The U.S. Army, in a search for “nonlethal incapacitating agents,” tested cannabis-based drugs on GI volunteers throughout the 1960s according to Dr. James Ketchum, the psychiatrist who led the classified research program at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland.

Ketchum retired as a colonel in 1976 and lives in Santa Rosa. He has written a memoir, “Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten,” in which he describes experiments conducted at Edgewood and defends the Army’s ethical standards. In a talk to the Society of Cannabis Clinicians in Los Angeles last month, Ketchum recounted to 20 doctors the Army’s experiments with cannabinoid drugs.

(The society was founded in 2000 by Dr. Tod Mikuriya, a Berkeley psychiatrist with a long-standing interest in cannabis therapeutics, to provide a forum in which doctors monitoring cannabis use by California patients could share information.)

Ketchum was a young captain finishing a residency at Walter Reed Army Hospital when he was assigned in 1961 to be the supervising psychiatrist at Edgewood Arsenal. The new president, John F. Kennedy, was enthusiastic about funding the search for nonlethal incapacitants (first authorized by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1958).

The synthetic analog of THC tested by the Army in pursuit of this ideal, EA 2233, was developed by a chemist named Harry Pars employed by the Arthur D. Little company of Cambridge, Mass. It was a mixture of eight isomers of the THC molecule (different arrangements of the same atoms). EA 2233 was ingested at strengths ranging from 10 to 60 micrograms per kilogram of body weight. Although its effects lasted up to 30 hours, they were not potent enough for military purposes.

Ketchum excerpts an interview in his book between a scientist and a GI on EA 2233:

Q: How are you?

A: Pretty good, I guess.

Q: Pretty good?

A: Well, not so good maybe.

Q: You’ve got a big grin on your face.

A: Yeah. I don’t know what I’m grinning about either. …

Q: Suppose you had to get up and go to work now. How would you do?

A: I don’t think I’d even care.

Q: Suppose the place was on fire?

A: I don’t think it would be — it would seem funny.

Q: It would seem funny? Do you think you’d have the sense to get up and run out or do you think you’d just enjoy it?

A: I don’t know. Fire doesn’t seem to present any danger to me right now.

Q: Can you think of anything now which would seem hazardous or worry you?

A: No. No. Everything just seems funny in the Army. Seems like everything somebody says, it sounds a little bit funny.

When the isomers of EA 2233 were isolated and purified following 1964, they were tested by Edgewood doctor Fred Sidell (while Ketchum focused on more promising incapacitants, mainly an atropine derivative with opiate properties, known as BZ, and LSD). Two of the THC isomers caused dramatic drops in blood pressure, according to Ketchum, so the lab stopped testing all of them. But Ketchum still wonders if one of the potent isomers would work as an incapacitant.

“The finding that isomers 2 and 4 possessed uniquely powerful postural hypotensive effects that prevented standing without fainting led Sidell to discontinue testing out of an abundance of caution for the welfare of the subjects. It later occurred to me that this property, in an otherwise nonlethal compound, might be an ideal way to produce temporary inability to fight (or do much else) without toxicological danger to life.”

Only a small fraction of Ketchum’s work at Edgewood involved THC derivatives. Ketchum says he was motivated to write his memoir because the media has conflated the ethical, scientific drug studies conducted by the Army on knowing volunteers with the kinky, unsafe drug studies conducted by the CIA on unwitting civilians.

A chapter of Ketchum’s book is devoted to informed consent. GIs considered Edgewood Arsenal what we used to call “good duty” and volunteered with alacrity for the two-month stint.

“We never needed to browbeat, threaten or hint at repercussions for someone’s unwillingness to participate in a drug test,” Ketchum writes. “Invariably, would-be volunteers inundated us with applications, year after year. An abundance of troops were obviously more than willing to jump through all the hoops required in order to make the list of accepted candidates. In fact, the ratio of the number of applicants to the number accepted increased progressively throughout the 1960s.”

When Ketchum arrived at Edgewood in 1961, the detachment of test subjects consisted of 20 men. By 1963 it was 50. “Eventually a cohort of 60-80 arrived, requiring the prior review of as many as 300-500 applicants,” he writes. Some 7,000 enlisted men took part in the program, most between 1961 and 1970.

“None, to my knowledge, returned home with a significant injury or illness attributable to chemical exposure,” Ketchum says. “Nevertheless, years later, a few former volunteers did claim that the testing had caused them to suffer from some malady.” Those claims came from subjects exposed to agents other than EA 2233, he says.

Source

“If you know the truth, the truth will make you free.” (John 8:32)

As many American Christians make their annual trip to church to celebrate Easter, no doubt many of them will be reevaluating their lives in relation to their beliefs.

When asking the question, “What would Jesus do?” Christian pot smokers sometimes feel conflicted. Few modern pastors and preachers advocate burning bowls from the pulpit, yet many of their followers smoke marijuana at home. So who is more Christlike?

Carl Ruck, of Boston University has the answer. Jesus Christ was a stoner.

Claims of drug use by biblical figures surprisingly have susbtance,
says Professor Carl Ruck

In ancient times cannabis was widely cultivated throughout the Middle East. It grows like a weed and provides nourishing seed, which is also a good source of fibre used to make rope.

People certainly knew of its pleasurable effects; it would have been impossible to harvest it without becoming ecstatic as the drug would be absorbed through the skin. And as long ago as 1935 a Slovakian linguist identified the plant known as “fragrant cane” in the English Bible as flowering cannabis, a link since accepted by some Jewish authorities.

Ancient people were fascinated by herbs and their healing powers and knew much more about them than we do; at least about mixing herbs to release their potency.

Ancient wines were always fortified, like the “strong wine” of the Old Testament, with herbal additives: opium, datura, belladonna, mandrake and henbane. Common incenses, such as myrrh, ambergris and frankincense are psychotropic; the easy availability and long tradition of cannabis use would have seen it included in the mixtures. Modern medicine has looked into using cannabis as a pain reliever and in treating multiple sclerosis. It may well be that ancient people knew, or believed, that cannabis had healing power.

Much of their knowledge, passed down through an oral tradition, has been lost and to some extent it is the modern prejudice against drugs that has stopped us looking for it. Revulsion against drugs and the hippie culture even led to the term “entheogen” being coined to describe a psychotropic substance used in religious rituals.

Entheogen comes from the Greek entheos (meaning “god-inspired within”) and the word is now commonly employed in English and European languages to discuss sacramental foods used by shamans (mystic or visionary priests) to achieve spiritual ecstasy.

So what of the early Christians? At the time they were evolving, they had to compete with other religions of the Roman empire. The strongest of those was Mithraism, imported from Persia, which exists today as Zoroastrianism.

Its sacrament, Haoma, was virtually identical to what we know of soma, in Brahmanism. Worshipped as a god, soma was a strange plant without leaves or roots that needed little light and induced religious ecstasy. It was most likely amanita muscaria: a magic mushroom. In ancient Rome sharing the Haoma cemented the bond of brotherhood of emperors, bureaucrats and soldiers. Pagan Greek celebrations at the sanctuary of Eleusis, meanwhile, included a visionary experience for a crowd of 1,000 people, from drinking a potion made from a fungus that grows on wheat and produces an effect similar to LSD.

So, did Jesus use cannabis? I think so. The word Christ does mean “the anointed one” and Bennett contends that Christ was anointed with chrism, a cannabis-based oil, that caused his spiritual visions. The ancient recipe for this oil, recorded in Exodus, included over 9lb of flowering cannabis tops (known as kaneh-bosem in Hebrew), extracted into a hin (about 11 pints) of olive oil, with a variety of other herbs and spices. The mixture was used in anointing and fumigations that, significantly, allowed the priests and prophets to see and speak with Yahweh.

Residues of cannabis, moreover, have been detected in vessels from Judea and Egypt in a context indicating its medicinal, as well as visionary, use. Jesus is described by the apostle Mark as casting out demons and healing by the use of this holy chrism. Earlier, from the time of Moses until the later prophet Samuel, holy anointing oil was used by the shamanic Levite priesthood to receive the “revelations of the Lord”. The chosen ones were drenched in this potent cannabis oil.

Early Christian documents found in Eygpt, thought to be a more accurate record than the New Testament, portray Jesus as an ecstatic rebel sage who preached enlightenment through rituals involving magical plants. Indeed, Bennett goes so far as to say that Jesus was probably not born the messiah but acquired the title when he was anointed with cannabis oil by John the Baptist. The baptism in the Jordan was probably to wash away the oil after it had done its work. The early Christians fought hard for followers in the ancient world, recognising the similarity of their own “foreign” god and his eucharistic meal to the Greek gods. Various sects and even the elite in what would eventually become the Roman Catholic church probably used the full range of available entheogens for baptism, ordination and the eucharistic meal.

What we now call the host might have been more than just bread. There are indications that early Christians shared magic mushrooms - and the spiritual visions and ecstasies they occasioned - as their eucharistic meal. A 4th-century mosaic discovered at a basilica in Aquileia in northern Italy depicts baskets of mushrooms. Why? This wasn’t a restaurant. Could the “red mushrooms” have been the ritual meal?

Eating bread and sharing wine together was, and remains, at the heart of the Christian ritual. We’ll never know exactly what Jesus and his disciples consumed at the Last Supper, but as they believed they were drinking the blood of Christ we must accept it was - if not actually hallucinatory - at least fortified by God.

By Carl Ruck, Boston University
Originally printed in The Sunday Times, 12 January 2003

By Lisa Mosing, MS, RD, FADA, LifeScript Director of Nutrition

Hemp? That’s rope, isn’t it? Guess again: it’s one of the hottest food trends of 2007 – a surprise success for a healthy nosh that’s thousands of years old. Yep, we’re talking about hemp that comes from the same plant species as marijuana (i.e., Cannabis). But isn’t it illegal? It is if you smoke it. But today, not only can you wear it, you can eat it, too. Read on to learn more about this high-quality protein. Plus: Are you a health food nut?

The kind of hemp you eat comes from a special variety of this plant that contains only trace amounts of the chemical (tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC) that causes marijuana’s intoxicating effects. So you don’t have to worry about it giving you a “high” any more than a poppy seed muffin will (which contain trace amounts of opiates).

More than 6,000 years ago, the Chinese cultivated hemp from a plant that grew wild throughout Asia. Even before Asians used soy foods, they prized hemp for its high-quality nutrition. Eventually the seed was cultivated in Europe and India. Indians called it “bhang,” using its dried leaves as a stimulant and medicine for colds, fevers, dysentery, and as part of religious ceremonies. Modern day nutritionists know the plant has high-quality protein and essential amino acids, along with a healthy blend of other nutrients, like iron, magnesium and manganese.

A Hefty Dose of Nutrition
Imagine a sesame seed and you’ll have a pretty close match to the hemp seed. However, it tastes more like sunflower seeds or pine nuts than it does sesame seeds. Like other seeds, hemp has a nutty flavor and a hefty dose of essential fatty acids and protein.

One tablespoon of hemp offers about three grams of protein, four grams of fat (primarily omega-6 and some omega-3), almost one gram of fiber, and no cholesterol. Hemp also offers a whopping array of vitamins and minerals, including vitamin E, iron, magnesium, manganese, potassium, and calcium. All this for a mere 56 calories – comparable to one cup of cantaloupe.

Hemp’s treasure of essential fatty acids (EFAs) – with a beneficial balance of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids – is particularly important for Americans who tend to run low on EFAs. According to more than five decades of scientific research, insufficient essential fatty acids in general may raise the risk of heart disease, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and skin conditions (like eczema and psoriasis). Operating with insufficient levels of these two fats also affects brain and immune functions, as well as infant development.

Omega-3s and omega-6s work together to keep us healthy, particularly our brains. Omega-3s help reduce inflammation and omega-6s increase it, a key immune system response. However, when the two fats are not in balance, and there are more omega-6s than omega-3s, we are more apt to develop diseases related to inflammation such as heart disease and rheumatoid arthritis. The majority of Americans get 11 to 30 times more omega-6s than omega-3s. Why? Mostly because they eat too many baked goods made with refined vegetable oils high in omega-6s.

In the Kitchen
Before hemp foods arrive on the shelves, the seeds have been shelled and cleaned. In supermarkets or health-food markets, hemp is sold as a shelled seed, oil, or flour. And you may even discover an assortment of hemp-filled prepared foods, such as bread, salad dressings, spreads, energy bars, shakes, chips, meatless burgers, and cookies.

If you have ever used flaxseed, using hempseed will be an easy addition to your diet. You can add both to yogurts, smoothies, juices, salads, and batter mixes. You can also roast hemp seeds, or include them in spices mix that you can sprinkle on your food instead of salt. Or you can even use it as a breading for meats or vegetables. For a stir-fry, instead of canola oil, try a little hemp oil.

If you have leftover hemp products, store them in the refrigerator: they’re sensitive to heat and light. Refrigerated, hemp will keep for months. But, once it’s lost its nutty taste, throw it out. If you’re still stumped about how to use it, you can even find hemp cookbooks such as The Hemp Nut Cookbook: Ancient Food for a New Millennium (Book Publishing, 2005). And for those of you interested in greening up your plate, hemp – often certified as organic – is an environmentally friendly crop that needs no herbicides or pesticides to grow, nor is it genetically modified.

Is Your Lunch Unlawful?
Three years ago, the Hemp Industries Association, which represents hemp companies in North America, won a court battle against the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) after they tried to ban the sale of hemp foods in the United States. The association demonstrated that hemp foods contain only insignificant amounts of THC. Shortly afterward, hemp products began to appear on store shelves. However, no matter how much you like hemp food products, growing hemp plants yourself is still illegal.

But don’t worry: A hemp-filled energy bar or smoothie won’t doom you to fail a random workplace drug test. Approximately 25 North American hemp manufacturers have promised through a TestPledge program not to allow their hemp nut and hemp oil products to exceed acceptable levels of THC.

Special thanks to T. Scott Brineman for running this down on his excellent blog, Conservative Revolutionary American Party III. (Link)

When Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz were snapped sharing a J in a public park, marijuana smokers everywhere nodded approvingly. Now stoners have given Diaz the big nod by awarding her Top CelebStoner.

Congratulations, Cameron Diaz!

Some politicians are so excited to take advantage of the drug war that they never slow down long enough to really understand that war. The drug war is all about a means to an end (power and control), and not about an implementation of any real philosophy.

That is why being a drug warrior can be so embarrassing.

• The feds recently took MDMA from the scientific community because a few kids had dehydrated while abusing it.

• Then the feds made Sudafed more difficult to buy than hard liquor or shotgun shells because some dudes somewhere were cooking it into crack.

So when Missouri Rep. Talibdin El-Amin (D-St. Louis) wants to take it to the next level, it should come as no surprise.

El-Amin recently learned that dissolving powdered cocaine in a mixture of water and baking soda produces crack cocaine. Using the logic of his predecessors, he has done what any good drug warrior would do:

He has called for government controls on the distribution and consumption of baking soda.

JEFFERSON CITY — First, the state said you must make a special trip to the pharmacy counter to buy certain cold medicines. That was to curb production of methamphetamine.

Now, a St. Louis legislator wants you to do the same thing to buy an even more common household item — baking soda — because it’s used to make crack cocaine.

Sales of cold medications containing pseudoephedrine, such as Sudafed, are strictly regulated in Missouri. Customers must show a photo ID when they buy the medicine. Pharmacists must log the names and addresses of buyers, including how much they buy. People under 18 may not buy the medicines.

The sponsor of the baking soda bill, Rep. Talibdin El-Amin, D-St. Louis, said the same approach was needed for baking soda because crack cocaine is often produced by dissolving powdered cocaine in a mixture of water and baking soda.

“We have crack cocaine running rampant in our neighborhoods,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, meth needs to be tackled. But anything that calls attention and brings the crack cocaine problem to the forefront is a positive step.”

Don’t expect a change any time soon, though. The bill, filed late last month, has yet to reach committee consideration and likely won’t reach the House floor for debate this year.

Critics say such a law would be impossible to enforce because baking soda, which is used as a deodorant, as a cleaning agent and in antacid, among other things, is so common.

“To put it behind the counter and create a log that a zillion people would have to use, the law would be completely useless,” said David Overfelt, president of the Missouri Retailers Association.

Baking soda could also be replaced in making crack cocaine with drain cleaner or ammonia, others say.

“With these drugs, there are so many different chemicals that can be used — batteries, coffee filters, anything,” said Ron Leone, executive director of the Missouri Petroleum Marketers and Convenience Store Association. “It’s like MacGyver. Everything’s possible.”

Drug enforcement experts say the differences between regulating the sale of pseudoephedrine and the sale of baking soda are sizable.

“When you generate a list of people who use baking soda, it pretty much includes everyone. It’s a common household item,” said Tom Murphy, a special agent with the St. Louis division of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

But Murphy said cocaine, in all of its forms, should be seen as a real problem.

“Cocaine is still the primary drug of concern in St. Louis and East St. Louis, Ill.,” he said. “It’s second behind meth in the rural areas. It’s still around.”

The baking soda bill is HB1189.

Source

The UK Daily Mail is actually running this flaccid piece of propaganda:

Boy on skunk cannabis butchered a grandmother

A teenager who was crazed by high-strength cannabis butchered a grandmother after ‘voices in his head’ told him to stab a woman.

Ezekiel Maxwell, a paranoid schizophrenic, launched the horrific attack after years of smoking super-strength ’skunk weed’.

The 17-year-old claimed ‘gangster voices’ from the ultra-violent computer game Grand Theft Auto had set him on a mission to stab a black woman.

He is the second teenage cannabis addict in a month to be found guilty of killing others after smoking the substance. Thomas Palmer, 18, was jailed for life for murdering his two friends with a hunting knife near their homes in Wokingham, Berkshire.

Maxwell prowled the streets with a kitchen knife until he came across Carmelita Tulloch as she walked to her job at a photocopying firm.

He stabbed her seven times, leaving her to die in a pool of blood as he fled home to his family. The case highlights the dangers of the highly potent ’skunk’.

The number of under-18s treated for smoking the drug has doubled to nearly 10,000 in a year and medical experts said the link between it and mental health problems is now impossible to ignore.

Maxwell attacked 51-year-old Mrs Tulloch on September 5 last year after a night smoking skunk and playing Grand Theft Auto.

He believed he was one of the principal characters called Carl Johnson, who carries a knife in the Playstation game, Croydon Crown Court was told.

Judge Warwick McKinnon said it was “a vile and quite senseless killing of an entirely innocent woman”.

Simon Denison, prosecuting, told the court: “Maxwell had been planning to stab a woman for seven days, it had to be a black Afro-Caribbean woman. He didn’t know why he had done it, he just had to do it.”

“He described the voices as taking over his thoughts and his body. They made him do things like cut his hair so he looked more like a gangster.

“Maxwell said in the months before the killing he was playing Grand Theft Auto to the exclusion of anything else.

“He had smoked cannabis the night before, he took a knife from the kitchen and went out to stab someone. After he stabbed Mrs Tulloch he ran home and told his mother what he had done.

“The psychiatric assessment is that he is a great risk to others and will be for many years.”

Maxwell lived 500 yards away from Mrs Tulloch on the same housing estate in Kennington, South London. He attacked her within five minutes walk of her home.

The youngster started smoking cannabis and skunk as well as taking cocaine at 14. He had previously been given cautions for possessing cannabis and has two convictions for mugging and assault.

Maxwell said he started hearing voices after smoking the drug and was referred to a psychiatric team by his GP in June last year.

He was prescribed anti-psychotic drugs and his case was reviewed four times. It was due to be considered again the day after he attacked Mrs Tulloch.

Instead, Maxwell went to a police station with his uncle and solicitor and handed himself in. He told officers: “I am given medication for my head and eyes, I don’t know why I have been told to take this medication. I have not taken it for two weeks.

“On September 4 I played Grand Theft Auto until late. When I got up I felt a bit unhappy and aggressive. “I went out of the house at about 10am.”

“I have a knife with me. I didn’t know why I had a knife, I saw a woman, I stabbed her with the knife, I stabbed her three times, there was a lot of blood. After I stabbed the woman I ran home.”

Inspiration: Maxwell was obsessed with violent computer game Grand Theft Auto

Maxwell has since been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Yesterday he was detained indefinitely under the Mental Health Act after pleading guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

Paul Jenkins, chief executive of mental health charity Rethink, said: ‘While there can be several triggers for mental illness, we know that if used by people under 18, cannabis doubles the risk of psychosis.

Professor John Henry, a clinical toxicologist, said: “People are beginning to realise that cannabis is not the puff and relax substance that people used to use.”

Studies show there is an increased instance of schizophrenia in cannabis users, in some people as much as a ten-Marjorie Wallace, Chief Executive of mental health charity SANE, said: “This has all the hallmarks of similar stories where a paranoid schizophrenic has not taken medication but has used cannabis.

“Cannabis, especially skunk, can act as a trigger to psychotic relapse in which someone may lose touch with reality and become a serious risk to himself and others.

“We expect the inquiry into this case will reveal the same faultlines underlying many of the 55 homicides involving mental illness each year.”

Mrs Tulloch, a receptionist, was married to Prince, 42, and had two adult daughters, Claudia and Andrea, from a previous marriage and a threeyearold granddaughter called Tianna.

Her sister Carol Smith said: “Someone has to take responsibility, how can he commit a crime like that and no one is responsible?

“There need to be regular check-ups for people like him.”

END OF TRANSCRIPT: MINISTRY OF TRUTH

In 2005, President Bush gave a speech at the San Diego Naval Air Station in which he compared the struggle against terrorism to World War II. If he is right, President Bush should be considering how he can use marijuana. (Yes…again.)

Back then, Slate.com reported:

The clear claims of this speech: Bin Laden and Zarqawi = Hitler and Mussolini. Terrorists = Nazis. Suicide bombers = kamikaze pilots. 1930s isolationists = Clinton-era Democrats. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s determination to spread democracy across the globe = … (could it be?) Bush’s own freedom-spreading policies.

There is no doubt that President Bush (along with a good number of Americans) believes that the Global War on Terror is just as serious a threat to the future of the US as World War II was. With the Iraq war costing over $8 billion per month, and the Global War on Terror already costing $500 billion, the news out of New Hampshire should give these war supporters cause to reflect.

Today:

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) - The House voted yesterday to allow farmers to grow hemp - a close relative of marijuana - despite federal hurdles to planting the controversial crop.

Supporters pointed out that hemp, which has a very low content of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, has unfairly been characterized as the same as marijuana.

“You don’t smoke hemp. A wheelbarrow full would only make you sick,” insisted Hopkinton Democrat Derek Owen.

“Hemp is one of the oldest and most useful and strongest natural plants known to man,” he told the House.
Peterborough Republican Andrew Peterson spoke briefly against the bill, urging the House to kill it.
But the House voted 190-76 to send it to the Senate.

Hemp, known for its strong fiber, is used in a wide range of products, including clothing, canvas, rope, fiberglass, insulation, automobile clutch- and brake-liners, cement and paper. It can be grown legally in other countries, including Canada.

“No one confuses water with vodka though they look the same,” Owen said.

Hemp can be grown only with permission from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. North Dakota farmers are currently trying to get DEA permission to grow hemp under that state’s rules.

“This is in the end an issue of liberty. Small farmers in the state need all the help they can get,” Owen said.

The bill would let farmers grow hemp after obtaining a permit. The state would issue licenses to grow hemp and be the sole supplier of the seed. The state also would regulate the industry. People with criminal records involving drug offenses within 10 years would not qualify for a permit.

The House passed a bill two years ago to allow farmers to grow hemp, but the Senate killed it.

Source

Also today in Albany, NY:

Members of the Albany Law School Democrats, Law School Professors, local politicians, and community activists gathered at DeJohn’s on Lark Street in Downtown Albany on Thursday night from 6-9 pm to raise money for body armor for soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To date, Bake Sales for Body Armor has held more than a dozen events nationwide and raised $23,105.23 primarily through bake sales as well as private donations.

During World War II, the government experienced a similar equipment and budgetary crisis. The solution was found in the versatility of the hemp plant. As difficult as it may be for some of us to believe, there are many Americans who can remember when the US government demanded we all grow marijuana.

Hemp for Victory explains the government program:

• “For the sailor, no less than the hangman, hemp was indispensable.”
• “The very word ‘canvas’ comes from the Arabic word for hemp.”
• “In 1942, patriotic farmers, at the governments request, planted 36,000 acres of seed hemp, an increase of several thousand percent.”

We no longer need sails and rigging, but we desperately need money. The nation’s farmers should be called upon once again.

In Dec 2006, a study titled “Marijuana Production in the United States,” by researcher Jon Gettman, concluded that, “marijuana has become a pervasive and ineradicable part of the national economy.”

Contrasting government figures for traditional crops — like corn and wheat — against the study’s projections for marijuana production, the report cited marijuana as the top cash crop in 12 states and among the top three cash crops in 30.

The study estimated that marijuana production, at a value of $35.8 billion, exceeds the combined value of corn ($23.3 billion) and wheat ($7.5 billion).

A 2005 analysis signed by over 500 economists (including the esteemed Milton Friedman, economist of the Nixon and Reagan administrations) estimated that if the United States legalized marijuana, the country would save $7.7 billion in law enforcement costs and could generate as much as $6.2 billion annually if marijuana were taxed like alcohol or tobacco.

With a total fiscal benefit of at least $14 billion per year, Marijuana could provide our troops with the body and vehicle armor our government cannot currently afford. It could also fund reinforcements. [If we really wanted to get creative, $14 billion could buy each one of the men and women over there a first class ticket home, a pay raise, and all the marijuana they could smoke responsibly.]

The farmers would benefit by being permitted to grow and sell the nation’s most valuable crop.

The sick would benefit by having better access to the medicine that they need.

And the federal government would have more money to waste chasing boogeymen and scaring the shit out of us.

We must tax and regulate marijuana. It seems so easy.

CelebStoner.com picked up this rant by Snoop Dogg.

AllHipHopNews reports:

Rapper Snoop Dogg recently appeared on a Holland based-talk show and had some unflattering words for frequent rap critic Bill O’Reilly.

“He’s a motherfuckin prick,” Snoop told Jensen. “He doesn’t understand me. He doesn’t understand how his kids and his family just loves Snoop Dogg, he don’t really get it. So instead of him trying to have an interview with me to try and better understand me, he’d rather bash me in the media , when he could have a conversation with me and get a one on one with me.”

The rapper even offered to actually appear on O’Reilly’s popular television show, The O’Reilly Factor.

“I’d love to go on his show, but we’d have to do it in my neighborhood though, so I can kick his motherfucking ass when we are finished.”

If O’Reilly comes to Long Beach to meet up with Snoop, On Marijuana will be there. In the meantime, let’s consider this match up.

Tennessee gave us The Great Marijuana Cave.
Wales, England delivered an entire hotel converted to a marijuana grow-op.

And now California can celebrate its addition to the list of sweet grow-ops.

The Drug Enforcement Administration has located a clandestine indoor marijuana growing operation in Santa Ysabel, California that was custom-built on a 39-acre ranch under a semi-remote cabin.

The marijuana facility was accessible through a secret walk-in closet that had been built in the garage. Inside the closet, agents found a hidden elevator that descended ten feet below the cabin.

From the elevator shaft, there was a 4-foot wide, 65-foot concrete-encased tunnel that led to sophisticated underground grow rooms complete with hydroponic irrigation, advanced ventilation systems and enough lights to make Seattle happy. The subterranean wonderland was reinforced with steel I-beams for safety.

Surveillance was also tight. The cabin was equipped with infrared cameras with night-vision capabilities. Closed-circuit monitors were used to monitor the veg and flowering chambers.

Three men were arrested and the DEA has already begun seizure of the property.

More info on the Cannabis Cabin
Source

San Diego, California is a bizarre city. The residents are some of the most laid-back, pot-friendly folks in Southern California. The government, on the other hand, is nuts. Reyes was fighting them here in January.

We touched on this in “San Diego District Attorney thinks SD is for sicherheitsdienst.” (The security service of the Nazi SS was called the SD, or sicherheitsdienst. Yeah, we looked it up. Who the hell knew that?)

Now Reyes is back in the news.

San Diego City Beat had this:

Rudy Reyes is, as he puts it, both a “hero and a villain.” Hero because during the 2003 Cedar fire, the then-26-year-old made sure his family got out of their Wildcat Canyon home before he tried to leave. Unable to start his car, Reyes sprinted through a wall of flames and came out burned over more than 65 percent of his body. He lost most of his left ear and part of a finger. His remaining digits are permanently disfigured. He was considered legally blind until corrective eye surgery two years ago fixed that. Despite it all, Reyes is charismatic—a thoroughly likeable guy driven to make the most of his life.

Problem is, he needs marijuana to do that…

Read the article.

And Reyes is mounting a multi-pronged attack on his oppressors: In the streets, the courthouse, and on video. A documentary was also recently made in response to the DEA’s abuses of medical patients in San Diego.

Reyes is one of many heroes in a docu-teaser we brought you earlier titled ‘RxCannabis.’