Cannabis Chronicles

Poppy fields in Afghanistan January 2008

Plan Colombia
Noam Chomsky
Excerpted from Rogue States, 2000
In 1999, Colombia became the leading recipient of US military and police assistance, replacing Turkey (Israel and Egypt are in a separate category). Colombia receives more US military aid than the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean combined. The total for 1999 reached about $300 million, along with [...]

In a story originally reported by the Willits News, it’s told that Mexican and South American drug cartels are active and present, even in the heart of California’s so called “Emerald Triangle”, a trend that’s another symptom of the ultimate failure of U.S. drug war policies.
Here’s the original piece . . .
The changing [...]

“Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.”
Federal Bureau of Narcotics Chief Harry J. Anslinger, 1929

For those who don’t know their marijuana history, Harry Anslinger is the individual who is most responsible for marijuana prohibition as we know it today. If there is such a thing as Hell, we’d like to believe [...]

While it’s not directly related to medical Marijuana, it’s still a medical issue for patients as long as there is severe pain in need of relief. We now turn the Cannabis Chronicles gaze to a bit about Opium that was originally sourced from the UK Guardian.
Opium: curse or cure?
Obsession with drug mafias and addiction [...]

The DEA hates “bad” drugs like marijuana, but their soon to be former chief executive apparently isn’t above using tired old beer commercial advertising phrases to describe her time with the organization . . .
DEA Chief to Resign, Take Motorola Job

By LARA JAKES JORDAN - The Associated Press -Monday, October 22
WASHINGTON — Drug Enforcement Administration [...]

News from earlier this summer, excerpted from the Metro Times - Detroit’s Weekly Alternative . . .
Prescription pot
Drive under way to make medical marijuana legal in Michigan
by Curt Guyette - 6/13/2007
Rochelle Lampkin knows she’s breaking the law when she lights a joint and takes a few tokes, but she doesn’t feel like a criminal.
“Sometimes,” she [...]

The rooster of the bird’s nest, Foggy, remembers smoking a fair bit of Lebanese hashish back in the late 70’s and early 80’s, so needless to say, this article brought back some fond memories.
From the Christian Science Monitor . . .
In Lebanon, a comeback for cannabis
Farmers in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley are growing more marijuana now [...]

The three little birds are close to celebrating five years together as a triad, so we thought it would be nice to take a look back at where the drug war was five years years ago. The following article was originally found at Salon.com, and it dates from the fall of 2002.
Bush’s reefer [...]

Does good pot really sell for $500 an ounce or more?
Those are the figures being reported in print these days for the US, which seems like outrageous prices for folks like us who are used to living in Canada’s more weed glutted regions. Perhaps our perception is off because we are medical users who [...]

Looking at things from a more global perspective, the next journal entry here is from the September/October edition of Foreign Policy Magazine: Your Portal to Global Politics, Economics, and Ideas. To get started with today’s journal entries, we recreate an article by Ethan Nadelmann, the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy [...]

And now we conclude today’s coverage of the DEA’s persecution of pain doctors with another pair of interesting reads.
As we’ve learned here at the Cannabis Chronicles, this isn’t a new development, it’s just another part of the war on drugs that’s based on an ideology that relieving somebody’s pain can make them feel too good. [...]

In this, the third part of the series we have been compiling on the DEA’s persecution of pain doctors, we now turn to some coverage from Reason, the magazine of free minds and free markets. This particular piece covers the Hurwitz arrest and trial, the subject of our most recent previous posting, as well as [...]

In depth coverage of the cannabis culture by mainstream media is fairly rare.  Most newspapers and television news broadcasts use pot and stoners as fodder for laughs, rather than any kind of topic worthy of serious discussion.
Fortunately, that’s changing, at least to an extent.
In a previous posting here at the Cannabis Chronicles we brought our [...]