Barney Frank Expects Nationwide Medical Marijuana Law To Pass Within the Next Few Years
Congressman Barney Frank, author of two important marijuana policy reform bills (H.R. 2835 and H.R. 2943), responded to a question about the direction of marijuana policy reform today on the Web site reddit.com. See the video below for his take on where the movement is headed.
Tagged with: Congressman Barney Frank and H.R. 2835 and H.R. 2943 by the author
30 comments
Woohoo!
i love this congressman’s train of though.
I love this guy!
He was wrong to say that the Clinton Administration and Janet Reno took a hand-offs approach to state medical marijuana laws. There were a number of DEA raids in California during the Clinton years and an (unsuccessful) push to prosecute physicians for discussing medical marijuana with their patients.
Anyway, we’ll forgive him for that!
im very proud to say that barney frank is my representative! there are a lot of assholes who hate him simply because he is openly gay but honestly, who cares….. we are nothing but another animal in the animal kingdom and as we all know, there are gay animals in every single species… its normal…. barney frank will fight for whats right, he may not get every little detail right but noone is pefect….
Gay or not, this man is on the right track. That’s much more than I can say for other politicians. Barney for Prez? In our dreams, his voice is not what the American public will relate too. I should know because I whole heartedly supported Perot and I’m fairly convinced the reason he didn’t win was because of his high pitched voice. American’s are caught up in this “image” thing. As stupid as that sounds, it’s true.
Look, in the past there were several lesbian and gay friends in my life, why? not because I was gay or lesbian, no, because I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that these people would not purposefully hurt me. It was one of the BEST times of my life experience.
Barney Frank is a breath of fresh air in a climate of liars and cheats, covering their and their money contributers ASSES!!!
A FEW YEARS????????????????????????????????????
WHAT, 72 YEARS HASN’T BEEN LONG ENOUGH????
I’m not waiting a few more years. 1st chance I get, Holland here I come.
I gotta say, not to offend anyone but while I am homofobic (seen too many prison movies), and christian (I have my beliefs but i dont feel right forcing them on others), i gotta say ( despite these things) this guy is by far my favorite politician in the government today he is doing great things for this country!!!
thank you MR. Frank!!!
LEGALIZE IT !!!!
p.s. im only human and everybody makes mistakes
I would invite this man to stay in my home and feel good about it and never worry about anybody catching gayness from him. God has nothing to do with it. All men and women were created equal and should be treated with the respect they give you. Barney Frank for President sounds good to me. He stands up to the creeps you see in Congress that hide behind their religion until they get caught, and he’s honest about his lifestyle. I would be proud to call him my friend. And he understands that cannabis is a good thing and should be used for any benefit it can provide to the world. Only the blind cannot see this.
Barney Frank and Ron Paul have been pushing this for some time now. They are doing a very good job and wish more people would wake up. Thanks again MPP and Barney Frank, keep up the good fight
Sober up guys. While Barney Frank is out there pushing through laws that his constituents don’t care about, his district is suffering from high unemployment and utter degeneration. Barney Frank is one of the players responsible for the financial collapse of this nation. Ya know, there is more to supporting an elected official, than whether or not he believes in legalizing dope. Did you all know that Barney Frank got censured by Congress because, there was a male prostitution ring being run out of his basement..look it up..Sobriety give you the unique ability to really see people for who they are..try it sometime….
Good point Jeff (#12) ! While I agree with congressman Frank on this issue, his overall leadership is terrible. Even a broken clock is right twice per day and all that…
he sounds a bit like Sylvester the cat doesn’t he? sufferin succotash Barney!
To Jeff, regarding Barnie Frank being censured. I took your advice and looked it up. You are wrong. Here’s the truth from Wikipedia(and see my my notes after the following):
A 1990 investigation by the House Ethics Committee was prompted by Steve Gobie, a male hustler Frank befriended and housed, who attempted to profit on his allegations that Frank knew he was using the home to see clients. Frank confirmed that he had once paid Gobie for sex, hired him with personal funds as an aide and wrote letters on congressional stationery on his behalf to Virginia state probation officials, but Frank said he fired Gobie when he learned that prostitution clients were visiting his apartment.[17][18] “Two years [after Frank fired Gobie], Gobie tried unsuccessfully to sell his story to the Washington Post. He then gave the story to the Washington Times for nothing, in hopes of getting a book contract for the male version of Mayflower Madam.”[19] After the investigation, the Committee found no evidence that Frank had known of or been involved in the alleged illegal activity and dismissed all of Gobie’s more scandalous claims; they recommended a reprimand for Frank using his congressional office to fix 33 of Gobie’s parking tickets.[20][21] The House voted 408-18 to reprimand Frank.[22][23] The attempts to censure and expel Frank were led by Republican Larry Craig, whom Frank criticized for hypocrisy after Craig’s own later arrest for soliciting gay sex in an airport bathroom.[24][25][26] Frank won re-election that year with 66 percent of the vote, and has won by larger margins ever since.
Frank was not censured. Jeff, it’s obvious to see that you are a liar and have a personal issue with Mr. Frank’s politics. Now try taking your own advice: get off the Conservative Kook-Aid and sober up. BTW, I did my research after enjoying a little bit of ‘Mother Nature’ and it’s very clear to me the type of person you really are. So, again you are wrong about sobriety too.
Mr.Frank is to be commended for being out front in the campaign to legalize MJ..Action will be taken,during Obamas SECOND term.His presidential memo was a signal to state governments: if they choose to develope the infrastructure for the trade in MJ.the Feds. will not interfere.This should open the floodgates through the 2012 elections for states to adopt plans.Action in New York is nearing. Another signal was sent to smaller Law enforcement groups, especially in medical program states, that Uncle Sam was not going to pick up half the tab because you invited a couple of DEA agents to observe the take down.This rise in cost should rein in many Cooley-San Diego type actions.
My argument is against the way we are handling drug policy. If you want to stop seeing drug related crimes, violence and death then you need to take action and demand drug policy reform that has PROVEN to work far better than our war on drugs.
Any time you have laws on the books that are causing a nonviolent US citizen to be arrested every 17 seconds for drug charges and those laws have been in effect for almost 100 years and the goals of those laws are not being accomplished AT ALL. Then it’s time for the citizens to say enough is enough and look for better ways of dealing with that particular problem.
Americans are winners, we hate to lose but we keep letting our political representatives get us involved in wars they have no intention of winning. The drug war is a real war and it is an unnecessarily harmful, completely unwinnable, and wasteful war. It is in fact a war against a certain large percentage of our own population that chooses to different degrees and with a wide range or results, to put a wide variety of different substances in their body and for a wide variety of reasons. It’s being fought in our communities with real guns, teargas, dogs and virtually every other tool of war available.
Right now we are installing 900 new prison beds and hiring 150 new correction officers every 2 weeks. Here in the “land of the free” for the first time in history, more than one of every 100 adults is in jail or prison. 2,319,258 Americans were incarcerated at the start of 2008. The United States incarcerates more people than any other nation, far ahead of even more populous China. More than half of federal prisoners are serving time for a drug offense.
The goals of the drug war are to “reduce drug related death, disease, crime and drug use”. It has accomplished NONE of those goals after almost 100 years of prohibition policy, over 1 trillion tax dollars wasted, ever tougher criminal penalties, arresting millions of Americans and all the other effort and resources that have been put into it.
On top of that in the case of marijuana which accounts for roughly half of all drug arrests, that drug never was a serious threat to society, families, or individuals and it never will be. Because of that bad law being implemented based on lies by a few people that stood to gain financially from marijuana’s prohibition and them intentionally deceiving lawmakers, literally millions of Americans that choose to use that plant for ANY purpose are criminalized needlessly. In the US we arrest someone on a marijuana charge every 38 seconds.
Because of our prohibition policy bad laws have been put on the books that make it illegal for IV drug users to obtain clean needles. This results in AIDS and hepatitis being spread unnecessarily into our non drug using society on a huge scale.
Now take a look at the way the Swiss have dealt with their heroin problem. You can watch a lot about this in the video titled “Jack Cole Interview” on the JSK site. In Switzerland they set up government run clinics where heroin addicts can go and get pharmaceutical grade heroin. If you don’t have the money to pay for the drug it’s free. That instantly put every illegal heroin dealer in that country out of business… they can’t compete with free. Anyone that wants heroin can go into a government run clinic up to 3 times a day and inject it. There are medical personnel on hand and anyone that wants to kick their habit is given counseling and help toward that goal. The results are that there has not been a single heroin overdose there in more than 13 years. Switzerland has the lowest AIDS and Hepatitis infection in all of Europe. Crime fell by 60% because no one is stealing or prostituting their self to pay for their heroin and after a 10 year study, they documented that there has been an 82% decline in new heroin users. Now please tell me why our drug war seems like a better policy than that. No one went to jail and no one got killed. This program is also far less expensive than what we are doing and far less harmful.
Drug addiction of all types should be handled as a medical problem not a criminal problem. If a person kills or drives when they are too intoxicated to do so or breaks any legitimate law, we already have laws on the books to deal with those problems and if a real danger to society is recognized like it was with drunk driving, then those laws certainly should be adjusted accordingly. Trying to lock up every drug user or eradicate every plant that produces illegal drugs from planet earth are completely unattainable goals. We simply cannot afford to lock up every drug user and even if we could the vast majority go back to using drugs when they are released. Some countries even went so far as to execute drug users and even that has not succeeded. At some point we have to realize that a certain percentage of people are always going to use drugs and implement policy that minimizes the harms without devastating society.
Most drugs are made from weeds that without prohibition would be of far less financial value. According to a fairly recent documentary by Walter Cronkite, all the plants needed to supply an entire year’s worth of the heroin consumed in the US could be grown on about 50 square miles almost anywhere on earth and the entire years worth of heroin could be transported in a single cargo plane. Doesn’t it make more sense to have doctors treat the addicts than to try and stop the heroin production? It has to because law enforcement has only been able to prevent the production or transportation of about 10% of the heroin according to their own statistics.
Despite the drug war and all the money and efforts that have been put into it, drugs today are more potent, more readily available and often less expensive than they were when Richard Nixon started the modern war on drugs.
If you can show me ANYTHING that the drug war has accomplished when it comes to reducing drug related death, disease, crime or addiction that has significantly improved any drug related area over a long period of time I’d appreciate you telling me what it is.
Let’s compare the results of two roughly comparable major cities which both have a drug problem. The cities are New York, and Liverpool, England.
In New York, heroin and cocaine addicts suffer from tremendous medical problems. In Liverpool, England, most heroin and cocaine addicts suffer few medical problems. In New York, most drug addicts are unemployed criminals. In Liverpool, most drug addicts are gainfully employed taxpayers. In New York, crime committed by drug addicts is a major problem. In Liverpool, it is a very minor problem. In New York, drug addicts often have their children taken away and live under miserable conditions. In Liverpool, most addicts live with their families in stable homes and manage to raise healthy, well-adjusted children. In New York, thousands of babies are permanently damaged every year by their mother’s drug use. In Liverpool, health authorities report no cases of harm to infants as a result of their mother’s drug use. In New York, sixty percent of all intravenous drug users are infected with AIDS, and they are a major cause of the spread of AIDS. In Liverpool, only one percent of the intravenous drug users are infected with AIDS and they are a very minor source of infection for the rest of the population. In the United States, drug use is illegal and the police hunt down drug users to throw them in prison. Four thousand people died from illegal drugs in the US last year and we now have more than 600,000 people in prison on drug charges. In Liverpool, England, the police do not arrest drug users any more. Instead, health care workers seek them out and encourage them to come in for counseling and medical treatment. Both counseling and medical treatment are provided on demand. The medical treatment often includes maintenance doses of narcotics under the management of a physician. Liverpool, England, has adopted the same approach as the Netherlands and has had substantially the same results. They both chose decriminalization.
Sources for this article date back to December 27, 1992. Although the information is somewhat behind the times, the message remains the same.
The Constitutional right to freedom of religion, free speech, a free press, to keep and bear arms, to be secure in your person, house, papers and effects against unreasonable search and seizure, to life, liberty and property, to be protected from having your property taken by the government without due process of law and without just compensation, to confront the witnesses against you, to be protected from excessive bail, excessive fines, cruel and unusual punishment, to vote and others have been denied to millions of Americans in the name of the drug war.
More information about drug laws from Just Say Know:
Using Internet Explorer web browser: http://jsknow.angelfire.com/home
With All Other Browsers: http://jsknow.angelfire.com/index.html
Everyone should watch this video, and send it to the president
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0OMRzj3_CU
Makes you wonder why there is no media coverage of this guy.
HEY guys, why cant we all just get along? There will always be one very simple but TRUMP ALL issue that will bind us all by our throats until the day we die *or the day we move away* and that is that we are AMERICANS. Yeah, like it or not, we are Americans and we will always have our RIGHT to think either right wing, left wing, or chicken wing. But the fact is that this man, gay or not, is trying to help someone be comfortable with who they are. Let me explain something to both 12 and 15, first, let me ask you this. How do you feel when you are labeled a lazy, stupid, and irresponsible adult JUST cause you smoke pot? Probably either live in a state where its legal for medical and use it in that way, OR you live behind closed doors such as the people who ARE gay, who are black, or who are being persecuted for their OWN civil rights and liberties. Yeah, its an interesting and very UNKNOWN debate, but the fact is guys, that WE the people of this US have ALWAYS wanted to have a country where it IS FREE TO THINK THE WAY THE INDIVIDUAL THINKS. And even IF by some way Frank was running a prostitution ring OR not, he is still human and has all rights to do so. PLAIN AND SIMPLE. I dont know about you guys that come to this site, but I know that I understand in some degree the PROVERBIAL “closet” that Mr. Frank came out of years ago and is comfortable with people being rude to him or being nice to him. Either way, he is still an American that is standing up for, what I believe, the last wall behind the government. I think that once MJ is legal, medically or full legal, the government will be de-face and torn apart. Thomas Jefferson said that 200 years after starting congress that it would HAVE TO BE REFORMED. Very simple reason for this, TOO MUCH POWER. And if you are not already scared of BIG BROTHER, then please tell me how you are doing it.
Guys, Its very simple, while we are fighting for our rights, each one of us has their own BELIEFs and that is why the first settlers in the 13 colonies came over here, they were being wrongfully persecuted by Kings and Queens and dictators that didnt care for “Freedom”. I know I care for Freedom, and I would give my life for it cause without freedom, we are not the UNITED STATES of America, we are a fallen country that lost its path to their dream. Please, while we still have some chance of winning our country back, forget judgements, forget anger at each other, and fight together as friends and who knows, you might find out that you have some ONE issue that will bond you for life, such as legalize. LEGALIZE. We are all in this together. Gay, black, purple, white, str8, or even Mexican *just a joke* we have to live in this country together. and yeah, you have to.
Good, maybe next time I will vote democrat again.
If universal health care and health care reform ever gets passed, then with a public option those who can’t afford to pay for their own medical marijuana medicine would get it subsidized or paid for by the public option, federal money, in which case there will need to be federal law allowing the medical use. If the public option pays for it in California, then it will pay for it wherever, and hence, a national medical marijuana law.
The 1st step is getting cannabis reclassified from shedule 1. Nothing can move on the federal foreward untill that happens.
“nothing can move foreward on the federal level untill that happens.” is what i meant to type…
who cares if barney frank was a pimp, he is standing up for the truely sick folks that need this medicine for there aliments , i think that this is a great drug for folks with a whole aray of physical problems ,LEGALIZE MY MEDS OBAMA AND THEN IF THINGS GO WRONG BLAME BARNEY FRANK , HA,HA JUST JOKING BARNEY, DO WHAT EVER IT TAKES TO MAKE IT THREW THIS LIFE!!!
Great Point Jeff (12).. Some people will sell their country for one issue in particular. We should focus on individual issues but the larger issue is that of personal liberty. The marijuana laws, as is, are ridiculiouls because (you want to smoke it?), no but because it infringes on personal liberty and oversteps the mandate of jurisdiction of the federal gov. If we put the fed gov back into it’s proper role then most of our current dilemmas will be solved respectively.
MPP:
I continually hear the California Experiment as a reason not to enact sensible medical marijuana laws. Opponents constantly suggest that anyone can get an ID card by going to a kook of a doctor with a headache, paying $250, and you can get your recommendation. Do you think that it would be a good idea to enact a rule that would require the recommendation to come from a patient’s Primary Care Physician? Furthermore to strengthen this they could determine that a patient has to have had 6 months of treatment under a physician before they can be considered a Primary Care Physician? The PCP would be able to coordinate through any specialists in order to make this recommendation.
Maybe not the best solution, but I’m tired of hearing how easy it is to get a recommendation and how this is being used against the movement.
Second thought for the day:
Why is it that California has a “non-profit” clause in their laws when the entire medical system (from nurses and doctors to medical equipment companies, to pharmaceutical companies, to the insurance companies all are allowed to make profits). I mean I understand that to get them open this may have been necessary, but has anyone thought how unfair this is? We don’t want to allow these dispensary owners from profiting off the pain and suffering of others, but we fully sanction this behavior in every other relm of the Health Care industry.
Good point DarthNole, and I’ve heard the same thing however, I think it’s exaggerated.
I’ve already looked into it at: http://www.thc-foundation.org/ and written them an email. The process is not as easy as these people are saying.
THC Foundation have credible doctors on board and as far as I understand your PCM is the one they get the paperwork from. And in my case it would come from an Internal Medicine Specialist as well.
California could well be a role model of how not to do it and create more favorable conditions for State run MJ facilities. Maybe not in California but other states may do it. I heard an interview on CNN Saturday “Mellowing on Medical Marijuana” and the guy from Ohio wants medical MJ to come through the mail.
JJ: If Oregon doesn’t offer the husband a job we’re concentrating on Colorado next. I’ve even entertained the idea of moving to Colorado alone for a short time until we can get jobs there.
This guy is awesome. Im pro-choice on EVERYTHING so i have no problem with him being gay in fact kudos to him because hes got some guts being out like that. marijuana should be completly legal. bottom line its no worse than alcohol or cigs despite the studies and government propaganda.
“studies” show smokeing 1 joint is as harmfull as smoking 4 cigs. well the average pot smoker smokes anywhere from only a bowl every now and then to maybe a couple j’s a day. thats not including the major pot heads lol but theres less of them then the every day smoker. so in reality those average people are healthier than most american tobacco smoekrs who smoke half a pack to a pack of cigs a day. and if someone tries to say “its a harmfull, mental imparing drug” thats BS because guess what. SO IS ALCOHOL DIPSHITS. so what if we legalize it we just have to make driving, age, and public laws like we do with alcohol. would that really be that hard?
btw heres some facts to realize.
-there has never been a single case of any person ever dying from marijuana use. you CANT technicaly overdose on it its been proven.
-marijuana is generaly a peacefull and social drug. you ever seen a bar fight over weed? i think not…. only thing NOT peacefull about it is the fact that its illegal and alot of drug dealers result to violence to make money. wouldnt be a problem if it was legal would it…
-marijuana can help more diseases than most modern medicene today. isnt american health bad enough to make this at least legal medicaly? shit….
legalize it
this guy can do it
[peace pot microdot]
[...] doesn’t know what a pot leaf looks like. Though he’s sponsoring a bill that’s pushing to legalize marijuana. He emphatically denies that he can recognize the product which he has pending legislation to [...]
..]one another must read source of tips on this issueis ,blog.mpp.org,..]
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