He's a Healer, Not a Dealer: Rick Simpson's "Cannabis Cures Cancer" Case Settled
Rick Simpson outside court in 2007A man who insists he has found the cure for cancer says he is leaving Canada for an unnamed country where he can live without fear of persecution or prosecution for taking and producing medicinal marijuana. "I can?t live in a country where I and others are labelled as criminals because of our medical need for this (marijuana) medication," Ricky Logan Simpson, 58, said Friday. "I?ve decided that after five years of trying to bring my medicine to the people, I don?t like the way this country is run. It seems that the health and welfare of the people means nothing to the (politicians) in Ottawa."
Mr. Simpson made the comments outside Nova Scotia Supreme Court moments after Justice Felix Cacchione fined him $2,000 and sentenced him to one day in jail, considered served by his court appearance, for producing marijuana and possessing less than three kilograms of tetrahydrocannabinol for the purpose of trafficking. Tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, is the main active ingredient in marijuana.
A charge of possessing less than 30 grams of marijuana was stayed. Mr. Simpson was given six months to pay the fine. A crowd of about 30 supporters in the courtroom applauded loudly when the sentence was handed down. As sheriff?s deputies tried to quiet them, one man yelled, "Rick Simpson is a healer, not a dealer."
Outside the courtroom, Chummy Anthony, president of the Nova Scotia Marijuana Party, held a sign bearing similar wording. He was upset that Mr. Simpson wasn?t simply given a discharge. He was yelling at the top of his lungs that "Mr. Simpson was just like Jesus Christ, because just like Jesus Christ, he was being prosecuted and persecuted for helping sick people."
A woman stood beside him holding up a DVD titled The Run from the Cure: The Rick Simpson Story. The DVD details Mr. Simpson?s court battles and his efforts ? including running in the last federal election ? to have federal medical marijuana laws changed. Mr. Simpson was seen distributing the DVD to people before his sentencing. Afterward, Mr. Simpson hugged and shook hands with supporters as he left the courtroom a free man. One man pledged that Mr. Simpson will not have to pay the fine because "all the people he?s helped will chip in money to make sure it?s paid."
A Supreme Court jury found Mr. Simpson guilty in September after a five-day trial. The charges stemmed from an RCMP raid on his Little Forks Road property on Aug. 3, 2005, that netted 1,190 marijuana plants. Mr. Simpson admitted at trial to growing marijuana on his property and using it to create a hemp oil that he claims cures everything from cankers to cancer. He distributed the hemp oil free to about 300 patients. Even after the trial ended with a guilty verdict, Mr. Simpson pledged to continue making and distributing the hemp oil. It was his contempt for the law, and the size of the marijuana seizure ? described as one of the biggest in the province ? that led Crown attorney Monica MacQueen to recommend a two-year jail sentence for Mr. Simpson. Defence lawyer Duncan Beveridge suggested an unconditional discharge, saying his client did not profit from his marijuana operation.
Justice Cacchione called the trial the most unique drug case he has ever presided over. He said he?d never heard of a drug trafficker telling police of his plans, or of a dealer who didn?t earn a profit from his trafficking. "Mr. Simpson?s actions were entirely altruistic," the judge said. "There was nothing insidious in what Mr. Simpson did." He acted out of a strongly held belief in the medicinal value of marijuana and a steadfast conviction that the hemp oil he made was helping people alleviate their suffering from a variety of ailments that prescription drugs were having little impact upon, the judge said. But he said he couldn?t grant a discharge because Mr. Simpson chose to grow marijuana and distribute his hemp oil illegally instead of participating in the federal government?s medical marijuana program. Ms. MacQueen said it was too early to say if the Crown will appeal.
Mr. Simpson?s legal woes are not over. He is to appear in Amherst provincial court on Feb. 28 to face another trafficking charge that Amherst police laid in November.
- Article from Halifax Chronicle Herald
- Read this earlier article for more background information about Rick Simpson
- Visit www.PhoenixTears.ca to see Rick Simpson's website
Freedom to Farm is the first test of religious freedom
Monday, February 9, 2009
Cops say legalize drugs
Recent reports of 'marijuana' arrests in Siskiyou County have consistently overlooked the known, permanent, long-term harms that the "war on [some] drugs" is doing to our communities and the environment. For all of the time & money wasted, human rights violated, lives ruined and trust destroyed, it is indisputable that prohibition is always counter-productive, causing innumerable harms to individuals, the environment, the economy.
Find Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (L.E.A.P.) at http://www.leap.cc/cms/index.php to learn what experienced police officers, judges and prosecutors are saying:
"LEAP is made up of current and former members of law enforcement who believe the existing drug policies have failed in their intended goals of addressing the problems of crime, drug abuse, addiction, juvenile drug use, stopping the flow of illegal drugs into this country and the internal sale and use of illegal drugs.
"A system of regulation and control of these substances (by the government, replacing the current system of control by the black market) would be a less harmful, less costly, more ethical and more effective public policy."
In June 2007 the U.S. Conference of Mayors passed a resolution stating, "the war on drugs has failed," calling for "a public health approach that concentrates more fully on reducing the negative consequences associated with drug abuse, while ensuring that our policies do not exacerbate these problems or create new social problems of their own."
Wouldn't it be more effective to teach individual responsibility? Building trust and community integrity in an atmosphere of responsible marijuana use, less hard drug use, more compassion and greater tolerance? This has been the case in Holland, where teen use of all drugs is a fraction of what it is in the U.S.. The best that can be done is to be honest and well informed about the relative risks of using various substances, including marijuana, alcohol, tobacco and chemical drugs.
Until that happens, jury nullification of non-violent marijuana crimes is the best way to heal the wound that's been inflicted on this community. It only takes one juror to say "not guilty" and a harmful law can be nullified. If that's what it takes to stop the "drug war" madness, then all people in this county who serve on a 'marijuana' trial jury are reminded that jury nullification is the anchor of American freedom.
On average, once a month, another police officer dies fighting an winnable war, enforcing hypocritical laws that cost billions, while doing much more harm than good. To continue a costly, pointless drug policy is a symptom of corruption and madness.
For people to pretend it doesn't exist won't make it go away. A Town Hall Meeting is needed to address community questions and concerns, then move forward to Cannabis agricultural abundance this spring. We don't have another planting season to waste. It may well already be too late to recover, but if we don't start now, then it may soon not matter what anyone does.
If someone has a better strategy for producing energy, food, building materials, herbal therapeutics, paper, cloth, pesticides and biodegradable plastics; while regenerating demineralized soils, stopping soil erosion, detoxifying contaminated soils, and producing monoterpenes to reflect UV-B radiation and seed clouds to mitigate climate change, then say so. If not, then just let organic agriculture and the free market economy work without government interference for the first time in our lives.
Individual choice is key to evolution of sustainable human values. By reclaiming the freedom to farm, the first test of religious freedom, we may yet have a chance to avoid the extinction we're presently headed for.
Paul von Hartmann
California Cannabis Ministry
projectpeace[at]yahoo.com
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You Tube Video: Cops say legalize drugs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEdzZaXwf8o&feature=related
Monday, February 2, 2009
"Why President Obama has to end Cannabis prohibition and how he can do it."
President Obama has to end prohibition because to do otherwise would reveal him as more than just another 'marijuana' hypocrite in our government. It would be criminally negligent for the President to ignore the known harms of Cannabis prohibition that he certainly must be aware of :
31 Harms of Cannabis Prohibition
1. Induces essential resource scarcity and inefficiency, by limiting the regional, sustainable production and dependable availability of several bio-fuels, including cellulosic hydrogen and ethanol, pyrolytic charcoal, diesel seed oil, methane gas, and compost heat.
2. Induces essential resource scarcity by limiting the production and availability of unique and essential foods, including three essential fatty acids, the best available source of organic vegetable protein, critically important vitamins, minerals and all of the essential amino acids.
3. Induces essential resource scarcity by limiting the production and availability of affordable, recyclable and biodegradable building materials for humans.
4. Reduces the carrying capacity of wildlife habitat by reducing the availability of essential food and cover.
5. Institutionalizes a black market economy in god-given herbs by misidentifying them as "drugs."
6. Corrupts governments, locally and globally.
7. Creates radical resource disparity, that inevitably leads to wars over energy, water and other essential natural resources.
8. Creates an economic vacuum that has addicted and corrupted our economic system to be dependent on toxic, unevenly distributed, finite resources.
9. Degrades the environment on regional and global levels. "Global Broiling" by increasing UV-B radiation is perhaps the least discussed example of "extinctionistic" effects that mankind's addiction to chemicals is already having.
10. Engenders poverty, illness and violence, where abundance, health and peace could otherwise exist.
11. Causes epidemic malnutrition.
12. Threatens everyone's health by inducing essential food scarcity, which obviates optimum human development and potential.
13. Perverts human social evolution toward synergistic collapse of environment, economics, and social structures.
14. Largely responsible for the rise of GMOs, having created protein shortages.
15. Economically and politically empowers the least conscious
16. Disrespects and interferes with science
17. Institutionalizes disrespect for Nature
18. Inhibits free individual spiritual evolution
19. Robs us of our Natural Rights, upon which our government was founded.
20. Robs other creatures, with whom we share this planet, of an unique and essential food and
shelter resource.
21. Creates conditions of acceptance for government misinformation, destroying the credibility of government.
22 Accelerates the spread of HIV/AIDS between infected mothers and nursing infants.
23. Creates a "forbidden fruit" which makes adolescent experimentation with 'marijuana' and other psychoactive substances more likely.
24. Makes the wild places into war zones, driving illegal growers further and further back into remote
wilderness areas.
25. Interferes with regeneration of damaged lands, and expansion of the global arable base.
26. Cripples organic agriculture by banning safe, potentially abundant biogenic pesticides and effective, rotational crop management.
27. Violates respect for previous generations who sacrificed so much for the freedoms we are losing in the name of the counter-productive, hypocritical, selective and expensive "drug war."
28. Results, on average, in the pointless death of one police officer per month, who waste their lives enforcing
anti-Constitutional laws that are counter-productive to their own stated objectives.
29. Constricts the global agricultural production of atmospheric aerosols called "monoterpenes" which have been shown to reflect solar radiation away from the planet, and seed cloud formation to protect the Earth from "global broiling" by increasing UV-B radiation.
30. Inhibits the use of a safe and effective herbal therapeutic by people who are intimidated by misinformation and violence that characterize 'marijuana' prohibition.
31. Destroys families through insidious, criminalization, secrecy and mistrust.
All the President has to do to end Cannabis prohibition is to recognize the legitimate need for this "strategic resource" (E.O.12919) and acknowledge the public's right of "essential civilian demand" for an unique and essential crop, being exercised by the California Cannabis Ministry in 2009.
"Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed...and every green herb."
Drugs don't make seeds, herbs do.
Freedom to farm is the first test of religious freedom.
Time is the limiting factor in the equation of survival.
We don't have another planting season to waste.
Please help to end prohibition by essential civilian demand in 2009.
Rick Simpson and his patients are beyond reproach.
Only an economically corrupted court would find this man guilty, rather than awarding him for bravery.
There are no objective courts. The black market has twisted society to the extent that justice means protecting the interests of petrochemical war-minded chemically saturated and spiritually vacant predators in human form.
To continue honoring prohibition statutes is an insult to the incomprehensible sacrifice of those people who fought and died for our freedoms, who did not die the freedom to complain.
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