Book Review: Medical Growing - A Garden of Peace

Steve Elliott ~alapoet~ in Culture, Growing, Products
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
http://www.tokeofthetown.com/2012/12/book_review_medical_growing_-_a_garden_of_peace.php

My friend Daniel Boughen has a green thumb, and he comes by it naturally. With a family history of organic horticulture, this British Columbia resident had a solid foundation when he began growing cannabis, the world's most medicinal plant.

Medical Growing: A Garden of Peace begins by ably pointing out the evil folly of the tragic War On Drugs, contrasting that with the numerous social, medicinal and economic benefits of cannabis and industrial hemp. Boughen shows a keen consciousness of the forces currently impacting the marijuana community, including the impending danger of corporate control.

In what I personally believe to be one of the most crucially important sections of the book, Boughen contrasts the corporate model of legalization with a more community-centered model. Daniel spares no words in condemning those who would make marijuana just another tool for big corporate profits.

"Monopolistic models for the corporatization of cannabis are now being presented by lobby groups who want to cash in on cannabis in order to sustain the inflated profits of Big Pharma," Boughen writes.

Recently instituted legalization models which place control in the hands of the state, and don't allow home growing, aren't good for cannabis genetics, we learn in Medical Growing.

"To preserve the biodiversity of the species, our access to specific strains grown for taste or symptoms, the people must remain the custodians of cannabis, and keep it in the public domain," Boughen writes. "Recent efforts to patent strains should be resisted; it's just another attempt by corporations to rob us of our natural rights."

Cannabis, Culture and Creativity

The important role of marijuana in culture isn't neglected, either.

"All of the arts have benefitted from the use of cannabis," Boughen writes. "It doesn't cause aggressive behavior or possess toxic properties of other substances, and cannabis is without the addictive profiles characterized by drugs such as tobacco, caffeine, alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamines or prescription opiates.

"Cannabis stimulates thought, creativity, and peaceful cooperation, and many of the other qualities we find aesthetically desirable in human kind, and yet with cannabis prohibition, those are not being stimulated in our society," Boughen points out. "When we prohibit cannabis, we also prohibit our culture's artistic and creative growth."

Grow Your Own

Daniel goes on to clearly outline a step-by-step manual for the growing, harvesting, curing and storage of cannabis, as well as provide recipes for preparing medicinal oils and other concentrates and extracts. Neither novice growers nor experienced veterans will feel left out, as the books techniques and tips cover a broad range of skill levels.

Boughen's clear, easy-reading style lets you know what to expect when growing cannabis, and what to do at each stage of growing and processing. He doesn't hide behind technical language; Medical Growing is written in everyday words, and the instructions call for everyday, low-cost materials found in most any home.

Daniel is a devotee of the "12-1" method of growing cannabis, and thus not a fan of the 18-6 vegetative grow cycle favored by many mainstream cultivators. However, even if you disagree with Boughen's assertion that 18-6 lighting cycles constitute "abusing" the plants, it's worth reading his arguments to broaden your perspective.

If you're confused about exactly what constitutes the 12-1 lighting cycle, see page 29 of Medical Growing for a clear explanation. Short version, instead of just a light and a dark cycle like 18-6, 12-1 involves 12 hours with the lights on; 5.5 hours lights off; 1 hour on; and 5.5 hours off, cycled over a 24-hour period.

Cannabutter and Baking

Since cannabis resins are easily extracted using butter to capture the oils, cannabutter (marijuana-infused butter) has become a popular option for those who use the herb medicinally. Medical Growing has a "Butter and Baking" section with instructions on how to make cannabis butter, and how to include it in recipes for cannabinated treats.

You can also learn how to make your own concentrates, including making hashish and making and dosing medicinal cannabis oils from leaf and trim (of which, using Boughen's techniques, you should soon have a nice supply).

Bottom Line

At $19.95 in the United States and $21.95 in Canada, Medical Growing: A Garden of Peace is a great choice either for yourself of for that experienced or aspiring cannabis farmer on your list.

For more information on ordering, visit www.agardenofpeace.com.

Graham Hancock: The War on Consciousness

http://www.disinfo.com/2010/11/graham-hancock-the-war-on-consciousness

Graham Hancock: The War on Consciousness
November 15, 2010

Site editor’s note: This article was originally published as part of the Russ Kick-edited Disinformation anthology, You Are STILL Being Lied To. Hancock’s latest book is a novel dealing with some of the issues presented below titled ENTANGLED: The Eater of Souls.

We are told that the “War on Drugs” is being waged, on our behalf, by our governments and their armed bureaucracies and police forces, to save us from ourselves. “Potential for abuse and harm” are supposed to be the criteria by which the use of drugs is suppressed—the greater a drug’s potential for abuse and harm, the greater and more vigorous the degree of suppression, and the more draconian the penalties applied against its users.

In line with this scheme drugs are typically ranked into a hierarchy: Schedules I, II, and III in the US, Classes A, B, and C in the UK, and so on and so forth all around the world. Thus, to be arrested for possession of a Schedule I or Class A drug results in heavier penalties than possession of a Schedule III or Class C drug. Generally if a drug is deemed to have some currently accepted medical use it is likely to be placed in a lower schedule than if it has none, notwithstanding the fact that it may have potential for abuse or harm. In the absence of any recognized therapeutic effects, drugs that are highly addictive, such as heroin or crack cocaine, or drugs that are profoundly psychotropic, including hallucinogens such as LSD, psilocybin, or DMT, are almost universally placed in the highest schedules and their use attracts the heaviest penalties.

The notable exceptions to this system of ranking according to perceived “harms” are, of course, alcohol and tobacco, both highly addictive and harmful drugs—far more so than cannabis or psilocybin, for example—but yet socially accepted on the grounds of long customary use and thus not placed in any schedule at all.

The Failed War

When we look at the history of the “War on Drugs” over approximately the last 40 years, it must be asked whether the criminalization of the use of any of the prohibited substances has in any way been effective in terms of the stated goals that this “war” was supposedly mounted to achieve. Specifically, has there been a marked reduction in the use of illegal drugs over the past 40 years—as one would expect with billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money having been spent over such a long period on their suppression—and has there been a reduction in the harms that these drugs supposedly cause to the individual and to society?

It is unnecessary here to set down screeds of statistics, facts, and figures readily available from published sources to assert that in terms of its own stated objectives the “War on Drugs” has been an abject failure and a shameful and scandalous waste of public money. Indeed, it is well known, and not disputed, that the very societies that attempt most vigorously to suppress various drugs, and in which users are subject to the most stringent penalties, have seen a vast and continuous increase in the per capita consumption of these drugs. This is tacitly admitted by the vast armed bureaucracies set up to persecute drug users in our societies, which every year demand more and more public money to fund their suppressive activities; if the suppression were working, one would expect their budgets to go down, not up.

Meanwhile the social harms caused by the “War on Drugs” itself are manifest and everywhere evident. In the United States, for example, there have been more than 20 million arrests for the possession of the Schedule I drug marijuana since 1965 and 11 million since 1990. The pace of arrests is increasing year on year, bringing us to the astonishing situation where, today, a marijuana smoker is arrested every 38 seconds. 1 The result, as Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, recently observed, is that marijuana arrests outnumber arrests for “all violent crimes combined,” meaning police are spending inordinate amounts of time chasing nonviolent criminals. 2 And it goes without saying that those who are arrested for the use of marijuana and other illegal drugs do suffer immense harm as a result of the punishments inflicted on them—including, but not limited to, personal trauma, loss of freedom, loss of reputation, loss of employment prospects, and serious, long-lasting financial damage.

Inventory of Harm

Such matters are only the beginning of the long inventory of harm caused by the “War on Drugs.”

Western industrial societies, and all those cultures around the globe that increasingly seek to emulate them, teach us to venerate above all else the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness that is particularly appropriate to the conduct of science, business, war, and logical inquiry, and to such activities as driving cars, operating machinery, performing surgery, doing accounts, drawing up plans, accumulating wealth, etc., etc., etc. But there are many other states of consciousness that the amazing and mysterious human brain is capable of embracing, and it appears to be a natural human urge, as deep-rooted as our urges for food, sex, and nurturing relationships, to seek out and explore such “altered states of consciousness.” A surprisingly wide range of methods and techniques (from breathing exercises, to meditation, to fasting, to hypnosis, to rhythmic music, to extended periods of vigorous dancing, etc.) is available to help us to achieve this goal, but there is no doubt that the consumption of those plants and substances called “drugs” in our societies is amongst the most effective and efficient means available to mankind to explore these profoundly altered states of consciousness.

The result is that people naturally seek out drugs and the temporary alterations in consciousness that they produce. Not all people in every society will do this, perhaps not even a majority, but certainly a very substantial minority—for example the 2 million Britons who are known to take illegal drugs each month 3 or those 20 million people in the US who have been arrested for marijuana possession since 1965. And these of course are only the tip of the iceberg of the much larger population of American marijuana users, running into many more tens of millions, who have, by luck or care, not yet fallen foul of the law and are thus not reflected in the arrest statistics.

Needless to say, it is of course exactly the same urge to alter consciousness that also impels even larger numbers of people to use legal (and often extremely harmful) drugs such as alcohol and tobacco—which, though they may not alter consciousness as dramatically as, say, LSD, are nevertheless undoubtedly used and sought out for the limited alterations of consciousness that they do produce.

For the hundreds of millions of people around the world whose need to experience altered states is not and cannot be satisfied by drunken oblivion or the stimulant effects of tobacco, it is therefore completely natural to turn to “drugs”—and, since the “War on Drugs” means that there is no legal source of supply of these substances, the inevitable result is that those who wish to use them must resort to illegal sources of supply.

Herein lies great and enduring harm. For it is obvious, and we may all see the effects everywhere, that the criminalization of drug use has empowered and enriched a vast and truly horrible global criminal underworld by guaranteeing that it is the only source of supply of these drugs. We have, in effect, delivered our youth—the sector within our societies that most strongly feels the need to experience altered states of consciousness— into the hands of the very worst mobsters and sleazeballs on the planet. To buy drugs our sons and daughters have no choice but to approach and associate with violent and greedy criminals. And because the proceeds from illegal drug sales are so enormous, we are all caught up in the inevitable consequences of turf wars and murders amongst the gangs and cartels competing in this blackest of black markets.

It should be completely obvious to our governments, after more than 40 years of dismal failure to suppress illegal drug use, that their policies in this area do not work and will never work. It should be completely obvious, a simple logical step, to realize that by decriminalizing drug use, and making the supply of all drugs available to those adults who wish to use them through legal and properly regulated channels, we could, at a stroke, put out of business the vast criminal enterprise that presently flourishes on the supply of illegal drugs.

It ought to be obvious, but somehow it is not.

Instead the powers that be continue to pursue the same harsh and cruel policies that they have been wedded to from the outset, ever seeking to strengthen and reinforce them rather than to replace them with something better. Indeed the only “change” that the large, armed bureaucracies that enforce these policies has ever sought since the “War on Drugs” began has, year on year, been to demand even more money, even more arms, and even more draconian legislative powers to break into homes, to confiscate property, and to deprive otherwise law-abiding citizens of liberty and wreck their lives. In the process we have seen our once free and upstanding societies— which used to respect individual choice and freedom of conscience above all else—slide remorselessly down the slippery slope that leads to the police state. And all this is being done in our name, with our money, by our own governments, to “save us from ourselves”!

Winners and Losers

Who benefits from this colossal stupidity and systematic wickedness? And who loses?

The beneficiaries are easy to spot.

First, the large and ever-expanding armed bureaucracies, funded with large and ever-growing sums of public money to suppress the use of drugs, have benefited enormously. Everyone who works for them, including the PR people and spin merchants who concoct the propaganda used to sell their policies to us, including their subcontractors both public and private, and including the (often privately run) prisons stuffed to bursting point with their victims, are the beneficiaries of this catastrophic failure on the part of our governments to think laterally, generously, and creatively. Whether you are a Drug Enforcement Administration agent or a prison guard, you naturally have a deeply vested interest in maintaining the miserable status quo, justified by the “War on Drugs,” that keeps you in your job, that ensures your monthly paychecks continue to come in, and that continuously expands your budgets.

The second main category of beneficiaries is—of course!—the criminal gangs and cartels that the present misguided official policies have empowered as the sole source of drugs in our societies. Over the past 40-plus years they have earned countless billions of dollars from the sale of illegal drugs which, had they only been legal, would not have earned them a single penny.

Who are the losers? First and most directly those millions upon millions of good, nonviolent people in our societies who have been jailed or otherwise punished for the possession and use of drugs. And second (regardless of whether or not they use illegal drugs themselves), virtually everyone else in our societies as well. For the quality of life of all of us has been diminished by the growth of the police state and by the murderous activities of the criminal gangs enfranchised, and kept in business, by the blind and mindless perpetuation of this failed and bankrupt “War on Drugs.”

So, in summary, the criminalization of drug use has brought no positive effects, only negative ones, and it has not stopped or even reduced the use of dangerous and harmful drugs. On the contrary, we have been so little “saved from ourselves” by this phony war that the use of almost all illegal drugs, far from decreasing, has dramatically increased during the past 40 years.

Learning from Tobacco

A contrary example, but one that is most instructive, concerns the use of tobacco in our societies.

Tobacco has never been illegal; far from that, its use has been actively encouraged by clever advertising campaigns mounted by the multibillion-dollar tobacco industry. But the use of tobacco does undoubtedly lead to great harms, both for the health of the individual and the health of society at large, and facts about these harms have been widely and successfully disseminated without a single tobacco user ever being arrested or persecuted.

It’s interesting in this connection to compare the success of public information campaigns about the dangers of tobacco use with the utter failure of public information campaigns about the dangers of marijuana use. The reason the anti-marijuana campaigns have failed is that millions of users know from their own direct, long-term experience that marijuana does not do them any great harm and (with reference to the most recent anti- marijuana propaganda) most definitely does not drive them mad. It may well be true that very small numbers of fragile teenagers whose mental health was already compromised have had their latent schizophrenia or other similar conditions worsened by the use of marijuana—but the vast majority of marijuana users are not at all affected in this way. Likewise efforts by government agencies to persuade us that new, stronger strains of marijuana presently available on the market (e.g., “skunk”) are more dangerous to our health than traditional strains of marijuana because they deliver much more of the active ingredient THC to our systems, have not persuaded anyone. Regular marijuana users presented with a stronger strain simply adjust their consumption, consuming far less of it than they would of a weaker strain in order to achieve the same effect, and feel intuitively that smoking less of any substance has got to be better for their lungs and general health than smoking more.

The consequence of this disconnect between personal experience and “facts” purveyed by official public information campaigns is that huge numbers of people no longer believe anything that our governments have to say to us about drugs. There is an increasingly widespread recognition that tainted, unreliable, and tendentious information is being passed on—information that cannot be trusted. And this distrust of official sources of information is, of course, only worsened by the propagandistic character, witch hunts, and scare tactics of the “War on Drugs” and by the realization that the health information purveyed in anti-drug campaigns is not underwritten by caring and nurturing official policies but instead by draconian criminal sanctions and punitive authoritarian attitudes.

Where the health hazards of tobacco use are concerned, on the other hand, since there are no criminal sanctions against tobacco users, no large, armed bureaucracies to enforce them, and no special interests to serve by the dissemination of misleading information, the evidence has been accepted and believed by most rational adults freely making up their own minds, precisely as one would expect.

The result? While the use of illegal drugs has everywhere skyrocketed over the past 40 years, regardless of the violent persecution of the users of these drugs, the use of tobacco, in a climate of free choice and reliable information, has plummeted to an all-time low. The consumption of tobacco, once seen as a socially approved, even desirable, and, indeed, “stylish” habit, has come to be regarded as a pariah-creating activity that only idiots would indulge themselves in. Although there are, of course, still many tobacco users—because nicotine is intensely addictive—their numbers continue to fall dramatically year on year as more and more of us make the free choice to give up the habit for the sake of our health.

Is it not obvious that the “tobacco model” could be applied with equal success to all illegal drugs? In other words, is it not obvious, if our governments really wish us to stop using drugs, that immediate legalization of adult personal use must follow, that the giant, armed bureaucracies that persecute drug users must be closed down, and that the whole matter must be thrown open, in the way that tobacco use has been thrown open, to the effects of good, reliable information and the sound commonsense of the vast majority of the population? If that happens then we can be certain that drugs that are genuinely harmful to health and wellbeing (in the way that tobacco certainly is) will fall out of favor with their users in exactly the way that tobacco has done. And if it turns out that some of these drugs are in fact not so harmful, then it should not concern us at all if some adults make the free choice to continue to use them.

Of course, even against a backdrop of legalization and good information, some adults will make the free choice to continue to use genuinely harmful drugs as well, just as some adults today do continue to make the free choice to continue to use tobacco. But that, too, is as it should be in a truly free society. Democratic Congressman Barney Frank was spot on the truth of what a free society really means when he announced a proposal in August 2008 to end federal penalties for Americans carrying fewer than 100 grams (almost a quarter of a pound) of marijuana. “The vast amount of human activity ought to be none of the government’s business,” Frank said on Capitol Hill. “I don’t think it is the government’s business to tell you how to spend your leisure time.”

It goes without saying that Frank’s proposal is unlikely to succeed in the hysterical climate of disinformation that presently surrounds this subject, and we must ask ourselves why this should be so. Why are commonsense proposals for the legalization of drugs never adopted, or even seriously considered by our governments? Why, on the contrary, are such proposals dogmatically opposed with even more propaganda and tainted information emanating from the big, armed anti-drug bureaucracies?

That legalization of drugs would shrink the budgets of those selfsame bureaucracies, and ultimately put them out of business, is part of the answer. But to find the real engine that perpetuates the “War on Drugs” we need to look deeper and ask fundamental questions about the relationship between the individual and the state in modern Western democracies.

Freedom of Consciousness

What is Western civilization all about? What are its greatest achievements and highest aspirations?

It’s my guess that most people’s replies to these questions would touch—before all the other splendid achievements of science, literature, technology, and the economy—on the nurture and growth of freedom.

Individual freedom.

Including, but not limited to freedom from the unruly power of monarchs, freedom from the unwarranted intrusions of the state and its agents into our personal lives, freedom from the tyranny of the Church and its Inquisition, freedom from hunger and want, freedom from slavery and servitude, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of thought and speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to elect our own leaders, freedom to be homosexual—and so on and so forth.

The list of freedoms we enjoy today that were not enjoyed by our ancestors is indeed a long and impressive one. It is therefore exceedingly strange that Western civilization in the twenty- first century enjoys no real freedom of consciousness.

There can be no more intimate and elemental part of the individual than his or her own consciousness. At the deepest level, our consciousness is what we are—to the extent that if we are not sovereign over our own consciousness then we cannot in any meaningful sense be sovereign over anything else either. So it has to be highly significant that, far from encouraging freedom of consciousness, our societies in fact violently deny our right to sovereignty in this intensely personal area, and have effectively outlawed all states of consciousness other than those on a very narrowly defined and officially approved list. The “War on Drugs” has thus unexpectedly succeeded in engineering a stark reversal of the true direction of Western history by empowering faceless bureaucratic authorities to send armed agents to break into our homes, arrest us, throw us into prison, and deprive us of our income and reputation simply because we wish to explore the sometimes radical, though always temporary, alterations in our own consciousness that drugs facilitate.

Other than being against arbitrary rules that the state has imposed on us, personal drug use by adults is not a “crime” in any true moral or ethical sense and usually takes place in the privacy of our own homes, where it cannot possibly do any harm to others. For some it is a simple lifestyle choice. For others, particularly where the hallucinogens such as LSD, psilocybin, and DMT are concerned, it is a means to make contact with alternate realms and parallel dimensions, and perhaps even with the divine. For some, drugs are an aid to creativity and focussed mental effort. For others they are a means to tune out for a while from everyday cares and worries. But in all cases it seems probable that the drive to alter consciousness, from which all drug use stems, has deep genetic roots.

Other adult lifestyle choices with deep genetic roots also used to be violently persecuted by our societies.

A notable example is homosexuality, once punishable by death or long periods of imprisonment, which is now entirely legal between consenting adults—and fully recognized as being none of the state’s business—in all Western cultures. (Although approximately thirteen US states have “anti-sodomy” laws outlawing homosexuality, these statutes have rarely been enforced in recent years, and in 2003 the US Supreme Court invalidated those laws.) The legalization of homosexuality lifted a huge burden of human misery, secretiveness, paranoia, and genuine fear from our societies, and at the same time not a single one of the homophobic lobby’s fire-and-brimstone predictions about the end of Western civilization came true.

Likewise, it was not so long ago that natural seers, mediums, and healers who felt the calling to become “witches” were burned at the stake for “crimes” that we now look back on as harmless eccentricities at worst.

Perhaps it will be the same with drugs? Perhaps in a century or two, if we have not destroyed human civilization by then, our descendants will look back with disgust on the barbaric laws of our time that punished a minority so harshly (with imprisonment, financial ruin, and worse) for responsibly, quietly, and in the privacy of their own homes seeking alterations in their own consciousness through the use of drugs. Perhaps we will even end up looking back on the persecution of drug users with the same sense of shame and horror that we now view the persecution of gays and lesbians, the burning of “witches,” and the imposition of slavery on others.

Meanwhile it’s no accident that the “War on Drugs” has been accompanied by an unprecedented expansion of governmental power into the previously inviolable inner sanctum of individual consciousness. On the contrary, it seems to me that the state’s urge to power has all along been the real reason for this “war”—not an honest desire on the part of the authorities to rescue society and the individual from the harms caused by drugs, but the thin of a wedge intended to legitimize increasing bureaucratic control and intervention in almost every other area of our lives as well.

This is the way freedom is hijacked—not all at once, out in the open, but stealthily, little by little, behind closed doors, and with our own agreement. How will we be able to resist when so many of us have already willingly handed over the keys to our own consciousness to the state and accepted without protest that it is OK to be told what we may and may not do, what we may and may not explore, even what we may and may not experience, with this most precious, sapient, unique, and individual part of ourselves?

If we are willing to accept that then we can be persuaded to accept anything.

1. Legislators aim to snuff out penalties for pot use. CNN, 30 July 2008.

2. Ibid.

3. Independent, London, 15 August 2008, page 1, citing Department of Health research.

Posted in: Alternatives, Cigarettes, Civil Liberties, Consciousness, DMT, Drugs, Freedom, Graham Hancock, Marijuana, Psychedelics, War On Drugs

Outspoken Drug Smuggler Reminisces About Hippie Trail

Kris Millegan
roadsend@aol.com
August 5, 2010

http://www.prweb.com/releases/drug_smuggler/drug_wars/prweb4336634.htm

Outspoken Drug Smuggler Reminisces About Hippie Trail -- Author Blasts the War on Drugs

Jimmy Buffet was one. The Eagles sang about them. The intrepid men (and sometimes women) who braved unpredictable associates, constant fear of apprehension and threats of violence in their daring exploits. Who were these people? Secret agents? Mercenaries? Even better. Drug smugglers!

The war on drugs is simply the war on some drugs, the ones they can't patent or control, the drugs that anyone can grow at home.

Walterville, OR
August 3, 2010

During the freewheeling days of the Sixties, marijuana and hashish were in high demand, and a number of dealers were willing to risk everything to supply the goods. One of the most outspoken of these entrepreneurs is author Joseph R. Pietri, whose new memoir "The King of Nepal, Life Before the Drug Wars" goes into fascinating detail into the life of a smuggler.

The book, mainly written while Pietri languished in a Laotian prison, paints a vivid picture of his life on the hippie trail that led from London to Amsterdam, with stops in India, Afghanistan and Laos. It details an exciting time of exotic locations, drug-fueled orgies, brushes with the law and meetings with colorful characters like Big Eddie, Sunshine James, Afghan Ted and the Birmingham Boys. He recounts ingenious methods of smuggling weed in custom-made suitcases and in animal containers, and includes accounts of complicit governments, such as the Nepalese royal family.

Marijuana was legal and even considered a sacrament in many countries until the US forced other nations to outlaw its use. The DEA, CIA and other agencies allowed the trafficking of the drug by the mujahideen to finance their fight against Communists. As a direct result, prices of marijuana and hashish skyrocketed while the price of heroin decreased dramatically. Now, Nepal is literally awash in heroin, and Pietri puts the blame for the thousands of new addicts squarely on the US government.

The war on drugs is simply the war on “some drugs, the ones they can’t patent or control, the drug that anyone can grow at home,” Pietri states. “It’s war being waged by the pharmaceutical companies and their puppets the US government who do not want you growing your own medicine.”

"The King of Nepal, Life Before the Drug Wars" is a fast-paced and highly entertaining journey through Pietri’s life, where hundreds of thousands of dollars were made and lost, friends died and years were spent in prisons in foreign countries and even worse ones in America. All for a plant that the author now grows legally as a supplier of medical marijuana in Oregon!

"The King of Nepal, Life Before the Drug Wars" is released by TrineDay Books, the country’s largest publisher of inconvenient truths.

Joseph Pietri is available for interviews. Contact Kent Goodman at (541) 954-8142 or write to kgoodman@amselmedia.com to make arrangements.

Smoke This Recession

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/02/20/notes022009.DTL

Smoke This Recession
It's simple: First we tax the booze. Then we legalize the pot. Done.
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, February 20, 2009

It is a time of strange bedfellows and bizarre contortions and extraordinary responses to extreme situations, all overslathered with gobs of panic and dread and oh my God, I might have to sell the Range Rover.

In other words, it is a time -- like you don't already know -- of plentiful alarmist rhetoric, resulting in weird outbursts of ingenuity and wanton ethics-loosening, all in a desperate effort to suck up some much-needed cash.

Translation: Money's tight, baby. City's in trouble. State's deep in the hole. Nation's broke.

Solution? Upend the system. Think differently. Get creative. Demolish Ye Olde Ways. And maybe get a really nice buzz on while you're at it.

Where to begin? How can the city/state refill their empty coffers and further gouge the populace to make ends meet? Increased bridge tolls? A new per-mile driving tax? Heavier parking fines? State parks abandoned and left to seed? Child's play, darling.

You want to raise funds in an instant? You want a sure-fire, double-barreled source of nearly limitless funds from a wary, burned-out citizenry? That's easy. Go after its biggest vices, its most beloved balms.

Up first: booze. Already local governments are quietly proposing jacking up the alcohol tax and loosening sales restrictions because, well, why the hell not? Aren't you, right this very moment, as you prepare your taxes and weep over your gutted portfolio and stare down one very bleak 2009, more in need of a drink or three than at any time in recent history except for the entirety of the last eight miserable, Bush-stabbed years? Well, there you go. Tax increases on cocktails, here they come.

But it's not just governments. Check out the happily shameless TV networks who, for the first time in a whocares number of years, are allowing ads for alcohol and K-Y lube during prime-time programming. Oh the outrage! Oh the debauchery! Who, pray who, will protect the children? Oh wait, the children are out buying daddy some more beer and applying for a job at Starbucks to help pay rent. Never mind.

New taxes on the other Great American vices: porn, gambling, prescription meds, pro sports, obesity, Miley Cyrus? Watch for it.

Now, let's get serious. Because there are, of course, bigger fish to fry in the sea of potentially lucrative, all-American inebriates. There is a far more potent, obvious solution to the state's budget woes, a huge, untapped revenue source, and now might be the perfect time to, you know, light it up.

Really now, could there be a better time to decriminalize/fully legalize pot? Or, more fully, to decriminalize pot, and then spread respectable pot shops and vending machines and dispensaries far and wide, instill quality control and decent oversight and then tax the living hell out of the glorious, stress-reducing goodness, as we stop wasting billions fighting its grand ubiquity and instead sink into profitable pools of warm, hazy progress? Don't you already know the answer?

It's difficult to imagine that some intrepid legislator hasn't already walked into Arnie "Pot is not a drug" Schwarzenegger's office and said, "Governator, now is the time. Light it up. Inhale the new reality. Pot is, by a huge margin, the single largest cash crop in the state unless you count porn stars and celebrity rehab. It rakes in upwards of $14 billion a year -- maybe a lot more than that -- and that's just from five clever hippies and a couple intrepid grandmas in Ukiah. Imagine what we could do if we went all-in."

Are the discussions ongoing? Are they passing the bong of possibility around the state Senate chambers? You're damn right they are. What's holding them back? Probably the usual: the negative PR, looking "soft" on crime, encouraging permissiveness, pressure from prison lobbies, and so on. Don't worry, Sacramento. Everyone's already plenty drunk/high on prescription meds trying to alleviate fears of losing their job to care about that nonsense right now. Get to it.

There won't be much pushback from D.C. President Obama's already stated that his upcoming appointee to head the DEA is going to knock it the hell off with the insidious raids of harmless medical pot shops in California, and wants to quit using federal resources to bash hippies and circumvent state laws.

Look. Is there really anyone left who doesn't already know the "War on Drugs" is a pathetic joke, an abject failure and a taxpayer nightmare, and the only reason it survives at all is to fund the CIA and fellate the prison guard unions and support a shameful prison system, and to let politicians say they're "tough on crime" so they can to deflect all those uninformed parents who relentlessly whine about pot in public schools just before dashing off a wine-tasting party to snort a nice line of Bolivian coke?

Anyone left, furthermore, who doesn't know that pot is far safer than booze, less addictive, nonviolent, more transportable, easier to light, and generally won't interfere with your ability to crawl across the carpet and lick cookie crumbs from your lover's thighs? And sure, while heavy, daily usage can make you slow and stupid and rather useless to the world, well, so can a six-pack of Diet Dr. Pepper and six hours of TV every day. Gateway drug? That's on Channel 2, right after "Oprah."

And another thing. Maybe it wouldn't be merely tax 'n' puff. Maybe California, already the pot-growing capital of the nation, could become something more. A hub. A world-class research center. Pot education, study, medicine, import/export, the works. We could ship our crop to various nations in desperate need of chilling the hell out, like Israel. Palestine. Pakistan. Russia. The N-Judah on a Friday afternoon. We could become the largest research and manufacturing center in the world. How proud we would be. You know, sort of.

Let's phrase this grand scenario in another way: Why the hell not try it? What have we got to lose? What, we could go more broke? We could get more desperate and anxious? Fact is, economic nightmares need not breed only miserable stories of lost homes and lost jobs and shuttered businesses. They can also spawn creative solutions, innovative thinking, widespread munchies. Now is the time.

Let's not get carried away. Pot's only one little inebriate, one mild and -- let's just admit it -- relatively boring feel-good plant. California is $40 billion in debt and we're running low on water and we can't give away those hideous tract developments out in Stockton. Milking the pot cow for all she's worth might net us, at best, a few billion a year. To get out of this massive hole, we'd have to legalize Ecstasy too. (Someday, honey, someday).

But it's something. It's radical new thinking that's not the slightest bit radical, or new, and in fact the notion is now even more obvious than it's been for the past 30 years. What are we waiting for? A match?

War On Drugs DVD Combo

http://infowars-shop.stores.yahoo.net/warondrugs.html

War On Drugs DVD Combo

Get three incredible DVDs covering the fraudulent War on Drugs.

In the first and second volumes of his powerful Never Get Busted DVD series, Former DEA Agent Barry Cooper reveals secret police tactics to help you protect your precious liberties while celebrated filmmaker Kevin Booth delves into the American Drug War to uncover the police state being constructed in the name of protecting the nations' children.

Regular price: $64.85
Sale price: $48.90

Never Get Busted Volume 1: Traffic Stops (DVD)

This DVD is truly a one-of-a-kind, never before seen, information packed tool which can help you save thousands in legal fees and stay out of jail!

Watch Real Footage of former DEA Agent Barry Cooper Making Marijuana Arrests, Learn Secret Drug Enforcement Tactics, Avoid Narcotics Profiling, Where Not to Hide Your Stash (Do Coffee Grounds Really Work?), How Police Cause Drug Dogs to False Alert, Search & Seizure Law Made Easy, How Police Can Tell When You’re Lying, 90 Minutes of One-On-One Training.

$19.95

Never Get Busted Volume 2: Never Get Raided (DVD)

This newly released film is the second in Barry Cooper's' series of controversial NeverGetBusted videos. The title, NeverGetRaided, describes the DVD perfectly. Part documentary and all instruction, NeverGetRaided promises to reveal all the latest drug enforcement tactics giving the viewer confidence in maintaining a cannabis culture lifestyle without ever being raided!

Alongside the cannabis friendly citizens, the non-smoker will enjoy the film as well because it interestingly catalogs secret police tactics and gives the audience an insider's view into what caused one of America's top drug cops to "switch sides."

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT Never Get Busted

"Cooper is a former narcotics officer once considered among the top cops in Texas, where more marijuana is seized each year than in any other state."

---USA Today

This hard hitting film contains 90 minutes of non-stop instruction taught in the same "shocking but polite" teaching style delivered in Barry's first film, Traffic Stops that recently gained world attention.

"Totally amazing. It's incredible watching Barry and Candi sneak into the marijuana field. Barry will need an agent soon to help him manage becoming one of today's top documentary film makers."

---Jim Grimes, Channel 33 Dallas,Texas

""The audience laughed, cheered, cried and cursed. It was amazing. More than I could've ever imagined. Truly an educational experience for whomever watches it."

--Mark Meisinger, Attorney At Law

MORE INFORMATION

Chapter 1: Guerrilla Growing Undetected

Barry teaches from the DEA training he received on how to spot marijuana fields from the air. He takes you on a helicopter ride over a genuine clandestine marijuana patch and then "creeps" you into the field while pointing out the grower's mistakes.

Chapter 2: Spotting Undercovers and Informants

Undercover officers and informants are perhaps the strongest and most dangerous tool used against American Citizens in the unjust War on Drugs. Barry points out only 28 officers have lost their lives in the War on Drugs in a ten year period (1996-2005) compared to millions of non-violent citizens who have lost their lives or have been placed in prisons to be raped or stabbed. Barry uses his experience as an undercover officer and interviews a seasoned drug dealer to teach you exactly how to detect these secret government agents.

Chapter 3: Selling Marijuana Safely (Cops are more dangerous than Dealers)

Discover a GUARANTEED method to sell marijuana and NeverGetRaided. The alcohol dealers do not have police invading their homes in the middle of the night and neither should pot dealers. Barry explains a method to use that even he could not bust! It really works.

Chapter 4: Growing Indoor Plants That Are Invisible To Law Enforcement

Are you currently growing your medicine indoors? Do you want to grow indoors but haven't because you don't want to get raided? Heat from lights are the grower's worst enemy so Barry teaches how to beat the heat by explaining FLIR (Forward Looking Infra-Red Radar.) Walk into an actual grow room and witness real police FLIR footage of an indoor grow operation. Not only does Barry teach how to confuse these heat imaging video cams but he also explains how to obtain grow equipment undetected. You will also learn how to spot police surveillance, tails and stakeouts and learn how to counter these efforts.

Chapter 5: Knock and Talks and K-9 Proofing.

Learn tips that GUARANTEE how to win 100% of the time when facing a police encounter at your door. Learn how to fool the dogs in case you didn't listen to Barry's advice and you get raided.

Chapter 6: A Message To DEA.

Barry pulls no punches when outlining an effective way to conduct search warrants without the violence. The DEA and other drug enforcement agencies will owe an answer after Barry exposes this non-violent method to seizing persons and property.

Chapter 7: Those Are Your Kids! Drugs Are Not Harming Them...The Police Are.

This "no holds bar" chapter challenges government propaganda programs such as D.A.R.E and encourages parents to take charge of their families by teaching the truth about drugs. In this chapter, Barry says what the "closet smoking parents" can't say...highly charged and controversial. Note: We currently have 1.5 million children missing one or both parents because of the Drug War.

$19.95

American Drug War DVD

Order This Incredible New Exposé Today!

Over 4 years, 4 festival wins – Sold out screenings from California to Manchester England.

Angered by the death of several family members from the "legal Drugs" of Alcohol, Tobacco and Pharmaceuticals - Texas filmmaker Kevin Booth delves into a world of deceit and corruption controlled by a drug dealing government who's only allegiance is to its corporate masters.

The official DVD contains over THREE HOURS of BONUS features. Including a sixty minute mini doc about Tommy Chong’s arrest. Sheriff Joe Arpaio serving rotten food to non-violent drug offenders. Mike Ruppert going into great detail about various CIA operations. Ricky Ross talking from a prison Pay Phone. And much much more making the DVD a must have especially if you have already seen the film.

This final version of the film features extensive sound mixing and post production for the SHOWTIME broadcast, and is the version we would like to have spread across the country and the world.

$24.95

Never Get Busted Again Combo

Regular price: $39.90
Sale price: $33.90

Alex Jones' terrifying new film End Game: Blueprint For Global Enslavement explores the history of eugenics and answers why the elite are so obsessed with thinning the human population. Order the DVD or Subscribe to prison planet.tv and watch the documentary in high quality online streaming format.

Now every order gets a free copy of the powerful Citizen's Rule Book!

Tommy Chong

http://www.avclub.com/content/interview/tommy_chong

Tommy Chong
Interviewed by Brian Polk
January 30th, 2008

Tommy Chong is more of a rite of passage than a comedian. As half of the stoner-focused comedy duo Cheech & Chong—not to mention his role as burnout Leo Chingkwake in That '70s Show—he's given generations of high-school kids something to giggle at while experimenting with pot. But the Bush administration wasn't laughing four years ago, when former Attorney General John Ashcroft launched Operation Pipe Dream—which targeted, among companies, Chong's son's Nice Dreams Enterprises, which sold bongs across state lines. Although Chong wasn't an active owner of the company, he was sentenced to nine months in federal prison, as documented in Josh Gilbert's new documentary A/K/A Tommy Chong. While serving his time, he wrote his first book, The I Chong: Meditations From The Joint, a memoir and account of the bust. Now 69 years old and still smokin', Chong recently spoke with The A.V. Club about prison, the demonic nature of the War On Drugs, and performing stand-up with his wife Shelby.

The A.V. Club: It's hard to believe you served nine months in federal prison for selling bongs.

Tommy Chong: It was one of those defining moments in someone's career. You have to be careful what you ask for. I remember just before I got busted, I was saying to the guy that did the documentary, "You know, we need some kind of publicity gimmick." And then the next week, I got busted. [Laughs.] It was weird.

AVC: In The I Chong, you present yourself in a light that's very different from your stoner persona. If the Bush administration knew you were a family man who has a personal relationship with God, do you think they would have gone after you?

TC: Oh, yeah. These guys are really demons. You look at Cheney, Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and Bush—if you saw them on Halloween, they wouldn't need a costume. You'd give them a treat and compliment them on what great-looking demons they were. They are demons. There's no doubt about it.

AVC: Why were you such a high priority for them?

TC: Because they're trivial. These guys were doing wrong, and they knew they were doing wrong. They knew they had no business going into Iraq. And for all we know, they have something to do with 9/11—maybe not physically doing it, but they knew it was coming. It was the only way they could grab the power they grabbed. Had it not been for 9/11, they would've never been elected the second time, for sure. As trivial as they are, they don't look at the big picture, ever. So when they saw the chance to take a stoner like me down—I'm like a right-wing wet dream. While I'm walking around touting the joys of pot-smoking, these guys are looking to put black and brown people in jail for life for just having possession of a joint. And I played right into their hands.

AVC: Do you think the raid deterred people from buying bongs and smoking pot?

TC: [Laughs.] No, not at all. That's never been their intent. They want to control the population. It's all about control with these guys: mind control, thought control. They're thought police. There's no end to it. They're exactly what the founders of the Constitution were talking about when they wrote the Constitution. They were saying, "We don't want these idiots to be able to do this." That's why Bush and the boys are doing their best to tear [the Constitution] up. You can't become a dictator through checks and balances.

AVC: Did your sentence inspire your political activism?

TC: Totally. Before that, I used to pride myself on being just a pot-smoker, a musician more than anything. Cheech and I used to call ourselves musicians; we never called ourselves comedians. We were musicians that were funny. I never gave a thought about the activism part of it. Marijuana and marching don't go good together. Marijuana and munching, maybe. But I've really evolved into quite a spokesman.

AVC: When you make appearances on talk shows, they don't seem to be expecting your vehement criticisms of the government. Is it frustrating when they imply you must be high to say things like that?

TC: [Laughs.] I love it when they say that. "Are you high right now, Tommy Chong? What are you thinking?" I am high, as a matter of fact. I stay as high as I can now. But I do have a plan for the country. It needs education. And there should be drug education—only they should teach people how to smoke pot, because even potheads don't know how to smoke pot. I intend to make that part of my lifestyle from now on. I've evolved into not only an activist, but an educator. I want to show people how, when, and why they should smoke pot.

AVC: How should they smoke pot?

TC: First of all, you have to be involved in the arts. If you're not a writer, actor, musician, poet, astronomer, athlete—people should only smoke pot who absolutely need to smoke pot. If you're a right-wing Republican, pot would hold you back. But if you feel you need to smoke pot, then you should smoke it.

AVC: How have the events of the last few years shaped your stand-up act? Are you more political?

TC: More spiritual. I think there's something very comedic about a pothead getting spiritual. [Laughs.] But awakening your spiritual side is really what artists do. When you hit a groove, it's not you; it's the spirit world. The spirits whisper the ideas in your brain and prod you along. They're the ones that are really happy.

AVC: And you claim the demons in power are keeping people from experiencing their personal spirituality.

TC: That's the difference between religion and spirituality. Religion is run by thought police. "Obey. Listen. This is what you do. Don't ask questions. Go die for your country." The spirituality says, "Okay, you can die for your country, but know what you're doing while you're doing it."

AVC: Based on the reactions from talk-show hosts, mainstream America doesn't appear to be ready to embrace your message.

TC: Mainstream America will never be ready. Mainstream anybody. I look at the world like musicians do. Jazz, for instance, will never be mainstream, no matter how much a jazz person would like it to be. It's just like good literature—the average person will never read the great literature that's available. Only a handful of people will understand even a fraction of what I know now. But I don't care about mainstream people. I never have. There's no reason to.

AVC: How did you end up performing with your wife, Shelby?

TC: My wife started out introducing me onstage, and now she does 20-30 minutes on her own. She's really come into her own. Women come out to see her; they don't give a shit about me. That's the biggest compliment ever, though, because I help her write her stuff. When I had my wife onstage with me, I was told by a few comics, "What are you doing? What are you getting your wife out here for?" It makes them look like assholes. Their wives are going, "Tommy Chong's wife's working, why can't I?" That's really my biggest thrill—to see her evolve.

AVC: Are you two the new Cheech & Chong?

TC: We're coming into our own, Shelby and I, to the point where I don't get questioned about Cheech anymore. It was a sad but beautiful transition that's almost completed. Eventually, I'll do a show where I won't have to sign a Cheech & Chong album. I sign quite a few still. But Shelby and I are coming into our own, and that's the exciting part about comedy. If you catch an act just before they go mainstream, that's the best. After they hit the mainstream, everything gets watered down a little bit.