http://www.mpp.org/

The Illinois House of Representatives adjourned on May 7 without voting on the Compassionate Use of Medical Cannabis Pilot Program Act. But we still have an opportunity to pass a compassionate medical cannabis law in 2010, and we need your help now more than ever. The House will return sometime this month because the state’s budget still needs to be approved, and SB 1381 could be called for a vote if we get the 60 confirmed “yes” votes that are needed. We are just a few votes shy and we need your help to send this bill to Gov. Pat Quinn.

Please write your representative today, and ask him or her to vote “yes” on SB 1381. In addition to e-mailing your representative, we encourage you to call your representative to tell him or her that you support SB 1381, and to ask for his or her “yes” vote on this compassionate bill. Please be sure to let me know of any response you get. Then, be sure to ask all of your friends and family in Illinois to reach out to their representatives.

Please let me know if you would like to volunteer or if you have a personal connection to the issue, including if you have a serious illness or are a medical professional or member of the clergy. Be sure to include your address or nine-digit ZIP code so I can determine who your representative is.

Please don’t forget to follow up on your letter by calling your representative, and by sharing this alert with friends, family, and neighbors who also support compassionate, doctor-recommended medical marijuana access in Illinois. You may also like to tune in to Chicago’s Fox 32 on Wednesday between 9:00 and 9:30 p.m. EST, when Rep. Lang will be appearing to discuss SB 1381 and medical cannabis in Illinois. Julie Falco, medical cannabis patient and multiple sclerosis sufferer, will also be featured on the program.

Thank you for supporting the Marijuana Policy Project and all that you have done to help advance this legislation. With your help, patients like these may no longer have to live in fear of arrest for using the medicine that works for them.

By Stephen Webster, Raw Story
via alternet.org

Far from being a war between hippies and police, the fight to legalize marijuana in California centers on whether decriminalizing and taxing cannabis can help fill the state’s fiscal hole.

Using the drug for medical purposes has been legal for 14 years in the western state. But a new initiative that will appear on the ballot in November elections is seeking to legalize recreational marijuana use.

The Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010 would let cities and counties adopt ordinances authorizing the cultivation, transportation and sale of marijuana, and tax its sale just like it taxes alcohol and cigarettes. (more…)

By Paul Armentano, AlterNet

Once again members of the mainstream media are running wild with the notion that marijuana use causes schizophrenia and psychosis.

To add insult to injury, this latest dose of reefer rhetoric comes only days after investigators in the United Kingdom reported in the prestigious scientific journal Addiction that the available evidence in support of this theory is “neither very new, nor by normal criteria, particularly compelling.” (Predictably, the conclusions of that study went all together unnoticed by the mainstream press.)

Yet today’s latest alarmist report, like those studies touting similar claims before it, fails to account for the following: If, as the authors of this latest study suggest, cannabis use is a cause of mental illness (and schizophrenia in particular), then why have diagnosed incidences of schizophrenia not paralleled rising trends in cannabis use over time?

In fact, it was only in September when investigators at the Keele University Medical School in Britain smashed the pot = schizophrenia theory to smithereens. Writing in the journal Schizophrenia Research, the team compared trends in marijuana use and incidences of schizophrenia in the United Kingdom from 1996 to 2005. Researchers reported that the “incidence and prevalence of schizophrenia and psychoses were either stable or declining” during this period, even the use of cannabis among the general population was rising. (more…)

side note: An informative video about what’s going on in California….and battle keep access to medical marijuana available for sick Americans.

Via Huffingtonpost

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — The first U.S. clinical trials in more than two decades on the medical benefits of marijuana confirm pot is effective in reducing muscle spasms associated with multiple sclerosis and pain caused by certain neurological injuries or illnesses, according to a report issued Wednesday.

Igor Grant, a psychiatrist who directs the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research at the University of California, San Diego, said five studies funded by the state involved volunteers who were randomly given real marijuana or placebos to determine if the herb provided relief not seen from traditional medicines.

“There is good evidence now that cannabinoids may be either an adjunct or a first-line treatment,” Grant said at a news conference where he presented the findings. (more…)

Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
http://www.sfgate.com

In a victory for medical marijuana users, the state Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a state law that protects them from arrest if they show police official identification cards. The court also overturned a law that limits how much pot patients can carry and how many plants they can grow.

The court unanimously ruled that the limits – 8 ounces of dried marijuana, six mature plants or 12 immature plants – conflicted with Proposition 215, the 1996 initiative that made California the first state to legalize marijuana for medical use. (more…)

Marijuana Policy Project
www.mpp.org

Last night, Gov. Jon Corzine (D) signed New Jersey’s medical marijuana legislation into law. As a result, New Jersey is now the 14th state to protect seriously ill patients from arrest and jail for using medical marijuana with their doctors’ approval.

The bill had been passed by the New Jersey Legislature on January 11, passing by 48-14 in the Assembly and 25-13 in the Senate.

The new law will not only protect medical marijuana patients from arrest and jail but also allows for the regulated dispensing of medical marijuana. When the law is implemented, it’s likely that there will be at least six dispensaries for patients to obtain their medicine, two in each part of the state. Doctors will be able to recommend up to two ounces of marijuana to patients within a 30-day period.

The Drug Policy Alliance New Jersey and the Coalition for Medical Marijuana-New Jersey led the lobbying efforts to pass this important legislation, which will go into effect this summer.

We’re hoping that the decisive victory in New Jersey will convince neighboring state New York to do the right thing and protect patients who continue to live in fear. MPP has been pushing a medical marijuana bill forward there for seven years, and this year looks like the year that it may finally become law.

With the help of MPP’s 29,000 dues-paying members, we’ll continue to roll back the government’s war on the sick and dying. We’re working hard in Arizona, New York, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, and Massachusetts to make these states the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th to pass medical marijuana legislation. Would you please consider making a donation today to support our efforts?

side note: I used to watch Washington Journal on CSPAN every morning…they used to have some real good moderators…..then something happened and they got this new woman who is a nutjob righty who hides behind her nice clothes and pretty face…but from time to time that righty side of hers comes screaming out. Which you’ll see in the video below, she doesn’t even flinch at the callers question/comments….and either does that piece of shit Senator John Barrasso from Wyoming. As Bob Cesca said on his blog: “This is jaw-droppingly creepy and awful. Even for teabaggers.”

via sloshspot.com

Love it or hate it, people smoke marijuana – lots of it. In some states marijuana consumption and posession have been decriminalized, and even legalized for medicinal purposes. But, have you ever wondered how large the economics of Marijuana were? Us too. As a result ,have decided to put together this graphic, which illustrates the popularity of marijuana consumption, the federal tax dollars spent to keep marijuana illegal, and the possible tax revenues that could be generated if marijuana production were legalized and taxed like any other agricultural product. It is especially interesting, with regards to the Great Recession:

original article

side note: For the past 2 years, we have been buying our pork from a local farmer, who is related to a good friend, this farmer raises only a small number of cows and pigs, but does it on small scale and really focuses on the conditions of his animals. Let me just say that I’ve never eaten pork so tasty….I know it sound hard to believe, but I can now tell the difference between quality and the shit that factory farms produce. This year, we decided that we’d buy beef from that farmer as well……we’ve just started consuming it, but god damn, it’s tasty as well!!!! With the obesity problems in this country…we need to start educating people on where their food comes from. Once again, the corporate culture of factory farms have invaded DC, and our politicians care more about their relection chests then their constituents!

HuffingtonPost.com
Nicolette Hahn Niman
Livestock Rancher, Lawyer, and Author, Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms

Most people share at least the following traits: they want to be healthy; they like animals; and they value clean air and water. Yet relatively few Americans connect those concerns with their food. As more people start making the link (especially if they’ve seen graphic video footage of industrial animal operations), many decide it’s time to stop eating foods from factory farms. This is a guide for doing just that.

I’ve been a vegetarian for more than twenty years. Unlike the fits and starts described in Jonathan Safran Foer’s autobiographical book Eating Animals, the day I decided to quit eating meat was the last time I ever did. I remember that dinner well. It was my mother’s tuna fish casserole, and actually quite tasty. But while I chose to stop eating meat, I never adopted the view that it was morally wrong, and, consequently, didn’t become one of those vegetarians who spends her spare time plumbing the depths of meat industry literature looking for bits of information to shock my friends and family into giving up meat.

Nine years ago, I had just started working as an environmental lawyer for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. when he approached me about leading a national campaign to reform the livestock and poultry sector. He said that industrialized animal production had become one of the nation’s worst polluters of water and air, and he wanted to aggressively attack the problem.

Initially, realizing that Bobby was asking me to work full-time on poop, I hesitated. It was not the glamorous job I’d envisioned when moving to New York to work for him. But then I visited towns in Missouri and North Carolina that had been overrun by factory-style production of hogs, chickens and turkeys. I witnessed biblical-scale plagues of pollution and stench; I spoke with people whose lives had been ruined when an industrial hog or poultry operation was erected next door; and I heard the details of how the animals were raised. My reticence vanished and I jumped at the chance to work on cleansing the earth of the animal factory menace.

I loved the job and threw myself into it, body and soul. But there was one problem: I could no longer deny the shady past of my own food. Every day, I was putting stuff into my mouth that undeniably came from factory farms. I was a vegetarian, yes, but consumed plenty of eggs, milk, yogurt, butter and cheese. And much of the factory farm data and stories I was gathering from all over the country was about egg and dairy operations. My unease grew with each passing day.

To avoid the products of factory farms, I became something of a food detective. My groceries were the subjects of my investigations. Where were they coming from and how they were produced? I roamed grocery store aisles carefully reading product labels, but there was little to no information about the conditions in which the animals were raised. I wrote letters to food companies with questions about what they fed their animals, but the letters went unanswered. The food system’s lack of transparency was frustrating. Eventually, I mostly gave up on supermarkets and began exploring new ways to get at the good food I was seeking. Although the task was daunting, my goal was simple: I wanted all my food to come from places I would enjoy visiting. (more…)

side note: Still think we’re the best country in the world? Only if you’re fuckin rich! The crazy thing about this is that tons of these kids will come from areas that are heavy Republican controlled….where people literally vote against not only their interests….but their childrens’ interests as well. This is one of the saddest things I’ve read in a long time…….

BY LINDSEY TANNER
Chicago Sun Times
AP

If she didn’t get food stamps, Angie Minix and her two boys would have had to survive on the peanut butter-and-jelly diet.

The Sauk Village mom isn’t alone.

In fact, nearly half of all U.S. children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food stamps at some point during childhood, and fallout from the current recession could push those numbers even higher, researchers say.

The estimate comes from an analysis of 30 years of national data, and it bolsters other recent evidence on the pervasiveness of youngsters at economic risk. It suggests that almost everyone knows a family who has received food stamps, or will in the future, said lead author Mark Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis. (more…)

By Steven Wishnia, AlterNet.
Obama’s drug czar has said “legalization” isn’t in his vocabulary. Here’s why it should be.

More members of Congress have publicly questioned whether President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii than have endorsed legalizing marijuana.

This comes despite the birth announcements printed in the Honolulu Advertiser in August 1961 and marijuana’s deep inroads into the cultural mainstream.

Almost every voter under 65 in this country has either smoked cannabis or grew up with people who did. Among its erstwhile users are the last three presidents, one Supreme Court justice and the mayor of the nation’s largest city. The pot leaf’s image pervades popular culture, from Bob Marley T-shirts to billboards for Showtime’s Weeds.

So why is actually legalizing it still considered a fringe issue? Why haven’t more politicians — especially the ones who inhaled — come out and said, “Prohibition is absurd and criminal. Let’s treat cannabis like alcohol”? (more…)

side note: Important aspect of this healthcare debate that isn’t discussed. Who would have thought that only Baseball and Insurance companies are exempt from anti-trust laws. If we could make it so they are playing on a more level playing field…then the Justice Department could look into how their conducting business. My assumption is that most, if not all, would have to change quite a bit to come into line under federal law.

By Bob Buckley
The Examiner
Can not have reform until this changes

Maybe I have missed it, but there has not been any discussion in the healthcare reform debate about what may be the biggest problem health insurance companies have. Actually, it is not a problem for them, but for those of us who have to pay for health insurance, and for physicians who are at the mercy of health insurers for reimbursements.
It is a little known fact that health insurance companies are exempt from the antitrust laws. A law passed at the end of World War II, the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945, exempts health insurance companies from the federal anti-trust legislation that applies to most businesses. Actually, the law gives states the authority to regulate the business of insurance without interference from federal regulation, unless federal law specifically provides otherwise.

Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont has introduced legislation about three weeks ago called the Health Insurance Industry Antitrust Enforcement Act, which removes the exemption or immunity health insurers enjoy. The law would also apply to medical malpractice insurers. Hurrah! (more…)

side note: There’s a reason that the health care industry was spending 1.4 million dollars a day (not a typo), on lobbying DC politicians to make sure they got the bill they wanted. And now we see the results of that coordinated effort. At the end of the day…..our politicians do not represent the people of their state or district….they represent the corporation who help them get re-elected. This is biggest downside of our system….campaign financing. We need to rid ourselves of this so these snakes in DC can get back to representing their constituents, not big business……..ya, I know, when pigs fly! (Which makes me think of one of my favorite scenes from The Simpsons:

By Noam N. Levey and Lisa Girion
LA TImes
The final bill may well reflect an industry group’s strategy of shaping universal coverage to benefit companies.

As President Obama’s push for a healthcare overhaul moves toward its final act, the oft-vilified health insurance industry is on the verge of seeing a plan enacted that largely protects its financial interests.

That achievement, should it stand up in the final legislation, would be the capstone of a sophisticated lobbying and strategic campaign that began even before Obama was elected president.

The specifics of the healthcare legislation are still being hashed out on Capitol Hill, and key details will evolve in the days ahead. Even so, there is broad agreement that the final plan will, for the first time, require Americans to buy health coverage, with taxpayer subsidies for millions who cannot afford it.

For the health insurance industry, that means millions of new paying customers. What’s more, there are likely to be no limits on what insurers can charge, while at the same time the plan is expected to limit competition from any new national government insurance plan that lawmakers create.

These anticipated wins — from an initiative that has at times been portrayed as doomsday for health insurers — is the result of a strategy developed by one of Washington’s savviest lobbyists, Karen Ignagni. Under Ignagni’s leadership, the industry group America’s Health Insurance Plans adopted the goal of universal coverage while setting out to shape it in a way that benefited insurers — a crucial move that aligned their interests with those of other groups, including consumers and hospitals.

Insurers poured campaign donations into the coffers of key sympathetic members of the House and Senate, and loaded up on lobbyists. And when Obama and other Democrats began attacking the industry, insurers made a strategic choice not to walk away from the negotiating table.

“While so many in this town have been playing checkers, Karen has been playing chess,” said Mark Merritt, a veteran lobbyist who heads the Pharmaceutical Care Management Assn. (more…)

side note: I have had quite a few conversations with folks concerning vaccines lately and I think it’s an important topic b/c it ties into the Big Pharma issues we have in this country. I am not a doctor or scientist, so I have really nothing credible to backup my beliefs, but I do know that Big Pharma companies will do anything to make a buck, even hurting people. It’s tough for me to put my trust in an industry that’s built on making as much money as possible. With that being said, my beliefs are that not everyone needs the H1N1 vaccine. If you are old, very young, or susceptible to getting sick, then yes, you should get one. The “every year” flu hasn’t hit us yet, that usually comes a bit later in the winter season, currently the only flu that people are getting sick from is the H1N1, and the people who are dying from it fall into the above 3 categories of who should get vaccinated for it. The other people who are dying from it are the ones who had an unknown preexisting condition. I do agree with this article about pseudoscience. There is no medical studies that link autism and vaccines. Without a shred of proof that shows a connection, we really need to continue to move forward to protect those who could die. If you are worried about the preservatives in the vaccine, then use the nasal spray vaccine that doesn’t have the mercury based preservatives in it. I just hope that most people continue to trust the medical studies out there and try not to form their own opinions based on an uneducated belief system. This part of the article really stood out to me:
Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.

By Amy Wallace
Wired.com

To hear his enemies talk, you might think Paul Offit is the most hated man in America. A pediatrician in Philadelphia, he is the coinventor of a rotavirus vaccine that could save tens of thousands of lives every year. Yet environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slams Offit as a “biostitute” who whores for the pharmaceutical industry. Actor Jim Carrey calls him a profiteer and distills the doctor’s attitude toward childhood vaccination down to this chilling mantra: “Grab ‘em and stab ‘em.” Recently, Carrey and his girlfriend, Jenny McCarthy, went on CNN’s Larry King Live and singled out Offit’s vaccine, RotaTeq, as one of many unnecessary vaccines, all administered, they said, for just one reason: “Greed.”

Thousands of people revile Offit publicly at rallies, on Web sites, and in books. Type pauloffit.com into your browser and you’ll find not Offit’s official site but an anti-Offit screed “dedicated to exposing the truth about the vaccine industry’s most well-paid spokesperson.” Go to Wikipedia to read his bio and, as often as not, someone will have tampered with the page. The section on Offit’s education was once altered to say that he’d studied on a pig farm in Toad Suck, Arkansas. (He’s a graduate of Tufts University and the University of Maryland School of Medicine).

Then there are the threats. Offit once got an email from a Seattle man that read, “I will hang you by your neck until you are dead!” Other bracing messages include “You have blood on your hands” and “Your day of reckoning will come.” A few years ago, a man on the phone ominously told Offit he knew where the doctor’s two children went to school. At a meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an anti-vaccine protester emerged from a crowd of people holding signs that featured Offit’s face emblazoned with the word terrorist and grabbed the unsuspecting, 6-foot-tall physician by the jacket. (more…)