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The Texas MJ Stamp though is an accidental legalization due to how Texas defines double jeopardy, you have actually been able to buy them since 2008.

http://www.ndsn.org/nov96/drugtax.html

That's a very bad thing. It's a long standing principle in British and American jurisprudence, all the way back to the 1600s, that juries do not have to justify their verdicts and cannot be held accountable for them.

Too bad this isn't true any more in the US. You can be charged with a crime if you vote to acquit a person and other jurors or the prosecutor doesn't like your politics. This happened to juror Laura Kriho in Colorado in 1997. She was the lone holdout to acquit on a drug possession charge.

"Unable to persuade the other jurors of her view of the evidence, she also used nullification and sentencing consequences arguments. The judge signed contempt of court charges against her two months later." http://www.ndsn.org/marapr97/kriho.html "She was issued the contempt citation for failure to inform the court, without being asked, that she had been arrested as a teenager thirteen years earlier for possession of an illegal substance. She was apparently supposed to have remembered each question asked to all of the preceding jury candidates and, then, at the end of the very long voir dire process, volunteer answers to possible questions she wasn't asked." http://www.apfn.org/thewinds/1998/09/jury_nullification.html

If ever called to to a trial as a juror I will inform the judge that I feel compelled to always vote to convict because I don't want to be held in contempt for not answering questions I was not asked, like Laura Kriho in 1997.

"Former juror Dan Cooper testified at Kriho's hearing that he overheard Judge Barnhill tell prosecutor Stanley to "look into this" after Kriho went to her car and returned with a pamphlet advocating jury nullification to give to another juror. The juror gave the pamphlet to Judge Barnhill. Grant says Stanley did "look into it" with the help of Gilpin County Judge Frederic Rodgers who wrote an article this summer for the Judge's Journal about what a judge can do when faced with a jury pool "tainted" with notions of jury nullification."

If you think you have power as a Juror, think again. Laura Kriho was convicted and fined $1200 for attempting jury nullification.

It's good to see the courts taking such care with respect to costs. I just wish that they took such care uniformly. Sadly, they do not. It's still the unchallenged case that when a company assesses damage due to computer-related criminal activities, they total up the cost of all of the hardware involved and all of the staff involved without any analysis of how much staff time was dedicated to dealing with the problem or how useful the hardware was and continues to be.

The same is the case with many drugs. Last I heard, for example, LSD had an interesting double-standard. The mass of the "drug" is measured with respect to the medium used (e.g. the mass of the blotter paper it's laced in plus the inconsequential mass of the drug itself). Then, that mass is compared to the effective dosage to determine "intent to distribute." You see, if you have a 1g piece of blotter, and the effective dose for LSD is 50-100 micro-grams, then legally you are said to possess between 1,000 and 20,000 doses of LSD, which implies your intent to distribute.... Follow that logic if you can.

If the courts were uniform in how they deal with quantifications during their cases, it would be a much more reasonable system.

Ironic that Dan Gillmore worked at the SJ Mercury News, that wonderful source of journalistic integrity that brought us the "CIA created crack cocaine" story.

It is no longer legal to be prosecuted if your drugs are confiscated and you do not have tax stamps.
http://www.ndsn.org/nov96/drugtax.html

Dig around the Jesse Ventura link, basically, he backed off of the death penalty once it became his decision. I would imagine there are many similar examples...

Um, no. First of all, the jury selection process has become the jury tampering process. A jury of peers should be a randomly-selected group of eligible people, but it's more or less handpicked nowadays. The verdict is often decided by which lawyer is craftiest in "disqualifying" potential jurors. Jurors in the pool should not be asked any questions aside from:

Do you personally know the plaintiff or defendant?

Do you have any hearsay knowledge of this case?

Have you or any member of your immediate family ever been the victim of a similar crime?

Anything else is jury tampering, and jurors should refuse to answer!

Second, there is the question of jury nullification. Judges and prosecutors seldom inform juries of their right and responsibility to return a "not guilty" verdict if they feel that the law does not reflect the values of the community or has not been applied appropriately. Jury nullification is the final check against the legislative and executive functions of government, and it has a long and established history. However, citizens have been harassed and even charged with contempt of court for exercising this sacred right.

Not only that, but the CIA dumped lost of Cocaine into, you guess it, south central L.A. Of course, they themselves denied everything.

The real test of DARE's effectiveness is the difference in drug use between schools using the program and schools not using the program. The only real data on this that I know of shows that DARE is not effective.

I was thinking more of the McCarthy eraHouse Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) , or the FBI's COINTELPRO
Of course the entertainment industry selling out it's artists, to gain favors from the government and the government breaking the law to in order to uphold the law is realy a 50's and 60's thing, and went out with the Nixon administration, right ?

How Caffeine works...
How Beer works...
How Pot works...

Google is great for finding out important, health-related information. :-)

Well, there's this, or this, or this, or this, just from the first 10 Google results. To be sure, medical marijuana use is legal in some areas, but cops arrest them anyway.

The word manufacture means create, not use. If you possess marijuana seeds with the intent to grow pot, that would be illegal, but if you merely possess marijuana (with some seeds attached) with the intent to smoke, that's not illegal (under federal law).

Huh? I'm allowed to have it but I'm not allowed to grow it, buy it, import it, or do anything that might bring it into my possession? Also, if I cultivate marijuana and make a joint out of it, mighn't that count as manufacturing? Moot point, since regardless of what the law is supposed to be, there are thousands of people arrested every year for nothing more than possession. Not selling it, not growing/synthesizing it, not using it, but simply having it on their person.

Wait a second now. Making the fruits of your work public does affect interstate commerce.

My point was that a lot of people will work a way around the DRM, and some of them will make it public, despite it being illegal to do so. Hollings and co. will look at that and say, "Guess we need to clamp down further" and try to limit even personal development of workarounds. And it's not unreasonable to think they'll try.

I think the achilles heel of the CBDTPA is section (3) part (d)
"In achieving the goals of setting open security standards that will provide effective security for copyrighted works, the security system standards shall ensure, to the extent practicable, that
(1) the standard security technologies are
(A) reliable;
(B) renewable;
(C) resistant to attack;
(D) readily implemented;
(E) modular;
(F) applicable in multiple technology platforms;
(G) extensible;
(H) upgradable;
(I) not cost prohibitive; and
(2) any software portion of such standards is based on open source code."

In other words, the perfect secure system, that can not only tell the difference between protected and unprotected bits, but can also tell when I'm making a legitimate copy under the Fair Use doctrine (section 3, part e), all to be implemented in hardware and software that you sell to hackers who have lots of spare time. What a joke. I agree with you in that respect, but you and I know infinitely more about computers than any judge or politician is likely to. 'Security' is the new computer buzzword and they'll toss it around like it's a minor feature that you can add in your spare time.

The following is the first few hits off Google using those search terms. I got 6,750 hits from them. I think your story is in there somewhere.The evidence points in one direction, and nobody on either side of "DRUGWARS" should have any interest in arguing it.

ABCNEWS.com : Study Finds D.A.R.E. Ineffective

Several Studies Suggest DARE Programs Ineffective

Project DARE Ineffective 10 Years Later!

Falcon's Cry: DARE found ineffective

Herald - Ineffective D.A.R.E. prevention program should be replaced

DARE's clout smothers other drug programs

Here's a quote from the article,"According to a Detroit News analysis of 33 Metro area school districts, there is no difference between teen drug and alcohol use in districts that offered DARE and in districts that did not. DARE is used in 70 of the 88 Metro districts."

I grabbed that one because it's from this year.

Do you get it now? There is no good news about DARE outside of the press releases from the people on the payroll.

One tenet of his is "The incidence of regulation appears to be unrelated to the incidence of the observed characteristics of natural monopoly". His view seems to be that regulation, government intervention to ensure precious commodities are fairly provided, is arbitrarily applied and benefit the regulated company. The subsidy becomes a profit center and encourages companies to align themselves toward lowest organizational costs. It results in an inefficiency used to lobby for more subsidies---a welfare case. Because this situation with utilities companies and MSFT doesn't compare, I'm not sure we can say where his sympathies point.

I am sure he's a great mind and is certainly a top authority on the subject having written the book Natural monopoly and its regulation and articles 'Theories of Economic Regulation' and 'Taxation by Regulation'(both from Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science). In fact, he's incredibly prolific . . . writes a book or two annually while serving as a Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals and senior lecturer at Chicago Law.