cannabisnews.com: Medical Marijuana Backers Say They'll Fight On





Medical Marijuana Backers Say They'll Fight On
Posted by CN Staff on July 26, 2007 at 13:14:53 PT
By Will Dunham
Source: Reuters 
Washington, DC -- Backers of a measure to stop the U.S. government from blocking the use of medical marijuana in states that allow it vowed on Thursday to press on with their fight despite losing another congressional vote.The U.S. House of Representatives late on Wednesday defeated a measure that would have blocked the federal law on a vote of 262-165. It attracted the most votes it has ever gotten, but for the fifth straight year fell far short of passage.
The measure, sponsored by New York Democratic Rep. Maurice Hinchey and California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, was offered as an amendment to the spending bill that funds the Justice Department.It would bar the department from spending money to prosecute people who use, prescribe, distribute or cultivate marijuana for medical purposes in states that permit it."We will continue to press on with it," Hinchey said in a telephone interview, saying he plans to try again in 2008. "There is a growing amount of support all across the country."Hinchey said he was disappointed at the margin of defeat, saying he thought it might attract 180 "yes" votes in the new Democratic-controlled House after getting 163 votes in 2006.He said, "I understand that there are a lot of people (lawmakers) who, even though they understand that what we're doing is the right thing, also understand how an issue like this can be politically manipulated by the opposition in an election."Hinchey noted that 12 states -- Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington -- have laws that allow use of marijuana for medical purposes like relieving the pain and nausea associated with cancer, AIDS and other illnesses.But, Hinchey said, the federal government has undermined those state laws, for example, by having Drug Enforcement Administration agents raid medical marijuana providers.Tom Riley, spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said state laws do not supersede federal laws criminalizing marijuana. Riley called the vote "a really tough day" for backers of the medical marijuana legislation."You can fool some of the people some of the time. And this medical marijuana has been one of those (issues) for the last few years," Riley said."But I think that the hand is starting to get played out here," Riley added. "More and more people are realizing there is a con going on -- that a lot of the people who are behind this aren't really interested in sick people who need medicine, they're interested in marijuana legalization and they're playing on the suffering of genuinely sick people to get it."Officials with the Marijuana Policy Project, which backs medical marijuana use, said evidence is mounting demonstrating its medical benefits."I have no doubt that 50 years from now we will look back on laws that put people in jail for using marijuana to relieve pain or nausea as every bit as barbaric as the laws that used to call for the burning of witches," said Bruce Mirken, a spokesman for the group.Source: Reuters (Wire)Author: Will DunhamPublished: July 26, 2007Copyright: 2007 Reuters News ServiceMarijuana Policy Projecthttp://www.mpp.org/CannabisNews Medical Marijuana Archiveshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/list/medical.shtml
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Comment #3 posted by FoM on July 26, 2007 at 17:25:00 PT
Smoking Marijuana Ups Risk of Schizophrenia: Study
July 26, 2007 http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?alias=smoking-marijuana-ups-ris&chanId=sa003&modsrc=reuters
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Comment #2 posted by paulpeterson on July 26, 2007 at 14:11:30 PT
Last night I had the strangest dream
Last night I watched the History Channel, about an old UFO case, in Aurora, Texas, from 1897. Back then they had newspapers, also, of course, and the printed news media was almost the only source of media. This case also was long before Roswell, when official "coverups" becan to be rumored, at least.The thing that struck me about the case, as presented on another media source, a cable TV broadcast, which has decentralized the "maintstream" consistency and tacit "censorship" of strange ideas and viewpoints, which further has diminished the sort of information control that occurs when only one single source of news is available is that instead of seeing information flourish, and various viewpoints explode, and a wealth of knowledge being proliferated, it certainly appears that in the past century or so, just the opposite has happened.The thing is, when the Aurora "event" occurred, there had already been a wealth of various accounts of sightings of the strange, cylinder shaped shiny object, that piloted through the sky with a smoke trail, finally striking and being knocked to bits by a windmill tower, on a judge's farm. For weeks, in fact, there had been sightings, and personal accounts, by citizens all over the Southwest-some 36 separate areas were implicated in the sightings, in Texas alone. And back then, it appears most people were very forthright in contacting their local media moguls, that were very forthright, also, in publishing, with remarkable repetition, each and every account, and on the particular day, when the object fought that windmill, there were apparently 12 other accounts, from witnesses, of having seen the vehicle, or contrivance, prior to the entry of the most unfortunate dogfight, that caused the occupant to lose his or her "airworthiness"-also the day the music stopped, in some ways.That brings me to my observation-back then, the people were much more likely to be open to the possibility of strange things happening, that they were open to discussing publicly, without fear of retribution or retaliation, merely for saying they saw or heard this or that, or that they believe certain things to be fact or possible.Why? I believe the even stranger development of a superhuman race, of superpowerful "doctors" that have the superhuman power and ability to discern when another person is "crazy" and the superhuman power over others to force them to take dangerous-even superhumanly dangerous drugs, to shut down brain power and stop people from having certain "untoward" thoughts, like seeing UFO's or thinking that big brother might have the bad "intent" to make buildings, truly windmill towers of power and control, to fall to the ground, causes the common people, even way down yonder in Aurora, Texas, to believe, and rightly so, that it is superhumanly dangerous to even see things, that others won't believe could occur, and certainly not to remember such things, so as to try to remain safe from such superhumanly powerful doctors, which some people call psychiatrists, and that's that.And of course, the idea that marijuana or cannabis, MIGHT have superhumanly powerful attributes to heal the sick and save the dying, is just the sort of thought or ideation, that is very dangerous for people to even think-certainly dangerous to talk about, and that is why so many congresspersons still think it superhumanly dangerous-at least from a political standpoint-to support blocking the also superhumanly powerful DEA from using their superpowers to stop the sick and stop the dying, from using this substance.Back to the UFO didactic: Also on cable, a few months ago, I saw a brief snippet about how, over O"Hare Airport, a good example of what a spaceport might look like, in the not too distant future, a carpet of concrete, with large, cylinder shaped vessels, that move through the air, with the greatest of ease, and fly up almost vertically, on schedule, and come down almost as quickly, there was a nighttime "event" with precision-perfect arrays of lights, which seemed to spin with regularity, as a potential "vessel" held motionless, for a goodly period of time, and then shot up, out of radar-range, with such stunning speed and precision, that it could not have been an earthly flight system involved-and since it was over O'Hare, they must have gotten some really good radar-range documentation of this event, and perhaps tens of thousands of credible witnesses probably had to have seen it, and perhaps photographed the object, yet there has only been a mere blip on the media radar screen so far, because, methinks this superhumanly powerful cabal of psychiatrists has long ago conditioned the populous to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain", because if people complain about the event, other people will complain about them, and there could otherwise be a large "blip" in the number of psychiatric ward admissions, from people that refuse to shut up and forget what they saw, right?In other words, we live in such a repressive and regressive society, that new ideas are destined to be shut down and forced into silence, to gird up a pseudo-"modernistic" view that everything that is worthy to learn about science, or about the world, our leaders already know, and it is not nice to fool the leaders, or to embarrass them, for instance by claiming to know something the leaders don't know already, right?So don't feel bad about how you and I know things about cannabis that otherwise well-intentioned legistalors don't want to support, because you and I know that they also know it is not nice to fool with the leader on this one. It is a strange dream, indeed, to dream of a society where new ideas are listened to and accepted, for the mere worth of encouraging new ideas, so people with new ideas can feel confortable and secure in sharing such new ideas. It is even stranger to dream about living in a so-called modern era, where even age-old ideas, about cannabis, aren't being listened to, by a ruthless power cabal, bent on ruthlessly chilling dissent on this issue-but of course, the Catholic Church and Popes since Innocente VIII, in 1478, ruled that cannabis is the "anti-sacrament", and right now that Benedict Arnold of Popes, Benedict, has ruled that all good Catholics must rail against heresy, and cannabis = heresy, right?So, people, just pass the pipe, light up, and shut up, otherwise it ain't safe to talk about this, even if it is good for you, right? Light up-what's in your pipe? PAUL PETESON, Storm Lake, Iowa
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Comment #1 posted by kaptinemo on July 26, 2007 at 13:56:53 PT:
Turgor
As in what happens when a tree root buckles a sidewalk. Slow, steady relentless pressure from below rising to breach what was thought to be impassable.Here's a suggestion to all those who presently work for cannabis law reform groups: start a voter registration drive in every State. That's the only way you'll be able to apply a political 2x4 to the heads of the pols who think they safely can ignore this issue. When they see millions of signatures, they'll stop laughing and start sweating. Until then, we'll just be playing the same old losing hand.
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