Mysterious Packages Of Pot Being Delivered All Over

The arrests have skyrocketed since the days of Giuliani and have increased further under Bloomberg. The idea behind it is that people who have pot on them are more likely to be affiliated with crime. Technically possession is a $100 fine, but NYPD tricks people into showing their stash in public, which is a misdemeanor. If they search and find it on you, it's a $100 slap on the wrist. Long story short, if asked if you're carrying, you may as well lie about it, as telling the truth will land you in jail.

I'll be watching my mail and keeping my fingers crossed.

seriously, what kind of idiot calls the cops when they get $20,000 of untraceable goods in the mail?

I'm all in favor of legalizing pot though I don't smoke anymore and haven't for at least 15 -20 years. What is the point of criminalizing this substance? Make it a controlled substance. Tax it appropriately and find ways to criminalize improper usage the same as we do with alcohol . . . Continuously telling people it's verboten makes it more appealing.

its been decriminalized in NYS since the 70s.

apparently Bloomberg and his NYPD goon squad didn't get the press release.

They get around the decriminalization laws by asking if you have any, and when you show them, they arrest you for displaying it in public. If you invoke your Miranda rights by not answering their questions and they find it upon their search, the $100 fine stands.

While bullets fly into El Paso, bodies pile up in the streets of Juarez, and thugs with gold-plated AK-47s and albino tiger pens are beheading federal officials and dissolving their torsos in vats of acid, here are some facts concerning the peaceful situation in Holland. --Please save a copy and use it as a reference when debating prohibitionists who claim the exact opposite concerning reality as presented here below:

Cannabis-coffee-shops are not only restricted to the Capital of Holland, Amsterdam. They can be found in more than 50 cities and towns across the country. At present, only the retail sale of five grams is tolerated, so production remains criminalized. The mayors of a majority of the cities with coffeeshops have long urged the national government to also decriminalize the supply side.

A poll taken last year indicated that some 50% of the Dutch population thinks cannabis should be fully legalized while only 25% wanted a complete ban. Even though 62% of the voters said they had never taken cannabis. An earlier poll also indicated 80% opposing coffee shop closures.
http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/a...

It is true that the number of coffee shops has fallen from its peak of around 2,500 throughout the country to around 700 now. The problems, if any, concern mostly marijuana-tourists and are largely confined to cities and small towns near the borders with Germany and Belgium. These problems, mostly involve traffic jams, and are the result of cannabis prohibition in neighboring countries. Public nuisance problems with the coffee shops are minimal when compared with bars, as is demonstrated by the rarity of calls for the police for problems at coffee shops.

While it is true that lifetime and past-month use rates did increase back in the seventies and eighties, the critics shamefully fail to report that there were comparable and larger increases in cannabis use in most, if not all, neighboring countries which continued complete prohibition.

According to the World Health Organization only 19.8 percent of the Dutch have used marijuana, less than half the U.S. figure.
In Holland 9.7% of young adults (aged 15 to 24) consume soft drugs once a month, comparable to the level in Italy (10.9%) and Germany (9.9%) and less than in the UK (15.8%) and Spain (16.4%). Few transcend to becoming problem drug users (0.44%), well below the average (0.52%) of the compared countries.

The WHO survey of 17 countries finds that the United States has the highest usage rates for nearly all illegal substances.

In the U.S. 42.4 percent admitted having used marijuana. The only other nation that came close was New Zealand, another bastion of get-tough policies, at 41.9 percent. No one else was even close. The results for cocaine use were similar, with the U.S. again leading the world by a large margin.

Even more striking is what the researchers found when they asked young adults when they had started using marijuana. Again, the U.S. led the world, with 20.2 percent trying marijuana by age 15. No other country was even close, and in Holland, just 7 percent used marijuana by 15 -- roughly one-third of the U.S. figure.
thttp://www.alternet.org/drugs...

In 1998, the US Drug Czar General Barry McCaffrey claimed that the U.S. had less than half the murder rate of the Netherlands. That’s drugs, he explained. The Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics immediately issued a special press release explaining that the actual Dutch murder rate is 1.8 per 100,000 people, or less than one-quarter the U.S. murder rate.

Here is a very recent article by a psychiatrist from Amsterdam, exposing Drug Czar misinformation
http://tinyurl.com/247a8mp


Now let's look at a comparative analysis of the levels of cannabis use in two cities: Amsterdam and San Francisco, which was published in the American Journal of Public Health May 2004,

The San Francisco prevalence survey showed that 39.2% of the population had used cannabis. This is 3 times the prevalence found in the Amsterdam sample

Source: Craig Reinarman, Peter D.A. Cohen and Hendrien L. Kaal, The Limited Relevance of Drug Policy
http://www.mapinc.org/lib/limi...

Moreover, 51% of people who had smoked cannabis in San Francisco reported that they were offered heroin, cocaine or amphetamine the last time they purchased cannabis. In contrast, only 15% of Amsterdam residents who had ingested marijuana reported the same conditions. Prohibition is the ‘Gateway Policy’ that forces cannabis seekers to buy from criminals who gladly expose them to harder drugs.

The indicators of death, disease and corruption are even much better in the Netherlands than in Sweden for instance, a country praised by UNODC for its so called successful drug policy.

Here's Antonio Maria Costa doing his level best to avoid discussing the success of Dutch drug policy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

The Netherlands also provides heroin on prescription under tight regulation to about 1500 long-term heroin addicts for whom methadone maintenance treatment has failed.
http://www.rnw.nl/english/arti...

The Dutch justice ministry announced, in May 2009, the closure of eight prisons and cut 1,200 jobs in the prison system. A decline in crime has left many cells empty. There's simply not enough criminals
http://www.nrc.nl/internationa...

For further information, kindly check out this very informative FAQ provided by Radio Netherlands: http://www.rnw.nl/english/arti...
or go to this page: http://www.rnw.nl/english/doss...

I wonder, if you received a large package of marijuana in the mail like this and report it to the police, could they try to charge you with possession?

"There are places where they've legalized drugs, and whether it destroyed the society or didn't, it's up to debate."

Mayor Bloomberg, allow me to introduce to a little place we'll call "Amsterdam". It's a magical place where you can walk in off the street and buy weed. Oh, and hash. There's no drug violence with these quasi-legally available drugs. And amazingly, Amsterdam has not become a desolate ruin where the few remaining residents wander around distractedly mumbling like Nixon but instead remains one of the world's great cities.

Smoking pot should have the same legality of getting naked... its a deep thought.

As you can see someone really wanted someone to make sure they got a pass on a gravy afternoon (undetected, of course). And while they were at it- to repackage it in tiny little packages in exchange for money, which one imagines could be used to finance more good times.

http://scallywagandvagabond.co...

We're cutting cops.

Why not stop spending money to prosecute pot & divert that money into keeping the cops?

Why not start NOW. Before the next rape or murder.

dear grandma,

drug laws don't stop the production, sale, or consumption of psychoactive substances.

drug laws funnel money to criminal enterprises and gangs.

black market trade is the source of most drug-related violence.

you can't overdose on marijuana (unlike LEGAL alcohol and pharmaceuticals).

there is no physical addiction to marijuana (unlike LEGAL alcohol and pharmaceuticals).

marijuana has been used by humans since prehistoric times.

read more at the peril of your ignorance:
http://www.drugpolicy.org/fact...

love you!

Don't know much about this wacky tobacky, but if Marijuana were legal the drug gangs would make a fortune. People would be killing each other in the street. Kids would then be able to get it. Not to mention there could be more over doses. The last thing I would want was some marijuana addicted maniac attacking me in the subway. This is some scary stuff.

huh, i didn't know that grandmas frequented Gothamist.

There is always someone who doesn't get the joke.

...especially when they are poorly done.

http://www.politicususa.com/en...
Let Them Eat Brownies: Michael Bloomberg’s Medical Marijuana Arrogance
Was Mayor Bloomberg propagandizing against medical cannabis when on June 18, 2010 he declared “It has nothing to do with medicine”? Or is our mayor simply unaware of the scientifically demonstrated therapeutic effects of cannabis? There was a hint of obstructionist bullying in other of his remarks. “The worst thing,” he stated, “is the hypocrisy of saying it’s medical marijuana. If you want to legalize it, let’s have that debate, but that’s what you’re really talking about.”

Medical legalization policy, though, must be meticulously formulated, separately from that for leisure legalization. Morphine is subject to recreational abuse, but nobody would think to send a patient to a 7-Eleven for their dose. To achieve medicinal consistency at various strengths, the Dutch Ministry of Health regulates cannabis cultivation. The minutiae of their regulatory requirements include this: “Analysis reports of soil analysis must be kept available in the dossier.”

Bill A09016 before the New York State Assembly appears equally well-thought- through for medical marijuana. The bill affirms that the legislation does not diminish the laws against illegal drug use. Bloomberg nevertheless calls it “a Trojan horse” for across the board legalization, as though an army of vomiting chemotherapy patients and their advocates were duplicitously plotting an ultimate triumph over society through debauchery.

This mayor has a history of not communicating an accurate, up-to-date understanding of medical cannabis. In 2002, he called medical legalization “a slippery slope,” adding that he favors enforcing the laws on the books. His attitude is a non-sequitur to medical cannabis. In February, the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research of the University of California reported that a randomized clinical trial of cannabis on multiple sclerosis patients found “significant improvement in both an objective measure of spasticity and pain intensity in patients whose standard therapy had provided inadequate relief.”

Why should legislation aimed at helping MS and other patients in New York be smeared as “hypocritical”? Unenlightened prohibition of cannabis has long kept health science from researching and prescribing cannabis as medicine. Harry J. Anslinger, Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, demonized marijuana with malicious zeal. His credibility on medical issues was nullified by any number of appalling quotes, including “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” Some might see a chance correspondence to Anslinger’s outlook in the disproportionate number of African-American New Yorkers arrested for marijuana as part of the city’s controversial stop and frisk program.

By not acknowledging a distinction between medical and recreational cannabis, Bloomberg compels us to examine his motives. He is, only perhaps, unschooled in the field of medical cannabis. In 2002, he referred to marijuana as a “narcotic,” though science, medicine and U.S. law do not consider it one. Through recent years, as hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific studies on medical cannabis have been published, Bloomberg has remained intransigent. Might he have economic interests in seeing marijuana kept entirely illegal?

Judge Jim Gray has pointed out that politicians tend to get support by “talking tough, not smart on drugs.” Bloomberg plainly needs an effective prod to start talking smart about medical cannabis. He is prominent enough a figure that the ignorance he spreads on this topic could result in preventable patient misery. Even in our polarized age, suffering is non-partisan. When a medical marijuana bill was debated in Albany in 2004, conservative Republican Assemblyman Robert Prentiss said: “If you have ever seen anyone on their deathbed, dying in agony, screaming in pain every day as I had with my father who had cancer, the risks of smoking marijuana are outweighed by the therapeutic benefits.”

I'm no fan of burn out pot heads but I say leave them to their own devices. Clogging up the prisons and legal system with people caught smoking a joint is just plain stupid. It makes me think the people who make these laws are smoking crack.

I'm no fan of burn out pot heads either. I'm more about professional, hard-working pot heads.

Thank you.

"There are places where they've legalized drugs, and whether it destroyed the society or didn't, it's up to debate."

Really? In which places are people contending that society has been destroyed because drugs were legalized?

Yeah, there aren't even fictional places drugs have destroyed. When no one in fiction is writing cautionary tales about it, I can't imagine it's a real threat.

My friend from Utah says that marijuana has destroyed the country of Mexico. At first I didn't believe him but he made some good points and now I'm on the fence. Drugs and violence just go hand in hand. If it were legal there would be MORE drugs and MORE violence. Who wants more violence?

The Mexican drug cartels only exist because marijuana is illegal in the USA. If it were legal, there would be an organized and regulated trade. By the way - Drugs of all sorts are essentially legal in Mexico, as they decriminalized possession of small amounts of just about anything. A lot of criminals would be out of business with drug legalization. A lot of prisons would be emptier too. Most drugs do NOT cause violence, but the opposite. It is the illegality that causes a need for criminals to run the show.

So, in Utah, if you stick your hand in hot water, you get burned, and if you stick your hand in cold water, you get burned worse? Remind me to stay out of Utah.

There is drug violence in Columbia, but it isn't coming from the coffee now is it?

There was drug violence during prohibition, but it wasn't coming from pot.

It seems like these good points your "friend" made went over our heads I guess.

Any drug violence at Columbia could result from coffee, if it's being used by overextended, tired grad students.

But it's not legal in Mexico, that's the point.

The DEA's version of Imaginationland?