Marijuana still Taboo - but crack coke... lets lighten up the laws

While the Obama administration has been raiding, pillaging and plundering medical marijuana clinics across the US, Holder says lighter sentences for crack addicts!

In testimony before the US Sentencing Commission Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder gave his support to a proposal that could result in the early release of thousands of federal crack cocaine prisoners.  The proposal would make retroactive last year's Fair Sentencing Act, which sharply reduced the disparities in sentencing between powder and crack cocaine offenses.

LINK

Now here is the real reason cocaine is a schedule 2 narcotic and the much safer marijuana is a schedule 1 narcotic, thanks go to Nixon.

Nixon proposed to divide the U.S. into two philosophically camps; one a dangerous pot smoking, draft dodging gaggle of young anarchists, lead by a noisy cadre of effete intellectuals, the other he would eventually term “The Silent Majority,” the largely war-backing, middle-class.

This necessitated that Nixon wage war on marijuana.  By vilifying a drug that he could associate with the anti-war movement he could leverage national opinion against the protesters.  Directives issued to law enforcement to pummel marijuana also included a softening of directives aimed at a drug that would become synonymous with the 70’s and beyond – cocaine.   The think tanks advised Nixon on the cocaine for pot swap: marijuana made you think abstractly, cocaine physically.  Heavy cocaine use leads to delusions of grandeur and identification with the ruling class — traits incompatible with rebellion and anarchy.

LINK

So there you have it, Obama is still following the anti-marijuana pro-war strategies of the Nixon administration. Old Generals still own the White House and have control of the man seated as president, the want of war profits is dominate over the peoples desire for peace.


Edit: this just posted on Al jazeera

The global drug war and the Nixon connection

Failed policies in the war against drugs have historical roots in the foreign policy objectives of powerful nations.

 As historian Alfred McCoy explained in his 1972 classic, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade - later revised and expanded into The Politics of Heroin - the global hard drug trade was virtually destroyed by World War II. The CIA helped revive it, beginning by striking a deal with the Corsican Mafia to secure their assistance in driving communist union organisers off of the docks of Marseilles, laying the foundations for the "French Connection".
There followed a long, far-reaching pattern of cooperation between US covert operations and high-level drug-dealing organisations, who helped make the shadier covert operations self-financing, insulating them from unwanted oversight. Thus, Southeast Asia became a major global drug-supplier as an off-shoot of the Vietnam War, especially its more covert aspects. Similarly, the CIA-supported Afghanistan conflict not only helped create al-Qaeda, it rocketed the local poppy crop to the top of the global charts. In addition, a wide range of covert actions across Latin America helped fuel the cocaine explosion of the 1970s and 1980s, including the innovation of crack cocaine.

LINK

Free Cannabis,

End Prohibition Now!