cannabisnews.com: Lawmakers Weigh Pot Testimony 





Lawmakers Weigh Pot Testimony 
Posted by CN Staff on April 02, 2005 at 08:11:57 PT
By Sean Cockerham, Anchorage Daily News
Source: Anchorage Daily News
Juneau, Alaska -- The governor's attempt to outlaw at-home marijuana passed the Senate health committee Friday amid conflicting claims about whether pot is as harmful as alcohol. Scientists from Harvard, the University of Southern California and the University of Alaska Fairbanks testified Friday against the governor's bill. Their statements contradicted testimony last week from state and federal drug officials who said pot is a dangerous drug.
The Senate Health and Social Services Committee table was stacked with massive binders and books with conflicting claims. Legislators weighed testimony from competing experts who each insisted the other side was wrong.Opponents of the bill urged lawmakers to put it on the slow track; they said the three hearings the committee held were not nearly enough to go through the scientific evidence over marijuana.Sen. Fred Dyson, R-Eagle River, disagreed. Dyson, chairman of the committee, said testimony from state officials point to a marijuana problem. The bill has to keep moving or it can't pass in the final five weeks of the legislation session, he said."I want to be an action guy," Dyson said. "Blue ribbon panels and more studies are a place for things to die."Dyson said the bill still has two more committees in the Senate and also the House to go through before it becomes law. He said he is going to read through more of the marijuana literature and will address the bill again in the finance committee.The Alaska Supreme Court in September let stand a lower court ruling that adults have the right to possess less than four ounces of pot for personal use in their homes. The court ruled it is protected under the strong right to privacy in the state Constitution.Gov. Frank Murkowski's bill, Senate Bill 74, seeks to create a legislative record of the harms of marijuana that the state can use in court to attempt to show it has an overriding interest in trumping the right to privacy. Snipped:Complete Article: http://www.freedomtoexhale.com/testimony.htmSource: Anchorage Daily News (AK)Author: Sean Cockerham, Anchorage Daily NewsPublished: April 2nd, 2005Copyright: 2005 The Anchorage Daily News Contact: letters adn.com Website: http://www.adn.com/ Related Articles & Web Site:Dr. Lester Grinspoonhttp://www.rxmarihuana.com/MJ Bill Ramps Up Debate on Drug's Potencyhttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread20443.shtmlWhite House Expert: Pot is Dangerous http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread20401.shtmlHearing On Outlawing MJ Stirs Strong Feelingshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread20399.shtml
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Comment #9 posted by FoM on April 02, 2005 at 13:23:22 PT
Hope
Thank you. I just read an article about how they are going to write a love letter to Neil and it was going to be read or performed or something at the Juno awards. Being raised Catholic I am sad at the Pope's passing but I'm listening to Neil on Rust Radio instead of the news on tv. These are very serious times and I see the concern on the Rust List which now has way over 4,000 people signed up. I guess that if Neil never does anything ever again his legacy is guaranteed. I found something on the Pope and Bob Dylan I thought you'd like. Dylan sang for Pope John Paul II in Bologna. The performance was part of the Eucharistic Congress, a weeklong religious congress focusing on youth and the future. The Jewish-born, Dylan sang "Knocking On Heaven's Door," "Forever Young," and "Hard Rain" to the crowd of over 400,000. The pope also referenced Dylan's classic "Blowing In The Wind" when he addressed the crowd. Dylan released Time Out Of Mind which revitalized his music with critics and a younger audience. http://www.rockonthenet.com/artists-d/bobdylan_main.htm
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Comment #8 posted by global_warming on April 02, 2005 at 13:18:33 PT
So Much for Spiritual Leadership
Pope John Paul II, the spiritual leader to more than 1 billion Catholics who spread his message worldwide in his 26-year papacy, has died, Vatican sources said.Yet, the war on people continues, the war in Iraq, and other filthy premonitions of more blood poring into this Blessed Earth.Hey God, down here, yup, this little blue gem in the smallest part of your world, can you take a moment and give us a hand?gw
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Comment #7 posted by Hope on April 02, 2005 at 12:53:06 PT
More on Neil Young
http://www.expressnewsline.com/phpnews1/news.php?action=fullnews&id=3469
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Comment #6 posted by Hope on April 02, 2005 at 12:18:22 PT
Outstanding quote from article below
"If they need more proof I will be happy to make up more stuff..."
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Comment #5 posted by Hope on April 02, 2005 at 12:17:04 PT
More Government Experts and "Sound Science"
April 2, 2005
E-Mails Reveal Fraud in Nuclear Site Study
By MATTHEW L. WALD 
 
WASHINGTON, April 1 - Government employees studying whether Yucca Mountain in Nevada would be a suitable place to bury nuclear waste acknowledged in e-mail messages to each other that they had made up details about how they had done their research in order to appear to meet quality standards, according to some of the messages made public on Friday.Some of the frank exchanges included instructions to erase them. The Energy Department, which is trying to open a waste repository at the mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, disclosed the existence of the e-mail messages two weeks ago. On Friday, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Reform released dozens of pages of the messages. One analyst wrote that a computer program had generated data he could not explain, so he withheld it from the quality assurance department, known as QA."Don't look at the last 4 lines. Those are a mystery," wrote the scientist, who the subcommittee said was an employee of the United States Geological Survey, a part of the Interior Department. "I've deleted the lines from the 'official' QA version of the files." "In the end I keep track of 2 sets of files, the ones that will keep QA happy and the ones that were actually used," he wrote. The message was dated November 1999.B. John Garrick, the chairman of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, a group of independent experts established by Congress to monitor the Energy Department, said that it was too soon to draw conclusions but that "it is disturbing to see such loosely framed discussions between scientists."Before releasing the messages, the subcommittee removed the names and titles of the senders and the recipients, and deleted other words that made the full context of some of the messages difficult to ascertain. But the theme was that employees were performing work they did not believe would meet standards set by the quality assurance inspectors, and were sometimes falsifying their work in ways that they believed would satisfy the inspectors. In a message dated April 22, 1999, a scientist wrote that he did some calculations by hand and that the computer program he wrote, presumably to do those calculations, "is not in the system." He wrote that he feared he would be "taken to the cleaners" by the inspectors because his work did not refer to an established procedure laid out in a scientific notebook, and he asked if he should create such a notebook "and back-date the whole thing??"The author of another message noted in January 2000 that he could not document the way certain work was done. "I can start making something up, but then the (deleted) projects will need to go on hold," he wrote. In an e-mail message in March 2000, a government worker wrote that he did not know when software he had used had been installed. "So I've made up the dates and names," he wrote. "If they need more proof I will be happy to make up more stuff, as long as its not a video recording of the software being installed." The chairman of the panel that released the messages, Representative Jon Porter, Republican of Nevada, pointed out that the Energy Department and the White House had repeatedly said that their recommendation of the Yucca Mountain site was based on "sound science." "If the project has been based upon science, and the science is not correct, it puts the whole project in jeopardy," said Mr. Porter, a longtime opponent of Yucca Mountain plan. "I believe these e-mails show science is not driving the project; it's expedience to get the job done."In a well-done scientific investigation, he said, the methods used to derive predictions about crucial factors like water infiltration should be transparent and reproducible.A lawyer who represents the State of Nevada, Joseph Egan, said that after reading the messages, "you can't even say it's wrong; you have to say it's not reliable.""You don't know how badly they've fudged this stuff," Mr. Egan said. Some of the correspondents explicitly discuss problems and say they do not believe that they make any material difference to the ability of the mountain, a volcanic structure on the edge of the Nevada Test Site, to hold the waste for thousands of years. But the issue of quality control is crucial to the Energy Department because to open a repository, it must win the approval of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has scuttled some projects because of quality assurance problems. In one case in the 1980's, the commission forced the owners of a nuclear reactor to abandon their project, after they had spent nearly $2 billion and when the reactor was said to be 98 percent complete, because of questions about whether some welds had been made properly and inspected adequately by qualified inspectors. The subcommittee on the federal work force, which released the e-mail messages, plans to hold a hearing on Yucca Mountain on Tuesday. The witnesses include several prominent opponents, including Gov. Kenny Guinn of Nevada and Senator Harry Reid, also of Nevada, the Democratic leader. 
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Comment #4 posted by Patrick on April 02, 2005 at 10:54:34 PT
Study after study after study
They always say they need to study marijuana. It’s just another ruse to prohibit. Marijuana, or as I prefer to call it cannabis, has to be the most studied substance on the planet by now? If our system of drug regulation can put Vioxx back on the market when we know it kills some people because the reward out weighs the risk, then there should be no argument about cannabis period. But alas, here we are after 70 plus years of prohibition still trying to “study” cannabis.I have a suggestion for a cannabis study to end all cannabis studies.First offer blanket immunity from prosecution in order to let anyone and everyone who has ever smoked it come forward and participate. Split the cannabis users into groups by how many years they have been smoking or using cannabis and then subdivide that group by light, moderate, or heavy use. As an example, I personally would be in the smoking cannabis for 25-30 years group at what I would call moderate use. Compare the life of the cannabis user to the life of a non-user of cannabis and see if the cannabis user is “harmed” in comparison to the non-user. Someone could create a survey to judge our happiness levels with life or some other measurement of harm and you will soon see that the only real harm caused by cannabis is from Prohibition and not the use of the cannabis plant by us mere adult mortals. It’s like anything else in life, abuse it and you may create the potential for harm.I think the study would show amazing results that prove cannabis does not ruin lives but that the man made prohibition of it causes much more harm to society. Of course this suggestion is yet another study we don’t really need. $.02
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Comment #3 posted by FoM on April 02, 2005 at 09:32:37 PT
Truth a Neil Article
Neil Young: Have Aneurysm, Will Travel? April 2, 2005So you were out and about a couple of weeks ago, saw an older rocker kinda guy and thought to yourself: Hey, that dude looks like legendary rock singer/songwriter Neil Young.The Cinnamon Girl guy. He's got a Heart of Gold. He's loves living on the Sugar Mountain. A witness to the needle and the damage done.You, my friends, are correct.Complete Article: 
http://tennessean.com/celebrities/archives/05/03/67742674.shtml?Element_ID=67742674
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Comment #2 posted by FoM on April 02, 2005 at 08:37:23 PT
I Agree Truth
I hope that Neil gets better quickly. Rust Radio is on this weekend and I listened to it until I turned off the computer for the night last night.Greendale Lyric: A little love and affection in everything you do will make the world a better place with or without you.http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/rust/message/122589
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Comment #1 posted by Truth on April 02, 2005 at 08:31:12 PT
Neil Young
My heart and prayers go out to Neil Young for a complete and speedy recovery. Long my you rock!
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