MassachusettsMarijuanaMovementJournal: American Facing Death Penalty in Egypt for Hemp Oil

Monday, February 21, 2011

American Facing Death Penalty in Egypt for Hemp Oil

by Phillip Smith, February 07, 2011, 11:36am, (Issue #670)

A US citizen jailed as a drug trafficker in Egypt in December after importing a shipment of non-drug hemp oil there was freed from jail late last month when mobs of protestors overran prisons across Cairo, but remains in legal limbo. Mostafa Soliman, who operates a company called Health Harvest, has so far been refused a new passport by the US Embassy in Cairo, which means he cannot leave the country. He faces a possible death penalty if convicted of drug trafficking.

http://stopthedrugwar.org/files/mostafa-soliman.jpg
Mostafa Soliman
According to the Death Penalty Project of the International Harm Reduction Association, Egypt is one of 32 countries that have laws mandating the death penalty for some drug offenses on the books. While Egypt is not among the leading drug offender executioner countries, such as Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Singapore, and Malaysia, drug offenders do get executed there, the first one in 1989.

Soliman, 62, was born in Egypt and has retained Egyptian citizenship, but the dual citizen has resided in the US for the past 40 years. He had returned to Egypt to oversee the arrival of the hemp oil shipment.

When the shipment of bottled hemp oil arrived at Egyptian customs in December, authorities translated "hemp oil" as "hash oil," and that's when Soliman's life took a Kafkaesque turn. (Arabic does not have a distinct word for "hemp": any concoction from the cannabis plant, whether high THC or low THC, is simply called cannabis.

"Even the Egyptian drug enforcement people told me they knew it wasn't hash oil," Soliman said by phone from Cairo Friday night. "But they said they had to follow procedure."

That procedure resulted in a December 30 raid by drug enforcers on Soliman's storage facility and Soliman's arrest on drug trafficking charges. He was jailed pending trial, first at a neighborhood police station, and then, after the local police commander grew irritated by consular visits, transferred to one of Cairo's maximum security prisons.

"I was in an eight by eight cell that held as many as 30 people," said Soliman. "There were killers waiting to be hanged, thieves, rapists. That really upset me."

[
http://stopthedrugwar.org/files/tahrir-square.jpg
protests in Tahrir Square
]After Soliman had spent several weeks in prison, his Egyptian attorney managed to arrange bail, which would have allowed him to legally leave prison pending trial. But in a bizarre twist of fate, before he could be released, the current protests exploded in Cairo, and the city's prisons were besieged by mobs of uncertain provenance determined to free the prisoners. The prison guards fled the assault even as the prison caught on fire, leaving prisoners locked in their cells.

"I hid under the window," when the prison came under attack, Soliman said. "I was afraid of the Molotov Cocktails. Then the protestors came and broke the locks on the cells and freed us. It was all planned out. They knew all the military was being moved to the square for the protests and there would be little security at the prisons."

Soliman said he thought the Moslem Brotherhood was behind the attacks on the prisons, but like much else in the current crisis, the truth about that is obscure.

After fleeing the prison, Soliman went into hiding in Cairo, and contacted the US Embassy for help. He sought help in translating research reports on hemp and on obtaining a new passport -- Egyptian authorities had seized his, which meant he was effectively unable to leave the country.

But not much help was forthcoming, said both Soliman and members of the Hemp Industries Association (HIA) and Vote Hemp, leading industry advocacy groups in the US that have taken up Soliman's cause.

"I face a death penalty for selling drugs," Soliman said. "I was hoping for the embassy to help me translate some analyses and reports from the States to help me prove my case, but they don't want to do anything. I did it myself, and spent $3,000 to get it done."

organic hemp seed oil label, from Soliman's company, Health Harvest
Nor would the embassy issue him a new passport. "I went to the embassy and a representative came out and said he would try to help me," recalled Soliman. "After I waited outside for three hours, he came back out and said a photo would expedite the process. I came back with the photo the next day, and he took it and again I waited outside for two hours. Then he came out and said he could not help me," he said.

"I don't know what's going on with these people; the embassy has not been very helpful at all. They're not cooperating," he said.

"The US Embassy has not treated this US citizen with any respect," said Vote Hemp spokesman Adam Eidinger. "Our attorneys sent them a letter, and they acknowledged receipt of it and said they are looking into it, but the embassy has not been sympathetic."

Vote Hemp and the HIA launched an action alert Friday afternoon in a bid to raise the profile of the case. The alert calls on people to write Secretary of State Clinton and urge her to ensure that Soliman is issued a new passport.

"We hope the action alert will generate thousands of letters to the secretary of state," said Eidinger. "We want them to take up his cause and give him a passport. Right now, he's in legal limbo. If he goes to the airport in Cairo, he will be arrested. The only reason we can tell they won't give him a passport is these drug charges. This man's life is on the line. If he's convicted, they could kill him. Egypt does have the death penalty for drug smuggling," he emphasized.

Soliman's arrest and the US Embassy's failure to assist have aroused the ire of others in the US hemp industry. "The Egyptian authorities are just following the lead of their DEA counterparts in this ridiculous conflation of healthy, nutritious, non-drug hemp seed oil with the drug marijuana," said David Bronner, head of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps and a major player in the US hemp industry. "It's even more ridiculous when you consider that they are accusing someone of smuggling hash into Egypt in a hemp bottle. That is so clearly absurd."

"This is a tragic mistake that could be solved with a simple drug test. Mr. Soliman is being falsely accused of importing ‘hash oil’ when in fact it was healthy hemp food," said HIA executive director Eric Steenstra. "Our campaign to free Mostafa Soliman will hopefully jump-start action at the US State Department. We recognize that the unrest in Egypt will make it more difficult for US authorities to act, but this terrible mistake by Egyptian authorities was made well before the recent protests began and in many ways symbolizes the corruption the protestors are resisting," he added.

Until something happens, Soliman is stuck in Cairo and facing the dire prospect of being tried as a drug trafficker for importing a healthy food product. He said he hoped to be able to clear matters up, but that the ongoing political turmoil made his prospects unclear.

"If this situation gets worse, I'm not going to stick around," he said. "If it clears up, then maybe my attorney can clear up my legal situation. But I still need a passport."

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STICKY GREENS homepage

(watch this site for a link to the STICKY GREENS Platform Page as it develops.)

— by NormanB (“Deviations from the Norm”)
Announcing a new Green Party Caucus identity group working to Legalize Marijuana & end discrimination against its users, to promote the economic and environmental benefits of Cannabis Hemp, and to convince the Green Party of the United States to fully embrace and promote these priciples.

Today I renounce my lifelong membership in the Democratic Party, recognizing that what has been my Party increasingly panders to corporate elitists and, in serving as shill to those donors, works against the principles I hold dear. How much money would I need in order to have enough to bribe the Party leaders to turn honest? And even that wouldn’t work, because I don’t want Party leadership that responds so disgracefully to money. What I want politically is peace, freedom, human rights, economic justice, environmental protection, and honesty & accountability in Government. With the move I make today I hope to further these goals.
Here we stand at the precipice: Albert Camus’ existential dilemma as described in The Myth of Sisyphus: The most important philosophical question is Should I commit suicide? because, if the answer is Yes, then the other questions are irrelevant. Ignorance on climate issues is such a valued commodity that the US has advanced in this important field to Number One in the world. In many African countries and island nations, 90% of the populace knows how we get Global Warming. In the US, more than 100,000,000 people doubt the science. That confusion helps fossil fuel and chemical companies profiteer off pollution and market extinctions that will include our own, if we don’t stop climate change. The current Administration ignores the climate emergency: After promising responsible conscientious environmental stewardship, it has instead allowed increased emissions of every Greenhouse Gas, and has had its Environmental Protection Agency officially lie about Coal and Nuclear Power, reclassifying them as “Clean Energy.” President Obama this week endorsed corporate-sponsored superstition over science: He declared that he intends to fight Global Warming without limiting any Greenhouse Gases. But the fact is: Greenhouse Gases cause Global Warming: By increasing emissions of every Greenhouse Gas, we Cause Global Warming, not Fight it.
Sunday I attended the Massachusetts Green-Rainbow Party (GRP) Convention in Worcester. Because I was not a member of the Green Party, my name placard wasn’t colored green. GRP 2010 Gubernatorial nominee Jill Stein, co-chair of the state Party, asked me what she could do to change my placard to green. I do very much agree with Dr. Stein and Green Party concensus on issues. And during her campaign she spoke thoughtfully and forcefully about Legalization. Much more than other political candidates, she favors protecting my civil rights, as a medical user, as a religious user, and as a recreational user. In our informal group from Western Mass’s Pioneer Valley, I saw tireless hard-working dedicated activists in it for the long haul, committed to improving our country and our planet. I have long respected the work of a majority of individuals in the circle. These Are My People. I do belong.
100,000,000 US citizens have smoked Marijuana. The Democratic and Republican Parties do not want our votes. The Greens and Libertarians do want them, but no Party is doing what it takes to get them. Our campaign for Legalizing Marijuana carried 75% of the vote in Amherst, 65% statewide. Gubernatorial candidate Jill Stein only got 1.43% statewide. Both the Democratic and Republican Parties in Massachusetts are shedding members: Independents now outnumber both Parties in the state. 70% of people nationwide have said they don’t trust Democrats and 80% don’t trust Republicans. If only those two-thirds of Massachusetts citizens demanding Marijuana reform saw the Greens as allies, we’d control elections in this state. But people in the Marijuana/Cannabis/Hemp movement largely see the Greens as irrelevant, and are unaware of that plank in the Party’s official platform calling for Legalization of Medical Marijuana and protection of its patients.
Now, we the Green Party, stand at the precipice. Should we commit suicide? The Hemp movement is our natural constituency and its voters make up two-thirds of the state’s electorate. Most of us in the Hemp movement see the Greens as not caring about our rights or the rights of patients suffering and dying from lack of access to medicine. Greens are also seen as lacking important knowledge on the economic and environmental realities surrounding Cannabis Hemp, and in some cases are perceived as lacking working knowledge of Global Warming science needed to talk to certain voters. The Sticky Greens hope to correct these problems, by including on our homepage primers on the science, economics, and bigotry encountered by Hempsters.
At the Convention, our local Greens generated a list of concerns we can work on together locally that were cited in our circle. I made the first suggestion on the list, Legalilzing Marijuana. When emailed copies of the list of concerns arrived, I saw that Marijuana is included, at the end, separated from everything else, looking like an afterthought. This is the prescription for our Party’s extinction. The 20 items on the list above Marijuana all added together can get us 1.43% of the vote. Marijuana gets us 65% statewide and in Boston, 75% in Amherst, 82% nextdoor in Pelham, and 80% in nearby Wendell. I urge Pioneer Valley Greens, the entire Mass GRP, and Greens across the country to learn the language of Hemp activism immediately. And I urge the Green Party of the United States Accreditation Committee to quickly approve and accept our Caucus, as soon as we meet the requirements. We have a spectacular opportunity.
Shortly I’ll go downtown to re-register to vote, this time as a member of the Green-Rainbow Party. I’m posting these ideas to my firedoglake.com Diary blog The Daily Machine, and to MaMaMoJo, which is my partner Rachel Neulander’s non-commercial Massachusetts Marijuana Movement Journal. Beginning today, MaMaMoJournal’s left column is the Sticky Greens homepage. It will include political, historical, and scientific information about Cannabis and its integral relation to energy, climate, food production, health, human rights, and honesty in politics and business. We’ll note its relationship to LGBTIQ issues and racism. Most importantly, we’ll show how science can stop and reverse Global Warming using existing technology, and do it in time if we start right away.
I’m also sending it to our local Greens circle, to Jill Stein and her campaign staff with whom I worked, and to the Accreditation Committee of the Green Party of the United States. The Sticky Greens will quickly become an official local Green-Rainbow Party group when three of us agree to form it. To get Accreditted as a Green Caucus, better able to affect national Party policy, we’ll need 100 members spread throughout 15 states. Reaching 100 members seems easier than reaching 15 states. We’ll try.
To join the Sticky Greens just email shamanslibrary@yahoo.com & display “join” in the Subject window, and you will receive an email newsletter. But joining the Sticky Greens Caucus identity group of the Green Party of the United States requires a little more: (1) Email shamanslibrary@yahoo.com & display “caucus” in the Subject window; (2) if you are not a member of the GPUS, register to vote as a Green Party member within 7 days; and (3) in your email to shamanslibrary, include all of the following info that’s applicable: Your email address, your phone number, your name, your mailing address, and your voting address. Let's have a Party!
I have been a political activist fulltime without pay for decades, having consciously decided in 1978 to dedicate my life to the unending push for human rights, environmental integrity, economic equality, art, and culture. In the early 1990s I toured the country with the Cannabis Action Network at early Hemp Rallies on the early Hemp Tours. In that function I performed and spoke at rallies in 20 or more states, and at 30 or more colleges. Coming off tour, still in the early 1990s, I founded SPACE: The St. Petersburg [Florida] Alliance for Cannabis Emancipation. Two years and five Hemp Rallies later, we disbanded the group having achieved our objective: Educating the press and public on the issue: By our fifth Rally, both our local middle-of-the-road newspapers (the St. Petersburg Times & Tampa Tribune) published editorials favoring complete Legalization. That was in a Republican-majority city in conservative Florida. One of my fellow activists in the Massachusetts Hemp movement, John Leonard, did a study recently showing how Hemp voters can be influenced to vote for issues and Parties they knew little about. We saw how it worked at our state convention, where Katelyn Golsby was the first speaker of the Party’s Campus Leaders. I had met Katelyn and her friend Eric Cameron at the local busstop and invited them to the Rock Opera I wrote and was soon to perform at the University of Massachusetts in an event sponsored by the Cannabis Reform Coalition there. Jill Stein spoke to begin the event, then took questions. Katelyn and Eric left carrying Jill Stein campaign signs. The Rock Opera was the most attended Jill Stein event of the entire autumn campaign. And as one student activist pointed out, we’d have had ten times as many attendees if we’d had two weeks to promote it.

Our Story So Far:

Norman B writes a blog-diary on the Seminal page of firedoglake. He is a longtime political activist and bard poet-performance artist-hedge scholar. He is passionate about history and those ignorant people we are doomed to watch repeating it, classical literature, current affairs, human rights, ecology, greenhouse gases, global warming and other environmental crises and overthrowing multi-national authoritarianism with poetry. He fights the never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the eradication of japanese knotweed and other invader plant species.

I, your humble correspondant and editor, Rachel N, am the doting mother of two well grown sons, a former professional fundraiser with The Share Group in Hadley, MA, a member of the International Union of Mail Artists and WORMOAK, Women Opposed To Regular Meetings Of Any Kind. I am passionate about my kids and about Norman, and my community, a loosely knit subcultural global continuum of die hard hippie treehugging seed saving pacifistic anarchistic street theatre performing gate storming video camcording witnesses, ethnomusicological preserving folkloric record keeping cultural archivists of our parlous times.

In our spare time we would like to save the world. We tried opening a channel on Youtube called medicinesocks hoping whatever memes we might emit therefrom to that effect would either immediately save the planet or immediately inspire other people to do so, or at the very least make us instant suddenly famous millionaires. We soon found that YouTube doesn't exactly work that way, or at least not yet. Saving the planet is going to be a real challenge and I don't mean to nag or sound like your mother but this mess isn't cleaning itself up, ya know?

Norman has been working on a book for years, a monster research project that keeps embiggening in scope and depth. It's about global warming and ways to stop promoting it and heal the damages which, in its development, has opened a can of worms most people can barely comprehend. It is hard to keep loving a man whose genius so often elicits blank stares or skeptical downturns of his listener's mouths but I do. I believe he's really onto something significant we all should understand about the problems of anthropogenic causes of pollution and climate change... if you thought the carbon footprint was bad, you ought to get a load of the Other Greenhouse Gases & further noxious poisons we're unleashing. We must be vigilant against the deliberate deceptions of corporate advertising campaigns which tout a new improved so-cheap-it'll-pay-for-itself nuclear industry, clean coal, "safe" fracking, off-shore drilling and the biggest pseudo-green deception of all, the so-called "Smart" Grid.

Norman's research keeps coming back around to HEMP, and the more he looks into it the more he is convinced that growing lots of hemp ASAP could be the greenest, cleanest key to recapturing excess carbon dioxide and getting it out of the atmosphere, and that an abundant, easy to extract hemp derived natural constituent, terpenine, can (and should!) be used to replace and abolish the fastest growing current industrial application of SF6. Sulfur hexaflouride, SF6, is a filthy greenhouse gas which is 34.500 times even more pernicious than carbon dioxide in its environmental impact. Can you guess who makes SF6 and what for? Can you imagine how much money there is to be made in the timely peddling of faux green poisonous solutions to real, global environmental crises? You've heard of the carbon footprint I presume. Pretty bad, that, huh. They tell us they're working on getting Beyond Petroleum (haha, joke) because they care, they *know* now that America can't help it, even Bush said we're all junkies, addicted to this bad druglike product from under the sea and Alaska and the mysterious Orient, called oil, which we need to get from or through domination of places like Iraq, and Afghanistan, where of late we've coincidentally been bombing to smithereens the 'enemy" we presume must be hiding among the veiled women, the poppy farmers in the pay of the CIA, the hungry kids, the goats and sheep and villages we're heroically raiding and razing, in a campaign to win hearts and minds and spread whatchamacallit... where was I?... oh yeah, oil, we're there for the oil, right? Confusing, rather, and that we know, too, how oil leaves that nasty honkin carbon footprint. Which nobody can deny. Make a chart. Depict the carbon footprint in actual relative scale to the giant Bigfoot Monster footprint of SF6, and you'll begin to see, I hope, what Norm's research has uncovered. It turns out SF6 is the chemical they just quietly put into a gazillion soon to be switched on leaky switchgear boxes for those big megalo windmill farms of the future (you've probably seen many slick oil company sponsored ads about them). DON'T BELIEVE WHAT THE ADS SAY, THE SMART GRID IS STUPID! Follow the Terpenine Station Segment of this new Blog for more details.

Personal Narrative:
Monday Morning, in the wee hours.

Pain is.... such a pain.
It feels like talons, or invisible welts left by a baseball bat, on my neck, shoulders, lower back and hips,
and to make matters worse my legs are all thick,puffed up and watery and they will not move at all without cramping, it's hard not to cry... my toes aren't working right, my eyes are all swollen and blurry, my forearms and hands are seizing up and stiffening like claws, my jaw aches, my face hurts.

This is AS, ankylosing spondylitis, with a concurrent flare up of what the rheumatologist calls fibromyalgia- god, I really didn't want that second diagnosis. That's another one of those diseases half the world thinks you're faking and even the believers, the doctor who diagnosed me, for example, can't do much for. Sure, there are pills (... no thank you!) And diets and excercises and theories up the yin yang and even superlative claims on the internet of total cures possible if only you purchase so & so's book.

I buy into the diet theory, believing that yes, you can make yourself feel better or worse depending on what and how you eat. And excercise.. well, that's a challenge when I'm feeling like pulverized crud but I move and stretch and breathe in ways I learned as a youngster practicing yoga and this also is helpful. Sometimes I just stay as still and calm and centered as I can and just focus on keeping breathing, like a zazen practitioner, and that's the only way through the worst moments. My mantram; Don't just do something, sit there!

Most people I know cannot sit still for long without feeling terribly guilty and remiss about the things they aren't getting to. Some people can't help but betray the subtle judgment they feel about inactivity, the suspicion that a person who hardly moves for days on end is really reprehensible... so many of my friends, no matter how exhausted they are will continue to push themselves through harrowing daily routines, complaining cheerfully and swilling coffee at regular intervals (with many wry, self-depracating references to their evil caffeine habits) in order to fuel and sustain the hectic pace of their lives. There is merit and self worth to be attained by pushing through one's tiredness and pain, none in attending to it, or in stopping when the body says to stop. You're never supposed to stop. Everyone I know has a personal narrative in which they heroically fight the overwhelming need for rest and soldier on through a tedious series of obligatory tasks, after all there's so much on the To Do list, so little time to do it all in.

The way I live around my pain is the mirror bizarro world image of that approach. In a world of pain, there is time, lots and lots of it, long elastic stretches of it, and veeeery very little to do in it. A vast stillness. So much time. But it's hard to think when you're in pain. it's hard to organize a thought, let alone a plan...

But I surprise myself, sometimes. If you can't exactly think, you intuit. And what you focus on grows, so I focus away from the pain and do what I love: examples: I talk to Norm, I rub his back, (this has helped him immeasurably and taught him how to massage me...) Intuition is contageous!

Sometimes when my hands free up I can play guitar: while playing, the music is everything, there's no pain.

I cook, I clean haphazardly, water the plants, play with the cats, I talk to one son on the phone and email the other, I make art (drawings, collage), & I made, until recently when the old Mac computer went pop! fizz...croak, videos. I've shot and edited more than two hundred short videos in the past three years...

A few times a year I get civic somehow and with the other volunteers or in whatever context I'm being active I complain cheerfully about how exhausting and daunting it is to do anything, and drink coffee and chime in along with everyone else about the terrible situation out there that we're trying to stop or change or at least wake other people up to that's so much more important than our insignificant (by comparison) aches and pains.

Why did I start this blog? What have I gotten myself into? It's too hard! I try to add more google gadgets, and dammit they aren't adding! Why??? HTML script? What tha heck is that... Wait... No! I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to give voice or fuel of any sort now to the inner saboteur. Shut up, inner sabo.

I started this blog, Dear Reader, because of the pain, mine and not just mine, yours, everybody's, and because of the one thing I know about getting anything done; that if I focus on this project, even a little bit each day, if I pace myself, and rest through the flares of illness, this project, this movement will grow. My little effort will grow it... I wish it were all spiffed up and beautiful already! I wish I had found a way to upload the articles that came in for today. John Dvorak has graciously contributed, Terry Franklin is on board and has promised to write, Norm, too says he'll write something... I wish the *other people* I've contacted would get back to me... (hint hint!)

This Saturday a local wizard who helps folks with disabilities with computer support will be reinstating my home video editing capability. That's good because there's already a whole hour of documented Massachusetts Hemp Historical Narrative sitting in my camera waiting to be edited into pithy zen koan highlights of the discussion and offered up for your perusal.

People, thanks for your attention. I am tired. The pain is huge and amorphous now, and very rude, clamoring for my attention, and I want to resist it and pay attention only to Project MaMaMoJo, but it's time to stop for now. I'm going to put the MaMa, and me, to bed for a while, and allow your kind attention to wander where it will.

Monday, February 21, 2011

American Facing Death Penalty in Egypt for Hemp Oil

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