Countries / states that legalized pot?

Let me say it again... no countries that are part of the UN have legalized marijuana... there are plenty that tolerate it and plenty that will give you a fine as opposed to jail time or give you nothing at all but that does not mean that according to their federal laws it is legal.

Examples: In both Austrailia and California, two places that are colored blue according to those maps-- 2 men (along with a bunch of others who have gotten shorter sentences) received a 25+ year sentence for cultivation in the past year. In Russia, protesters were beaten VIOLENTLY and jailed during the Global Marijuana March.

The world is not always as pot friendly as it seems and lots of countries have no problem executing people for mere possession much less traficking.

 

CANADA's War on Drugs??

Battle Royal Looms as Canadian Government Set to Unveil Tough Anti-Drug Strategy

by: The Drug War Chronicle (01 Jun, 2007)

Canadians MUST mobilize against a US-style War on Drugs in Canada!

The Conservative government of Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper is set to reveal what is expected to be a US-style approach to drug policy any day now. While action in parliament is unlikely until after the looming summer recess, battle lines are already being drawn in what promises to be a bitter fight.

Although the government has yet to reveal particulars, it is widely assumed that the new drug strategy will take a "tough on crime" approach to drugs, cracking down on grow-ops and drug sellers with harsher penalties, providing more money for law enforcement, and moving away from harm reduction approaches such as Vancouver's Insite safe injection site.

"There will be a heavier emphasis on enforcement, with some additional money for treatment," said Eugene Oscapella, head of the Canadian Drug Policy Foundation. "The other thing is they want mandatory minimum sentences for some drug offenses, especially serious trafficking offenses," he told Drug War Chronicle.

An early hint of the Harper government's drug policy came in March, when Conservatives allocated an extra $70 million over two years for enforcement, treatment, and prevention, but no mention was made of harm reduction programs. In Canada, these also include needle exchanges and the distribution of sterile crack pipes.

Of the additional funding, treatment programs will get nearly half, law enforcement about a third, and the rest will go into "just say no" style youth prevention program. The new drug strategy is also expected to endorse the use of drug courts, where drug offenders can be ordered into treatment programs instead of jail or prison.

The Canadian federal government currently spends about $350 million a year on anti-drug efforts, the vast majority of which goes to law enforcement, with lesser amounts for treatment and prevention, and a pittance for harm reduction. Canadian drug policy is guided by a 20-year-old national drug strategy that has been widely criticized for lacking clear direction, targets, and measurable results.

What the Harper government is proposing is not the answer, says a growing chorus of critics. The Liberal Party was quick off the mark to attack the yet-to-be-seen Conservative drug strategy.

"Stephen Harper's government is expected to announce next week new measures that will retreat from harm reduction measures that help Canadians, such as the safe injection site in Vancouver," said Liberal Health critic Bonnie Brown in a press release last week. "They are trying to do this under the guise of cracking down on illicit drug trafficking and prevention - even though all the research suggests that an ideologically-motivated war on drugs is ineffective, while programs such as the safe injection site are producing positive results."

A series of reports - including the Canadian Medical Association Journal and the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS - have concluded that the site has had a positive effect on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, and has not increased crime or addiction rates, or threatened public health and safety.

"Rather than focusing its efforts where they are needed most - such as funding the safe injection site and other programs vital to a larger harm reduction strategy in Canada - this government is putting its right-wing agenda ahead of scientific evidence, and at a tremendous cost to those affected by addiction," said Brown.

Brown's charge resonates with a number of Canadian researchers. "The science is there. What we're seeing here is political interference," said Dr. Thomas Kerr with the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, who has led several research studies on Insite. "I think it's a sad day for drug policy in Canada given that the Conservative government is now advocating a US-style approach to drug policy that's been shown to fail," he told reporters in Vancouver last week.

Kerr isn't the only one complaining. Several prominent researchers from across Canada have written an open letter to Health Canada criticizing it for calling for new research on Insite despite years of research showing positive incomes. The call for proposals from Health Canada ensures that the research will be superficial and inadequately funded, they said. They also took issue with a condition that researchers not be allowed to talk about their findings for six months after reports are submitted.

"Clearly what that does is to muffle people who might have something to say until after the curtain has dropped on this piece of political theatre," Benedikt Fischer, a director of the BC Centre for Addictions Research at the University of Victoria, said in an interview last Friday. "Overall, we get the feeling that what this is about is there's an attempt to instrumentalize science in a fairly cheap way for politics."

"The Conservatives don't like InSite," said Oscapella. "This is not an issue of science, but of ideology and playing to the peanut gallery. They have tried to misstate its purpose, what it has achieved, and the position of other countries. This is a propaganda exercise by the government to further its electoral objectives," he said.

"But the Liberals are no angels, either," he pointed out. "They had three opportunities to reform the cannabis laws and they didn't do that. I give them some credit for the medical marijuana regulations, but at the same time, the process is now incredibly cumbersome. They backed away from decriminalization. In effect, they backed a tough drug war, but with softer rhetoric."

"The Liberals are known to oppose from the left and govern from the right," said Dana Larsen, a New Democratic Party (NDP) candidate for a West Vancouver riding and head of the party's anti-prohibitionist wing, eNDProhibition. "Now they're in opposition, and they will say that Harper's drug war is wrong. But they passed our current drug law in 1996 despite testimony from nearly everyone it was bad law, and marijuana arrests went up every year the Liberals were in power."

But while the national NDP supports harm reduction and legalizing marijuana as part of its platform, its national leadership has not embraced the issue, Larsen said. "The party is good on policy, and the party spokesperson on drug issues, Libby Davies, is great, but we haven't succeeded yet in getting the party to make ending the drug war a priority." Davies was traveling on personal business outside the country and unavailable for comment this week.

Canada will have all summer to brood over the coming battles over drugs and crime, but with the Harper government a minority government, it will have to reach out to the Liberals, the NDP, or the Bloc Quebecois to pass anything. None of the opposition parties seems likely to support a "tough on drugs" package like that now envisioned by the Conservatives.

"They don't have the votes to pass this by themselves," said Oscapella. "The fear is what happens if they get reelected with a majority. Then they could walk all over everybody."


- Article from StopTheDrugWar.org

Canadian pot illegal again
by Reverend Damuzi (05 Mar, 2004) Courts keep flip-flopping, keeping lawyers busy and tokers confused.




On October 7, the Ontario Court of Appeal ended Canada's "Summer of Legalization" with a legal decision that once again made pot possession into a recognized criminal offense across the province.

"I bet that as we speak, some kid is being busted on the streets of Toronto," said renowned cannabis lawyer Alan Young, in an interview immediately after the decision. "For about a week or two, it will be very dangerous to smoke pot in Ontario. Reassertion of power is always very overbearing."

Originally, Ontario courts had ruled that because the federal government had failed in their obligation to change the law to allow for access to pot for medical purposes, Canada's whole cannabis law was deemed invalid (CC#44, Marijuana legal in Ontario).

This led to a summer of legal possession in Ontario, which spread to other provinces as other courts bowed to the Ontario decisions. Cannabis Culture publisher Marc Emery even went on a cross-country tour, toking up at police stations across Canada (CC#46, Marc Emery's Summer of Legalization tour). Emery was arrested and charged with possession six times, but it seems unlikely that he will face any convictions.

In their October decision, the Ontario Court of Appeal agreed that the feds had failed to make med-pot accessible, but restored pot prohibition with a questionable do-it-yourself fix that took lawyers and activists by surprise. Instead of telling the government to clean up its own mess and change the unconstitutional med-pot regulations, the court "repaired" them itself. By thus tweaking the regulations, the court ruled that it also restored the prohibition on pot possession.

However, the court conceded that a pot possession amnesty had existed between July 31, 2001, the original deadline the government had been given to fix the law, and October 7, 2003, the day the court fixed the regulations for the government. This means that any pot possession convictions during those two years are invalid.

Activists charged that the court had usurped the powers of Parliament by rewriting a regulation, a power sacrosanct to the government's cabinet. Young's accomplice in pot justice, lawyer Paul Burstein, will attempt to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada, using precisely this line of argumentation.

Tweaking the regulations

In order to fix the Medical Marijuana Access Regulations (MMAR) and make them constitutional, the Ontario Court of Appeal ordered changes that should make it a little easier for Canadian med-pot users to get their medicine.

Previously, a licensed med-pot user could contract with only one grower, that grower could grow only for that one patient, and the grower couldn't charge for their services. The court ordered the regulations changed so that a licensed grower can grow for any number of licensed med-pot users, and allowed growers to be paid for their efforts.

In an interview with Cannabis Culture, leading pot lawyer John Conroy was skeptical that Canada's thriving network of "compassion clubs" would be approved for licenses under the new scheme.

"There is still nothing that authorizes licenses to be given to anything but individuals," explained Conroy. "So societies, profit or nonprofit, are not covered. You might get a bunch of growers together to grow for the club, but only if the club caters exclusively to licensed patients, and most don't."

The Ontario Court of Appeal also struck out MMAR requirements that forced applicants to get recommendations from more than one doctor, often making it impossible for sick people to find enough specialists to fill out their forms.

However, the court decision didn't address one pressing concern: sections of the MMAR that could imperil doctor's licenses, leading colleges of physicians across Canada to advise against signing forms for med-pot patients.

Another decision rendered on the same day by the Ontario Court of Appeal was also unfavorable to the pot culture. The accusation that marijuana laws were genocidal, brought by John Turmel and Terry Parker, was discarded with a degrading, short ruling. Turmel and Parker plan to appeal the decision.

Perplexed judges

Meanwhile, Canada's Supreme Court is mulling another comprehensive constitutional challenge to recreational pot laws, in a case brought by pot activists David Malmo Levine, Chris Clay and Randy Caine (CC#44, Canada's Supreme Court hears pot challenge).

A decision is expected any day, and would overrule all previous

Canadian court decisions on cannabis.

The chaos and uncertainty around Canada's pot laws is profound enough to stir metaphysical angst. If you are charged today, will the laws you are charged under at some time in the future be deemed not to exist in the present? Or, if you were charged during the amnesty period and are applying to have your charges dropped, could those same charges at some point in the future be deemed to have truly existed?

These questions are being asked in courtrooms across Canada.

In BC at least, judges are still aggravated by cannabis' current confused legal status.

A ruling by BC Judge Buller Bennet, handed down on October 6, the day before the pot prohibition was reinstated, asked how Canadians can be charged under a law that always seems to be changing.

"How can an informed citizen know the state of the law when judges cannot agree amongst themselves; when it appears that possession of marihuana may be legal in some provinces and not in others; and when Parliament does not amend or reenact invalid legislation?" asked Judge Bennet. "The answer is self-evident: he or she cannot.

"Therefore, even if I had found that the law was valid in this province and it was not an abuse of process to prosecute under it," concluded the Judge, "I would still find an abuse of process in this case."

Three days after the Ontario Court's ruling, another BC Provincial Court Judge called Canada's pot laws a "joke," and gave the ganja grower in the case a one-year conditional sentence.

 

i dunno dude i didn't make the map, i just posted it. it was on wiki

 

Its a cool map and I would love for it to be accurate because that would mean that we have a ton of chill places to puff... the only reason I'm putting such an emphasis on it being kind of misleading is because people are getting incarcerated in a lot of the countries that the map labels cannabis as legal or decriminilized. We want to reform global marijuana laws and when people are being placed in prison for growing, trafficking, possessing or importing/exporting the plant then we do not want to give people the impression that it is legal in those countries.

You have to do a lot in most places in Austrailia (after its home of MARDIGRASS!!) to be incarcerated for cannabis however 100 plants will do the trick on both the east and west coast of the continent and that is no good and should be ended in a lot of Austrailians' opinions. In Russia, possession of very small amounts of the plant will land you in prison and often land you in pain as well.

You see what I mean?

 

i concur

 

i hope that map is right, cause i hope it is decriminalized in NC. thatwill be/could be/is ballin

 

North Carolina's state law:

Possession of one half ounce or less is punishable by up to 30 days in jail, most likely suspended. Possession of greater than one half ounce is punishable by 1 - 120 days in jail, with a possibility of community service or probation in lieu of jail. Possession greater than 1.5 ounces increases the penalties to up to 12 months in jail.

Manufacture, Cultivation, sale or delivery of less than five grams, for no remuneration (payment, barter, or exchange of any kind) is considered possession and not sale. For amounts of ten pounds or less, the penalty is up to 12 months in jail.

Penalties for sale, delivery or manufacture are increased if the sale occurs within 300 feet of a school zone if the offender is over 21 and if the sale was made to a minor or to a pregnant woman.

Possession of paraphernalia is punishable by up to six months in jail.

(N.C.G.S. 90-95 as of 2/05/07)

 

Possession:
1/2 oz or less misdemeanor 30 days* $200
1/2 to 1 1/2 oz misdemeanor 1 - 120 days** $500
More than 1 1/2 oz felony up to 12 months Discretionary Fine
*Suspended sentence mandatory.
**Community service or probation possible. 45 maximum for those with a clear record.

Sale or Cultivation:
Less than 5 g with no renumeration (assumes first offense for sentencing guidelines) see Possession
Up to 10 lbs felony up to 12 months not more than $5,000
10 to 50 lbs felony 25 months and up to 30 months MMS*** not more than $5,000
50 to 2000 lbs felony 35 months and up to 42 months MMS*** not more than $25,000
2000 to 10,000 lbs felony 70 months and up to 84 months MMS*** not more than $50,000
10,000 lbs or more felony 179 months and up to 219 months MMS*** not more than $200,000
Within 300 feet of school zone felony increased penalty increased penalty
Sale to a minor if seller is over age 21 or sale to a pregnant woman felony increased penalty increased penalty
***Mandatory minimum sentence.
Miscellaneous (paraphernalia, license suspensions, drug tax stamps, etc...)
Paraphernalia possession misdemeanor 6 months variable

 

well at least they got texas right

 

Is there an updated map, rather than the one posted?

There are 13 states that have decriminalized medical marijuana in the states now, not six.

 

wiki

 

lol, positive consequences. As a reward for smoking you should get even more.