Clandestine marijuana cultivation is ruining our forests (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images/SCPR.org).
OAKLAND, California - Oaksterdam University, bringing the feel of free Amsterdam to notoriously beleaguered police state battleground Oakland, was raided by federal agents of the militarized IRS and DEA. Why?The real reason beyond the sealed warrants to trash the wheelchair-bound millionaire founder Richard Lee cannabis campus, apartment, and affiliated dispensary while a suspended student at a nearby Christian university was becoming a mass murderer and terrorist, is money.
Hundreds of million of dollars in profits are being lost to taxpaying entrepreneurs and collectives, to alternative health care providers and recreational Bay Area potheads when it could be going into the pockets of major pharmaceutical companies who buy influence in Washington and determine who will and will not be raided.
Police state tactics leads to suppression that drives up prices and sends cultivation underground into the forest (wolfenotes.com). The "war" on drugs holds the drug dealing system in place making it so profitable for bankers, municipalities, and public-private prison corporations capitalizing on the misery.Attorney General Eric Holder, Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske, and President B.S. Obama, after saying they would not go against states with their own medicinal use laws, are now in lock step with multinational corporations whose highest goal is their shareholders' financial interests. The future is this: local pharmacies will become the dispensaries of tomorrow. But they will not sell whole plant cannabis. There is not future in that.
- (SCPR) Destroying Our Forests: Illegal marijuana farms on public and private forest land aren't new in California, but they are a growing problem, with high stakes for the environment and public safety. In Mendocino County, the effort to find a solution has taken on a particular urgency after the murder last summer of one of its most prominent residents. Reporter Lisa Morehouse from The California Report investigates. LISTEN
Obscene profits are to be made from harmful but protected isolates, synthetics, and patented "pharmaceuticals" based on lab-produced Cannabis sativa strains. Why chew on willow bark when you can have Tylenol, Anacin, or generic aspirin destroying your stomach lining and liver? And what better way to teach small time cultivators a lesson than to bring in out of state paramilitary forces to enforce federal laws controlled by corporations via their centralized hub of influence, Washington DC?
They will be full of THC but bereft of the other more medicinal cannabinoid compounds -- particularly cannabidiol (CBD) -- that make cannabis and hemp some of the most useful plants on the planet, weeds in common parlance but longstanding treatments that were once a staple of nearly every doctor's bag in America.
Plants, herbs, greens -- all of them are good, except this one that makes you giggle?So long as it remains illegal, dangerous, cracked down on, availability is limited, and prices are high. Banks and others then make massive profits from something that commonly grows at the expense of the environment due to illegal cultivators in our forests, who are "externalizing" their costs onto the public while destroying wildlife and polluting waterways to say nothing of killing anyone who gets in their way.
