Teen dies from smoking synthetic pot

Real thing still illegal

(AP, MSNBC) A 13-year-old in the U.S. who became ill after smoking synthetic marijuana and had a double lung transplant has died. Tonya Rice tells the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review newspaper that her son, Brandon, died Thursday morning at a Pennsylvania hospital. The boy smoked the fake marijuana out of a plastic candy dispenser and suffered chemical burns to both lungs. More

Why is Hemp Illegal?
Cannabis is a plant with many uses. It has always been popular with industry -- until it realized it could monopolize and make more money from deadly petroleum products. Who needs strong HEMP fiber, balanced oil, super protein, cancer medicine (it actually selectively eliminates cancer cells), or just about anything else when PLASTICS can be used to make toxic cloth (polyester), solvents, flavorings, preservatives, or deadly carcinogens?

Hemp is not marijuana. Anyone who smokes recreationally bears the unhealthy result of such abuse. "Marijuana" is an invention of a well orchestrated propaganda campaign paid for by the petrochemical industry. To take the psychoactive ingredient and breed plant strains that specifically promote abuse and addiction -- while pretending it is just individuals doing the research and development without clandestine government help -- is one of the great lies of our time.

(elenakulikova/flickr.com)

Marijuana has become a scourge, whereas hemp is a green solution to many post-industrial problems. After making tobacco toxic (it is said only cigarettes cause cancer, not the unadulterated plant in its natural state) industry sold it, made it as addictive as it could, and finally tried everything it could to avoid liability while the foolish in all quarters did the sensible thing of stating that there was no scientific link establishing a connection between smoking and cancer. They did not subsequently come forward to apologize for their tragic myopia.

In the same way, pot abuse and the "War on Drugs" conceals and distracts from the benefits of hemp. Obama has turned his back on normalizing cannabis laws in favor of Bush-era police state crackdowns on medical dispensaries.

Abuse in ICE detention (PBS-Frontline)

Wisdom Quarterly, PBS, PRI, Frontline

(PBS) Coming Oct. 18: Lost in Detention examining the Obama administration's controversial illegal treatment of immigrants.

More than one million immigrants have been deported since Pres. Obama took office. Under his [Cheney-style] administration, deportations and detentions have reached record levels. With it have come complaints of rape, torture, abuse, indefinite detention, and harsh treatment, including charges that families have been unfairly separated after being caught in nationwide dragnets. The administration has promised to make the detention system more humane or to more selectively target serious criminals. But it faces Republican critics urging stricter measures -- and a growing backlash among compassionate voters and Latinos, a key 2012 electoral force. This is a powerful journey into the secretive world of immigrant detention, with a penetrating look at those being detained and the abuses they are put through.

• WATCH on air and online beginning Tuesday, Oct. 18, 9:00 pm ET on PBS (check local listings).

(PRI, TheWorld.org) Few people associated the candidacy of Barack Obama with a “get tough” approach to illegal immigration. But the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has stepped up deportations under his orders.

And at the same time, a network of detention facilities has expanded to house illegal immigrants. Correspondent Maria Hinojosa from PBS-FRONTLINE along with the Investigative Reporting Workshop spent the last year exploring the hidden world of immigration detention.

Children of undocumented immigrants rally in DC (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images).

In the past decade, three million immigrants have been detained in the system. One of them, a Canadian citizen, was a woman we’ll call Mary. She agreed to speak only if we disguised her identity. Her detention began when local police in Florida pulled her over in a routine traffic stop.

We do not live in a "police state," but somehow US citizens are wrongly detained and deported by I.C.E., yet another paramilitary force targeting civilians (warincontext.org).

They found a warrant for her arrest for a check she had bounced 10 years earlier. ICE discovered she had been living in the US for 15 years without a visa, so the agency sent her a thousand miles away to the Willacy detention center in Texas.

During her three months there, Mary says she endured repeated sexual assaults by a guard. Her voice choking with emotion, she told me how she tried to fight him off, and how he threatened her. “He said, ‘if you tell anyone, you wouldn’t come out of here alive to see your family.’ So then, who do you go and tell?”

(PBSNewsHour) PBS.org A year long investigation examines the current U.S. immigration enforcement system and uncovers hidden stories of abuse in detention system. Hari Sreenivasan interviews Frontline's Maria Hinjosa.

A cache of government documents recently obtained by the ACLU details more than 170 allegations of sexual abuse during the past four years. And FRONTLINE’s investigation uncovered more than a dozen stories of sexual abuse at Willacy, and many other accounts of racial and physical abuse.

When we visited Willacy, ICE would not let us talk with detainees or interview the local ICE officials. But we did speak with dozens of former detainees and staff.

In 2009, Twana Cooks-Allen was the mental health coordinator at Willacy. She was asked to survey all detainees as part of a broad review of the detention system, undertaken by ICE officials in Washington. When Cooks-Allen delivered initial findings of the survey, she says local ICE officials began a cover-up. More

• Beliefnet.com: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

"Vaccine-Nation" (comedy parody)

Legal "Slave Labor" taking US jobs (ALEC)

James Wilson, a Berrydale Forestry Camp farm squad prisoner, finishes loading collard greens on a truck at the Univ. of Florida West Florida Research and Education Facility in Jay, Florida, Feb. 7, 2011 (Meggan Haller/The New York Times).

The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor
Mike Elk and Bob Sloan, The Nation (Report, August 5, 2011)

This article is part of a Nation series exposing the American Legislative Exchange Council, in collaboration with the Center For Media and Democracy. John Nichols introduces the series.

The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners.

At the Union Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken, and pork for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporation that operates the state’s forty-one work programs. In addition to processed food, PRIDE’s website reveals an array of products... More

• 

FRESH AIR: “[Republican legislators] now hold more state legislative seats than at any time since 1928, the year that Herbert Hoover came to the presidency,” says reporter John Nichols. “They control 25 states [with] both houses of the legislature. There are also 21 states where Republicans control both houses of the legislature and the governorship. And in the backroom of politics, that’s what people really want. If you’ve got governor, state House and state Senate, you can pretty much roll through whatever legislation you want.” Nichols, a political reporter for The Nation, recently wrote the introduction and co-authored two in a series of articles about the relationship that state-based legislators have with a group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC is a group that brings together state legislators and representatives of corporations to draft model bills that can then be introduced at the state level of government. An archive of ALEC documents was recently leaked to the Center for Media and Democracy. “All of those pieces oflegislation and those resolutions [in the documents] really err toward a goal, and that goal is the advancement of an agenda that seems to be dictated at almost every turn by multinational corporations,” Nichols tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “It’s to clear the way for lower taxes, less regulation, a lot of protection against lawsuits, [and] ALEC is very, very active in [the] opening up of areas via privatization for corporations to make more money, particularly in places you might not usually expect like public education.” MORE

• Plutocracy Now: A Vast Right-wing Conspiracy

ALEC: Ghostwriting the Law for Corporate America
American Association of Justice (justice.org)

The Koch Brothers, big tobacco, insurance companies, and the drug industry: all behind the shadowy corporate front group known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

On the surface, ALEC is mostly comprised of thousands of state legislators, each paying a nominal fee to attend ALEC retreats and receive model legislation. In reality, corporations pay ALEC a king’s ransom to access legislators to distribute radical legislation that puts corporate interests over American workers and consumers.

So, while the membership appears to be public sector, corporate money dominates ALEC. In fact, public sector membership dues account for only around one percent of ALEC’s annual revenues. ALEC claims to be nonpartisan, but its pro-corporate, anti-consumer mission is clear.

Read about ALEC’s hand in protecting oil companies, chemical manufacturers and Wall Street banks in AAJ’s report here: More

• AAJ Release: Report lifts veil on ALEC's pro-corporate, anti-consumer mission
• Anthony Tarricone: ALEC Ghostwriting the Law (HuffPo)
• Disappeared News: Hawaii's hidden history, slave labor
• GO FISH: How to Win Contempt and Influence People:

Prison Hunger Strike (Democracy Now!)

Headlines (FULL EPISODE)

• Pacifica Radio: archived episodes
• Free Speech Radio (KPFK.org)
  
• Relatives say inmates on hunger strike getting sick
• State continues its "Disinformation Campaign"
• Statewide tortured prisoner hunger strike winding down
• Hunger strike challenges California prison system
• 11th Day of Hunger Strike (Public Radio)
• Go Harrison! (Pacifica)

Pelican Bay Prison torture unit (SHU)