Rebel with Just Cause Award 2007

Ooooops! Who spilled the beans? --by Bonnie Colleen McCool

America gets an F in two out of three public safety indicators comparing world governments' statistics concerning homicides, assaults and thefts. The US is a material world so we get just above average marks for protection from and solving thefts. Where our government fails is in protecting us from and solving homicides and assaults.

Across the US last year 40% of the murders, almost 60% of the rapes and about half of the aggravated assaults went unsolved. The horrendous cumulative effect of this is becoming obvious. While we police individual recreational and medicinal use of drugs; murderers and violent sexual predators roam free.

Warriors can earn their pay and get their adrenaline rush catching murderers, sexual predators and other perpetrators of violence. Many of whom we know are out there, somewhere. Then our peace keepers will truly be making our neighborhoods safer.

The Netherlands drug policy of peace; no drug war cost and no ruined lives, is worth considering. They tax cannabis just like any other commodity and medicinal use is legal. They incarcerate one per thousand of their citizens compared to seven out of every thousand of US citizens behind bars; making the "Land of the Free" have the largest prison system in the world. A recent survey showed 19% of Dutch teens have tried cannabis and less than 3% have ever used any illegal drug. Their public schools are exemplary while ours sometimes seem more like prisons than institutions of learning and free thought.

Switzerland and Netherlands do a much better job with their violent crime. Their drug laws help lessen the harm to society by triggering less assaults and homicides. Their teen drug use is down. Could it be because they live in a safer, saner world? Maybe, but California's teen use of marijuana is down so maybe it has more to do with drug sales being handled by legitimate business people less likely to sell to a child or to recruit a minor to sell to their peers.

The truth is out and spreading like wildfire! It will not be suppressed, until every household knows the clamor, the swelling protest, exposing dark, dirty secrets of heinous crimes against humanity!

Cannabis medicines were once the “drugs of choice” in the United States. Until they were declared illegal, they had been used in about 30 prescription medicines for a 100 specific medical problems.

In a cannabis study on cancer conducted in 1974, researchers at the Medical College of Virginia, who had been funded by the National Institute of Health to find evidence that marijuana damages the immune system, instead found that THC slowed the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice - lung and breast cancer, and a virus-induced leukemia. The Drug Enforcement Agency shut down that study and buried that life saving information. In 2000, it was validated again when researchers in Madrid announced they had destroyed incurable brain tumors in rats by injecting them with THC, the active ingredient in cannabis.

This is the biggest scandal, much bigger than sex in the oval office! Yet where are the headlines? Where is the outrage in major news media? Are they like Mexican journalist, afraid to tell truth to power? Fear losing their jobs not their lives, so far at least.

Big pharmacy lobbyist have paid for road blocks to cannabis research. For all these decades, the medical profession has been treating cancer patients to killer cocktails of antiangiogenesis drugs that cut off the blood supply to tumors while also killing healthy cells! Ifosfamide destroys the patients bladder and kidneys. And as a last hope treatment, thaledomide, the sleeping pill that produced clubfeet and webbed fingers will also starve tumors. These poison drip cocktails come with side effects you can count on to make life no longer worth living. Radiation is another poisonous, "cure" and surgery often triggers the cancer to spread. We all know someone who has suffered these hellish treatments. One day these, "cures," will be looked on as a step back to the dark ages in medicine.

Have you heard about the cancer study in California which showed that people who smoke marijuana are less at risk of developing lung cancer than tobacco smokers? Cancer Monthly in May 2006 published an article stating the FDA lost more credibility by insisting "no sound scientific studies" support the medical use of marijuana, dismissing and contradicting highly regarded scientists.

Texas polled at 75% overall for medical marijuana. At the center or heart of this great state that number jumped to 83%!

Check out: "Top 10 Pot Studies Government Wished it Had Never Funded"

10) MARIJUANA USE HAS NO EFFECT ON MORTALITY

9) HEAVY MARIJUANA USE AS A YOUNG ADULT WON’T RUIN YOUR LIFE

8) THE “GATEWAY EFFECT” MAY BE A MIRAGE

7) PROHIBITION DOESN’T WORK (PART I)

6) PROHIBITION DOESN’T WORK (PART II:

Does prohibition Cause the“GATEWAY EFFECT”?)

5) OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER (PART I)

4) OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER, (PART II)

3) OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER (PART III)

2) OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER (PART IV)

1) MARIJUANA DOES HAVE MEDICAL VALUE

Read more about these studies here.

Harassing the sick and dying is un-American and un-Christian activity! We have spent close to a trillion dollars waging war on a disease, a sickness! We lock up sick people. Use is considered abuse so nonviolent recreational users are incorrectly locked up as addicts. Rarely is the true addict treated as a patient instead of a criminal.

There is a connection between violence and alcohol or pharmaceuticals including school violence. The tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceuticals gangs deal drugs that kill many more annually than all illicit drugs. We tolerate their salesmen!

We can never agree on everything but surely we can agree that responsible behavior; weighing the choices and making a safer, wiser decision is to be encouraged in America not criminalized.. Cannabis is the safest health choice in recreational drugs and as medicine it does not have the negative side effects of many prescription drugs. A policy that disregards science and punishes families of citizens for making a safer health choice in a recreational or medicinal drug is bordering on insanity or reefer madness.

Medicine has become just another big business with profits more important than the well being of the individual. Our under treatment of pain is medieval or just plain evil! Dr. David E. Joranson of the University of Wisconsin Medical school thinks, "The use of pain medications has become a crime story when it should be a health care story." Most Americans and Texans agree and believe health care is the responsibility of the individual. The use of marijuana has been demonized and made a crime, when in truth, it is a health care story about a safer choice!

Texas increased its spending on cell blocks by 346% between 1986 and 2000. During that same period spending for higher education increased 47%.

The,"World Prison Population List" (seventh edition), by Roy Walmsley is out with the latest available information. The US holds top ranking at 738 per 100,000 people. Our closest competitors Russia with 611. Texas has an imprisonment rate pushing 1,000 out of every 100,000. "There's no country on the planet - no dictatorship on earth - as comfortable with locking people up as the state of Texas." -- Tami Halphen, A Blue Activist in a Red State

U.S. police arrested an estimated 829,625 persons for marijuana violations in 2006, according to the latest FBI annual Uniform Crime Report. That total, the highest ever recorded for marijuana violations, made up 44 percent of all drug arrests.

"After millions of people arrested and incarcerated, it is clear that the "war on drugs" has reshaped the way America responds to crime and ushered in an era of instability and mistrust in countless communities." According to a new report from the Sentencing project, a half million poor souls are presently incarcerated for drug offenses. Drug abusers deserve medical help. Instead we lock them in prison, a breeding ground for crime.

The drug war obviously exacerbates, rather than reduces, racial prejudice! The White incarceration rate nationwide was 393 per 100,000, Latino-957 and Black-2,531. Texas number of offenders supervised per 100,000 is 34.8% higher than the national average, incarcerating 3,734 Blacks, 1,152 Latinos and 694 Whites out of every 100,000 people, as of February 2005.

Our DEA overseers have harassed the sick and dying, shamed and destroyed families, locked up and killed many (including enforcement) over one of the safest therapeutically active plants known to man; while FDA"overseers"allowed more pharmaceutical killers on the market. Both agencies exacerbate problems instead of solving them. They should be disbanded.

When we fight against drugs, we fight for the souls of our fellow Americans," said President Bush. Like flagellant priests, overzealous drug warriors draw blood daily from their brothers for their medicinal and recreational drug use. Don't let them carry this nation one step further down this depraved path!

Fellow Americans, we are out of control! We, the people, have no say in the running of this country. We have turned over the reins to a few cold-hearted, power-mad evil doers with little or no ethics, who in a careless bloodletting, feeding frenzy worship nothing more than the almighty dollar.

War is a tool governments use to make us more accepting of their waste of our precious lives and resources. War creates a booming economy for some on the suffering of many. The Iraq war and drug war are smokescreens for corruption but something smells rotten! Politics and money, is there a way to separate them?

Changing whose in charge will not effect much. The real cause of this huge quagmire of failed policy is the beast, big government, that money hungry beast, Uncle Sam! Ma Freedom tells it like it is! The beauty of it is when we focus on downsizing our government we regain our roots of self-government and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and future generations.

The World Trade Organization and the United Nations are more big government, money hungry beasts that we must tame or cut down to size. Both are meant to be helpful organizations devoted to fairness and cooperation between nations and to preserving life as we know it. In reality, as with most big government programs it doesn't work that way! They often make things worse for the very people they're intended to help, making us pay with our precious lives and resources.

"Liberty Enlightening the World" is the official name of our Statue of Liberty. Boy did we miss the boat somewhere! With more people in prison here than anywhere else on earth, is this the way to be the land of the free? With modern unbiased, science based statistical reporting, we can see where our laws are causing more harm than good and change accordingly. We can't take that necessary evil, money out of the equation but we can demand compassionate policy and ethics from our leaders when peace lovers, liberty lovers, true patriots unite!

Leaders responsible for current quagmire will one day answer to a higher power for their crimes against humanity. It's time to end the terror by changing our intrusive, big-bully policies, both foreign and domestic. The monetary costs are staggering and the human suffering unconscionable.

Big government programs are costly and wasteful, diverting money and energy from more positive, productive local uses. Enmasse we pack the punch that will streamline and transform these money hungry beasts into user friendly tools that work, as intended, for us not against us. When ethics rule, we make, "His Kingdom come" as was planned by the Spirit of 1776 as shown in our Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and reinforced by the Bill of Rights!

The separation of church and state allows other faiths. That does not mean erase any reference to the Creator and the Bible from our money and any state function, building, etc. Knowing our Christian roots is key to remaining true to the "Spirit" of our constitution and to our founding father's vision of self-government leading to abundance - free of tyranny and oppression. Have you ever wondered What Would the Founders Do Today?

Getting Out the Vote

Sign Voters for Peace Pledge! "I will not vote for or support any candidate for Congress or President who does not make a speedy end to the war in Iraq, and preventing any future war of aggression, a public position in his or her campaign."

Be sure to register to vote and find out who is on the ballot in your state in the next election. To find out the Lone Star state races go to the Texas voters guide. More information on Congress activities can be found each day on Congress.org. or VoteSmart.org You can find out your current races through either.

Why don't more Americans vote? During the last four decades of presidential elections only 54 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots. America ranks 35th in voter turnout out of the world's prominent democracies. Our numbers are embarrassing compared to Italy's 90 percent, Germany's 80 percent, France and Canada's 76 percent, Britain's 75 percent and Japan's 71 percent.

Voters on the bottom rung of income and education in America are voting at rates half those of their wealthier, well-educated counterparts. Fueling this indifference are feelings of oppression, alienation, powerlessness and cynicism with no real hope for change. In Nevada, for example, 3,688 persons voted for "None of These Candidates" in the 2004 presidential election (Nevada is the only state that allows this option). Many around the country are so disenchanted with the American dream of self government they rarely vote or just don't bother with it at all..

The federal war on drugs is largely responsible for voter apathy. Getting children to snitch on their parents; getting parents to drug test and rat on their children; harassing the sick and dying is despicable and against American ideals. Prohibition destroys families without compunction or compassion. There are millions of orphaned American children because of the drug war.

Kinky Friedman says, "If God wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates worth voting for." Last November he felt he was running against apathy, mostly. People have died to give us the right to vote; please, use it. People have died protecting our freedom. If we continue on our present course they will have died in vain. We still have the power to change!

James Werner recent Libertarian candidate for governor of the Great State of Texas says, "With your help, we can restore lost civil liberties, return government to its rightful and limited role, and insure a safe and prosperous future for all Texans!" He is the only candidate, among recent hopefuls, who supports reducing the size of state government and favors dramatically increasing your personal freedom.

Read about REFORM candidates running for office on STOP THE DRUG WAR!