Proposed new law to protect bloggers from SLAPP suits

Join EFF and the Public Participation Project in calling on Congress to support the PETITION Act, strong federal anti-SLAPP legislation. The concept is simple: when a blogger faces a legal threat for legitimate online content, she can file a motion to get the case dismissed quickly. If the case is found to be frivolous in court, she won't have to pay the legal fees." Here is discussion of a meritless suit against Matthew Inman that illustrates the need for such a law.

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Mayor of Newark latest to slam the “war on drugs”

Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark is the latest public figure to slam the "war on drugs." As reported by Huffington Post, Booker described the war on drugs as ineffective it

"represents big overgrown government at its worst." "The so called War on Drugs has not succeeded in making significant reductions in drug use, drug arrests or violence," the Democrat wrote during the Reddit "ask me anything" chat. "We are pouring huge amounts of our public resources into this current effort that are bleeding our public treasury and unnecessarily undermining human potential." Booker then called drug arrests a "game."

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Infographic: Many reasons why the United States should legalize marijuana

I found this infographic full of useful data, all pointing in one direction: We should legalize use of marijuana by taxing and regulating it. The current approach of subjecting users to the criminal justice system is destructive and immoral.

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Reason Magazine declares the war on drugs a total failure

Reason Magazine has been against the "war on drugs" for decades. Here are many dozens of articles published by Reason regarding the insanity of the "war on drugs." Citing to the New York Time, Reason gives the following evidence that the "war on drugs" is a failure:

Prices match supply with demand. If the supply of an illicit drug were to fall, say because the Drug Enforcement Administration stopped it from reaching the nation’s shores, we should expect its price to go up. That is not what happened with cocaine. Despite billions spent on measures from spraying coca fields high in the Andes to jailing local dealers in Miami or Washington, a gram of cocaine cost about 16 percent less last year than it did in 2001. The drop is similar for heroin and methamphetamine. The only drug that has not experienced a significant fall in price is marijuana . . . Jeffrey Miron, an economist at Harvard who studies drug policy closely, has suggested that legalizing all illicit drugs would produce net benefits to the United States of some $65 billion a year, mostly by cutting public spending on enforcement as well as through reduced crime and corruption.

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Federal government classification of marijuana proven to be unscientific

From Raw Story:

A government-sponsored study published recently in The Open Neurology Journal concludes that marijuana provides much-needed relief to some chronic pain sufferers and that more clinical trials are desperately needed, utterly destroying the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) classification of the drug as having no medical uses. While numerous prior studies have shown marijuana’s usefulness for a host of medical conditions, none have ever gone directly at the DEA’s placement of marijuana atop the schedule of controlled substances. This study, sponsored by the State of California and conducted at the University of California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research, does precisely that, driving a stake into the heart of America’s continued war on marijuana users by calling the Schedule I placement simply “not accurate” and “not tenable.”

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