are simple but important. They place great confidence in our prosecutors and supervisors to apply them in a thoughtful and disciplined manner, with the goal of achieving just and consistent results in federal cases.
First, it is a core principle that prosecutors should charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense. This policy affirms our responsibility to enforce the law, is moral and just, and produces consistency. This policy fully utilizes the tools Congress has given us. By definition, the most serious offenses are those that carry the most substantial guidelines sentence, including mandatory minimum sentences.
There will be circumstances in which good judgment would lead a prosecutor to conclude that a strict application of the above charging policy is not warranted. In that case, prosecutors should carefully consider whether an exception may be justified. Consistent with longstanding Department of Justice policy, any decision to vary from the policy must be approved by a United States Attorney or Assistant Attorney General, or a supervisor designated by the United States Attorney or Assistant Attorney General, and the reasons must be documented in the file.
Second, prosecutors must disclose to the sentencing court all facts that impact the sentencing guidelines or mandatory minimum sentences, and should in all cases seek a reasonable sentence under the factors in 18 U.S.C. § 3553. In most cases, recommending a sentence within the advisory guideline range will be appropriate. Recommendations for sentencing departures or variances require supervisory approval, and the reasoning must be documented in the file .
Any inconsistent previous policy of the Department of Justice relating to these matters is rescinded, effective today.1
Each United States Attorney and Assistant Attorney General is responsible for ensuring that this policy is followed, and that any deviations from the core principle are justified by unusual facts. I have directed the Deputy Attorney General to oversee implementation of this policy and to issue any clarification and guidance he deems appropriate for its just and consistent application.
Working with integrity and professionalism, attorneys who implement this policy will meet the high standards required of the Department of Justice for charging and sentencing.”
Now the ‘inconsistent previous policy’ refers to former AG Eric Holder’s memo which had advised federal prosecutors to use their discretion when building a case against non-violent drug offenders, as a way to reserve harsh mandatory minimum sentences only for violent or high-level drug crimes. Now I’m not entirely sure how much his ‘advisement’ had taken, especially in California, but on Sept. 3, 2013, David Downs at sfgate.com called bullshit the disconnect between ‘policy’ and ‘local reality’.
“On Thursday U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Cole released a memo which states that the Administration will allow marijuana regulation plans to move forward in Washington and Colorado. The memo also instructs federal prosecutors to de-prioritize enforcement actions against medical marijuana businesses in states where the drug is legal, so long as the businesses are following state law.
On Friday, U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag’s office told me, reporting for the East Bay Express, that the situation in the Bay Area will largely remain the same. Ms. Haag has worked to dismantle state-legal pot-growing regulations in Mendocino County and Oakland, as has sought to shut down the best and most compliant medical marijuana operations in the region, including Harborside Health Center in Oakland and Berkeley Patients Group in Berkeley, CA.”
Did that disconnect get ironed out? The forfeiture gains were said to be massive, dunno about prison sentences.
“In a statement on Friday afternoon, Holder called Sessions’ new directive “dumb on crime,” noting that his 2013 policy had increased the number of high-level offenders who were prosecuted. “Abandoning this evidence-based progress and turning back the clock to a discredited, emotionally-motivated, ideological policy also threatens the financial of the federal criminal justice system,” he wrote, before calling on Congress to reverse the order by enacting legal criminal justice reforms. “It should do so and ensure that criminal justice policy is designed for 21st-century realities and not beholden to failed 20th century ideology.”
From Glen Ford:
“What Sessions is actually defending are the racist policies championed by Eric Holder, himself, when he was U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia in the mid-Nineties.”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the deep-fried racist from Alabama, would like to turn the clock back to pre-Emancipation, but will settle for a return to the good old days of Bill Clinton, the mega-incarcerating con man from Hope, Arkansas. It is important to maintain an historical perspective on the actual policies that are being pushed by Republican and Democratic political actors, given the corporate media’s practice of revising history on a daily basis. Sessions’ new instructions demand that his U.S. attorneys “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense,” rather than adjust criminal charges and sentencing recommendations based on the defendants individual history and circumstances. Sessions insists that federal prosecutors push all the legal buttons necessary to activate mandatory minimum sentences, with no judicial discretion.
“Obama ‘led from behind’ on criminal justice issues, positioning himself on the cautious side of the emerging establishment consensus that the U.S. prison population must be shrunk.”
Obama and Holder did tolerate, and even encourage, a degree of prosecutorial discretion in framing charges and recommending sentences – although they proposed no fundamental reforms to the system. The truth is, prosecutorial discretion is an arbitrary tool of the state, a matter of convenience and budget-adjusting that has nothing to do with justice and leaves the repressive architecture of mass Black incarceration totally intact – as should be obvious, since all it took was a memo from Jeff Sessions to undo the phony “reform.”
As to the racial element, HRW got something right, for a change./s.
“More than 1.25 million people are arrested per year for drug possession, making it the single most arrested crime in the country. Black and white adults use drugs at similar rates, but a Black adult is 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug possession [wd here: some reports say 5 times more likely to be arrested, and with far more convictions and incarcerations, slightly fewer for Latinos]. On any given day there are at least 137,000 people behind bars as a result of drug possessions, while tens of thousands more are convicted, cycle through jails and prisons, and spend extended periods on probation and parole, often burdened with crippling debt from court-imposed fines and fees. There is a better way. This report provides detailed recommendations authorities should follow to minimize the harmful consequences of current laws and policies, until decriminalization is achieved.”
And all of this while seven states have passed Recreational MJ (strange term, I’ll grant you) legalization, and 29 states have passed Medical Marijuana legalization. No news from Beauregard on his policy on MMJ-legal cannabis busts, or he’s sticking with his…hmmmm; it might be a different thing…
Udi Ofer, Director of the ACLU’s Campaign for Smart Justice writes:
“Attorney General Jeff Sessions knows that the United States is the world’s leading incarcerator. We imprison more people than any other nation in the world. But apparently he likes that distinction because he just doubled down on it, guaranteeing that more people will be locked up for drug offenses in America’s federal prisons.
The 2013 Holder policy, as well as other federal and state reforms, was beginning to work. In 2015, the incarcerated population in the United States fell to its lowest level since 2004. The number of people in state and federal prisons dropped by 2.3 percent, with 40 percent of that drop due to fewer people in the federal Bureau of Prisons. In fact, President Obama was the first president in at least 40 years to leave office with a smaller federal prison system than he started with.”
His section on the decrease of crime rates since 1991 is fuzzy and too general, ill-defined, but I’ve seen this complaint before:
“Listening to Attorney General Sessions and to President Trump, you would think that America is living through a crisis of crime. Sessions constantly talks about a crime epidemic, selectively using statistics in a way that is misleading, and sometimes even outright lying. In his swearing in, Attorney General Sessions talked about a “dangerous permanent trend” of increasing crime. Yet that was a lie. There is no evidence of a national crime wave, as right now we’re living at a time when the crime rate is historically low.
But with this new directive, Attorney General Sessions is now implementing policies based on lies and misleading facts. He is directing federal prosecutors to increase a failed War on Drugs that has devastated the lives of millions of Americans, ripping apart families and communities, particularly Black people and other people of color, in a vicious cycle of incarceration. And he has already issued an order that will lead the federal government to rely more on private prisons, whose bottom line will increase under Attorney General Sessions’ new order.”
From Feb. 2017, HuffPo authors Riley and Ferner offered some dire warnings and past quotes from drug war dinosaur Beauregard, such as “Good People don’t smoke marijuana”.
“Drug policy reformers have raised concerns that Sessions could use the FBI to crack down on marijuana operations nationwide, or direct the Drug Enforcement Administration to enforce federal prohibition outside of the jurisdiction of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. The court ruled in August that a federal rider blocks federal officials from prosecuting state-legal marijuana operators and patients. But that rider must be re-approved annually, and if it’s allowed to expire, Sessions could then order the DEA to enforce federal law nationally. He could also sue the various state governments that have set up regulatory schemes.
Marijuana is the most commonly used illicit substance in the United States, and the trend of states bucking prohibition in favor of legal regulation of the plant reflects a broad cultural shift toward greater acceptance of marijuana. National support for the legalization of the drug has risen dramatically in recent years, recently reaching historic highs in multiple polls. And states like Colorado, the first to establish a regulated adult-use marijuana marketplace, have seen successes that have debunked some lawmakers’ and law enforcers’ predictions that such policies would result in disaster.”
As to that fear, you may remember in 2014 that BAR’s Bruce Dixon ‘had recently steered readers to newly procured FOIAed documents at Mukrock.com that he called ‘a smoking gun’ in the DEA manuals of ‘parallel reconstruction’ of phony chains of evidence that began with NSA and likely other security state acronym agencies funneled to law enforcement agencies’. Well, guess which inconvenient people they might want to ‘construct’ cases against for fun and private prison profit?
Just a squib from an old diary:
“As described in the released portions of the module, parallel construction simply entails splitting the prosecutorial labor, with a Taint Review Team tackling pre-trial review so the trial prosecutor encounters as little classified evidence as possible.
But the released training modules provide no guidance on key issues noted in documents obtained by Reuters last August. In particular, the SOD slides barred agents from disclosing classified sources on affidavits or in courtroom testimony. Under this strain of parallel construction, the court would never know the classified origins of an investigation.
“You’d be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.’ And so we’d alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it,” as one former federal agent described the process to Reuters.
Susanne Posel of OccupyCorporatism.com has the story on why Sessions also reversed Obama’s ‘phase out of federal prisons’ as he was going out the door. Some gaggable facts and history:
“When it comes to criminal offenses, “96.9% of cases processed included pleas” in order to avoid trial because “drug offenders accounted for 50% of the male federal prison population and 58% of the federal female prison population.”
When taken into account that “blacks were 10.1 times more likely than whites to enter prison for drug offenses” it begins to become clear that racism is a big part of the scheme to incarcerate as many Americans as possible.
Privatization of prisons has also contributed to the terrible conditions they are in; as well as the necessity for 100% capacity for the increase in profit margins.
A record 90% of inmates in the US are “held in private prisons” meaning they are incarcerated within a private for profit corporate facility, including GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).
Both CCA and GEO are publically traded corporations and take in several hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue annually.
CCA attributes this lucrative investment to potential future stockholders to their “high recidivism” rate which ensures they will continue to be relevant and necessary.
Aramark, a corporation providing food to prisons, was caught 65 times for “failing to provide food or ran out of food”; including 5 recorded cases of maggots found in the food Aramark provided.
This corporation also changed their recipes to include “substandard ingredients”.
[From Aramark’s ‘about us’: ‘Creating experiences that engage and inspire; We deliver an impact wherever people work, learn, recover and play’]
To save money in Arizona back in 2013, medical spending dropped by $30 million after it was privatized while staffing levels also dropped. However, within the first 8 months of 2013, 50 prisoners died “within the department of corrections custody”.
‘Happy Orange Friday’ by Anthony Freda
History has taught me some strange arithmetic
Using swords, prison bars, and pistol grips
English is the art of bombing towns
While assuring that you really only blessed the ground
Science is that honorable, useful study
Where you contort the molecules and then you make that money
In mathematics, dead children don’t get added
But they count the cost of bullets comin’ out the automatic
Economics is the symphony of hunger and theft
Mortar shells often echo out the cashing of checks
In Geography class, its borders, mountains and rivers
But they will never show the line between the takers and givers
Algebra is that unique occasion
In which a school can say that there should be a balanced equation
And then Statistics is the tool of the complicit
To say everybody’s with it and that you’re the only critic…
Cringeworthy Bonus:
Isn’t it killingly funny that the librul class has made Comey a celebrity star victim since his firing?
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
For a bit of fun i’d run into accidentally from the decaturdaily.com:
“It’s a bit unfair for U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ critics to make fun of his name, as some do, stressing the Beauregard in Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Invoking Sessions’ full name, with its echoes of the antebellum past, is clearly meant to cast Sessions as a throwback to the Deep South’s segregated, authoritarian past.”
oh the thrills of living w/a high schooler…
hopefully such a silly video will make Sessions’ apoplectic. i’m watching this last night, and the movie it’s with, thinking this is mostly silly & harmless, except a kid’s desire to be ‘young and wild and free’ will send many a parent off the deep end b/c at heart they are puritanical pleasure-hating obedient little slaves, not unlike guvna beauregard.
when to the sessions of sweet silent thought, I summon remembrance of how I love you, sweet leaf…
let’s not forget all the thousands and thousands killed internationally in the drug war. let’s not forget that there is nothing that is more studied on this planet than the effects of US gov’t policy. and that ergo ipso blunto, the effects of any policy are the policy’s *intent*.
let’s also not forget that as there had been a slight dip, very slight, in the prison pop under Obama, there was a massive infusion of dollars & repression into the carceral system w/the renewed vigor of the war on the undocumented. so much for the bs about declining numbers of incarcerated.
http://www.consumertrap.com/2017/05/home-marketing-platform/
this is about the future of the home as a marketing platform, thanks to goog et al. this is analogous to what people like sessions & many other assholes not quite as prickish as him want, and we are already a long way toward achieving, for the entirety of every person’s life. skinner boxes of varying sizes, the car, the home, job, the tellie, the tube.
to the degree that smoking a doob provides a bit of freedom from the manufactured madhouse, then songs geared to juveniles about the revolutionary potential of a bong hit have their appeal. assholes like Jefferson sessions make them self-fulfilling.
bah, humbug. i knew i should have let you write the damned diary, j. well, minus the snoop dawg video… ;-) yeah, ain’t it cool that statistics can be so ‘massaged’? i was so burned out that i’d forgotten to add glen ford’s rant before i pressed ‘publish’. (word docs get kinda unwieldy for me to wrangle at the best of times.)
but srsly, is the lame rubbish about sessions claim that we need to fight against cannabis cuz opioid addiction is rampant strange cuz there isn’t even all that much evidence of that addiction. so much of it just seems like RT sorts of click-bait to me.
yeah, freedom from the madhouse, but also pain relief. there are some drawbacks to my swallowing small capsules of ground dried high-cbd cannabis, but still, it does help my pain enough to be able to do a few things i hadn’t been able to do lately. otherwise, i put a bud in an alligator clip, light it, and breathe the smoke into my nose, much less harsh than smoking it in a pipe, ish.
but cripes, think how much safer for other beings cannabis is compared to alcohol. ha! driving while high on cannabis is a stoopid as hell concocted charge, isn’t it? maybe i’m crazy, but i’d think that the authors of our discontent would want us to be a bit more mellow, yanno what i mean? was it heinlein who’d promised us soma? i’d also forgotten to check whether there’d been any relief to banks being unwilling to deposit proceeds from legal mmj and other cannabis becuse of ‘federal guidelines’. hell, that’s capitalism 101, isn’t it?
gads, that consumer trap page; 2867 Spams eaten and counting. i don’t know all those terms and AI things of which they spoke, but it sounded grisly as all giddy-up.
danke. I guess. soma’s in brave new world. and of course it’s reasonable to think that perhaps the “snoop dawg vs. AG sessions” is a manufactured dialectic. I don’t follow that scene but snoop at this point seems like a marketing gimmick. I can understand why a kid might think smoking a j is the royal road to a rebellious happiness and why that idea might have certain uses in the managed marketing democracy of the US. of course there’s the whole big pharma thing, but another aspect to the hostility to pot may be that kids smoking pot are much much less likely to take Yale seriously and go on to put in the 80-120 hrs a week necessary to become one of the conflict managers who run the show here. hostility, aggression and deceit seem less attractive. it wouldn’t solve everything of course but people could be a bit happier w/the j freely around and we sure as hell can’t have that. the happier one is, the less of a temptation there is to be a hyper-competitive cleft asshole.
and the lure of drugs of all stripes, esp. the bottle, is partly cuz of easy pleasure. and pleasure is just so goddam hard to come by in the rat race, so screw it. i’m cooking up. I mean toking up, yeah.
anyway, on the cheech & chong-ish movie in that viddy: in a way it’s like different strokes or the brady bunch. b/c of what it excludes. throwing in a bunch of pot smoking w/copious amounts of swearing & a fair amount of casual misogyny & gratuitous sex as a rebellious pose is about as rebellious as elvis’ hips were. note how yesterday’s rebellious poses are now seen as normal entertainment but today’s poses, and that’s what it is: a pose, today’s poses are threatening & nation-imperiling. barf. how much adults interpret the antics of youth thru their own resentment & miserableness is pretty astounding. thus the punishment mode in “dealing w/the kids.” send ’em all to military school! that’ll show ’em.
dayum, you dig deep on all of this, bong hits. you deserve more of a response than i have to give at the end of an almost comically failed appliance day, long and uninteresting tale that’s harshed my mellow and planned baking schedule for grammy cookie gifts for the grandchirren.
i’ll be back in the mornin’, but i hope you listened to boots and the coup. i’d have thunk boot’s would be right up you alley, which is why i’d included some lyrics. well, never mind. sleep well after a bong hit for jesus, you clever mofo.
ah, huxley, not heinlein; thanx. i’m struggling my way a bit here, bong hits, but i’m not convinced that folks use cannabis and the bottle for the same reasons on the whole, myself. i’d have a hard time characterizing the many reasons for the pipe, including a heightened sense of awareness, fun, and scores of medical reasons, including helping autism spectrum disorders, mind-blowingly enough. more about that later, perhaps, but the bottle seems to numb a person to a great degree, and as davidly points out, releases inhibitions. and reflexes, which w/ driving, i think is huge, in that an over-drinker has the power to hurt, maim, spindle, or mutilate other people, while reefer doesn’t diminish any reflexes that might harm others.
i suppose your take on snoop’s manufactured marketing gimmick makes sense in that legal weed is huge bidness. every month just in CO sales top a million bucks, and that municipalities and counties decide whether to allow sales, and if so, how much to tax sales, there’s a lotta money comin’ into the coffers. now of course the high prices & taxes at dispensaries cause the black market to operate, which was why the promoters of legalization were so classist and moronic.
more in a bit.
rebellion is a commodity and snoop lost all his street cred that week he guest-hosted Regis & Kathy Lee (j/k).
outside of being consciousness-altering substances that most everyone craves, i’m not equating pot & alcohol. I know a blunt from a bottle.
keep on the grassy side of life
lol on your new name; you r the master! but ah, the snoop-penny drops; from da wiki:
“In April 2015, Broadus became a minority investor in his first investment venture Eaze, a California-based weed delivery startup that promises to deliver medical marijuana to persons doorstep in less than 10 minutes. In October 2015, Broadus launched his new digital media business Merry Jane that focuses on news about marijuana. “Merry Jane is cannabis 2.0,” he said in a promotional video for the media source. “A crossroads of pot culture, business, politics, health.”
In November 2015, Broadus announced his new brand of cannabis products Leafs By Snoop”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leafs_By_Snoop
“It has been noted in The Atlantic that the carefully designed packaging by Pentagram has been designed “to make marijuana appeal to upscale consumers.”
pt II on the other yet to come…
many would disagree w/the 1st half of your 1st sentence. depends on circumstance, mood, company etc. and of course one’s self. and what’s a poor schlub to do if no drug dealers are around? say in ancient Greece? oh well, another bottle of vino it is. them braincells ain’t gonna kill themselves.
this comment seems to be in the wrong place, single malt. but what i was trying to say is that the bottle acts a central nervous system (including a brain) depressant, and slows down the functioning of nerve cells. to me that means that we drink to forget for a time, say that the boss kicked our puppies that day, that the cop pulled us over for nothin’, the megaload of work and responsibilities coming the next day, etc. and it also mutes physical pain for a short time.
no denying that it’s a social lubricant, hence often called liquid courage in that it frees our inhibitions and self-monitors and even masks. yes, i get that it can seem to make one happier, and goddess knows i’ve done some drinking in my day, certainly not limited to music gigs.. but in bars, i’d frequently be turned off by drunk behaviors, although i often mused that ‘pretending to be inebriated’ in order to say or do something ‘out of character’, if not odious, was just as creepy. reefer doesn’t share those properties, imo. and as far as i know, the pain relief from weed is the cannabinol does have analgesic and anti-inflammatory properties. thtat’s all. and yes, some would still call bullshit on even that.
sometimes when guests come for dinner they bring yummier wine that we ever could have afforded, and i love it.
i’ve been cooking up coconut canna-balm from our homegrown, and am looking to try some canna-balm gel from glycerine.
on edit: hell, where do ya think the phrase ‘in vino veritas’ was born? ;-)
I know where it’s from. and it is important that he does not say wine=truth. it’s more along the lines of ben franklin’s “beer is proof god loves us and wants us to be happy.” and, you know, plato’s drinking party, the symposium. but they are still drinking.
and there’s drinking and there’s drinking.
okay. i yield, who cares, good nite. on edit: but why not benedictine monk dom perignon, credited w/ having invented champagne?: “Come quick, my brothers, I am drinking the stars”?
and that was wd ‘in vino veritas’.
yes, but what i’d meant was that the bottle is not so much about teh happy, but an anodyne, likely in many senses of the word: painkiller, and while not specifically tuned to the other definition, still operative: ‘not likely to provoke dissent or offense’ in that it’s socially acceptable to be drunk at parties, have to apologize for behaviors the next day, etc. and…everyone *gets it*, or nods to it in remembrance.
and yeah, i drink a bit of crap liquor as an anodyne before i undertake a few necessary tasks, not solely as liquid courage, but to take some of the edge off the pain. (i drink the nasty stuff cuz i don’t wanna ‘like’ the medicine, yanno?)
No Kush for Sess!-D
Sure, some of these retrogrades believe their own stink, as Beau prolly does. But the broader deal isn’t whether or not is makes sens from the population control by way of narcotics perspective. It’s only useful as a tool to extract rents and incarcerate, i.e. extract rents. Also, in the matter of Jane Decriminalization: any progress made on this turf would, I reckon, face pushback from those who stand to lose. Not just big pharma but the peeps makin’ dough from selling the illicit substance.
Speakin’ o’ which: has anyone here encountered anything anecdotal about newly minted sellers in CO, for example, getting shook down by the old school?
Yo, wendye: ye ole one hit kit aka one-hitter aka sneak-a-toke aka bat is pretty good way to go as far as pipage. But you need a strong thick needle or something to clean the frequent clogging.
Of related concern, generally speaking: The issue of pot smoking as taboo (’cause the wet-brained ‘grups say so) can sometimes obscure further problems that spring from that irrationality. Foremost with which I have made personal acquaintance: from 17 to 18 years of age I got high before during and after everything: school, work, social gatherings. I loved getting high, so much so, that even though it was psychological torture to operate the cash register in the supermarket and deal with the requisite shopper at the checkout (seriously, more unpleasant than if I had not been high), I would still get high before my next shift. In other words: it wasn’t to deal with anything because it didn’t help.
Anyway, as a young adult I quit buying weed because whenever it was around, I’d smoke it. It couldn’t just exist in my drawer. What I would like to suggest here is that the demonization of reefer fails to supply young people with the realistic pitfalls of getting high. Whenever they find out that it’s actually quite fun and doesn’t lead to some of the horrid scenarios suggested, it falls promptly into the Tooth Fairy category with no more discussion. Not very enlightening.
By the way: insofar as it reduces inhibition, alcohol is more of a gateway drug than marijuana.
It just so happens that tonight, for me, is THC night. Woohoo!
ha. we have two seedlings in the greenhouse (yes, EA: locked down against marauders!) of a strain called ‘o g kush’; not knowing what the ‘o g’ stands for, i call it ‘omg kush!’. thanks for the pipe tip, but the sniff works pretty well, really. the little flattish stone pipe mr. wd bought me i cleaned diligently w/ a pipe cleaner, even cleaned the screen, and still, it tasted like ass, as our daughter often says. ;-) now mr. wd has some little electric gizmo called a vaporizer that suits him to a T. [update: mr wd just looked up o g kush, and discovered that the name came from an l.a. grower, and it stands for ‘ocean grown kush’; how cool is that?] we have ‘kind mind’ (love that name) and a couple high cbd strains whose name was unknown by the seed-giver. but oh, my, the temps plunged last night, and mr. wd had to cover them all w/ garden row cover material, and we’re hoping they fared well.
i dunno what beauregard believes, but given that he claims there’s so much ‘violence’ around ‘drugs’, and includes MJ, then he’s specifically targeting non-violent users, ya have to think it’s about locking away not only people of color, but also any dissidents who are inconvenient to the corrupt state apparatus. i srsly believe that even though ‘parallel reconstruction’ has been outed, it’s still in effect. and of course, decriminalization of all drugs would end the violence, but as you say, too many are profiting from keeping them illegal, and as a weapon against the people.
yep, even the Rand think tank names alcohol as ‘the gateway drug’ , save for people seriously out of balance psychologically, whatever that meant, in the first place. come to think of it, i smoked weed long before i drank, save for the half a beer our pop allowed us so we wouldn’t over-drink out in the world. seemed to work, lol.
interesting pot pattern in your life, davidly. i guess i finally gave it up when i began noticing how much it tightened up the muscles around my occipital area, but then i’d had several whiplashes from cars crashing into mine by then, so…i dunno. re ‘the grups’, mr. wd finds that among the shoppers at the various dispensaries around here, both rec and mmj, seniors are very well-represented.
hadn’t heard about many dispensary busts in CO lately (loads a year or two ago), but here’s a page that has lots of headlines; some looks as though the busts were legit, but who can say after reading the SF gate article? have nice thc evening! woot!
http://www.thecannabist.co/category/news/crime/
within a recent essay about today being the day that ajit pai will decide to declare the internet a common carrier no longer were these two internal links about one’s connectivity being at which speed, then a test page. i suppose as in a ‘before and after’ comparison.
https://psmag.com/news/why-is-american-internet-so-slow
http://www.dospeedtest.com/
here’s a related explanation by john zangas at deecee media group.
but @davidly the mj was meant to be a gateway to forming a soviet w/your fellow cashiers, to militancy & class solidarity. pot fail.
anyway, as the Achievers in the Obama admin demonstrated and like the pestilent shrubs & men from hope before them, the federales ain’t ever going to give up the power to intervene in state/local/family/personal life over drug use. the drug war operates domestically as internationally: the excuse to intervene. there may be greater or lesser times of active enforcement but the authority never wanes. and never will, not at the federal level under this gov’t.
the USG knows that its current policies have led to the deaths (incl. torture, rape and all that fun stuff) of tens of thousands of people in Mexico alone in the last 15 years. couldn’t care less. the Sloan, Harvard & Wharton schools of business could not teach more effective “conflict management.” would anyone be surprised if the Mexican health care establishment’s biggest item in its investment portfolio were the weapons manufacturers paid by the DEA to flood places like Tijuana with guns? shit, that’s as a solid business model as any. take it to the bank. the bank of international settlements, wells fargo, etc., etc.
yes WD I have been hopping around listening to some stuff from the coup. thank you.
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oh, teachers: the person(s) behind the whateveritisimagainstit blogspot w/his run-down of the NYT front page from 100 years ago, they noted a few days ago that of the 20,000 school teachers working in NYC, only THIRTY (all socialists, natch) refused to sign the city-mandated loyalty oath passed after Wilson & Washington manipulated the country into signing on to WW1.
I mention this cuz to a large degree, the drug war for kids in this country is fought around schools & teachers. i’m sure we all have greater or lesser romantic nostalgia for a teacher or two from our past, but boy school sure is about Conformco programming. once again, the rigidity of the environment might make some kids feel like smoking a doob is the theft of Promethean fire. take that, Zeus Pater! puff puff puff.
part I response to banker’s cocaine: while i’d been taken aback by “the drug war for kids in this country is fought around schools & teachers”, which i failed to imagine being so, you may have filled in the rest with: “the rigidity of the environment might make some kids feel like smoking a doob is the theft of Promethean fire.” if so, i can see that. but at least in many schools, kids that feel marginalized, don’t fit in, are bullied, can act out in a host of different ways, tragically including suicide. goths in school are one of the ways to act out, almost a resultant self-marginalization by way of posed subversion, perhaps leading to kinda/sorta ‘families’ akin to gangs.
right after columbine, the school our son had transferred to in cortez, co, rounded up all the goths, stole their laptops, broke into them, searching for ‘plots’. our son launched a defense of them, which made me pretty damned anxious, to say the truth, given that he’s identifiably black, which put him in the suspect class automatically. he used to do one of those chris rock or someone’s bits: “security! n*gger in aisle ten!”
and ooof, then i remembered DARE ‘taught’ at our elementary school. now a child could opt out, which our daughter chose to do, mainly cuz she knew that the cop teacher was a major prick via personal knowledge. soooo….they made her sit in the hall as (not) punishment.
glad ya watched the coup; after all, i watched the snoop dawg. ;-) but i do love it that boots is teaching his commie subversiveness to kids all over europe too, by now. why he ever teamed up w/ tom morello for a record is still a mystery to me.
but @davidly the mj was meant to be a gateway to forming a soviet w/your fellow cashiers, to militancy & class solidarity. pot fail.
:-D
whew!. eddie snowden will be sooooo relieved: ‘Justice Department appoints special counsel to investigate Trump-Russia claims‘ wsws.org
“The factional battle raging in Washington entered a new stage Wednesday evening with the appointment of former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate alleged ties between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian officials. Mueller, who headed the FBI under George W. Bush and for the first two years of the Obama administration, was the longest-serving FBI director after J. Edgar Hoover.”
that should satisfy both sides in the war, yes? and Mr. Market’s biggest billionaires went down on the trump/russia gossip? Good!
‘The Evidence Is Overwhelming: Cannabis Is an Exit Drug for Major Addictions, Not a Gateway to New Ones’; People dependent on cocaine, opioids and other prescription drugs could ease out of their addictions with cannabis., alternet, by the deputy director of NORML
well, at least ‘a growing body of evidence’, but still, fairly convincing, as a lot of this has been broadcast over the past year.
greenwald just couldn’t help himself: “Though Manning’s case has been somewhat colored by the changing perceptions over time of WikiLeaks, she actually first attempted to contact traditional media outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico with her revelations, only to be thwarted by a failure to get their attention”
but anyway ;-) :
one theme in the “classical” world of Greece & Rome is the “civilizing” influence of wine. in agriculture, religion, trade, social practice, art (e.g., dionysus & drama), etc. it’s a concept that I think could be extended to the pursuit of mind-altering intoxicants in general throughout the world & human history.
until you get to puritan shitheels like Sessions, who, let’s face it, represents a prohibitive, punitive strain all too recognizable in US history. but he’s a cultural type.
where does the culture, this mentalite, come from? if pursuit of mind-altering intoxicants is part of & a motive behind human social evolution, what does the attempt to arrest & prohibit this on-going development mean? and the prohibition against people of today enjoying what ages past have already developed in the field of consciousness changing?
i’m sure there were great philosophical conversations over wine in the classical world, and breeding the best grapes per region was an agricultural art in itself, yes.
and yes, in how many cultures did (and still do) psychotropic plants play a major role in shifting/concentrating alternative awareness and communicating w/ deities and the spirit world in general? wasn’t even kava kava declared illegal here once our rulers thought it was by way of a ‘sneaky high’? and more power to those working stiffs who don’t have legal access to cannabis, and like to hoist a few beers after work to forget their work days.
given that beauregard’s memo had advised a ‘certain amount of discretion’, which non-violent, low level users does he mean they should prosecute to the fullest…’ yada, yada? those they’re after for other reasons, those most profitable to the prison industrial complex, both? someone must have told him that weed’s not dangerous.
but i’d meant to come back to say that you’re so right: the drug wars by the US are indeed internationally harmful. do colombian narco-barons get their weapons here?