Marijuana

	mountain lion

Russell Rexrode, a 41 year old Ft. Bragg resident, has been sentenced to 180 days in jail following his conviction by a jury of felony cultivation of marijuana. Sheriff's deputy Dustin Lorenzo testified during the trial that he weighed 119 pounds of processed marijuana and 142 pounds-worth of unprocessed marijuana plants found at Rexrode's residence. Sheriff's Lieutenant Rusty Noe testified that the wholesale value of the pot was $2,400 per pound.

Fish and Game Department Lieutenant Lynette Shimek testified that she led the search of Mr. Rexrode's property on Oct. 17, 2005, on the basis of evidence relating to "unlawful mountain lion possession." Superior Court judge Ron Brown presided over the case, and in addition to giving Rexrode the jail sentence, he ordered the defendant to pay $1,500 for the misdemeanor offense of having the mountain lion. [Ukiah Daily Journal]

What do you do if you find the world's largest marijuana stash? Call in the airforce!

The crack teams discovered 236.8 tons of cannabis buried in vast trenches in the desert. The drugs had a minimum street value of £225 million, and weighed more than 30 double-decker buses, officials said.

Lieutenant General Abdul Hadi Khalid, Afghanistan's deputy interior minister, said: "This is a new world record in the global war on drugs."
…

British fighter jets were called in from nearby Kandahar Airfield to smash open the underground stores. A Nato spokesman said the planes dropped three 1,000lb bombs on the trenches, before troops from the commando unit known as 333 doused the wreckage with petrol and set them alight. [scotsman.com]

There's something tragically ironic about using fighter jets to launch air strikes on a plant that's never killed anyone in the history of the world. Are you having fun yet, brave desert drug soldiers? Someone get these guys some volleyball nets before they nuke a poppy field.

TOKYO (AFP) — An unsuspecting passenger who flew to Tokyo is carrying one million yen's worth of cannabis compliments of customs authorities after a sniffer dog failed a test, officials said Monday.

An officer at Narita International Airport on Sunday stuffed 142 grams (five ounces) of the drug into the side pocket of a randomly selected black suitcase coming off an overseas flight so that the animal could detect it.

"The dog couldn't find it and the officer also forgot which bag he put it in," a customs office spokeswoman said.

"If by some chance passengers find it in their suitcase, we're asking them to return it," she said.

Seriously, if they wanted it returned, they should've refrained from announcing that it's worth a million yen.

This whole fiasco reflects terribly on Japanese drug enforcement, but also on Japanese marijuana, which was valued at nearly $2,000 an ounce, but apparently didn't smell very interesting.

1. One must show a correlation. Marijuana use and mental illness have to show up in many of the same people. That might not be so hard to demonstrate, but the reason for the correlation may be as simple as the fact that lots of people use marijuana, so most physicial or psychological issues may be represented among its users. Which leads to the second needed level:
2. One must show a temporal order. That is, it is necessary to prove that marijuana use preceded the onset of mental illness. If marijuana use began later, there obviously is no causation. Even if they start at about the same time, there may be no causation.
3. And then there is a third, very crucial intellectual requirement for drawing the conclusion that marijuana use causes mental illness. That is the need to demonstrate a "lack of spuriousness" -- which means eliminating the possibility that other factors could have led to both the marijuana use and the mental illness. For example, physical or other life issues may have led an individual to become depressed, and that person may have then begun using marijuana because of being depressed. Or there could be biological or personality factors that make both depression and drug use more likely. Or there could be other things going on.

The cartel’s supply chain is embedded in the huge legal bilateral trade between the United States and Mexico. Remember that Mexico exports $198 billion to the United States and — according to the Mexican Economy Ministry — $1.6 billion to Japan and $1.7 billion to China, its next biggest markets. Mexico is just behind Canada as a U.S. trading partner and is a huge market running both ways. Disrupting the drug trade cannot be done without disrupting this other trade. With that much trade going on, you are not going to find the drugs. It isn’t going to happen. Police action, or action within each country’s legal procedures and protections, will not succeed. The cartels’ ability to evade, corrupt and absorb the losses is simply too great. Another solution is to allow easy access to the drug market for other producers, flooding the market, reducing the cost and eliminating the economic incentive and technical advantage of the cartel. That would mean legalizing drugs. That is simply not going to happen in the United States. It is a political impossibility. This leaves the option of treating the issue as a military rather than police action. That would mean attacking the cartels as if they were a military force rather than a criminal group. It would mean that procedural rules would not be in place, and that the cartels would be treated as an enemy army. Leaving aside the complexities of U.S.-Mexican relations, cartels flourish by being hard to distinguish from the general population. This strategy not only would turn the cartels into a guerrilla force, it would treat northern Mexico as hostile occupied territory. Don’t even think of that possibility, absent a draft under which college-age Americans from upper-middle-class families would be sent to patrol Mexico — and be killed and wounded. The United States does not need a Gaza Strip on its southern border, so this won’t happen. The current efforts by the Mexican government might impede the various gangs, but they won’t break the cartel system. The supply chain along the border is simply too diffuse and too plastic. It shifts too easily under pressure. The border can’t be sealed, and the level of economic activity shields smuggling too well. Farmers in Mexico can’t be persuaded to stop growing illegal drugs for the same reason that Bolivians and Afghans can’t. Market demand is too high and alternatives too bleak. The Mexican supply chain is too robust — and too profitable — to break easily. The likely course is a multigenerational pattern of instability along the border. More important, there will be a substantial transfer of wealth from the United States to Mexico in return for an intrinsically low-cost consumable product — drugs. This will be one of the sources of capital that will build the Mexican economy, which today is 14th largest in the world. The accumulation of drug money is and will continue finding its way into the Mexican economy, creating a pool of investment capital. The children and grandchildren of the Zetas will be running banks, running for president, building art museums and telling amusing anecdotes about how grandpa made his money running blow into Nuevo Laredo. It will also destabilize the U.S. Southwest while grandpa makes his pile. As is frequently the case, it is a problem for which there are no good solutions, or for which the solution is one without real support.

…these aren't flower-power farmers growing a few stalks hydroponically for personal toking. They're organized criminal gangs — some with deep roots in Mexico — and pot helps fund their violence. [Merced Sun-Star]

"Ninety-nine percent of the plants seized in the national forests," [Special Agent] Stokes said, "were planted by members of the Mexican National Cartel which has a huge network throughout California and the west.

"We've actually tracked the dollars back to Mexico," Stokes concluded. [Mountain News]

Something doesn’t add up here. For starters, the Mexican National Cartel doesn't seem to exist. And I don’t know how you'd track dollars from a marijuana crop that was eradicated and never sold.

And then there's this from the Merced Sun-Star:

…it's extremely rare and difficult for law enforcement to bust the drug lords responsible for funding the large growing operations. Often, even the growers themselves do not know who is funding an illegal cultivation.

So really, no one has any idea who's behind this. Arrests for outdoor cultivation are extremely rare, and yet local papers throughout California eagerly and repeatedly quote law-enforcement officials who blame the problem on Mexicans.

Appeals to racial prejudice and hysteria have always been a primary propaganda tool in the drug war. Exaggerating the involvement of violent drug cartels glamorizes the process of looking for pot in the woods and casts marijuana users as funders of violence. Such claims also facilitate the Drug Czar's desperate attempt to link marijuana prohibition to the more-popular war on terror.

Whether they're Mexican gangsters or white college kids, the people planting pot in the woods are a product of marijuana prohibition. They'll never stop growing pot in the woods because it's valuable and they never get in trouble for it. The only way to stop people from planting drugs in the forest is to let them do it somewhere else.

[Merced Multi-Agency Narcotics Task Force Commander] Compston said more growers are cloning female plants, which produce the valuable buds with higher THC levels, in order to yield a product that will be more profitable on the street. "They are basically making hybrid plants," Compston said. [Merced Sun-Star]

Most marijuana plants are valued at $1,000 to $3,000 per plant, based on the measurement that an average plant will yield one pound of finished product per season, according to Merced County Sheriff's Detective Scott Dover. With the newer varieties' higher THC content, however, Dover said it's not uncommon to find a single plant priced up to $5,000.