cannabisnews.com: Marijuana Cultivator Trial Goes To Jury 





Marijuana Cultivator Trial Goes To Jury 
Posted by CN Staff on January 30, 2003 at 16:32:25 PT
By The Associated Press 
Source: Associated Press
The federal marijuana case against Ed Rosenthal, the self-described ``Guru of Ganja,'' concluded Thursday as prosecutors and the defense wrapped up their cases. Jurors will begin deliberating Friday. Rosenthal, who could face a life sentence if convicted, did not testify. The case represents the latest clash between state and federal authorities over the medical use of marijuana. Rosenthal, 58, an author of how-to books and columns on growing marijuana, says he was growing pot to help the sick, which is legal under a 1996 California law. 
But the federal government doesn't recognize the state law and U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer prohibited Rosenthal and his lawyers from making that defense to the jury. California and seven other states - Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Oregon and Washington - allow the sick to receive, possess, grow or smoke marijuana for medical purposes without fear of state prosecution. But the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled it is a violation of federal drug laws for medical marijuana clubs to dispense pot. Source: Associated Press Published: Thursday, January 30, 2003Copyright: 2003 Associated Press Related Articles & Web Sites:Green-Aid.comhttp://www.green-aid.com Americans For Safe Accesshttp://www.safeaccessnow.orgEd Rosenthal's Trial Pictures & Articleshttp://freedomtoexhale.com/trialpics.htmDefense Gets Key Ruling in Pot Trial http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread15328.shtmlPot Trial Focus on DEA Agenthttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread15302.shtml
Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help




Comment #6 posted by FoM on January 30, 2003 at 19:39:14 PT
Inadmissible Facts About Ed Rosenthal 
    
 Asked About EdBy Fred GardnerLawyers for Ed Rosenthal have asked me to be a witness for him in federal court. [Note: Gardner was excluded from testifying by Judge Breyer - DG]. The defense case is expected to begin Wednesday, Jan. 29 and to take about two days. Only a jury of his peers stands between Ed and 10 years in prison, given the mandatory minimums; it could be 20 years, it could be the rest of his life. Ed's wife and daughter sit and watch and pray -like loved ones of defendants in courtrooms everywhere- that a juror, or better yet all twelve, will empathize, will understand that this man's absence will mean loneliness and grief out of all proportion to his alleged crime."It was my evil twin brother," is the line Ed wants his lawyers to take. "He's been hounding me for years" Ed's self-image is stand-up comic. He's 58, from the Bronx, tends to interrupt you in mid-sentence. His passion for cannabis led to a wider interest in botany; he's into orchids and begonias, too. His kids are intelligent, beautiful, and well adjusted; neither has smoked pot. Nick is a sophomore at Columbia. He was an intern at the SF District Attorney's office last summer and the assistant DA he worked under thought he was great. Justine is a 9th grader in Oakland. "My dad's a hero," she told the SF Examiner, which ran the quote on the front page under a picture of her and Ed that showed the feeling was mutual.The day of the "hero" headline prosecutor George Bevan asked District Judge Charles Breyer to impose a gag order on Ed so that the jury wouldn't get "contaminated" by public discussion of the case. Breyer refused, noting that in his whole career he'd never issued a gag order. In practical terms, a gag order would have made Ed's trial an even bigger story. What a perfect liberal Charles Breyer is: he abjures the gag order outside the courtroom while gagging Ed inside it by disallowing the real-world defense, i.e. that Ed was given immunity by the City of Oakland based on a section of the Controlled Substances Act that reads: "No civil or criminal liability shall be imposed upon any duly authorized officer who shall be lawfully engaged in the enforcement of any law or municipal ordinance relating to controlled substances."Statutes are supposed to mean what they say. Breyer ruled that section 885(d) of the CSA does not mean what it says, it means the opposite! Nor did the U.S. Congress mean what it said in defining the goal of the CSA as to maintain the health and general welfare of the American people." Breyer interprets Congressional intent as "Prohibition for prohibition's sake."SKIP LINEBF In Memory Yet Green END BFI first met Ed at the International Cannabinoid Research Society conference in the summer of 1998. The ICRS is made up of university and drug-company researchers, very few of whom work with the plant itself. ["Cannabinoid," refers to chemicals from three sources -extracted from the plant, synthesized in the lab, or produced by the body.] Ed was attending as a journalist, trying to keep abreast of the scientists' findings. At lunch on the second day he saw me with a camera and asked if I'd take a picture of him with his hero, Raphael Mechoulam, an Israeli scientist who'd figured out the stereospecifics of the THC molecule in 1964.That afternoon I sat next to Ed at the "Frontal Lobe Symposium," a panel of researchers funded by the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse. It began with a blatantly political message from NIDA director Alan Leshner urging scientists to "get into the fray" by publicizing "the harm involved in using marijuana." The featured talk was by Peter Fried, a psychology professor who has been funded by NIDA since 1978 to determine whether marijuana use by women during pregnancy adversely affects their children.As Ed explained in a whisper, "For the first five years he found no negative impact, the kids were all the same, but just as his grant was about to run out, he found that if the mom smoked pot, there was a fall-off in this thing called 'executive functioning.'"Professor Fried defined executive functioning as "a set of processes that are involved in future-oriented behaviors that include aspects of attention, judgment, planning and decision making. EF involves the identification of subgoals, conjuring up and mentally assessing different response options, and concomitant self-monitoring and self-correction..."Ed's comment on this jibber-jabber: "Who would have thought that when the social scientists took the floor the material would become harder to grasp?"Fried tested the kids' response to a repeated sound pattern in which a loud click would be followed by a much softer click. He found that the kids whose moms did not smoke pot tended to stop responding to the second click -they filtered it out of their consciousness- whereas the children of pot-smoking moms kept responding to it. Fried defined the first group as "normal" and the second group as "impaired.""In other words," observed Ed, "he defines better hearing as an inability to screen out irrelevant data. Anything to keep that grant coming!"Fried's data showed that at age 12 the children of women who used marijuana moderately while pregnant had higher IQs and more friends than the children of the non-users. "If the press ever gets wind of this," said Fried rather sheepishly, "the game is over!"Ed: "Was that a joke or a Friedian slip?"Of course Fried had to come up with an explanation for his troubling data if he wanted to stay on the NIDA payroll; and so he attributed the success of the pot-smoking-moms' kids not to cannabis exposure but to what he called "the earth-mother effect." The pot-smoking moms nursed their kids longer and gave them more nutritious food and more attention, said Fried, so their offspring were superior ITAL despite END ITAL their having smoked pot!As soon as the floor was open for questions, Ed rose to ask, "Do any of you think your work is influenced by Alan Leshner's bias?" This is not the kind of inquiry usually posed at scientific conferences. There was silence as Fried and the other panelists looked at each other to see who would respond. After a few beats the diplomatic moderator, Rik Musty, remarked, "Science is always influenced by the culture in which it's conducted."Indeed.SKIP LINE, BFResearch -A Dream Deferred END BFBack in San Francisco I would see Ed holding forth at organizational meetings of the Medical Cannabis Association. The MCA was going to be a trade group of club owners -"dispensary proprietors," as they prefer to be called- and growers. An early point of contention was whether consumers -"patients"- could become full members with voting rights. Most trade groups exist to maximize the profits of producers and/or distributors; consumers don't have a seat at the table. The MCA decided that patients should have equal standing, and that a key goal should be bringing the price down.Ed's recurrent theme was "quality control." The passage of Prop 215 had drawn many relative newcomers into the field, and Ed feared that some of them might purvey cannabis with mold or pesticide residue. He would say, "You have to know what you're doing, it's not that easyŠ People with compromised immune systems can't handle toxins. They need a pure product of consistent quality."Ed was also a strong proponent of research and record-keeping. His broad ambition was to figure out which strains of the plant worked best for people with various conditions. For openers he hoped to develop a strain that was high in cannabidiol (CBD), not THC. The British pharmaceutical entrepreneur Geoffrey Guy had been licensed by the Home Office to develop cannabis-based medicines. Ed had heard from Guy that CBD appeared to have significant anti-anxiety and anti-convulsant effects (without the psychoactive effects of THC). This was of direct interest to me because I have a loved one with intractable epilepsy. For generations, in California and almost everywhere else, marijuana has been grown for sale to people who want the psychoactive effects, i.e. high THC, low CBD. Your Mendocino sinsemilla is typically more than 20% THC and about 0.1% CBD.Ed had a dream in which growers would develop strains with different cannabinoid ratios, club proprietors would conduct simple clinical trials to determine what conditions people were treating with what results ("Try this strain for the next three weeks and report back"), and patients would get deep discounts to encourage participation. Ed's chosen niche was growing clones -starter plants of known potency from which patients could grow their own. Now he's charged with growing 3,163 plants. The draconian federal laws are based on number of plants, not weight, and the mandatory minimum kicks in at 1,000 plants. Never mind that 1,000 clones at $5 each = $5,000, and there are plenty of North Coast growers getting more than a pound -i.e., about $5,000- off one plant grown outdoorsThe Medical Cannabis Association stalled soon after it got off the ground in the winter of 1998/99. A steady barrage of prosecutions by California DAs unwilling to accept that Prop 215 was the law, plus a few strategic thrusts by the feds, have diverted potential members' time, energy and money into legal-defense projects. Club owners and growers who haven't been busted are keeping low profiles. Almost nobody is talking about self-regulation to assure quality control, or better record keeping to determine what conditions Californians are actually treating with cannabis, and with what results. As for research into which components of the plant exert which medicinal effects That's best left up to people in civilized countries.None of the above may be admissible, but all of it is true. -- ---- Dale Gieringer (415) 563-5858 // canorml igc.org 2215-R Market St. #278, San Francisco CA 94114
California NORML
[ Post Comment ]


Comment #5 posted by The GCW on January 30, 2003 at 18:48:55 PT
The righteous will flourish like the green leaf.
Proverbs 11:1, subtitled, Contrast the Upright and the Wicked, A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, But a just weight is His delight.Proverbs 11:26, He who withholds grain, the people will curse Him, But blessing will be on the head of him who sells it.Proverbs 11:28, subtitled, Contrast the Upright and the Wicked, He who trusts in his riches will fall, But the righteous will flourish like THE GREEN LEAF. Proverbs 11:30, The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life; and he that winneth souls is wise.To the jury...
[ Post Comment ]


Comment #4 posted by FoM on January 30, 2003 at 18:35:15 PT
mayan
Here's another one mayan from National Review on the Rave Act and I hope the jurors realize the importance of their decision.Feel Like Dancing?: http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread15329.shtml
[ Post Comment ]


Comment #3 posted by mayan on January 30, 2003 at 18:10:01 PT
RAVE ACT MUTATION!
The RAVE Act has a new name! It's now called the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act (S. 226). DON'T BE FOOLED! It's the RAVE Act in new clothing.http://www.nomoredrugwar.org/music/rave_act.htmThat did seem fast,FoM. I guess there wasn't much to talk about since the defense couldn't mention the medicinal aspect of Ed's work. No matter what happens, Ed will always be remembered as a leader and hero of this movement. But I suppose that's why they went after him.The way out is the way in -The cover-up of 9–11 continues:
http://onlinejournal.com/Commentary/Lynn013003/lynn013003.html9/11 Prior Knowledge/Government Involvement Archive:
http://www.propagandamatrix.com/archiveprior_knowledge.html9/11 Truth Alliance: http://unansweredquestions.org/alliance/index.html9/11 Exposed: http://www.911exposed.com/The 9/11 Investigative Community:
http://www.falloutshelternews.com/911Community.htm9/11 - Guilt In High Places:
http://emperors-clothes.com/indict/911page1&2.htmThe 9/11 Truth Movement - Selected Resources for Researchers and Activists: http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/LEV212A.html9/11 "Conspiracies" and the Defactualisation of Analysis: http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq37.html9/11 Skeptics Unite: http://www.osamaskidneys.com/links.htmlPaul Thompson's Complete 9/11 Timeline: http://cooperativeresearch.org/completetimeline/The People's Investigation of 9/11: http://www.911pi.com/
[ Post Comment ]


Comment #2 posted by The GCW on January 30, 2003 at 17:14:13 PT
SECTION 56
http://www.docbushseeds.com/section56.html"No amount of persecution will ever change the rightousness of the Tree of Life, cannabis sativa, True Hemp. Healing of the Nations.""The Tree of Life will provide for you."= - =
How many of the jurors do NOT know the implications?Surly the prohibitionist supporting judge, told them to only consider that it is against Fed. law and to decide if Ed simply broke Fed. law.The judge may be beyond prayer... but pray for those 12 to realize who gave, what the government wants to exterminate.Just one squint of love from the jury is all that is needed to allow Ed His freedom.Jesus is alive. Is He present in one of those 12? 
[ Post Comment ]


Comment #1 posted by FoM on January 30, 2003 at 16:44:31 PT
That Was Fast
Let's hope for a good verdict!
[ Post Comment ]


Post Comment