Rebel with Just Cause Award 2010

Ooooops! Who spilled the beans? --by Bonnie Colleen McCool

Animal and human mother's milk are packed full of cannabinoids. Breast milk is the largest natural source of cannabinoids in the world except for the cannabis plant. The true facts are cannabis plants and our bodies have inborn occurring endocannabinoids or signaling molecules that activate cannabinoid receptors within our brains. Endocannabinoids are essential to nurturing new life. Some scientists speculate that cannabinoids play a protective role in the brain, slowing the rate of disease.

The truth is out and spreading like wildfire! Cannabis cures cancer! This truth will not be suppressed, until every household knows the clamor, the swelling protest, exposing dark, dirty secrets of heinous crimes against humanity!

Does anyone you know or love have cancer? Eleven thousand people recently raced for a cure in El Paso, but we actually seem to be running FROM the cure!! It is down right sinister, a crime against humanity, for the medicinal uses of cannabis to be suppressed.

THC is the active ingredient in cannabis. Watch the herb in action in the Seth Group's petri dish. An internet search for "THC cancer" brings up thousands of research papers from all over the world. Ooooops! Who spilled the beans? SCIENTISTS and PATIENTS all over the world, that's who!

In a cannabis study on cancer conducted in 1974, researchers at the Medical College of Virginia, who had been funded by the National Institute of Health to find evidence that marijuana damages the immune system, instead found that THC slowed the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice - lung and breast cancer, and a virus-induced leukemia. The Drug Enforcement Agency shut down that study and buried that life saving information. In 2000, it was validated again when researchers in Madrid announced they had destroyed incurable brain tumors in rats by injecting them with THC, the active ingredient in cannabis.

This is an atrocious scandal, too ghastly to be ignore, more explosive than sex in the oval office! Yet where are the headlines? Where is the outrage in major news media? Are they like Mexican journalists, afraid to tell truth to power? Fear losing their jobs not their lives, so far at least.

Big pharmacy lobbyist have paid for road blocks to cannabis research. For all these decades, the medical profession has been treating cancer patients to killer cocktails of antiangiogenesis drugs that cut off the blood supply to tumors while also killing healthy cells! Ifosfamide destroys the patients bladder and kidneys. And as a last hope treatment, thaledomide, the sleeping pill that produced clubfeet and webbed fingers will also starve tumors. These poison drip cocktails come with side effects you can count on to make life no longer worth living. Radiation is another poisonous, "cure" and surgery often triggers the cancer to spread. We all know someone who has suffered these hellish treatments. One day these, "cures," will be looked on as a step back to the dark ages in medicine.

Texas straight talker, Paul says we are "politicizing pain." The debate over medical marijuana or cannabis is really a scandalous controversy over whether this very safe, effective, easy-to-grow herb should be allowed to compete with expensive dangerous pharmaceuticals

Harassing the sick and dying is an un-American activity.

Patients testify to Cannabis' help in treating post traumatic stress, chronic pain, multiple sclerosis, gastrointestinal (GI) tract disorders, Alzheimer's, Cancer, epilepsy, glaucoma, hepatitis C and HIV/AIDS and more! They swear it is an effective safer replacement for very dangerous pharmaceuticals.

Profiteering has no place in medicine, which must be concerned with the well being of the individual not the bottom line. Doctors who have monitored cannabis use by hundreds of thousands of patients in California and Oregon can document a consistent pattern of using less pharmaceuticals including cutting opiates use byhalf. Repealing prohibition of marijuana would bring other much needed healthcare reform.

Cannabis medicines were once the “drugs of choice” in the United States. Until they were declared illegal, they had been used in about 30 prescription medicines for a 100 specific medical problems.

Texas polled at 75% overall for medical marijuana. At the center or heart of this great state that number jumped to 83%!

Check out: "Top 10 Pot Studies Government Wished it Had Never Funded"

10) MARIJUANA USE HAS NO EFFECT ON MORTALITY

9) HEAVY MARIJUANA USE AS A YOUNG ADULT WON’T RUIN YOUR LIFE

8) THE “GATEWAY EFFECT” MAY BE A MIRAGE

7) PROHIBITION DOESN’T WORK (PART I)

6) PROHIBITION DOESN’T WORK (PART II:

Does prohibition Cause the“GATEWAY EFFECT”?)

5) OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER

4) OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER

3) OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER

2) OOPS, MARIJUANA MAY PREVENT CANCER

1) MARIJUANA DOES HAVE MEDICAL VALUE

Read more about these studies here.

Dick "Tater" Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, wrote in his diary back in 1969, that "[Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem [welfare] is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to ..." Nixon's motive was further corroborated in 1995 by Nixon's other aide, John Ehrlichman, during an interview with Dan Baum, author of Smoke and Mirrors, when he told Baum, "Look, we understood we couldn't make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue for the Nixon White House that we couldn't resist it."

Marijuana prohibition began and remains about racism, power and control. One in 106 whites are incarcerated. One in 36 Hispanics and one in 15 blacks are incarcerated! Prohibition is a policy still used by racists to fulfill their agenda. It is a great shame on US; we incarcerate more of our people than any other nation in the world!

Harassing the sick and dying is un-American and unchristian activity! We have spent close to a trillion dollars waging war on a disease, a sickness! We lock up sick people. Use is considered abuse so nonviolent social users are incorrectly locked up as addicts. Rarely is the true addict treated as a patient instead of a criminal.

Medicine has become just another big business with profits more important than the well being of the individual. Our under treatment of pain is medieval or just plain evil! Dr. David E. Joranson of the University of Wisconsin Medical school thinks, "The use of pain medications has become a crime story when it should be a health care story." Most Americans and Texans agree and believe health care is the responsibility of the individual. The use of marijuana has been demonized and made a crime, when in truth, it is a health care story about a safer choice!

It is a fallacy to believe the evils of the drug war are unintended. Felony convictions disenfranchise mostly poor and minority Americans. Tricky Dick Nixon was really good at hiding tyranny under the guise of good intentions, a con used by the servants of tyranny, throughout history.

His DEA could be called the Drug Encouragement Administration. Use of drugs in the last 35 years has increased. Drugs are more potent and available. This Agency (according to the governments own numbers) has had a greater than thirty-fold increase in budget and has 4 times the agents.

This unscientific and senseless policy triggers violence in our streets and on our borders. Corruption is rampant, official lawlessness rules as it did during alcohol prohibition.

The DEA and other drug warriors seem blithely unconscious of the societal harm their policies cause. If you research it you will find that there were few overdose deaths before prohibition.

Public safety should come first. At least 230 US citizens have been murdered in Mexico in the last 5 years. Former presidents of Brazil, Columbia and Mexico have called for a change in focus to reducing harm and tackling organized crime.

Across America paramilitary drug raids trigger violence rather than lesson the risk. The outrageous violence and official lawlessness triggered by the drug war will end with repeal just as these policy created problems disappeared with repeal of alcohol prohibition.

Please ask YOUR state and federal representatives to support a blue ribbon commission reviewing the effectiveness of drug prohibition. Our corrupt system attracts those interested in milking it for all it is worth. Restore justice and attract more of those who will make the system run with the milk of human kindness.

Some of our leaders live in a state of denial. Others are like bad horseman; too concerned about staying in the saddle to worry about where they are headed. Many are outright servants of tyranny; good at ignoring the rule of law, history and science while catering to the needs of special interests but very bad at determining what is best or safer for the individual or society.

Gain better control by regulating all drugs like we do pharmaceuticals, tobacco or alcohol. We tolerate the salesmen of these drug gangs that cause more death annually than all illicit drugs.

We can never agree on everything but surely we can agree that responsible behavior; weighing the choices and making a safer, wiser decision is to be encouraged in America not criminalized. Cannabis is the safest health choice in social drugs and as medicine it does not have the negative side effects of many prescription drugs. A policy that disregards science and punishes families of citizens for making a safer health choice in a social or medicinal drug is bordering on insanity or reefer madness.

The war on drugs devastates the lives of drug users and their families. Taking children from the homes of parents who made a safer health choice is senseless policy. Taking property from these same, destroyed by government families, is legalized extortion!

U.S. police arrested an estimated 873,000 persons for marijuana violations in 2007, according to the latest FBI annual Uniform Crime Report. That total, the highest ever recorded for marijuana violations, made up 42.1 percent of all drug arrests.

Meanwhile across the US 36.4% of the murders, 59.6% of the rapes and 45.1% of the aggravated assaults became cold case files! The cumulative effect of this is horrendous. While we police nonviolent folks' social, religious and medicinal use of drugs; murderers and violent sexual predators roam free.

Warriors can earn their pay and get their adrenaline rush catching murderers, sexual predators and other perpetrators of violence. Many of whom we know are out there, somewhere. Then our peace keepers will truly be making our neighborhoods safer.

The Netherlands drug policy of peace; no drug war cost and no ruined lives, is worth considering. They tax cannabis just like any other commodity and medicinal use is legal. They incarcerate one per thousand of their citizens compared to seven out of every thousand of US citizens behind bars; making the "Land of the Free" have the largest prison system in the world. A recent survey showed 19% of Dutch teens have tried cannabis and less than 3% have ever used any illegal drug. Their public schools are exemplary while ours sometimes seem more like prisons than institutions of learning and free thought.

Switzerland and Netherlands do a much better job with their violent crime. Their drug laws help lessen the harm to society by triggering less assaults and homicides. Their teen drug use is down. Could it be because they live in a safer, saner world? Maybe, but California's teen use of marijuana is down so maybe it has more to do with drug sales being handled by legitimate business people less likely to sell to a child or to recruit a minor to sell to their peers.

Texas increased its spending on cell blocks by 346% between 1986 and 2000. During that same period spending for higher education increased 47%.

The,"World Prison Population List" (seventh edition), by Roy Walmsley is out with the latest available information. The US holds top ranking at 738 per 100,000 people. Our closest competitors Russia with 611. Texas has an imprisonment rate pushing 1,000 out of every 100,000. "There's no country on the planet - no dictatorship on earth - as comfortable with locking people up as the state of Texas." -- Tami Halphen, A Blue Activist in a Red State

"After millions of people arrested and incarcerated, it is clear that the "war on drugs" has reshaped the way America responds to crime and ushered in an era of instability and mistrust in countless communities." According to a report from the Sentencing project, a half million poor souls are presently incarcerated for drug offenses. Drug abusers deserve medical help. Instead we lock them and nonviolent users in prison, a breeding ground for crime.

According to a new report released today by the Pew Center on the States’, at the start of 2008, 2,319,258 adults were held in American prisons or jails, or one in every 99.1 men and women. Texas beat out California as the nation’s prison leader.

"A close examination of the most recent U.S. Department of Justice data (2006) found that while one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, the figure is one in nine for black males in that age group. Men are still roughly 13 times more likely to be incarcerated, but the female population is expanding at a far brisker pace. For black women in their mid- to late-30s, the incarceration rate also has hit the one-in-100 mark. In addition, one in every 53 adults in their 20s is behind bars; the rate for those over 55 is one in 837."

Our DEA overseers have harassed the sick and dying, shamed and destroyed families, locked up and killed many (including enforcement) over one of the safest therapeutically active plants known to man; while FDA"overseers"allowed more pharmaceutical killers on the market. Both agencies exacerbate problems instead of solving them. They should be disbanded.

When we fight against drugs, we fight for the souls of our fellow Americans," said President Bush. Like flagellant priests, overzealous drug warriors draw blood daily from their brothers for their medicinal and social drug use. President Obama, please, don't let them carry this nation one step further down this depraved path!

Fellow Americans, we are out of control! We, the people, have no say in the running of this country. We have turned over the reins to a few cold-hearted, power-mad, morally bankrupt evil doers with little or no ethics, who in a careless bloodletting, feeding frenzy worship nothing more than the almighty dollar.

War is a tool governments use to make us more accepting of their waste of our precious lives and resources. War creates a booming economy for some on the suffering of many. The Iraq, Afghanistan war and drug war are smokescreens for corruption but something smells rotten! Politics and money, there's a way to separate them, DownSizeDC!

The military and law enforcement have recruitment problems because current policy attracts those interested in working in a corrupt system and milking it, thereby creating a pervasive disrespect for the law. Our system could run with the milk of human kindness, if America had the ethical, efficient and constitutionally limited government our founders envisioned.

Changing whose in charge will not effect much. The real cause of this huge quagmire of failed policy is the beast, big government, that money hungry beast, Uncle Sam! Ma Freedom tells it like it is! The beauty of it is when we focus on downsizing our government we regain our roots of self-government and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and future generations.

The World Trade Organization and the United Nations are more big government, money hungry beasts that we must tame or cut down to size. Both are meant to be helpful organizations devoted to fairness and cooperation between nations and to preserving life as we know it. In reality, as with most big government programs it doesn't work that way! They often make things worse for the very people they're intended to help, making us pay with our precious lives and resources.

"Liberty Enlightening the World" is the official name of our Statue of Liberty. Boy did we miss the boat somewhere! With more people in prison here than anywhere else on earth, is this the way to be the land of the free? With modern unbiased, science based statistical reporting, we can see where our laws are causing more harm than good and change accordingly. We can't take that necessary evil, money out of the equation but we can demand compassionate policy and ethics from our leaders when peace lovers, liberty lovers, true patriots unite!

Leaders responsible for current quagmire will one day answer to a higher power for their crimes against humanity. It's time to end the terror by changing our intrusive, big-bully policies, both foreign and domestic. The monetary costs are staggering and the human suffering unconscionable.

Big government programs are costly and wasteful, diverting money and energy from more positive, productive local uses. Enmasse we pack the punch that will streamline and transform these money hungry beasts into user friendly tools that work, as intended, for us not against us. When ethics rule, we make, "His Kingdom come" as was planned by the Spirit of 1776 as shown in our Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and reinforced by the Bill of Rights!

The separation of church and state allows other faiths. That does not mean erase any reference to the Creator and the Bible from our money and any state function, building, etc. Knowing our Christian roots is key to remaining true to the "Spirit" of our constitution and to our founding father's vision of self-government leading to abundance - free of tyranny and oppression. Have you ever wondered What Would the Founders Do Today?

2011-2016Rebels with Just Cause Names

One of my 2011 Rebel with Just Cause portraits will be shared by Bradley Manning and Julian Assange: for posting the Afghanistan war diaries on wikileaks. It is not a crime to expose war crimes. Marc Emery is our hero and wins the other 2011 portrait for taking a stand for justice against a morally bankrupt, violence triggering, nightmare policy.

One 2012 Rebel is journalist and poet Javier Sicilia, whose son was killed in drug prohibition-related violence inspiring him to galvanize Mexican society and awaken international debate. In the summer of 2011, tens of thousands marched across Mexico to protest the drug war and the 50,000 drug prohibition related deaths in the previous five years.

Americans are not the only rebels with just cause but it is our patriotic duty to rebel against big government corruption and oppression.

Kevin Zeese is the other 2012 Rebel for his tireless efforts for peace. He is the Executive Director and cofounder of VotersForPeace. He is an attorney, and a long time peace advocate.

Gary Johnson and Judge Jim Gray are the recipients of McCool's 2013 Rebel With Just Cause Award for their efforts toward saving the American Dream: self-government free of big government corruption and oppression and restoring Justice the guardian of liberty!

Richard Lee will receive the other 2013 portrait for his trailblazing work for drug policy reform, made in spite of great adversity. Richard has become one of the highest-profile, most sympathy drawing activists on this planet, a famous spokesman for self-government and ending cannabis prohibition.

How did Colorado disrupt the Drug War? “Marijuana has been illegal because of the perception of harm surrounding it — that’s how they made it illegal, that’s how it is illegal currently,” Mason Tvert tells David Martinez in the 3D Cannabis Center’s bustling lobby. On this afternoon the quiet of the store turned more festive upon seeing him enter at precisely 4:20. He is greeted by smiling customers with high fives, thank yous and even a few photo and autograph requests. “Our opponents’ goal has been to maintain a perception of harm. So our idea has been to get people to understand that marijuana is not as harmful as they’ve been led to believe, and not as harmful as a product like alcohol that is already legal.” Mason Tvert helped create and served as the head honcho of the Colorado group aptly named Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recreation (aka SAFER)!! He has definitely earned the honor of being named a 2014 Rebel with Just Cause.

Alison Holcomb, the lead architect of Initiative 502, which legalized marijuana in Washington state has also clearly earned the honor of being named a 2014 Rebel with Just Cause. Declaring that the ACLU is ready for a fight, Holcomb, says the state’s attorney general is wrong in his opinion that cities and counties can legally ban pot businesses (like we have dry counties for alcohol in Texas).

Championed by President Jose Mujica, Uruguay chooses self-government!! In 2013 same-sex marriage and cannabis were legalized. President Jose Mujica has definitely earned the honor of being named as another 2014 Rebel with Just Cause. "Uruguay frequently ranks as one of the most developed and prosperous countries in Latin America. Uruguay is home to 3.3 million people." Many believe Jamaica will be the next country to legalize this healing plant.

Edward Snowden's release of NSA material was called the most significant leak in U.S. history by Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. It has earned him the honor of being named a 2014 Rebel with Just Cause.

Dean Becker is one recipient of McCool's 2015 Rebel With Just Cause Award for his trailblazing work for drug policy reform including his reporting for Pacifica radio and the 2014 publication of his book, "To End the War On Drugs," the unvarnished truth that will help bring an end to this century of lies featuring the thoughts of 115 experts on the subject of drug policy.

The other 2015 Award winner is John Kiriakou for his trailblazing work; being a whistle blower about water-boarding torture being used by the CIA to interrogate Al Qaeda prisoners. He continued the fight from prison in 2014 and today. He is determined to get our government to appoint a special prosecutor, reopen the case on CIA torture and hold public hearings on the torture program, demanding the truth, and vowing never again to allow the abomination of torture to become U.S. Government policy.

Beto O'Rourke is one recipient of McCool's 2016 Rebel With Just Cause Award for piloting reforms for the VA that could improve outcomes for veterans throughout the country. 22 Veterans Commit Suicide Daily!

The other 2016 Award winner is Ethan Nadelmann for his tirelss, passionate work for drug policy reform; restoring justice and humanity to our system! Ethan's Fiery TEDTalk: What Has the War on Drugs Done to the World? "Twenty years ago, Ethan Nadelmann left his teaching position at Princeton University to become a full-time advocate for ending the drug war."

Since 2006 I have awarded two free portraits yearly, each dedicated to the freedom philosophy or the American dream. I call it the, "Rebel with Just Cause Award." It is given to true American patriots; those who stand for freedom against tyranny and injustice. The real visionaries, who laid down America's laws, those who defined what an American patriot would be, were rebels with just cause. It's not just our right it's an American's patriotic duty to rebel against big government corruption. I apologize, due to health and family issues I am behind on executing my Rebel portraits. I promise I will git 'er done!

True American patriotism is a willingness to shoulder our duty, to challenge the government when it’s wrong, to be a Rebel with Just Cause! Give me a little encouragement: Hit "like" in the American's for Safe Access portrait at the top of McCool's Rebels With Just Cause FaceBook page. You are a true patriot and my hero! Thanks for all you do for reform!