I recently saw a Fox News interview with Rob Kampia and Calvina Fay as guests. Before I go any further I would like to point out how much I despise Fox News for it’s blatant fear mongering and loud opinions camouflaged as news. However if you YOU TUBE (c) “marijuana legislation” they (FOX) have some considerable hits and most of those hits have at the least diverse viewpoints if not that of legalization.

To get back to the point of the Kampia/Fay debate I found something that Fay said extremely telling of how unstable the prohibitionist ground is. Her quote was that if regulated and taxed “we would not be able to police the people” growing in basements, attics etc and therefore would be unable to tax them. She went on to say that prohibition has NOT failed. This lady is crooked. Her idea is that we shouldn’t tax marijuana because we couldn’t police it so we should just continue to POLICE IT even though she herself just said it was impossible to police!? This woman is dumber than a bag of hammers or all the PHARMA money along with tobacco and alcohol lobbyists got her wondering which way is up or both.

I propose we re-schedule marijuana so that we can get some testing done and while we are at it maybe the D.E.A. might think about ACTUALLY doing its job and scheduling Alcohol and Tobacco because I find it awfully mysterious that two of the most addictive, deadly and non-medicinal drugs are NOT EVEN scheduled.

My apologies for the lack of proofreading in the previous post, it is simply not professional on my part.
I have made some edits but also wanted to share an e-mail I recently received from the FDA. I basically inquired why cocaine and methamphetamine were Schedule 2 drugs and marijuana Schedule 1? Schedule 2 of course allows for the drug to be prescribed by a doctor for a “legitimate reason.” I don’t want to get too into the fact that 14 states have found marijuana to be a drug worth prescribing because we get into the 10th amendment and state laws contradicting federal law. I think it is safe to say that anyone who thinks that cocaine and meth deserve to be Schedule 2 they also would expect marijuana to be at least Schedule 2 (please tell me NO one thinks marijuana is MORE dangerous than cocaine or methamphetamine.)

Back to the point of the e-mail, FDA replied that Methamphetamine hydrochloride was a prescription drug used for “attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity and as a short-term (i.e., a few weeks) adjunct in a regimen of weight reduction for exogenous obesity.” Cocaine they said was NOT an FDA approved drug.

This raised lots of questions for me, perhaps the most confusing was why someone with hyperactivity would be given a drug like meth? Perhaps there is a difference between “street methamphetamine” and this “hydrochloride” version? However D.E.A. does not distinguish as they do with PCP and its precursor. Nonetheless I still don’t see any reason why meth would help one suffering from ADHD? As for cocaine, the FDA’s email raises major questions because according to the D.E.A.’s web site cocaine is prescribed as an anesthesia in surgery.

So if FDA says that cocaine is not an approved drug and D.E.A. says it is sometimes used in surgery and the D.E.A. schedules drugs with “expertise” they receive from FDA then someone is lying or there has been a major breakdown in communication. Someone make sense of this because these two agency’s are blatantly contradicting each other.

Some 30 years after after Ronald Reagan declared drugs “public enemy NO. 1″ and almost 40 years after Nixon’s own Shafer Commission found nothing wrong with personal cannabis use, this country finds itself in yet another counter-productive war (as if we don’t have enough of them).   I am going to assume you already have an opinion on the “War on Drugs” so I will cut right to the most pressing issues and skip background and the basics.

Most importantly is the issue that kids need to be protected from drugs.   Organizations like Partnership for a Drug Free America and the D.E.A would have you believe that strict prohibition and and punishment is the means to this end, nothing can be further from the truth.  The reality is that the winners of prohibition are the DRUG DEALERS!  How, you ask?  It is deadly simple.  Because marijuana is an illegal drug with strict punishment for even small possession, drug dealers make a fortune selling a plant that is easy to grow and difficult to detect.  Prohibition directly affects the marijuana supply by keeping it relatively low so that dealers can charge far more than it costs to grow.

If marijuana was taxed and regulated it would actually make it less accessible to those under 21 because as of today dealers don’t check ID’s.  At least with regulation the drugs are off the street and age control is implemented.  Furthermore the safety of users is heightened because not only will marijuana be harder to get for those underage but there would be testing to make sure that marijuana does not have other drugs or pesticides in it.  Today dealers don’t tell you if the marijuana is laced with other drugs and nothing stops them from doing this.

I encourage everyone to do their own research.  Intellect and being informed are your best weapons in today’s world.

Here’s a place to start: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/readersrespond/bal-marijuanaletter0208,0,1337622.story