• Cannabis & Hemp

    Jack Herer, 1939 – 2010

    Pubdate: Sat, 24 Apr 2010
    Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
    Copyright: 2010 Los Angeles Times
    Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
    Photo: Of Jack Herer printed in black and white in the newspaper http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2010-04/53454182.jpg

    JACK HERER, 1939 – 2010

    Proselytizer for Legal Pot

    Jack Herer, an energetic advocate for marijuana legalization who was a mesmerizing presence on the Venice Boardwalk and achieved worldwide renown after he wrote a treatise extolling the virtues of hemp, died April 15. He was 70.

    Herer suffered a debilitating heart attack in September, minutes after he delivered a typically pugnacious pro-pot speech at the Hempstalk festival in Portland, Ore., insisting that marijuana ought to be smoked morning, noon and night. “You’ve got to be out of your mind not to smoke dope,” shouted Herer, dressed in a green short-sleeved shirt and shorts made from hemp. “It is the best thing the world has ever had.”

    He never recovered and died at home in Eugene on tax day. “Dad has not filed taxes in over 30 years, so it was wonderful he died on tax day, it really was,” said his son Mark Herer, who is the president of The Third Eye, the family’s smoke shop and hippie wares store in Portland.

    Herer researched and wrote an exuberant book that became the bible of the movement to legalize hemp, a non-psychoactive strain of marijuana. “The Emperor Wears No Clothes,” which was first published in 1985, has sold more than 700,000 copies. In it, Herer wields extensive documentation to ridicule the government’s ban on hemp cultivation and to highlight the plant’s versatility as paper, fiber, fuel, food and medicine.

    The book made Herer into one of the most recognizable figures in the marijuana movement and converted him into a pop icon memorialized by a strain of cannabis. For decades, Herer, known as the Emperor of Hemp or the Hemperor, crisscrossed the country, rhapsodizing about the wonders of weed.

    Bruce Margolin, one of L.A.’s best-known marijuana defense lawyers, recalls that Herer was always trying to teach people about hemp. “At that time I was ignorant of it like everyone else,” he said. “He educated me and many, many other people through his book and his lectures.”

    Herer was born June 18, 1939, in New York City, the youngest of three children, and served in Korea as an Army military police officer. He discovered his mission in Los Angeles after he moved to the city in 1967 with his wife and three sons to work at a neon sign company. He tried marijuana two years later and quickly became engrossed in learning about it. “He was always a very curious person about everything. He read everything he got his hands on,” said Vera Donato, who was married to Herer from 1960 to 1969.

    In the early 1970s, he wrote “G.R.A.S.S.,” which stood for “Great Revolutionary American Standard System.” It promoted a 1-to-10 scale for grading marijuana. He also began to invent drug paraphernalia.

    In 1973, he launched a relentless effort to legalize marijuana in California, working year after year on initiatives that failed, often in league with Ed Adair, a head shop owner who died two decades ago. In 1980, the two became co-commanders of Reefer Raiders and set up camp on the lawn of the federal building in Westwood, openly smoking joints for the media. A year later, they pushed their own measure.

    Herer opened a head shop in Van Nuys called High Country and recruited other owners to help fund his initiatives. In 1983, he ran afoul of a new state law that made it a misdemeanor to sell devices to use with illegal drugs. Police confiscated more than 6,000 items in two raids. Three years later, Herer was convicted and ordered to pay a $1,500 fine and serve two years’ probation.

    In the 1980s, he could frequently be found at an information booth on the Venice Boardwalk, a gregarious man who showed obvious pleasure in trying to persuade skeptics. “I think the thing that motivated him the most was his love and respect for planet Earth and that he was a kind and good-hearted person just naturally,” said Jerry Rubin, a fellow activist who was often stationed nearby. “He was doing a consciousness-raising lifetime exercise.”

    Herer researched “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” for years, scouring the archives of the Library of Congress for evidence that he believed the government suppressed when marijuana was outlawed in 1937.

    The book, updated many times, sparked a hemp resurgence, and he became a circuit-riding preacher. In 1990, Herer addressed 60 rallies in 48 places in one six-week stint.

    At 6 feet and 230 pounds, with unkempt hair and a bushy beard, Herer was an imposing, but not intimidating figure, a bearish counterculture holdout who was often found in tie-dyed shorts and a T-shirt with a pot leaf overlaid on an American flag on the front and a history of hemp on the back.

    Herer had a heart attack and stroke at a hemp festival in 2000. He boasted that his rehabilitation was aided by cannabis oil. When he concluded his last speech, he said, “Come over to my booth, over there, and I will see you next time.”

    “He didn’t write the script, but you couldn’t write it better,” Mark Herer said. “Dad has a speech, the crowd cheers and he walks off into the sunset.”

    Herer was married four times. He is survived by his wife, six children, a brother and a sister. A memorial will be held at 1 p.m. Sunday at Eden Memorial Park, 11500 Sepulveda Blvd., in Mission Hills.

  • Letter of the Week

    It’s Time To Rethink Our Drug Policies

    LETTER OF THE WEEK

    Politicians still speak of winning the war on drugs, but that war is over.  And guess what? We lost.

    Despite all government efforts to the contrary, our borders are becoming ever more porous to hard drugs.  American entrepreneurial genius has made marijuana a major cash crop in many states, and meth labs are popping faster than we can close them.  Isn’t it high time we rethought our drug policies?

    As with alcohol, prostitution and gambling, control funded through taxation makes more sense than attempted eradication, an admirable but futile undertaking.  Legalization with control not only removes the allure of drug profits but impacts the companion crimes of prostitution, theft and police corruption.  It will also relieve a criminal justice system overwhelmed with simple marijuana possession cases.

    There is little correlation between harsher drug laws and drug abuse.  Norway and Sweden share a common border and Nordic culture.  Norway has moderate drug policies while Sweden’s laws are much stricter.  But both have essentially the same addiction rates.

    A Zogby poll published last May in The Economist magazine found a narrow majority of Americans favor some form of legalization and control.  But this, in no way, means approval, merely acceptance of reality.

    GEORGE B. REED JR.

    Fort Oglethorpe

    Pubdate: Mon, 12 Apr 2010

    Source: Chattanooga Times Free Press (TN)

  • Hot Off The 'Net

    Dismantling the Talking Points of Marijuana Prohibitionists

    By Tony Newman and Stephen Gutwillig

    The war on drugs will be on the ballot in California this November. The nation will watch the state decide whether to tax and regulate marijuana or continue to arrest adults for possession of this plant.

    The vote on the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010 will impact many of the most important issues in the country today. Californians will express how they want police resources used, if adults who consume marijuana should be criminalized, how best to deal with the tragic violence in Mexico, and what our priorities should be in tough economic times. It’s no wonder that seven months out, this issue has already generated thousands of news stories around the world.

  • Cannabis & Hemp - Hot Off The 'Net

    4/20 Poll Actually Shows Majority Support For Drug Reforms

    By Stephen C. Webster

    As with many instances in politics, actuality can often be obscured behind the wrong frame: ask a question just the right way and results can be wildly tilted, one way or another.

    Take the case of an Associated Press/CNBC poll released on April 20, 2010, detailing Americans’ opinions on legalizing marijuana. The poll was widely reported as declaring that 55 percent in the U.S. are opposed to ending prohibition.

    Make no mistake, “oppose” is exactly what 55 percent of the people said when asked: “Do you favor, oppose or neither favor nor oppose the complete legalization of the use of marijuana for any purpose?”

  • Drug Policy

    Pulitzer Prize Awarded To Kathleen Parker

    The 2010 Pulitzer Prize has been awarded to Kathleen Parker of The Washington Post for her perceptive, often witty columns on an array of political and moral issues, gracefully sharing the experiences and values that lead her to unpredictable conclusions.

    A MAP author search turns up 121 articles by her since 1998. http://www.mapinc.org/author/Kathleen+Parker

    It would be hard to think of a well known conservative columnist who supports legalizing marijuana as strongly.

    Asking your local larger newspapers to carry Kathleen Parker’s columns makes much sense in my opinion. Tell the newspapers that you wish to read the columns of a Pulitzer columnist. The prize is a big deal.

  • Hot Off The 'Net

    Medical Marijuana and the Law

    Diane E. Hoffmann, J.D., and Ellen Weber, J.D. , New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 362:1453-1457 April 22, 2010, Number 16

    The U.S. legal landscape surrounding “medical marijuana” is complex and rapidly changing. Fourteen states – California, Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Hawaii, Colorado, Nevada, Vermont, Montana, Rhode Island, New Mexico, Michigan, and most recently, New Jersey – have passed laws eliminating criminal penalties for using marijuana for medical purposes, and at least a dozen others are considering such legislation.1 Medical experts have also taken a fresh look at the evidence regarding the therapeutic use of marijuana,2,3 and the American Medical Association (AMA) recently adopted a resolution urging review of marijuana as a Schedule I controlled substance, noting it would support rescheduling if doing so would facilitate research and development of cannabinoid-based medicine. Criticizing the patchwork of state laws as inadequate to establish clinical standards for marijuana use, the AMA has joined the Institute of Medicine, the American College of Physicians, and patient advocates in calling for changes in federal drug-enforcement policies to establish evidence-based practices in this area.

    States have led the medical marijuana movement largely because federal policymakers have consistently rejected petitions to authorize the prescription of marijuana as a Schedule II controlled substance that has both a risk of abuse and accepted medical uses. Restrictive federal law and, until recently, aggressive federal law enforcement have hamstrung research and medical practice involving marijuana. The federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA) classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug – one with a high potential for abuse and “no currently accepted medical use” – and criminalizes the acts of prescribing, dispensing, and possessing marijuana for any purpose. Although physicians may recommend its use under First Amendment protections of physician-patient communications, as set forth in the 2002 federal appeals court decision Conant v. Walters, they violate federal law if they prescribe or dispense marijuana and may be charged with “aiding and abetting” violation of the federal law if they advise patients about obtaining it. A 2005 Supreme Court decision (Gonzales v. Raich) made clear that regardless of state laws, federal law enforcement has the authority under the CSA to arrest and prosecute physicians who prescribe or dispense marijuana and patients who possess or cultivate it.

    Nevertheless, in October 2009, the Department of Justice issued a memorandum to U.S. Attorneys stating that federal resources should not be used to prosecute persons whose actions comply with their states’ laws permitting medical use of marijuana. This change in the Justice Department’s prosecutorial stance paved the way for states to implement new medical-marijuana laws, and states are now attempting to design laws that balance concerns about providing access for patients who can benefit from the drug with concerns about its abuse and diversion. Although the current state laws facilitate access, they do little to advance the development of standards that address the potency, quality, purity, dosing, packaging, and labeling of marijuana.

    All the state laws allow patients to use and possess small quantities of marijuana for medical purposes without being subject to state criminal penalties. They also allow a patient’s “caregiver” – an adult who agrees to assist with a patient’s medical use of marijuana – to possess, but not use, marijuana. Most laws protect “qualifying” patients, who are variously defined as those who have received a diagnosis of a debilitating medical condition and have written documentation (or, in one case, an oral recommendation) from their physician indicating that they might or would “benefit from the medical use of marijuana” or that the “potential benefits of medical use of marijuana would likely outweigh the health risks.” Definitions of “debilitating medical condition” vary by state (see Table 1) but typically include HIV-AIDS, cachexia, cancer, glaucoma, epilepsy and other seizure disorders, severe nausea, severe and chronic pain, muscle spasms from multiple sclerosis or Crohn’s disease, and other conditions. All but two states allow additions to this list if approved by the state health department.