Washington, April 30, 1998
From Newt Gingrich’s Press Release on the "Speaker’s Task Force for A Drug-Free America," after a page of generalities that they think that we are stupid enough to believe:

"Recent studies show that drug use among children is up, and their attitudes about the dangers of drugs are down. Specifically, the number of 9-to-12 year olds experimenting with marijuana increased 71% from 1993 to 1997, according to the Partnership for A Drug-Free America." See
PDFA’s Propaganda Released On the Internet Hides Margin Of Error That Makes Headline Meaningless

This number is based on an increase from 3 percent to 5 percent of children in that age group. The margin of error for the children’s data was plus or minus 2.2 percentage points. This means that marijuana use among this group may actually have dropped!

Can you pronounce NORMLN?
From Reuters March 23, 1998 article on hemp: "In January the American Farm Bureau, the largest U.S. farm group, withdrew its support for research into hemp. Delegates cited law-enforcement concerns and said they didn't want to be linked with groups like the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws Now."
Actually, that is NORML's feminist branch, to legalize female plants.

--Wilson said unions back campaigns and issues that are at odds with their membership, such as a California initiative to legalize marijuana for medical uses. ``How would you feel as a rank-and-file Teamsters member knowing this is where your hard-earned dues are going -- to make pot ... more available? The answer is you'd be mad as hell.'' – From a news story about Wilson’s support for a law that would limit labor unions’ ability to use their members’ dues for political purposes.
There are two obvious problems with his statement. The first is the quibble that he has no way of knowing what the Teamsters think about medical marijuana. The really important point is that a majority of California voters supported Prop 215, but he continues to use state money to thwart their will.

From newly opened Nixon papers at the National Archives that he never expected to be public:
Richard Nixon, in a June 15, 1971, discussion on drug policy, dismissed ``soft-headed psychiatrists who work in places like NIMH (National Institute for Mental Health) favor marijuana because they're probably all on the stuff themselves.''
For more on Nixon’s role in creating the "War on Drugs" see Smoke and Mirrors

The following passage is from an 1887 speech by Roger Q. Mills of Texas. It was quoted more than once during the December, 1914 debate in Congress:
"Prohibition was introduced as a fraud; it has been nursed as a fraud. It is wrapped in the livery of Heaven, but it comes to serve the devil. It comes to regulate by law our appetites and our daily lives. It comes to tear down liberty and build up fanaticism, hypocrisy, and intolerance. It comes to confiscate by legislative decree the property of many of our fellow citizens. It comes to send spies, detectives, and informers into our homes; to have us arrested and carried before courts and condemned to fines and imprisonments. It comes to dissipate the sunlight of happiness, peace, and prosperity in which we are now living and to fill our land with alienations, estrangements, and bitterness. It comes to bring us evil-- only evil-- and that continually. Let us rise in our might as one and overwhelm it with such indignation that we shall never hear of it again as long as grass grows and water runs."
Thanks to Walker Chandler and Mike Cutler.

The article was spurred by the question of impeaching Clinton, if it is found that he lied about someone else’s not inhaling.

From the New York Times
February 16, 1998

"I'm definitely going to change my life style. Unfortunately for you, I'm not going to change my friends. My friends are real. I'm going to stand behind them and support them. I'm not going to deviate from that. I might have to wear a gas mask from now on, but whatever." -- Ross Rebagliati, in a news conference after it was announced that he could keep his Olympic Gold Medal. See Minor Disaster for Prohibitionists! Rebagliati To Keep Olympic Gold Medal; Marijuana Discussed

"We in this country have to make up our minds -- -- we can not have it both ways: we cannot be both drug-free
and free." Lester Grinspoon, M.D., Harvard Medical School, Co-author Marihuana, The Forbidden Medicine, Marihuana Reconsidered, etc.

"I was tortured with all the dare programs and drug propaganda while I was in junior high and early high school. I remember hearing the word marijuana and equating it with some sort of mortal sin, but I was raised to question things, and to not always believe what I was told...  My senior year of high school, I was offered a joint at a concert. I apprehensively decided that I would try it. The first few times I smoked I began to realize that a lot of what I was taught was crap (and not just regarding drugs)." Thanks to J.G. -- A Sophomore at a large university. If our "drug educators" would just listen a little, they might learn why lying about marijuana is counterproductive. Maybe that is why they don't listen... why no one listens.

"The most dangerous drug in America is a 12-year-old smoking pot." -- Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey, on CNN, from "Monitoring the Future" , Saturday, Dec. 20, 1997 Transcript

Thanks to Dave Fratello, who observed: "Very revealing. No one could make this stuff up."

December 19, 1997

"It's a very humbling experience being busted by your own flesh and blood. It makes you want to stop using drugs."

-- KEITH WALLACE, whose 3-year-old son helped get him arrested by handing police a bag of marijuana from the family car after the father was stopped for speeding.---

He was also drunk, but there is no news in that. Complete Story

"CORRECTION: In "For the Record" (Feb. 24) NR reported that Pope John Paul II wanted the Italian government to ban tobacco as a hard drug. In fact he was talking about marijuana. So the Pope is right about tobacco, though wrong about pot." National Review Magazine / March 24, 1997 page 6.

"One of the safest therapeutically active substances known...." Drug Enforcement Administration Administrative Law Judge, Francis Young, 1988

"True, the Founding Fathers had provided for a specific right to bear arms, but the only reason they'd nothing to say to about the right to plant seeds (was)... because it never would have occurred to them that any state might care to abridge that right. After all, they were writing on hemp paper." Michael Pollan, quoting California flower grower, Will Fulton. Harper's Magazine / April 1997 page 52.

"The smoking of cannabis, even long term, is not harmful to health." EDITORIAL Deglamorising cannabis THE LANCET . Volume 346, Number 8985, November 11, 1995, p. 1241.

"Between 2 and 5 per thousand cannabis users get into trouble." Dutch Cannabis Policy Update

"Apparently, in Amsterdam where use of illicit drugs is made possible due to the hassle free (illicit) availability of that type of drug, the use of cannabis satisfies almost all curiosity. Small numbers of experienced cannabis users try other illicit substances, mostly cocaine and ecstasy."Cannabis Use, A Stepping Stone to Other Drugs? The Case of Amsterdam. by Peter Cohen and Arjan Sas.

"Marijuana gives rise to insanity -- not in its users but in the policies directed against it. A nation that sentences the possessor of a single joint to life imprisonment without parole but sets a murderer free after perhaps six years is in the grips of a deep psychosis." More Reefer Madness by Eric Schlosser. An important article in the April Atlantic Monthly by the author of two previous articles published in The Atlantic in 1994.

"Marijuana causes people to lose their memory and lose their energy, and it makes them stupid... It is the last thing that one would want to see happen on or around a university or state capital.... And people who are casual about drugs ought to realize that a lot of people are dying in America." From The De-Valuing of America (page 130) by Former drug addicted Drug Czar William Bennett. (He was on nicotine maintenance when he was Drug Czar.)

" Perhaps the most pointed statement Wednesday to the powers of pot came from Keith Vines, a prosecutor in the San Francisco district attorney's office. In 1990, Vines prosecuted what was one of the biggest drug busts in the city's history. Three years later, he was near death because of AIDS wasting syndrome. The recommendation: marijuana. 'As a patient, I made the decision to save my life,' said Vines, a plaintiff in the case who still uses marijuana for medical purposes." From Los Angeles Times, May 1, 1997 Copyright Los Angeles Times

Meet the Press Excerpt August 10, 1997 Samples:

Hardball journalism. MR. RUSSERT: "How serious of a problem is using marijuana for medicinal use?"

Strategic analysis, discovering our cavalry techniques to avoid modern technology. GEN. McCAFFREY: "We've got a national campaign by drug legalizers, in my view, to try and use medicinal uses of drugs and legalization of hemp as a stalking horse to get in under the radar screen."

The Economist August 16, 1997 Marijuana as a medicine A subtle syllogism

"Some drugs are known to induce paranoia through chemical action. Marijuana, it seems, can do it through political action instead."

"There are a lot more pro-drug messages. Drug humor is rampant on late-night talk shows. Sitcoms have little wink-and-nod jokes about cocaine and marijuana."

-- ALAN LEVITT, a senior adviser in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, on the media's role in the rise of drug abuse among America's youth. Dec. 5, 1997

Jay Leno:
Medical Margarine: "At the big medical marijuana conference at UC Irvine, they introduced a new product, cannabis butter. It's butter made from hemp. They're calling it, 'I Can't Believe It's Not Marijuana.' "

Scottish poet Robert Burns

From

Jolly Mortals, Fill Your Glasses

"See the smoking bowl before us;
Mark our jovial ragged ring.
Round and round take up the chorus,
And in rapture let us sing!"
(Okay, so it probably was not about cannabis, but...

Interview in the January 1998 POZ Magazine (page 87)

POZ: What about complimentary therapies?

Kiyoshi Kuromiya: "My only complementary therapy is marijuana. I've tried
Marinol .. but if you have appetite loss you want to deal with it immediately.
Marinol doesn't kick in immediately, and honestly, it's not as effective as
pot. I'd smoked pot before,  and I enjoy it. It's essential in preventing
weight loss. When I was in Yokohama in 1994 for the International Conference
on AIDS, I couldn't get any pot because of Japan's strict laws. Without access
to marijuana, I lost 18 pounds in 18 days. I also operate the only cannabis
buyers club that distributes marijuana for free. We distribute half an ounce
every two weeks to 30 different clients."

According to POZ, Kuromiya also runs "Philadelphia's Critical Path AIDS
Project, a 24-hour AIDS hotline, ... a massive web site (www.critpath.org) , publishes a quarterly
newsletter and provides free Internet access and email to over 1,000 people."
Whew, typical lazy pothead!