Search Results: cures-not-wars (2)

Free Dana Beal
Dana Beal to Toke of the Town: “They had to let me go, ’cause I up and died on them”

​Exclusive Interview: Dana Beal

Longtime marijuana activist Dana Beal has had a rough year. Back on January 6, he was charged with possessing 169 pounds of marijuana after being pulled over in Dodgeville, Wisconsin for a broken taillight and missing bumper — and he was already facing charges involving 150 pounds the previous year in Nebraska. On September 20, he got a five-year prison sentence for the newer charges.

It seemed a foregone conclusion. Beal — with an ancestor who signed the Declaration of Independence, Beal, a founding member of the Youth International Party (Yippies) along with the legendary Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, Beal, who’d been involved in every major social justice movement since the early 1960s — was going to be spending some time in the Big House. His sentence was a “half and half,” where he’d have to serve the first 2.5 years and be paroled for the second half.
But Dana’s life has never been, and probably never will be, a boring one, from the 1960s to being in his 60s. In 1967 he was charged with trying to sell acid to an undercover cop; he went on the run but eventually ended up serving a year on that rap. In 1972 he founded, then edited, the Yipster Times (later to become Overthrow) which published until 1979. His efforts to promote the use of ibogaine to cure addiction to heroin, cocaine and alcohol through the organization Cures Not Wars have resulted in thousands of people being able to walk away from hard drugs.

Graphic: Cures Not Wars

​The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) is hailing the passage of another milestone for the Global Marijuana March, with Georgetown, Guyana and Ryebrook, N.Y., as the 299th and 300th cities holding a march, rally, forum or benefit on the weekends of Saturday, May 1 and May 8.

NORML and numerous other groups called for more cities this year to participate, so that organizers could meet and surpass their stated goal of more than 200 cities.
“Worldwide action is necessary for any outright legalization, since cannabis is largely prohibited globally by a United Nations treaty known as the Single Convention, enacted in 1962 through the efforts of top anti-cannabis zealot Harry Anslinger, the original instigator of U.S. cannabis prohibition in 1937,” said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML.