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Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Free Dana Beal

Ibogaine anti addiction activist
currently incarcerated and up for parole



Free Dana Beal! Founder of the Global Marijuana March. Great letter. Some history of Dana's activism. Please share! Thanks to all the great people helping Dana out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Kuby
http://cannabis.wikia.com/wiki/Dana_Beal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Beal
https://www.facebook.com/groups/143405647913

 Dana wrote the following model letter for early parole.  He wrote:  "No two letters should be exactly the same, but the contents of the last paragraph should go in each one."

State of Nebraska Board of Parole
PO Box 94754
Lincoln, NE 68509-4754

[date]

Dear Sir or Madam:

I have read that due to prison overcrowding, you have a program of early parole (furlough) for non-violent offenders and inmates with health problems.  I think Irvin Dana Beal should be at the top of your list.  He's had two heart attacks in the past 18 months, including full cardiac arrest on September 27, 2011when he was clinically dead for 4 minutes, followed by 6 days in an induced coma, followed by a double bypass.  His hospital bill was almost a quarter of a million dollars, a bill Iowa County, WI only partially dodged by granting him emergency appeal bond.  (They still had to pay $114,000.)  On February 24, 2012, he had a second heart attack; the stent cost WI DOC another $50,000.

Beal is currently incarcerated in Nebraska for providing medical marijuana to patients with serious life-threatening conditions in Michigan, NYC, and Washington, D.C. -- mostly people with AIDS.  The prosecutor refused to admit that even though their provider was arrested, the seriously ill continue to need their medicine, and also that Beal was a sick man taking care of other, even sicker people.

Ironically, Beal is not only a founder of the medical marijuana movement, but a longtime AIDS activist who worked in the '90s with the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) on the first broad spectrum treatment for addiction to methamphetamine, cocaine, opiate, alcohol , and cigarettes -- ibogaine.  Just last Fall, NIDA appropriated $5 million to develop its own, synthetic iboga congener, 18-methoxycoronaridine (18-MC).  Beal has devoted half his life to a cure for drug addiction.  If you give him a furlough, he's ready to use his exhaustive knowledge of FDA regulations, addiction medicine, and personal ties at NIDA Medications Development to secure funding and help the Nebraska DOC and University of Nebraska set up Phase I and Phase II clinical trails of 18-MC for interruption of addiction to methamphetamine, crack, opiates, and alcohol -- thereby solving your prison overcrowding problem.  Instead of confining Beal, you should be utilizing this resource.   Enforced inactivity is nowhere near as bad as the punishment inflicted on Nebraska taxpayers because you're not using the only known pharmacotherapy for crystal meth.

Respectfully,
[signature]

[print name and
address]


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