U.S. Supreme Court Deals "Blow" to Medicinal Marijuana
Doesn't the Supreme Court feel this man's pain?
The Supreme Court voted 6-3 today to uphold the federal ban on the medical use of marijuana. This means that sick people in any of the eleven states that have passed laws allowing the use of some form of medicinal marijuana can now be arrested and thrown in the slammer. In essense, the decision reinforced the ability of federal laws to trump state ones. This has been the case since the nation's founding but certain powers have always been reserved for the states, as Justice Sandra Day O'Connor pointed out in her dissent: "The states' core police powers have always included authority to define criminal law and to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens." This argument holds no weight with the Court's more conservative members who beleive that since the drug is classified by the government as an intoxicant with no medicinal value, the ban cannot be removed. Strangely enough, people still use alcohol to drown their pain and you don't even need a prescription.
Ironically, the United States government made marijuana illegal in the first place at the bidding of several western governors as an excuse to deport Mexican immigrants. A few Mexicans were probably seen puffing a joint, their entire race was then stereotyped as lazy bums, and they were sent packing. Their plan may have had a few flaws seeing that today Hispanics are the largest minority group in the country, having overtaken blacks. Whatever government offical ever decided to use drug laws as immigration policy must have been nuts. Or maybe he just knew some Mexican guy who hooked him up with some good smoke.
posted by The Yahtzee Manifesto @ 6:49 PM
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1 Comments:
You had to be around in the late sixties, early seventies to know what went down. The Vietnam war was raging and Richard Nixon was President. He was an extremely bitter, cynical, and paranoid man! I was at the March on Washington in 1969, where half a million of us were swaying back and forth singing John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.” I got to Woodstock a week late, but there were 10,000 people still partying, and I saw the mud and the thousands of muddy sleeping bags left behind.
Nixon had to do something drastic to stop this anti-war youthful energy pouring out onto the streets, so in 1972 he had his flunkies pass a law that classified marijuana as a Schedule One drug, alongside heroin. Schedule One means no medicinal value, whatsoever. To this day, we are living in the shadow of this gross deception, since cannabis has been used as a healing herb since time immemorial.
The fight to reschedule marijuana as a Schedule Two or Schedule Three drug is being led in part by the Virginia-based medpot advocacy group, Patients Out of Time (POT). They are the organizers of the upcoming Fourth National Conference on Cannabis Therapeutics, to be held on April 6-8, in Santa Barbara, California.
Co-sponsored by the University of California, San Francisco and the California Nurses Association, the conference will feature prominent physicians and other health professionals, talking about using cannabis in palliative care, pain management, and pregnancy. Also discussions on marijuana as therapy for AIDS and MS patients, the differences between synthetic and natural THC, as well as reports on cannabis research from Israel, Spain, Canada, the UK, and the Netherlands.
This conference will go a long way to refute the absurd claim of the U.S. government that marijuana has no medicinal properties. In my own life, I know only too well that cannabis is good medicine. I suffer from glaucoma, and I’ve tried many medications, but smoking marijuana is the only one that reduces the inner pressure on my eyeballs and eases my pain.
Sure, I’m worried about the Supreme Court decision that allows the feds to bust me for smoking weed, even though the state I live in allows it. They busted the compassion club where I used to get my dope, and I had to travel to the next county to buy my medicine. Then I said, screw that, I’ll grow my own!
I’m doing it on the sly, since I don’t wanna get busted by the feds. I set up a mini-grow room in my basement. First I boarded up the two small windows on either side of the small room, but I left a hole in the middle of the wood, and screwed fans onto the hole. One is to bring air in, the other is the exhaust fan. I was advised to put a charcoal filter into the exhaust one, to keep telltale odors from escaping the room.
I purchased a 250W High Pressure Sodium lamp with ballast. I affixed the light to the ceiling and built a shelf to hold the ballast. The garden store owner suggested that I put a rubber pad under the ballast, to reduce the vibrational noise. It has to be a special kind of rubber, since the ballast does get hot. I was told to keep all electrical cords off the floor, so I duct taped them to the walls, above the outlets.
The basement had no heat, so I had to bring in a compact electrical heater with a thermostat. I put the light and the heater on a multi-channel digital timer, to be able to control both. I also added a humidifier, since electric heat tends to dry the air. This way I could program exactly the right amount of light, temperature, and humidity, required by my pot plants.
250W is supposed to give enough light for up to three plants, but I’m growing four. I coated the walls with white plastic sheets to reflect the lights, and also added fluorescent grow lights on four sides, for extra lumens. With four plants growing year round, I produce enough medicine to control my pain and keep my eyeballs from popping.
I cashed in some investments, and was able to buy a four-bucket flood and drain hydroponic system. Also known as ebb and flow, these systems involve flooding the grow medium (clay pebbles) with nutrient solution several times during a 24-hour period, then in between, letting the medium dry out. Since the pebbles retain moisture, the root system of the plant—which permeates the pebbles, is never allowed to dry out completely. The whole thing works with a timer, and in-between waterings the solution retreats into a reservoir.
I was confident enough to set up this system by myself, since I managed to find a company online that gives expert advice to licensed medpot growers. They also provide the nutrients, specifically engineered for each stage of life of the cannabis plant. I would highly recommend Grow, Micro and Bloom by the Advanced Nutrients company to any medpot patients who are contemplating growing their own.
Since I’m very partial to good tasting weed, I was advised to drain my reservoir of all nutrient solution for the final 7-10 days of the flowering cycle and mix some Final Phase with 5.5 to 5.8 pH balanced water to purify the plant from a chemical point of view. As a result, I produce the best tasting medicine around!
I still resent having to be on the look-out for the federales, but after I inhale deeply, this annoyance is much easier to take. If you want to take part in the fight to reschedule marijuana as an acceptable drug, get in touch with Patients Out of Time. They’ll be very glad of your support.
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