[ShiningSkull]

LEAP - Law Enforcement Against Prohibition - Cops Say Legalize Drugs

Don't Let Congress Censor
Discussion of Legalization

As soon as this Thursday, November 5, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee could vote on an amendment that will legally prevent some of the government's top advisers from even discussing the idea of legalizing or decriminalizing drugs as a solution to the failed "war on drugs."

Yes, you read that right. The Senate just might censor its own policy advisers from giving science-based advice.

The censorship amendment's author, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), is trying to attach the speech prohibition onto an otherwise positive bill that will create a blue ribbon commission to study our nation's failed criminal justice and drug policies. The commission is supposed to make recommendations for ways to improve the system, but how can they do that with the blindfold that Sen. Grassley wants to put on them? Please take action below and tell your senators to oppose the censorship amendment!

Click here to send email: Law Enforcement Against Prohibition


This is a landmark amendment, it's importance shouldn't be underestimated by anyone. Free speech is at stake here.

Dianne Feinstein is a member of the Senate Judiciary committee which will be voting on this amendment. Calls are more important than emails.

Dianne Feinstein, California - (202) 224-3841 - Bay Area Office: (415) 393-0707 - Los Angeles Office: (310) 914-7300

[ShiningSkull]

Here's another story about Senator Grassley's amendment:

Grassley Hoping to Keep
Medical Marijuana Illegal

By Mike Lillis 11/4/09 3:02 PM

On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider legislation designed to overhaul the nation’s criminal justice system by creating a commission to examine that system and make reform recommendations to Congress. The bill, sponsored by Sens. Jim Webb (D-Va.) and Arlen Specter (D-Pa.), is designed to confront the problem of the nation’s incarceration rates, which are far and away the highest in the developed world.

One focus of the commission’s review, sponsors say, will necessarily be the sentencing policies surrounding the decades-old “war on drugs,” which critics argue has packed the nation’s prisons needlessly with non-violent offenders.

Some Republicans, however, are wary of taking any steps toward a legalization of drugs. And they’re lining up with amendments to prevent that from happening. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), for example, has been weighing a provision that would prevent the newly formed commission from even studying the effects that drug legalization would have on the criminal justice system.

“The point is, for them to do what we tell them to do,” Grassley said Wednesday of the commission. “And one of the things that I was anticipating telling them not to do is to recommend or study the legalization of drugs.”

Asked by a reporter if his amendment would “have even stopped the discussion of legalized marijuana for medical purposes,” Grassley responded, “Yes, the extent to which it would be decriminalization, the answer is yes.”

The Webb-Specter bill has 34 co-sponsors, including Judiciary Committee Republicans Orrin Hatch (Utah) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.).

Grassley Hoping to Keep Medical Marijuana Illegal The Washington Independent

[ShiningSkull]

More from Rollingstone, including the text of the amendment:

Drug War Madness:
Grassley’s Gag Rule

11/3/09, 12:57 pm EST

Sen. Jim Webb (D-Virginia) has bravely proposed legislation to create a Blue Ribbon commission to conduct an 18-month, “top-to-bottom” review of America’s criminal justice system with the goal of bringing U.S. incarceration rates in line with the rest of the civilized world.

The commission is to make sweeping recommendations for reform, and is tasked in particular with developing proposals to “restructure our approach to drug policy.”

Enter unreconstructed drug warrior Sen. Chuck Grassley, who has released the text of an amendment that would ensure the commission not reach any conclusions that threaten 40 years of failure. The commission would be prohibited, thanks to Grassley, from examining any “policies that favor decriminalization of violations of the Controlled Substances Act or the legalization of any controlled substances.”

Below, the text of Grassley’s gag rule:


AMENDMENT intended to be proposed by Mr. GRASSLEY
….
SEC. ll. RESTRICTIONS ON AUTHORITY.
The Commission shall have no authority to make findings related to current Federal, State, and local criminal justice policies and practices or reform recommendations that involve, support, or otherwise discuss the decriminalization of any offense under the Controlled Substances Act or the legalization of any controlled substance listed under the Controlled Substances Act.


Jack Cole, a retired undercover narcotics officer who now heads the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) tells Rolling Stone that “Senator Grassley’s censorship amendment would block what Senator Webb is trying to achieve with this bill. All along, Senator Webb has said that in the effort to fix our broken criminal justice system ‘nothing should be off the table.’ That should include the obvious solution of ending the ‘drug war’ as a way to solve the unintended problems caused by that failed policy,” says Cole.

National Affairs Daily Edited by Tim Dickinson



Drug War Madness: Grassley’s Gag Rule : Rolling Stone : National Affairs Daily

[BrattonBasher]

Grassley is a very powerfull Republican! I imagine the entire Republican Caucus would be against an honest debate about drugs. How sad...

[VooDoo Chile]

Dude, not only is this retarded; it's totally unconstitutional IMO. Violates a substantive interpretation o' the Speech and Debate clause under Article I section 6.

[BrattonBasher]

Originally Posted by VooDoo Chile

Dude, not only is this retarded; it's totally unconstitutional IMO. Violates a substantive interpretation o' the Speech and Debate clause under Article I section 6.

It's procedural.

[VooDoo Chile]

Originally Posted by BrattonBasher

It's procedural.

Hey, I tried, eh? You try pullin' something meaningful outta an incredibly vague 18th century document and see what you come up with!

[DankJews]

How Can We Allow For Such Things To Happen?!?!?!?!?! It Drives Me Crazy!!!!

Thanks For The Post SS

.:Stay Medicated:.

[Masonic Chronic]

They are doing the same thing in England (The Queen's dungeon) where they fired their top medical science advisor over his thought that "medical cannabis is safer than alcohol."

[ShiningSkull]

More context about Jim Webb's bill calling for the overhaul of the criminal justice system in the United States.


NEW YORK, Nov. 4, 2009

A New Era for U.S. Drug Policy?
Jim Webb Says America's Justice System Is Broken and Drug Policy Is Largely to Blame; Is Portugal's Liberal Approach a Model?

By Ken Millstone
(CBS) This story was written by Ken Millstone as part of a CBSNews.com special report on the evolving debate over marijuana legalization in the U.S. Marijuana Nation: The New War Over Weed - CBS News

Ethan Nadelmann is feeling good. Really good. As the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, Nadelmann has long advocated for the liberalization of U.S. drug laws -- specifically, making marijuana legal, regulated and taxed and ending criminal penalties on the possession and use of all other drugs. For most of that time the Alliance has been relegated to the fringe of serious policy discussions, a space long occupied - or so the stereotype goes - by radical libertarians and readers of the marijuana enthusiast magazine High Times.

But things are changing. The last few months are "the first time I've ever felt that the wind is at my back and not in my face," Nadelmann said. "There's a tremendous amount of momentum across the board."

Consider the developments of the last year. In March, Virginia Sen. Jim Webb introduced a bill calling for a wholesale overhaul of the criminal justice system in the United States. Our system is cripplingly large, he argued, and marred by wrongful incarcerations, poor rehabilitative treatment and mental health care and a price tag of $44 billion a year on prisons alone. Webb called the situation a "national disgrace," and said the elephant in the room is sky-high incarceration rates for drug users due to the U.S.'s 40-year-old War on Drugs.

California, the first state to make marijuana legal for medical use, is considering a bill to legalize and tax marijuana for all residents; it had its first hearing in the state assembly last week. Massachusetts voted to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana. The attorney general of Arizona has said that legal marijuana might be an answer to the Mexican drug cartel violence spilling over into his state.

And a Gallup poll released last month shows that support for national marijuana legalization has climbed steadily since the early 1980s, recently hitting an all-time high of 44 percent. "That is the most extraordinary poll result as I have seen in all my years working in this," Nadelmann said. "We haven't changed our position, but we are basically more and more part of the mainstream discussion." He likens the situation to movements like gay rights and civil rights that made rapid strides in relatively short periods. "We're getting awfully close to something that looks a lot like a tipping point," he said.

The recent reform push hasn't been limited to the United States, either. In August, Mexico, with little fanfare, passed a bill decriminalizing the possession and use of small amounts of all narcotics, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines. The U.S. - in what drug reform advocates see as a promising sign - made no criticism of the change. (The George W. Bush administration persuaded then Mexican President Vicente Fox not to sign an identical measure in 2006.) Argentina has passed its own decriminalization bill and Brazil and Ecuador are considering similar measures. None of this means that liberalizing drug laws in the United States is going to be easy for Nadelmann and his allies. Webb's bill, which is being heard Thursday in the Senate Judiciary Committee, has amassed 34 Senate co-sponsors - including Republicans Lindsey Graham and Olympia Snowe - and drawn broad support from justice advocacy groups.

But according to Webb spokeswoman Jessica Smith, "Twenty-one amendments have been filed in Judiciary that speak to our bill. They're largely from the Republicans [and] I imagine a large amount of them are going to be about drug policy. ... They don't want to go home and say 'I'm legalizing drugs.'" Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, offered an amendment explicitly forbidding any recommendations that even discuss drug decriminalization or legalization.

To be clear, Webb's bill does not call for drug legalization or even focus on drug policy exclusively. Instead, it would appoint a bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission to make recommendations on reforming the criminal justice system as a whole. "We have 5 percent of the world's population. We have 25 percent of the world's known prison population," Webb said when he introduced the bill. "We have an incarceration rate in the United States the world's greatest democracy - that is five times as high as the incarceration rate of the rest of the world."

"There's only two possibilities here," he continued. "Either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice." Webb's bill calls for a hard look at drug policy with all options on the table. He has talked about "overincarceration" and the "criminalization" of drugs - phrases that have been taboo until now in mainstream drug policy discussions. One talking point: the United States had 41,000 drug offenders in prison in 1980. Now the number is more than half a million - a 1,200 percent increase. And many of those are non-violent offenders jailed only for possession.

“We can't have a debate about our criminal justice system if we just ignore the drug part of it," Smith said and the goal of the bill is to dispassionately consider all options for reform. "States across the country - their budgets are being completely eaten up by incarceration. ... Is it effective? Is it cost effective? Are we doing the right thing here when we lock people up?"

In the early 1970s, Richard Nixon appointed a former Republican governor, Raymond Shafer, to lead a similar commission to examine marijuana. The commission's report recommended the decriminalization of personal use and questioned the constitutionality of harshly criminal marijuana policy generally. Nixon repudiated the recommendations, but the commission's findings were no aberration, according to Nadelmann. "The same thing happens almost every time," he said. "If you actually set up a commission that is truly independent ... inevitably they come up with recommendations that favor significant reform."

Portugal: A Case Study
In 2001, Portugal decriminalized not just marijuana but all drugs - heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine. Drug use has held steady overall, but declined in several key demographics, including teenagers. Drug-related crime plummeted. So did overdoses and HIV from needle use.

Last year, the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute sent the writer Glenn Greenwald to Portugal to report on the country's experience in the nearly eight years since decriminalization.

Greenwald, a former attorney who blogs at Salon.com, is best known for his liberal positions on civil liberties, torture, and the Bush administration. He said he has never written about drug policy before and went to gather empirical evidence on Portugal's outcomes. (Greenwald lives in Brazil and speaks fluent Portuguese.) The result was a strongly positive 30-page report published by Cato in April.

"In the 1990s they probably had the single worst problem with drug abuse and related pathologies of any country in Europe. Crime was through the roof," Greenwald said in an interview in September. "They felt like they had a huge crisis on their hands ... The more they criminalized the worse it got."



A New Era for U.S. Drug Policy? - CBS News

Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

[kennabis]

Originally Posted by Masonic Chronic

They are doing the same thing in England (The Queen's dungeon) where they fired their top medical science advisor over his thought that "medical cannabis is safer than alcohol."

heck, i would fire him to! if i were workin for the "conspiracy"

i've disliked the british before i new what is was like to dislike something

obama hasn't been the same (to some), since he visited the queen. maybe she indoctrinated him into the "lizard people"

if anyone can turn into a lizard, it would have to be a brit! tea anyone?!?

[Greenbud]

Done.

Mad props to ShiningSkull for posting news.

We need to act on this as much as we need to respond to local attacks on our MMJ freedoms.

Everyone must contact Feinstein ASAP people. No excuses.

GB

Originally Posted by ShiningSkull

LEAP - Law Enforcement Against Prohibition - Cops Say Legalize Drugs

Don't Let Congress Censor
Discussion of Legalization

As soon as this Thursday, November 5, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee could vote on an amendment that will legally prevent some of the government's top advisers from even discussing the idea of legalizing or decriminalizing drugs as a solution to the failed "war on drugs."

Yes, you read that right. The Senate just might censor its own policy advisers from giving science-based advice.

The censorship amendment's author, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), is trying to attach the speech prohibition onto an otherwise positive bill that will create a blue ribbon commission to study our nation's failed criminal justice and drug policies. The commission is supposed to make recommendations for ways to improve the system, but how can they do that with the blindfold that Sen. Grassley wants to put on them? Please take action below and tell your senators to oppose the censorship amendment!

Click here to send email: Law Enforcement Against Prohibition


This is a landmark amendment, it's importance shouldn't be underestimated by anyone. Free speech is at stake here.

Dianne Feinstein is a member of the Senate Judiciary committee which will be voting on this amendment. Calls are more important than emails.

Dianne Feinstein, California - (202) 224-3841 - Bay Area Office: (415) 393-0707 - Los Angeles Office: (310) 914-7300

[Bogart McKilo]

I hope enough people email/call. Grassley and others want to bring all the facts to the table...so long as they're his.

[cephas]

Hot damn.

Straight up, I'm just jealous.

What I wouldn't give to be able to make up the rules to the game.....

...I'd make better rules than these poopyheads too. I'd make rules like on Fridays everybody has to sing everything, and dance everywhere all day, I'd call it Cephie's "living in a musical day!" There would be random musicians just walking around keeping accompaniment to it all, maybe set up Grand piano's on a PA system on top of the skyscrapers, how sweet would that be! I mean, for real, figure if the government is going to just waste it's money on useless crap it should at least be entertaining.

....I'd have a rule where pharmacists would have to perform all clinical drug trails on themselves, and Dr.'s would have to take all medications before they could prescribe any of it....

...I'd have Gov'mnt employees handing out free gov'mnt j's to people who look sad...

Then I'd probably get assassinated, but what a run it would be....

...these doodoo poopy monsters just waste all that cool power.