In my post Newt On Opiates I said:
So let me tell you what I think. Congress is in the process of ending Drug Prohibition by passing bills one at a time. And when there is not much public uproar they pass another. They will keep doing this until Federal Prohibition is gutted. When that is sufficiently accomplished – and not until then – drugs will get rescheduled.
Well, they are moving right along.
There is now a Bill in process to exempt certain medical cannabis patients from Federal prosecution.
This past week, the Cannabidiol Research Expansion Act (S. 3269) was introduced in the United States Senate, which would ease research barriers and create exemptions from federal law for certain medical cannabis patients. The bill was introduced by four members of the Senate Judiciary Committee – Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and Tom Tillis (R-NC). Much of the bill is focused on allowing for institutions of higher education or manufacturers to register with the federal government in order to conduct research on cannabis (marijuana) or cannabidiol (CBD), but it’s the “Safe Harbor” provision that is drawing the attention of medical cannabis patients.
The Safe Harbor provision would exempt pediatric patients with intractable epilepsy and their parents/legal guardians from the penalties of the Controlled Substances Act for the possession and pediatric use of CBD. Patients with conditions other than intractable epilepsy would be excluded, and no amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) are permitted.
Would you believe that the DEA beat them to it? From February 2016:
Under a new policy announced Wednesday, the DEA is easing requirements for clinical trials involving cannabidiol. The change aims to “streamline the research process regarding CBD’s possible medicinal value and help foster ongoing scientific studies,” it said in a release.
Essentially the move cuts through some of the red tape facing cannabis-related studies. Effective immediately, researchers in FDA-approved clinical trials can apply for a permit to possess an “approved amount” of cannabidiol for research, allowing research teams to obtain their supply more seamlessly.
Prior to the change, if a trial ran out of cannabidiol and needed to acquire more, researchers would have to issue a request in writing to modify their DEA registration. That would set in motion an approval process involving both the DEA and the Food and Drug Administration, potentially delaying studies or interrupting treatment. The new policy removes that step.
So the Congress is turning administrative law into black letter law.
I’m more convinced that ever that the word has gone out to end Drug Prohibition and to avoid making it an electoral issue. Thus the bipartisan support we see in these moves. Ardent Prohibitionist Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is supporting this? Really? Something or someone made him change his mind.
It is always possible that the oligarchy sees more profit in legal sales than in Prohibition and that the prohibitionist rump faction of the Republican Party has lost its power. And maybe they are going as fast as they can to defuse a race war. Greatly reduce the ongoing gang warfare. And stop supporting the Islamics who are currently supplying the opiate trade.
And about the Nixon administration that started all this? Dan Baum grills Nixon administration functionary John Ehrlichman:
I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Government lying to the citizens? Really? My guess is that the lies are no longer convenient thanks to the efforts of the writers at this blog and so many others.
The polls now show support for cannabis legalization at about 58%. And as the over age 65 Republicans die off it will be going even higher. Every year. Evidently this is the year to end it.
It also may have something to do with the fact that cannabis can reduce health care costs for the elderly.
And one other point. With these moves the operators of our government are giving themselves away to those paying attention.
The thing that is clear to our overlords is that I have no secrets in the Internet Age. What is not yet clear to them is that neither do they. Any action on the secrets they hold is a reveal. So their knowledge is of limited value or useless. Counterproductive even.
Perhaps the owners of the government are not as inept as they seem. Maybe their plans are not entirely anti-citizen. Of course they may have to be forced to act. But still.
Comments
4 responses to “It Continues”
I followed you over here from your months-old comments on NR after scrolling through some of your posts on Disqus. I like your perspective–it has an inner consistency that is lacking in the schizoid prescribed lists of virtues the left and right maintain. Your thoughts about PTSD are interesting to me too. I had to add my $0.02 on legalization of pot that’s going on, as it’s something I’ve been watching unfold with some amusement, mostly at the contrast of my 13 yo self smoking nasty mexi brick seeds and stems behind the rec center to now being able to walk down the street to a tastefully appointed pot store with a dizzying array of options. I never would have predicted this even 5 years ago.
I think it’s a confluence of interests across the political spectrum that have aligned at the same time like a rare parade of planets: aging, wealthy baby boomers who want their pot back for their twilight years but don’t want to buy on the street [note, physician assisted suicide isn’t far behind on their agenda, which also has a confluence of its own starting to form], major corporate interests–especially old tobacco, pharma, and big agriculture, small business interests, conferences of mayors and governors who want to reduce spending on prisons and/or show progress on reducing prison populations and/or show progress on decreasing black incarceration and/or find a new tax revenue source no one will oppose, and the shifting attention to opiates as the devil du jour which both creates pot demand by the people who get cut off of the medicine they need and reduces resources for keeping up the war on pot.
I think you might be a little optimistic about the pot thing signaling an end to drug prohibition, though. People see pot as basically benign, and most people in the US have smoked it and so know first hand it’s no worse than alcohol, and many think it’s less harmful or beneficial. That’s what’s won the populous over on it, not that it’s a personal freedom or that the government shouldn’t tell adults what they can do with their own bodies. They don’t see opiates as harmless… thanks to the current hysteria over opiates, the peeps think the vicodin you get after your wisdom teeth are removed is the highway to heroin and living in the gutter. Note how this hysteria is growing as hysteria over pot dies out. A concession had to be made to prisoncorp and rehabcorp and sinnercorp, I think, or at least there’s the invisible hand that sees to creating shifts rather than wholesale reversals so as not to cause too much market disruption. Still, I do believe that if the wheels of democracy ever got turning enough to have a constitutional convention, the end of prohibition is probably the only amendment that would have a chance. Maybe birth-right citizenship too.
Julie,
Thanks!
You might want to look at what Drug Warrior Newt Gingrich has to say about opiates.
http://classicalvalues.com/2016/07/newt-on-opiates/
It is not just marijuana. BTW Congress has basically passed Newt’s proposal. In the Senate the vote was 92 to 2.
The powers that be may not feel the need to indefinitely limit access to drugs, but they’ve become awfully fond of the police state apparatus that they were able to justify based on the “war.”
Hence this bit-by-bit tinkering with the law; they will gradually erode the prohibitions while leaving the entire mechanism of control in place.
[…] And it looks like the political leaders of the country have taken my advice without notifying the moral crusaders. I have written about that at – It Continues. […]