Posts Tagged ‘legalization’

Hail To The Choom

By mike flugennockMonday - May 23rd, 2016Categories: Economy, Health Care, Obamarama, liberty

In his high school days in Hawaii, Barack Obama hung out with a circle of friends nicknamed “the Choom Gang” — “choom” being Hawaiian slang for smoking marijuana. Almost all the students in this group went on to be entirely productive and successful citizens — writers, lawyers, businessmen and, of course, President of the United States.

This is by way of reminding everybody out there that cannabis is still listed by the DEA as “Schedule 1″, along with meth and heroin, and that Obama could start the descheduling process for marijuana himself instead of passing the buck to Congress. Obama himself is living proof that cannabis should be descheduled; his legacy could only be improved by ending a program of persecution based entirely on the deceptions and racism of Harry Anslinger and Richard Nixon.

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22 A Day

By mike flugennockSaturday - May 21st, 2016Categories: Health Care, Iraq, Obamarama, liberty, smoke-ins

At last report, 22 veterans a day are committing suicide due to depression and other post-traumatic stress. Today, DCMJ and the Weed For Warriors Project threw a Smoke-In and Die-In at Lafayette Square in front of the White House. “Easier access does not equal EQUAL access” said WFW’s Brandon Wyatt, an Iraq War veteran and attorney who uses cannabis to heal his PTSD.

"22 A Day" Cannabis Protest for Vets, White House from Mike Flugennock on Vimeo.

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The DEA’s Schedule is Nixon’s Schedule

By mike flugennockThursday - May 12th, 2016Categories: DC Local, Health Care, Obamarama, liberty, smoke-ins

The DEA schedule of narcotics — in which cannabis is classifed alongside heroin — was a product of the Nixon era, when the modern War On Drugs started cranking up. Tricky Dick himself, on a leaked White House tape, was said to have called marijuana “…the drug of choice of Mexicans, hippies and niggers.”

Here’s former White House Domestic Affairs Advisor, the notorious John Ehrlichman, with a slightly more nuanced framing of this policy in a 1994 interview:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
–John Ehrlichman, Nixon Domestic Affairs Advisor, 1994

The DEA schedule is Nixon’s schedule, part of a policy born out of deception and racism. It’s time to DEschedule cannabis.

We’ll be at the White House on May 20, how about yourself?

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He’s Late!

By mike flugennockTuesday - April 26th, 2016Categories: Health Care, Obamarama, liberty, smoke-ins

Yesterday, following on the heels of a successful “Smoke-In” protest earlier this month, was DCMJ’s historic meeting with White House officials from the Office Of National Drug Control Policy concerning the rescheduling or descheduling of marijuana from its current status at Schedule 1 — listed alongside heroin and methamphetamine. Along with combat veteran Brandon Wyatt of the group “Weed For Warriors”, DCMJ leaders Adam Eidinger and Nikolas Schiller spoke to the ONDCP representatives at length on the need for a political — rather than scientific — solution to the current cannabis prohibition situation. Citing the racism of Federal Narcotics Bureau Commissioner Harry Anslinger (responsible for the initial Federal ban on cannabis in the 1930s) and, later, President Nixon in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Eidinger asserted that because cannabis prohibition was a political act, a solution to end prohibition must also be political.

Eidinger and Schiller called for a followup to this meeting at a higher level, a “bud summit” at the White House with El Presidente himself. “He doesn’t even have to say anything,” commented Eidinger, “he just needs to listen. Because it’s going to take a year of dialogue at the federal level to figure out federal legalization.”

Listening to a recording of the ONDCP meeting at a “post-mortem” meeting back at the DCMJ office, conversation turned toward the fact that Obama was late in deciding on how to handle Federal legalization; “late for 4/20″ was the joke going around the room, and it inspired a literary analogy “hook” on which to hang a “hashtag point” — #HesLate — and this cartoon.

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