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In a Historic Move, Vote to Federally Legalize Marijuana to Take Place in Congress—This Week

Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project
Waking Times

Washington, D.C. — As countless individuals across the land of the free are rotting in cages for possessing a plant deemed illegal by the government, a historical bill is making its way through Congress that could change everything. A congressional committee reportedly plans to vote on a bill this week that would end the federal prohibition of marijuana.

The Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, sponsored by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), would remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). But that is not all. It would go one step further and seek to undo the horrific damage caused by the state’s war on this plant.

According to the legislation, the act would:

provide for expungement and resentencing of prior convictions and prevent federal agencies from using cannabis as a reason to deny access to benefits or citizenship status for immigrants.
It would also impose a five percent federal tax on the sales of marijuana products. Some of that revenue would be directed toward a new Opportunity Trust Fund aimed at supporting grant programs to provide job training and legal aid for people impacted by prohibition enforcement, loans for small marijuana businesses owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals and efforts to minimize barriers to licensing and employment in the legal industry. Some of these efforts would be run through a new Cannabis Justice Office in the Department of Justice.

The bill currently has 55 cosponsors. Showing the partisan divide when it comes to legalizing this plant, all but one of the cosponsors are Democrats. Sadly, most of the “small government” Republicans still think massive militarized police forces kicking in doors in the middle of the night to arrest people for a plant is “conservative.”

According to Forbes, Wednesday’s planned Judiciary Committee vote on the far-reaching cannabis reform legislation is expected to be announced on Monday.

The monumental nature of this bill cannot be understated. The good that it could do — not simply by legalizing weed — by by reversing the damage caused by the war on marijuana, is immeasurable.

Starting with Colorado and Washington in 2012, the government’s immoral, violent, and destructive war on marijuana began to come to a grinding halt. Although measures for medical marijuana were enacted long before this, complete legalization paved the way for a revolution.

Sadly, however, despite this revolution, millions of people whose lives were ruined from weed arrests, are still carrying around these convictions on their permanent records, drastically stifling their career and home buying opportunities. Once those within the system began to realize this, measures were taken to help these folks clean up their records. States across the country have been setting out to undo this damage, but it hasn’t been fast enough. This bill could change that.

But that’s not all it would do. Legalizing marijuana would also have a massive potential to curb the opioid crisis currently gripping the nation.

As TFTP previously reported, in a study published in a peer-reviewed journal, Melvin D. Livingston, Tracey E. Barnett, Chris Delcher, and Alexander C. Wagenaar, set out to see if any association existed between Colorado’s legalization of marijuana and opioid-related deaths in the state.

The researchers looked at all of the available data from the year 2000 to the year 2015. What they discovered may come as a shock to many. While the rest of the nation struggles with a burgeoning fatal opioid and heroin overdose crisis, the State of Colorado saw opioid deaths reduced while its population exploded.

It has long been stated that cannabis is a “gateway” drug, which leads users to experiment with other drugs, leading up to the most deadly, such as heroin. But the researchers in the study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that the availability of safe and legal cannabis actually reduced opiate deaths:

“Colorado’s legalization of recreational cannabis sales and use resulted in a 0.7 deaths per month…reduction in opioid-related deaths. This reduction represents a reversal of the upward trend in opioid-related deaths in Colorado.”
The researchers concluded, “Legalization of cannabis in Colorado was associated with short-term reductions in opioid-related deaths.”

It’s not just that study either. There were other studies showing that deaths from opioids plummet in states with legal cannabis, and that 80 percent of cannabis users give up prescription pills. A Feb. 2017 study confirmed that opioid dependence and overdoses dropped significantly in medical cannabis states.

In January 2017, the National Academies of Science published an exhaustive review of the scientific literature and found that one of the most promising areas in medical cannabis is for the treatment of chronic pain.

As TFTP reported in 2017, a new experimental study showed exactly how cannabis works to treat actual opioid addiction – by actually blocking the opioid reward in the brain.

“This study sought to determine whether the cannabis constituent cannabidiol attenuates the development of morphine reward in the conditioned place preference paradigm. Separate groups of mice received either saline or morphine in combination with one of four doses of cannabidiol using three sets of drug/no-drug conditioning trials. After drug-place conditioning, morphine mice displayed robust place preference that was attenuated by 10 mg/kg cannabidiol. Further, when administered alone, this dose of cannabidiol was void of rewarding and aversive properties. The finding that cannabidiol blocks opioid reward suggests that this compound may be useful in addiction treatment settings.”

Those who continue denying the evidence, while continuing to lock people in cages for a plant, will ultimately be judged by history. They will not be the heroes they claim to be now. They will be remembered as the ones responsible for mass incarceration, fostering the police state, and dealing a near-death blow to freedom.

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Planet Earth

More than 5,000 birds die suddenly from a mysterious death

Wildlife experts are trying to understand the cause of the massive deaths of birds on the shores of Sambar Lake – India’s largest salt lake.

Sambar Lake is located 80 km southwest of Jaipur (Jaipur). It covers an area of 190 to 230 square kilometers, depending on the season.Many migratory birds, marsh birds, gather at the lake shores at certain times of the year (Wader), flamingos, storks, ducks and dozens of different species. But, about two weeks ago, locals often began to see carcasses of birds.

To date, more than 2,000 dead birds have been found on the coastal stretch, about 12 km wide, and more than 5,000 on unofficial ones. According to locals, the former lively shores of the lake have now become a bird cemetery, among which there are rare species.

According to one resident, there are so many bird carcasses in some places that they look like a large pile of manure from afar!

The cause of the death of the birds has not yet been clarified. They were not killed with a firearm or other weapon. No wounds or signs of disease were found on their bodies. Large piles of dead birds in one place indicate that they died suddenly, exactly at the same place they were in groups overnight.

Local ornithologist Abhinav Vaishnav tells reporters:

“We have never seen anything like this here. About 5,000 birds have died here from a mysterious death …! “

Environmentalists and animal rights activists have voiced several versions of the mass deaths of birds – from a severe hailstorm to pesticides used in nearby agricultural fields. There is also a version for mass infection.

But for the locals, all of these versions seem like a pitiful attempt to put what’s going wrong. For them, such bird death is a mysterious and abnormal phenomenon.

Ramesh Chandra Road says:

“I have not seen anything like this in my 40 years of service in the forestry department. At first, I also thought it might be due to hail, but here every year there are strong hail storms. I also don’t believe in the pesticide version. No trace of them was found in the water samples. “

Some of the dead bird carcasses were sent for analysis to a laboratory in Bopal.

The locals gather the rest of the carcasses in piles, then bury them in deep holes near the beach.

Expect to be informed if further information is available on what is happening.

Planet Earth

Former Apollo Astronaut Pushes for International Commitment to Protect Earth from Killer Asteroids

There are few astronauts more respected and remembered than those who served on the Apollo missions – thirty-two military jet and test pilots who made or died training for the three-man Apollo missions that eventually sent humans to the Moon and back. When they have spoken – about space travel, the Moon, future missions, UFOs and other subjects – the world has listened. Rusty Schweickart, the Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 9, spoke recently about the need for an international commitment to protect Earth from killer asteroids. As usual, his comments are worth listening to.

“During the Apollo 9 mission we were dark-adapted for an experiment, looking at the spectacular night-time Earth, watching weather fronts, thunder storms and lightning, a really great sight out of the window. Then, who knows who said it first, but one of us said they saw a little flash down there and someone else says ‘yeah, I saw it too,’ but you wouldn’t have mentioned it if the first person hadn’t said it. And then we realized: that was a meteor, burning up below us. Wow, below us – which meant it came down through our altitude!”

A close encounter of the worst kind – an asteroid impact in space – instead became an experience that forever influenced Russell “Rusty” Schweickart. When he was selected in 1963, Rusty Schweickart was a unique member of NASA Astronaut Group 3 – the fourteen astronauts selected by NASA to succeed the two-man Gemini missions in the three-man Apollo flights that would eventually lead to a walk on the Moon. Those names are well-known to the public today — Collins, Cunningham, Gordon, Aldrin, Cernan, Chaffee to list a few – but back then they were better known in the military as fighter pilots and test pilots. Schweickart was an experienced Air Force pilot, but he was also a research scientist at the Experimental Astronomy Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fields of upper atmospheric physics, star tracking and stabilization of stellar images.

Astronaut Group Three announced on October 18, 1963. They are (seated, left to right) Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., William A. Anders, Charles A. Bassett II, Alan L. Bean, Eugene A. Cernan, and Roger B. Chaffee. Standing (left to right) are Michael Collins, R. Walter Cunningham, Donn F. Eisele, Theodore C. Freeman, Richard F. Gordon Jr., Russell L. Schweickart, David R. Scott and Clifton C. Williams Jr. (Credit: NASA)

The 1969 flight of Apollo 9 was the first flight of the lunar module, piloted by Schweickart, and the first spacewalk of the Apollo missions, also by Schweickart. During a recent ESA Open Day at the European Space Agency’s ESTEC technical center in Noordwijk, The Netherlands, the former astronaut heard about the latest plans to stop asteroids like the one the Apollo 9 crew encountered before they destructively impact Earth. In 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test will hit the smaller member of the Didymos binary asteroids. Then, if approved this month by Europe’s space ministers, the ESA’s Hera mission will perform a close-up survey of the asteroid and crater after impact. Schweickart says he likes the idea of a multi-spacecraft mission rather than a single asteroid-seeking rocket.

“And one of the key unknowns of the kinetic impactor technique is a term we call ‘beta’ – when we hit the asteroid, how much stuff is going to come flying off? If it’s moving at greater than escape velocity, then that adds to the momentum shifting the orbit, boosting the technique’s effectiveness. That factor depends on the asteroid’s composition and structure, and we need a close-up look to find out what that is.”

In 2002, Schweickart helped found the B612 Foundation (named for the planetoid in The Little Prince), whose primary mission is “protecting the Earth from asteroid impacts and informing and forwarding world-wide decision-making on planetary defense issues.” Since asteroids can hit anywhere on Earth, Schweickart has long advocated international cooperation in both deflecting space rocks and in determining which ones to hit. He sees the NASA/ESA tandem as the first example of this cooperation. Unfortunately, we’re barely into asteroid defection business and have no idea what an impact will do – it could actually push the space rock into a higher likelihood of impact.

“In that case the observer spacecraft would have another job to do – to switch to gravity tractor mode, using altimeters and ion engines to stay just away from the asteroid, and nudge its orbit enough to miss the keyhole as well as the planet.”

Astronaut Rusty Schweickart (Credit: NASA)

Rusty Schweickart makes it sound so easy and doable, but the former Apollo and Skylab astronaut knows the dangers of space. He was the backup pilot for Roger B. Chaffee on Apollo 1, which ended in the tragic deaths of the crew members in a ground test accident. He also knows how expensive a worldwide asteroid deflection system would be and how difficult it is to get nations to agree on anything, let alone unseen dangers from outer space. That’s why he stays involved in both the technology and the politics of space.

At 84, Rusty Schweickart is still influenced by that near-impact experience on Apollo 9. For that, we should all be grateful.

Source: Mysterious Universe