While California is clearly at the vanguard of implementing major legal and policy changes in seeming conflict with the federal government’s 72-year old cannabis prohibition laws, in fact little ol’ Rhode Island is on the precipice of effectively breaking the federal government’s ban on the cultivation and sale of cannabis by joining New Mexico as the only states favoring medical cannabis laws to have state-sanctioned medical cannabis cultivators and retail outlets for qualifying medical patients.
For far too long the federal government’s war on cannabis consumers has been a bipartisan effort.
At worst, politicians of both political persuasions have proactively lobbied for tougher pot penalties (or actively opposed efforts to amend such laws); at best, leaders of both major parties have done nothing at all.
Two years after The Lancet’s dire predictions, a team of researchers at the Keele University Medical School have once and for all put the ‘pot-and-mental illness’ claims to the test. Writing in a forthcoming edition of the scientific journal Schizophrenia Research, they compare long-term trends in marijuana use and incidences of schizophrenia and/or psychoses in the United Kingdom. And what do they find?
For nearly 40 years, NORML has provided a voice in the public policy debate for the tens of millions of Americans who enjoy cannabis responsibly. NORML is and has always been the ‘marijuana’ consumers’ lobby.
Remember this statement from our Drug Czar that “legalization” is not in the president’s vocabulary, nor in his own?
Over 500 NORML supporters donated slightly more than $16,000 (avg. donation was $32) in support of running the winning 60 second ad from NORML’s 2008 online ad contest.
Theresa Anthony could be you or me. Or could have been a young Barack Obama. Just another dead unicorn, expiring in a cage for the crime of preferring the safest choice of social relaxant or therapeutic medicine.