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Fascist Goons Attack Peaceful Rainbow Family Gathering

From: "Don E Wirtshafter" Attorney at Law
Subject: Help Stop Government Repression
Date: Sun, Jun 25, 2006 07:55 PM

Dear Friends,
I need your help to protect my "family," the collective efforts of tens of thousands of citizens known as the "Rainbow Family." This week, near Steamboat Springs, Colorado, the U.S. Forest Service has taken illegal action to stop this annual assembly for _expression and prayer, in gross violation of the participants' essential Constitutional rights. . . . The 'Rainbow' Gatherings have borne a legacy of spiritual & cultural pilgrimage to the National Forests since 1972, the purest exercise of open consensual assembly in our time. The annual 'Gathering of the Tribes' draws thousands over the first week of July, focusing on the 4th as a holy day of prayer for peace and freedom. In recent years small regional events in this mode have emerged, and such gatherings have taken place in many nations around the world.

REPRESSIVE FEDERAL POLICIES --

The Bush Administration has spent millions of dollars trying to stop the Rainbow Gatherings. They are enforcing a 'Noncommercial Group Use' permit regulation that is impossible for unaffiliated individuals to comply with. They require that someone sign as an agent for a fictional group entity named as Permit Holder -- which then must assume full liability from the Government and bind participants vicariously to its terms.

By the creed of the gatherings, no one can appoint themselves to such a position. More importantly, such an ad hoc gathering has no legal capacity to designate agents or act as a group party in any way. As a result, individuals are denied personal standing in First Amendment exercise and subjected to harsh criminal prosecution for being anywhere near the area. The Forest Service requires that a permit be applied for in advance of the gathering. And they use any excuse possible to deny a permit application when we manage to submit one. This year their denial was based on the fact that a logging company had a permit to log in a nearby parcel of the national forest, even though there is no logging activity present whatsoever. The site is far remote from any inhabitants -- but still the Forest Service is all over our case.

Millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent to block this harmless gathering from taking place. The scariest aspect of all this is how Homeland Security is using these gatherings to perfect their techniques of martial law. Regulations written for the Federal Emergency Management Authority to deal with natural disasters are now being used to crush dissent in this country. Each year the Rainbow Gathering is declared a "National Incident" and federal military law ensues. A Special Agent is appointed "Incident Commander", with a Delegation of Authority, a large law enforcement "Team", and huge budget to control the gathering. Qualified Forest Service administrators lose their power, while the county sheriff and other officials are brought into targeted law enforcement actions by inclusion in the Incident Team and other inter-agency agreements. Each year Homeland Security gains more power over the individuals involved.

RIGHTS CRISIS IN COLORADO --
At this writing Forest Service law enforcement has issued over 500 tickets to the early arrivals at the gathering in Colorado. They have blocked the road and have prevented food and water from reaching those who managed to get into the gathering before the police roadblock was set up. The 500 people with tickets are being herded into trials like none anyone has seen before in America.

These pseudo trials are prototypes for what Homeland Security will use in the cases of insurrection or even a plague. Defendants lose the right to a public hearing (this year these hearings are being held behind closed doors in a firehouse garage near the site). Attorneys and legal observers have been denied the right to even view these trials. The defendants are not explained their rights nor afforded the right to an attorney, the right to summon witnesses, the right to a jury trial, etc.

Defendants are ordered to appear each day at 9:00 a.m. and sit in the hot sun without water or sanitary facilities until their trials. Some have now been waiting for several days. These abbreviated trials only take a few minutes. Last year I tried to help a string of defendants defend themselves in these "trials" but felt helpless to do much as the system was clearly stacked against them. This year is especially frustrating to me as I have to watch this come down from 6000 miles away. Right now I am in Hungary at a medical conference for my employment. I am flying home on Thursday and plan on being in court Saturday, July 1st, to defend some of my best friends who got a ticket for "illegally gathering" as they drove down a public highway.

WHAT TO DO --
The confrontation this year is getting more intense by the minute, which is why I am asking for your help. The only way to stop a massive conflagration in Colorado in the next few days is to get thousands of people to contact their political representatives as well as the responsible administrators at the Forest Service to demand that this repression stop immediately.

Please, even if you can never conceive of yourself at a Rainbow Gathering, you must understand that if these citizens lose their constitutional right to gather, we all lose such rights. This year the Rainbow Gathering is being used to set precedents that will be turned against drug policy, civil liberty, anti-war or other activists in the near future.

Following are some instructions on who to write and/or call. We hope to start flooding the Department of Agriculture and the Forest Service with complaints starting Monday morning and not stopping until harassment stops. It is especially important that we get a few Congressional representative and Senators concerned enough to write the Forest Service for an explanation of why so much money is being spent to keep people from camping in the National Forest set aside for exactly that purpose.

Please keep the pressure on these bureaucrats until we are able to spread the word that the government has backed off and that the gathering can proceed unhindered. If you do not know the contact information for your Congressman or Senator, you can find this here. You can call your representative at 212-224-3121. Besides your representatives in Washington, please call and write the following people to voice your protest to this harsh treatment of people who just want to go on a camping trip in the woods. Keep the calls coming until word is passed around that the government has called off their dogs. Please forward this letter to your friends and feel free to re-post it on any listserv or website you wish. Email me if you have any questions.

Don E Wirtshafter
Attorney at Law
Box 18 Guysville, OH 45735
740 662 5297

don@hempery.com
USDA, Natural Resources & Environment
Mark Rey, USDA Undersecretary
1400 Independence Ave. SW, # 217-E
Washington, DC 20250
202-720-7173 Fax: 202-720-0632
mark.rey@usda.gov

Kathleen Gause, Director 202-205-8534
USDA Forest Service
Civil Rights Staff
Stop Code 1142
1400 Independence Ave., S.W.
Washington., DC 20250-1142
Tel (202) 205-1585

Office of the Chief
NetZero Message Center 06/26/2006 01:52 AM
NetZero Message Center Page 5 of 6

Dale Bosworth, Chief
USDA Forest Service
Yates Federal Building (4NW Yates)
201 14th Street, SW - Washington, DCÊ20250
202-205-1661; Fx: 202-205-1765

Executive Assistant...Karla Hawley, 202 -205-1195
Medicine Bow-Routt National Forests,

Mary H. Peterson, Supervisor
2468 Jackson Street -- Laramie, WY 82070-6535
307-745-2300 Fax: 307-745-2398
U.S. Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Region (R-2)

Rick Cables, Regional Forester
Mail: P.O. Box 25127 -- Lakewood, CO 80225-0127
303-275-5451

Richard Stem, Deputy Regional Forester, Resources: 303-275-5451
Steve Silverman, Office of General Counsel, Regional Attorney: 303-275-5536

Bill Fox, Law Enforcement & Investigations, Special Agent in Charge: 303-275-5253

Jerome Romero, Deputy Director of Civil Rights: 303-275-5340

Some resources to research these issues further:
The best Rainbow website: http://www.welcomehome.org/

A good article written before the feds came down hard: http://www.csindy.com/csindy/2006-06-22/cover.html

More recent coverage:
Google - -rainbow gathering arrests on Google News

Rainbow Children Detained in the name of Homeland Security!!!!

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 5:16 AM

 

Leading UK medical journal calls for reviving research into psychedelic drugs
(The Lancet, Volume 367, Number 9518, 15 April 2006)
That psychedelic drugs, such as LSD and MDMA (ecstasy), can be effective treatments for various psychiatric illnesses is an old idea. Once considered wonder drugs for their effects on anxiety, depression, alcoholism, and other mental illnesses, they have been effectively banished from medical practice after legal rulings banned their sale and use. Although such bans were largely put in place to quash concerns about rampant recreational drug use fuelling the counter cultures of the 1960s and 1980s (LSD and MDMA, respectively), criminalisation of these agents has also led to an excessively cautious approach to further research into their therapeutic benefits. . . . So do illicit drugs have therapeutic benefits that outweigh their substantial social harm? The evidence is scant. . . . But the case of a man who emerged from a decade-long period of intensive MDMA use—during which he is estimated to have taken 40?000 pills - with no signs of the profound neurotoxicity that has long been feared to result from even limited consumption of ecstasy, has re-energised calls for more research into the real side-effects, and therapeutic potential, of psychedelic drugs. Although some small-scale research projects using LSD, MDMA, and the active components of cannabis are now underway, the blanket ban on psychedelic drugs enforced in many countries continues to hinder safe and controlled investigation, in a medical environment, of their potential benefits. . . . Exaggerated risks of harm have contributed to the demonisation of psychedelic drugs as a social evil. But although this dangerous reputation—generated and perpetuated by the often disproportionately stiff penalties for their use—is helpful for law enforcement, it does not correspond to the evidence. Rather, the social prescription against psychedelic drugs that hinders properly controlled research into their effects and side-effects is largely based on social and legal, as opposed to scientific, concerns. To maximise research into therapeutic benefits without exacerbating real social harms a legal structure that recognises this distinction is sorely needed.

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 8:39 AM

 

The Journal of Cannabis in Clinical Practice
In case you haven't visited the Web site of the California Cannabis Research Medical Group, you might want to check it out. Among other things, this group publishes the above named journal. Their current print edition runs a hefty 40 pages and carries some very interesting advertisements. The current issue is also available online. . . . Stories covered in the Spring 2006 edition include:

Cannabis and PTSD

California Issues ID Cards

A Day in the Life of a Cannabis Consultant

The Recurring Terror of Combat

A Clinician Ponders Mechanism of Action

Cannabis Eases Post-Traumatic Stress

Harm reduction: the cannabis paradox

Cannabis Relieves Morning Sickness

Advantages of Orally Ingested Cannabis

Cannabis as a First-line Treatment for Childhood Mental Disorders

Also included is text from the Congressional hearings about The Prohibition of Marijuana. There you can read the government's witnesses say things like, "[marijuana] is now being used extensively by high school children in cigarettes. It's effect is deadly. . . . The fatal marijuana cigarette must be recognized as a deadly drug, and the American children must be protected against it."

That testimony was given in 1937 and a significant number of Americans are so screwheaded that they still believe these lies.

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 8:43 AM