Van: "Bob Newland"
Aan: "ARO" ; "NORML Affiliates"
Verzonden: zondag 5 april 2009 22:03
Onderwerp: ARO: What can I do about it?

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Throughout history, humans have endured and resisted injustice. They do
so because injustice hurts. If the king's knights can come arbitrarily
to your house and rape your daughter and take your silver platters and
eat your livestock, it hurts. The problem always is: *What can I do
about it?*

The Great Events of history that we observe on various holidays and in
history classes are all celebrations of triumphs over injustice.
Currently every single national government in the world is
systematically making mockeries of every single reference to "liberty"
and "justice."

/What *CAN* I do about it?  I mean, some gel-haired investment banker
prick just caused my employer to collapse, 'cause he bought about a
billion dollars of sort of worthless paper as an investment, costing me
and 543 other people their jobs. I gotta make a living. The company's
investment banker got promoted with a six-figure bonus. I know you're
right, but man, we're up against some endless shit./

No advances are made against the governmental forces of evil until the
evil becomes so apparent that the governed stop supporting those who
perpetrate the evil. Governments hide their evil when they can.
Courthouses are repositories of evil practices. In courthouses they put
people by the trainload in prisons for shocking lengths of time for
trivial acts that are, in truth, nothing more than behavior that happens
to annoy some people. Almost no one knows what goes on inside
courthouses. If most people knew, they would burn them.

Meantime, those who have caused the greatest financial disaster in human
history are being rewarded for their incompetence and venality.

Most of us have a personal prominent injustice to which we pay some
homage. We might even donate time or money to those we think are working
to correct it. Y'all know what mine is, more or less. The thing is,
every thing is connected to every other thing.

/Yeah.... So?/

Well, I'm makin' a pitch for you to get pissed off enough about an
injustice that is so obvious and so evil that I fail to see how you can
refuse to do SOMETHING about it.

Is it an injustice to be afflicted with the disease Multiple Sclerosis?
A case can be made that it's unjust, but no one I know can say that
another person handed that disease to its bearer. Arguments about the
injustice of being handed a disease are pointless.

Is it an injustice to withhold relief from the pain and life-threatening
muscle spasms that accompany MS? If you believe that relief from pain
and the threat of death can be justifiably withheld, you are no longer
worthy of conversation with decent people.

Governments all over the world attempt to withhold such relief, but few
are so adamant as the federal government of the United States of
America, the beacon of freedom shining for all the world to adore. And
within the United States, the government of South Dakota is among the
most vicious in its denial of such relief.

For medical conditions that cause teeth-grinding agony, the sort of pain
that makes you know that life is not worth living if you have to endure
it indefinitely, like MS, fibromyalgia, migraines, many back injuries,
some arthritic conditions, and many more, sometimes rare, conditions,
cannabis is a proven palliative.

Possession of enough cannabis to get you through the day's pain can put
you in jail for a year---without the medicine that allows you to
exist--and cost you $2000 in a fine along with whatever you might pay
for a lawyer. The state can also take your kids away from you.

Possession of enough cannabis to get you through few weeks of pain can
put you in prison for two years, without your medicine, and cost you
over $5000 and your kids.

The act of handing a suffering person enough medicine to get him through
a few day's pain can put you in prison for five years and cost you more
than $20000, even if you realized no profit from the exchange. The state
can seize just about whatever of your property they want, also,
including your kids.

/They don't do that, do they? Nobody goes to prison for giving someone a
joint./

If they don't do it, why is it possible for them to do so? It is
undeniably possible.
http://legis.state.sd.us/statutes/DisplayStatute.aspx?Type=Statute&Statute=22-42-7

http://legis.state.sd.us/statutes/DisplayStatute.aspx?Type=Statute&Statute=22-42-6

http://legis.state.sd.us/statutes/DisplayStatute.aspx?Statute=22-6-1&Type=Statute

http://legis.state.sd.us/statutes/DisplayStatute.aspx?Statute=22-6-2&Type=Statute


While most people do not suffer the maximum penalty for these offenses,
they can. Therefore, it is a sure thing that they do, on occasion.

The courts are clever at mostly keeping the penalties actually assessed
below the threshold of shock to large numbers of consciences. Mostly,
for the offenses listed above a person can walk after paying a few
hundred dollars and maybe spending a few days in jail. That happens in
this country about every 45 seconds. In South Dakota it happens once
every hour, 24/7/365.

It is true that the majority of arrests for cannabis do not fall in the
category of persecution of desperately ill people. But the fact that it
happens at all is a shocking injustice.

And it does happen. Matthew Ducheneaux was sentenced to 30 days in jail
for smoking a joint to alleviate the spasms that caused him intense
pain. Tom Faltynowicz was put in jail for seven days and on probation
for a year for growing his own medicine, medicine that his doctor flatly
stated in court was "essential to his therapy." In Tom's case, as an
AIDS patient, that meant it was essential to his life.

A young woman I know who suffers ghastly nerve pain in a leg partially
amputated due to cancer recently spent eighteen months in prison because
she was buying cannabis and selling part of it so she could afford her
own therapy. I could cite more.

I now know more than a couple dozen people in South Dakota whose
physicians know and approve of their cannabis use for various ailments.
Yet so far only one of those physicians has deigned to publicly support
a change in the law that would remove just a little bit of the fear that
afflicts all these patients above and beyond their having to deal with
the pain or nausea they suffer---the fear of being arrested and
disgraced in their communities and put in jail without their medicine.

Injustice? The word is absurdly inadequate.

Twenty-four times a day, every day, every year, a person in South Dakota
is subjected to the possibility of conviction of an offense based on a
statement made by the first "drug czar," Harry Anslinger, to Congress in
1942, "Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men."
Congress then increased funding for his agency, the Bureau of Narcotics
and Dangerous Drugs. Anslinger then went on to attempt a nationwide
roundup of jazz musicians, whom, he said, were the primary users and
distributors of "reefer." The major problem, in his mind, was that
ingestion of cannabis caused white women to actually want to touch black
men.

A series of men and women, black, white, and brown proceeded over the
next 30 years to increase the penalties for using and distributing
cannabis based on the science provided by Anslinger and his experts.
Here is the science:

Testimony came from a pharmacologist who said he had injected
himself and 300 dogs with what he called the "active ingredient" in
marihuana. Two of the dogs died from the injection of the substance
into their brains. (The "active ingredient," THC, would not actually
undergo extraction until many years later. One wonders what he did
inject into the dogs.) The pharmacologist testified that he "changed
into a bat and flew around the room and landed inside a 50-foot
inkwell."

After the pharmacologist completed his testimony, Dr. William C.
Woodward, a lawyer and chief counsel for the American Medical
Association testified, *"The American Medical Association knows of
no evidence that marijuana is a dangerous drug."*

This statement prompted one of the committee members to remark,
"Doctor, if you can't say something good about what we are trying to
do, why don't you go home?"

As we found out in Pierre two months ago, legislators haven't changed
much. Nor have the law-enforcement inheritors of Anslinger's traditions.

What has changed is the evidence available to those who will look at it.
Several major US government studies have concluded that, at the very
least, cannabis has some medical application and should be studied
further. Richard Nixon spoke to his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, about
Nixon's own Shafer Commission Report (Nixon never read the report) in 1972:

"I see another thing in the news summary this morning about it.
That's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for
legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with
the Jews, Bob, what is the matter with them? I suppose it's because
most of them are psychiatrists."

One of the conclusions reached by the Shafer Commission was:

"Neither the marihuana user nor the drug itself can be said to
constitute a danger to public safety. Therefore, the Commission
recommends that possession of marijuana for personal use no longer
be an offense, and that the casual distribution of small amounts of
marihuana for no remuneration, or insignificant remuneration, no
longer be an offense."

President Clinton commissioned another marijuana study in 1997, by the
Institutes of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. Its report,
issued in 1999, was promptly ignored again by the executive branch.
Among dozens of the IOM report's findings that indicated positive
effects in various medical conditions was this:

"Considerable clinical evidence indicates that marijuana could yield
a variety of useful medicines, especially for nausea, vomiting, and
appetite stimulation. THC, in the form of Marinol (dronabinol), has
already been used for more than a decade to treat these symptoms in
cancer patients and for several years in AIDS patients as well. But
other cannabinoids, or combinations of cannabinoids, may prove to be
more effective than THC alone. If so, any pharmaceuticals that
result from such discoveries could benefit people with AIDS as well
as those living with cancer."

No scientific study has ever found evidence of harm from marijuana use
that justifies a criminal penalty for personal use. Even in the case of
alcohol, South Dakota justice does not impose a criminal penalty for its
mere use by adults, despite ample evidence that it creates great harm.

While it is obviously a travesty of justice to assess criminal penalties
for possession, use and sale of cannabis, the members of the So. Dak.
Compassion Coalition have made a tactical decision to attempt only to
provide a small measure of protection for the most vulnerable among us
who need cannabis to alleviate their pain, nausea and other
life-threatening medical conditions. We feel that our proposal is the
most we can accomplish while defending it against the lies that we know
will be forthcoming from the attorney general, renowned medical expert
Larry Long.

Numerous times we have presented evidence to South Dakota legislative
committees, who have responded by making a joke of the entire process,
abdicating their responsibilities and violating the trust placed in them
by their constituents. It is hard to find words to characterize their
behavior adequately. We'll leave it at this: South Dakota legislative
committees at present are not worthy of the dignity accorded them by
even acknowledging their existence. There are individual legislators who
do not deserve our contempt, but not many.

So, we're takin' it to the streets. We're asking each of you to sign a
petition that will place a question on the ballot in 2010. The question is:

Should a person suffering pain or nausea be allowed, under the
supervision of a doctor, to use the most benign and beneficial
therapeutically active herb known to man to alleviate his or her condition?

We're also asking you to help the most vulnerable among us by asking
everyone you know to sign the petition.

We're also asking you to help us by giving us money, so we can afford to
help the most vulnerable among us.

*We're asking you to take a stand, to do SOMETHING entirely within your
power to stop the state-sanctioned torture of the most vulnerable among us.*

In a nutshell, this is what the Safe Access Act will do:

The South Dakota Safe Access Act provides:

1. That people suffering from medical conditions that cause acute or
chronic pain, dangerous or painful muscle spasms, or severe nausea
or loss of appetite qualify for cannabis therapy.

2. That a patient and doctor may decide to embark on a course of
cannabis therapy, and register with the Dept. of Health.

3. That a patient and his or her caretaker may each possess 6 live
cannabis plants and an ounce of usable cannabis.

4. That a person using cannabis for therapy may advance a 'medical
necessity' defense in the event of arrest, even though he or she has
not yet registered as a qualifying patient. (This provision gives
otherwise-qualified patients who have not learned about the new law
a fighting chance in court. It will probably be changed by the
legislature after the law has been in effect for a year.)

5. That a person with a registry card identifying him or her as a
qualifying patient need not worry about being arrested for
possession, and his/her registered caretaker need not worry about
being arrested for distribution. (This will be true if law
enforcement officers, state's attorneys and the attorney general
obey the law.)

You can see the law in the form in which we are proposing it here
.

Now, get in touch with us and let us know what you will do to help us
help the most vulnerable among us.

You can donate at the website below.

Bob Newland
http://www.SoDakSafeAccess.net/
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Attachment: http://drugsense.org/temp/EiNZAsHjCs17.html