Kate Comiskeys death is a tragic casualty of the war on drugs. It began when Governor General Taft outlawed opium in the newly conquered Philippines, then expanded with the Pure Food and Drug and Harrison acts. After the failed experiment with alcohol prohibition, not to be defeated moralists convinced congress to make marijuana essentially illegal with exorbitant taxation. The only opposition testimony was from the American Medical Association. Nixon developed the forerunner to the DEA and vowed to create a way to get blacks without appearing to be racist. It has worked quite well.

Kate Comiskeys death is a tragic casualty of the war on drugs. It began when Governor General Taft outlawed opium in the newly conquered Philippines, then expanded with the Pure Food and Drug and Harrison acts. After the failed experiment with alcohol prohibition, not to be defeated moralists convinced congress to make marijuana essentially illegal with exorbitant taxation. The only opposition testimony was from the American Medical Association. Nixon developed the forerunner to the DEA and vowed to create a way to get blacks without appearing to be racist. It has worked quite well.

Nixon commissioned conservative republican governors Shafer and Hughes to do a study and officially denounce marijuana once and for all. That commission disappointed the president and recommended among other things, that marijuana should be legal/regulated as is alcohol, and that the only legitimate role for the federal government regarding drug use would be to help identify people who might benefit by getting help. That report was rejected by Nixon, and the war on drugs was initiated with a relatively small budget of about $30 million. Selective prohibition was considered the moral thing to do; it would drive up prices making drugs comparatively unavailable to the average person. By the time Reagan became president the war on drugs took a serious turn. Maryland University basketball star Len Bias died of a cocaine seizure (his friends were afraid to get help for fear of legal culpability) and several dozen crack babies fed the federal frenzy that ratcheted up the war even further. Helping it along was the CIA involvement in cocaine trafficking to help fund the illegal arming of contras in Nicaragua. Illicit drugs became a huge business- because of the black market. It is estimated that the three largest industries in the world today are: oil, arms and illicit drugs.

Unfortunately there is so much money to be made in illicit drugs that no one in legislative power is willing to pull out the rug on this financial feeding trough. The money derived from illicit drugs finances governments, central banks, political parties and countless subversive organizations. The profits only exist in the context of a black market. These drugs are not expensive to produce or distribute and even with interdiction/confiscations the prices are only 10% of what they were at the threshold of the war on drugs in the early 1980s. It has also fueled an explosion of prisoners, with more people incarcerated for non violent drug offenses in the United States than in all of Europe for all causes. Today more black adult men are in jail than college. In 2003 there were more arrests in America for simple marijuana possession (includes cannabis seeds)than for all violent crime combined.

Drug law violations are difficult to detect as they generally involve a voluntary seller and purchaser. Purchasers may be seeking euphoric escape, relief of suffering or to fuel addiction. In order to discover these transactions, government often rely on snitches, informants, and undercover agents in order to catch one or more persons engaging in mutually consensual commerce. Mitch Gooldy was such a man. Although he was a frequent flyer in drug court, he arranged to become an informant for the government instead of going to jail (or obtaining the medical help the Shafer Commission thought he should be receiving). This placed him in ideal position to continue (ab)using illicit drugs and is a directly complicit circumstance in his vehicular murder of Ms. Comiskey.

Our current strategy for selective illicit drug use is fault based. If we were to consider instead a public health policy that utilizes harm reduction, reality education, treatment and maintenance programs, we would save billions (Rand study suggests a $7 return on every dollar such invested), allow hundreds of thousands of otherwise peaceful people to be productive citizens and family members, diminish our drain on welfare resources and free our police and courts to deal with more threatening problems. People in such a system are more than twice as likely to be employed and drug free. In such a system Ms. Comiskey might still be alive.

The problem is such a system relies on scientific facts, logic and reason. It diminishes moralists who feel certain drug use is simply wrong, and should be punished. Given the current budgetary state of affairs in Indiana and America, we should re-evaluate our current approach if for no other purpose than to save money. Nirvana seeds are good. The additional benefit would be healthier people, fewer broken homes, more people in the work force.

Ten days after suspending a newly-instituted program providing identification cards to users of medical marijuana, the California State Department of Health Services (CDHS) on Monday announced it would start issuing the cards again.

The decision came after a review of the state’s Compassionate Use Act by the state Attorney General’s Office found that state employees would not be violating anti-drug laws in issuing the cards semillas feminizadas.

In explaining the legal review, Deputy Attorney General Jonathan K. Renner noted that the federal government can subpoena information from the CDHS to prosecute medicinal marijuana users for federal crimes.

The DHS will alter the cards to inform recipients of the risk, according to a DHS statement released Monday. The 123 people currently possessing the cards will be notified by the Department, the statement said.

As previously reported by TheNewStandard, the CDHS temporarily halted dispensing medical marijuana IDs and requested a legal review of the program in light of last month’s Supreme Court ruling that state medical marijuana laws do not preclude federal prosecution of users, distributors or doctors facilitating patient use of the illegal drug.

Pruning techniques are commonly used by Cannabis cultivators to limit the size of their plants and promote branching. Several techniques are available, and each has its advantages and drawbacks. The most common method is meristem pruning or stem tip removal. In this case the growing tip of the main stalk or a limb is removed at approximately the final length desired for the stalk or limb. Below the point of removal, the next pair of axial growing tips begins to elongate and form two new limbs. The growth energy of one stem is now divided into two, and the diffusion of growth energy results in a shorter plant which spreads horizontally.

Auxin produced in the tip meristem travels down the stem and inhibits branching. When the meristem is re moved, the auxin is no longer produced and branching may proceed uninhibited. Plants that are normally very tall and stringy can be kept short and bushy by meristem pruning. Removing meristems also removes the newly formed tissues near the meristem that react to changing environmental stimuli and induce flowering. Pruning during the early part of the growth cycle will have little effect on flowering, but plants that are pruned late in life, supposedly to promote branching and floral growth, will often flower late or fail to flower at all. This happens because the meristemic tissue responsible for sensing change has been removed and the plant does not measure that it is the time of the year to flower. Plants will usually mature fastest if they are allowed to grow and develop without interference from pruning. If late maturation of Cannabis is desired, then extensive pruning may work to delay flowering. This is particularly applicable if a staminate plant from an early maturing strain is needed to pollinate a late-maturing pistil late plant. The staminate plant is kept immature until the pistillate plant is mature and ready to be pollinated. When the pistillate plant is receptive, the staminate plant is allowed to develop flowers and release pollen.

Pollen release is fairly rapid inside the bags, and after two days to a week the limbs may be removed and dried in a cool dark place, unless the bags are placed too early or the pollen parent develops very slowly. To inspect the progress of pollen release, a flashlight is held behind the bag at night and the silhouettes of the opening flowers are easily seen. In some cases, clear nylon windows are in stalled with silicon glue for greater visibility. When flowering is at its peak and many flowers have just opened, collection is completed, and the limb, with its bag attached, is cut. If the limb is cut too early, the flowers will not have shed any pollen; if the bag remains on the plant too long, most of the pollen will be dropped inside the bag where heat and moisture will destroy it. When flowering is at its peak, millions of pollen grains are released and many more flowers will open after the limbs are collected. The bags are collected early in the morning before the sun has time to heat them up. The bags and their contents are dried in a cool dark place to avoid mold and pollen spoilage. If pollen becomes moist, it will germinate and spoil, therefore dry storage is imperative.

After the staminate limbs have dried and pollen re lease has stopped, the bags are shaken vigorously, allowed to settle, and carefully untied. The limbs and loose flowers are removed, since they are a source of moisture that could promote mold growth, and the pollen bags are re sealed. The bags may be stored as they are until the seed parent is ready for pollination, or the pollen may be re moved and stored in cool, dry, dark vials for later use and hand application. Before storing pollen, any other plant parts present are removed with a screen. A piece of fuel filter screening placed across the top of a mason jar works well, as does a fine-mesh tea strainer.

Now a pistillate plant is chosen as the seed parent. A pistillate flower cluster is ripe for fertilization so long as pale, slender pistils emerge from the calyxes. Withered, dark pistils protruding from swollen, resin encrusted calyxes are a sign that the reproductive peak has long passed. Cannabis plants can be successfully pollinated as soon as the first primordia show pistils and until just before harvest, but the largest yield of uniform, healthy seeds is achieved by pollinating in the peak floral stage. At this time, the seed plant is covered with thick clusters of white pistils. Few pistils are brown and withered, and resin production has just begun. This is the most receptive time for fertilization, still early in the seed plant’s life, with plenty of time remaining for the seeds to mature. Healthy, well flowered lower limbs on the shaded side of the plant are selected. Shaded buds will not heat up in the bags as much as buds in the hot sun, and this will help protect the sensitive pistils. When possible, two terminal clusters of pistillate flowers are chosen for each pollen bag. In this way, with two pollen bags for each seed parent and two clusters of pistillate flowers for each bag, there are four opportunities to perform the cross successfully. Remember that production of viable seed requires successful pollination, fertilization and embryo development. Since interfering with any part of this cycle precludes seed development, fertilization failure is guarded against by duplicating all steps.

Several steps must be taken to preserve our vanishing genetic resources, and action must be immediate:

Seeds and pollen should be collected directly from reliable and knowledgeable sources. Government seizures and smuggled shipments are seldom reliable seed sources. The characteristics of both parents must be known; consequently, mixed bales of randomly pollinated marijuana are not suitable seed sources, even if the exact origin of the sample is certain. Direct contact should be made with the farmer-breeder responsible for carrying on the breeding traditions that have produced the sample. Accurate records of every possible parameter of growth must be kept with carefully stored triplicate sets of seeds.
Since Cannabis seeds do not remain viable forever, even under the best storage conditions, seed samples should he replenished every third year. Collections should be planted in conditions as similar as possible to their original niche and allowed to reproduce freely to minimize natural and artificial selection of genes and ensure the preservation of the entire gene pool. Half of the original seed collection should be retained until the viability of further generations is confirmed, and to provide parental material for comparison and back-crossing. Phenotypic data about these subsequent generations should be carefully recorded to aid in understanding the genotypes contained in the collection. Favorable traits of each strain should be characterized and catalogued.
It is possible that in the future, Cannabis cultivation for resale, or even personal use, may be legal but only for approved, patented strains. Special caution would be needed to preserve variety in the gene pool should the patenting of Cannabis strains become a reality.
Favorable traits must be carefully integrated into existing strains.