Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2010
Subject: #445 Please Support California’s Proposition 19

PLEASE SUPPORT CALIFORNIA’S PROPOSITION 19

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DrugSense FOCUS Alert #445 – Sunday, August 8th, 2010

Today the California state capitol’s daily newspaper featured
marijuana articles.

To respond with letters go to http://www.sacbee.com/2006/09/07/19629/submit-letters-to-the-editor.html

Ways you may support Proposition 19 are found at http://www.taxcannabis.org/

It’s not what others do – it’s what YOU do.

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Source: Sacramento Bee (CA)

Page: 5E

Webpage: http://mapinc.org/url/JGQmEm4Y

Copyright: 2010 The Sacramento Bee

Author: Dale Gieringer, Special to The Bee

Note: Dale Gieringer is the California director of the marijuana
legalization group NORML, the National Organization for Reformof
Marijuana Laws.

RISK OF STONED DRIVERS MINIMAL WITH PROP. 19

Critics of this November’s Proposition 19 initiative to legalize
marijuana are raising concerns that it could lead to an epidemic of
road accidents by pot-impaired drivers.

Because accidents, unlike other purported hazards of marijuana, pose a
risk to non-users, such concerns deserve to be addressed seriously.

Fortunately, there exists extensive evidence showing that marijuana,
unlike alcohol, does not pose a major highway safety hazard, and that
liberal marijuana laws have no adverse impact on highway safety.

Studies on marijuana and driving safety are remarkably consistent,
though greatly under-publicized because they fail to support the
government’s anti-pot line. Eleven different studies of more than
50,000 fatal accidents have found that drivers with marijuana-only in
their system are on average no more likely to cause accidents than
those with low, legal levels of alcohol below the threshold for DUI.

The major exception is when marijuana is combined with alcohol, which
tends to be highly dangerous.

Several studies have failed to detect any increased accident risk from
marijuana at all. The reason for pot’s relative safety appears to be
that it tends to make users drive more slowly, while alcohol makes
them speed up.

Thus legalization could actually reduce accidents if more drivers used
marijuana instead of alcohol, but it could also increase them if there
were more combined use of the two.

So what will happen if California approves Proposition 19? Contrary to
the claims of some opponents, Proposition 19 does not change current
laws against driving under the influence. Nor would it bar testing of
bus drivers or other safety-critical workers, as some have alleged; in
fact, it explicitly protects the right of employers to address
consumption that impairs job performance. Nor would it override
federal drug-free work-force rules any more than did Proposition 215.

Nor would legalization necessarily dramatically increase the number of
pot smokers. Studies have consistently failed to find any relationship
between marijuana laws and usage rates. In the Netherlands, where
marijuana is publicly available in coffee shops, usage is only half
that in the United States. The Netherlands also boasts one of Europe’s
lowest road fatality rates, well below its neighbors.

Similarly, California, despite having the freest medical marijuana
regime in the nation, ranks 18th among states in marijuana use and
boasts a highway fatality rate well below the national average.

Proposition 19 critics cite a recent report by retired researcher Al
Crancer warning that the percentage of fatal drivers with marijuana in
their blood has increased in California since 2004. (This doesn’t mean
that marijuana necessarily caused the accidents, just that the drivers
had used it in the past hours or days). Crancer spuriously blames this
on the legalization of medical marijuana, but that happened in 1996,
not 2004. Moreover, his data suggest similar trends in other states.

In fact, California ranks 14th in the nation in the rate of marijuana
involvement in accidents, well behind states with tougher marijuana
laws such as South Carolina, Indiana and Missouri. Crancer’s data also
show that two of the state’s most pot-friendly counties, San Francisco
and Santa Cruz, had zero pot-related road fatalities in 2008. All of
this shows that liberal access to pot doesn’t necessarily mean more
DUIs.

Still, it seems reasonable to assume that legalization would increase
the number of pot users. A Rand Corp. report on legalization envisions
a possible doubling in usage in California bringing us back to the
same level as in the late 1970s, when marijuana use peaked.

You don’t remember an epidemic of highway accidents back when pot was
so popular? That’s because it didn’t happen. U.S. accident rates
declined steadily throughout the 1960s and ’70s, even while tens of
millions of Americans were introduced to marijuana. Happily, accident
rates have declined steadily since records were kept, thanks to
improved technology, safer roads, better enforcement and public education.

Californians have little reason to fear an epidemic of auto accidents
if Proposition 19 passes. New users would include many law-abiding
persons who were previously deterred by its illegality and who would
be more apt to respect DUI laws than today’s scofflaw users. Other
problems could be controlled by common-sense enforcement and
regulations, such as discouraging combined sales of liquor and pot.

Long ago, the architect of marijuana prohibition, Federal Bureau of
Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger, warned that legalizing
marijuana would mean “slaughter on the highways.” Anslinger also
warned that pot turned users into homicidal assassins, maniacs and
addicts. Then as now, the public would be wise to disregard such
reefer madness.

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Source: Sacramento Bee (CA)

Page: A1, Front Page

Webpage: http://mapinc.org/url/BtMchV4z

Copyright: 2010 The Sacramento Bee

Author: Peter Hecht, Sacramento Bee

WEED GOES MAINSTREAM

John Wade, 43, a San Francisco commercial lighting specialist, takes a
quick hit from a marijuana cigarette on the golf course to steady
himself before putting.

Sarika Simmons, 35, of San Diego County, sometimes unwinds after the
kids are asleep with tokes from a fruit-flavored cigar filled with
pot.

And retiree Robert Girvetz, 78, of San Juan Capistrano, recently
started anew – replacing his occasional martini with marijuana.

“It’s a little different than I remember,” he says. “A couple of hits
– and wooooo….”

As California voters prepare to decide in November whether to become
the first state to legalize marijuana for recreational use, a new
Field Poll conducted for The Sacramento Bee reveals that weed already
is deeply woven into society.

Those who use the drug, and their reasons for doing it, may be as
diverse as the state itself.

Forty-two percent of adults who described themselves as current users
in the July poll said they smoke pot to relieve pain or treat a health
condition. Thirty-nine percent use it recreationally, to socialize or
have fun with friends.

Sixty percent say marijuana helps them relax or sleep. Twenty-four
percent say it stimulates their creativity.

Historically, marijuana use in California remains lower than during
peak years of the late 1970s. But voters’ approval of Proposition 215,
the Compassionate Use Act – which made the state the first to legalize
medical marijuana – is changing the social dynamic, according to poll
results and interviews with users in 15 counties.

“It’s certainly likely that post-Proposition 215, it has become more
mainstream and the base of users has broadened,” said Craig Reinarman,
a UC Santa Cruz sociology professor who has studied marijuana in society.

Other measures back the Field Poll findings:

. More than 400,000 Californians use marijuana daily, according to
the state Board of Equalization. And state residents consume 16
million ounces of weed a year, from legal and illegal sources.

. More than 3.4 million Californians smoked pot in 2008, according to
the latest research by the National Survey on Drug Abuse and Health.

And, in the Field Poll, 47 percent of registered voters said they have
used marijuana at least once in their life. That exceeds the
registration of any political party in the state.

Breaking Stereotypes

Marijuana use in California extends well beyond any stoner
stereotype.

“I don’t walk around in Bob Marley T-shirts or have a marijuana flag
in my room,” said Kyle Printz, 44, a Marin County software engineer.

Printz occasionally smokes pot after writing computer code – “and
dealing with zeros and ones all day long.” He said, “It alters your
state of mind a bit and does help you relax.”

Deborah Pottle, 56, a disabled former state corrections officer from
Modesto, has a physician’s recommendation for marijuana for her back
injuries and a precancerous condition. She prefers cannabis in
lozenges and brownies and melds pot flakes into spaghetti sauce and
high-protein meals.

“I find it better by a long shot than … trying to keep pills down,”
said Pottle, who sees marijuana only as a medical remedy – not recreation.

Nationally, more than 100 million Americans have tried marijuana, and
10 states – led by Rhode Island, Vermont and Alaska – have higher per
capita use than the Golden State.

But in California, a proliferating industry of medical cannabis
dispensaries, offering exotic strains such as “Blue Dream,” “Train
Wreck” or “Green Crack,” helps supply a vast market, including many
people who never venture inside a pot shop.

According to the state Board of Equalization, California marijuana
dispensaries – intended to serve bona fide medical users, including
AIDS, cancer and chronic pain sufferers – produce up to $1.3 billion
in marijuana transactions for people reporting a vast range of ills.

“I’m sure there are people who suffer from any number of maladies that
seek therapy from marijuana use,” said Sacramento County Sheriff John
McGinness. “But for at least as many, I think it’s a ruse for healthy
people who enjoy the effects of marijuana.

“That’s how they obtain it without hassle.”

Illegal Trafficking Persists

Ngaio Bealum, editor of West Coast Cannabis, a 50,000-circulation
lifestyle publication that bills itself as the Sunset magazine of
weed, says the dispensary evolution and sophisticated growing
techniques are changing California’s pot culture.

But he said illegal marijuana trafficking lives on to satisfy the
demand.

“The old-school weed man still exists, but he’s had to step his game
up,” Bealum said. “Now when you go to the clubs (dispensaries), you’ve
got 50 different kinds” of pot strains. “The weed man now has to offer
a few different kinds – and start making brownies, too.”

California decriminalized marijuana use and possession 34 years ago.
People caught with less than an ounce face a misdemeanor that carries
a $100 fine. Those with medical recommendations now can legally
possess up to 8 ounces.

Bealum says readily available weed – and the reduced stigma and
penalties – make people less wary of consequences.

“As the boomers get older, those guys realized it is really no big
deal,” he said. “And the younger kids don’t think it’s a big deal,
because their parents used to do it.”

The July Field Poll shows plummeting support for tougher marijuana
laws and increased backing for softer penalties. Yet marijuana arrests
continue to rise.

In 2008, California authorities cited 61,388 people on misdemeanor pot
offenses and 17,126 for felonies such as illegal trafficking,
cultivation or possession for sale. Total arrests were up by nearly
one-third since 2003.

According to the Bee-commissioned poll, current marijuana use is most
prevalent in the Bay Area and Northern California, including North
Coast and Sierra Nevada counties with pot-receptive climates and
cultures. Use is lower in the Central Valley and lowest in San
Diego/Orange counties.

And, following previous trends, reported pot use is higher among
whites than African Americans, Latinos and other ethnic groups.

All Ages and Lifestyles

Marijuana has found niches in the California lifestyle with young
people starting their careers, affluent baby boomers and urban
professionals.

Ryan Issaco, a 21-year-old San Jose college senior bound for law
school, says he gets marijuana from friends with medical cards or from
acquaintances who bring weed from North Coast pot-growing regions to
the Silicon Valley.

He lights a water pipe and explores “different avenues on the issues”
with companions. “I love to talk politics when I’m a little high,”
Issaco said.

Californians age 40 to 49 – people who grew up a decade or more
removed from the hippie era and the Summer of Love – are most likely
to have used marijuana at some point in their lives, the poll showed.

Though current use is highest among people between 18 and 29 and
earning less than $40,000 a year, pot also is finding a significant
foothold among many reaching their prime career earning years.

Steven Keegan, 40, a Los Angeles sporting goods designer, earns more
than $100,000 marketing to Fortune 500 companies. He says he smokes
pot before a typical weekend day spent with his girlfriend at L.A.’s
Zuma Beach.

At bedtime, he relaxes with “Woody Harrelson” – a popular cannabis
strain named for the actor, an outspoken booster of marijuana use.

“I can come home from work and if I’m up at night thinking about
various projects, I’ll just take a hit and … I can go to sleep,”
Keegan said.

John Wade, who does lighting and production for weddings and corporate
events, uses his “one hitter” – a miniature pipe that looks like a
cigarette – to sneak smokes at Giants baseball games, on ski lifts –
and on the golf course.

“You don’t want to smoke too much because it can make the game worse,”
he said. “But I’ve taken a hit and gone off and had a couple of good
holes. I seem to be able to focus on my putting better.”

According to the Field Poll, the overwhelming majority of current pot
smokers prefer to use it at home or a friend’s house. Smaller numbers
say they enjoy it at parties, concerts or outdoors.

Simmons, of San Marcos, sometimes retreats to a patio to relieve
stress once her three daughters are asleep and won’t notice.

“I don’t even like the smell of it on my hands or body,” she said.
“I’m very discreet about it.”

Some Share ‘Medical Pot’

Dawn Sanford, a call center data entry worker from Sacramento, said
she rarely buys marijuana herself. But she reaches out to friends with
a ready supply or a medical recommendation.

Sanford has never seen a physician for a pot referral but suffers
occasional panic attacks. Sometimes, she said, she calls a female
friend who uses marijuana for anxiety to ask, “Can we do this please?”

The potential for pot purchased at medical dispensaries to be diverted
for recreational use is prompting efforts to prevent patients from
reselling or giving away pot.

Purchasers are limited to 2 ounces a week at Harborside Health Center,
which serves 48,000 medical users through its Oakland and San Jose
dispensaries. The Oakland outlet alone handles $20 million a year in
marijuana transactions, according to the center.

Harborside bans cell phones or money exchanges on dispensary premises.
It looks for people whose approach – such as buying up particular pot
strains or purchasing in multiple quantities – suggest they may be
planning to resell it.

“We’ve trained our staff to identify transactions that may be
suspicious,” said Harborside Director Steve DeAngelo. “When you have
dual markets, one legal and one illegal, existing side-by-side, you’re
going to have the issue of diversion.”

Many marijuana users have friends who bring home dispensary pot as
easily as picking up the groceries.

So in Riverside County, Annette Drennan, 30, an amateur astrologer who
is taking a class on meditation, enjoys smoking with her boyfriend – a
pot patient – because “when I get stoned I can really feel the present.”

Sociologist Reinarman said, “The line that separates recreational use
from medical use is blurred” by the infusion of medical pot into
California’s popular culture.

“There is no contradiction from people who sometimes use it for pain
or sometimes use it for sleep or sometimes use it because it is fun
and or stimulates their creativity,” he said.

The notion offends Lanette Davies, who runs Sacramento’s Canna Care
dispensary, which serves 5,000 registered marijuana patients.

Davies believes many illicit marijuana users may be self-medicating
for undiagnosed medical conditions. But she said, “I don’t support
people using strictly for recreation. If you want to take Vicodin
simply because it feels good, that doesn’t make it OK.”

While many dispensaries pitch exotic pot strains, such as “Grandaddy
Grape Ape” and “Brainstorm Haze,” as if they were prize-winning
vintages of wine, Canna Care rejected the common name of one popular
variety. It changed “Green Crack” to “Green Lady” to avoid an appeal
to recreational users.

“We will not put up ‘crack,'” Davies said.

Marketing Approaches Vary

Pot marketing is booming with the burgeoning medical marijuana
industry.

MediCann, a California physicians network that has overseen referrals
for more than 200,000 patients, portrays medicinal marijuana use as a
mainstream experience.

Its “typical stoner” ad campaign features photos of real estate
agents, marketing executives, veterans, community volunteers,
professors and plumbers who find relief for anxiety, arthritis,
nausea, sleeplessness or back pain.

By contrast, an advertisement for Los Angeles’ Grateful Meds
dispensary appears to pitch mind-altering rewards.

“The place where patients are high-spirited!” says an ad in a Los
Angeles pot culture magazine. With depictions of semi-nude women, the
advertisement offers free joints or pot brownies for each new “patient.”

“This is what we’ve come to,” said John Redman, executive director of
Californians for Drug Free Youth. Such appeals attract young adults
and make a drug culture attractive to teens, he said. “How is it that
we as a society cannot look at that?”

Redman contends depictions of pot as a cool and natural alternative to
other drugs are akin to the Joe Camel ads that were blamed for drawing
kids to cigarettes.

According to national drug survey data, one-third of current
California marijuana users are 18 to 25. Twelve percent – nearly
425,000 – are ages 12 to 17.

Lure Surprises Some

The complexity and lure of the contemporary pot market surprises even
some veteran users such as Wade, who started smoking as a teenager.

As a grown-up, he cited occasional hives and rashes to get a
physician’s recommendation. That entitled him to shop dispensaries
featuring scores of marijuana varieties. They include cannabis sativa
plants – said to produce a cerebral high; indica plants – considered
body relaxants; and crossbred plants said to offer both medicinal effects.

Some strains pack a greater psychoactive punch than Wade was ready
for. “I found them too strong,” he said.

Wade has a favorite – “Blackberry Kush,” an indica strain he says has
“great flavor” and crystal-like texture that “looks like someone took
the buds and rolled them in sugar.”

The new culture is luring back former pot smokers,
too.

Robert Girvetz tried marijuana more than 40 years ago, indulged for a
few years and moved on with little nostalgia. But then, well into his
70s and “very much retired” from running a window-covering business,
he was reintroduced by friends and relatives.

A cousin gave Girvetz a vaporizer that let him use pot without
lighting up. Preferring marijuana to cocktails, he savors it “once
every couple of months, just for kicks.”

Girvetz did have one notable bad experience. “I ate a whole (pot)
brownie when I shouldn’t have,” he said. “I almost had to crawl out of
my chair to get into bed.”

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Suggestions for writing letters are at our Media Activism Center
http://www.mapinc.org/resource/#guides

For facts about marijuana please see http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/node/53

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Prepared by: Richard Lake, Focus Alert Specialist
www.mapinc.org

=.

Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2010
Subject: #444 Will California Legalize Marijuana?

WILL CALIFORNIA LEGALIZE MARIJUANA?

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DrugSense FOCUS Alert #444 – Friday, July 30th, 2010

The AlterNet article below provides a good overview of the current
status of Proposition 19.

Writing Letters to the Editor will be a part of the educational mix
needed to help the proposition pass.

The more good, short, thoughtful letters written the more the
newspapers will consider the issue of importance to their readers –
even if your letter is not printed.

The Media Awareness Project Source Directory for Letters to the Editor
contacts is at http://www.mapinc.org/media.htm

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Pubdate: Fri, 30 Jul 2010

Source: AlterNet (US Web)

Copyright: 2010 Independent Media Institute

Website: http://www.alternet.org/

Author: Daniela Perdomo, AlterNet

Note: Daniela Perdomo is a staff writer and editor at AlterNet

Cited: Proposition 19 http://www.taxcannabis.org/

Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Proposition+19

WILL CALIFORNIA LEGALIZE POT?

With Only a Few Months to Go Until the Election, the Campaign to
Legalize Marijuana in California Has Only $50,000 in Cash on Hand.
The Question Now Is: How Can It Win?

Today, at least a third of Americans say they’ve tried smoking weed.
Is it possible that after half a century of increasingly mainstreamed
pot use the public is ready for marijuana to be legal? We may soon
find out.

California has long been on the front lines of marijuana policy. In
1996, it became the first state to legalize medical cannabis. This
year, the Tax Cannabis initiative — now officially baptized
Proposition 19 — may very well be the best chance any state has ever
had at legalizing the consumption, possession and cultivation of
marijuana for anyone over 21.

Drug reformers are particularly excited about Prop. 19’s prospects
because the pot reform stars seem to be as aligned as ever here.
Consider the current state of marijuana in California. For one,
medical cannabis has normalized the idea of pot as a legitimate
industry to many of the state’s residents. At least 300,000 and as
many as 400,000 Californians are card-carrying medical marijuana
patients, and the medical pot industry brings in around $100 million
in sales tax revenue each year, according to Americans for Safe Access.

Add to this the fact that at least 3.3 million Californians consume
cannabis each year, a figure culled from a presumably low-ball federal
estimate, meaning the actual incidence rate may be much higher. In
other words, at least one in 10 Californians uses pot every year.
Plus, 38 percent of Californians say they have tried pot at least once
in their lifetimes.

Next, tie the widespread use of this mild substance — which has
proven to be less harmful than alcohol and cigarettes — to the
growing slice of law enforcement resources that are dedicated to
fighting non-violent crimes associated with marijuana. Since 2005,
marijuana arrests have increased nearly 30 percent, totaling 78,000 in
2008, according to figures from the state’s Office of the Attorney
General. Of those arrests, four out of five were for simple
possession. Not surprisingly, this overzealous drug war
disproportionately affects minorities and young people.

All of this in the face of the state’s massive debt — $19 billion for
the month-old fiscal year — which is closing schools, laying off
police officers, and shutting down key public services while
cash-strapped taxpayers foot the bill for a failed, senseless drug
policy. With little money in state and local municipalities’ coffers,
criminalizing marijuana seems a senseless waste of the state’s largest
cash crop. In all, marijuana prohibition is both an economic and a
social issue — and Prop. 19 hopes to convince California voters that
Nov. 2 is the time to end it.

The midterm elections are just over three months away, and Prop. 19 is
seen by many observers as one of the ballot items most likely to
galvanize voters. As the people behind Prop. 19 prepare to launch
their ground campaign in earnest, it’s clear the initiative will be
under a magnifying glass every step of the way.

The question on everyone’s mind is: How do they win?

The reality of the matter is that Prop. 19 has the deck stacked
against it simply because there is no precedent for a voting public of
a state to endorse removing all civil and criminal penalties
associated with adult marijuana use. All preceding efforts have met
sad ends: A 1972 measure also called Prop. 19 failed in California;
more recently, attempts in Alaska, Colorado and Nevada were also
rejected. In the face of decades of federal and state prohibition, it
is still much easier to vote no than yes, even in the face of
convincing arguments to do otherwise.

“There is no template available that shows what you need to do to
achieve victory,” says Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

Where Prop. 19 Stands Today

For the past few months since qualifying for the ballot, Prop. 19 has
focused on building up its online support, fund-raising, staffing the
Oakland office, building a coalition, and setting up a network of
volunteers throughout the state who will soon power the ground force.
Over this time, the mainstream media’s coverage of the campaign has
mostly focused on poll numbers.

Polls in April and May found support at 56 percent and 51 percent,
respectively. A SurveyUSA poll released this month shows support at 50
percent, 10 points over those against it. A new Public Policy Polling
poll found the divide to be even greater, with 52 percent supporting
and 36 percent nixing it — and the campaign says these results are
more consistent with its internal polling. But another poll also
released this month, the Field poll, showed that more people oppose
the initiative than support it, at 48 to 44 percent. (This contrasts
with the last Field poll, conducted over a year ago, which found
support at 56 percent.) No matter which numbers you’re looking at
though, 50, 52 or even 56 percent isn’t all that comforting. It’s one
thing to say yes to a pollster, it’s quite another thing to get out
and vote that way.

“Progressive drug reform on the California ballot needs to be polling
in the high 50s or low 60s,” says Stephen Gutwillig, the California
director at the Drug Policy Alliance. “This is because they generally
have nowhere to go but down because of the fear-mongering that usually
occurs at the hands of the law enforcement lobby which tends to not
need as much money to push their regressive fear-based messages.”

Mauricio Garzon, the even-tempered campaign coordinator, admits polls
could be better but is sure that something even more important is
happening. “We’re seeing a legitimization of this issue, politically.
There was a time when this was impossible,” he says. “You reflect on
this and you see a shift in public sentiment and this is what this
campaign has always been about. Making Americans understand how
important this issue is. It’s a real issue and the existing framework
has been devastating to our society.”

Indeed, Tax Cannabis has always been framed as a public education
campaign. In this sense, at least, Prop. 19 is really succeeding —
after all, a lot of people are talking about it.

Prop. 19’s newly hired field director, James Rigdon, thinks marijuana
legalization has a lot more going for it than other issues. “There’s
something appealing about this for everyone — helping the economy,
incarceration issues, personal freedom ideas, public safety concerns.
People from all walks are willing to come out and support us,” Rigdon
tells me. “Our supporters aren’t just Cheech and Chong. They’re
everyday people who support this because it’s good for everybody.”

The multi-layered appeal to ending marijuana prohibition even has some
expert election observers believing that ballot initiatives legalizing
cannabis may be the Democrats’ answer to the gay marriage bans that
drive Republican voters to the polling places. That theory remains to
be tested in November, but what is certain now is that the
far-reaching benefits that come with legalizing the marijuana industry
in California have attracted a broad coalition of supporters of all
stripes.

In addition to all the major players in the drug reform community,
groups ranging from the NAACP to the ACLU have also signed up as
official endorsers of Prop. 19. So, too, have numerous labor unions,
faith leaders, law enforcement officers, elected officials, and
doctors and physicians. According to Gutwillig, a coalition of
organized labor, civil rights organizations, and the drug policy
reform movement “has not existed before and could be
game-changing.”

As the coalition of Prop. 19 supporters grows, so does the mainstream
media’s coverage. Gutwillig believes Prop. 19 has done a “really good
job of defining the way the media is covering it; coming up with new
and interesting ways of talking about the issue. They are talking
about the failures of prohibition without seeming to encourage greater
consumption of marijuana. And the argument that is increasingly made
is that this is not playing out as criminal justice reform, that this
is playing out as a social or cultural or economic issue. The framing
is different.”

Here Gutwillig is referring to the last statewide drug initiative —
Prop. 5 in 2008. That failed measure was framed as a criminal justice
issue and sought to emphasize treatment and rehabilitation for drug
offenders over harsh criminal consequences. So the Prop. 19 campaign’s
hope may be to learn from the lesson of Prop. 5 and skew away from
criminal justice arguments. But there could be a downside to this approach.

“Prop. 19 is talking about this as more of a jobs, revenue issue,
which plays well for the mainstream media which likes to play up the
fiscal side of it because it ties into larger stories, but a more
sinister interpretation may be that it allows the media to talk about
marijuana reform without talking about marijuana reform,” Gutwillig
says.

This is tied to another worry Gutwillig observes. “The research and
focus groups I’ve seen see the whole revenue thing as gravy — it
matters to people who’ve already made up their minds about supporting
Prop. 19. But it’s not the reason someone is going to come off the
fence. [Talking about revenue] doesn’t resonate with voters, nor
should it,” he says. “But what does resonate is the other side of the
fiscal coin, which is the opportunity to save and redirect scarce law
enforcement resources. That message makes a big difference. People’s
instincts tell them there is something fundamentally hypocritical
about marijuana prohibition.”

Prop. 19 hopes to appeal to the instincts of Californians who believe
the drug war has failed.

The Campaign’s Strategy

As Prop. 19 prepares to fan out across California, it has set two very
important, realistic goals. The first is that it will not try to
change the minds of those who believe marijuana prohibition has been a
success. This means that the campaign is out to mobilize those who
already support Prop. 19, and make sure they show up to vote; it also
means they will focus on convincing those who have some sense that
criminalizing pot has done more harm than good that this measure is
the right solution to this policy problem. The campaign expects the
swing demographics to be comprised mostly of blacks, Latinos, mothers,
and young people.

In its second key strategic move, the campaign will especially focus
on the largest areas of voters most likely to vote in midterm
elections — Los Angeles County, Orange County, the Bay Area, the
Inland Empire, and the Central Valley — rather than spread itself too
thin across the entire state.

As the campaign prepares to begin its on-the-ground outreach over
these next few weeks, the question of financing arises. After all, big
dollars are behind most successful campaigns.

While Tax Cannabis premiered with a lot of fanfare about its financial
backing, the situation is somewhat different now. Richard Lee, the pot
entrepreneur and co-proponent of the initiative, injected $1.4 million
of his money — via Oaksterdam University — to ensure its passage.
While fund-raising has continued at a steady clip, the latest public
filings show that most of the larger cash infusions still come from
S.K. Seymour, LLC, Lee’s umbrella organization that runs Oaksterdam
and other cannabis-related businesses. Despite this, Prop. 19 is
committed to raising small amounts from many people, and the filings
show many small-dollar donations have started to flow in. According to
Lee, the campaign has raised $130,000 online and most of these
donations were under $250.

Yet Lee admits that “everything is on track, except fund-raising.” The
campaign currently has $50,000 in cash. While the campaign has talked
to the major funders of other marijuana measures throughout the
country — people like Peter Louis, George Soros, Bob Wilson, and John
Sperling — none have committed funding yet. All of these men
contributed between $1 million and $2 million each to Prop. 5, the
failed 2008 measure that sought to reform sentencing for drug-related
offenses. A big question remains unanswered: Why are these Prop. 5
donors not funding Prop. 19?

Their non-involvement may be why Garzon says the campaign “can
certainly do a lot with a little.” Prop. 19 has not yet planned for a
mass media campaign, which costs a lot of money. For example, a
statewide TV ad buy for a political candidate in California costs
about $1 million per week. That’s a daunting figure and so Tax
Cannabis will instead be stressing one-to-one public education, which
will take the form of door-to-door canvassing, phone banks and
town-hall meetings.

“We don’t think we need [a mass media campaign] to win. It depends on
our budget — if we have room for it, we will,” Garzon says. “People
are interested enough that we find the person-to-person interaction to
be very successful. When you answer their questions, they’re very
supportive.”

The Prop. 19 campaign will rely heavily on volunteers. Though the
campaign hasn’t yet put out an official appeal, 2,600 people have
already signed on. Many thousands more are expected to comprise the
complete army of volunteers, who will have to learn how to craft
talking points that appeal to different kinds of on-the-fence
Californians.

Already the campaign has some idea of what those talking points will
be. A town-hall meeting in Mendocino County gave Garzon an opportunity
to see what resonated with voters there. The event was billed as “Life
After Legalization,” and speakers framed the passing of Prop. 19 as an
opportunity to become “the Napa Valley of cannabis,” Garzon said. By
the end of the meeting, a union man had inspired attendees to chant,
“Organize! Organize!”

For Jerome Urias-Cantu, a law student at Stanford, the key issue is
border safety. In a fund-raising appeal sent out to Prop. 19’s mailing
list, he wrote about a cousin who lived in Ciudad Juarez, just miles
from the California border, who was killed in the escalating drug war
in Mexico. “Oscar had nothing to do with the drug trade, but he was
shot and killed nonetheless,” Urias-Cantu wrote. “That’s why I support
the reform of California’s cannabis laws. The measure will prevent
needless deaths by reducing the profitability of the drug trade and
putting the violent drug cartels out of business.” (The Office of
National Drug Control Policy estimates that Mexican cartels receive 60
percent of their revenue from marijuana sales in the United States.)

Lance Rogers, a volunteer regional director based in San Diego,
believes that besides the border issues, people in his area will be
interested in economic arguments for Prop. 19. “San Diego — like the
state — is in a major fiscal crisis. We have an extreme budget
deficit due to pension problems,” he says.

And as a criminal defense attorney, Rogers has met others like him who
“see the effects of an overly punitive criminal justice system on
marijuana offenses. I see people go to prison for five or seven years
for sales of less than an ounce of marijuana. Granted, these are folks
who have prior felonies or other things going on, but the fact is that
this person is going to prison for $75,000 a year for doing what Prop.
19 would legalize.”

Priscilla A. Pyrk, the regional director for the Inland Empire and the
owner of a medical marijuana collective, thinks dispelling stereotypes
about cannabis consumers and entrepreneurs will be important, too.
“The cannabis industry needs to revamp how people perceive this
industry and its users,” Pyrk says. “That’s why it’s great that we
have a lot of non-traditional cannabis consumers coming on board.
They’re coming out of the closet! Doctors, lawyers, businessmen are
coming out and standing up for the initiative.”

Women, who were key in the effort to legalize medical cannabis and
have more generally helped mainstream pot use, will also be targeted.
According to Richard Lee, soccer moms in particular are a big
undecided group. “We have to educate them about how Prop. 19 will
protect their kids better than the status quo,” he says. “The current
system draws kids into selling and buying cannabis. If alcohol was
illegal, it’d be the same way. There is a forbidden fruit
attraction.”

Stephen Gutwillig agrees: “The campaign must validate moms’ instinct
that there is something whack about marijuana prohibition. The
instinct that marijuana is more like tobacco and alcohol than not, and
safer — which it is — and that there’s no reason that we shouldn’t
be trying to regulate marijuana. They know we’re wasting a lot of law
enforcement resources on this futile attempt to enforce these
unenforceable laws.”

As Prop. 19 works on the ground, it will count on the field support of
three organizations. One is NORML, the National Organization for the
Reform of Marijuana Laws; the second is the Courage Campaign, a
progressive advocacy group with 800,000 members. Arisha Hatch, the
national field director at Courage, estimates that about 500 to 1,000
of its volunteers will be highly involved with the Prop. 19 campaign’s
get-out-the-vote work, which she sees as “the biggest challenge [Prop.
19] will face. We need to get people to actually speak on message and
in a responsible way about what taxing and regulating cannabis will be
like.

“Marijuana legalization is the only thing on the ballot that can
replicate that turnout. I see it as an extremely important issue for
progressives, which is why Courage has made it the initiative we’re
supporting this cycle,” Hatch says.

The final group supporting Prop. 19 on the ground is Students for
Sensible Drug Policy, which will manage the campus outreach and focus
on bringing out the youth vote.

Aaron Houston, the executive director of SSDP, says he is committed to
proving the conventional wisdom about youth voters and midterm
elections wrong: “What we’re going to change with this election is
demonstrate that marijuana on the ballot motivates young people to
turn out and vote. Opportunistic politicians will find out that
marijuana increases youth turnout and that speaking out against drug
reform is to their peril.”

Scoping Out the Opposition

Prop. 19’s most vocal opposition comes from the top. Gubernatorial
candidates Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown don’t see eye to eye on much,
but they both seem to have decided it’s politically expedient to
oppose the measure. Senator Dianne Feinstein also recently came out
against it.

“I was at a party with doctors who said they used to light up with
Jerry Brown,” says Garzon. “But you know, the reality is that we know
that politicians aren’t going to lead on this issue.”

Feinstein, for her part, refers to a Rand study released this month to
justify the idea that “if Proposition 19 passes, the only thing that
would be certain is drug use would go up and the state of California
would run afoul of federal law and risk losing federal funding.”

But if you read the actual study, you learn that Rand is still rather
conservative in its ability to prognosticate much: “The proposed
legislation in California would create a large change in policy. As a
result it is uncertain how useful these studies are for making
projections about marijuana legalization.”

Yet even a rather staid study like Rand still sees positives such as
tax revenues, which the state has projected could be as high as $1.4
billion annually. As for Feinstein’s claim, there is no reason to
believe Prop. 5 would affect federal funding (which Feinstein will
fight for anyway). As Richard Lee says, similar arguments were used
against Prop. 215 but the medical marijuana measure has not resulted
in less funding coming to California. And regarding the senator’s
assertion that drug use will go up, the opposite may be true. Other
studies show that marijuana use among youth has actually dropped since
medical marijuana was legalized in California. There was a 47 percent
decline among the state’s ninth-graders from 1996 to 2006.

“Sen. Feinstein opposed Prop. 215 although she has now come out in
favor of medical marijuana. It’s political math,” Lee says. “With
Prop. 215, all the major politicians and statewide candidates were
against it but it passed with 56 percent of the vote. So if you look
at the polling, the voters don’t trust politicians on this.”

Currently, the No on Prop. 19 movement seems relegated to a few small
groups. The most well-funded one is called Public Safety First, which
claims endorsements from the California Chamber of Commerce, the
California Police Chiefs Association and the California Narcotic
Officers’ Association. The group is headed by John Lovell, the
lobbyist for the police and narcotic officers’ unions. Public Safety
First has under 250 fans on Facebook — compared to the over 120,000
Prop. 19 has — and James Rigdon, the Prop. 19 field director, says at
least 20 of them are fans of Prop. 19, too. “Some of them even work
here,” he laughs.

A couple volunteer opposition groups have cropped up, too. Citizens
Against Legalizing Marijuana seems to have little if any money behind
it. Another such group, Nip It In The Bud, boasts little more than a
Web site, which depicts a skeleton holding a scroll reading: “Fix
California with pot??? NOT!”

Prop. 19 seems more concerned with opposition within the movement than
without it.

“From our own side there has been some fragmentation as there is in
all social movements. There’s just different people with different
ideas,” Garzon says. “We’re open to criticism but we’re trying to do
things responsibly. We can’t please everybody but we’ve tried to craft
something that makes sense to a mother in Los Angeles, too. This isn’t
ultimately about the right to smoke, it’s about taxes in our
communities, a failed system, a public health issue.”

I told Garzon that a few marijuana activists had written me to say
they were upset about the local control aspect of Prop. 19 — counties
can decide whether to legalize the sale of cannabis. One had called
the regulatory framework confusing and a bureaucratic disaster waiting
to happen.

“We’re not instituting a state government aspect, true. But it’ll come
down to who do you want to give your tax dollars to? Local control is
what we need on so many issues but in particular this issue,” he said.
Local governments can decide “ideologically, culturally, operationally
what is right for them. What it does is allows the best of the models
to bubble up to the top. If say, one place does it horribly wrong,
then Pasadena can wait and see how Davis does it. Local governments
can decide not to pass it this year — but those who don’t pass on the
opportunity will take advantage of that extra revenue.”

Priscilla A. Pyrk, the Prop. 19 organizer in the Inland Empire, also
hopes to assuage some opposition from within the medical cannabis
community: “Prop. 19 does not have anything to do with the medical
side of cannabis. Prop. 215 stays intact. This can help medical
cannabis patients by alleviating any of the judgment that is currently
focused on them.”

Not Much Time Left

How do they win? No one can say for sure, but the fund-raising
strategy will be of paramount importance so the get-out-the-vote game
can succeed. This midterm election cycle, the Prop. 19 campaign has to
convince voters that marijuana prohibition hits on many important
issues vital to their lives.

Going forward, the campaign will be heavily publicizing a recently
released report from the non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office
which finds that Prop. 19 would put police priorities where they
belong, generate hundreds of millions in revenue and protect the public.

The campaign needs to hammer in several points to stand a chance. Its
messaging has to emphasize how marijuana prohibition has been a
costly, senseless disaster. The drug war has strengthened and enriched
violent cartels while law enforcement resources have been wasted on
arresting non-violent marijuana users, ruining lives and siphoning
from key public services that are sorely needed by all Californians.
Prop. 19 must also make clear that taxing and regulating pot will make
it harder for minors to access pot — and that medical marijuana has
proven that increased regulation decreases use by kids. Finally, the
campaign ought to appeal to voters by reminding them that this
initiative is their opportunity to take a stand where politicians have
been reluctant to act. In other words, the time is now.

If the campaign is successful, Californians will wake up on Nov. 3 to
find that marijuana prohibition is finally over. If it isn’t, at least
we will be a step closer to that possibility.

**********************************************************************

Suggestions for writing letters are at our Media Activism Center
http://www.mapinc.org/resource/#guides

For facts about marijuana please see http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/node/53

**********************************************************************

Prepared by: Richard Lake www.mapinc.org

=.

Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2010
Subject: #443 Drug Policy Is Inconsistent With All Available Evidence

DRUG POLICY IS INCONSISTENT WITH ALL AVAILABLE EVIDENCE

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DrugSense FOCUS Alert #443 – Saturday, July 24th, 2010

Syndicated columnist Dan Gardner covers an event and provides a
historical background which has received little attention (the New
York Times did cover the story http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10/n583/a01.html
).

Mr. Gardner was recognized by the Drug Policy Alliance with the Edward
M. Brecher Award for Achievement in the Field of Journalism for the
series at this link http://www.mapinc.org/gardner.htm You may read
more of his columns at http://www.mapinc.org/author/Dan+Gardner

Please read and sign The Vienna Declaration at http://www.viennadeclaration.com/

An anonymous donor has challenged DrugSense to raise $25,000 in new
donations and/or increases in current periodic donations. Once the
goal is achieved the donor will provide us with $25,000. Today we have
almost reached this important goal. Please help us meet the challenge!
http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm

**********************************************************************

Pubdate: Fri, 23 Jul 2010

Source: Ottawa Citizen (CN ON)

Copyright: 2010 The Ottawa Citizen

Contact: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/letters.html

Author: Dan Gardner, The Ottawa Citizen

WHY OUR DRUG POLICY IS ‘INCONSISTENT’ WITH ALL AVAILABLE EVIDENCE

It’s safe to assume most people have never heard of the “Vienna
Declaration.” And that simple fact helps explain why public policies
that fail — policies that do vastly more harm than good — can live
on despite overwhelming evidence of their failure.

The Vienna Declaration, published in the medical journal The Lancet,
is an official statement of the 18th International AIDS Conference,
which wraps up today in Vienna. Drafted by an international team of
public health experts, including Evan Wood of the University of
British Columbia, the Vienna Declaration seeks to “improve community
health and safety” by, in the words of the committee, “calling for the
incorporation of scientific evidence into illicit drug policies.”

Please don’t stop reading. I promise this will not turn into another
of my rants about the catastrophic failure of drug prohibition. I’ve
been writing variations on that theme for more than a decade now and
everyone knows I am a crazed extremist whose views are not to be
trusted by decent folk. I’ll spare you.

Instead, I will merely present a few sentences from the Vienna Declaration:

. “The criminalization of illicit drug users is fuelling the HIV
epidemic and has resulted in overwhelming health and social
consequences.”

. “There is no evidence that increasing the ferocity of law
enforcement meaningfully reduces the prevalence of drug use.”

. “The evidence that law enforcement has failed to prevent the
availability of illegal drugs, in communities where there is demand,
is now unambiguous. Over the last several decades, (there has been) a
general pattern of falling drug prices and increasing drug purity —
despite massive investments in drug law enforcement.”

. (Existing policies have produced) “a massive illicit market. …
These profits remain entirely outside the control of government. They
fuel crime, violence and corruption in countless urban communities and
have destabilized entire countries, such as Colombia, Mexico, and
Afghanistan.”

. “Billions of tax dollars (have been) wasted on a ‘war on drugs’
approach …”

. Governments should “undertake a transparent review of the
effectiveness of current drug policies.”

. “A full policy reorientation is needed.”

Remarkable, isn’t it? It’s exactly what this crazed extremist has been
saying for more than a decade and yet the people who wrote and signed
it are anything but crazed extremists. Among them is a long list of
esteemed public health experts, including the president of the
International AIDS Society, the executive director of the Global Fund
to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, and Canada’s own Dr. James Orbinski.
There are former presidents of Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. And there
are several Nobel laureates, including the economist Vernon Smith.
(See the full list of signatories, along with the statement, at
viennadeclaration.com).

This should be big news. Drug policies affect everything from the
local street corner to the war in Afghanistan — and here is a long
list of informed and eminent people who agree what we are currently
doing is a horrifying mistake that wastes money and takes lives. The
public should be alarmed.

But this is not big news. And the public is not alarmed. In fact, most
of the public has never heard of the Vienna Declaration. Why not?

To answer that, let me take you way back to Sept. 5, 1989. That
evening, U.S. president George H.W. Bush made a televised national
address. Holding up a bag labelled “evidence,” Bush explained that
this was crack seized at the park across the street from the White
House. Crack is everywhere, he said. It’s an epidemic. Bush vowed
“victory over drugs.”

The whole thing was a fraud. Federal agents had tried to find someone
selling drugs in the park but couldn’t. Posing as customers, they
called a drug dealer and asked him to come to the park. “Where the
(expletive) is the White House?” the dealer said. So the police gave
him directions.

This chicanery was exposed not long after but it didn’t matter. Bush’s
address was a smash. The media bombarded the public with hysterical
stories about the “crack epidemic.” Popular concern soared. And “all
this occurred while nearly every index of drug use was dropping,”
noted sociologists Craig Reinarman and Harry G. Levine.

The power to throw the switch on media coverage isn’t exclusive to the
White House, of course. In 1998, the United Nations convened a General
Assembly Special Session which brought leaders from all over the world
to discuss illicit drugs. The media deluged the public with stories
about drugs — and the UN’s official goal, signed at the end of the
assembly by all member states, of “eliminating or significantly
reducing the illicit cultivation of the coca bush, the cannabis plant
and the opium poppy by the year 2008.”

Time passed. The Special Assembly was forgotten. When 2008 rolled
around, cocaine output had increased 20 per cent and opium production
had doubled. But this spectacular failure was almost completely
ignored in the media. Why? The UN stayed mum. So did national
governments. With no major institutions putting the subject on the
agenda, the media ignored it.

This is the essential problem: If governments talk about drugs,
journalists talk about drugs; if they don’t, we don’t. And since
governments are full of people whose budgets, salaries, and careers
depend on the status quo, they talk about drugs when doing so is good
for the status quo, but they are silent as mimes when it’s not. Thus
the media become the unwitting propaganda arm of the status quo.

I’m not sure what it will take to change this. It would certainly help
if the media would stop letting governments decide what is news and
what is not. Even better would be leaders with the courage to put
evidence ahead of cheap politics, entrenched thinking, and vested interests.

But that’s not happening. And so, on Monday, the government of Canada
felt free to categorically reject the Vienna Declaration because it is
“inconsistent” with its policies — policies which have never been
subjected to evidence-based evaluation and would surely be condemned
if they were.

This is how failure lives on.

**********************************************************************

Suggestions for writing letters are at our Media Activism Center
http://www.mapinc.org/resource/#guides

For facts about HIV/AIDS & Injection Drug Use please see
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/node/48

**********************************************************************

Prepared by: Richard Lake www.mapinc.org

=.

Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2010
Subject: #442 Battle Of Words In The War On Drugs

BATTLE OF WORDS IN THE WAR ON DRUGS

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DrugSense FOCUS Alert #442 – Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

The Miami Herald’s syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts column below has
been printed in various newspapers as you may see at
http://www.mapinc.org/author/Leonard+Pitts

All are appropriate targets for you letters to the
editor.

An anonymous donor has challenged DrugSense and MAP to raise $25,000
in new donations and/or increases in current periodic donations. Once
the goal is achieved the donor will provide us with $25,000. Today we
are about four fifths of the way to this important goal. Please help
us meet the challenge! http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm

**********************************************************************

BATTLE OF WORDS IN THE WAR ON DRUGS

Bishop Ron Allen probably thinks Alice Huffman has been smoking
something.

Huffman, president of the California Conference of the NAACP, recently
declared support for an initiative that, if passed by voters in
November, will decriminalize the use and possession of marijuana.
Huffman sees it as a civil rights issue.

In response, Allen, founder of the International Faith-Based
Coalition, a religious social activism group, has come out swinging.
“Why would the state NAACP advocate for blacks to stay high?” he
demanded this month at a news conference in Sacramento. “It’s going to
cause crime to go up. There will be more drug babies.” Allen wants
Huffman to resign.

But Huffman is standing firm, both in resisting calls for her head and
in framing this as an issue of racial justice. There is, she notes, a
pronounced racial disparity in the enforcement of marijuana laws.
She’s right, of course. For that matter, there is a disparity in the
enforcement of drug laws, period.

In 2007, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, 9.5
percent of blacks (about 3.6 million people) and 8.2 percent of whites
(about 16 million) older than 12 reported using some form of illicit
drug in the previous month. Yet though there are more than “four
times” as many white drug users as black ones, blacks represent better
than half those in state prison on drug charges, according to The
Sentencing Project. The same source says that though two-thirds of
regular crack users are white or Latino, 82 percent of those sentenced
in federal court for crack crimes are black. In some states, black men
are jailed on drug charges at a rate 50 times higher than whites.

And so on.

So while the bishop hyperventilates about blacks “staying” high (?),
he ignores a clearer and more present danger. As Michelle Alexander
argues in her book The New Jim Crow, those absurd sentencing rates,
combined with laws making it legal to discriminate against even
nonviolent former felons in hiring, housing and education, constitute
nothing less than a new racial caste system.

Allen worries about a baby being born addicted to pot, but the
likelier scenario is that she will be born to a father unable to
secure a job so he can support her, an apartment for her to live in or
an education so he can better himself for her — all because he got
caught with a joint 10 years ago.

It is a cruel and ludicrous predicament.

And apparently Huffman, like a growing number of cops, judges, DEA
agents, pundits and even conservative icons like the late William F.
Buckley Jr. and Milton Friedman, has decided to call the war on drugs
what it is: a failure. It is time to find a better way, preferably one
that emphasizes treatment over incarceration.

You’d think that would be a no-brainer.

We have spent untold billions of dollars, ruined untold millions of
lives and racked up the highest incarceration rate in the world to
fight drug use. Yet we saw casual drug use “rise” by 2,300 percent
between 1970 and 2003, according to Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition, an advocacy group. And as drug use skyrocketed, we find
that we have moved the needle on “addiction” not even an inch, up or
down.

All we have managed, and at a ruinous cost, is to relearn the lesson
of 1933, when alcohol Prohibition ended: You cannot jail or punish
people out of wanting what they want.

I’ve never used drugs. I share Allen’s antipathy toward them. But it
seems silly and self-defeating to allow that reflexive antipathy to
bind us to the same strategy that has failed for 30 years.

By now, one thing should be obvious about our war on
drugs.

Drugs won.

**********************************************************************

Suggestions for writing letters are at our Media Activism Center
http://www.mapinc.org/resource/#guides

Over thirty thousand published letters provide examples at
http://www.mapinc.org/lte/

**********************************************************************

Prepared by: Richard Lake www.mapinc.org

=.

Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2010
Subject: #441 Legalized Pot? Like Getting Bonged In The Head

LEGALIZED POT? LIKE GETTING BONGED IN THE HEAD

**********************************************************************

DrugSense FOCUS Alert #441 – Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

The column below illustrates that a columnist may cover a topic
well.

An anonymous donor has challenged DrugSense and MAP to raise $25,000
in new donations and/or increases in current periodic donations. Once
the goal is achieved the donor will provide us with $25,000. Today we
are about four fifths of the way to this very important goal. Please
help us meet the challenge! http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm

**********************************************************************

Pubdate: Tue, 13 Jul 2010

Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PA)

Webpage: http://mapinc.org/url/H11qQ2tj

Copyright: 2010 PG Publishing Co., Inc.

Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/pm4R4dI4

Author: Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Cited: Proposition 19 http://www.taxcannabis.org/

Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Proposition+19

Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?261 (Cannabis – United States)

Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?253 (Cannabis – Medicinal – U.S.)

Legalized Pot? Like Getting Bonged in the Head

In November, Californians will have the opportunity to vote on a
ballot initiative legalizing all marijuana use, whether medicinal or
not.

According to the latest poll of likely California voters, Proposition
19 will pass. This will put the Obama administration in an awkward
position.

The federal government is already suing Arizona for its recently
enacted immigration law. What will the Obama Justice Department do
when a state goes rogue by establishing its own rules when it comes to
licensing and taxing the sale of weed?

California law will be in opposition to federal law as well as in
violation of a 1961 international treaty that prohibits the
legalization of cannabis. The U.S. is a signatory to that treaty.

In a surprising move, Alice Huffman, the president of the California
State Conference of the NAACP, threw the prestige of her organization
behind Proposition 19.

Citing a new study by the Drug Policy Alliance, Ms. Huffman insisted
last week that the legalization of marijuana is, among other things, a
civil rights issue because blacks are more likely to be arrested for
pot possession than whites, even though blacks use it at far lower
rates.

In California, blacks make up 22 percent of those busted for marijuana
possession despite being less than 7 percent of the population.
National NAACP Chairman Julian Bond applauded Ms. Huffman’s stance, as
did the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and the California
Black Chamber of Commerce.

Shortly after Ms. Huffman endorsed Prop 19, a group of black religious
leaders called for the civil rights leader’s head. “Why should the
state NAACP advocate for blacks to stay high?” asked Bishop Ron Allen
of the International Faith-Based Coalition. “It’s going to cause crime
to go up. There will be more drug babies.”

Closer to home, a bill to legalize medical marijuana use continues to
languish in both chambers of the state Legislature despite polling
that puts voter support for it at 81 percent.

The Republican and Democratic gubernatorial candidates oppose medical
use of marijuana, no matter how restrictive Pennsylvania’s laws would
be compared to California’s.

(It’s interesting that the leading politicians of our state favor
liberalized gun laws, expanded gambling and the expansion of
controversial hydraulic fracturing techniques to extract natural gas
from below ground in ways that could adversely affect the state’s
water supply.)

There’s also concern that the revenue stream created by legalizing
marijuana in California and other places is overstated. The Rand
Corp.’s Drug Policy Research Center said that the state’s premium weed
could drop from a high of $450 an ounce to $38. California would have
to slap on a consumption tax to double or triple the price to get a
workable funding stream.

The criminal black market for marijuana would collapse, but it could
be replaced around the edges by law-abiding folks growing and selling
their own weed. Why is that such an unacceptable outcome?

A state highly skilled at slapping on taxes like Pennsylvania could
use the legalization of marijuana as an opportunity to provide a
“gateway service” to the Liquor Control Board as it transitions out of
the liquor control business.

Overnight, the LCB could become the Legalized Cannabis Board. The LCB
could bring the benefit of generations of condescension by bored
clerks to a sector of the economy that desperately needs it. Dealing
with the culture of the LCB would be such a bummer for most potheads
that demand for marijuana would drop precipitously. It is an elegant
way to deal with both sides of the demand curve.

There would be those who would rather grow their own weed and avoid
paying any taxes than buy it from state middlemen. As someone who
doesn’t personally indulge, the thought of neighbors growing a patch
of Mary Jane in their back yard for private use doesn’t exactly terrify me.

For most of our history, Americans grew and consumed marijuana in
various forms. Aren’t we politically mature enough to go back to the
days of deciding what merits watering in our own back yards? If
dealing with hemp was good enough for George Washington and the
Founding Fathers …

Only ideologues are unable to admit what is obvious to everyone else:
The Drug War has been an unmitigated disaster. It has resulted in the
fattening of profits for drug lords, the destabilization of nations,
the corruption of law enforcement, the reallocation of dwindling
national resources down rat holes, the expansion of the
prison-industrial complex, expensive wars overseas and national hypocrisy.

You don’t need to smoke a bong to see that.

**********************************************************************

Suggestions for writing letters are at our Media Activism Center
http://www.mapinc.org/resource/#guides

For facts please see Marijuana: http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/node/53

**********************************************************************

Prepared by: Richard Lake www.mapinc.org

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Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2010
Subject: #440 The American Civil Liberties Union Sued Wal-Mart

THE AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION SUED WAL-MART

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DrugSense FOCUS Alert #440 – Friday, 2 July 2010

The Michigan Medical Marihuana Act protects employees from being
disciplined for their use of medical marihuana in accordance with the
law.

The Act states (see http://drugsense.org/url/8mvr7sW8
):

(c) If a patient or a patient’s primary caregiver demonstrates the
patient’s medical purpose for using marihuana pursuant to this
section, the patient and the patient’s primary caregiver shall not be
subject to the following for the patient’s medical use of marihuana:

(1) disciplinary action by a business or occupational or professional
licensing board or bureau; or

(2) forfeiture of any interest in or right to property.

Wal-Mart’s Statement of Ethics http://ethics.walmartstores.com/Pdf/U.S_SOE.pdf
states “If any part of this Statement of Ethics goes against local
policies or laws, then the local policy or law must always be followed.”

But what Wal-Mart states conflicts with what it did in the case of a
Michigan medicinal marijuana user, Joseph Casias. Please read the
newspaper clippings about the case at http://www.mapinc.org/people/Joseph+Casias

Please also read the lawsuit Casias v. Wal-Mart http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/casias_complaint_6_24_10.pdf

Letters to the Editor about this case may help. You may also consider
calling Wal-Mart at 1-800-WM-ETHIC [1-800-963-8442] or sending an
email to [email protected] or by completing their on line form at
https://www.walmartethics.com/gcs/ethicsconcern

An anonymous donor has challenged DrugSense and MAP to raise $25,000
in new donations and/or increases in current periodic donations. Once
the goal is achieved the donor will provide us with $25,000. Today we
are about four fifths of the way to this very important goal. Please
help us meet the challenge! http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm

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Suggestions for writing letters are at our Media Activism Center
http://www.mapinc.org/resource/#guides

For facts please see Medical Marijuana: http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/node/54

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Prepared by: Richard Lake www.mapinc.org

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