A letter to Obama

Mr. President.

You are letting down your constituents down by being too bi-partisan We need you to start standing up for Social security and health care.Not give in to the Republicans outrageous demands in the hope of gaining their favor.They The Conservatives hate you,and laugh every time you give in.You not going to gain anything from them.

We also need you to put an end to these costly and unnecessary wars. America is in financial crisis. We can not afford spending billions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan when Americans are loosing their homes and falling into poverty.

Flowery words go only so far.Its time for you to stop trying to make nice with the conservatives and start fighting for the people who voted you in.

Oregon Cannabis Tax Act: A Movement to Legalize

OCTA is currently in the petition stage and does not have enough signatures at the time to make the ballot. As of July 27, 2011 the measure has obtained 30,139 signatures. However, hope is not lost, as the measure just needs to reach the required amount of authenticated signatures (125,000) by July 2nd of 2012.

This means that if you're a marijuana user and a resident of Oregon it's pretty much your civic duty to sign that petition. You may reach the organization funding the measure at www.cannabistaxact.org.

If passed, OCTA will enable adults to legally purchase marijuana from state-licensed stores, such as liquor stores. It will also create many more jobs, by enabling farmers to grow cannabis for these state stores. Adult residents will be able to grow a reasonable personal amount of weed. Additionally, the act will allow farmers to grow hemp for material, food and fuel, and will also raise an estimate $120 million annually in taxes from selling marijuana. Furthermore, the state will save an estimated $61.5 million by not having to prosecute harmless cannabis "offenders."

If you want to find out more about ways you can help legalize marijuana in both your own state as well as Oregon, please visit the following webistes:

www.cannabistaxact.org

www.norml.org

Why the Pot Industry Needs to Get a Lot Greener

There's a budding movement urging cannabis growers to ask themselves: How green is your grass?

A recent energy-use report authored by one California scientist and a Humboldt County-based group are taking a sharp look at the carbon footprint of industrial-scale indoor cannabis growing. An ordinance in Boulder requires medical-cannabis dispensaries to pay carbon offset fees. All of them are concerned about the environmental impacts as the medical cannabis industry grows ever larger.

But first, a quick history lesson in indoor growing: A few decades ago, a bunch of hippies trekked off to the rural lands of Humboldt County, Calif., to create idyllic, off-the-grid communities. When their kids got old enough to drive, growing cannabis and selling marijuana became the way to pay for gas. But as the CAMP raids started up in the 1980s, growers had to move their operations indoors. Elaborate lighting systems were created to maximize growth cycles. Fuel had to be trucked over miles of dirt roads to run the generators that kept the operations going.

Today, as sixteen U.S. states have approved medical cannabis, it's becoming easier for entrepreneurs to set up elaborate energy-sucking cannabis nurseries. And all that indoor cannabis comes with high energy costs.

In April, energy and environmental systems analyst Evan Mills released his report "Energy Up in Smoke," which examined the energy usage and carbon footprint of indoor cannabis growing operations. (While Mills is a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, his website emphasizes that the report was conducted independently and on his own time.)

Consulting with an indoor growing expert, Mills crunched the numbers for running all those high-intensity lights, pumps, dehumidifiers, heating and irrigation systems, plus the electric gadgets that control them.

The report finds that nationwide, "indoor Cannabis production results in energy expenditures of $5 billion each year, with electricity use equivalent to that of 2 million average U.S. Homes." All related CO2 production, including transportation, equals that of 3 million cars.

In California, where the growing medical cannabis industry still has a sort of Wild West feel, indoor growing is responsible for about 3 percent of the entire state's electricity use, or a staggering 8 percent of household use.

Mills finds that producing just one joint creates two pounds of CO2 emissions. One indoor off-grid plant -- like that in rural areas that use power from diesel generators -- requires 70 gallons of diesel fuel to grow.

Mills writes that cost-effective efficiency improvements of 75% are conceivable, and that "shifting cultivation outdoors eliminates most energy uses (aside from transport)."

In other words: to grow the greenest weed, outdoor is the way to go.

But as Sacramento-area dispensary owner Kris Burnett points out, there are hurdles keeping many growers from moving outside, especially in urban areas, such as crop security, exposure to law enforcement, and ever-changing local pot regulation ordinances.

"Nobody knows what [Sacramento] County is planning to do," says Burnett, who opened her collective in June. "It's a grey area with the law."

She also points to patients who live in assisted living homes or apartments with no place to grow outdoors.

Charley Custer, a member of the green-growing advocacy group Grow it in the Sun, says that his organization doesn't speak out against patients who cultivate their own medication in their closets at home."What we're trying to do is raise awareness of the destructive and even insane practices of industrial and commercial growers," says Custer. "We have nothing to say against whatever practices individuals use to get their own medicine."

The Corporate Supreme Court; Time For Impeachment

By Ralph Nader

Five Supreme Court Justices--Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito and Kennedy are entrenching, in a whirlwind of judicial dictates, judicial legislating and sheer ideological judgments, a mega-corporate supremacy over the rights and remedies of individuals.

The artificial entity called "the corporation" has no mention in our Constitution whose preamble starts with "We the People," not "We the Corporation."

Taken together the decisions are brazenly over-riding sensible precedents, tearing apart the state common law of torts and blocking class actions, shoving aside jury verdicts, limiting people's "standing to sue", pre-empting state jurisdictions--anything that serves to centralize power and hand it over to the corporate conquistadors.



Here are some examples. (For more see thecorporatecourt.com). Remember the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound twenty two years ago? It destroyed marine life and the livelihoods of many landowners, fishermen and native Alaskans. Its toxic effects continue to this day.

Well, after years of litigation by Alaskan fishermen, the Supreme Court took the case to review a $5 billion award the trial court had assessed in punitive damages. A 5 to 3 decision lowered the sum to $507.5 million which is less than what Exxon made in interest by delaying the case for twenty years. Moreover, the drunken Exxon captain's oil tanker calamity raised the price of gasoline at the pump for awhile. Exxon actually made a profit despite its discharge of 50 million gallons.

The unelected, life-tenured corporate court was just getting started and every year they tighten the noose of corporatism around the American people.

In Bush v. Gore (5-4 decision), the Court picked the more corporate president of the United States in 2000, leaving constitutional scholars thunderstruck at this breathtaking seizure of the electoral process, stopping the Florida Supreme Court's ongoing state-wide recount. The five Republican Justices behaved as political hacks conducting a judicial coup d'état.

But then what do you expect from justices like Thomas and Scalia who participate in a Koch brothers' political retreat or engage in extrajudicial activities that shake the public confidence in the highest court of the land.

Last year came the Citizens United v. FEC case where the Republican majority went out of its way to decide a question that the parties to the appeal never asked. In a predatory "frolic and detour," the 5 justices declared that corporations (including foreign companies) no longer have to obey the prohibitory federal law and their own court's precedents.

Corporations like Pfizer, Aetna, Chevron, GM, Citigroup, Monsanto can spend unlimited funds (without asking their shareholders) in independent expenditures to oppose or support candidates for public office from a local city council election to federal Congressional and Presidential elections.

Once again our judicial dictatorship has spoken for corporate privilege and power overriding the rights of individual voters.

Eighty percent of the American people, reported a Washington Post poll, reject the Court's view that a business corporation is entitled to the same free speech rights as citizens.

Chances are very high that in cases between workers and companies, consumers and companies, communities and corporations, tax payers and military contractors--big business wins.

Inanimate corporations created by state government charters have risen as Frankensteins to control the people through one judicial activist decision after another. It was the Supreme Court in 1886 that started treating a corporation as a "person" for purposes of the equal protection right in the fourteenth amendment. Actually the scribe manufactured that conclusion in the headnotes even though the Court's opinion did not go that far. But then it was off to the races. These inanimate giants, astride the globe, have privileges and immunities that "We the People" can only dream about, yet they have equal constitutional rights with us (except for the right against self-incrimination (Fifth Amendment) and more limited privacy rights.)

What is behind these five corporate Justices' decisions is a commercial philosophy that big business knows best for you and your children. These Justices intend to drive this political jurisprudence to further extremes, so long as they are in command, to twist our founders clear writings that the Constitution was for the supremacy of human beings.

To see how extreme the five corporate justices are, consider the strong contrary view of one of their conservative heroes, the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist in a case where a plurality of justices threw out a California regulation requiring an insert in utility bills inviting residential ratepayers to band together to advance their interests against Pacific Gas and Electric. The prevailing justices said--get this--that it violated the electric company monopoly's first amendment right to remain silent and not respond to the insert's message.

Conservative Justice Rehnquist's dissent contained these words--so totally rejected by the present-day usurpers: "Extension of the individual freedom of conscience decisions to business corporations strains the rationale of those cases beyond the breaking point. To ascribe to such artificial entities an "intellect" or "mind" for freedom of conscience purposes is to confuse metaphor with reality."

It was left to another conservative jurist, the late Justice Byron White, dissenting in the corporatist decision First Nat'l Bank v. Bellotti (1978) to recognize the essential principle.

Corporations, Justice White wrote, are "in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only the economy but also the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process." The state, he continued, has a compelling interest in "preventing institutions which have been permitted to amass wealth as a result of special advantages extended by the State for certain economic purposes from using that wealth to acquire an unfair advantage in the political process". The state need not permit its own creation to consume it." (emphasis added)

Never have I urged impeachment of Supreme Court justices. I do so now, for the sake of ending the Supreme Court's corporate-judicial dictatorship that is not accountable under our system of checks and balance in any other way.

top federal prosecutor in Oregon Vows to end medical Marijuana program.

The top federal prosecutor in Oregon and 33 of the state's district attorneys announced last week that they are going to put an end to prescription pot sales. The authorities say that although Oregon currently has nearly 40,000 people enrolled in its voter-approved medical-marijuana program, law enforcement must take action because the system violates federal law and is "putting marijuana in the hands of more and more healthy kids." But is that really true?
Eric Devericks
Related Content

Oregon Prosecutors Promise Medical Marijuana Crackdown, For the Kids' Sake
June 6, 2011
Spokane Police, Busy Raiding Pot Dispensaries, No Longer Have Time to Investigate Property Crime
May 19, 2011
Spokane Marijuana Dispensaries Raided; Feds Say New State Law Won't Stop Crackdown
April 29, 2011
Portland Geeks Release "Badass-Ness Map" That Scores Neighborhoods by Proximity to Hipster Amenities
April 28, 2011
Reverb Comment of the Week
April 26, 2011

More About

Oregon Department of Public Health
Spokane
Portland (Oregon)
Medical Marijuana
Marijuana

The first part, of course, is accurate: Oregon's medical-marijuana system violates federal law. This is the same rationale used by eastern Washington prosecutors for raiding Spokane dispensaries in recent weeks. Pot is still a Schedule I controlled substance—along with heroin, cocaine, and LSD—and therefore has no legitimate medical use in the eyes of the federal government. There's no wiggle room here; a law is a law is a law, and it is a prosecutor's duty to uphold that law no matter how misguided or ineffective it may be.

And in Oregon, where voters approved medical marijuana in 1998, selling weed in any way, shape, or form is still technically forbidden by state law. Eligible patients must get their medical grass from "registered grow sites" regulated by the Department of Health. Dispensaries are not permitted, but disabled tokers are allowed to get their daily doses from "designated primary caregivers."

Nevertheless, dozens of cannabis clubs have sprouted across Oregon (mostly in Portland) over the past decade. These are places with couches, vaporizers, and snacks where card-holding pot smokers can use—and, in rare cases, replenish—their supply. These are the type of businesses that have the state's top lawmen in a tizzy.

U.S. Attorney Dwight C. Holton, 33 district attorneys, the state Sheriff's Association, and the Oregon Association of Chiefs of Police declared last Friday, June 3, that "individuals and businesses that conduct sales of marijuana face the risk of prosecution, civil enforcement action, and seizure of assets."

Justifying the crackdown, the prosecutors have repeatedly stated that the state's medical-marijuana system is making it easier for kids to get high. In addition to Holton's claims about weed finding its way into "the hands of more and more healthy kids," Marion County District Attorney Walt Beglau made this proclamation: "Drug traffickers are hiding behind the medical-marijuana law to protect their sham operations. We have to rein in this outlaw atmosphere before any kid can walk into a storefront on Main Street in any town in Oregon and buy marijuana illegally."

Holy crap, if kids are buying bags of reefer as if they were gummy bears, then statistics about teenage marijuana use must be off the charts! Yet when the Partnership for Drug-Free America surveyed 3,287 ninth through 12th graders in 2009, it found that pot use by high schoolers nationwide has actually decreased since 1998, the year Oregon adopted its medical-marijuana system.

According to the polling, in 2009 25 percent of teens reported smoking marijuana in the past month. The previous year it was 19 percent, and before that the figures had been steadily declining for the entire decade. In 1998, 27 percent of teens surveyed said they had smoked pot recently.

What's more, according to a 2008 study by the Marijuana Policy Project, the declines in teenage marijuana use are even more pronounced in states that allow medical pot. "No state with a medical-marijuana law has experienced an increase in youth marijuana use since their law's enactment," the research found. "In fact, all states have reported overall decreases—exceeding 50 percent in some age groups—strongly suggesting that enactment of state medical-marijuana laws does not increase teen marijuana use."

In Oregon specifically, the pot-smoking trends "are slightly less favorable than nationwide trends, although teen use is still down overall." The study, which relied on data provided by the Oregon Department of Health, found that among more than 20,000 eighth and 11th graders, pot use declined across the board—up to 33 percent in some demographics—from 1998 to 2007.

A spokeswoman for the Oregon U.S. Attorney's office did not immediately respond to a phone call and e-mail from Seattle Weekly asking about the discrepancy between the rhetoric in their press release and the actual statistics. Until they get back to us, it's probably safe to assume they've just been blowing smoke.

Psychedelic icon Owsley Stanley dies in Australia

Owsley "Bear" Stanley, a 1960s counterculture figure who flooded the flower power scene with LSD and was an early benefactor of the Grateful Dead, died in a car crash in his adopted home country of Australia on Sunday, his family said. He was 76.

The renegade grandson of a former governor of Kentucky, Stanley helped lay the foundation for the psychedelic era by producing more than a million doses of LSD at his labs in San Francisco's Bay Area.

"He made acid so pure and wonderful that people like Jimi Hendrix wrote hit songs about it and others named their band in its honor," former rock 'n' roll tour manager Sam Cutler wrote in his 2008 memoirs "You Can't Always Get What You Want."

Hendrix's song "Purple Haze" was reputedly inspired by a batch of Stanley's product, though the guitarist denied any drug link. The ear-splitting psychedelic-blues combo Blue Cheer took its named from another batch.

Stanley briefly managed the Grateful Dead, and oversaw every aspect of their live sound at a time when little thought was given to amplification in public venues. His tape recordings of Dead concerts were turned into live albums, providing him with a healthy income in later life.

"When it came to technology, the Bear was one of the most far-out and interesting guys on the planet," Cutler wrote. "The first FM live simulcast could be, in part, attributed to his vision, as could the first quadraphonic simulcast on radio."

The Dead, a fabled rock band formed in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1965 known for its improvisational live concerts, wrote about him in their song "Alice D. Millionaire" after a 1967 arrest prompted a newspaper to describe Stanley as an "LSD millionaire."

Steely Dan's 1976 single "Kid Charlemagne" was loosely inspired by Stanley's exploits.

'COMMUNITY SERVICE'

According to a 2007 profile in the San Francisco Chronicle, Stanley started cooking LSD after discovering the recipe in a chemistry journal at the University of California, Berkeley.

The police raided his first lab in 1966, but Stanley successfully sued for the return of his equipment. After a marijuana bust in 1970, he went to prison for two years.

"I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for," he told the Chronicle's Joel Selvin.

"What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different."

He emigrated to the tropical Australian state of Queensland in the early 1980s, apparently fearful of a new ice age, and sold enamel sculptures on the Internet. He lost one of his vocal cords to cancer.

Stanley was born Augustus Owsley Stanley III in Kentucky, a state governed by his namesake grandfather from 1915 to 1919. He served in the U.S. Air Force for 18 months, studied ballet in Los Angeles and then enrolled at UC Berkeley. In addition to producing and advocating LSD, he adhered to an all-meat diet.

Cutler, speaking on behalf of the family, said in an interview that Stanley and his wife, Sheila, were driving to their home near the city of Cairns along a dangerous stretch of highway when he evidently lost control during a storm. He died instantly; his wife broke her collar bone.

Stanley is also survived by four children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Which Dangerous Toxins Are in Your Pot?

Your weed might be gnarlier than you think. So what's an eco-conscious stoner to do?

In 2004, California organic farm inspector Chris Van Hook submitted an unusual request to the US Department of Agriculture: He wanted permission to certify a medical marijuana farm as organic. He’d already inspected three pot farms, he says, before word came back that weed couldn't be organic because it wasn’t a federally recognized crop.

So Van Hook founded Clean Green, a certification program for medical marijuana farmers that's nearly identical to the USDA's organics program—except that it can't legally use the term "organic." Since launching in 2004, Clean Green has certified 80 medical marijuana growers who last year produced 8,000 pounds of cannabis valued at as much as $33 million. It's the only inspection service aimed at pot smokers who want their ganja to be farmed as safely and ethically as their organic salad greens.

In practice, medical marijuana is typically greener than pot from your curbside drug dealer, which is often sourced through Mexican cartels or illegal grows in national forests. But the distinction pretty much stops there. Grown under the radar of state and federal agricultural authorities, even "medical" cannabis can be covered in toxic mold, raised in rooms filled with shedding pit bulls, or coated in commercial-grade synthetic fertilizers and insecticides such as phosphate and Diazinon, which can be especially toxic if improperly applied. "Under our program a huge advantage is the patient can be assured that their cannabis is being grown in a legally compliant manner," says Van Hook. Well, at least "legally compliant" enough for any eco-conscious stoner.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, I accompanied Van Hook, a balding, soft-spoken, 54-year-old, on an inspection of an indoor cannabis growing operation in a house deep in a Northern California redwood forest. He'd asked that I not reveal the name and location of the grower, a fit, clean-cut young father whose day job involves corporate leadership training. It had been about a year since Van Hook had certified his grow-op; just as USDA organic standards require, it was now up for its annual re-inspection.

"I just want to do something I believe in," explained the grower, who I'll call Jack, as we stood outside his modest bungalow, "and do it as ethically and environmentally consciously as possible."

Advertise on MotherJones.com

Though medical marijuana is legal in 15 states, most of them don't inspect pot farms for compliance with agricultural laws. Which where Van Hook's status as an accredited "apples-to-zucchini" USDA-certified organic farm inspector comes in: He's denied some pot growers Clean Green certification for infractions such a using composted human feces to fertilize plants, growing plants near livestock pens that coat buds in manure dust, or setting off a bug bomb in a grow room shortly before harvesting.

In the front of a detached garage, Jack deactivated a security alarm system and welcomed us inside. Van Hook was already scribbling notes; he doesn't certify grow-ops in houses with children, who can ingest buds or be killed in electrical fires, unless the plants are in "detached, locked facilities." Jack unlocked another door leading to a sealed-off grow room that filled the garage nearly wall-to-wall. The pungent smell of 40 thriving marijuana plants (most of them a variety known as Sour Diesel) mixed with the earthy aroma of a bubbling brew of compost tea, a mix of nutrients and beneficial bacteria that is used as a fertilizer and disease suppressant.
Next Page: "Forget about the Buddhas and the space ships; I look at the ingredients."

Along a wall full of organic gardening products—a molasses-and-yucca-based soil supplement, an oil from Indian neem trees to control pests—Van Hook spotted an unfamiliar-looking bottle of "natural" fertilizer from a company called Humboldt Nutrients. Like many products marketed to pot growers, its psychedelic label looked like the cover of a Grateful Dead album. "Forget about the Buddhas and the spaceships; I look at the ingredients," Van Hook said as he picked up the bottle. A USDA-certified input reviewer on Van' Hook's seven-person staff would later vet its contents.

A lack of approved products isn't the only obstacle to growing organic ganja. Compost teas and guano-based fertilizers contain too much sediment to pass through the tubes used in soil-free hydroponics systems, so indoor growers like Jack rely instead on standard potting soil and watering by hand. Powerful grow lamps suck down large amounts of electricity—a criticism often raised by certified outdoor farmers, whose weed fetches about 50 percent less on the dispensary market because it isn't as powerful or visually striking as indoor buds. Though Van Hook doesn't penalize people who use lamps, he refuses to certify indoor grow-ops powered by dirty diesel generators, which are common in California's remote northern counties.

As Van Hook continued his inspection, Jack flipped a switch and triggered a white nova of grow lamps. Van Hook crouched beneath them with a microscope in search of signs of pesticide residue and spider mites on marijuana leaves; a few insects are actually desirable as signs of pesticide-free growing. He went on to check that Jack complied with local pot-cultivation laws, electrical codes, and agricultural sanitation standards. He's applied a similar checklist to the nine medical marijuana dispensaries that are certified as "processor/handlers," giving them the right to package Clean Green pot—just as the USDA authorizes Whole Foods to package organic granola.

According to Van Hook, Clean Green marijuana doesn't necessarily sell for more than uncertified medical pot; the trick is knowing where to find it. About 10 California dispensaries offer Clean Green-approved product, including Harborside Health Center in Oakland and Herbal Cure Collective in Los Angeles. Van Hook, who charges an average of $1,800 per certification, pitches his services to farmers and dispensary owners primarily as a tool for product differentiation and marketing.

Despite those benefits, many pot growers and sellers are nervous about letting a third-party inspector take notes that could be used against them by federal law enforcement. Which is why the inside of Van Hook's van displays a framed copy of his law degree from Concord Law Law School; being a lawyer enables him to keep his notes confidential under attorney-client privilege.

The final stop on Van Hook's inspection was in a shed where Jack unlocked a metal chest beneath a futon to reveal several plastic "turkey bags" brimming with buds. Some dispensaries commission independent testing on their purchases to check for harmful chemical residues. Van Hook's field tests are more basic. He pulled out a microscope and searched for signs of hair or mold. "They are beautiful buds; they are immaculate," he proclaimed, marveling at their gemlike THC crystals. Jack smiled. "You are a medical cannabis patient, aren't you, Chris? Why don't you try a little bit?"