Thursday, December 13, 2012
Medicinal Cannabis freedom attacked by Sonoma County Board of Supervisors
2012-12-08 "Sonoma BOS Propose Changing Cannabis Guidelines This Tues. Dec 11" message from "canorml.org":
Join us at our "Cannabis in California: Ending the 100 Year War" conference in San Francisco January 26 & 27, 2013 Visit: [http://www.canorml.org/100years]
Some were unable to use the URL for the petition below. Try [http://www.change.org/petitions/sonoma-county-board-of-supervisors-take-no-action-on-the-recommendations-of-the-marijuana-ad-hoc-committee]
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Dear SAMM supporters,
The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors will be meeting next Tuesday, December 11, at 2:30 pm to vote on repealing the 2006 Resolution and thereby revert back to the state guidelines of 6 mature plants/12 immature plants. We would lose the right to cultivate in 100 square feet and possess 3 pounds of dried bud. We need YOUR HELP now as never before to preserve our guidelines, which were hard won and which have served as a model for other counties in California. We cannot and must not go back!
We need to show up in force at the Board meeting on Tuesday and let the Board know we are committed to standing up for our rights. They cannot vote this through on such short notice.
Please SIGN the online petition below. And write letters to the Supervisors---see link below to find their emails & phone numbers. You may also use the link below to access the County Staff Report.
The best way we can protest this is with our bodies. Let's pack the Board with HUNDREDS of supporters! The Board meets at 575 Administration Drive, Room 100A, Santa Rosa. We need to show that we are a force to be reckoned with.
The information below was written by Sarah Shrader of the Sonoma Chapter of Americans for Safe Access, ASA. Please forward to all your friends to get folks out to this important meeting next Tuesday and to sign the petition.
Thanks for your support, Kumari Sivadas & Mary Pat Jacobs, Sonoma Alliance for Medical Marijuana
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Attention Sonoma County Patients!
Act Now to STOP Your Medical Cannabis Rights from being VIOLATED!
On December 6th, 2012, it was made public that the Board of Supervisors would be adding an item to their December 11th meeting agenda that would dramatically change the legal landscape of local medical cannabis patients' rights. These recommendations have not been vetted by community members or industry stakeholders and five days is not enough time for the Board of Directors to elicit input from their constituents on this controversial public program.
We need to attend this meeting IN FORCE to show our elected public officials that we DO NOT SUPPORT these actions!
The Medicinal Marijuana Ad Hoc Committee recommends that the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors
(1) repeal their 2006 resolution allowing for local qualified patients to cultivate up to 30 plants, which would effectively reduce the allowable number to the state mandatory minimum of 6 plants,
(2) to establish an ordinance prohibiting the cultivation of marijuana in unoccupied residential buildings and
(3) direct staff to establish a Marijuana Task Force modeled on the Sonoma County Methamphetamine Task Force.
To see the counties staff report check out: [www.sonoma-county.granicus.com/GeneratedAgendaViewer.php?view_id=2&event_id=20]
We can create the effective and clearly united response by participating in ALL THREE of the following actions:
* ATTEND THE MEETING Tuesday December 11th we will be gathering at 2 PM at the Arlene Francis Center (99 west 6th street in Santa Rosa) to carpool over to the meeting with fellow community members and activists. We will get a chance to go over talking points & practice our speeches to Board of Supervisors.
* CONTACT YOUR SUPERVISORS at (707)565-2241 or reach out to them at their individual emails which are posted on the following page: [http://supervisors.sonoma-county.org/]
* SIGN THE PETITION on Change.org [www.change.org/petitions/sonoma-county-board-of-supervisors-take-no-action-on-the-recommendations-of-the-marijuana-ad-hoc-committee]. It is imperative that we take action now to protect patients' rights, safe access and responsible public process in Sonoma County!
For more information on participating in this community action please contact Sonoma ASA 707 595 0215 or sarah@safeaccesssnow.org
Monday, December 10, 2012
2012-12-10 "Raiding Consciousness: Why the War on Drugs Is a War on Human Nature"
by Lewis Lapham [http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175626/tomgram%3A_lewis_lapham%2C_drugs_and_the_national_security_state/]:
[This essay will appear in "Intoxication," the Winter 2012 issue of Lapham's Quarterly. This slightly adapted version is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.]
The question that tempts mankind to the use of substances controlled and uncontrolled is next of kin to Hamlet’s: to be, or not to be, someone or somewhere else. Escape from a grievous circumstance or the shambles of an unwanted self, the hope of finding at a higher altitude a new beginning or a better deal. Fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars; give me leave to drown my sorrow in a quart of gin; wine, dear boy, and truth.
That the consummations of the wish to shuffle off the mortal coil are as old as the world itself was the message brought by Abraham Lincoln to an Illinois temperance society in 1842. “I have not inquired at what period of time the use of intoxicating liquors commenced,” he said, “nor is it important to know.” It is sufficient to know that on first opening our eyes “upon the stage of existence,” we found “intoxicating liquor recognized by everybody, used by everybody, repudiated by nobody.”
The state of intoxication is a house with many mansions. Fourteen centuries before the birth of Christ, the Rigveda finds Hindu priests chanting hymns to a “drop of soma,” the wise and wisdom-loving plant from which was drawn juices distilled in sheep’s wool that “make us see far; make us richer, better.” Philosophers in ancient Greece rejoiced in the literal meaning of the word symposium, a “drinking together.” The Roman Stoic Seneca recommends the judicious embrace of Bacchus as a liberation of the mind “from its slavery to cares, emancipates it, invigorates it, and emboldens it for all its undertakings.”
Omar Khayyam, twelfth-century Persian mathematician and astronomer, drinks wine “because it is my solace,” allowing him to “divorce absolutely reason and religion.” Martin Luther, early father of the Protestant Reformation, in 1530 exhorts the faithful to “drink, and right freely,” because it is the devil who tells them not to. “One must always do what Satan forbids. What other cause do you think that I have for drinking so much strong drink, talking so freely, and making merry so often, except that I wish to mock and harass the devil who is wont to mock and harass me.”
Dr. Samuel Johnson, child of the Enlightenment, requires wine only when alone, “to get rid of myself -- to send myself away.” The French poet Charles Baudelaire, prodigal son of the Industrial Revolution, is less careful with his time. “One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing, the only question. Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please.”
My grandfather, Roger Lapham (1883–1966), was similarly disposed, his house in San Francisco the stage of existence upon which, at the age of seven in 1942, I first opened my eyes to the practice as old as the world itself. At the Christmas family gathering that year, Grandfather deemed any and all children present who were old enough to walk instead of toddle therefore old enough to sing a carol, recite a poem, and drink a cup of kindness made with brandy, cinnamon, and apples. To raise the spirit, welcome the arrival of our newborn Lord and Savior. Joy to the world, peace on earth, goodwill toward men.
“If You Meet, You Drink…” -
Thus introduced to intoxicating liquors under auspices both secular and sacred, the offering of alms for oblivion I took to be the custom of the country in which I had been born. In the 1940s as it was in the 1840s, as it had been ever since the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth laden with emboldening casks of wine and beer. The spirit of liberty is never far from the hope of metamorphosis or transformation, and the Americans from the beginning were drawn to the possibilities in the having of one more for the road. They formed their character in the settling of a fearful wilderness, and the history of the country could be written as a prolonged mocking and harassing of the devil by the drinking, “and right freely,” from whatever wise and wisdom-loving grain or grape came conveniently to hand.
The oceangoing Pilgrims in colonial Massachusetts and Rhode Island delighted in both the taste and trade in rum. The founders of the republic in Philadelphia in 1787 were in the habit of consuming prodigious quantities of liquor as an expression of their faith in their fellow men -- pots of ale or cider at midday, two or more bottles of claret at dinner followed by an amiable passing around the table of the Madeira.
Among the tobacco planters in Virginia, the moneychangers in New York, the stalwart yeomen in western Pennsylvania busy at the task of making whiskey, the maintaining of a high blood-alcohol level was the mark of civilized behavior. The lyrics of the Star-Spangled Banner were fitted to the melody of an eighteenth-century British tavern song. The excise taxes collected from the sale of liquor paid for the War of 1812, and by 1830 the tolling of the town bell (at 11 a.m., and again at 4 p.m.) announced the daily pauses for spirited refreshment.
Frederick Marryat, an English traveler to America in 1839, noted in his diary that the way the natives drank was “quite a caution... If you meet, you drink; if you part, you drink; if you make acquaintance, you drink; if you close a bargain, you drink; they quarrel in their drink, and they make it up with a drink. They drink, because it is hot; they drink, because it is cold.”
During what were known as the Gay Nineties, at the zenith of the country’s Gilded Age, Manhattan between the Battery and Forty-second Street glittered in the lights of 10,000 saloons issuing passports to the islands of the blessed and the rivers of forgetfulness. No travel plan or destination that couldn’t be accommodated, prices available on request. French champagne at Sherry’s Restaurant for the top-hatted Wall Street speculators celebrating the discoveries of El Dorado; shots of five-cent whiskey (said to taste “like a combination of kerosene oil, soft soap, alcohol, and the chemicals used in fire extinguishers”) for the unemployed foreign laborer sleeping in the gutters south of Canal Street. Who could say who was hoping to trade places with whom, the uptown swell intent upon becoming a noble savage, the downtown immigrant imagining himself dressed in fur and diamonds?
What else is America about if not the work of self-invention? Recognize the project as an always risky business, and it is the willingness to chance what dreams may come (west of the Alleghenies or on the further shores of consciousness) that gives to the American the distinguishing traits of character that the historian Daniel J. Boorstin, librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987, identified as those of the chronic revolutionary and the ever hopeful pilgrim. Boorstin drew the conclusion from his study of the American colonial experience: “No prudent man dared be too certain of exactly who he was or what he was about; everyone had to be prepared to become someone else. To be ready for such perilous transmigrations was to become an American.”
“There Are More Kicks to Be Had in a Good Case of Paralytic Polio” -
So too in the 1960s, the prudent becoming of an American involved perilous transmigrations, psychic, spiritual, and political. By no means certain who I was at the age of 24, I was prepared to make adjustments, but my one experiment with psychedelics in 1959 was a rub that promptly gave me pause.
Employed at the time as a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner, I was assigned to go with the poet Allen Ginsberg to the Stanford Research Institute there to take a trip on LSD. Social scientists opening the doors of perception at the behest of Aldous Huxley wished to compare the flight patterns of a Bohemian artist and a bourgeois philistine, and they had asked the paper’s literary editor to furnish one of each. We were placed in adjacent soundproofed rooms, both of us under the observation of men in white coats equipped with clipboards, the idea being that we would relay messages from the higher consciousness to the air-traffic controllers on the ground.
Liftoff was a blue pill taken on an empty stomach at 9 a.m., the trajectory a bell curve plotted over a distance of seven hours. By way of traveling companions we had been encouraged to bring music, in those days on vinyl LPs, of whatever kind moved us while on earth to register emotions approaching the sublime.
Together with Johann Sebastian Bach and the Modern Jazz Quartet, I attained what I’d been informed would be cruising altitude at noon. I neglected to bring a willing suspension of disbelief, and because I stubbornly resisted the sales pitch for the drug -- if you, O Wizard, can work wonders, prove to me the where and when and how and why -- I encountered heavy turbulence. Images inchoate and nonsensical, my arms and legs seemingly elongated and embalmed in grease, the sense of utter isolation while being gnawed by rats.
To the men in white I had nothing to report, not one word on either the going up and out or the coming back and down. I never learned what Ginsberg had to say. Whatever it was, I wasn’t interested, and I left the building before he had returned from what by then I knew to be a dead-end sleep.
My long-standing acquaintance with alcohol was for the most part cordial. Usually when I drank too much, I could guess why I did so, the objective being to murder a state of consciousness that I didn’t have the courage to sustain -- a fear of heights, which sometimes during the carnival of the 1960s accompanied my attempts to transform the bourgeois journalist into an avant-garde novelist. The stepped-up ambition was a commonplace among the would-be William Faulkners of my generation; nearly always it resulted in commercial failure and literary embarrassment.
I didn’t grow a beard or move to Vermont, but every now and then I hit upon a run of words that I could mistake for art, and I would find myself intoxicated by what Emily Dickinson knew to be “a liquor never brewed/from Tankards scooped in Pearl.” The neuroscientists understand the encounter with the ineffable as an “endorphin high,” the outrageously fortunate mixing of the chemicals in the brain when it is being put to imaginative and creative use.
On being surprised by a joy so astonishingly sweet, I assumed that it must be forbidden, and if by the light of day I’d come too close to leaning against the sun with seraphs swinging snowy hats, by nightfall I felt bound to check into the nearest cage, drunkenness being the one most conveniently at hand. Around midnight at Elaine’s, a saloon on Second Avenue in Manhattan that in those days catered to a clientele of actors, writers, and other assorted con artists playing characters of their own invention, I could count on the company of fellow travelers outward or inward bound on the roads of perilous transmigration. No matter what their reason for a timely departure -- whether to obliterate the fear of failure, delete the thought of wife and home, reconfigure a mistaken identity, project into the future the birth of an imaginary self -- all present were engaged in some sort of struggle between the force of life and the will to death. Thanatos and Eros seated across from each other over the backgammon board on table four, the onlookers suspending the judgment of ridicule and extending the courtesy of tolerance.
Alcohol serves at the pleasure of the players on both sides of the game, its virtues those indicated by Seneca and Martin Luther, its vices those that the novelist Marguerite Duras likens, as did Hamlet, to the sleep of death: “Drinking isn’t necessarily the same as wanting to die. But you can’t drink without thinking you’re killing yourself.” Alcohol’s job is to replace creation with an illusion that is barren. “The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.”
The observation is in the same despairing minor key as Billie Holiday’s riff on heroin: “If you think dope is for kicks and thrills you’re out of your mind. There are more kicks to be had in a good case of paralytic polio and living in an iron lung. If you think you need stuff to play music or sing, you’re crazy. It can fix you so you can’t play nothing or sing nothing.” She goes on to say that in Britain the authorities at least have the decency to treat addiction as a public-health problem, but in America, “if you go to the doctor, he’s liable to slam the door in your face and call the cops.”
Humankind’s thirst for intoxicants is unquenchable, but to criminalize it, as Lincoln reminded the Illinois temperance society, reinforces the clinging to the addiction; to think otherwise would be “to expect a reversal of human nature, which is God’s decree and never can be reversed.” The injuries inflicted by alcohol don’t follow “from the use of a bad thing, but from the abuse of a very good thing.” The victims are “to be pitied and compassionated,” their failings treated “as a misfortune, and not as a crime or even as a disgrace.”
The War on Drugs as a War Against Human Nature -
Whether declared by church or state, the war against human nature is by definition lost. The Puritan inspectors of souls in seventeenth-century New England deplored even the tentative embrace of Bacchus as “great licentiousness,” the faithful “pouring out themselves in all profaneness,” but the record doesn’t show a falling off of attendance at Boston’s eighteenth-century inns and taverns. The laws prohibiting the sale and manufacture of alcohol in the 1920s discovered in the mark of sin the evidence of crime, but the attempt to sustain the allegation proved to be as ineffectual as it was destructive of the country’s life and liberty.
Instead of resurrecting from the pit a body politic of newly risen saints, Prohibition guaranteed the health and welfare of society’s avowed enemies. The organized-crime syndicates established on the delivery of bootleg whiskey evolved into multinational trade associations commanding the respect that comes with revenues estimated at $2 billion per annum. In 1930 alone, Al Capone’s ill-gotten gains amounted to $100 million.
So again with the war that America has been waging for the last 100 years against the use of drugs deemed to be illegal. The war cannot be won, but in the meantime, at a cost of $20 billion a year, it facilitates the transformation of what was once a freedom-loving republic into a freedom-fearing national security state.
The policies of zero tolerance equip local and federal law-enforcement with increasingly autocratic powers of coercion and surveillance (the right to invade anybody’s privacy, bend the rules of evidence, search barns, stop motorists, inspect bank records, tap phones) and spread the stain of moral pestilence to ever larger numbers of people assumed to be infected with reefer madness -- anarchists and cheap Chinese labor at the turn of the twentieth century, known homosexuals and suspected Communists in the 1920s, hippies and anti-Vietnam War protestors in the 1960s, nowadays young black men sentenced to long-term imprisonment for possession of a few grams of short-term disembodiment.
If what was at issue was a concern for people trapped in the jail cells of addiction, the keepers of the nation’s conscience would be better advised to address the conditions -- poverty, lack of opportunity and education, racial discrimination -- from which drugs provide an illusory means of escape. That they are not so advised stands as proven by their fond endorsement of the more expensive ventures into the realms of virtual reality. Our pharmaceutical industries produce a cornucopia of prescription drugs -- eye-opening, stupefying, mood-swinging, game-changing, anxiety-alleviating, performance-enhancing -- currently at a global market-value of more than $300 billion.
Add the time-honored demand for alcohol, the modernist taste for cocaine, and the uses, as both stimulant and narcotic, of tobacco, coffee, sugar, and pornography, and the annual mustering of consummations devoutly to be wished comes to the cost of more than $1.5 trillion. The taking arms against a sea of troubles is an expenditure that dwarfs the appropriation for the military budget.
Given the American antecedents both metaphysical and commercial -- Thomas Paine drank, “and right freely”; in 1910, the federal government received 71% of its internal revenue from taxes paid on the sale and manufacture of alcohol -- it is little wonder that the sons of liberty now lead the world in the consumption of better living through chemistry. The new and improved forms of self-invention fit the question -- to be, or not to be -- to any and all occasions.
For the aging Wall Street speculator stepping out for an evening to squander his investment in Viagra. For the damsel in distress shopping around for a nose like the one seen advertised in a painting by Botticelli. For the distracted child depending on a therapeutic jolt of Adderall to learn to read the Constitution. For the stationary herds of industrial-strength cows so heavily doped with bovine growth hormone that they require massive infusions of antibiotic to survive the otherwise lethal atmospheres of their breeding pens. Visionary risk-takers, one and all, willing to chance what dreams may come on the way West to an all-night pharmacy.
The war against human nature strengthens the fear of one’s fellow man. The red, white, and blue pills sell the hope of heaven made with artificial sweeteners.
[This essay will appear in "Intoxication," the Winter 2012 issue of Lapham's Quarterly. This slightly adapted version is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.]
The question that tempts mankind to the use of substances controlled and uncontrolled is next of kin to Hamlet’s: to be, or not to be, someone or somewhere else. Escape from a grievous circumstance or the shambles of an unwanted self, the hope of finding at a higher altitude a new beginning or a better deal. Fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars; give me leave to drown my sorrow in a quart of gin; wine, dear boy, and truth.
That the consummations of the wish to shuffle off the mortal coil are as old as the world itself was the message brought by Abraham Lincoln to an Illinois temperance society in 1842. “I have not inquired at what period of time the use of intoxicating liquors commenced,” he said, “nor is it important to know.” It is sufficient to know that on first opening our eyes “upon the stage of existence,” we found “intoxicating liquor recognized by everybody, used by everybody, repudiated by nobody.”
The state of intoxication is a house with many mansions. Fourteen centuries before the birth of Christ, the Rigveda finds Hindu priests chanting hymns to a “drop of soma,” the wise and wisdom-loving plant from which was drawn juices distilled in sheep’s wool that “make us see far; make us richer, better.” Philosophers in ancient Greece rejoiced in the literal meaning of the word symposium, a “drinking together.” The Roman Stoic Seneca recommends the judicious embrace of Bacchus as a liberation of the mind “from its slavery to cares, emancipates it, invigorates it, and emboldens it for all its undertakings.”
Omar Khayyam, twelfth-century Persian mathematician and astronomer, drinks wine “because it is my solace,” allowing him to “divorce absolutely reason and religion.” Martin Luther, early father of the Protestant Reformation, in 1530 exhorts the faithful to “drink, and right freely,” because it is the devil who tells them not to. “One must always do what Satan forbids. What other cause do you think that I have for drinking so much strong drink, talking so freely, and making merry so often, except that I wish to mock and harass the devil who is wont to mock and harass me.”
Dr. Samuel Johnson, child of the Enlightenment, requires wine only when alone, “to get rid of myself -- to send myself away.” The French poet Charles Baudelaire, prodigal son of the Industrial Revolution, is less careful with his time. “One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing, the only question. Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please.”
My grandfather, Roger Lapham (1883–1966), was similarly disposed, his house in San Francisco the stage of existence upon which, at the age of seven in 1942, I first opened my eyes to the practice as old as the world itself. At the Christmas family gathering that year, Grandfather deemed any and all children present who were old enough to walk instead of toddle therefore old enough to sing a carol, recite a poem, and drink a cup of kindness made with brandy, cinnamon, and apples. To raise the spirit, welcome the arrival of our newborn Lord and Savior. Joy to the world, peace on earth, goodwill toward men.
“If You Meet, You Drink…” -
Thus introduced to intoxicating liquors under auspices both secular and sacred, the offering of alms for oblivion I took to be the custom of the country in which I had been born. In the 1940s as it was in the 1840s, as it had been ever since the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth laden with emboldening casks of wine and beer. The spirit of liberty is never far from the hope of metamorphosis or transformation, and the Americans from the beginning were drawn to the possibilities in the having of one more for the road. They formed their character in the settling of a fearful wilderness, and the history of the country could be written as a prolonged mocking and harassing of the devil by the drinking, “and right freely,” from whatever wise and wisdom-loving grain or grape came conveniently to hand.
The oceangoing Pilgrims in colonial Massachusetts and Rhode Island delighted in both the taste and trade in rum. The founders of the republic in Philadelphia in 1787 were in the habit of consuming prodigious quantities of liquor as an expression of their faith in their fellow men -- pots of ale or cider at midday, two or more bottles of claret at dinner followed by an amiable passing around the table of the Madeira.
Among the tobacco planters in Virginia, the moneychangers in New York, the stalwart yeomen in western Pennsylvania busy at the task of making whiskey, the maintaining of a high blood-alcohol level was the mark of civilized behavior. The lyrics of the Star-Spangled Banner were fitted to the melody of an eighteenth-century British tavern song. The excise taxes collected from the sale of liquor paid for the War of 1812, and by 1830 the tolling of the town bell (at 11 a.m., and again at 4 p.m.) announced the daily pauses for spirited refreshment.
Frederick Marryat, an English traveler to America in 1839, noted in his diary that the way the natives drank was “quite a caution... If you meet, you drink; if you part, you drink; if you make acquaintance, you drink; if you close a bargain, you drink; they quarrel in their drink, and they make it up with a drink. They drink, because it is hot; they drink, because it is cold.”
During what were known as the Gay Nineties, at the zenith of the country’s Gilded Age, Manhattan between the Battery and Forty-second Street glittered in the lights of 10,000 saloons issuing passports to the islands of the blessed and the rivers of forgetfulness. No travel plan or destination that couldn’t be accommodated, prices available on request. French champagne at Sherry’s Restaurant for the top-hatted Wall Street speculators celebrating the discoveries of El Dorado; shots of five-cent whiskey (said to taste “like a combination of kerosene oil, soft soap, alcohol, and the chemicals used in fire extinguishers”) for the unemployed foreign laborer sleeping in the gutters south of Canal Street. Who could say who was hoping to trade places with whom, the uptown swell intent upon becoming a noble savage, the downtown immigrant imagining himself dressed in fur and diamonds?
What else is America about if not the work of self-invention? Recognize the project as an always risky business, and it is the willingness to chance what dreams may come (west of the Alleghenies or on the further shores of consciousness) that gives to the American the distinguishing traits of character that the historian Daniel J. Boorstin, librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987, identified as those of the chronic revolutionary and the ever hopeful pilgrim. Boorstin drew the conclusion from his study of the American colonial experience: “No prudent man dared be too certain of exactly who he was or what he was about; everyone had to be prepared to become someone else. To be ready for such perilous transmigrations was to become an American.”
“There Are More Kicks to Be Had in a Good Case of Paralytic Polio” -
So too in the 1960s, the prudent becoming of an American involved perilous transmigrations, psychic, spiritual, and political. By no means certain who I was at the age of 24, I was prepared to make adjustments, but my one experiment with psychedelics in 1959 was a rub that promptly gave me pause.
Employed at the time as a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner, I was assigned to go with the poet Allen Ginsberg to the Stanford Research Institute there to take a trip on LSD. Social scientists opening the doors of perception at the behest of Aldous Huxley wished to compare the flight patterns of a Bohemian artist and a bourgeois philistine, and they had asked the paper’s literary editor to furnish one of each. We were placed in adjacent soundproofed rooms, both of us under the observation of men in white coats equipped with clipboards, the idea being that we would relay messages from the higher consciousness to the air-traffic controllers on the ground.
Liftoff was a blue pill taken on an empty stomach at 9 a.m., the trajectory a bell curve plotted over a distance of seven hours. By way of traveling companions we had been encouraged to bring music, in those days on vinyl LPs, of whatever kind moved us while on earth to register emotions approaching the sublime.
Together with Johann Sebastian Bach and the Modern Jazz Quartet, I attained what I’d been informed would be cruising altitude at noon. I neglected to bring a willing suspension of disbelief, and because I stubbornly resisted the sales pitch for the drug -- if you, O Wizard, can work wonders, prove to me the where and when and how and why -- I encountered heavy turbulence. Images inchoate and nonsensical, my arms and legs seemingly elongated and embalmed in grease, the sense of utter isolation while being gnawed by rats.
To the men in white I had nothing to report, not one word on either the going up and out or the coming back and down. I never learned what Ginsberg had to say. Whatever it was, I wasn’t interested, and I left the building before he had returned from what by then I knew to be a dead-end sleep.
My long-standing acquaintance with alcohol was for the most part cordial. Usually when I drank too much, I could guess why I did so, the objective being to murder a state of consciousness that I didn’t have the courage to sustain -- a fear of heights, which sometimes during the carnival of the 1960s accompanied my attempts to transform the bourgeois journalist into an avant-garde novelist. The stepped-up ambition was a commonplace among the would-be William Faulkners of my generation; nearly always it resulted in commercial failure and literary embarrassment.
I didn’t grow a beard or move to Vermont, but every now and then I hit upon a run of words that I could mistake for art, and I would find myself intoxicated by what Emily Dickinson knew to be “a liquor never brewed/from Tankards scooped in Pearl.” The neuroscientists understand the encounter with the ineffable as an “endorphin high,” the outrageously fortunate mixing of the chemicals in the brain when it is being put to imaginative and creative use.
On being surprised by a joy so astonishingly sweet, I assumed that it must be forbidden, and if by the light of day I’d come too close to leaning against the sun with seraphs swinging snowy hats, by nightfall I felt bound to check into the nearest cage, drunkenness being the one most conveniently at hand. Around midnight at Elaine’s, a saloon on Second Avenue in Manhattan that in those days catered to a clientele of actors, writers, and other assorted con artists playing characters of their own invention, I could count on the company of fellow travelers outward or inward bound on the roads of perilous transmigration. No matter what their reason for a timely departure -- whether to obliterate the fear of failure, delete the thought of wife and home, reconfigure a mistaken identity, project into the future the birth of an imaginary self -- all present were engaged in some sort of struggle between the force of life and the will to death. Thanatos and Eros seated across from each other over the backgammon board on table four, the onlookers suspending the judgment of ridicule and extending the courtesy of tolerance.
Alcohol serves at the pleasure of the players on both sides of the game, its virtues those indicated by Seneca and Martin Luther, its vices those that the novelist Marguerite Duras likens, as did Hamlet, to the sleep of death: “Drinking isn’t necessarily the same as wanting to die. But you can’t drink without thinking you’re killing yourself.” Alcohol’s job is to replace creation with an illusion that is barren. “The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.”
The observation is in the same despairing minor key as Billie Holiday’s riff on heroin: “If you think dope is for kicks and thrills you’re out of your mind. There are more kicks to be had in a good case of paralytic polio and living in an iron lung. If you think you need stuff to play music or sing, you’re crazy. It can fix you so you can’t play nothing or sing nothing.” She goes on to say that in Britain the authorities at least have the decency to treat addiction as a public-health problem, but in America, “if you go to the doctor, he’s liable to slam the door in your face and call the cops.”
Humankind’s thirst for intoxicants is unquenchable, but to criminalize it, as Lincoln reminded the Illinois temperance society, reinforces the clinging to the addiction; to think otherwise would be “to expect a reversal of human nature, which is God’s decree and never can be reversed.” The injuries inflicted by alcohol don’t follow “from the use of a bad thing, but from the abuse of a very good thing.” The victims are “to be pitied and compassionated,” their failings treated “as a misfortune, and not as a crime or even as a disgrace.”
The War on Drugs as a War Against Human Nature -
Whether declared by church or state, the war against human nature is by definition lost. The Puritan inspectors of souls in seventeenth-century New England deplored even the tentative embrace of Bacchus as “great licentiousness,” the faithful “pouring out themselves in all profaneness,” but the record doesn’t show a falling off of attendance at Boston’s eighteenth-century inns and taverns. The laws prohibiting the sale and manufacture of alcohol in the 1920s discovered in the mark of sin the evidence of crime, but the attempt to sustain the allegation proved to be as ineffectual as it was destructive of the country’s life and liberty.
Instead of resurrecting from the pit a body politic of newly risen saints, Prohibition guaranteed the health and welfare of society’s avowed enemies. The organized-crime syndicates established on the delivery of bootleg whiskey evolved into multinational trade associations commanding the respect that comes with revenues estimated at $2 billion per annum. In 1930 alone, Al Capone’s ill-gotten gains amounted to $100 million.
So again with the war that America has been waging for the last 100 years against the use of drugs deemed to be illegal. The war cannot be won, but in the meantime, at a cost of $20 billion a year, it facilitates the transformation of what was once a freedom-loving republic into a freedom-fearing national security state.
The policies of zero tolerance equip local and federal law-enforcement with increasingly autocratic powers of coercion and surveillance (the right to invade anybody’s privacy, bend the rules of evidence, search barns, stop motorists, inspect bank records, tap phones) and spread the stain of moral pestilence to ever larger numbers of people assumed to be infected with reefer madness -- anarchists and cheap Chinese labor at the turn of the twentieth century, known homosexuals and suspected Communists in the 1920s, hippies and anti-Vietnam War protestors in the 1960s, nowadays young black men sentenced to long-term imprisonment for possession of a few grams of short-term disembodiment.
If what was at issue was a concern for people trapped in the jail cells of addiction, the keepers of the nation’s conscience would be better advised to address the conditions -- poverty, lack of opportunity and education, racial discrimination -- from which drugs provide an illusory means of escape. That they are not so advised stands as proven by their fond endorsement of the more expensive ventures into the realms of virtual reality. Our pharmaceutical industries produce a cornucopia of prescription drugs -- eye-opening, stupefying, mood-swinging, game-changing, anxiety-alleviating, performance-enhancing -- currently at a global market-value of more than $300 billion.
Add the time-honored demand for alcohol, the modernist taste for cocaine, and the uses, as both stimulant and narcotic, of tobacco, coffee, sugar, and pornography, and the annual mustering of consummations devoutly to be wished comes to the cost of more than $1.5 trillion. The taking arms against a sea of troubles is an expenditure that dwarfs the appropriation for the military budget.
Given the American antecedents both metaphysical and commercial -- Thomas Paine drank, “and right freely”; in 1910, the federal government received 71% of its internal revenue from taxes paid on the sale and manufacture of alcohol -- it is little wonder that the sons of liberty now lead the world in the consumption of better living through chemistry. The new and improved forms of self-invention fit the question -- to be, or not to be -- to any and all occasions.
For the aging Wall Street speculator stepping out for an evening to squander his investment in Viagra. For the damsel in distress shopping around for a nose like the one seen advertised in a painting by Botticelli. For the distracted child depending on a therapeutic jolt of Adderall to learn to read the Constitution. For the stationary herds of industrial-strength cows so heavily doped with bovine growth hormone that they require massive infusions of antibiotic to survive the otherwise lethal atmospheres of their breeding pens. Visionary risk-takers, one and all, willing to chance what dreams may come on the way West to an all-night pharmacy.
The war against human nature strengthens the fear of one’s fellow man. The red, white, and blue pills sell the hope of heaven made with artificial sweeteners.
Monday, December 3, 2012
Chia seeds
Chia seeds are more or less flavorless, and can be added to yogurts, wholesome-food bars and fruit salads.
2012-12-02 "Are Chia Seeds a Superfood?" by Jan Cho[http://www.care2.com/causes/are-chia-seeds-a-superfood.html]:
A staple of the pre-Columbian Mayan and Aztec diets, chia seeds are making a comeback as the latest so-called superfood.
Loaded with omega-3′s, antioxidants, fiber, calcium, protein and a number of other vitamins and minerals, chia seeds are about as nutrient-dense as you can imagine a food to be. They’re said to be able to aid with weight loss, control blood sugar and reduce the risk of heart disease, though none of these claims have been backed up by scientific evidence.
In “Born to Run,” author Christopher McDougall attests to the seeds’ ability to boost stamina and energy, describing how ancient Aztecs chomped on the seeds as they made their conquests and how the Tarahumara Indians today use the seeds to fuel long-distance runs barefoot. “Among Wall Street’s trading desks and bullpens,” Bloomberg Businessweek adds [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-24/chia-seeds-wall-streets-stimulant-of-choice], “chia seeds are becoming the stimulant of choice” — “healthier than coffee, cheaper (and obviously more legal) than cocaine, and less juvenile than a 5-hour Energy drink.”
So the trend has set in and the craze will ensue. Whole and ground chia seeds are being added to smoothies, puddings, soups, cereals and a variety of baked goods. It was only a matter of time before they were co-opted by the food industry. Dole, according to a recent New York Times article [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/business/chia-seeds-gain-popularity-for-nutritional-benefits.html?pagewanted=1&hp&_r=0], “chose chia as the first ingredient it would promote in its new Nutrition Plus line of products, which aim to provide a functional benefit to consumers.” The seeds have entered the broader market and can now be found in many mainstream grocery stores. Demand for chia products has grown fivefold this past year, says John Roulac, founder of Nutiva, which sells organic chia seeds.
But are chia seeds really a superfood? Are they any more “super” than the blueberries, almonds and acai berries of yesteryear? The truth of it is, as Michael P. Hirsch, vice president of the company that sells Chia Pets, said, “Everybody is looking at this because everybody is always looking for something new.”
In reality, the hype over chia seeds as a superfood isn’t about health. It’s about marketing and about marketers having found the next nutritional “it” product to peddle. Consider acai, which “became one of the fastest-growing foods in history, billed as a miracle cure for, among other things, obesity, attention-deficit disorder, autism, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, and erectile dysfunction,” as reported in the New Yorker last year. But these claims now seem farfetched, and acai has lost a lot of its luster. The fruit hovers in an “uneasy limbo,” wrote John Colapinto for the New Yorker — “not quite written off as yesterday’s news but perilously close.” It’s telling that the leading acai juice company in the U.S. hired a former Coca-Cola executive as its new marketing director to revive demand for the fruit.
In short, “superfoods” are a marketing conceit. Choosing what to eat for health entails simply choosing food that’s real and whole. In fact, I can’t think of any real food that couldn’t also be or hasn’t already been touted as a superfood — whether it’s broccoli or apples or salmon or spinach or walnuts or beans or tofu. Today it just happens to be chia seeds. They’re new, they’re exotic, they have a good back story and they’re extremely versatile. They’re a marketer’s dream.
2012-05-24 "Chia Seeds, Wall Street's Stimulant of Choice" by David Sax
[http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-24/chia-seeds-wall-streets-stimulant-of-choice]:
Christine Kenney, a triathlete who works the equity capital markets execution desk at Citigroup (C) in Manhattan, starts every morning at work with a bowl of low-fat yogurt, honey, and a heap of chia seeds. Throughout the day she subsists on chia snack bars. “It’s better for my job because I’m not supposed to be off the desk very much,” she says, noting how she’s gotten most of the co-workers from her desk hooked on the seeds. “There’s other seeds out there that are nutritious, but this is the best. It’s the alpha seed.”
Among Wall Street’s trading desks and bullpens, chia seeds are becoming the stimulant of choice. Healthier than coffee, cheaper (and obviously more legal) than cocaine, and less juvenile than a 5-hour Energy drink, chia has undergone a total metamorphosis from 1980s punchline (Chia Pet’s “ch-ch-ch-chia” jingle still haunts Gen Xers) to superfood.
Credit for chia’s second coming belongs partly to the 2009 bestselling book Born to Run by Christopher McDougall, about a remote Mexican tribe of marathon-running Tarahumara Indians who have been bullish on chia since Aztec days—eating it ground, mixed into drinks, or raw. After reading it, Dan Gluck and Nick Morris, a manager and trader at a New York hedge fund, began supplementing their post-workout breakfasts with chia seeds, rich in protein, fiber, and omega-3 fatty acids. They spread the chia gospel to friends in finance and soon had a following. In 2011 they launched Health Warrior, which markets chia seeds and snack bars boasting chia’s purported benefits, from sustained energy to enhanced focus and better digestion.
While research on those benefits is relatively sparse, Wall Street chia heads aren’t waiting for further studies. “Instead of snacking on the trading desk, I will make a chia smoothie or grab one of their Health Warrior Chia Bars,” says Jason Feinberg, managing director of U.S. equity trading at Barclays Capital (BCS). Shane Emmett, Health Warrior’s chief executive officer, says an investment bank and a hedge fund have begun buying in bulk. “I’m sure the ‘warrior’ speaks a little bit to the aggressive nature of folks on the Street,” he says.
2012-12-02 "Are Chia Seeds a Superfood?" by Jan Cho[http://www.care2.com/causes/are-chia-seeds-a-superfood.html]:
A staple of the pre-Columbian Mayan and Aztec diets, chia seeds are making a comeback as the latest so-called superfood.
Loaded with omega-3′s, antioxidants, fiber, calcium, protein and a number of other vitamins and minerals, chia seeds are about as nutrient-dense as you can imagine a food to be. They’re said to be able to aid with weight loss, control blood sugar and reduce the risk of heart disease, though none of these claims have been backed up by scientific evidence.
In “Born to Run,” author Christopher McDougall attests to the seeds’ ability to boost stamina and energy, describing how ancient Aztecs chomped on the seeds as they made their conquests and how the Tarahumara Indians today use the seeds to fuel long-distance runs barefoot. “Among Wall Street’s trading desks and bullpens,” Bloomberg Businessweek adds [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-24/chia-seeds-wall-streets-stimulant-of-choice], “chia seeds are becoming the stimulant of choice” — “healthier than coffee, cheaper (and obviously more legal) than cocaine, and less juvenile than a 5-hour Energy drink.”
So the trend has set in and the craze will ensue. Whole and ground chia seeds are being added to smoothies, puddings, soups, cereals and a variety of baked goods. It was only a matter of time before they were co-opted by the food industry. Dole, according to a recent New York Times article [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/business/chia-seeds-gain-popularity-for-nutritional-benefits.html?pagewanted=1&hp&_r=0], “chose chia as the first ingredient it would promote in its new Nutrition Plus line of products, which aim to provide a functional benefit to consumers.” The seeds have entered the broader market and can now be found in many mainstream grocery stores. Demand for chia products has grown fivefold this past year, says John Roulac, founder of Nutiva, which sells organic chia seeds.
But are chia seeds really a superfood? Are they any more “super” than the blueberries, almonds and acai berries of yesteryear? The truth of it is, as Michael P. Hirsch, vice president of the company that sells Chia Pets, said, “Everybody is looking at this because everybody is always looking for something new.”
In reality, the hype over chia seeds as a superfood isn’t about health. It’s about marketing and about marketers having found the next nutritional “it” product to peddle. Consider acai, which “became one of the fastest-growing foods in history, billed as a miracle cure for, among other things, obesity, attention-deficit disorder, autism, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, and erectile dysfunction,” as reported in the New Yorker last year. But these claims now seem farfetched, and acai has lost a lot of its luster. The fruit hovers in an “uneasy limbo,” wrote John Colapinto for the New Yorker — “not quite written off as yesterday’s news but perilously close.” It’s telling that the leading acai juice company in the U.S. hired a former Coca-Cola executive as its new marketing director to revive demand for the fruit.
In short, “superfoods” are a marketing conceit. Choosing what to eat for health entails simply choosing food that’s real and whole. In fact, I can’t think of any real food that couldn’t also be or hasn’t already been touted as a superfood — whether it’s broccoli or apples or salmon or spinach or walnuts or beans or tofu. Today it just happens to be chia seeds. They’re new, they’re exotic, they have a good back story and they’re extremely versatile. They’re a marketer’s dream.
2012-05-24 "Chia Seeds, Wall Street's Stimulant of Choice" by David Sax
[http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-24/chia-seeds-wall-streets-stimulant-of-choice]:
Christine Kenney, a triathlete who works the equity capital markets execution desk at Citigroup (C) in Manhattan, starts every morning at work with a bowl of low-fat yogurt, honey, and a heap of chia seeds. Throughout the day she subsists on chia snack bars. “It’s better for my job because I’m not supposed to be off the desk very much,” she says, noting how she’s gotten most of the co-workers from her desk hooked on the seeds. “There’s other seeds out there that are nutritious, but this is the best. It’s the alpha seed.”
Among Wall Street’s trading desks and bullpens, chia seeds are becoming the stimulant of choice. Healthier than coffee, cheaper (and obviously more legal) than cocaine, and less juvenile than a 5-hour Energy drink, chia has undergone a total metamorphosis from 1980s punchline (Chia Pet’s “ch-ch-ch-chia” jingle still haunts Gen Xers) to superfood.
Credit for chia’s second coming belongs partly to the 2009 bestselling book Born to Run by Christopher McDougall, about a remote Mexican tribe of marathon-running Tarahumara Indians who have been bullish on chia since Aztec days—eating it ground, mixed into drinks, or raw. After reading it, Dan Gluck and Nick Morris, a manager and trader at a New York hedge fund, began supplementing their post-workout breakfasts with chia seeds, rich in protein, fiber, and omega-3 fatty acids. They spread the chia gospel to friends in finance and soon had a following. In 2011 they launched Health Warrior, which markets chia seeds and snack bars boasting chia’s purported benefits, from sustained energy to enhanced focus and better digestion.
While research on those benefits is relatively sparse, Wall Street chia heads aren’t waiting for further studies. “Instead of snacking on the trading desk, I will make a chia smoothie or grab one of their Health Warrior Chia Bars,” says Jason Feinberg, managing director of U.S. equity trading at Barclays Capital (BCS). Shane Emmett, Health Warrior’s chief executive officer, says an investment bank and a hedge fund have begun buying in bulk. “I’m sure the ‘warrior’ speaks a little bit to the aggressive nature of folks on the Street,” he says.
Thursday, November 29, 2012
2012-11-29 "Banned Berkeley medical marijuana collective may move to Vallejo"
by Doug Oakley /MediaNews Group [http://www.timesheraldonline.com/news/ci_22089425/banned-berkeley-medical-marijuana-collective-may-move-vallejo]:
BERKELEY -- The owner of a medical marijuana collective whose operation was declared a nuisance and ordered to close by the City Council on Tuesday night said he will take his business to Vallejo.
Without comment, the council unanimously declared Perfect Plants Patients Group a nuisance after a Nov. 11 hearing in which it said the collective was operating illegally.
Eric Thomas, president of Perfect Plants Patients Group at 2840 Sacramento Ave., said he already runs one collective in Vallejo and will try to open a second one there because the rules governing medical marijuana are easier.
Vallejo, which housed at best count a couple dozen store-front dispensaries by early this year, has no medical marijuana sales permitting process, nor a specific ban on it. Since February, several dispensaries have been shut down -- some repeatedly -- through police raids, even as the city has begun taxing medical marijuana sales. A city effort in recent years to begin regulating and permitting the industry foundered over legal concerns.
A Vallejo police spokesman had no specific response to Thomas' stated plan, saying only that the department plans to "continue to investigate illegal storefront dispensaries that are open in Vallejo, as time permits."
"It looks like it will be a losing battle for us to stay open in Berkeley unless they are willing to rewrite the rules concerning collectives," Thomas said Wednesday.
But a member of the Sacramento Street Improvement Association who lives around the corner and who threatened to sue the group over allegations it brought crime, trash and street drug sales is dubious. He said he won't be convinced Thomas is gone until he sees the space empty.
"The sign is still up, everything is still in the office," Ryan Kerian said. "To me, they are still operating. We want the city to get a legal order telling them to vacate."
A number of issues contributed to the City Council action including the fact that Perfect Plants was a collective operating in a commercial area, where only licensed dispensaries are permitted to sell medical marijuana in Berkeley. The three licenses in Berkeley are already taken. Medical marijuana collectives, generally smaller, are allowed in residential areas in Berkeley.
In addition, the city contended the collective was violating a rule that medical marijuana outlets need to be more than 600 feet from any school. Longfellow Middle School is nearby.
Thomas said in the 15 months he was in business in Berkeley he had 4,000 members and was selling about $15,000 to $20,000 worth of marijuana every two months. A robbery in April cut revenues, he said.
Thomas said he has paid only $2,000 out of $25,000 in fines levied against him by the city over the last year. He said he is disappointed over the City Council action.
"Berkeley had a chance to step up and be leaders in medical marijuana," Thomas said, "but they've fallen behind over politics and money."
BERKELEY -- The owner of a medical marijuana collective whose operation was declared a nuisance and ordered to close by the City Council on Tuesday night said he will take his business to Vallejo.
Without comment, the council unanimously declared Perfect Plants Patients Group a nuisance after a Nov. 11 hearing in which it said the collective was operating illegally.
Eric Thomas, president of Perfect Plants Patients Group at 2840 Sacramento Ave., said he already runs one collective in Vallejo and will try to open a second one there because the rules governing medical marijuana are easier.
Vallejo, which housed at best count a couple dozen store-front dispensaries by early this year, has no medical marijuana sales permitting process, nor a specific ban on it. Since February, several dispensaries have been shut down -- some repeatedly -- through police raids, even as the city has begun taxing medical marijuana sales. A city effort in recent years to begin regulating and permitting the industry foundered over legal concerns.
A Vallejo police spokesman had no specific response to Thomas' stated plan, saying only that the department plans to "continue to investigate illegal storefront dispensaries that are open in Vallejo, as time permits."
"It looks like it will be a losing battle for us to stay open in Berkeley unless they are willing to rewrite the rules concerning collectives," Thomas said Wednesday.
But a member of the Sacramento Street Improvement Association who lives around the corner and who threatened to sue the group over allegations it brought crime, trash and street drug sales is dubious. He said he won't be convinced Thomas is gone until he sees the space empty.
"The sign is still up, everything is still in the office," Ryan Kerian said. "To me, they are still operating. We want the city to get a legal order telling them to vacate."
A number of issues contributed to the City Council action including the fact that Perfect Plants was a collective operating in a commercial area, where only licensed dispensaries are permitted to sell medical marijuana in Berkeley. The three licenses in Berkeley are already taken. Medical marijuana collectives, generally smaller, are allowed in residential areas in Berkeley.
In addition, the city contended the collective was violating a rule that medical marijuana outlets need to be more than 600 feet from any school. Longfellow Middle School is nearby.
Thomas said in the 15 months he was in business in Berkeley he had 4,000 members and was selling about $15,000 to $20,000 worth of marijuana every two months. A robbery in April cut revenues, he said.
Thomas said he has paid only $2,000 out of $25,000 in fines levied against him by the city over the last year. He said he is disappointed over the City Council action.
"Berkeley had a chance to step up and be leaders in medical marijuana," Thomas said, "but they've fallen behind over politics and money."
Monday, November 26, 2012
Cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants
[http://www.google.com/patents/US6630507]:
Cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants
Aidan J. Hampson et al
Patent number: 6630507
Filing date: Feb 2, 2001
Issue date: Oct 7, 2003
Application number: 09/674,028
Cannabinoids have been found to have antioxidant properties, unrelated to NMDA receptor antagonism. This new found property makes cannabinoids useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The cannabinoids are found to have particular application as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and HIV dementia. Nonpsychoactive cannabinoids, such as cannabidoil, are particularly advantageous to use because they avoid toxicity that is encountered with psychoactive cannabinoids at high doses useful in the method of the present invention. A particular disclosed class of cannabinoids useful as neuroprotective antioxidants is formula (I) wherein the R group is independently selected from the group consisting...
Inventors: Aidan J. Hampson, Julius Axelrod, Maurizio Grimaldi
Original Assignee: The United States of America as represented by the Department of Health and Human Services
Primary Examiner: Kevin E. Weddington
Attorney: Klarquist Sparkman, LLP
Current U.S. Classification: 514/454
International Classification: A61K/3135
Cited Patent Filing date Issue date Original Assignee Title
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US5227537 Jan 8, 1992 Jul 13, 1993 Heinrich Mack Nachf. Method for the production of 6,12-dihydro-6-hydroxy-cannabidiol and the use thereof for the production of trans-delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol
US5284867 Apr 8, 1992 Feb 8, 1994 Yissum Research Development Company of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem
Ramot University, Authority for Applied Research and Industrial Development Ltd. NMDA-blocking pharmaceutical compositions
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Pharmos Corp. Neuroprotective pharmaceutical compositions of 4-phenylpinene derivatives and certain novel 4-phenylpinene compounds
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Yissum Research Development Company of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem
Pharmos Corp. NMDA-blocking pharmaceuticals
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US5635530 May 24, 1994 Jun 3, 1997 Yissum Research Development Company of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (3S,4S)-delta-6-tetrahydrocannabinol-7-oic acids and derivatives thereof, processors for their preparation and pharmaceutical compositions containing them
US5696109 Jun 7, 1995 Dec 9, 1997 Eukarion, Inc. Synthetic catalytic free radical scavengers useful as antioxidants for prevention and therapy of disease
US6410588 Mar 6, 2001 Jun 25, 2002 The Mathilda and Terence Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology
Yissum Research and Development Company of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Use of cannabinoids as anti-inflammatory agents
Referenced byCiting Patent Filing date Issue date Original Assignee Title
US7179800 Apr 15, 2003 Feb 20, 2007 Virginia Commonwealth University Cannabinoids
US7184198 Mar 8, 2005 Feb 27, 2007 Konica Minolta Holdings, Inc. Display element
US7285687 Jun 20, 2002 Oct 23, 2007 Virginia Commonwealth University
Organix Inc. Cannabinoids
US7597910 Aug 20, 2005 Oct 6, 2009 SLGM Medical Research Institute Compositions and methods for treating prostate disorders
US7674922 Sep 28, 2006 Mar 9, 2010 Albany Molecular Research, Inc. Process for production of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol
US7884133 Sep 8, 2004 Feb 8, 2011 Yissum Research Development Company of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Ariel Ltd. Pharmaceutical compositions containing (+) cannabidioil and derivatives thereof and some such novel derivatives
US8106244 May 16, 2011 Jan 31, 2012 Albany Molecular Research, Inc. Process for production of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol
Claims
1. A method of treating diseases caused by oxidative stress, comprising administering a therapeutically effective amount of a cannabinoid that has substantially no binding to the NMDA receptor to a subject who has a disease caused by oxidative stress.
2. The method of claim 1, wherein the cannabinoid is nonpsychoactive.
3. The method of claim 2, wherein the cannabinoid has a volume of distribution of 10 L/kg or more.
4. The method of claim 1, wherein the cannabinoid is not an antagonist at the NMDA receptor.
5. The method of claim 1, wherein the cannabinoid is:
where R is H, substituted or unsubstituted alkyl, carboxyl, alkoxy, aryl, aryloxy, arylalkyl, halo or amino.
6. The method of claim 5, wherein R is H, substituted or unsubstituted alkyl, carboxyl or alkoxy.
7. The method of claim 2, wherein the cannabinoid is:
where
A is cyclohexyl, substituted or unsubstituted aryl, or
but not a pinene;
R1 is H, substituted or unsubstituted alkyl, or substituted or unsubstituted carboxyl;
R2 is H, lower substituted or unsubstituted alkyl, or alkoxy;
R3 is of H, lower substituted or unsubstituted alkyl, or substituted or unsubstituted carboxyl;
R4 is H, hydroxyl, or lower substituted or unsubstituted alkyl; and
R5 is H, hydroxyl, or lower substituted or unsubstituted alkyl.
8. The method of claim 7, wherein
R1 is lower alkyl, COOH or COCH3;
R2 is unsubstituted C1-C5 alkyl, hydroxyl, methoxy or ethoxy;
R3 is H, unsubstituted C1-C3 alkyl, or COCH3;
R4 is hydroxyl, pentyl, heptyl, or diemthylheptyl; and
R5 is hydroxyl or methyl.
9. The method of claim 1, wherein the cannabinoid is:
where R1, R2 and R3 are independently H, CH3, or COCH3.
10. The method of claim 9, wherein the cannabinoid is:
where:
a) R1R2R3H;
b) R1R3H, R2CH3;
c) R1R2CH3, R3H;
d) R1R2COCH3, R3H; or
e) R1H, R2R3COCH3.
11. The method of claim 2, wherein the cannabinoid is:
where R19 is H, lower alkyl, lower alcohol, or carboxyl; R20 is H or OH; and R21-R25 are independently H or OH.
12. The method of claim 11, wherein R19 is H, CH3, CH2OH, or COOH, and R20-R24 are independently H or OH.
13. The method of claim 2, wherein the cannabinoid is:
where R19 and R20 are H, and R26 is alkyl.
14. The method of claim 10, wherein the cannabinoid is cannabidiol.
15. A method of treating an ischemic or neurodegenerative disease in the central nervous system of a subject, comprising administering to the subject a therapeutically effective amount of a cannabinoid, where the cannabinoid is
where R is H, substituted or unsubstituted alkyl, carboxyl, alkoxy, aryl, aryloxy, arylalkyl, halo or amino.
16. The method of claim 15, wherein the cannabinoid is not a psychoactive cannabinoid.
17. The method of claim 15 where the ischemic or neurodegenerative disease is an ischemic infarct, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and human immunodeficiency virus dementia, Down's syndrome, or heart disease.
18. A method of treating a disease with a cannabinoid that has substantially no binding to the NMDA receptor, comprising determining whether the disease is caused by oxidative stress, and if the disease is caused by oxidative stress, administering the cannabinoid in a therapeutically effective antioxidant amount.
19. The method of claim 18, wherein the cannabinoid has a volume of distribution of at least 1.5 L/kg and substantially no activity at the cannabinoid receptor.
20. The method of claim 19, wherein the cannabinoid has a volume of distribution of at least 10 L/kg.
21. The method of claim 1, wherein the cannabinoid selectively inhibits an enzyme activity of 5- and 15-lipoxygenase more than an enzyme activity of 12-lipoxygenase.
22. A method of treating a neurodegenerative or ischemic disease in the central nervous system of a subject, comprising administering to the subject a therapeutically effective amount of a compound selected from any of the compounds of claims 9 through 13.
23. The method of claim 22 where the compound is cannabidiol.
24. The method of claim 22, wherein the ischemic or neurodegenerative disease is an ischemic infarct, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and human immunodeficiency virus dementia, Down's syndrome, or heart disease.
25. The method of claim 24 wherein the disease is an ischemic infarct.
26. The method of claim 1, wherein the cannabinoid is not an antagonist at the AMPA receptor.
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Wal*Mart attacks cannabis patient
2012-11-13 message from "Cannabis Nation Radio"
[http://cannabisnationradio.com/] [http://facebook.com/reformwarrior]:
It is rare that such a hardworking, dedicated employee comes along. Walmart may have won in court, but they lost one of their best employees, who could have provided them immense insight, and worked with them to improve not only the bottom line, but employee relations as well, which are apparently at an all time low. Walmart proved what many say about multinational corporations.... they are cold, calculating, lack compassion, have no human insight, and the human factor has been completely removed from their human relations.
[http://cannabisnationradio.com/] [http://facebook.com/reformwarrior]:
It is rare that such a hardworking, dedicated employee comes along. Walmart may have won in court, but they lost one of their best employees, who could have provided them immense insight, and worked with them to improve not only the bottom line, but employee relations as well, which are apparently at an all time low. Walmart proved what many say about multinational corporations.... they are cold, calculating, lack compassion, have no human insight, and the human factor has been completely removed from their human relations.
Friday, November 9, 2012
Cannabis Freedom
"The Truth About Hemp: Part I" by Kyle Peterson from "NOO Journal" Issue [six] 2007
[http://www.noojournal.com/view.php?mode=1&issue=six&id=105]:
WHICH SINGLE PLANT is found growing naturally in all 50 U.S. states and has over 25,000 possible uses, including paper, clothing, food, and fuel? The answer: hemp, a variety of the plant cannabis sativa L, often mistaken for marijuana. It’s been used for centuries in almost every civilization, including the United States. So, why it is illegal today?
Regardless of its possibilities as a source of food, fuel, and industrial materials, for many Americans, cannabis carries with it the stigma of a drug culture that developed in the U.S. during the 20th century. Viewed as a “gateway” into a forbidden and dangerous world, cannabis has become a scapegoat for the ills of society. But the fact of the matter is that prior to its prohibition in the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, hemp was a legal cash crop, grown by our Founding Fathers, and for many years was even an acceptable form of payment for taxes.
Despite its current status as a Schedule One narcotic, before 1937, the U.S. government recognized the differences between the varieties of the plant used for industrial hemp and those cultivated for the flowers, or buds. What happened to change that is a story of narrow, self-interests that would lead our nation down an unsustainable path, a story all too common in the United States history.
In the early part of the 20th century, incredible discoveries and innovations in the uses of agricultural products inspired a new field of science, called “chemurgy.” Defined by the Columbia Encyclopedia as a “branch of applied chemistry concerned with preparing industrial products from agricultural raw materials,” chemurgy was an agrarian response to an increasingly manufactured world and as such, we shall see, was diametrically opposed to the interests of the major petroleum and chemical corporations of the day.
Perhaps some of the most famous discoveries in the field of chemurgy were those made by the scientist George Washington Carver. While working at the Tuskegee Institute, Carver discovered literally hundreds of uses for various foodstuffs such as potatoes, soy beans, pecans, and peanuts, uses including adhesives, axle grease, bleach, shaving cream, and synthetic rubber (Bellis). But Carver was not the only one making such discoveries.
Always searching for ways to improve his original design of the automobile, Henry Ford looked to nature for answers. Ford built the body of a model car entirely from hemp and other fibers by binding them together with a resin and molding it into the desired shape. Today, this material is known as a biocomposite, and car manufacturers such as Ford, BMW, Daimler-Chrysler, and GM are experimenting with biocomposites to make door panels, head liners, and other parts. The Ford Motor Corporation alone used more than 5,000,000 pounds of hemp between 1999 and 2000 (Rothenberg 20).
But Mr. Ford wasn’t alone in his innovations with hemp, nor in his desire for ethanol, which he called “the fuel of the future," to fuel the automobiles of America. He originally intended to power automobiles with ethanol, known then as ethyl alcohol, so that Americans could make use of the vast number of materials available for conversion into cellulosic and starch-based ethanols.
Another advocate for ethanol was scientist Harold Hibbert. In 1920 at Yale University, Hibbert was experimenting with the chemical decomposition, or hydrolysis, of cellulose, an organic compound found in cell walls of all green plants, including hemp. But because cellulose is a complex polysaccharide and requires enzymes or acids that to this day are expensive to manufacture, cellulosic ethanol was not yet commercially viable (Kovarik).
Almost one hundred years later, several biotech companies, including Arkenol Fuels and Iogen, have begun marketing their patented hydrolysis processes that can convert anything from paper waste to farm and forest residues into cellulosic ethanol. The Energy Information Administration estimates that by 2015 improvements in the hydrolysis process will lower production costs by as much as 60 cents per gallon, allowing cellulosic ethanol to compete with gasoline. One such improvement is the use of genetically engineered enzymes to turn feedstocks into ethanol, technology unavailable to Hibbert in the 1920s.
Undoubtedly, the scientists working on ethanol from cellulose faced challenges, but probably none as daunting as opposition from the alliance between the Standard Oil, Ethyl, DuPont, and GM corporations. In his essay “Henry Ford, Charles Kettering, and The Fuel of the Future,” Professor Bill Kovarik details how the executives of these corporations feared competition from ethanol and so not only spread propaganda and lobbied ferociously against subsidies, but privately investigated politicians and advocates who supported the renewable fuel. In addition, the corporation Ethyl, which marketed leaded gasoline, even went so far as to refuse the sale of its products if a wholesaler also sold ethanol. Although the Supreme Court upheld an anti-trust lawsuit against Ethyl in 1940, as a result of such pressure, according to Kovarik, the once broad-based support for ethanol evaporated.
The cannabis plant, which can be converted into cellulosic ethanol, suffered a similar fate as part of the chemurgy movement. A new invention, similar to Eli Whitney’s revolutionary cotton gin, called the hemp decorticator, made stripping the bast, or outer fibers of the stalk more efficient. Such an improvement in technology reduced the time and cost of processing, which would in turn encourage the expansion of uses for hemp (Rothenberg 7). An ill-timed Popular Mechanics article published in February of 1938, the same month the Marihuana Tax Act came into effect, proposed hemp would be the next “billion dollar crop” (8).
However, the chemical giant DuPont held numerous patents, including one on tetraethyl lead (an oxygenate used to raise octane levels), which could be substituted with ethanol (7). Thus the future profits of the corporation were put in jeopardy, especially since serious questions had been raised about the potential hazards of lead after numerous deaths and injuries of workers who handled the toxic material. In the early development of leaded gasoline at least 40 workers died from lead poisoning and several hundred others were injured. Workers who knew what was causing their hallucinations called their factories “Houses of Butterflies.” These deaths caused much public controversy and at one point, the New Jersey state legislature banned the sale and production of leaded gasoline (Kovarik and Hermes).
As one of the chief investors in the corporation, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, had a vested interest to see DuPont prosper and beat out its competitors, including those who offered alternatives, like ethanol. As the popularity of hemp grew, so did the threat it posed as an alternative to lead.
So Mellon appointed Henry Anslinger, who at that time was the Assistant U.S. Commissioner on Prohibition, to the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Anslinger, who would later marry Mellon’s niece, spent two years drafting the Marihuana Tax Act. In 1937, the bill was submitted to the House Ways and Means Committee, who was headed by another DuPont ally. The House Ways and Means Committee was the only congressional committee that could submit a bill to Congress without input from other government agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the bill moved on to Congress. Anslinger testified about the “evils” of “marihuana” and with the prodding of prohibition lobbyists, the bill passed (Rothenberg 7).
The Marihuana Tax Act did not ban cannabis outright, nor would the tax of 1 dollar per ounce raise much revenue. But the Act required growers, manufacturers and distributors of hemp products to report every transaction to the IRS and provide the names and addresses of any recipient. Failure to comply would result in heavy fines or imprisonment. As a result, no one wanted to run the risk of dealing with cannabis, so the once-burgeoning industry quickly faded (Solomon). It is worth mentioning that in 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the requirement to register with the IRS violated the 5th amendment by forcing the petitioner to “identify himself as a member of a ‘selective group inherently suspect of criminal activities,’ and thus those provisions created a ‘real and appreciable’ hazard of incrimination …” (Leary v. United States). However, subsequent laws such as the Controlled Substance Act of 1970, plus court decisions such as Gonzales v. Raich in 2005, have upheld the federal government’s ability to regulate the interstate commerce of controlled substances.
The United States of America stands with one of the most crucial choices of its entire history: whether to increasingly rely on foreign markets and imports, which benefit only a few, or to look inside its own borders for alternative resources that would rehabilitate its economy and environment. Such a question should be answered by the people of this great nation, not just government officials and captains of industry. Regardless of hemp’s current legal status, I firmly believe that history will bear out how the many uses of the cannabis sativa plant outweigh concerns and objections held by government officials and other opponents. But it is up to concerned citizens everywhere to make heard their voices and make known their opposition to the status quo.
References
Bellis, Mary. About: Inventors. “George Washington Carver.” About.com. 1/26/07 http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa041897.htm
DiPardo, Joseph. Outlook for Biomass Ethanol Production and Demand. 7/30/02. United States. Dept.of Energy. Energy Information Administration. 1/28/07
Kovarik, William.“Henry Ford, Charles Kettering,and the Fuel of the Future.” 1998. Hempfarm.org. 1/10/07. http://www.hempfarm.org/Papers/Fuel_ of_the_future.html
Kovarik, William and Matthew E. Hermes. ChemCases.com. “TEL Toxicity.” Kennesaw State University. National Science Foundation. 1/29/07 http://www.chemcases.com/tel/tel-17.htm
Rothenberg, Erik.“A RENEWAL OF COMMON SENSE:The Case for Hemp in 21st Century America.” October,2000. VoteHemp.com. 1/26/07 http://www.votehemp.com/PDF/renewal.pdf
Solomon, David. “The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937.” Schaffer Library of Drug Policy. DrugLibrary.org. 2/04/07 http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/hemp/ taxact/mjtaxact.htm
[http://www.noojournal.com/view.php?mode=1&issue=six&id=105]:
WHICH SINGLE PLANT is found growing naturally in all 50 U.S. states and has over 25,000 possible uses, including paper, clothing, food, and fuel? The answer: hemp, a variety of the plant cannabis sativa L, often mistaken for marijuana. It’s been used for centuries in almost every civilization, including the United States. So, why it is illegal today?
Regardless of its possibilities as a source of food, fuel, and industrial materials, for many Americans, cannabis carries with it the stigma of a drug culture that developed in the U.S. during the 20th century. Viewed as a “gateway” into a forbidden and dangerous world, cannabis has become a scapegoat for the ills of society. But the fact of the matter is that prior to its prohibition in the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, hemp was a legal cash crop, grown by our Founding Fathers, and for many years was even an acceptable form of payment for taxes.
Despite its current status as a Schedule One narcotic, before 1937, the U.S. government recognized the differences between the varieties of the plant used for industrial hemp and those cultivated for the flowers, or buds. What happened to change that is a story of narrow, self-interests that would lead our nation down an unsustainable path, a story all too common in the United States history.
In the early part of the 20th century, incredible discoveries and innovations in the uses of agricultural products inspired a new field of science, called “chemurgy.” Defined by the Columbia Encyclopedia as a “branch of applied chemistry concerned with preparing industrial products from agricultural raw materials,” chemurgy was an agrarian response to an increasingly manufactured world and as such, we shall see, was diametrically opposed to the interests of the major petroleum and chemical corporations of the day.
Perhaps some of the most famous discoveries in the field of chemurgy were those made by the scientist George Washington Carver. While working at the Tuskegee Institute, Carver discovered literally hundreds of uses for various foodstuffs such as potatoes, soy beans, pecans, and peanuts, uses including adhesives, axle grease, bleach, shaving cream, and synthetic rubber (Bellis). But Carver was not the only one making such discoveries.
Always searching for ways to improve his original design of the automobile, Henry Ford looked to nature for answers. Ford built the body of a model car entirely from hemp and other fibers by binding them together with a resin and molding it into the desired shape. Today, this material is known as a biocomposite, and car manufacturers such as Ford, BMW, Daimler-Chrysler, and GM are experimenting with biocomposites to make door panels, head liners, and other parts. The Ford Motor Corporation alone used more than 5,000,000 pounds of hemp between 1999 and 2000 (Rothenberg 20).
But Mr. Ford wasn’t alone in his innovations with hemp, nor in his desire for ethanol, which he called “the fuel of the future," to fuel the automobiles of America. He originally intended to power automobiles with ethanol, known then as ethyl alcohol, so that Americans could make use of the vast number of materials available for conversion into cellulosic and starch-based ethanols.
Another advocate for ethanol was scientist Harold Hibbert. In 1920 at Yale University, Hibbert was experimenting with the chemical decomposition, or hydrolysis, of cellulose, an organic compound found in cell walls of all green plants, including hemp. But because cellulose is a complex polysaccharide and requires enzymes or acids that to this day are expensive to manufacture, cellulosic ethanol was not yet commercially viable (Kovarik).
Almost one hundred years later, several biotech companies, including Arkenol Fuels and Iogen, have begun marketing their patented hydrolysis processes that can convert anything from paper waste to farm and forest residues into cellulosic ethanol. The Energy Information Administration estimates that by 2015 improvements in the hydrolysis process will lower production costs by as much as 60 cents per gallon, allowing cellulosic ethanol to compete with gasoline. One such improvement is the use of genetically engineered enzymes to turn feedstocks into ethanol, technology unavailable to Hibbert in the 1920s.
Undoubtedly, the scientists working on ethanol from cellulose faced challenges, but probably none as daunting as opposition from the alliance between the Standard Oil, Ethyl, DuPont, and GM corporations. In his essay “Henry Ford, Charles Kettering, and The Fuel of the Future,” Professor Bill Kovarik details how the executives of these corporations feared competition from ethanol and so not only spread propaganda and lobbied ferociously against subsidies, but privately investigated politicians and advocates who supported the renewable fuel. In addition, the corporation Ethyl, which marketed leaded gasoline, even went so far as to refuse the sale of its products if a wholesaler also sold ethanol. Although the Supreme Court upheld an anti-trust lawsuit against Ethyl in 1940, as a result of such pressure, according to Kovarik, the once broad-based support for ethanol evaporated.
The cannabis plant, which can be converted into cellulosic ethanol, suffered a similar fate as part of the chemurgy movement. A new invention, similar to Eli Whitney’s revolutionary cotton gin, called the hemp decorticator, made stripping the bast, or outer fibers of the stalk more efficient. Such an improvement in technology reduced the time and cost of processing, which would in turn encourage the expansion of uses for hemp (Rothenberg 7). An ill-timed Popular Mechanics article published in February of 1938, the same month the Marihuana Tax Act came into effect, proposed hemp would be the next “billion dollar crop” (8).
However, the chemical giant DuPont held numerous patents, including one on tetraethyl lead (an oxygenate used to raise octane levels), which could be substituted with ethanol (7). Thus the future profits of the corporation were put in jeopardy, especially since serious questions had been raised about the potential hazards of lead after numerous deaths and injuries of workers who handled the toxic material. In the early development of leaded gasoline at least 40 workers died from lead poisoning and several hundred others were injured. Workers who knew what was causing their hallucinations called their factories “Houses of Butterflies.” These deaths caused much public controversy and at one point, the New Jersey state legislature banned the sale and production of leaded gasoline (Kovarik and Hermes).
As one of the chief investors in the corporation, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, had a vested interest to see DuPont prosper and beat out its competitors, including those who offered alternatives, like ethanol. As the popularity of hemp grew, so did the threat it posed as an alternative to lead.
So Mellon appointed Henry Anslinger, who at that time was the Assistant U.S. Commissioner on Prohibition, to the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Anslinger, who would later marry Mellon’s niece, spent two years drafting the Marihuana Tax Act. In 1937, the bill was submitted to the House Ways and Means Committee, who was headed by another DuPont ally. The House Ways and Means Committee was the only congressional committee that could submit a bill to Congress without input from other government agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the bill moved on to Congress. Anslinger testified about the “evils” of “marihuana” and with the prodding of prohibition lobbyists, the bill passed (Rothenberg 7).
The Marihuana Tax Act did not ban cannabis outright, nor would the tax of 1 dollar per ounce raise much revenue. But the Act required growers, manufacturers and distributors of hemp products to report every transaction to the IRS and provide the names and addresses of any recipient. Failure to comply would result in heavy fines or imprisonment. As a result, no one wanted to run the risk of dealing with cannabis, so the once-burgeoning industry quickly faded (Solomon). It is worth mentioning that in 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the requirement to register with the IRS violated the 5th amendment by forcing the petitioner to “identify himself as a member of a ‘selective group inherently suspect of criminal activities,’ and thus those provisions created a ‘real and appreciable’ hazard of incrimination …” (Leary v. United States). However, subsequent laws such as the Controlled Substance Act of 1970, plus court decisions such as Gonzales v. Raich in 2005, have upheld the federal government’s ability to regulate the interstate commerce of controlled substances.
The United States of America stands with one of the most crucial choices of its entire history: whether to increasingly rely on foreign markets and imports, which benefit only a few, or to look inside its own borders for alternative resources that would rehabilitate its economy and environment. Such a question should be answered by the people of this great nation, not just government officials and captains of industry. Regardless of hemp’s current legal status, I firmly believe that history will bear out how the many uses of the cannabis sativa plant outweigh concerns and objections held by government officials and other opponents. But it is up to concerned citizens everywhere to make heard their voices and make known their opposition to the status quo.
References
Bellis, Mary. About: Inventors. “George Washington Carver.” About.com. 1/26/07 http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa041897.htm
DiPardo, Joseph. Outlook for Biomass Ethanol Production and Demand. 7/30/02. United States. Dept.of Energy. Energy Information Administration. 1/28/07
Kovarik, William.“Henry Ford, Charles Kettering,and the Fuel of the Future.” 1998. Hempfarm.org. 1/10/07. http://www.hempfarm.org/Papers/Fuel_ of_the_future.html
Kovarik, William and Matthew E. Hermes. ChemCases.com. “TEL Toxicity.” Kennesaw State University. National Science Foundation. 1/29/07 http://www.chemcases.com/tel/tel-17.htm
Rothenberg, Erik.“A RENEWAL OF COMMON SENSE:The Case for Hemp in 21st Century America.” October,2000. VoteHemp.com. 1/26/07 http://www.votehemp.com/PDF/renewal.pdf
Solomon, David. “The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937.” Schaffer Library of Drug Policy. DrugLibrary.org. 2/04/07 http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/hemp/ taxact/mjtaxact.htm
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
2012-10-02 "Panther medicine; An original member of the Black Panther connects the dots between marijuana access and justice"
by Caitlin Donohue from "San Francisco Bay Guardian"
[http://www.sfbg.com/2012/10/02/panther-medicine]:
Elder Freeman, Black Panther cannabis activist
HERBWISE The night before our interview, Elder Freeman spoke alongside Peace and Freedom Party presidential candidate (and beloved sitcom sassmouth) Roseanne Barr, 2008 Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney, and others about the political possibilities of marijuana at a panel discussion held inside Oaksterdam University.
As Black Panther History Month begins, commemorating the 46th anniversary of the party's founding by Freeman and his peers — see info on events at the end of this article — it seems only fitting that the cannabis movement and the Panthers' struggle for social justice and the right to control our own communities be connected. For Freeman, the two have become inextricably linked.
The morning of the day we met at West Oakland's Revolution Cafe, the 67 year old original member of LA's Black Panther Party had two doctors appointments. Freeman has colon cancer. Three years ago, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He smokes marijuana to improve his appetite — he's used to eating a single meal a day, but that's not enough to keep up his strength during treatment. As a long-time 215 card-carrier, the last year's federal crackdown on cannabis dispensaries threatens to send him back to buying pot on the streets.
Is access to marijuana a Black Panther issue? Freeman thinks so. He tells me why over a cup of coffee (cream, no sugar), and between interruptions by well-wishers — the entire neighborhood knows him, it seems, they all want to pay their respects.
"It's all connected. The simple fact is that the judicial system is inadequate. The whole idea that they want to keep it in an illegal state is so that they can criminalize people." He became aware of cannabis, he says, when Bob Marley started talking about its connection to non-violence. "I identified with the Rasta community for awhile," he tells me.
Freeman's been told that this current bout of cancer is incurable. But he's also been told that the Watts uprising in 1965 that was responsible for his political awakening was actually riots and that he deserved to spend those seven years in jail alongside many of his Panther cohorts on a laundry list of mostly trumped-up charges. He didn't buy those things either.
In fact, at Oaksterdam he shared with the crowd that he plans on going to Cuba for a second opinion on his medical treatment. "There's something about American medicine that seems to be lacking," he says.
Last night's event was actually the first time Freeman spoke as a cannabis activist. He spends most of his time as an advocate these days working for inmate rights — not surprising when you consider he spent the better part of a decade as a political prisoner. He works with All of Us or None (www.allofusornone.org), a national organization that works to "ban the box" — remove questions about past incarceration from employment applications — promote inmate voting rights, and build awareness in the communities most affected by mass incarceration. So although personally, access to cannabis is clearly a health concern, he tends to speak about it with more a law and order focus.
"People are doing a lot of time for something that they shouldn't even be in jail for." He wonders out loud to me about why we don't lock up cigarette producers. "They got it backwards. But that's capitalism."
BLACK PANTHER HISTORY MONTH RALLY
Oct. 13, noon
Frank Ogawa Plaza, Oakl.
BLACK PANTHER HISTORY MONTH EXHIBIT
Oct. 13, 2pm, free
Geoffrey's Inner Circle
410 14th St., Oakl.
www.itsabouttimebpp.com
[http://www.sfbg.com/2012/10/02/panther-medicine]:
Elder Freeman, Black Panther cannabis activist
HERBWISE The night before our interview, Elder Freeman spoke alongside Peace and Freedom Party presidential candidate (and beloved sitcom sassmouth) Roseanne Barr, 2008 Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney, and others about the political possibilities of marijuana at a panel discussion held inside Oaksterdam University.
As Black Panther History Month begins, commemorating the 46th anniversary of the party's founding by Freeman and his peers — see info on events at the end of this article — it seems only fitting that the cannabis movement and the Panthers' struggle for social justice and the right to control our own communities be connected. For Freeman, the two have become inextricably linked.
The morning of the day we met at West Oakland's Revolution Cafe, the 67 year old original member of LA's Black Panther Party had two doctors appointments. Freeman has colon cancer. Three years ago, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He smokes marijuana to improve his appetite — he's used to eating a single meal a day, but that's not enough to keep up his strength during treatment. As a long-time 215 card-carrier, the last year's federal crackdown on cannabis dispensaries threatens to send him back to buying pot on the streets.
Is access to marijuana a Black Panther issue? Freeman thinks so. He tells me why over a cup of coffee (cream, no sugar), and between interruptions by well-wishers — the entire neighborhood knows him, it seems, they all want to pay their respects.
"It's all connected. The simple fact is that the judicial system is inadequate. The whole idea that they want to keep it in an illegal state is so that they can criminalize people." He became aware of cannabis, he says, when Bob Marley started talking about its connection to non-violence. "I identified with the Rasta community for awhile," he tells me.
Freeman's been told that this current bout of cancer is incurable. But he's also been told that the Watts uprising in 1965 that was responsible for his political awakening was actually riots and that he deserved to spend those seven years in jail alongside many of his Panther cohorts on a laundry list of mostly trumped-up charges. He didn't buy those things either.
In fact, at Oaksterdam he shared with the crowd that he plans on going to Cuba for a second opinion on his medical treatment. "There's something about American medicine that seems to be lacking," he says.
Last night's event was actually the first time Freeman spoke as a cannabis activist. He spends most of his time as an advocate these days working for inmate rights — not surprising when you consider he spent the better part of a decade as a political prisoner. He works with All of Us or None (www.allofusornone.org), a national organization that works to "ban the box" — remove questions about past incarceration from employment applications — promote inmate voting rights, and build awareness in the communities most affected by mass incarceration. So although personally, access to cannabis is clearly a health concern, he tends to speak about it with more a law and order focus.
"People are doing a lot of time for something that they shouldn't even be in jail for." He wonders out loud to me about why we don't lock up cigarette producers. "They got it backwards. But that's capitalism."
BLACK PANTHER HISTORY MONTH RALLY
Oct. 13, noon
Frank Ogawa Plaza, Oakl.
BLACK PANTHER HISTORY MONTH EXHIBIT
Oct. 13, 2pm, free
Geoffrey's Inner Circle
410 14th St., Oakl.
www.itsabouttimebpp.com
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Vallejo PD vamps on H2C cannabis clinic
Vallejo City's Holy War against medicinal cannabis [link]
2012-08-11 "Vallejo marijuana dispensary raided by Police, three arrested", by Sarah Rohrs from the "Vallejo Times-Herald"
2012-08-11 "Vallejo marijuana dispensary raided by Police, three arrested", by Sarah Rohrs from the "Vallejo Times-Herald"
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Freedom Edibles and Samson's Unit (Vallejo)
Freedom Edibles in Vallejo was organized by Shawn Polly, who wanted to use the proceeds to underwrite a rehabilitation house for recovering addicts and alcoholics, called "Samson's Unit" (now defunct). More information about what happened to Samson's Unit can be found at [northbayuprising.blogspot.com/2012/04/occupy-yard-last-updated-2012-04-18.html]
2011-11-28 Freedom Edible update to their facebook forum "Vallejo Patients Group" [https://www.facebook.com/groups/190198891068427/]:
Good Morning everyone, just to let you know if you don't want to be apart of this group you can easily remove it. If you do not use marijuana as medicine you should remove yourself as well. Welcome to the wonderful World of Whole Sale Edibles Freedom Edibles.
H.A.C.C.P. APPLICATION: We have a H.A.C.C.P. application on file with the San Fransisco Health Dept. What this means is anybody can view where we got are butter. Where are butter was made. It has alot of info about are butter. To view it get ahold of Larry Kistler Health Inspector of the San Fransisco Health Dept. and ask about High on the Mountain Top Butter made by Freedom Edibles.
Freedom Edibles is 1 of 25 Edible Patient Suppliers in the State of California that has a H.A.C.C.P. Application on file with a health dept.
Know who makes your food. Most these people in California and by most i mean all dont have any kinda regulation We are Regulated By a Health Dept. Cant stress how important that is. If you are buying food from a clinic that does not have a H.A.C.C.P. Application on file stop you are in danger and you nor them know where your food was made or in what conditions!!!
Food Safety Certificate: Yes we have it. Does the clinic you get your edibles thowe? For years there has been no regulation on edibles. In 2009 the San Fransisco Health Dept. made it law that you have to have a Food Safety Certificate. A simple 8 hour class is required to gain this certificate. Next time you buy edibles from a clinic ask to see a copy of the food safety certificate of the edible organization you have chosen. I bet you free edibles they aint got one.
Prices: Keep this in mind we get $3 for a rice krispy from clinics and they mark it up by atleast 100%. This goes for all the products i am about to list. By going with Freedom Edibles you eliminate the middle man. Stop getting ripped off by Greedy so called Marijuana Clinics join with Freedom!
BlueBerry and Bannana Nut Mini Muffins=$1 0.7g clipings
Star Candies (50) different Flavers 0.05 kief=$1
Kief Capsules=$2 0.3g kief
middle size candies=$2 0.2g kief
Suckers (50) different flavers 0.3g kief=$3
Rice,Fruity,Coco,Apple,Cookie,All-Berry,etc. Krispys=$3 1.7g clipings
Cookies&Cream,Chocolate Chip,Turtle,Carmel Pecon,Funnettie,Wal-Nut,Mint,Butterscotch,etc.etc. Brownies=$4 2.5g clipings
Blueberry,Banana Nut Muffins,Cranberry-Orange,Cinnimon-Streasul,etc.etc.=$4 2.5g clipings.
Peanut-Butter,Oatmeal,Chocolate-Chip,Chocolate-Mint,Rainbow,etc.etc. Cookie Bars=$4 3.0g clipings
All Cup-Cake Flavers are the same as cakes with one exception The Tie Dye Cup-Cake this one of a kinder is medicated with the frosting and the cake twice as powerful as a cake or cup-cake offered to you the patient at the same price :0 ENJOY
Strawberry,Lemen,Carot,Spice,German Chocolate,White,Rasta,Chocolate Cakes,etc.etc.
=$5 3.0g clipings
Drinks 12oz oval bottles-Blue Raspberry,Sour Apple,Orange,Grape,Watermelen,Pineapple,Strawberry,Cherry,Pink-Lemenade,Lemenade,Tigers-Blood,Strawberry-Raspberry,etc.etc. =$5 0.5g kief
Hot- sauce=$5 6oz bottle 3.5g clipings (made from Tapatia)
Peanut Butter Crunchy or Smooth=$5 (made from Skippy) 6oz hexagon jar 3.5g clipings
Bar-B-Q-Sauce=$5 6oz. bottle 3.5g clipings
Vegatable Glycerin (Tincture)=$20 1oz bottle 14g clipings
High on the Mountain Top Butter: Enjoy 3 different sizes and 5 differnt strains!!!
Strains are Blueberry,Church O.G. Kush,TrainWreck,HinduKush,PurpleKush!!!
Sizes and Price are 1/4 cup=$5 1/2 cup=$10 1 cup=$20
Didnt find what you are looking for? Let me tell you ive been working for 14 hours and my fingers are tied. We have over 700 Products yes Seven Hundred. In time i will put them up but until then just ask and it shall be given. We will try are hardest to meet everyneed for your pain.
So you think Whole-Sale is a deal huh? well Save even more money and cook your own!!! By making your own food with butter you will save between 30-50 percent more than you allready do by going with Freedom Edibles.
We have Gluten Free,Suger Free,Organic, and Vegan
We offer 10-30 free edibles a week for Terminal or Serious Ill Patients just message me.
Must have a Valid Script for Marijuana and be verified at E.C.C. Vallejo Or Natures Love Vallejo. Must do Min. Order of $30. Around 90% of all are products have a shelf life of atleast 30 days and can be frozen for months. If you donate over $100 you will get a free cup of Butter!!! (A $20 Value)
ACCOMPLISHMENTS ARE AS FOLLOWED -
1. WE DONATE FOOD TO EMANUEL TEMPLE CHURCH MENS HOME. TAKE DONATIONS TO HAPPY LIL TREES.
2. WE DONATE BOX TOPS TO LOCAL VALLEJO SCHOOLS.
3. WE DONATED 12 EASTER BASKETS TO CHILDREN AT THE VALLEJO HOMELESS SHELTER.
4. WE PROVIDED MENTORS FOR HOMELESS VALLEJO CHILDREN AT THE SHELTER.
5. FOR 12 WEEKS WE PUT A BOOTH ON SONOMA AND INDIANA ST. MINISTERING, AND COUNCILING AND FEEDING CRACK COCCAINE ADDICTS, BLOODS MAFIA MEMBERS,PROSTITUITES,PIMPS,AND HOMELESS PEOPLE. WE MINISTER BY THE GREAT NAME OF JESUS CHRIST. WE HELPED CHANGE SO MANY LIVES AND HELPED PEOPLE TO GET OFF CRACK COCAINE. PLEASE LOOK AT ARE PHOTO'S UNDER SAMSONS UNIT FOR PICTURES OF ARE TIME ON THE STREETS OF VALLEJO!!!
6. HOSEA PERIZ A 9 YEAR WONDERER ON SONOMA BLVD. ADDICTED TO CRACK COCAINE. BEEN TO SAN QUENTIN MORE TIMES THEN YOU HAVE FINGERS. WAS ARE FIRST TROPHY. HE REDEDICATED HIS LIFE TO CHRIST AND LEFT THE YAY ALONE.
7. THE MOST AWSOME ACCOMPLISHMENT YET. FOLKS IVE LIVED IN PORT-O-PODDIES-TENTS-TREE-STUMPS(REDWOODS) COUCHES,SALVATION ARMY'S, RESCUE MISSIONS I WAS HOMELESS FOR YEARS. WE NOW HAVE A MENS SOBER LIVING HOME THAT CAN HOUSE 8 MEN SO FAR. IT IS KNOWN AS SAMSONS UNIT A CHRISTIAN MISSIONARY ORGANIZATION FUNDED BY FREEDOM EDIBLES!!!! PRAISE GOD I WAS THREATENED BY THE CITY THAT THEY WOULD SUE ME IF I OPENED A HOMELESS SHELTER IN ZONING OTHER THAN INTENSIVE USE. i LOOKED THERE IS NO PROPERTY UNDER SUCH ZONING FOR RENT. GOD IS GOOD GOD PROVIDES LUP HOLES WHEN OUR CITY LEADERS ONLY PROVIDE EVIL!!! WE ONLY HAVE 2 MEN CURRENTLY AS OF TODAY. STILL HAVE ALOT OF WORK TO DO. WE PROVIDE PHONE,INTERNET,FURNITURE,LAUNDRY,T.V.,D.V.D., COUNCILING, RIDES TO AND FROM LABER READY, DRUG-TEST, DINNER EVERY NIGHT,FRIDGE,FREEZER,OVEN,MICROWAVE,PET-THEARAPY,SPIRITUAL-GUIDENCE, AND SO MUCH MORE. IT HAS BEEN MY DREAM TO OPERATE A HOMELESS SHELTER AND THIS WILL BE A GREAT TEST FOR ME. I THINK GOD FOR ALLOWING ME TO BE HOMELESS FOR 3 YEARS IF I WASN'T I WOULD NOT HAD KNOWN HOW TO SAVE THEM PRAISE YOUR HOLY MAKER FOR THE BAD TIMES FOR THEY MIGHT TURN TO GOOD EVEN GREAT SOMEDAY PRAISE GOD!
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2011-11-29 update from "Freedom Edibles" organizer Shawn Allen Polly:
Hay everyone i need some help! I am starting a Mens Home and i need Wood for Bunk Beds. A Carpenter or Two that can Build them. I can offer Edibles in return as long as you are a patient. Please dont reply just for the edibles or your gonna be disappointed i need a few good men. And i need some Wood (hahaha!).
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2011-12-09 update from "Freedom Edibles" organizer Shawn Allen Polly:
Hi everyone hope all is well. I am looking for a couple of patients who are interested in working for Free Edibles. I need a couple more people on my clean-up crew. I am willing to give $15 a hour in edibles of your choice. We have hundreds of products to choose from. Task includes washing dishes, Sweep, mop, wipe down, etc. Its about 10-20 hours a week. This is a good way to get the medicine you need in exchange for work!!! Thank You so much offer applies to medical marijuana patients only!!! Located in Vallejo.
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2011-12-10 update from "Freedom Edibles" organizer Shawn Allen Polly:
Hello everyone want some Edibles? This Sunday from 12-5 p.m. here in Vallejo we are doing are second work day for Samsons Unit Mens Sober Living Home!!! Last week all who worked earned around 70 dollars in medicine. I have flowers to trade for work as well. Lets come together and put this mens home together before Christmas so i can get some men in here in time for Christmas!!! Offer only applies for medical marijuana patients!!! For more info just message me!!!
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2011-12-12 update from "Freedom Edibles" organizer Shawn Allen Polly:
As of today i went to the Vallejo Homeless Shelter also known as The Christian Help Center. I gave a speech to a few men who are in the Shelter. I found out today just how much people are in need. One of the guys has a job but no place to live. Another is trying to get a job with a church over on broadway st. here in Vallejo. And another has his wife and kid in another shelter who just needs a little help. I gave them a information booklet on Samsons Unit. All of them agree that this program would benefit them. Most of the men i talked to just need a little help to get there lives back to normal. All of them agreed to drug testing and obeying the rules and regulations. They all agree that $60 a week is a great deal as well. All we need to do is get the lumber for the bunk beds and twin size mattress's. I got the house and im willing to move people who are battleing drugs and alcohol in here and live with them. Someone get some lumber please that is the easy part. We need lumber for 4 more bunkbeds about $420 worth imagine that 420. Each bed cost $105 to make and we need 4. I dont know how much twin size mattress's are but we need 12. I am willing for anyone to come visit this home and see what we have done and what we are trying to do! I would say $900 is all it will take to get all the lumber and get these beds ready before Christmas! So Who's got $900 bucks to get 8-12 men off the streets of Vallejo? A sad question to ask i wish i had it. Everyone i have asked tells me they cant help or gives a small chunk thinking it will cover everything. I got a van we can go get the lumber and mattresses you pay for them. I need no money just your time and help. I have a couple of skilled peeps that know how to put bunk beds together in 2 hours flat. Ive did about all i can do please someone some church something rise up and make this a reality. Thank You Shawn Polly 707-655-0313 For lumber size look under documents at the top then go to current needs.
i will still trade edibles at wholesale for trade of supplies
Samson's Unit was founded in May 2011, and started a weekly service and community feed.
Shawn Polly writes on July 3rd: I did not realize how much the devil wants my soul dead until
Today I ministered to around 20 people including these children. I went to Safeway tonight for food. About ten minutes into it, a Demon approached me. He started talking to me about weird stuff. I went to check out, and he was two people behind me. He said you in the green bandanna and started to attack me I blocked this guy as people intervened. Call it mental, but I call it demons!"
2011-06-05 "Week 4 Samsons Unit" photographs by Shawn Polly:
2011-07-03 "Week 8 Samsons Unit" photographs by Shawn Polly:
2011-07-10 "Week 9 Samsons Unit" photograph by Shawn Polly:
2012-01-12 "What is Samsons Unit?"
video uploaded by Shawn Polly·to [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvF3HfEGbYc]:
Shawn Polly explains the making of Samsons Unit Mens Sober Living Home.
2011-12-19 "Samson's Unit Sober Living Home is open!"
update from "Samson's Unit" organizer Shawn Allen Polly:
We got another resident today here at the start of Samson's Unit Mens Sober Living Home!!! That makes 3 guys now here at the house.
I am amazed that nobody has been by or been talking to me about how we can come together to make this continue to happen. I still only have one bunk bed with no mattresses?
What if you were homeless down on your luck? What about that one family member who is just trying to stop drinking? Or the family member or friend who uses drugs? Well if it was up to most of you they would be dead. It's almost Christmas. All these people claim they know God? How much do they really know God? O i got a thing in my yard or window that says i love the lord bull shit! To know God is to love people as your self. Is it possible to please God? Can we persuade something so powerful to give extra attention to are self? Hebrews 13:16 says "And don't forget to do good and to share with those in need. These are the sacifices that please God". Aint nobody but like 5 or 6 people even lifted a finger to help out . Shit sacrifice is way to big a word for most of you. I took 3 people in where i live that stuggle from Meth and Crack Coccaine. 3 less people on the streets of Vallejo. 3 more open spots at the Vallejo Homeless Shelter. Ive did my part as a Christian as a Jew as a good person in life. Now all you inconsideret people that are just my friend on face book because i make edibles. Remove yourself. I am trying really hard to not kuss and be mature about this. To all of you who could had helped or still can and dont help with the basic things we need to get this mens home fully operative. Please please reconsider living shoot yourself before christmas thank you heartless people of Vallejo!!!
2011-12-21 "I have a system that can solve the Vallejo Homeless Epidemic"
update from "Samson's Unit" organizer Shawn Allen Polly:
We got two more guys in today. Thats a total of four men at Samsons Unit. The two guys that we took in today are former Marines. One 30 and the other 25. They are both really awsome brothers. I have been talking with them getting to know them alot better. I found out today that our eldest resident Mr. Yancey age 53 lost his wife a year ago and lost his home in a fire recently in El Sobrante. Before Mr. Yancey was here he biked 12 miles a day to Mare Island where he works at Blu Homes. We are able to hook him up with rides now and make him breakfast where he once did not have before work. At Samsons Unit Mens Sober Living Home we are able to not only help out 4 amazing guys so far but three of them are Veterens. The lord is really starting to move it is amazing to see this mens home starting to form! Three of the guys we have here we have taken out of the Christian Help Center. CHC is Vallejo's only Homeless Shelter. Months back i got CHC on video saying there is not enough room for all the homeless there. You can find that video under Freedom Edibles videos. I truly know that i can change Vallejo for good and put a dent in the homeless epidemic. As well as the Crack Cocaine epidemic! I have been going by the homeless shelter everyday for a week now since we have had Samsons Unit open. I have discovered there are alot of Sober men down on there luck only needing a little encouragement. Only needing a place they can call home. I truly know we have a great system that is founded on the Love of Jesus Christ. I have done nothing but love love love these brothers that are here. I see the love of Christ coming out of there souls because of it Praise be to God the most high most most most high!!! I feel more complete everyday working with the homeless and getting them off the streets of Vallejo, Ca. The streets of Vallejo are as dangerous as they come. We have one of the highest homicide rates in the nation! I have also discovered there is a brother at the shelter who has a terminal illness. He gets about 600 bucks a month he needs a apartment or his own space. He has Serosis of the Liver! He knows the lord Jesus Christ he just needs help with finding his own place. Another discovery is Vallejo has alot of Homeless Mental People running around with no where to go. The CHC has no where for people with Mental Problems to go. I cant take them here around men who are recovering from drugs and alcohol. But we can run another mens home that is dedicated to the homeless men of Vallejo who have mental problems. It's gonna take some help to do it can't do it alone. Eventually I know God will help me to acomplish this. I have much much bigger goals of having Womens Homes And Family Homes. Who knows maybe God will eventually bless me with a fully operative Homeless Shelter one day? I trully know in time with the proper help i can get over 90% of Homeless people off the streets of Vallejo. I know what you are saying 90% thats too high a number. In 5 days i have taken 3 guys out of the Vallejo Homeless Shelter. It has taken that long because nobody wants to donate or help. With the proper donations and help i truly know i can make the Homeless shelter empty. In this system God gave me i truly know i can all-most eliminate the Homeless epidemic of Vallejo,Ca. And have a spot for any Homeless person housing Woman, Men, and Children with what ever issues they have. Through Sober living, Special treatment for the Mental Ill, Victims of Violence, and alot of other bases i didnt mention. God Bless Us all and a good night from Samsons Unit Mens Sober Living Home.
2013-01-31 HAVE YOU EVER BEEN LEFT TO DIE?"
update from "Samson's Unit" organizer Shawn Allen Polly:
CHAPTER-1
Prop 215 The Compassianate Use Act has been misused by most marijuana clinics in California. Ive been doing bussiness with High Standards for 3 months as of last week. I was in San Jose and i decided to go by there and see if I could get the money they owed me (consignment). When i walked in I brought a mini muffin tree for our mini muffins and our trophy that we won at the 2010 people choice awards. I noticed most of our product was still there. Two weeks old I wondered whats the problem. I checked all of them for signs of mold. They were all still good. I looked at a bud tender and asked him how much are the mini muffins here. He said $3 I was upset I said to him that I only sale these for $1 to High Standards. I continued to add that a patient would not buy these mini muffins at such a high price. As I was speaking I looked at our candy jar on there counter and seen $3 per candy. I was furious because I sold these to High Standards for 0.50 cents each. They were making a 600% profit. All of our edibles were marked up at this store. I humbled my self after telling the bud tender my feelings. I put the mini muffin tree together and put fresh muffins on the tree and took the old ones back. I then offered to put my trophy in there glass case and he said that would be cool and I did so. I then asked him if I could get paid the remaining balance he said let me find out. He went in the back and came out with a phone that had Jamie one of the owners on it. She said how do you have the right to tell me I sale edibles for too much. I said Mrs. our candies are marked up 600% and all of our edibles are atleast marked up by 200%. She told me that we wont be doing bussiness with you that she would pay me out and I was done. As she was saying this Jason the other owner was in the background of the phone cursing at me. I asked Jamie for 60 seconds to explain she said go ahead. I started by saying if a patient goes to another clinic in San Jose and they see our same product you have here for 6 times more than they will think bad things of both of us. She said she needed to charge more because of taxes? Here is the math breakdown on what she is saying! We sold high standars a product for fifty cents 0.50 cents They turned around and sold it for $3. Every other clinic we have sales our candies for $1. It's a $2.50 gain. 5 times more than what they paid. Thats a brief description on how one of our products was abused very badly at this clinic. Many more of our products were marked up atleast 200% When we sold the candy to them at 0.50 cents each we did not make a profit for them. We do these edibles that cheap for patients and do not make a profit so we can offer affordable medicine to sick and injured people, at a very low cost. When i explained this to Jamie she was furious as well as Jason. She said get your money and dont ever come back! I told her that all I do is right in this world. I serve the lord Jesus Christ everyday of my life! I told her that i witness to people in the great name of Jesus Christ everyday in Vallejo, Ca. I also told her that I cant afford to lose there support that I started a homeless shelter in Vallejo, Ca called Samsons Unit. She said that she did not care. I said very well then. I handed the phone to her staff they asked me to come into the back. A tall white young man with blond hair asked me how much I was owed I told him. He laid some money down on a table and said I will get the rest. After other employees were calling me names and making fun of my religion I grabed the money that was mine put it in my pocket and attempted to leave. Three guys stood before me telling me I could not leave. I said if you touch me it's assalt and battery as i started out the door. They said if you leave its theft and we will call the police. I had 3 people with me waiting in the lobby. I came out of the back and told everyone we have to go now High Standards is calling the cops on us. As we were leaving one of the employees was placing his hand on my friend who was behind me and it caused me to trip. As we all drove away I told them how cruel and heartless they were by treating a man who gives all he has to the needy away like waste.
CHAPTER-2
When I got home that night I had a message on my phone that said Jason was calling the police on me for theft. I called Jason back and tried to reason with him by saying this is to small just let it go. He started calling me names and I told him why do you treat a Godly man like waste. He said your not Godly my grandmother is a ordained minister who runs a recovery program. He went onto say that I was on drugs. I told Jason that I run a sober living home for recovering addicts. Jason allready knew this because he was suppose to build two bunk beds for our homeless shelter. We talked for a hour and a half one time about how High Standards would finance the homeless shelter Freedom Edibles started. He set up a appointment with me and never showed up. He lied to me. He lied to the homeless. He lies to mankind. After I reminded him of this he was furious. He said dont you know who I am I am a medical marijuana clinic owner I make over 2 MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR I CAN HAVE YOU PUT UNDER IF I WANTED TO. I told him he was stupid saying he would kill me on audio with 3 wittnesses then I hung up. I started getting phone calls from him right after I hung up. I answered and told him just let it go brother it was good while it lasted. Since last Wednsday I have had several threatning messages left on my machine. One of them says this From Jason and I quate " Shawn I am going to make sure you dont sell edibles ever again to any of these clinics in California. I've called E.C.C. Ive Called Greenwell and I called Happy Little Trees and told them that you stole from High Standards and there going to stop doing bussiness with you. Your done buddy none of these places even like you they all think you are a joke". Well this didnt meen much to me untill today. Chris from Greenwell sent me a tex message that said "why are other vendors saying that your talking crap about me?' I called him imediatly and said Stix what are you talking about? I asked him if high Standards called them saying I stole from them. He said yes and we dont want to ever have you in Greenwell again. I hung up and called the owner Matt. He didnt repsond so I went down to the Greenwell. When I got there security held me at the door and asked on the radio if I could come in Matt said no. I asked if he would speak to me on the radio he said yes. He told me that high standards called him saying alot of bad things about me. I said thats not true he said he was waiting for 2 weeks to see a video tape of me stealing money from them. I said Matt i've been here for over 2 years. I said Matt what about the homeless shelter i started what about the work we do on the streets of Vallejo how will we be able to continue to do it? He said stop sucking on the greenwell tittie and go get some new clubs. I said Matt you stole the slushie machine from me and now you make thousands of dollars off of it. Months back Freedom Edibles put a slushie machine at Greenwell they removed my machine bought another one and in time they told me it was there idea and it was there money. They stole thousands of dollars from me from homeless citizens in there own city. Because of that loss we could not afford to set up are booth on Sonoma and Indiana St. in Vallejo on Sundays at 3 and feed and minister to Crack Cocaine addicts. 4 months before he stole the slushie machine from us he hired a manager to copy all of our products. His name is Robin. Robin copied most of Freedom Edibles brownies, cakes, cookie bars, and etc.. For what reason did he do such things. All of our edibles sold out every week there. They copied most of what I had and started charging more than I did. We sold our cakes and brownies for $3.50 there. Go look at the price of there cakes and brownies now! After having all I worked for stolen from I left Greenwell for two weeks. Two weeks later I got hungry and started calling Matt and telling him how it's not fare to steal from people. How it's not fare that the one vendor in his store that started a mens shelter is having everything he has taken from him. I told him that I was going to show up with picketers and protest his establishment. After I talked to him several times he told me he would donate to me if I was a 501 c3. I told him I am trying to get the paperwork going. I showed up at Greenwell that night to tell Matt face to face how he stole everything I had from me. He screamed at me, cursed me, told me I was a bad christian, threatened me, then he gave me $500 dollars and some trim to go away and keep my mouth shut. I asked if I could bring what Robin doesn't make for there collective he said sure. Bring butter, teas, ice-cream, and drinks. I said thank you and walked away in tears Knowing I use to have over 60 products at this store. Tonight Greenwell told me I was a thief. Tonight Greenwell took the rest of all I had. My name they have taken from me it seems. After I got off the radio with Matt I took both shoes off my feet and said this. The bible says to shake the dust off your feet as a testomony to those who do not accept you. And i sit there and hit both shoes infront of those doors to Greenwell Cooperative Vallejo, CA. Greenwell took from the one vendor who is making a change on the streets of Vallejo. Our product has been in Vallejo ever since cliff had the first clinic over 3 years ago on Tennesee St. They copied our products and charged patients more. I spoke up for patients rights to the Compassionate Use Act and I had everything taken from me. Greenwell all-ready had it out for me for months now. High Standards calling them was just a exscuse to kick me out and copy my butter and what ever else they will steal. High Standards also contacted E.C.C and Happy Little Trees in Vallejo. They told both places the same as Greenwell. Both places ignored them because they know better than that. Happy Little Trees owner laughed when he heard that I allegidly stole and said well if he did he gave it to the poor.
CHAPTER-3
The worse part about all of this is the Slander and for what I never sinned against anyone at High Standards. I spoke up for dieing and injured people. People who cant speak for there self. In return High Standards calls all the M.M.D's I'm at and speaks lies. They called every bussiness I work for and told them lies. Even clinics I havent even talked to yet. Now if I promote our edibles people will asume I am a thief if they do not know me and not want to do bussiness with me. What they did is a crime and it's not right. It is important to remember no body regulates these clinics. Only a few county's in California have regulations regarding M.M.D's. No body says that you have to keep it fare for the patients. These clinics can charge whatever they want to you. Vendors have no say in the price of you medicine. I have been a advocate for years now on many subjects. When is enough really enough? I started a homeless shelter for men on December 20th 2011. The name of the shelter is called Samsons Unit. It can be found under Freedom Edibles on You Tube or Samsons Unit at the top of the seach bar for facebook. I have a program that can get most of the homeless off the streets of Vallejo. So far no clinic in Vallejo or in California has ever made a donation. Rolandes from Happy Little Trees gave us the money for our second bunk bed to be built here. Micheal Durica and his family built the first bunkbed for the mens home. Since then ive asked everyone in the Medical Marijuana Industry for help with this project. All I got was no's, lies, and mislead. Jason kept me on the phone for over a hour promising he would help out. The system is corrupted it's not about Compassion anymore it's about self gain. Freedom Edibles is one of about 25 companies in the U.S. that has a H.A.C.C.P. aplication on file with a health dept. We are regulated by the San Fransisco Health Dept. Most edible vendors arent even Food Safety Certified. Next time you visit a clinic and decide what edible is right for you ask them to see a copy of the premier food safety certificate. Odds are if there not in S.F. county they dont have one. Ask high standards or Greenwell if anyone in there store has a H.A.C.C.P. application on file with the health dept. There going to say this whats a H.A.C.C.P. application. This is because they don't have any edible vendords who have been approved by a health dept. We are, and I can proudly and boldly say, that we are regulated. Most clinics aren't like High Standards and Greenwell both have threatened to murder me. I told them do me a favor and send me to my maker. I feel as if I have been screwed completly. How can these establishments make millions of dollars and steal from me? How can these establishments force people that open homeless shelters to close the doors? Now I worry if Samsons Unit Mens Sober Living Home will stay open? Why should anyone have to wonder if they are going to be able to help a drug addict know Christ? I have some amazing men in the home one of them is 25 he is a Marine he fought in Korea, Afganistan, and Iraq. He was injured in the war and is disabled. We are trying to get him his own place so his wife and kid can move in with him. Mr. Yancey is 53 he lost his home in a fire and then he lost his wife. I found him and John at the Vallejo Homeless Shelter. They have been here for over a month. I recently took another brother in Timothy who was in tears 54 and no peace we gave him rest and he has been here a week so far. I have had more guys here that did not work out. But we are having a good success rate so far. Praise be to God. Freedom Edibles for years has been giving in major ways to patients and communities. Freedom Edibles name has been bashed. Now I cant get more clinics without them questioning me about what High Standards told the world. Who really suffers in all this?
CHAPTER-4
As for me and my household we will serve the lord. I could find a job somewhere I am sure and support my self. There are more harsh things I could be doing. In all of this the Marijuana Patient is stolen from. The Cancer patient over charged and without medicine dies. There are hundreds of illnesses out there that marijuana can ease. Will these patients ever have affordable medicine? Next time you go into a collective ask them for some Compassion (free medicine). Odds are they will tell you they cant help you. Sure there are a few clinics out there that give back but on a percentage level we are talking 1% actually don't make a profit. Freedom Edibles is in that catogory because we give everything we have. I own a beat up washer a dryer a old T.V. a dvd player a broken computer and thats about it. Everything I own I gave to the start of the homeless shelter that is much needed in Vallejo, CA. Now the one thing I still have, my name, is being bashed. Now who suffers besides the patients. Well no money equals no homeless shelter. It's almost like most clinics in Vallejo want Crack Cocaine addicts to roam the streets. Why do I say this because they could not even donate a bunk bed. Keep in mind we also donate food to the Emmanuel Temple Church Mens Home in Vallejo as well. Now there affected because of greedy greedy clinics who profit off of sick and injured people. If you are a patient and you dont want to get ripped off contact me and I will take care of you at wholesale. If anyone who reads this wants to start a M.M.D. in Vallejo for patients in the bay area to have medicine at whole sale price then contact me. I would like to start a clinic here in Vallejo and charge no more than 5 a gram for 6 star top of the line medicine hash and flowers. I would also like to do wholesale edibles in this eliminating all these over priced collectives. 12 a gram 15 a gram 18 a gram 20 a gram aren't you tired of paying these prices ever wonder how much it cost to grow this medicine 1500 watts is about 40 cents a hour. Veg cycle is typically 18 hours light thats about $210 dollars a month in electric fees. After flowering begins it's alot less electric use all together around $700 in electric to grow 1 and a half pounds. 24 ounces 672 grams for allmost $700. Thats about a dollar a gram so why charge 10-20 dollars for a gram? Because they can. Even if people are useing other things in there grow a gram wont come out to more than a cost of $2 per gram. If I had the money I would start a grow and start a clinic. I would not charge more than 5 dollars per gram of every kind. People will drive for miles to save money and eventually if these greedy clinics want to stay open they will be forced to lower there prices to 5 or less a gram. We as patients have the right to cheap and affordable medicine. Will we stand up for our rights? Will we let clincis over charge sick and dieing people? I wont I will not stand for it. I will be raising money to open a clinic for the people by the people. We only need about 7,000 to start I nice clinic ether in San Jose or Vallejo. I am down for both cities. Patients are getting ripped off in every city by over charging greedy clinics! Lets make a difference and change Medical Marijuana Forever lets lower the price of marijuana and force these greedy establisments to shut down or give fair prices to patients. The Compasionate Use Act has been choped up into a money making pit as does most things in this world. Don't stand for it any longer choose to make a difference Boycot these greedy establisments. Start growning your own medicine. Help me to open a Clinic that has top of the line for 5 dollars a gram or less. And next time your in Greenwell or High Standards tell them Freedom Edibles will still serve the lord even without there blessing AMEN. GOD BLESS THE FEW M.M.D.'S WHO DO RIGHT YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE.
[signed] Shawn Polly
707-655-0313
Medables777@yahoo.com
Freedom Edibles @ You Tube
FreedomEdibles/Facebook
2012-04-09 "Annual Prayer Breakfast"
update from Shawn Allen Polly:
Osby Davis' Annual Prayer Breakfast address concerning the future of Vallejo is titled "Rebuilding Lives and the Vallejo Community, Collaboration is key". Watch it at youtube [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dmF_Su5wtw].
As most people know or may not know. Freedom Edibles has been working on the streets of Vallejo, Ca for over a year. We council crack cocaine addicts, Gang Members, the homeless and so many more people. We have a mens sober living home called Samson's Unit. We house men recovering from Alcohol and Narcotics. Mayor Osby Davis says in this video at 6 min. 30 sec. that he supports anyone who is trying to make Vallejo a better city. He also says it is not about your philosophy it's about your motives. The city of Vallejo denied the inspection for the 1,000 pounds of supplies we had gathered for the tsunami that wiped out the country of Japan. That was the city attorney that denied that request in 2011. In late 2011 the planning department said i would be arrested for operating a illegal business if i opened a homeless shelter outside of Intensive use Zoning. I looked at the map the city provides at all intensive use zones. I drove around at each location to only find huge industrial buildings for thousands a dollars a month in rental fees? They have a permit required to open a Homeless shelter it's called a open use permit. $3,000 non refundable fee. It takes month's to get approved or denied? And why such harsh fees for providing your city such a great service? The city needs a new shelter. The Christian Help Center can only house 60 men, woman, and children. Georgia st. is full of empty buildings. I had a lady that was going to rent out this building that still sits there. For $500 bucks a month. I was going to put a food closet in the front room and a computer room in the back for education. I went to the planning dept. and once again they said the Zoning does not allow a food closet. So once again i could be arrested and shut down for operating a illegal bussiness. I told them it would be by appointment only and would not create traffic in the area. There was four marijuana clinics in the area including one next door. and several bars as well. But we cant have a food pantry and education center? Measure C passed by voters by 76%. Since then many people in Vallejo have went to jail fighting for safe acces for patients. Is the new Mayor a lier? Am i next to be silenced?
2012-03-06 "Intro to Vallejo church fraud"
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEQYt-fXWik] at [http://www.youtube.com/user/ExposetheChurch]:
This channel will serve as a protest to the ways of the Vallejo, Ca church system. I have had nothing but problems with every church in Vallejo? Is it me or is it them. In time i will have alot of video evidence you decide! Vallejo church is big money these days. There taking your money and not giving it back to you when you ask for help!
[http://www.churchfraud.org/]
Thank you for your interest in Church Fraud!
This website is designed for people who have an open mind. If you think your church is not fraudulent in any way. This web-site will not help you. This website will expose the way churches in the San Francisco Bay area operate. All information is true and accurate and can be verified through video, audio, and witnesses. If you are a christian prepare to be amazed at the way the Body of Christ operates in the bay area and the world.
Ephesians 5:11 to 14 - "(11) Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. (12) For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. (13) But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible,(14) for anything that becomes visible is light."
Hello, my name is Shawn Polly. I am about to share some stories that will challenge your belief in church. Please note if your church is mentioned by no means am I telling you to leave your church. Instead confront the members of your church in public. The enemy wants you to grow bitter and not go to church. If I grew bitter I would not step foot in a church to preach the truth when there pastor doesn't. It is up to us to change the image of the Body of Christ that has been so misleading to mankind.
Japan Earthquake and Tsunami 2011 -
It is all to weird of a story and very sad at the same time. Shortly after Japan was devastated in 2011 I had a heart to help. I kept having this dream about holding a Japanese baby. I called my phone company a few days later to add international calling. I was told that International calling was free to Japan for 30 days because of the tragedy. I contacted a church in Tokyo that told me they could use all the help they could get. I contacted the Salvation Army of Vallejo, Ca asking if I could use the barrels to collect supplies for the Japanese people. The Salvation Army agreed and it seemed like all was going well. I put barrels everywhere and collected around 1,000 pounds of food, medical, and clothing. My plan was to deliver the supplies to Japan personally and video document the destruction. In this I would come back to the states and form teams that would be there to this day.
God's People are not God's People -
When you have hundreds of dollars in medicine, clothing, and food the last thing you would imagine is that it would go to waste. I contacted over 50 churches in Vallejo, American Canyon, and Napa to help me get over there or get the supplies over there. Church after church gave me an excuse why they could not do it or collaborate with other churches to make it happen. Most churches said we already sent money, or they give to a charity that is in the region like The Red Cross or Samaritans Purse. After contacting so many churches I tried the charity's they said they sponsored. Samaritans Purse said they already have enough people there and they could not help me get the supplies over. The Red Cross would not take my supplies and told me I had to take a class to go over seas. Okay i'll take the class I said. The Red Cross said the class is once a month and it takes multiple classes until you complete the course. Nothing was looking up.
How Does God Finance Missions?
I have had a lot of people who claim to be of Christ tell me "if God wanted you there he would had made a way for you to be there". I then ask those people does God work through his people? And if so why weren't his people helping the children in Japan? God commands his followers to obey the bible. There is no limit to compassion. Jesus Christ did not teach us to let people suffer but to suffer with people. So many church leaders will be asked by God on the day of judgement. Why did you not listen to the words I spoke. No church was interested in getting the food, medicine, and clothing to Japan. I watched baby food go bad holding onto it in hopes someone would help me get it there in time!
A Table in Darkness -
God spoke to me and said I was to go to the heart of the hood and minister. I went to Sonoma and Indiana street in Vallejo. For those who don't know this area let me explain. Bloods Mafia gang members, Prostitutes, Crack Cocaine dealers, Alcoholism, every where in sight hay there's even a porn theater across the street. I put a table up ordered 10 pizzas and served water and pizza to who ever was hungry or thirsty playing christian hip hop in the background. A white boy in the hood was a scary feeling but evermore I shall not fear. My first week I met Hosea Perez a.k.a. Video. He approached me the third Sunday I was feeding people and said this "Shawn I just got out of jail for Crack Cocaine and I don't want to stay on the streets or I will do more Crack. Can I go home with you he asked".
Fear or No Fear -
At this point I got a man who has been to prison more times then I got fingers asking me if he can stay the night with me. If I said no I would disregard the bible and follow Mammon. I told Video come with me. He could had killed me, Robbed me, Or anything. Instead he lived there for three months. He told me how he was a pastor in Oklahoma years back and had lost his way with God. Pretty soon when I would show up at 3 P.M. on Sundays to feed folks in the hood Video was with me. Everyone knew him and trusted him in the ghetto. He was the weapon God had gave me the translator I needed. Video became the preacher he once was and started preaching light in a very dark place.
13 Weeks and No Church Showed Up -
For 13 weeks I had been calling and even visiting churches in Vallejo about this street ministry. I had one pastor show up and pray for two Min. and that was it. Emmanuel Temple Apostolic Church Pastor Harris. I asked him if he would spare a couple of his members and he said he would try. I never got any help from his church. Did Mr. Harris pray in vain? Why did he pray for things he could already do? Don't you love it when your in need and a fake christian says let me pray for you instead of actually helping you. I don't know about you but it happens to thousands of people everyday in America.
The Door Christian Fellowship Church Vallejo, Ca -
The Door showed me the door one night. I went to church there after seeing them fly signs at the shopping center on Admiral Callaghan. They really seemed like they were the type that was about street ministry. I showed up there one night after being invited and I wanted to ask for there help at the booth we had set up in the projects. They told me before they would help me I would have to build a relationship with them first. I told them it's not me that needs your help it's the lost souls where my booth is. They kept making up reasons why they could not help until they got to know me. I told them is this what you preach here. Jesus Christ did not say follow me when you are comfortable. Jesus went into strangers homes for the sake of the gospel. They kicked me out of there church for reciting scripture where they were not following the commandments of there Messiah.
Conclusion of The table in Darkness -
For over 13 weeks no church showed up to help serve food or even pitched in on anything. I started a church on the streets. We had about 40 people that would show up every Sunday. Kids were drawing I love Jesus all over the sidewalk. People were loving each other and peace was being installed in a very un-peaceful place. Only one man can do so much. I had spent around $1200 in the 13 weeks I had been there. I lost my job and could not pay for anymore pizza, snacks, or toys for the kids. Although a lot of greatness had come from this mission there was still a very sad darkness. No church had cared for the lost in the projects. They never showed up to the rescue even though we were the church in plain sight.
Does Vallejo Church seem Fraudulent yet?
I had a 3 bedroom home I was renting in Vallejo. I started talking to friends about starting a men's home for sober living. We built a couple of bunk beds and drew up literature on the program. We called the home Samson's Unit Men's Sober Living Home. I started interviewing guys at the local homeless shelter in Vallejo called The Christian Help Center. Pretty soon we had five guys living there. All of the guys that lived there were Vet's except one. I mailed 90 churches in Vallejo explaining what we were doing asking for help. All I got back was return address letters. No church called me, e-mailed, or came by. I even called and visited some of the Vallejo churches. Not one of them ever helped with the men's home. Shocking enough the Discover Channel thought it was worth visiting even if the church didn't. We had a married couple that was sleeping in our backyard. They were on Heroin sleeping under a bridge in Vallejo. We gave them a place to live. With no room inside we gave them what we had. Because we followed what the bible actually teaches we sheltered the afflicted and they got saved. You can find there story on T.L.C. the name of the show is Addicted and the title is Sean and Jenna. It's kind of funny no church stopped by but the Discovery Channel sent people to document it.
Community Bible Church Vallejo, Ca. -
I went to this church and dropped off a 20 Min. video explaining how the men's home operates asking for help. I waited 3 weeks and did not here from them. This is one of the biggest churches in Vallejo next to the high school. When I heard nothing from the leadership of the church I made flyers explaining that I need help with the men's home. As I was putting them on the cars 4 deacon's came out of the church demanding I leave the property. As I leave I stop on the sidewalk and tell them I am a Christian in need of help. As I try to explain about the men's home one of the church members pushes me off the sidewalk into the street. I never got vulgar, angry, or any of the liking. This church member attacked me for no reason. I came back and I flew a sign that said Church of Satan as people were leaving the church for there Sunday meeting. Another point to make about this church is that they are building a new temple and parking lot next to there church. Do you think that they could meet outside instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to meet inside? I wonder if any of there members are going through foreclosure as they build this new temple. What would Vallejo think if they built a new homeless shelter or a woman's battered home center for woman and children. I know that Vallejo does not have enough shelter for people and they send people to Fairfield, Ca all the time for shelter.
The List of Churches that did not Care. -
Are you kidding I contacted every church in Vallejo. Nobody Knew how to help the sick and afflicted.
Help me Feed the Hungry Concord Body of Christ. -
Have you ever heard of Urban Farming? Billions of pounds of fruit goes to waste every year in residential neighborhoods. I run an organization called Samson's Unit. When I say I run it that's because nobody will help. Just me and the great woman God put in my life make it happen. I gathered fruit from residential neighborhoods for around 4 months in Concord delivering it to food programs around Concord and the surrounding. I asked over 30 churches to help me with volunteers, equipment, etc. . No church raised a finger to help me gather food for the hungry. Here are a few of those stories.
Tabernacle Baptist Church Concord, Ca. -
I went to this church for a couple of months. On Sunday nights they have a service. At this service you can have a chance to speak to the congregation. For several weeks I reported to the church members about my progress. Every Sunday night I would ask the members to join me. Not one member ever joined me. I asked this church for help to feed the hungry for months. Next time you see Pastor New House ask him why he didn't spare one guy to help pick fruit?
Saint Bonaventure Catholic Church. -
Thanksgiving 2012 I delivered 517 pounds of fruit to there food program. It took along time to pick and it cost gas money to find the fruit trees. I asked there church for a gas card in the amount of $50. They told me they could not afford to help me. Has anyone ever been to this church. You can tell that there 30 acre property is worth millions of dollars. I am sorry to report this church is a fraud. They need to live like Jesus. Jesus Christ did not say spend millions of dollars on a church compound. What if they took there 50 million dollar property sold it and built drug rehab centers? Do you think meeting outside or maybe in a building they can buy for 50 thousand would be more appropriate? I think if some of these big churches would do as I have stated above that people would actually believe in the church.
Remember Super Storm Sandy?
When the storm hit I contacted Tammy Morris in the Atlantic City region. She runs a food distribution center that oversees 51 food pantries. I asked her if I got a semi truck to deliver 40,000 pounds of potatoes could they use them. She told me that people were without food, electric, shelter, and etc. . I told her I would try my hardest to accomplish the goal. I contacted Dick Wheller who is a potato farmer in West Virginia. He told me for $2,700 he would deliver 40,000 pounds of grade A potatoes to Tammy Morris. I had $200 of my own money already on the total. All I needed was some help to get the rest. Here are some stories of churches in Concord that did not care to help the victims of Super Storm Sandy.
Tabernacle Baptist Church Concord, Ca. -
I asked Pastor New House to donate to it. He was on his way to L.A. to hire a new assistant pastor for there church. He could had asked his members of the church to match me or sell some of there material possessions. It's sad that his church requires him to hire a pastor from a college. A fraction of the money he used to hire the new pastor could had paid for the potatoes. There are a lot of people out there that have never went to school to learn the bible who are priest.
Mormon Church Concord, Ca Concord Blvd. -
If you ever want to get kicked out of a Mormon church just ask them to sell there possession to help the Super Storm Sandy Victims. I wish I could get some of these stories on video. I told this church all the facts and asked if they would contribute. When they said I had to ask the main Mormon Church in town I was upset. I asked them where in the bible does it say to ask someone else if you have permission to help the hurt and hungry? I asked them to personally help. They told me to leave. I told them if 13 members sold a $200 possession with my $200 we would have enough to do it. They called the cops and I left. I was surprised that the Mormon Church acted like this. No actually it doesn't matter what church you are it seems they all follow mammon.
Holy Cross Lutheran Church Concord, Ca. -
At the storage unit across from this church I had a table set up. At this table I had signs asking people to give food for the victims. I told the pastor of this church that the victims of Super Storm Sandy needed help with food and how he could help. I think he said something like we have already gave to the Victim's. I thought in my head do we only give comfortably? The answer is yes. The church these days lives in houses that cost a half of million dollars while people are homeless. You would think that as many churches there are there would be no homeless. If people accepted homeless people as Christ excepted us there would be no homeless. If a church of 100 members for example had 10 members that were willing to house one homeless person each. It would bring homeless to an end. As many churches that are in one city it would seem that something like this would be into play already. Jesus said that the poor will always be with you. He didn't say that people should sleep in bushes and homeless shelters. I encourage you to go sleep at a homeless shelter for 3 days and tell me it's christian to put people in that condition. My point being as long as material possession stands in the way of God the church is a fraud. As long as we fear that creepy homeless guy showing him partial love we can't expect to go to Heaven.
It's simple for example we do more then just pray for you. -
Have you ever asked a church pastor to help you with something you know he can help you with but he says let's pray about it. I have asked a lot of pastor's of big and small churches to help me help others. I have heard most of them say they can't and then ask if they can pray for me. To be Christlike means a lot of things. When material possession gets in the way of humanity you can't possible say your of God. You have the homeless woman holding a sign as 100 cars pass by that are worth $20,000 with a cross hanging on the rear view mirror. As long as churches meet indoors the Body of Christ is doomed. These temples are worth hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars most times. Go out to the streets and shout God's name stop hiding behind doors.
I want to see dry bones living again. -
It is my goal to awake some churches out there and there members to what is going on in there own church. If the dark is exposed then it will be no more.
It seems if you are American then you are a Christian. A lot of people who go to church will be left behind. People actually have convinced there selves in whatever way to justify what to follow and when to follow in the bible. There are people being murdered today in countries around the world because they are a christian. People are in prison for life because they are a disciple of Jesus Christ. I saw a homeless lady the other day out in a field by the Taco Bell on Clayton Rd. in Concord, Ca. I asked her if she was hungry. As I was taking her some burritos from Taco Bell I seen two people in there early 50's eating by the window where you can see the homeless lady. I approached the couple and nicely asked if they go to a local church. They said Tabernacle Baptist in Concord, Ca. I said okay I know Pastor New House. I asked them if they noticed the homeless lady. They said yes. I asked them why they didn't feed her. They said they have fed her before and asked me what I was getting at. I asked them if they were Christians. When they said yes I said prove it. I went and gave the lady some food and gave her my phone and e-mail and am working on getting her housing. I am really sick of people posing as disciple's of God. I know that we are all sinners and that we fall short. How far have we fallen. This church name that church name. His church is the only true way. Her church is the only true way. People wake up while there is still time. Wake up before Christ comes like a thief in the night.
2011-11-28 Freedom Edible update to their facebook forum "Vallejo Patients Group" [https://www.facebook.com/groups/190198891068427/]:
Good Morning everyone, just to let you know if you don't want to be apart of this group you can easily remove it. If you do not use marijuana as medicine you should remove yourself as well. Welcome to the wonderful World of Whole Sale Edibles Freedom Edibles.
H.A.C.C.P. APPLICATION: We have a H.A.C.C.P. application on file with the San Fransisco Health Dept. What this means is anybody can view where we got are butter. Where are butter was made. It has alot of info about are butter. To view it get ahold of Larry Kistler Health Inspector of the San Fransisco Health Dept. and ask about High on the Mountain Top Butter made by Freedom Edibles.
Freedom Edibles is 1 of 25 Edible Patient Suppliers in the State of California that has a H.A.C.C.P. Application on file with a health dept.
Know who makes your food. Most these people in California and by most i mean all dont have any kinda regulation We are Regulated By a Health Dept. Cant stress how important that is. If you are buying food from a clinic that does not have a H.A.C.C.P. Application on file stop you are in danger and you nor them know where your food was made or in what conditions!!!
Food Safety Certificate: Yes we have it. Does the clinic you get your edibles thowe? For years there has been no regulation on edibles. In 2009 the San Fransisco Health Dept. made it law that you have to have a Food Safety Certificate. A simple 8 hour class is required to gain this certificate. Next time you buy edibles from a clinic ask to see a copy of the food safety certificate of the edible organization you have chosen. I bet you free edibles they aint got one.
Prices: Keep this in mind we get $3 for a rice krispy from clinics and they mark it up by atleast 100%. This goes for all the products i am about to list. By going with Freedom Edibles you eliminate the middle man. Stop getting ripped off by Greedy so called Marijuana Clinics join with Freedom!
BlueBerry and Bannana Nut Mini Muffins=$1 0.7g clipings
Star Candies (50) different Flavers 0.05 kief=$1
Kief Capsules=$2 0.3g kief
middle size candies=$2 0.2g kief
Suckers (50) different flavers 0.3g kief=$3
Rice,Fruity,Coco,Apple,Cookie,All-Berry,etc. Krispys=$3 1.7g clipings
Cookies&Cream,Chocolate Chip,Turtle,Carmel Pecon,Funnettie,Wal-Nut,Mint,Butterscotch,etc.etc. Brownies=$4 2.5g clipings
Blueberry,Banana Nut Muffins,Cranberry-Orange,Cinnimon-Streasul,etc.etc.=$4 2.5g clipings.
Peanut-Butter,Oatmeal,Chocolate-Chip,Chocolate-Mint,Rainbow,etc.etc. Cookie Bars=$4 3.0g clipings
All Cup-Cake Flavers are the same as cakes with one exception The Tie Dye Cup-Cake this one of a kinder is medicated with the frosting and the cake twice as powerful as a cake or cup-cake offered to you the patient at the same price :0 ENJOY
Strawberry,Lemen,Carot,Spice,German Chocolate,White,Rasta,Chocolate Cakes,etc.etc.
=$5 3.0g clipings
Drinks 12oz oval bottles-Blue Raspberry,Sour Apple,Orange,Grape,Watermelen,Pineapple,Strawberry,Cherry,Pink-Lemenade,Lemenade,Tigers-Blood,Strawberry-Raspberry,etc.etc. =$5 0.5g kief
Hot- sauce=$5 6oz bottle 3.5g clipings (made from Tapatia)
Peanut Butter Crunchy or Smooth=$5 (made from Skippy) 6oz hexagon jar 3.5g clipings
Bar-B-Q-Sauce=$5 6oz. bottle 3.5g clipings
Vegatable Glycerin (Tincture)=$20 1oz bottle 14g clipings
High on the Mountain Top Butter: Enjoy 3 different sizes and 5 differnt strains!!!
Strains are Blueberry,Church O.G. Kush,TrainWreck,HinduKush,PurpleKush!!!
Sizes and Price are 1/4 cup=$5 1/2 cup=$10 1 cup=$20
Didnt find what you are looking for? Let me tell you ive been working for 14 hours and my fingers are tied. We have over 700 Products yes Seven Hundred. In time i will put them up but until then just ask and it shall be given. We will try are hardest to meet everyneed for your pain.
So you think Whole-Sale is a deal huh? well Save even more money and cook your own!!! By making your own food with butter you will save between 30-50 percent more than you allready do by going with Freedom Edibles.
We have Gluten Free,Suger Free,Organic, and Vegan
We offer 10-30 free edibles a week for Terminal or Serious Ill Patients just message me.
Must have a Valid Script for Marijuana and be verified at E.C.C. Vallejo Or Natures Love Vallejo. Must do Min. Order of $30. Around 90% of all are products have a shelf life of atleast 30 days and can be frozen for months. If you donate over $100 you will get a free cup of Butter!!! (A $20 Value)
ACCOMPLISHMENTS ARE AS FOLLOWED -
1. WE DONATE FOOD TO EMANUEL TEMPLE CHURCH MENS HOME. TAKE DONATIONS TO HAPPY LIL TREES.
2. WE DONATE BOX TOPS TO LOCAL VALLEJO SCHOOLS.
3. WE DONATED 12 EASTER BASKETS TO CHILDREN AT THE VALLEJO HOMELESS SHELTER.
4. WE PROVIDED MENTORS FOR HOMELESS VALLEJO CHILDREN AT THE SHELTER.
5. FOR 12 WEEKS WE PUT A BOOTH ON SONOMA AND INDIANA ST. MINISTERING, AND COUNCILING AND FEEDING CRACK COCCAINE ADDICTS, BLOODS MAFIA MEMBERS,PROSTITUITES,PIMPS,AND HOMELESS PEOPLE. WE MINISTER BY THE GREAT NAME OF JESUS CHRIST. WE HELPED CHANGE SO MANY LIVES AND HELPED PEOPLE TO GET OFF CRACK COCAINE. PLEASE LOOK AT ARE PHOTO'S UNDER SAMSONS UNIT FOR PICTURES OF ARE TIME ON THE STREETS OF VALLEJO!!!
6. HOSEA PERIZ A 9 YEAR WONDERER ON SONOMA BLVD. ADDICTED TO CRACK COCAINE. BEEN TO SAN QUENTIN MORE TIMES THEN YOU HAVE FINGERS. WAS ARE FIRST TROPHY. HE REDEDICATED HIS LIFE TO CHRIST AND LEFT THE YAY ALONE.
7. THE MOST AWSOME ACCOMPLISHMENT YET. FOLKS IVE LIVED IN PORT-O-PODDIES-TENTS-TREE-STUMPS(REDWOODS) COUCHES,SALVATION ARMY'S, RESCUE MISSIONS I WAS HOMELESS FOR YEARS. WE NOW HAVE A MENS SOBER LIVING HOME THAT CAN HOUSE 8 MEN SO FAR. IT IS KNOWN AS SAMSONS UNIT A CHRISTIAN MISSIONARY ORGANIZATION FUNDED BY FREEDOM EDIBLES!!!! PRAISE GOD I WAS THREATENED BY THE CITY THAT THEY WOULD SUE ME IF I OPENED A HOMELESS SHELTER IN ZONING OTHER THAN INTENSIVE USE. i LOOKED THERE IS NO PROPERTY UNDER SUCH ZONING FOR RENT. GOD IS GOOD GOD PROVIDES LUP HOLES WHEN OUR CITY LEADERS ONLY PROVIDE EVIL!!! WE ONLY HAVE 2 MEN CURRENTLY AS OF TODAY. STILL HAVE ALOT OF WORK TO DO. WE PROVIDE PHONE,INTERNET,FURNITURE,LAUNDRY,T.V.,D.V.D., COUNCILING, RIDES TO AND FROM LABER READY, DRUG-TEST, DINNER EVERY NIGHT,FRIDGE,FREEZER,OVEN,MICROWAVE,PET-THEARAPY,SPIRITUAL-GUIDENCE, AND SO MUCH MORE. IT HAS BEEN MY DREAM TO OPERATE A HOMELESS SHELTER AND THIS WILL BE A GREAT TEST FOR ME. I THINK GOD FOR ALLOWING ME TO BE HOMELESS FOR 3 YEARS IF I WASN'T I WOULD NOT HAD KNOWN HOW TO SAVE THEM PRAISE YOUR HOLY MAKER FOR THE BAD TIMES FOR THEY MIGHT TURN TO GOOD EVEN GREAT SOMEDAY PRAISE GOD!
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2011-11-29 update from "Freedom Edibles" organizer Shawn Allen Polly:
Hay everyone i need some help! I am starting a Mens Home and i need Wood for Bunk Beds. A Carpenter or Two that can Build them. I can offer Edibles in return as long as you are a patient. Please dont reply just for the edibles or your gonna be disappointed i need a few good men. And i need some Wood (hahaha!).
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2011-12-09 update from "Freedom Edibles" organizer Shawn Allen Polly:
Hi everyone hope all is well. I am looking for a couple of patients who are interested in working for Free Edibles. I need a couple more people on my clean-up crew. I am willing to give $15 a hour in edibles of your choice. We have hundreds of products to choose from. Task includes washing dishes, Sweep, mop, wipe down, etc. Its about 10-20 hours a week. This is a good way to get the medicine you need in exchange for work!!! Thank You so much offer applies to medical marijuana patients only!!! Located in Vallejo.
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2011-12-10 update from "Freedom Edibles" organizer Shawn Allen Polly:
Hello everyone want some Edibles? This Sunday from 12-5 p.m. here in Vallejo we are doing are second work day for Samsons Unit Mens Sober Living Home!!! Last week all who worked earned around 70 dollars in medicine. I have flowers to trade for work as well. Lets come together and put this mens home together before Christmas so i can get some men in here in time for Christmas!!! Offer only applies for medical marijuana patients!!! For more info just message me!!!
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2011-12-12 update from "Freedom Edibles" organizer Shawn Allen Polly:
As of today i went to the Vallejo Homeless Shelter also known as The Christian Help Center. I gave a speech to a few men who are in the Shelter. I found out today just how much people are in need. One of the guys has a job but no place to live. Another is trying to get a job with a church over on broadway st. here in Vallejo. And another has his wife and kid in another shelter who just needs a little help. I gave them a information booklet on Samsons Unit. All of them agree that this program would benefit them. Most of the men i talked to just need a little help to get there lives back to normal. All of them agreed to drug testing and obeying the rules and regulations. They all agree that $60 a week is a great deal as well. All we need to do is get the lumber for the bunk beds and twin size mattress's. I got the house and im willing to move people who are battleing drugs and alcohol in here and live with them. Someone get some lumber please that is the easy part. We need lumber for 4 more bunkbeds about $420 worth imagine that 420. Each bed cost $105 to make and we need 4. I dont know how much twin size mattress's are but we need 12. I am willing for anyone to come visit this home and see what we have done and what we are trying to do! I would say $900 is all it will take to get all the lumber and get these beds ready before Christmas! So Who's got $900 bucks to get 8-12 men off the streets of Vallejo? A sad question to ask i wish i had it. Everyone i have asked tells me they cant help or gives a small chunk thinking it will cover everything. I got a van we can go get the lumber and mattresses you pay for them. I need no money just your time and help. I have a couple of skilled peeps that know how to put bunk beds together in 2 hours flat. Ive did about all i can do please someone some church something rise up and make this a reality. Thank You Shawn Polly 707-655-0313 For lumber size look under documents at the top then go to current needs.
i will still trade edibles at wholesale for trade of supplies
Samson's Unit was founded in May 2011, and started a weekly service and community feed.
Shawn Polly writes on July 3rd: I did not realize how much the devil wants my soul dead until
Today I ministered to around 20 people including these children. I went to Safeway tonight for food. About ten minutes into it, a Demon approached me. He started talking to me about weird stuff. I went to check out, and he was two people behind me. He said you in the green bandanna and started to attack me I blocked this guy as people intervened. Call it mental, but I call it demons!"
2011-06-05 "Week 4 Samsons Unit" photographs by Shawn Polly:
2011-07-03 "Week 8 Samsons Unit" photographs by Shawn Polly:
2011-07-10 "Week 9 Samsons Unit" photograph by Shawn Polly:
2012-01-12 "What is Samsons Unit?"
video uploaded by Shawn Polly·to [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvF3HfEGbYc]:
Shawn Polly explains the making of Samsons Unit Mens Sober Living Home.
2011-12-19 "Samson's Unit Sober Living Home is open!"
update from "Samson's Unit" organizer Shawn Allen Polly:
We got another resident today here at the start of Samson's Unit Mens Sober Living Home!!! That makes 3 guys now here at the house.
I am amazed that nobody has been by or been talking to me about how we can come together to make this continue to happen. I still only have one bunk bed with no mattresses?
What if you were homeless down on your luck? What about that one family member who is just trying to stop drinking? Or the family member or friend who uses drugs? Well if it was up to most of you they would be dead. It's almost Christmas. All these people claim they know God? How much do they really know God? O i got a thing in my yard or window that says i love the lord bull shit! To know God is to love people as your self. Is it possible to please God? Can we persuade something so powerful to give extra attention to are self? Hebrews 13:16 says "And don't forget to do good and to share with those in need. These are the sacifices that please God". Aint nobody but like 5 or 6 people even lifted a finger to help out . Shit sacrifice is way to big a word for most of you. I took 3 people in where i live that stuggle from Meth and Crack Coccaine. 3 less people on the streets of Vallejo. 3 more open spots at the Vallejo Homeless Shelter. Ive did my part as a Christian as a Jew as a good person in life. Now all you inconsideret people that are just my friend on face book because i make edibles. Remove yourself. I am trying really hard to not kuss and be mature about this. To all of you who could had helped or still can and dont help with the basic things we need to get this mens home fully operative. Please please reconsider living shoot yourself before christmas thank you heartless people of Vallejo!!!
2011-12-21 "I have a system that can solve the Vallejo Homeless Epidemic"
update from "Samson's Unit" organizer Shawn Allen Polly:
We got two more guys in today. Thats a total of four men at Samsons Unit. The two guys that we took in today are former Marines. One 30 and the other 25. They are both really awsome brothers. I have been talking with them getting to know them alot better. I found out today that our eldest resident Mr. Yancey age 53 lost his wife a year ago and lost his home in a fire recently in El Sobrante. Before Mr. Yancey was here he biked 12 miles a day to Mare Island where he works at Blu Homes. We are able to hook him up with rides now and make him breakfast where he once did not have before work. At Samsons Unit Mens Sober Living Home we are able to not only help out 4 amazing guys so far but three of them are Veterens. The lord is really starting to move it is amazing to see this mens home starting to form! Three of the guys we have here we have taken out of the Christian Help Center. CHC is Vallejo's only Homeless Shelter. Months back i got CHC on video saying there is not enough room for all the homeless there. You can find that video under Freedom Edibles videos. I truly know that i can change Vallejo for good and put a dent in the homeless epidemic. As well as the Crack Cocaine epidemic! I have been going by the homeless shelter everyday for a week now since we have had Samsons Unit open. I have discovered there are alot of Sober men down on there luck only needing a little encouragement. Only needing a place they can call home. I truly know we have a great system that is founded on the Love of Jesus Christ. I have done nothing but love love love these brothers that are here. I see the love of Christ coming out of there souls because of it Praise be to God the most high most most most high!!! I feel more complete everyday working with the homeless and getting them off the streets of Vallejo, Ca. The streets of Vallejo are as dangerous as they come. We have one of the highest homicide rates in the nation! I have also discovered there is a brother at the shelter who has a terminal illness. He gets about 600 bucks a month he needs a apartment or his own space. He has Serosis of the Liver! He knows the lord Jesus Christ he just needs help with finding his own place. Another discovery is Vallejo has alot of Homeless Mental People running around with no where to go. The CHC has no where for people with Mental Problems to go. I cant take them here around men who are recovering from drugs and alcohol. But we can run another mens home that is dedicated to the homeless men of Vallejo who have mental problems. It's gonna take some help to do it can't do it alone. Eventually I know God will help me to acomplish this. I have much much bigger goals of having Womens Homes And Family Homes. Who knows maybe God will eventually bless me with a fully operative Homeless Shelter one day? I trully know in time with the proper help i can get over 90% of Homeless people off the streets of Vallejo. I know what you are saying 90% thats too high a number. In 5 days i have taken 3 guys out of the Vallejo Homeless Shelter. It has taken that long because nobody wants to donate or help. With the proper donations and help i truly know i can make the Homeless shelter empty. In this system God gave me i truly know i can all-most eliminate the Homeless epidemic of Vallejo,Ca. And have a spot for any Homeless person housing Woman, Men, and Children with what ever issues they have. Through Sober living, Special treatment for the Mental Ill, Victims of Violence, and alot of other bases i didnt mention. God Bless Us all and a good night from Samsons Unit Mens Sober Living Home.
2013-01-31 HAVE YOU EVER BEEN LEFT TO DIE?"
update from "Samson's Unit" organizer Shawn Allen Polly:
CHAPTER-1
Prop 215 The Compassianate Use Act has been misused by most marijuana clinics in California. Ive been doing bussiness with High Standards for 3 months as of last week. I was in San Jose and i decided to go by there and see if I could get the money they owed me (consignment). When i walked in I brought a mini muffin tree for our mini muffins and our trophy that we won at the 2010 people choice awards. I noticed most of our product was still there. Two weeks old I wondered whats the problem. I checked all of them for signs of mold. They were all still good. I looked at a bud tender and asked him how much are the mini muffins here. He said $3 I was upset I said to him that I only sale these for $1 to High Standards. I continued to add that a patient would not buy these mini muffins at such a high price. As I was speaking I looked at our candy jar on there counter and seen $3 per candy. I was furious because I sold these to High Standards for 0.50 cents each. They were making a 600% profit. All of our edibles were marked up at this store. I humbled my self after telling the bud tender my feelings. I put the mini muffin tree together and put fresh muffins on the tree and took the old ones back. I then offered to put my trophy in there glass case and he said that would be cool and I did so. I then asked him if I could get paid the remaining balance he said let me find out. He went in the back and came out with a phone that had Jamie one of the owners on it. She said how do you have the right to tell me I sale edibles for too much. I said Mrs. our candies are marked up 600% and all of our edibles are atleast marked up by 200%. She told me that we wont be doing bussiness with you that she would pay me out and I was done. As she was saying this Jason the other owner was in the background of the phone cursing at me. I asked Jamie for 60 seconds to explain she said go ahead. I started by saying if a patient goes to another clinic in San Jose and they see our same product you have here for 6 times more than they will think bad things of both of us. She said she needed to charge more because of taxes? Here is the math breakdown on what she is saying! We sold high standars a product for fifty cents 0.50 cents They turned around and sold it for $3. Every other clinic we have sales our candies for $1. It's a $2.50 gain. 5 times more than what they paid. Thats a brief description on how one of our products was abused very badly at this clinic. Many more of our products were marked up atleast 200% When we sold the candy to them at 0.50 cents each we did not make a profit for them. We do these edibles that cheap for patients and do not make a profit so we can offer affordable medicine to sick and injured people, at a very low cost. When i explained this to Jamie she was furious as well as Jason. She said get your money and dont ever come back! I told her that all I do is right in this world. I serve the lord Jesus Christ everyday of my life! I told her that i witness to people in the great name of Jesus Christ everyday in Vallejo, Ca. I also told her that I cant afford to lose there support that I started a homeless shelter in Vallejo, Ca called Samsons Unit. She said that she did not care. I said very well then. I handed the phone to her staff they asked me to come into the back. A tall white young man with blond hair asked me how much I was owed I told him. He laid some money down on a table and said I will get the rest. After other employees were calling me names and making fun of my religion I grabed the money that was mine put it in my pocket and attempted to leave. Three guys stood before me telling me I could not leave. I said if you touch me it's assalt and battery as i started out the door. They said if you leave its theft and we will call the police. I had 3 people with me waiting in the lobby. I came out of the back and told everyone we have to go now High Standards is calling the cops on us. As we were leaving one of the employees was placing his hand on my friend who was behind me and it caused me to trip. As we all drove away I told them how cruel and heartless they were by treating a man who gives all he has to the needy away like waste.
CHAPTER-2
When I got home that night I had a message on my phone that said Jason was calling the police on me for theft. I called Jason back and tried to reason with him by saying this is to small just let it go. He started calling me names and I told him why do you treat a Godly man like waste. He said your not Godly my grandmother is a ordained minister who runs a recovery program. He went onto say that I was on drugs. I told Jason that I run a sober living home for recovering addicts. Jason allready knew this because he was suppose to build two bunk beds for our homeless shelter. We talked for a hour and a half one time about how High Standards would finance the homeless shelter Freedom Edibles started. He set up a appointment with me and never showed up. He lied to me. He lied to the homeless. He lies to mankind. After I reminded him of this he was furious. He said dont you know who I am I am a medical marijuana clinic owner I make over 2 MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR I CAN HAVE YOU PUT UNDER IF I WANTED TO. I told him he was stupid saying he would kill me on audio with 3 wittnesses then I hung up. I started getting phone calls from him right after I hung up. I answered and told him just let it go brother it was good while it lasted. Since last Wednsday I have had several threatning messages left on my machine. One of them says this From Jason and I quate " Shawn I am going to make sure you dont sell edibles ever again to any of these clinics in California. I've called E.C.C. Ive Called Greenwell and I called Happy Little Trees and told them that you stole from High Standards and there going to stop doing bussiness with you. Your done buddy none of these places even like you they all think you are a joke". Well this didnt meen much to me untill today. Chris from Greenwell sent me a tex message that said "why are other vendors saying that your talking crap about me?' I called him imediatly and said Stix what are you talking about? I asked him if high Standards called them saying I stole from them. He said yes and we dont want to ever have you in Greenwell again. I hung up and called the owner Matt. He didnt repsond so I went down to the Greenwell. When I got there security held me at the door and asked on the radio if I could come in Matt said no. I asked if he would speak to me on the radio he said yes. He told me that high standards called him saying alot of bad things about me. I said thats not true he said he was waiting for 2 weeks to see a video tape of me stealing money from them. I said Matt i've been here for over 2 years. I said Matt what about the homeless shelter i started what about the work we do on the streets of Vallejo how will we be able to continue to do it? He said stop sucking on the greenwell tittie and go get some new clubs. I said Matt you stole the slushie machine from me and now you make thousands of dollars off of it. Months back Freedom Edibles put a slushie machine at Greenwell they removed my machine bought another one and in time they told me it was there idea and it was there money. They stole thousands of dollars from me from homeless citizens in there own city. Because of that loss we could not afford to set up are booth on Sonoma and Indiana St. in Vallejo on Sundays at 3 and feed and minister to Crack Cocaine addicts. 4 months before he stole the slushie machine from us he hired a manager to copy all of our products. His name is Robin. Robin copied most of Freedom Edibles brownies, cakes, cookie bars, and etc.. For what reason did he do such things. All of our edibles sold out every week there. They copied most of what I had and started charging more than I did. We sold our cakes and brownies for $3.50 there. Go look at the price of there cakes and brownies now! After having all I worked for stolen from I left Greenwell for two weeks. Two weeks later I got hungry and started calling Matt and telling him how it's not fare to steal from people. How it's not fare that the one vendor in his store that started a mens shelter is having everything he has taken from him. I told him that I was going to show up with picketers and protest his establishment. After I talked to him several times he told me he would donate to me if I was a 501 c3. I told him I am trying to get the paperwork going. I showed up at Greenwell that night to tell Matt face to face how he stole everything I had from me. He screamed at me, cursed me, told me I was a bad christian, threatened me, then he gave me $500 dollars and some trim to go away and keep my mouth shut. I asked if I could bring what Robin doesn't make for there collective he said sure. Bring butter, teas, ice-cream, and drinks. I said thank you and walked away in tears Knowing I use to have over 60 products at this store. Tonight Greenwell told me I was a thief. Tonight Greenwell took the rest of all I had. My name they have taken from me it seems. After I got off the radio with Matt I took both shoes off my feet and said this. The bible says to shake the dust off your feet as a testomony to those who do not accept you. And i sit there and hit both shoes infront of those doors to Greenwell Cooperative Vallejo, CA. Greenwell took from the one vendor who is making a change on the streets of Vallejo. Our product has been in Vallejo ever since cliff had the first clinic over 3 years ago on Tennesee St. They copied our products and charged patients more. I spoke up for patients rights to the Compassionate Use Act and I had everything taken from me. Greenwell all-ready had it out for me for months now. High Standards calling them was just a exscuse to kick me out and copy my butter and what ever else they will steal. High Standards also contacted E.C.C and Happy Little Trees in Vallejo. They told both places the same as Greenwell. Both places ignored them because they know better than that. Happy Little Trees owner laughed when he heard that I allegidly stole and said well if he did he gave it to the poor.
CHAPTER-3
The worse part about all of this is the Slander and for what I never sinned against anyone at High Standards. I spoke up for dieing and injured people. People who cant speak for there self. In return High Standards calls all the M.M.D's I'm at and speaks lies. They called every bussiness I work for and told them lies. Even clinics I havent even talked to yet. Now if I promote our edibles people will asume I am a thief if they do not know me and not want to do bussiness with me. What they did is a crime and it's not right. It is important to remember no body regulates these clinics. Only a few county's in California have regulations regarding M.M.D's. No body says that you have to keep it fare for the patients. These clinics can charge whatever they want to you. Vendors have no say in the price of you medicine. I have been a advocate for years now on many subjects. When is enough really enough? I started a homeless shelter for men on December 20th 2011. The name of the shelter is called Samsons Unit. It can be found under Freedom Edibles on You Tube or Samsons Unit at the top of the seach bar for facebook. I have a program that can get most of the homeless off the streets of Vallejo. So far no clinic in Vallejo or in California has ever made a donation. Rolandes from Happy Little Trees gave us the money for our second bunk bed to be built here. Micheal Durica and his family built the first bunkbed for the mens home. Since then ive asked everyone in the Medical Marijuana Industry for help with this project. All I got was no's, lies, and mislead. Jason kept me on the phone for over a hour promising he would help out. The system is corrupted it's not about Compassion anymore it's about self gain. Freedom Edibles is one of about 25 companies in the U.S. that has a H.A.C.C.P. aplication on file with a health dept. We are regulated by the San Fransisco Health Dept. Most edible vendors arent even Food Safety Certified. Next time you visit a clinic and decide what edible is right for you ask them to see a copy of the premier food safety certificate. Odds are if there not in S.F. county they dont have one. Ask high standards or Greenwell if anyone in there store has a H.A.C.C.P. application on file with the health dept. There going to say this whats a H.A.C.C.P. application. This is because they don't have any edible vendords who have been approved by a health dept. We are, and I can proudly and boldly say, that we are regulated. Most clinics aren't like High Standards and Greenwell both have threatened to murder me. I told them do me a favor and send me to my maker. I feel as if I have been screwed completly. How can these establishments make millions of dollars and steal from me? How can these establishments force people that open homeless shelters to close the doors? Now I worry if Samsons Unit Mens Sober Living Home will stay open? Why should anyone have to wonder if they are going to be able to help a drug addict know Christ? I have some amazing men in the home one of them is 25 he is a Marine he fought in Korea, Afganistan, and Iraq. He was injured in the war and is disabled. We are trying to get him his own place so his wife and kid can move in with him. Mr. Yancey is 53 he lost his home in a fire and then he lost his wife. I found him and John at the Vallejo Homeless Shelter. They have been here for over a month. I recently took another brother in Timothy who was in tears 54 and no peace we gave him rest and he has been here a week so far. I have had more guys here that did not work out. But we are having a good success rate so far. Praise be to God. Freedom Edibles for years has been giving in major ways to patients and communities. Freedom Edibles name has been bashed. Now I cant get more clinics without them questioning me about what High Standards told the world. Who really suffers in all this?
CHAPTER-4
As for me and my household we will serve the lord. I could find a job somewhere I am sure and support my self. There are more harsh things I could be doing. In all of this the Marijuana Patient is stolen from. The Cancer patient over charged and without medicine dies. There are hundreds of illnesses out there that marijuana can ease. Will these patients ever have affordable medicine? Next time you go into a collective ask them for some Compassion (free medicine). Odds are they will tell you they cant help you. Sure there are a few clinics out there that give back but on a percentage level we are talking 1% actually don't make a profit. Freedom Edibles is in that catogory because we give everything we have. I own a beat up washer a dryer a old T.V. a dvd player a broken computer and thats about it. Everything I own I gave to the start of the homeless shelter that is much needed in Vallejo, CA. Now the one thing I still have, my name, is being bashed. Now who suffers besides the patients. Well no money equals no homeless shelter. It's almost like most clinics in Vallejo want Crack Cocaine addicts to roam the streets. Why do I say this because they could not even donate a bunk bed. Keep in mind we also donate food to the Emmanuel Temple Church Mens Home in Vallejo as well. Now there affected because of greedy greedy clinics who profit off of sick and injured people. If you are a patient and you dont want to get ripped off contact me and I will take care of you at wholesale. If anyone who reads this wants to start a M.M.D. in Vallejo for patients in the bay area to have medicine at whole sale price then contact me. I would like to start a clinic here in Vallejo and charge no more than 5 a gram for 6 star top of the line medicine hash and flowers. I would also like to do wholesale edibles in this eliminating all these over priced collectives. 12 a gram 15 a gram 18 a gram 20 a gram aren't you tired of paying these prices ever wonder how much it cost to grow this medicine 1500 watts is about 40 cents a hour. Veg cycle is typically 18 hours light thats about $210 dollars a month in electric fees. After flowering begins it's alot less electric use all together around $700 in electric to grow 1 and a half pounds. 24 ounces 672 grams for allmost $700. Thats about a dollar a gram so why charge 10-20 dollars for a gram? Because they can. Even if people are useing other things in there grow a gram wont come out to more than a cost of $2 per gram. If I had the money I would start a grow and start a clinic. I would not charge more than 5 dollars per gram of every kind. People will drive for miles to save money and eventually if these greedy clinics want to stay open they will be forced to lower there prices to 5 or less a gram. We as patients have the right to cheap and affordable medicine. Will we stand up for our rights? Will we let clincis over charge sick and dieing people? I wont I will not stand for it. I will be raising money to open a clinic for the people by the people. We only need about 7,000 to start I nice clinic ether in San Jose or Vallejo. I am down for both cities. Patients are getting ripped off in every city by over charging greedy clinics! Lets make a difference and change Medical Marijuana Forever lets lower the price of marijuana and force these greedy establisments to shut down or give fair prices to patients. The Compasionate Use Act has been choped up into a money making pit as does most things in this world. Don't stand for it any longer choose to make a difference Boycot these greedy establisments. Start growning your own medicine. Help me to open a Clinic that has top of the line for 5 dollars a gram or less. And next time your in Greenwell or High Standards tell them Freedom Edibles will still serve the lord even without there blessing AMEN. GOD BLESS THE FEW M.M.D.'S WHO DO RIGHT YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE.
[signed] Shawn Polly
707-655-0313
Medables777@yahoo.com
Freedom Edibles @ You Tube
FreedomEdibles/Facebook
2012-04-09 "Annual Prayer Breakfast"
update from Shawn Allen Polly:
Osby Davis' Annual Prayer Breakfast address concerning the future of Vallejo is titled "Rebuilding Lives and the Vallejo Community, Collaboration is key". Watch it at youtube [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dmF_Su5wtw].
As most people know or may not know. Freedom Edibles has been working on the streets of Vallejo, Ca for over a year. We council crack cocaine addicts, Gang Members, the homeless and so many more people. We have a mens sober living home called Samson's Unit. We house men recovering from Alcohol and Narcotics. Mayor Osby Davis says in this video at 6 min. 30 sec. that he supports anyone who is trying to make Vallejo a better city. He also says it is not about your philosophy it's about your motives. The city of Vallejo denied the inspection for the 1,000 pounds of supplies we had gathered for the tsunami that wiped out the country of Japan. That was the city attorney that denied that request in 2011. In late 2011 the planning department said i would be arrested for operating a illegal business if i opened a homeless shelter outside of Intensive use Zoning. I looked at the map the city provides at all intensive use zones. I drove around at each location to only find huge industrial buildings for thousands a dollars a month in rental fees? They have a permit required to open a Homeless shelter it's called a open use permit. $3,000 non refundable fee. It takes month's to get approved or denied? And why such harsh fees for providing your city such a great service? The city needs a new shelter. The Christian Help Center can only house 60 men, woman, and children. Georgia st. is full of empty buildings. I had a lady that was going to rent out this building that still sits there. For $500 bucks a month. I was going to put a food closet in the front room and a computer room in the back for education. I went to the planning dept. and once again they said the Zoning does not allow a food closet. So once again i could be arrested and shut down for operating a illegal bussiness. I told them it would be by appointment only and would not create traffic in the area. There was four marijuana clinics in the area including one next door. and several bars as well. But we cant have a food pantry and education center? Measure C passed by voters by 76%. Since then many people in Vallejo have went to jail fighting for safe acces for patients. Is the new Mayor a lier? Am i next to be silenced?
2012-03-06 "Intro to Vallejo church fraud"
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEQYt-fXWik] at [http://www.youtube.com/user/ExposetheChurch]:
This channel will serve as a protest to the ways of the Vallejo, Ca church system. I have had nothing but problems with every church in Vallejo? Is it me or is it them. In time i will have alot of video evidence you decide! Vallejo church is big money these days. There taking your money and not giving it back to you when you ask for help!
[http://www.churchfraud.org/]
Thank you for your interest in Church Fraud!
This website is designed for people who have an open mind. If you think your church is not fraudulent in any way. This web-site will not help you. This website will expose the way churches in the San Francisco Bay area operate. All information is true and accurate and can be verified through video, audio, and witnesses. If you are a christian prepare to be amazed at the way the Body of Christ operates in the bay area and the world.
Ephesians 5:11 to 14 - "(11) Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. (12) For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. (13) But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible,(14) for anything that becomes visible is light."
Hello, my name is Shawn Polly. I am about to share some stories that will challenge your belief in church. Please note if your church is mentioned by no means am I telling you to leave your church. Instead confront the members of your church in public. The enemy wants you to grow bitter and not go to church. If I grew bitter I would not step foot in a church to preach the truth when there pastor doesn't. It is up to us to change the image of the Body of Christ that has been so misleading to mankind.
Japan Earthquake and Tsunami 2011 -
It is all to weird of a story and very sad at the same time. Shortly after Japan was devastated in 2011 I had a heart to help. I kept having this dream about holding a Japanese baby. I called my phone company a few days later to add international calling. I was told that International calling was free to Japan for 30 days because of the tragedy. I contacted a church in Tokyo that told me they could use all the help they could get. I contacted the Salvation Army of Vallejo, Ca asking if I could use the barrels to collect supplies for the Japanese people. The Salvation Army agreed and it seemed like all was going well. I put barrels everywhere and collected around 1,000 pounds of food, medical, and clothing. My plan was to deliver the supplies to Japan personally and video document the destruction. In this I would come back to the states and form teams that would be there to this day.
God's People are not God's People -
When you have hundreds of dollars in medicine, clothing, and food the last thing you would imagine is that it would go to waste. I contacted over 50 churches in Vallejo, American Canyon, and Napa to help me get over there or get the supplies over there. Church after church gave me an excuse why they could not do it or collaborate with other churches to make it happen. Most churches said we already sent money, or they give to a charity that is in the region like The Red Cross or Samaritans Purse. After contacting so many churches I tried the charity's they said they sponsored. Samaritans Purse said they already have enough people there and they could not help me get the supplies over. The Red Cross would not take my supplies and told me I had to take a class to go over seas. Okay i'll take the class I said. The Red Cross said the class is once a month and it takes multiple classes until you complete the course. Nothing was looking up.
How Does God Finance Missions?
I have had a lot of people who claim to be of Christ tell me "if God wanted you there he would had made a way for you to be there". I then ask those people does God work through his people? And if so why weren't his people helping the children in Japan? God commands his followers to obey the bible. There is no limit to compassion. Jesus Christ did not teach us to let people suffer but to suffer with people. So many church leaders will be asked by God on the day of judgement. Why did you not listen to the words I spoke. No church was interested in getting the food, medicine, and clothing to Japan. I watched baby food go bad holding onto it in hopes someone would help me get it there in time!
A Table in Darkness -
God spoke to me and said I was to go to the heart of the hood and minister. I went to Sonoma and Indiana street in Vallejo. For those who don't know this area let me explain. Bloods Mafia gang members, Prostitutes, Crack Cocaine dealers, Alcoholism, every where in sight hay there's even a porn theater across the street. I put a table up ordered 10 pizzas and served water and pizza to who ever was hungry or thirsty playing christian hip hop in the background. A white boy in the hood was a scary feeling but evermore I shall not fear. My first week I met Hosea Perez a.k.a. Video. He approached me the third Sunday I was feeding people and said this "Shawn I just got out of jail for Crack Cocaine and I don't want to stay on the streets or I will do more Crack. Can I go home with you he asked".
Fear or No Fear -
At this point I got a man who has been to prison more times then I got fingers asking me if he can stay the night with me. If I said no I would disregard the bible and follow Mammon. I told Video come with me. He could had killed me, Robbed me, Or anything. Instead he lived there for three months. He told me how he was a pastor in Oklahoma years back and had lost his way with God. Pretty soon when I would show up at 3 P.M. on Sundays to feed folks in the hood Video was with me. Everyone knew him and trusted him in the ghetto. He was the weapon God had gave me the translator I needed. Video became the preacher he once was and started preaching light in a very dark place.
13 Weeks and No Church Showed Up -
For 13 weeks I had been calling and even visiting churches in Vallejo about this street ministry. I had one pastor show up and pray for two Min. and that was it. Emmanuel Temple Apostolic Church Pastor Harris. I asked him if he would spare a couple of his members and he said he would try. I never got any help from his church. Did Mr. Harris pray in vain? Why did he pray for things he could already do? Don't you love it when your in need and a fake christian says let me pray for you instead of actually helping you. I don't know about you but it happens to thousands of people everyday in America.
The Door Christian Fellowship Church Vallejo, Ca -
The Door showed me the door one night. I went to church there after seeing them fly signs at the shopping center on Admiral Callaghan. They really seemed like they were the type that was about street ministry. I showed up there one night after being invited and I wanted to ask for there help at the booth we had set up in the projects. They told me before they would help me I would have to build a relationship with them first. I told them it's not me that needs your help it's the lost souls where my booth is. They kept making up reasons why they could not help until they got to know me. I told them is this what you preach here. Jesus Christ did not say follow me when you are comfortable. Jesus went into strangers homes for the sake of the gospel. They kicked me out of there church for reciting scripture where they were not following the commandments of there Messiah.
Conclusion of The table in Darkness -
For over 13 weeks no church showed up to help serve food or even pitched in on anything. I started a church on the streets. We had about 40 people that would show up every Sunday. Kids were drawing I love Jesus all over the sidewalk. People were loving each other and peace was being installed in a very un-peaceful place. Only one man can do so much. I had spent around $1200 in the 13 weeks I had been there. I lost my job and could not pay for anymore pizza, snacks, or toys for the kids. Although a lot of greatness had come from this mission there was still a very sad darkness. No church had cared for the lost in the projects. They never showed up to the rescue even though we were the church in plain sight.
Does Vallejo Church seem Fraudulent yet?
I had a 3 bedroom home I was renting in Vallejo. I started talking to friends about starting a men's home for sober living. We built a couple of bunk beds and drew up literature on the program. We called the home Samson's Unit Men's Sober Living Home. I started interviewing guys at the local homeless shelter in Vallejo called The Christian Help Center. Pretty soon we had five guys living there. All of the guys that lived there were Vet's except one. I mailed 90 churches in Vallejo explaining what we were doing asking for help. All I got back was return address letters. No church called me, e-mailed, or came by. I even called and visited some of the Vallejo churches. Not one of them ever helped with the men's home. Shocking enough the Discover Channel thought it was worth visiting even if the church didn't. We had a married couple that was sleeping in our backyard. They were on Heroin sleeping under a bridge in Vallejo. We gave them a place to live. With no room inside we gave them what we had. Because we followed what the bible actually teaches we sheltered the afflicted and they got saved. You can find there story on T.L.C. the name of the show is Addicted and the title is Sean and Jenna. It's kind of funny no church stopped by but the Discovery Channel sent people to document it.
Community Bible Church Vallejo, Ca. -
I went to this church and dropped off a 20 Min. video explaining how the men's home operates asking for help. I waited 3 weeks and did not here from them. This is one of the biggest churches in Vallejo next to the high school. When I heard nothing from the leadership of the church I made flyers explaining that I need help with the men's home. As I was putting them on the cars 4 deacon's came out of the church demanding I leave the property. As I leave I stop on the sidewalk and tell them I am a Christian in need of help. As I try to explain about the men's home one of the church members pushes me off the sidewalk into the street. I never got vulgar, angry, or any of the liking. This church member attacked me for no reason. I came back and I flew a sign that said Church of Satan as people were leaving the church for there Sunday meeting. Another point to make about this church is that they are building a new temple and parking lot next to there church. Do you think that they could meet outside instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to meet inside? I wonder if any of there members are going through foreclosure as they build this new temple. What would Vallejo think if they built a new homeless shelter or a woman's battered home center for woman and children. I know that Vallejo does not have enough shelter for people and they send people to Fairfield, Ca all the time for shelter.
The List of Churches that did not Care. -
Are you kidding I contacted every church in Vallejo. Nobody Knew how to help the sick and afflicted.
Help me Feed the Hungry Concord Body of Christ. -
Have you ever heard of Urban Farming? Billions of pounds of fruit goes to waste every year in residential neighborhoods. I run an organization called Samson's Unit. When I say I run it that's because nobody will help. Just me and the great woman God put in my life make it happen. I gathered fruit from residential neighborhoods for around 4 months in Concord delivering it to food programs around Concord and the surrounding. I asked over 30 churches to help me with volunteers, equipment, etc. . No church raised a finger to help me gather food for the hungry. Here are a few of those stories.
Tabernacle Baptist Church Concord, Ca. -
I went to this church for a couple of months. On Sunday nights they have a service. At this service you can have a chance to speak to the congregation. For several weeks I reported to the church members about my progress. Every Sunday night I would ask the members to join me. Not one member ever joined me. I asked this church for help to feed the hungry for months. Next time you see Pastor New House ask him why he didn't spare one guy to help pick fruit?
Saint Bonaventure Catholic Church. -
Thanksgiving 2012 I delivered 517 pounds of fruit to there food program. It took along time to pick and it cost gas money to find the fruit trees. I asked there church for a gas card in the amount of $50. They told me they could not afford to help me. Has anyone ever been to this church. You can tell that there 30 acre property is worth millions of dollars. I am sorry to report this church is a fraud. They need to live like Jesus. Jesus Christ did not say spend millions of dollars on a church compound. What if they took there 50 million dollar property sold it and built drug rehab centers? Do you think meeting outside or maybe in a building they can buy for 50 thousand would be more appropriate? I think if some of these big churches would do as I have stated above that people would actually believe in the church.
Remember Super Storm Sandy?
When the storm hit I contacted Tammy Morris in the Atlantic City region. She runs a food distribution center that oversees 51 food pantries. I asked her if I got a semi truck to deliver 40,000 pounds of potatoes could they use them. She told me that people were without food, electric, shelter, and etc. . I told her I would try my hardest to accomplish the goal. I contacted Dick Wheller who is a potato farmer in West Virginia. He told me for $2,700 he would deliver 40,000 pounds of grade A potatoes to Tammy Morris. I had $200 of my own money already on the total. All I needed was some help to get the rest. Here are some stories of churches in Concord that did not care to help the victims of Super Storm Sandy.
Tabernacle Baptist Church Concord, Ca. -
I asked Pastor New House to donate to it. He was on his way to L.A. to hire a new assistant pastor for there church. He could had asked his members of the church to match me or sell some of there material possessions. It's sad that his church requires him to hire a pastor from a college. A fraction of the money he used to hire the new pastor could had paid for the potatoes. There are a lot of people out there that have never went to school to learn the bible who are priest.
Mormon Church Concord, Ca Concord Blvd. -
If you ever want to get kicked out of a Mormon church just ask them to sell there possession to help the Super Storm Sandy Victims. I wish I could get some of these stories on video. I told this church all the facts and asked if they would contribute. When they said I had to ask the main Mormon Church in town I was upset. I asked them where in the bible does it say to ask someone else if you have permission to help the hurt and hungry? I asked them to personally help. They told me to leave. I told them if 13 members sold a $200 possession with my $200 we would have enough to do it. They called the cops and I left. I was surprised that the Mormon Church acted like this. No actually it doesn't matter what church you are it seems they all follow mammon.
Holy Cross Lutheran Church Concord, Ca. -
At the storage unit across from this church I had a table set up. At this table I had signs asking people to give food for the victims. I told the pastor of this church that the victims of Super Storm Sandy needed help with food and how he could help. I think he said something like we have already gave to the Victim's. I thought in my head do we only give comfortably? The answer is yes. The church these days lives in houses that cost a half of million dollars while people are homeless. You would think that as many churches there are there would be no homeless. If people accepted homeless people as Christ excepted us there would be no homeless. If a church of 100 members for example had 10 members that were willing to house one homeless person each. It would bring homeless to an end. As many churches that are in one city it would seem that something like this would be into play already. Jesus said that the poor will always be with you. He didn't say that people should sleep in bushes and homeless shelters. I encourage you to go sleep at a homeless shelter for 3 days and tell me it's christian to put people in that condition. My point being as long as material possession stands in the way of God the church is a fraud. As long as we fear that creepy homeless guy showing him partial love we can't expect to go to Heaven.
It's simple for example we do more then just pray for you. -
Have you ever asked a church pastor to help you with something you know he can help you with but he says let's pray about it. I have asked a lot of pastor's of big and small churches to help me help others. I have heard most of them say they can't and then ask if they can pray for me. To be Christlike means a lot of things. When material possession gets in the way of humanity you can't possible say your of God. You have the homeless woman holding a sign as 100 cars pass by that are worth $20,000 with a cross hanging on the rear view mirror. As long as churches meet indoors the Body of Christ is doomed. These temples are worth hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars most times. Go out to the streets and shout God's name stop hiding behind doors.
I want to see dry bones living again. -
It is my goal to awake some churches out there and there members to what is going on in there own church. If the dark is exposed then it will be no more.
It seems if you are American then you are a Christian. A lot of people who go to church will be left behind. People actually have convinced there selves in whatever way to justify what to follow and when to follow in the bible. There are people being murdered today in countries around the world because they are a christian. People are in prison for life because they are a disciple of Jesus Christ. I saw a homeless lady the other day out in a field by the Taco Bell on Clayton Rd. in Concord, Ca. I asked her if she was hungry. As I was taking her some burritos from Taco Bell I seen two people in there early 50's eating by the window where you can see the homeless lady. I approached the couple and nicely asked if they go to a local church. They said Tabernacle Baptist in Concord, Ca. I said okay I know Pastor New House. I asked them if they noticed the homeless lady. They said yes. I asked them why they didn't feed her. They said they have fed her before and asked me what I was getting at. I asked them if they were Christians. When they said yes I said prove it. I went and gave the lady some food and gave her my phone and e-mail and am working on getting her housing. I am really sick of people posing as disciple's of God. I know that we are all sinners and that we fall short. How far have we fallen. This church name that church name. His church is the only true way. Her church is the only true way. People wake up while there is still time. Wake up before Christ comes like a thief in the night.
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