Search Results: forced treatment (72)

New Jersey State Senate Bill 2842 and Assembly Bill 4241 were passed in the final week of June and were rushed immediately to Governor Chris Christie’s desk to sign into law. Passing by a lopsided 25-13 margin in the Senate, and an uneventful amendment process in the General Assembly, the bill is intended to ease dogmatic restrictions on what many consider to be a farce of a medical marijuana program.
Early last month, on July 9th, the bill was still sitting, unsigned, on Gov. Christie’s desk as he partied with Bon frickin’ Jovi. Unconcerned, Governor Christie has repeatedly stated that there is “no crisis” in the state’s medical marijuana program, even though the state’s only dispensary has been closed since June due to a “lack of inventory”.

Katie Euphrat/KPBS
Mother Earth Healing Co-operative co-founder Bob Riedel: “The loss of this facility today is a real tragedy for those patients who turned to us to help relieve the pain and suffering associated with treatments for life threatening cancers and other conditions”

Thousands of medical marijuana patients lose access to medical marijuana as U.S. Attorney forces eviction of San Diego County’s only licensed dispensary, Mother Earth Alternative Healing Coop, Inc. 
The only licensed medical marijuana dispensary in San Diego County, California — Mother Earth Alternative Healing Coop, Inc. — was forced to close its doors and cease operations Tuesday a a result of the U.S. Attorney’s office pressure to force its eviction.
The El Cajon facility said it had served thousands of medical marijuana patients since it opened in July 2011, and had complied with all state and local laws, even the very restrictive policies adopted by San Diego County. It was cited as a model operation and was lauded by many as completely fulfilling the intent of California voters who approved Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act of 1996. 
“The loss of this facility today is a real tragedy for those patients who turned to us to help relieve the pain and suffering associated with treatments for life threatening cancers and other conditions,” said Bob Riedel of Mother Earth, Inc. “This is a sad day for them and a sad day for those who believe that the federal government has overstepped its bounds in pursuing a dubious course of action to close facilities that are legal under current state law.

Julian Abram Wainwright/Vinaland
Recovering drug users share buckets of water for a communal bath at a drug rehabilitation center in Vietnam

​Vietnam subjects patients at so-called “drug rehabilitation centers” to abuse and forced labor, according to an international human rights group which called for the facilities to be shut down.

Human Rights Watch, based in New York, on Wednesday called on international donors to check the programs they fund inside the drug rehab centers for possible human rights violations, reports Mike Ives at Forbes.com.
The United States and Australian governments, the United Nations, the World Bank and other international donors may “indirectly facilitate human rights abuses” by paying for drug dependency and HIV treatments for addicts inside the centers, according to the group.

Graphic: NORML Stash Blog
Fuck censorship.

​​In March, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), a component agency of the National Institutes of Health, acknowledged the medicinal benefits of marijuana in its online treatment database. But the information only stayed up a few days, before it was scrubbed from the site.

Now, newly obtained documents reveal not only how NCI database contributors arrived at their March 17 summary of marijuana’s medical uses, but also the furious politicking that went into quickly scrubbing that summary of information regarding the potential tumor-fighting effects of cannabis, reports Kyle Daly at the Washington Independent.
Phil Mocek, a civil liberties activist with the Seattle-based Cannabis Defense Coalition, obtained the documents as a result of a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request he filed in March after reading coverage of the NCI’s action. Mocek has made some of the hundreds of pages of at-times heated email exchanges and summary alterations available on MuckRock, a website devoted to FOIA requests and government documents.

Graphic: NORML Stash Blog
“NCI apparently got a talking to from someone” ~ Radical Russ Belville, NORML


Welcome to Room 420, where your instructor is Mr. Ron Marczyk and your subjects are wellness, disease prevention, self actualization, and chillin’.

Worth Repeating

By Ron Marczyk, R.N.
Health Education Teacher (Retired)

You are witnessing cannabis history in the making.
You can clearly see what happened, in the illustration above. The government has changed the verbiage regarding cannabis on the National Cancer Institute’s cancer.gov website, only 11 days after it was added.

We demand that the original statement be re-posted as it was, and for the National Cancer Institute to stand by its original research statement.

This was a naked political move. Please call the NCI public inquiry phone line at 301-435-3848 or email them at http://www.cancer.gov/global/contact/email-us.

Photo: Ted S. Warren/AP
In which Dino Rossi learns that making fun of medical marijuana patients is bad politics

​The political atmosphere around marijuana has changed. It used to be a slam dunk to make fun of marijuana users — even medical marijuana patients — but a recent drama which played out in Washington state showed how much that has changed. A Republican candidate for U.S. Senate has been forced to “clarify” a series of tasteless jokes he made at the expense of medical marijuana research and patients.

“Last week, Republican Dino Rossi issued an extremely immature and thoughtless press release criticizing federally funded research being conducted at Washington State University into marijuana’s effect on pain medication,” said Mike Meno of the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP).
The two-year study, by psychology professor Michael Morgan, involves injecting rats with synthetic cannabinoids and opiates in order to research their combined actions in order to find ways to improve treatment for people suffering from chronic pain.
“Rather than emphasize the great need for this type of research, as well as the proven efficacy of marijuana in helping to manage pain, Rossi decided to revert to hackneyed and unoriginal middle-school level humor,” Meno said.

Graphic: Mirror Cracked

​Surprise, surprise. Most people who go to drug rehab programs for marijuana don’t want to be there, and were in fact forced to either attend the dreary, pointless sessions or to go to jail. 

Nearly six out of ten people — 57 percent — admitted to drug treatment programs for marijuana are “referred” there by the criminal justice system, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — meaning most people in pot rehab were forced to go there under threat of jail.
And only 15 percent of marijuana treatment admissions were self-referred, according to the study. This percentage is less than half the number of self-referrals for alcohol and cocaine, and about one-quarter the number of self-referrals reported for heroin, at 56 percent.

In a move that isn’t at all surprising, the American Medical Association remains opposed to marijuana legalization and maintains that marijuana is a “dangerous drug” in a 19-page report titled “A Contemporary View of National Drug Control Policy”. To be fair, the group also finally admits that the war on drugs has been a complete failure.
The AMA committee on Science and Public Health also told the 527-member AMA House of Delegates in their report that they’ll be watching how recreational marijuana sales and legalization for adults over 21 pans out in the long run.

Project SAM (Smarter Approaches to Marijuana) likes to tout themselves has having some progressive ideas on marijuana legalization and criminalization. They say their goal is to “inform public policy with the science of today’s marijuana,” for example. But they’re really an anti-marijuana group trying a new approach to the same old Reefer Madness.
And now the Marijuana Policy Project is calling SAM out on it, with MPP Maine director David Boyer urging SAM to join forces with MPP to promote “an honest, evidence-based public dialogue about marijuana” in Maine, where recreational cannabis legalization efforts are starting to take shape.

1 2 3 8