(The Raw Story via InfoWars.com) “We’re not at war with people in this country,” [US Drug Czar Gil] Kerlikowske told The Wall Street Journal in May.
However, if the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s (ONDCP) budget for fiscal year 2011 is to be believed, Kerlikowske was full of hot air.
According to 2011 funding “highlights” released by the ONDCP (PDF link), the Obama administration is growing the drug war and tilting its funds heavily toward law enforcement over treatment.
The president’s National Drug Control Budget also continues the Bush administration’s public relations tactic of obscuring the costs of prosecuting and imprisoning drug offenders. “Enron style accounting,” is how drug policy reform advocate Kevin Zeese described it, writing for Alternet in 2002.
The budget places America’s drug war spending at $15.5 billion for fiscal year 2011; an increase of 3.5 percent over FY 2010. That figure reflects a 5.2 percent increase in overall enforcement funding, growing from $9.7 billion in FY 2010 to $9.9 billion in FY 2011. Addiction treatment and preventative measures, however, are budgeted at $5.6 billion for FY 2011, an increase from $5.2 billion in FY 2010.
In short, the Obama administration’s appropriations for treating drug addiction are just short of half that dedicated to prosecuting the war.
The problem, of course, is that when you have declared drugs to be illegal, you must expend resources to arrest, try, and convict the people who manufacture, transport, sell, buy, and use drugs. It’s really less about the the people who use drugs than it is about the people whose jobs depend on arresting the people who use drugs.
We’re in the middle of a recession. Jobless numbers are through the roof. If marijuana were regulated like alcohol or tobacco, you suddenly add a whole bunch of DEA, police, prosecutors, wardens, guards, and more to the unemployment line. Then add in the young people who have found marijuana growing and dealing to be the only living wage job they can find, now suddenly unemployed by marijuana re-legalization, and you’ll see unemployment figures that would guarantee an Obama re-election defeat in 2012.
Yes, a legal marijuana market would open up many jobs and industries and tax revenues heretofore unrealized, but transitioning to that market is going to take time. In the meantime, what jobs are open for former drug cops and pot dealers?
We bring this up to temper our disappointment in a man who in 2004 said our “War on Drugs is an utter failure and we need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws” but in 2010 has turned into just another prohibitionist president.
(Find more information on this contradiction between the Obama Administration’s lip service toward treatment over incarceration, complete with quotes and informative graphs, at Pete Guither’s informative DrugWarRant blog.)
It is hard to know which is worse, ignorance or dishonesty? I can’t ascribe either specifically when it comes to the agitprop of Florida’s so-called drug czar Bruce Grant, but his anti-medical cannabis rant published recently in the Orlando Sentinel wins the distinction of being the first in an ingoing series entitled NORML’s Reefer Madness Du Jour, which serve as 1) peeks into and observations of those who still support the practice of arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating cannabis consumers; 2) trying to understand and expose the motivations of those who seek to deny sick, dying and sense-threatened medical patients who possess a physician’s recommendation to use cannabis; 3) shedding light on those who deny American farmers the ability to cultivate and prosper from the cultivation of industrial hemp, just like hemp farmers from Canada, France, China, Russia, etc…
It is no surprise to any casual observer of cannabis law reform that the politically-appointed position of ‘Director of Drug Control Policy’, largely a symbolic government job, in the current epoch of modern American politics, notably in red state-leaning Florida, will be against ‘drugs’ (interestingly, these so-called drug czars rarely rail against the three most deadly and addicting ‘drugs’: alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceuticals).
But what makes czar Grant’s full-throated rant against medical cannabis standout is the vacuousness in his effort to mislead the citizens of Florida.
Medical Marijuana Would Multiply Misery Of Abuse
The push is on to add medical marijuana to the ballot. This proposal would make the use of cannabis for medical purposes legal in Florida.
It seems that every few years vocal marijuana-interest groups seek a way to normalize their drug of choice for the rest of us. Maybe they’ve forgotten the terrible human toll exacted by drug abuse.
We have to look no further than our own friends and families, addiction-treatment centers and local hospitals to see the tragic consequences these substances visit upon human beings. The misery would only be compounded should medical marijuana be allowed.
Smoked marijuana is not medicine. Pot smoke contains more carcinogens than cigarette smoke and is simply not healthy for you.
In short, inhaling toxic chemicals and carcinogens from the burning of a crude weed is not recommended by any reputable medical authority.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration routinely tests new drugs according to a rigorous protocol to prove their safety before they are allowed to be sold to the public as medicine. Marijuana has passed no such test.
Is there potential use for some form of cannabis in medicine? Sure. The American Medical Association recently recognized limited therapeutic benefits of marijuana — specifically, pain reduction and appetite improvement — in certain patients and has called for further research to look into the development of cannabinoid-based medicines and alternate-delivery systems.
If this research shows promise, scientists will then be able to isolate the therapeutic chemicals, have them tested and approved by the FDA, and finally packaged in a synthetic form as medicine, much like was done with Marinol some years ago.
These are possibilities for the future, but right now neither the AMA nor any competent medical authority in this country has yet endorsed marijuana as medicine.
Considering our national obsession with the health consequences of high cholesterol, trans fats, obesity and second-hand tobacco smoke, why would we now seek to legitimize and encourage the use of a carcinogenic substance?
Let’s look at the California experiment that began in 1996: People in that state have been using medical marijuana as a convenient cover for the illegal recreational use of the drug. Initially prescribed to alleviate nausea and loss of appetite associated with treatments for cancer and HIV, medical cannabis is now widely prescribed for ailments such as headaches, back pains, insomnia and even ingrown toenails.
In one clinic in San Diego in 2006, the Drug Enforcement Administration reported that only 2 percent of the patients received their prescriptions for serious conditions like AIDS and cancer, while the other 98 percent received marijuana to treat back spasms, headaches, anxiety and other such maladies. Is this the kind of “medicine” we want in Florida?
The case for medical marijuana is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The true agenda behind the rhetoric is full legalization. Smoking marijuana as a medical treatment empowers marijuana-interest groups to achieve their ultimate goal of marketing this intoxicating substance to the entire population — sick or not.
Legalization would most certainly lead to abuse by an even greater number of youth and adults than seen today. Ask any addict undergoing treatment whether or not marijuana should be legalized, and you will get a resounding “no.”
Why? Because between alcohol, tobacco and illegal drugs, we already have enough problems with substance abuse. Drug abuse inflicts staggering monetary costs reflected in crime, incarceration, property damage and adverse health outcomes. Even worse is the cost in lost human lives.
Marijuana would embolden those who would use the plight of the sick as a clever subterfuge for drug legalization with tragic ramifications for our citizens. We support medical progress and relieving pain in the sick and dying, but allowing medical marijuana would cost us all more than we can pay.
Bruce Grant is director of the Florida Office of Drug Control.
OK…where to begin?
First, right out of the gate, the threat of medical cannabis being foisted onto the unknowing and easily manipulated citizens of Florida by crazed cannabis activists.
Second, medical cannabis is a mean-spirited ruse for legalization.
Threat #2…Grant implies cannabis places citizens into drug addiction centers and hospitals. Is this true? Doesn’t alcohol, pills and tobacco products put consumers in some jeopardy for the need of addiction or medical treatments. Maybe czar Grant has never visited an emergency room on Saturday nights after midnight…
Despite the fact that 14 states recognize cannabis as a medicine (where 90 million Americans reside), and arguably now so does the federal government under the Obama administration post a well-publicized DOJ memo this past October, and that there are thousands of supportive and affirming scientific studies published indicating cannabis’ safety and utility as a medicine, czar Grant (who is not a medical doctor, rather a career military and anti-drug officer) flatly declares: There is no such thing as medical cannabis. Period.
One wonders if Alice in Wonderland is czar Grant’s favorite book and inspiration for informed policy-making?
Czar Grant seeks a fig leaf to hide behind when claiming that the FDA has not approved medical cannabis. Has the FDA actually tested medical cannabis? No. Has the FDA been abused by anti-cannabis politicians to produce position papers against cannabis? Yes. Ironically released by the ONDCP and Bush 2.0 administration in conjunction with NORML’s 36th annual national conference.
In short, inhaling toxic chemicals and carcinogens from the burning of a crude weed is not recommended by any reputable medical authority.
These are possibilities for the future, but right now neither the AMA nor any competent medical authority in this country has yet endorsed marijuana as medicine.
Czar grant just outright lies when he asserts that no reputable medical organization supports patient access to whole-smoked cannabis when there are hundreds of reputable medical organizations that do, including the American Nurses Association, American Public Health Association, AIDS Action Council, American Academy of Family Physicians and The British Medical Association, etc…robbed of their historic, institutional opposition to cannabis, czar Grant even has to soft pedal the American Medical Association’s new direction on medical cannabis’ medical utility.
Czar Grant dangles the false promise (and proven marketplace loser) of 100% pure THC pills like Marinol being superior to natural cannabis.
A favorite prohibitionist canard to employ, as Grant does, is the one that asserts ‘in a world where deadly and addicting drugs like alcohol and tobacco are legal, me-oh-my, why would we want to legalize another drug like cannabis?’
The simple retorts are:
-The failure of cannabis prohibition for 73-years does nothing to actually control the use of the drug;
-Cannabis is already so popular it is not clear at all that taxing it will increase the use of it. In states that have medical cannabis laws and/or decriminalized cannabis there has been no discernible increase in the use of the herb by children or adults;
-Cannabis, despite it’s long illegality is a top five cash crop in America, the drug is readily purchased on most any street and children in government surveys acknowledge greater access to untaxed/unregulated cannabis than taxed and controlled drugs like alcohol and tobacco products.
Czar Grant then goes on to commit a damning blood libel by labeling all medical cannabis consumers in California as frauds. His proof: He cites a recent anti-medical cannabis white paper created by the California Chiefs Of Police Association, which was written and published for the purpose of propagandizing for anti-cannabis activists, law enforcement and opinion-makers in the media.
If one employed Grant’s prohibitionistic thinking, if a youth illegally purchased a bottle of beer or prescription pills, then the government should ban alcohol and pharmaceuticals and criminalize the behavior.
The fact is that tens of millions of citizens–in states like CA, CO, OR, NM, WA–safely and responsibly use medical cannabis everyday with their physician’s recommendation with little-to-no-harm to the individual patient, their city, state and society.
Czar Grant may want to take note that states like NM, RI, ME and now NJ (and the District of Columbia) are issuing state licenses to medical cannabis cultivators and distributors, therefore it can be stated that cannabis is a safe medicine, that is why the states are allowing its use and sales.
If cannabis was the problem and health threat czar Grant claims, why would every single candidate from the Democratic party in the 2008 presidential election, including now President Obama, support lawful access to medical cannabis?
If cannabis truly were deadly and dangerous why would voters massively favor reform in the voting booth and state legislators pass and governors sign these measures into law? Because they favor their own deaths and illness? Do the politicians who support medical access to cannabis want to sow death, disease and drug addiction to their very own voting constituents?
How logical and based in reality is czar Grant’s mentality regarding cannabis?
Lastly….
We support medical progress and relieving pain in the sick and dying, but allowing medical marijuana would cost us all more than we can pay.
I don’t know who the ‘we‘ is in czar Grant’s absurd claim as a vast majority of Americans do in fact support medical access to cannabis. When given the opportunity to directly vote on the matter of medical access to cannabis, only once since 1992 have cannabis law reformers not prevailed at the ballot box (South Dakota, 2006, where reformers lost 51%-48%; prevailing in AK, WA, OR, CA, AZ, NV, CO, MT, MI and ME).
If Grant and other prohibitionist really care about the health and welfare of their fellow Floridians, they should do the two following things:
-Get into a car, head Ft. Lauderdale way and look up stockbroker and one of five federally-licensed medical cannabis patients in the United States Irvin Rosenfeld. Irv receives over 300 complimentary pre-rolled cannabis ‘joints’ every month grown at NIDA’s University of Mississippi cannabis farm, rolled en mass at a secret facility at the Research Triangle Institute in NC and escorted by US Marshals to a DEA-certified pharmacy. The man smokes about 10-12 large joints a day, is a successful stockbroker, sailboat racer, community volunteer and high taxpayer.
I guess in czar Grant’s world Mr. Rosenfeld should suffer in silence and not be an active, productive, fully-engaged-in-life medical patient who consumes cannabis prescribed by his physician.
Of course, anti-cannabis guest columns have been penned in the mainstream media by dozens of political appointees against any modicum of cannabis law reforms since the early 1990s.
How has that worked so far for them?
Does Grant believe the results will be any different in Florida regardless of his shallow and ill-informed cry of wolf?
House and Senate negotiations for the 2010 Appropriations bill have been completed. This is the huge federal budget bill and it just so happens that Washington DC is a federal district and its spending is controlled by Congress.
In 1998, DC passed a medical marijuana bill overwhelmingly, but Congressional drug warriors led by Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia prevented DC from spending any federal money to count the votes (that’s right, in our democracy’s capital, our leaders conspired to prevent citizens from counting votes in a legal election). When that was deemed unconstitutional, they spent the money to count the votes, showing that 69% of DC supported medical marijuana. So Rep. Barr created the “Barr Amendment” that prevented DC from spending any money to implement the medical marijuana program they had voted in.
Well, today’s 2010 Appropriations bill changes all that. In addition to removing bans on abortion, domestic partnerships, and needle exchange, Congress has given the go-ahead to begin implementing DC medical marijuana!
(US Senate) Removing Special Restrictions on the District of Columbia: Eliminates a prohibition on the use of local tax funds for abortion, thereby putting the District in the same position as the 50 states. Also allows the District to implement a referendum on use of marijuana for medical purposes as has been done in other states, allows use of Federal funds for needle exchange programs except in locations considered inappropriate by District authorities, and discontinues a ban on the use of funds in the bill for domestic partnership registration and benefits.
DC’s medical marijuana bill was written with the same sort of open language as was passed in California… will we be seeing marijuana dispensaries on K Street anytime soon?
Check it out on http://live.norml.org – Rick Steves coming up soon, plus discussions from the founder of Oaksterdam, Richard Lee; Dr. Harry Levine on race and marijuana arrests; and California NORML’s Dale Gieringer on the current legal landscape there.
NORML’s new talk radio program, NORML SHOW LIVE, will be streaming for three days at the 2009 NORML National Conference, “Yes We Cannabis”, live from the Grand Hyatt Hotel in San Francisco. These special three-hour episodes will be available at live.norml.org at the following special times and archived for download later just fifteen minutes after broadcast:
Thursday, September 24
11:00am – 2:00pm Pacific Time
Friday, September 25
11:00am – 2:00pm Pacific Time
Saturday, September 26
3:00pm – 6:00pm Pacific Time
The show will be hosted by “Radical” Russ Belville, but with very limited commercial interruption and the occasional narration. After the shows broadcast remotely in the difficult wireless environment of Portland’s Kelley Point Park and the noisy backstage of the Boston Freedom Rally, Russ is excited to present an indoor event that will take its audio directly from the conference PA system.
No employee of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) sans the director has ever drawn more public and academic criticism than David Murray, ONDCP’s chief scientist.
Virtually an entire book was derived from the ONDCP’s twisting science and statistical data during Murray’s eight-year tenure—Dr. Matthew Robinson’s Lies, Damn Lies and Drug War Statistics, A Critical Analysis Of Claims Made By The ONDCP. You can watch Murray and Robinson debate about the drug war and ONDCP’s methodology at the Cato Institute here.
Question: When will Obama and Holder finally kick Murray to the curb and replace him with someone other than another anti-cannabis zealot masquerading as a ’scientist’?
The Washington Monthly’s Charlie Homans cast some much needed, white hot light in Mr. Murray’s direction.
******
The Bushie Obama Can’t Fire
by Charles Homans
August 25, 2009
Obama vowed to reverse Bush’s hard-line drug policies, but Dubya still has a man raising havoc in the White House drug office. Problem is, Obama can’t fire him.
The Bush years were not the finest hour for the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy. Drug czar John Walters, who ran the place beginning in late 2001, waged a militaristic drug war, pouring money into dubiously effective efforts to fight trafficking abroad while letting treatment programs stagnate at home, and obsessing over marijuana at the expense of more dangerous drugs.
It’s an approach that Barack Obama’s drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, is now trying to steer away from. He has vowed to end the use of the phrase “war on drugs,” and the hard-liners who filled out Walters’ office are now gone. All of them, that is, except one guy: David Murray, the drug czar’s chief scientist, and Walters’ most enthusiastic disciple.
David Murray is a lone human memento of the Bush administration’s drug war, surrounded bypeople who are trying to undo the work on which he has spent the past eight years.
“He was brought in as a political hatchet man,” says Ross Deck, a former ONDCP analyst and a 16-year-veteran of the office who quit during the Walters years. Before joining in the ONDCP, Murray had no prior experience in addiction science, or law enforcement, or anything else particularly related to drug policy.
He is on the record questioning many of the drug policies espoused by Kerlikowske. Congress has spent three years trying to get him fired.
Why, then, does Murray somehow still have a job in the Obama administration? The reason can be found in the fine print of the federal bureaucracy. Midway through his tenure, Walters moved Murray—at the time his special assistant—from a politically appointed job to the chief scientist’s post, a theoretically apolitical position that makes him much harder to fire. By law, Kerlikowske can’t touch a hair on his head for the first 120 days of his own stint as drug czar. Which means that until the middle of September, Murray is living in a peculiar limbo: a lone human memento of the Bush administration’s botched prosecution of the drug war, surrounded by people who are trying to undo the work on which he has spent the past eight years.
ONDCP veterans speak fondly of Murray’s predecessor, a defense research veteran named Al Brandenstein, who was the drug czar office’s only previous chief scientist from 1991 until Walters removed him in 2004. Brandenstein worked to put advanced drug-detection technologies in the hands of law-enforcement agencies, but he was also interested in advancing the understanding of the demand side of the drug-use equation. In the 1990s, he got government funding for brain-scanning equipment that medical researchers would use to better understand the biochemistry of addiction. Critics in the drug-policy community argue that Brandenstein’s work produced little of value, and that his post existed mostly to provide a pretext for government spending on gadgetry—but for better or worse, that was what Congress had asked for when it created the chief scientist job.
Murray, on the other hand, was not. A former cultural anthropologist who had left academia for the conservative think-tank circuit, he had made a name for himself in Washington a decade earlier with an article in Policy Review about the danger out-of-wedlock births posed to the fabric of American society. (It began, memorably, “America is becoming a nation of bastards.”) As Walters’ special assistant, he had made headlines in Canada in 2003 by suggesting that the U.S.’s northern neighbor’s experiments with marijuana decriminalization could cause diplomatic problems along the border.
Shelving most of Brandenstein’s work, Murray pursued the occasional science project—he was enthusiastic about testing the Beltway’s sewage for traces of cocaine—but mostly used his office as a political soapbox, lambasting opponents and burying unflattering data that suggested his boss wasn’t exactly winning the drug war. (The Statistical Assessment Service, a research organization that Murray himself launched in 1994, has in recent years devoted much ink to debunking its own founder’s claims on drug-policy issues like needle exchange.)
In congressional testimony, Murray branded medical-marijuana advocates “modern-day snake-oil proponents”; in a 2007 appearance on a panel at the libertarian Cato Institute, he derided the think tank’s pro-legalization stance to be “an illusion” that “grows out of late-night dormitory engagements in college that one hopes one outgrows.” He also alienated more middle-of-the-road drug-policy experts both inside and outside the bureaucracy; one outside expert recalls attending a drug-research group meeting with Murray and hearing him offhandedly refer to the pot-friendly Netherlands as a “narco-state.”
“David acted as though he had said nothing the least bit unusual in saying that,” the expert says. “It’s indicative of how off the map he is—he simply doesn’t understand how strange his own views are about these things.”
Congress felt similarly. In the fall of 2005, as the panic over methamphetamine use in rural America was reaching its apex, Walters sent Murray to brief the members the House of Representatives’ Meth Caucus—a group formed by mostly rural and Western congressmen in 2001—on what the administration planned to do about the burgeoning problem. The assembled lawmakers were so spectacularly unimpressed that one of them, Indiana Republican Mark Souder, marched out of the meeting and promptly demanded that Murray step down from his post, calling his briefing “pathetic” and an “embarrassment.” Murray’s performance was so bad, Souder declared, that “if Director Walters and anyone else in that office agrees with what was said today, they should resign.”
This was grandstanding, of course. But Congress made more substantial efforts to oust Murray after the Democrats came to power in 2006. Over the next three years, the Senate Appropriations Committee—which controls the federal government’s purse strings—used its annual report to criticize the chief scientist directly, a highly unusual gesture. “The Committee,” one of the reports reads, “is highly disappointed in the director of this program”—Murray—“and is troubled by his ideas for research and development that appear to have little or no value.” When Walters insisted on keeping him in the post in the face of such criticism, the Appropriations Committee responded by slashing funding for it. Murray’s office, which received nearly $47 million in 2003, got just $1 million this year.
The committee has made it clear that ONDCP’s science shop won’t see another dime until Murray is gone, at least from his current job. What happens after that is an open question. (Repeated calls to the ONDCP’s press office for an interview with Murray or a comment on his future prospects went unreturned.) While most drug-policy watchers assume Kerlikowske will kick him out of the chief scientist post as soon as he can, actually firing him is trickier. There are ways to encourage burrowed-in ideologues to quit, however—ONDCP veterans recall that George Bush Sr.’s drug czar, Bob Martinez, used to do it by assigning them to an office with no windows, phones, or computers.
“He’ll be there until somebody runs him off,” Ross Deck, the former ONDCP analyst, says of Murray. “What can they do with him? They can give him a job counting paperclips.”
In an attempt to clarify an apparent gaffe made a few weeks ago to California media stating that “marijuana is dangerous and has no medicinal value”, drug czar Gil Kerlikowske in a new interview with his hometown media in Seattle has only slightly, almost imperceptibly, modified his remarks by now implying that somehow how ‘smoked‘ medical cannabis is not a legitimate and effective drug delivery method:
When asked about his comments a few weeks ago Kerlikowske told KOMO news “I certainly said that legalization is not in the president’s vocabulary nor is it in mine. But the other question was in reference to smoked marijuana. And as we know, the FDA has not determined that smoked marijuana has a value, and this is clearly a medical question that should be answered by the medical community.”
KOMO also reports:
Kerlikowske’s stand on legalizing marijuana for everyone is more clear-cut. The Office of National Drug Control Policy, by law, actively works against legalizing drugs.
Kerlikowske takes on last jab at cannabis by continuing his predecessor’s proclivity to mislead the media and public by claiming “You know from the University of Washington, the number one call from young people for treatment here, after alcohol, is marijuana. So I’m not seeing the benefit to society with legalization here.”
Number one, cannabis is not legal in Washington state, or anywhere in the US, 2) youth in Washington, and all around the US, after being ensnared by the hundreds of thousands per year by cannabis prohibition laws enforced by the criminal justice system (or university police), are provided with the Hobson’s Choice of either going to jail or so-called ‘treatment’.
Mr. Kerlikowske should cease employing this rhetorical straw man as he is intelligent enough to know its inaccuracy, but continues to adopt the failed rhetoric of prior hardliner drug czars Gen. Barry McCaffrey and John Walters, who consistently made the same claims during their tenure, and lost credibility every time they continued to propound such obviously misleading propaganda.
Kerlikowske’s latest unfortunate remarks affirm cannabis law reformers have much work left to do! Maybe our good drug czar should call actor Patrick Swayze and ask him ‘if he is benefiting from smoked medical cannabis?’
Patrick Swayze, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer over a year ago, is using medical marijuana to relieve the pain of his last days of chemotherapy.
According to a family insider, Swayze, 56, has found that smoking marijuana helps with his nausea, inability to sleep, and anxiety. The insider noted on the actor’s slight weight gain as well as adding that he (Swayze) feels more “normal than he has in months.”
Pictures have surfaced of Swayze out with his brother Donnie looking much healthier than he had weeks before.
“Patrick was rapidly losing weight because he couldn’t keep good down. He was so weak, he needed help getting around,” the source told the magazine.
“Marijuana works extremely well for many cancer patients. It helps fight nausea from chemotherapy treatments and may alleviate anorexia or loss of appetite,” Dr. Ron Kennedy of Santa Rosa, CA, said of the situation.
It was only a matter of time before someone combined a certain memorable image of a young future president with a jokey twist on his campaign slogan … to come up with a message that Barack Obama definitely did not approve.
The folks at the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws got there first. For their annual conference poster, they took an old photo of cool-dude college freshman Obama puffing away — on a regular cigarette, mind you — and tweaked it just ever so slightly to fit their message: “Yes We Cannabis.”
Think it might be a problem for the president (who opposes legalization)? It’s really a problem for the photographer. Lisa Jack, an Obama classmate at Occidental College, snapped the image in 1980, one in a series of photos that never saw the light of day until she debuted them in Time’s 2008 Person of the Year issue. She had no idea her photo had been appropriated by NORML until we told her Tuesday.
“They do not have my permission,” said Jack, a psychology professor in Minnesota. These photos “are absolutely not to be used in this way. … I really made a grand effort to do this properly, and I’m very irritated. If I’d wanted these to be used for political purposes, I’d have sold them to Hillary years ago.”
NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre cheerfully acknowledged the lift by artist Sonia Sanchez, who summoned the psychedelic aesthetic of ’60s rock posters. “With very little adulteration, she placed what appears to be a cannabis cigarette” in the president’s hand, St. Pierre said. But she made few other changes: Obama “almost made the photograph for us.”
Everyone who attends the September conference in San Francisco will get a poster; NORML is also selling them on the Web ($25 for an 18-by-24-inch with St. Pierre’s autograph, $15 without). Can they do that? St. Pierre admits they didn’t get permission, but “our lawyers thought it was adulterated enough to comply with the fair use laws.”
We’ll see. Shepard Fairey made more dramatic changes to the Obama photo he turned into the now-famous “HOPE” collage — but he’s still embroiled in bitter litigation with the Associated Press, which owns the original image. The AP accused him in federal court of “blatant copying.” And yes, Jack has already called the lawyers for Getty Images, which oversees her photo’s copyright.
Jack, whose photos now have a gallery show in L.A., grudgingly admits “it’s really cool” that the images are already iconic enough to steal. She’d love to see Fairey do a work-up on them — with permission, of course.
A brief history about the series of Obama photos is found at The Huffington Post.
During a time of immense cannabis law reforms and major shifts in public opinion in favor of such, emerges now a throwback to the dark ages of America’s war on some drugs from the 1980s: The Congressional Anti-Cannabis Caucus.
Escaping any real media attention last week was the formulation of a new anti-marijuana caucus in the House of Representatives. As reported in Roll Call on July 13, a press conference was held with former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and Darrell Issa (R-CA) that seeks to re-commit the Congress to the status quo of ‘fighting a war on drugs’.
The photograph displayed on Roll Call(which is a subscription publication) of the press conference prominently featured an anti-medical marijuana prop (made from a shoe box).
Heard on the Hill: Issa clutched a prop, a box that represented a shipment of medical marijuana. On the box was the handwritten phrase “Medical Rx” and a drawing of a pot leaf. …
The newly formed House Drug Task Force elected ardent anti-cannabis congressman John Mica (R-FL), who, according to the Deseret News, complained that the Obama administration “seeks to shut the war on drugs down.” And that, “the record to date is dismal with the demotion of Drug Czar’s office to a sub-Cabinet position, the announced support for needle exchange programs, the decriminalization of illegal narcotics and other measures that would weaken current national anti-drug efforts.”
Deseret News reports that the task force–which currently only has Republican members–has four core initiatives: stopping drug use before it starts through education and community action; healing drug users; disrupting the narcotics market; and stringent narcotics enforcement.
In other words, this ‘new’ anti-cannabis caucus would like to continue wasting taxpayers’ money, keep twisting the Constitution into knots, and continue killing innocent bystanders and drug users–while at the same time–hypocritically supporting government regulatory schemes that allows for the production, sale and taxation of more dangerous and addictive drugs such as tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceuticals products.
Two relevant points: 1) As this so-called ‘House task force’ is only populated with Republicans, it is hardly a ‘House’ task force, and 2) back in the overzealous ‘anti-drug’ 1980s, there was a large, powerful and bi-partisan ‘Select House Subcommittee On Narcotics’, chaired by uber-powerful Charles Rangel (D-NY), and strongly supported by the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). This committee dubiously helped champion the creation of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Partnership for a Drug-America campaign, DARE program in public schools, civil forfeiture laws, mandatory minimum sentencing, mass drug testing in the workplace, etc…..
Where is the CBC and Way and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel these days on the so-called war on drugs?
While Congress debates health care, handles the economic downturn, and the quagmire in Afghanistan, Congressman Barney Frank is eyeing America’s draconian pot policies. Read Esquire’s exclusive interview.
By: John H. Richardson, Esquire Magazine
To my shame, I started my interview with Congressman Barney Frank about the legalization of marijuana by apologizing to my subject. “I know you guys have a lot on your plate these days, so I’m sorry to be calling you about something kind of trivial…”Then I did a rapid midcourse correction. “But it’s not trivial, because people go to jail over it.”
“That’s exactly right,” Frank said.
We were talking about the Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults Act of 2009, Frank’s latest attempt to bring sanity to the federal marijuana laws. Currently, pot is classified as a Schedule I Controlled Dangerous Substance under federal law, which makes it worse than morphine, cocaine, amphetamine, and PCP. Possession of a single joint carries a penalty of $1,000 and a year in prison – a charge faced by about 800,000 American citizens every year. This is the government whose judgment on war and economics we are supposed to respect.
So I started the interview over.
ESQUIRE: Could you tell me why you’re doing it at this time? Everybody says you guys have got so much to handle right now.
BARNEY FRANK: Announcing that the government should mind its own business on marijuana is really not that hard. There’s not a lot of complexity here. We should stop treating people as criminals because they smoke marijuana. The problem is the political will.
ESQ: That’s my second question. There’s already been a lot of change in the country. Thirteen states have decriminalized pot. What’s holding up Congress?
