OAS boosts legalizastion -- A mounting chorus of muckety-mucks realize how dumb it is to classify cannabis as a Schedule One Narcotic in the U.S. Controlled Substances Act (This means the feds continue to insist that cannabis has "no currently accepted medical use.")
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OAS to White House and Hemisphere: It’s High Time to Consider Legalizing Pot
Time Magazine, May 22 2013
http://world.time.com/2013/05/22/key-regional...izing-pot/
partial extract:
By Tim Padgett May 22, 2013
On the Latin American street, the Organization of American States has always borne a reputation, often undeserved, as Washington’s lackey. But the OAS, based in Washington, just sent the western hemisphere a message the White House would rather not hear: It’s time to seriously discuss legalizing marijuana as one means of reducing harrowing drug violence. That conclusion, from a study presented last Friday in Bogotá, Colombia, by OAS Secretary-General José Miguel Insulza, is one that a growing number of Latin American governments — including Uruguay, which might legalize marijuana this year — are urging the Obama Administration to accept. Having the motion seconded by Washington’s “lackey” makes it harder to ignore.
But even as Insulza and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos were hailing the OAS report last week, something else was brewing in Bogotá that could further undermine resistance to pot legalization. The Colombian capital is about to start a program that uses marijuana to wean junkies off bazuco, a cheap but fiercely addictive cocaine paste. It will mark one of the largest experiments to determine if marijuana — which legalization opponents still insist is a “gateway” to harder drugs like cocaine and heroin — is in reality an “exit” drug. If so, it will only serve to reinforce the argument, mentioned by the OAS study, that marijuana is a relatively benign drug, far more comparable to alcohol than it is, say, to crystal meth.
