Obama’s Department of Justice says marijuana as dangerous as heroin

It’s simply bad science and clear falsehood. Basing laws on opinion rather than facts is pathetic and laughable. How anyone can take this government seriously is beyond me. This brings in to question every single piece of health and well being legislation passed by this government. Clearly, they cannot be trusted to make rational decisions.

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The motivation is the fact that this country is jammed full of moronic right-wing knuckle dragging voting cretins who will support anything that has the word “war” in the title, because they are small minds who get off on thinking they have power over others and it makes their dicks hard to think they are somehow part of a “war”.

Fighting them means he actually has to take notice of it as well. And that means it is up to us to get it to both his attention as well as to Eric Holder’s, though Mr. Holder is just holding down the fort until his successor is sworn in (and good luck getting one past the current Senate). Yes, my personal hunch is that Obama is not paying attention, or has placed it on very low priority.

Seriously, though, the DEA is a cesspit of special interests, and spinning it down is going to be painful. These are people who have gotten accustomed to having power over mere citizens, and will fight tooth and nail to keep the power to crack heads.

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This should not surprise anyone. If marijuana is legalized (or even just decriminalized), a LOT of people in Washington will be facing having no more justification for their budgets. The DOJ has thousands of jobs at stake. And Obama is too gutless to do anything his corporate puppet masters don’t want, like put marijuana (hemp) in a category where it could legally be a threat to the paper and cotton industries.

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Which type? This search string did not let me find a manual/datasheet.

I have some limited experience from mid-90’s with a Hewlett-Packard GC-MS analyzer. Sweet sweet toy…! Plus a little less-hands-on-than-I’d-like experiences with IR and UV-VIS, sadly even more limited in practice, and only theory with Raman and NMR.

I always did calibrations, whether chemical or physical, with a standard; a known-value resistor, reference voltage source, precisely weighed stable chemical compound dissolved in precisely measured volume of water, piece of known material with known spectrum… For the world of analyzer-in-every-pocket/smartphone, I see this doable via e.g. sealed ampoules or cuvettes with a known reference, possibly even built-in in the instrument itself.

I understand that, but this is an action of a theoretically left-of-center party. Of course the Democrats are right-wing by any reasonable standards, but even so, the war on drugs is a typical Republican theme, so it’s strange for a Democrat to try to cater to the Republican platform when there is zero chance of any Republican actually voting for a Democrat on that basis.

I think that they know scheduled #1 is a lie, but what they don’t want is the end of the gravey chain and mass unemployment for prohibition jobs

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That is a pretty good counter argument against the fact that Obama appoints the head of the DEA and could order him to schedule marijuana by the actual criteria they are legally supposed to be using. What exactly is your theory for why he has refused to do that?

Obama is spineless. This is the same guy that didn’t get on board officially with gay marriage until it was approved by a majority of Americans and so overwhelming and embarrassing that he was risking backlash from his own party, and even then his hand was forced early by Biden.

Obama is pathetic. The nicest thing I can say about him is that he is better than Romney. That is pretty small praise. He truly has poisoned his party though. It is going to take a good decade or two before someone promising change on the left is believed again without serious proof of their credentials.

it wasn’t a counter argument, as you made no argument. It was a counter provocation, and yes, it was good.

Sure I made an argument. I argued that you can directly point to the executive, in this case Obama, for the way that marijuana is handled in the US, and that he can easily make it federally legal without congressional support. It is a pretty A to B argument. If you can’t understand that, I am not sure I can help you out mate.

American election joke wooshed over your head like a low-flying goose man. Diebold made the shitty electronic defrauding voting machines in 2004 that would highlight Bush-Cheney no matter which candidate you poked at on the screen.


In other words, Diebold is to real life, what Acme is to Wile E Coyote and Roadrunner.

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That happens sometimes. I learned to live with that. :smiley:

I assumed that the company can manufacture a wider range of products, and got some tentative but odd matches on googling.

I remember that. Oh the jokes!

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Call me crazy, but I’ve never been threatened by a pharmacist. However, I have received death-threats, abuses, cloak & dagger harassment from numerous black-market weed dealers. Most of these money hungry chimps are peddling pot laced pesticides. Really safe organic marijuana is hard to come by, and for someone with chronic nerve pain, a neurotoxin in your medicine can really put a damper on your day. The DoJ is there because there are bad people out there growing and they are the ones that need to be stopped.

I wanted to link this the other day, having read it in the print edition, but RS hadn’t put it up online then.

The War on Drugs is Burning Out

A few interesting bits, but the whole article is worth a read:

By removing low-level youth pot offenses from the criminal-justice system, overall youth crime has plummeted by nearly 30 percent in California – to levels not seen since the Eisenhower administration. And decriminalization didn’t lead to any of the harms foretold by
prohibitionists. Quite the opposite: Since the law passed in 2010, the rate of both high school dropouts and youth drug overdoses are down by 20 percent, according to a new research report from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. Non–marijuana drug arrests for California youth, meanwhile, are also down 23 percent

and also

Federal drug sentencing remains draconian: Locking a person in a cage for five years for possessing five grams of an intoxicant is not a rational policy. But the Holder reforms may signal that the flood of Drug War incarceration has reached its high-water mark. For the first
time in 34 years, the federal inmate population is falling, down 4,800 in the past year. By 2016, a drop of 12,200 is projected – equivalent to more than six federal prisons filled to capacity.

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I’d say coke fits that bill pretty well. I heart drugs. If you gave me some coke I’d do it, but I’ve never seeked out or purchased coke because it’s just not enough of a headfuck for me. You feel good, but you actually look like shit and behave like an egotistical asshole for absolutely no reason.

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You mean like this guy?

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America sounds like a hellhole for buying weed if your experience is indicitave of the general experience. I’ve smoked a LOT of weed in oz (and Canada and Japan and NZ for that matter) and it’s never been like this… probably a result of the cut-throat nature of being the enemy in a war.

Here you’ll occasionally get weed which has not had the hydro nutrients flushed properly (most people can’t tell that though) but you don’t really get pesticide-laced weed because 90% of grows in metro areas are indoor, under lights. The worst that any caring grower will use is pyretherins. I know this is different over there though, where a lot of the supply is grown in national parks using chemicals that are banned for use in most places.

I’ve also never been threatened or pressured to buy. Medical marijuana is a good thing, but I’d say that the cause of these dealers being cretins IS the DoJ and its foolish war on weed. I feel for you though and am glad at least you have options now. I find the biggest stoner dealers will usually have decent and reliable stuff because they smoke it themselves.

Sadly you still need GC/MS to get an accurate reading of everything and there’s no affordable GC/MS machines. Luckily we live in the age of teh interwebs and there are labs that you can send your samples to to have checked for a pretty reasonable price… This is obviously not good for flying under the radar, so most people who take chemicals and want to know still just rely on reagent tests. Holy SHIT would I like a lab on a chip though! But all reagent tests merely confirm the thing you’re looking for rather than telling you everything that’s in it, so it’s clearly not ideal.

There used to be no affordable gigasample digital oscilloscopes, no affordable worldwide-reach instant communication… This will pass too.

Interesting. However, a bit too difficult and calling in third-parties and is bound to have uncomfortably long turnaround, which limits usability and certainly precludes using the method as a part of realtime process feedback in a microreactor synth rig.

Join the club. The fastest way to get these toys will be to design them ourselves…

Try to look around atmospheric pressure time-of-flight mass spectrometers. Fairly simple design-wise, and can be insanely sensitive, though there will likely be a big swarm of devils in various little details…

A lot of the tech has its beginnings in 30’s to 50’s, with the level of engineering that is now available off the shelf for cheap. My gut feeling is that looking there, how they did it back then, is the best way. And be aware that many of the problems they got can be solved numerically today; a lot of automation can be done with a software based sequencer on a microcontroller or a raspberry pi like board so measurements can be repeated easily.

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