While the Obama Administration continues its crackdown on marijuana, including medical marijuana, New York City is joining other jurisdictions in the decriminalization of possession of small quantities of pot. Last year, NYPD made 50,000 arrests for such small quantities of pot. The welcomed change further detaches the federal crackdown on marijuana from public opinion if not reality.
Possession of small amounts of marijuana is a crime only if the marijuana is in public view or if it is being smoked in public, but these arrests are part of the controversial policy of pat downs by police — the current debate of extensive use of the stop-and-frisk practice by police.
Just this week I was called by a friend whose teenage son was charged with other teenagers after a police raid on a party that generated a complaint over noise. He was simply in a house where officers found a small amount of pot but they still charged everyone upstairs with possession. It is obviously a ridiculous charge but I hear of such cases constantly in Virginia and other states. While some politicians insist that pot is a “gateway” drug to more serious drugs, it is more clearly a gateway to criminal records for teenagers who are torn from their schools and lives to face entirely unnecessary charges.
Source: NY Times
Swarthmore,
That is bad news from Wisconsin.
Bill McWilliams, your comment is mainly correct, the CIA was helping the Corcican Mafia to fuel the heroin epidemic in the US in the 60’s in return for, among other things, breaking the strike among various French unions in and around the port of Marseilles.
Union busting and drug running by the government. Ironic confluence of subjects on this thread: not much has changed considering the magnitude of the Afghan poppy crop and today’s vote in Wisconsin.
excerpt:
“Like their Mafia cousins, the Corsican syndicates key to success was their usefulness, in particular, to the CIA.
The CIA came into existence in September 1947. During that same year, Marseilles’ hungry workers, whose wages were now even lower than dtring the height of the great depression, went on strike, bringing France to an economic standstill. The French communist party supported their action and unions throughout France, whose members were experiencing similar hardship, joined in. Interpreting such action as the prelude to a communist coup (despite the advice of analysts that this was not the case) the CIA tried to break the strike by paying socialist union leaders large sums of money to abandon their alliance with the communist-led unions and return to work. The socialists were also encouraged to remove communists from the ranks of the special police unit charged with curbing organised crime and smuggling so that it could be used to intimidate striking workers.
But this was not yet enough to break the strike in Marseilles, so the CIA’s operatives “supplied arms and money to the Corsican gangs for assaults on communist picket lines and harassment of important union officials”. By December the strike was over and the Corsican syndicates’ arch enemies, the communists, particularly the communist members of the organised crime police unit, no longer posed any threat to their operations. After helping to break up another strike by hungry workers in 1950, the two Corsican syndicate bosses that the CIA had sponsored to do its work, the Genrini brothers, consolidated their influence upon the local politics and docks of Marseilles. In conjunction with Lucky Luciano the Genrini brothers then set about making Marseilles America’s heroin laboratory during the heroine epidemic infested 60’s, capturing the lion’s share of the American heroin market.”
http://www.converge.org.nz/pirm/cia.htm
Scott Walker is the projected winner
Thanks OS….
Apparently no one here is aware of the fact that intelligence services all over the world engage in drug smuggling, demonizing out-of-favor, so-called dictators (Noriega, Ortega et al.), to help ensure the viability and rising profits of the prison industry, to get as many people as possible into The System, and on and on.
Off-the books intel operations depend on Afghan-derived heroin funds, cocaine from S.A. and on and on.
That won’t change anytime soon. At least not until rich people decide to fund intelligence services via paying a few bucks more each year in taxes.
You could be right about returning to church if Barrett wins.
Thanks, lotta. Good link. Wonder if the Repubs will win? The turnout looks exceptional. If they lose, I might have to go back to church and rethink my position on a God who cares about human activities.
I did some GOTV calling this afternoon.
Great link lotta. The turnout numbers have been amazing. I hope that the County Clerk is being watched carefully.
OTOTOTOT
The Wisconsin recall is underway, This article indicates that County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus is back in the mix after saying she was going to sit out this election. That’s troubling and indicates that Walker and the Republicans are terrified, Nickolaus is the walking embodiment of “election fraud”.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9331#more-9331
THANKS OS! Cool site.
@Idealist: Selecting non-cancerous persons from a blood donor program seems irrelevant in only that they perhaps claimed to not being cannabis users.
The point is they did NOT claim that, they admitted to cannabis use. The point is to compare people with cancer to people of the same age and gender without cancer, and see if there is a difference in their cannabis use or history. There was, after statistical analysis of long histories, the difference in cannabis use was statistically significant.
Where then is the epdemiological data, where whole populations can be used to establish a connection, if not a cause relationship.
We do not do that, not for smoking, not for breast cancer, not for other cancers or carcinogens. We use statistical samples. If you think any cancer result is from an entire population, you are wrong.
The material on chemical similarity seems of no worth at all to me.
Then I posit you know nothing about chemistry at all and just want to believe in magic. It isn’t “chemical similarity,” it is the identical compounds known to cause cancer in cigarette smoke.
The relevance of the mutagenicity tests depend on your evaluation.
No, it doesn’t. It is not subjective, it is a standardized and objective test to determine if something causes cancer.
I think I will stop discussing this, you are obviously overly invested in “knowing” the wrong answer.
I only object to pot smoking in public. Since the smoke can impact non-smoking people around the smoker, I think consideration for the non-smoking people should be higher than the smoker’s desire for some pot–just as in cigarette smoking.
This is way OT, but for the geeks out there, the transit of Venus across the sun has started. You can view it from several different observatories and hear a discussion of the rare phenomenon at the SLOOH web site. Notice at the top of the telescope image you can use the arrows for scrolling to different viewing sites around the globe.
http://events.slooh.com/
Well done again. I am not a scientist, but find the in vitro outside my range of knowledge. The human reports seem to be just that, reports of clinical observations, ie nothing on controls, except Zhang, where what use the controls had in the study is not evident. The mouse skin essay is also too brief for me to understand. But that comes from not knowing the territory.
Selecting non-cancerous persons from a blood donor program seems irrelevant in only that they perhaps claimed to not being cannabis users. Where then is the epdemiological data, where whole populations can be used to establish a connection, if not a cause relationship.
The material on chemical similarity seems of no worth at all to me. The relevance of the mutagenicity tests depend on your evaluation, I can’t judge.
Thanks for the info.
It’s late here, for me at least. Wonder where Big Tree disappeared to, here’s what interested me.
“In fact, The American Cancer Society…read that again…a year or two back came out stating that there is no causal relation between Cannabis use and cancer.”
For myself, I might sometime try it again, but hardly any risk at my age. And have already had my squamous cancer, finished treatment for two years ago. Smoked tobacc for 35 years, and stopped for 25 years ago.
Thanks again.
@idealist: I am not sure if you can get the same reports I can, I have transparent university access to journals and research. So, just for you, some excerpts from a published survey circa 2002: Hall, W. and MacPhee, D. (2002), Cannabis use and cancer. Addiction, 97: 243–247
—-summary quotes—-
… Cannabis smoking, like tobacco smoking, begins typically in adolescence (Bachman et al. 1997) but unlike tobacco, most cannabis users discontinue their use in their mid- to late 20s, with only a minority continuing to use cannabis into their 30s and beyond …
There is very little evidence that THC is mutagenic …
—-quoting of evidence—–
There is more consistent evidence that cannabis smoke is mutagenic in vitro (MacPhee et al. 1999; Marselos & Karamanakos 1999; Leuchtenberger et al. 1983). Cannabis smoke produces chromosomal aberrations such as hypoploidy and mutagenicity in the Ames test (Bloch et al. 1983) and it causes cancers in the mouse skin test assay of carcinogenicity (MacPhee et al. 1999). The fact that it is cannabis smoke that is carcinogenic (Bloch et al. 1983) suggests that any cancers caused by cannabis smoking are most likely to develop in organs that receive maximum long-term exposure to cannabis smoke or its constituents, namely, the lung and possibly the upper aerodigestive tract (mouth, tongue, oesophagus) and bladder (MacPhee et al. 1999).
[snip]
There are good reasons for suspecting that cannabis smoking may contribute to the development of lung cancer and cancers of the aerodigestive tract (the oropharynx, nasal and sinus epithelium and the larynx). The first is the strong qualitative similarity between the carcinogens found in cannabis and tobacco smoke (Institute of Medicine 1999; Tashkin et al. 1999; Van Hoozen & Cross 1997). Tobacco smoke is a demonstrated cause of respiratory cancer (International Agency On Cancer 1990). Cannabis contains many of the same carcinogens and mutagens as tobacco but differs in containing cannabinoids rather than nicotine (Tashkin et al. 1999). There are quantitative differences in the amounts of some carcinogens, with cannabis smoke typically containing higher levels of some carcinogens than tobacco smoke (Institute of Medicine 1999; Tashkin et al. 1999)
Secondly, chronic cannabis smokers show histopathological changes of a type that typically precede carcinoma development in tobacco smokers (Tashkin et al. 1999; Fligiel et al. 1988).
Thirdly, there are case reports of cancers of the upper aerodigestive tract in young adults who have been chronic cannabis smokers. Donald (Donald 1991) reported 13 cases of advanced head and neck cancer occurring in young adults under 40 years of age. Eleven had been daily cannabis smokers but at least five also smoked tobacco and three were heavy alcohol consumers, both risk factors for these cancers (Vokes et al. 1993). Taylor (1988) reported a similar series of 10 upper respiratory tract cancers in adults under the age of 40 years. Five cases had a history of heavy cannabis smoking, two patients were ‘regular’ cannabis users, one was a ‘possible’ cannabis user and two did not use cannabis. Six were heavy alcohol consumers and six were cigarette smokers. Other investigators (Caplan & Brigham 1990; Nahsa & Latour 1992; Endicott et al. 1993) have reported cancers in young adults with histories of heavy cannabis use. Caplan & Brigham (1990) reported two cases of squamous cell carcinoma of the tongue in males aged 37 and 52 years. Neither smoked tobacco nor consumed alcohol; a history of long-term daily cannabis use was their only shared risk factor.
[snip]
Zhang et al. (1999) reported a case–control study of cannabis use in head and neck cancers. They compared rates of cannabis use among 173 cases of primary squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck with that in 176 controls. The cases were patients at the Memorial–Sloan Kettering Hospital in 1992–94 and the controls were age- and sex-matched cancer-free blood donors at the same hospital.
The life-time use of cannabis was higher in cases than controls (14% and 10%, respectively) and the odds ratio for cannabis smoking was 2.6 (95% confidence interval: 1.1, 6.6) after adjustment for cigarette smoking, alcohol use and other known risk factors. There was a dose–response relationship between frequency and duration of cannabis use and the likelihood of having cancer. The relationship between cannabis smoking and these cancers was stronger among adults under the age of 55 years (OR = 3.1, 95% CI: 1.0, 9.7).
——–end quotes——-
Back to Tony: None of that is definitive, but cannabis smoke DOES contain carcinogens, and unless you believe in magic, where there are carcinogens there is a greater risk of cancer.
TonyC,
Well done. Do you have any analyses of demonstrated carcinogenic (in animal models) effects from compounds or ash from burnt cannibis? The sweepers got it from tar on the testes, it is said. Could they bathe. Not often in those days and with those wages.
@idealist: The point of inhalation is to transfer the inhaled substance directly to the bloodstream via the lung, which is evolved for the purpose of extraction from the atmosphere into the bloodstream.
Where it goes from there is anybody’s guess. Some carcinogens, like tar, are too big to pass into the bloodstream, and cause cancer in the transportation tract by damaging cells by contact (mouth, throat, lungs, nasal, etc).
idealist707 1, June 5, 2012 at 4:20 pm
I always, almost, use hyperbole. Y’all know that.
=============================
I use a hyperbowl every once in awhile too.
W’all know that, cause you bong to this blog.
I am giggling and need some munchies …
later dood.
The odd thing Tony is that chimney sweeps in a coal burning England who smoked got cancer of the testicle sack. Not of the lungs.
But you get to hold onto your libertarian belief in smoke causing cancer until that 30 year comparison
study shows up. Take a toke in the meanwhile and enjoy.
I watch which way the wind is blowing today before trimming my sails. Did you once decide that the winds are always northerly?