Arresting Grandmothers for Fun and Profit

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sat, 22 Dec 2001 13:00:00 GMT
Jim Pfiffer at the Star-Gazette - Grandmother tried to help others with pot - Sherrie Wilkie, a 65-year-old Elmira New York grandmother has been evicted from her apartment and arrested for running a medical marijuana club. This story will likely disappear on Monday or Tuesday, and I can't find any archives, so read it quickly. [cures-not-wars]

Jim Pfiffer at the Star-Gazette via MAPInc - Woman Running Medical Pot Club Busted - a permanent link to an earlier Star-Gazette report on this story. [drugsense]

Tom Gorman at Star-Gazette - War against our enemies snares a grandmother - scroll down to the second letter. Good satirical commentary on the Sherrie Wilkie story. Will likely disappear tomorrow, so I copied it below.

War against our enemies snares a grandmother

I was born and raised in Waverly, but moved to Georgia and later to California more than a decade ago.

I had no particular plans to return to live in the Southern Tier. However, the news of the arrest and imminent eviction of Sherrie D. Wilkie for distribution of medicinal marijuana lends me hope that the area is once again a safe place to live and to raise a family.

In these times of national crisis, I can think of no better use of our government's resources than enforcing laws against America's true enemies -- 65-year-old grandmothers.

We can only hope that this nation's sensible drug laws have saved Wilkie (and those like her) from a bleak future of "reefer madness."

TOM GORMAN

Pasadena, Calif.

Adam J. Smith at Mother Jones - America's Lonely Drug War - With the confirmation of John Walters as the new drug czar, America is one of the only places in the world that still attempts to use criminal sanctions to combat a health problem. You'd think that alcohol prohibition would have taught us, but no. [drcnet]

Jacob Sullum at Reason - Killing a Painkiller: The OxyContin hysteria inflicts pain - because some idiots use OxyContin to get high, the feds conclude that it must be kept away from chronic pain sufferers who really need it. Makse sense. Not! [lew]

Last May a Kentucky physician reported that a former patient, a paraplegic with severe chronic pain, had killed himself. The man's new doctor, alarmed by official warnings about the prescription painkiller OxyContin, had drastically reduced his dose, leaving him in agony.

...

The message of the OxyContin crackdown, then, is that the government has an obligation to protect people from their own recklessness, no matter how many innocent bystanders are hurt in the process.

Joe Burton at All Southwest News - Rooting Out Terrorism - it seems that the U.S. government was a bit more involved in 9/11 than they're letting on. [grabbe]

STOP THE WAR, WE ARE BOMBING THE WRONG COUNTRY !!! Afghanistan is catching the bombs and missiles that should be landing in Riyadh. Of course that will never happen. After this so called "war on terrorism" catches it's fall guy, we'll go on looking for other third world countries to blast. The American sheeple will be happy getting the bad guy (dead of course), The Saudis will still be counting the big oil bucks while stewing about our continued support of Israel. One thing for sure, the UN/ NWO sure makes for some strange bedfellows.

Junko Yoshida at EE Times - Euro bank notes to embed RFID chips by 2005 - talk about Big Brother watching. If this happens, cash transactions will no longer be anonymous. [wes]

Dave Winer's DaveNet - How to help peace - After 9/11, Dave gave $100 to the Palestinian Red Crescent, sort of Palestine's Red Cross. Good idea, Dave.

I got my mom to give them $100 too. Now we joke about how the Bush Administration is going to round us up. I told her I thought it would be an honor to be rounded up for giving a small amount of money to help people who need help.

Scot Hacker at OS News - MacOSX Week: Tales of a BeOS Refugee - compares Apple's new operating system with the now defunct BeOS. [script]

LimeWire 2.0 is out. I haven't downloaded it yet. [wes]

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