by Aaron Turpen, CannaCentral

Colorado has decided that the privacy of patient health records is negotiable and that this information needs to be shared with law enforcement at the local, state, and federal level on a 24/7 basis. All despite the Constitution of the State of Colorado and federal laws regarding medical records.

The state bureaucracy is moving forward with plans to take Colorado’s (currently) confidential medical marijuana registry and “integrate” it with law enforcement and tax office databases.

The Colorado Department of Revenue’s Medical Marijuana Advisory Board held a final meeting for the year on Monday, December 6. At that meeting, a (no doubt highly paid) consultant gave a presentation regarding what she believes will be required for the various state agencies to have full access to the medical marijuana patient registry and improvements that need to be made to the registry itself.

The plan is for the patient registry to be open and shared with several state and federal agencies including the Colorado Department of Revenue, Department of Public Health and Environment, and all local, state, and federal law enforcement including the DEA, FBI, Colorado Crime Information Center and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

This “data integration” will have one purpose: to ostracize and play Big Brother over the state’s medical marijuana patients and caregivers.

Of course, that’s not how they said it. The Tax Department (I mean.. Department of “Revenue”) says that this is so that patients are more easily identified by law enforcement during drug stings and to reduce wrongful arrests of those legally possessing marijuana.

Ya, right. Law enforcement has a stellar record, especially at the federal level, of recognizing patients’ rights when it comes to MMJ.

None of the bureaucrats have bothered to notice that the very idea of this setup requires a full amendment to change Colorado’s constitution. Currently, it reads:

(3) The state health agency shall create and maintain a confidential registry of patients who have applied for and are entitled to receive a registry identification card according to the criteria set forth in this subsection, effective June 1, 1999.

(a) No person shall be permitted to gain access to any information about patients in the state health agency’s confidential registry, or any information otherwise maintained by the state health agency about physicians and primary care-givers, except for authorized employees of the state health agency in the course of their official duties and authorized employees of state or local law enforcement agencies which have stopped or arrested a person who claims to be engaged in the medical use of marijuana and in possession of a registry identification card or its functional equivalent, pursuant to paragraph (e) of this subsection (3). Authorized employees of state or local law enforcement agencies shall be granted access to the information contained within the state health agency’s confidential registry only for the purpose of verifying that an individual who has presented a registry identification card to a state or local law enforcement official is lawfully in possession of such card.

(Constitution of the State of Colorado, Article XVIII, Section 14)

Note the use of the word “confidential” and the “No personal shall be permitted to gain access” bits. Seems pretty damn clear to me. You?

Except for the five or six minute presentation at the meeting, the rest of the information on these proposed changes are buried in a 90-odd page set of draft rules the Medical Marijuana Advisory Board unveiled. The current database is maintained by the Colorado Department of Health and Environment and can only be accessed by police officers who are specifically requesting a “yes” or “no” answer to the question of a patient’s registry status.

The proposed reasoning and justification for the new All Seeing Eye Database* is pretty baseless (*my proposed name for the new database). A rule-making hearing next month will likely seal the deal unless patients and advocates in Colorado stand up and make some noise about this.

I suggest threatening lawsuits over the proposal’s constitutionality. Maybe suggesting a similar database be created for blood donors, transplant waiting lists, people with pacemakers, those with diabetes, and another list for politicians and bureaucrats who don’t do what the police think they should be doing. These sound just as reasonable to me. If we’re going to have a Big Brother Police State, let’s go all the way! Why pretend?

Information From:
Cannabis Therapy Institute
Face the State (Greg Campbell)
Cannabis Therapy Institute YouTube Channel
Michie Institute Legal Resources (Colorado Constitution)

by Aaron Turpen, CannaCentral

Colorado’s regulators are looking to install a seed to smoke tracking system to monitor medical marijuana in the state. Ostensibly, they say this is to keep drug dealers from obtaining medical marijuana cards, buying large quantities from dispensaries, and selling it elsewhere. Nevermind the economics of such an enterprise or the costs the state will bear to implement their Big Brother scheme.

What’s worse, Colorado sees this as a “model” that other states could follow for their own legalized marijuana tracking. Under Proposition 19 in California, this would be perfectly legal, by the way.

Other ideas that lawmakers and regulators in Colorado are floating include biometric tracking of patients to ensure they are not “gaming the system” to get more pot. Things like fingerprint scans connected to both patient ID cards and required for purchase at the register and using radio frequency (RFID) tags in marijuana containers itself have been suggested. Even capturing patient’s driver’s licenses or ID cards on camera before any purchase is on the table.

The senior director for medical marijuana enforcement in Colorado, Matt Cook, likens the measures to what you’d experience at the horse or dog track or at pharmacies. His idea is contradicted by the fact that you don’t have to give fingerprint ID or do anything more than show picture ID (no photographs or other tracking) in order to fill a prescription at most pharmacies in Colorado.

Of course, all of this is “for public confidence.”

The question is.. which public and confidence in what?

Worse yet, the tracking would not require the approval of duly elected lawmakers, but could be implemented at Cook’s whim. Public hearings are planned on the issue in January and medical marijuana advocates and patients in Colorado are planning to fight it.

[source Associated Press]

“At least it’s not DNA,” say advocates…

by Heidi Hemmat, Fox31

DENVER – What started as a walk to the park with his dogs ended with a trip to the hospital for a Denver dog owner. 32-year-old Mark Ashford says he was beaten black and blue by two Denver Police officers.

“They punched him and pinned him up against the fence and forced his head into the concrete.” Ashford’s attorney, Will Hart, said the beating that was caught on camera is a clear case of Excessive Force. “This happened when he was walking his dogs, he has a conversation with another citizen that the police officer doesn’t like and as a result, he ends up in the hospital,” said Hart.

Hart says Mark Ashford was walking his dogs near 20th and Little Raven in LoDo, when he saw police pull over a driver for failing to stop at a stop sign. Ashford told the driver he saw him stop and would be willing to testify in court. Hart says the officer overheard him and “wasn’t very happy.”

That’s when Ashford says the Denver police officers demanded his I.D. and detained him. Ashford tried to take a picture of the officers to document the incident, and a few second later he was on the ground.

Police charged Ashford with interference and resisting arrest. Hart says, the charges were later dropped because the officers violated Ashford’s 4th amendment rights, “they had no reason to stop him, take his ID or detain him.”

An Excessive Force complaint was filed against both officers involved. A Denver police spokesperson says the internal affairs department has completed its investigation, but they are now turning the case over to the independent police monitor. Police won’t say if the officers were disciplined in any way until the investigation is complete.

Read the rest at this link and to see video.

by Mike Adams, NaturalNews

Many of the freedoms we enjoy here in the U.S. are quickly eroding as the nation transforms from the land of the free into the land of the enslaved, but what I’m about to share with you takes the assault on our freedoms to a whole new level. You may not be aware of this, but many Western states, including Utah, Washington and Colorado, have long outlawed individuals from collecting rainwater on their own properties because, according to officials, that rain belongs to someone else.

As bizarre as it sounds, laws restricting property owners from “diverting” water that falls on their own homes and land have been on the books for quite some time in many Western states. Only recently, as droughts and renewed interest in water conservation methods have become more common, have individuals and business owners started butting heads with law enforcement over the practice of collecting rainwater for personal use.

Check out this YouTube video of a news report out of Salt Lake City, Utah, about the issue. It’s illegal in Utah to divert rainwater without a valid water right, and Mark Miller of Mark Miller Toyota, found this out the hard way.

After constructing a large rainwater collection system at his new dealership to use for washing new cars, Miller found out that the project was actually an “unlawful diversion of rainwater.” Even though it makes logical conservation sense to collect rainwater for this type of use since rain is scarce in Utah, it’s still considered a violation of water rights which apparently belong exclusively to Utah’s various government bodies.

“Utah’s the second driest state in the nation. Our laws probably ought to catch up with that,” explained Miller in response to the state’s ridiculous rainwater collection ban.

Salt Lake City officials worked out a compromise with Miller and are now permitting him to use “their” rainwater, but the fact that individuals like Miller don’t actually own the rainwater that falls on their property is a true indicator of what little freedom we actually have here in the U.S. (Access to the rainwater that falls on your own property seems to be a basic right, wouldn’t you agree?)

Outlawing rainwater collection in other states

Utah isn’t the only state with rainwater collection bans, either. Colorado and Washington also have rainwater collection restrictions that limit the free use of rainwater, but these restrictions vary among different areas of the states and legislators have passed some laws to help ease the restrictions.

In Colorado, two new laws were recently passed that exempt certain small-scale rainwater collection systems, like the kind people might install on their homes, from collection restrictions.

Prior to the passage of these laws, Douglas County, Colorado, conducted a study on how rainwater collection affects aquifer and groundwater supplies. The study revealed that letting people collect rainwater on their properties actually reduces demand from water facilities and improves conservation.

Personally, I don’t think a study was even necessary to come to this obvious conclusion. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that using rainwater instead of tap water is a smart and useful way to conserve this valuable resource, especially in areas like the West where drought is a major concern.

Additionally, the study revealed that only about three percent of Douglas County’s precipitation ended up in the streams and rivers that are supposedly being robbed from by rainwater collectors. The other 97 percent either evaporated or seeped into the ground to be used by plants.

This hints at why bureaucrats can’t really use the argument that collecting rainwater prevents that water from getting to where it was intended to go. So little of it actually makes it to the final destination that virtually every household could collect many rain barrels worth of rainwater and it would have practically no effect on the amount that ends up in streams and rivers.

It’s all about control, really

As long as people remain unaware and uninformed about important issues, the government will continue to chip away at the freedoms we enjoy. The only reason these water restrictions are finally starting to change for the better is because people started to notice and they worked to do something to reverse the law.

Even though these laws restricting water collection have been on the books for more than 100 years in some cases, they’re slowly being reversed thanks to efforts by citizens who have decided that enough is enough.

Because if we can’t even freely collect the rain that falls all around us, then what, exactly, can we freely do? The rainwater issue highlights a serious overall problem in America today: diminishing freedom and increased government control.

Today, we’ve basically been reprogrammed to think that we need permission from the government to exercise our inalienable rights, when in fact the government is supposed to derive its power from us. The American Republic was designed so that government would serve the People to protect and uphold freedom and liberty. But increasingly, our own government is restricting people from their rights to engage in commonsense, fundamental actions such as collecting rainwater or buying raw milk from the farmer next door.

Today, we are living under a government that has slowly siphoned off our freedoms, only to occasionally grant us back a few limited ones under the pretense that they’re doing us a benevolent favor.

Fight back against enslavement

As long as people believe their rights stem from the government (and not the other way around), they will always be enslaved. And whatever rights and freedoms we think we still have will be quickly eroded by a system of bureaucratic power that seeks only to expand its control.

Because the same argument that’s now being used to restrict rainwater collection could, of course, be used to declare that you have no right to the air you breathe, either. After all, governments could declare that air to be somebody else’s air, and then they could charge you an “air tax” or an “air royalty” and demand you pay money for every breath that keeps you alive.

Think it couldn’t happen? Just give it time. The government already claims it owns your land and house, effectively. If you really think you own your home, just stop paying property taxes and see how long you still “own” it. Your county or city will seize it and then sell it to pay off your “tax debt.” That proves who really owns it in the first place… and it’s not you!

How about the question of who owns your body? According to the U.S. Patent & Trademark office, U.S. corporations and universities already own 20% of your genetic code. Your own body, they claim, is partially the property of someone else.

So if they own your land, your water and your body, how long before they claim to own your air, your mind and even your soul?

Unless we stand up against this tyranny, it will creep upon us, day after day, until we find ourselves totally enslaved by a world of corporate-government collusion where everything of value is owned by powerful corporations — all enforced at gunpoint by local law enforcement.