MARIJUANA ADVOCATES CALL FOR A SAFER ALTERNATIVE FOR ST. PATRICK’S DAY WHAT: Rally and Press Conference WHEN: Tuesday March 16, 2010 at Noon WHERE: City Hall Park – Broadway between Park Place and Barclay WHO: Empire State NORML with speakers, Author Dr. Julie Holland, CUNY professor Harry Levine, and Executive Director of NORML Allen St. Pierre
NORML CALLS FOR A GREENER, CLEANER AND SAFER ST. PATRICK’S DAY:
*Empire State NORML and noted speakers come downtown for a press conference concerned about social and property damage associated with St. Patrick’s Day Calling for marijuana to be recognized as a safer alternative to alcohol.
*Demanding the NYPD respect marijuana’s decriminalized status.
*Celebrating the premiere of the new NORML ad, running in Times Square
-CITY HALL PARK, MARCH 16, 2010, NOON-
This coming Tuesday at high noon, Empire State NORML, the New York Chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) will rally at City Hall Park on the Broadway side. They will be presenting marijuana as a safer alternative to alcohol for New York’s many St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. Dozens are expected to attend and it’s certain to gain the attention of the hundreds of financial district workers who access the park area every lunchtime.
-Alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana-
According to Dr. Holland “Say what you will about marijuana, one thing you can’t say: pot kills. No practical lethal dose has ever been established; no fatal overdose has ever been recorded. In America, the most likely harm to result from using cannabis is being arrested.”
Dr. Holland added “Alcohol kills brain cells and liver cells. If you drink long enough, heavily enough, you will end up needing a new liver and a new brain. American hospitals are clogged with people suffering from alcohol-induced dementia and liver failure. And don’t forget: abrupt withdrawal from alcohol, once you are addicted, carries a thirty percent mortality. The DT’s can kill you, just as getting too drunk can kill you. Alcohol is a toxic drug. And it is legal.”
-Call for the NYPD to stop unjust marijuana prosecutions-
Empire State NORML will also call on the New York City Police Department to enforce the marijuana possession laws in line with its decriminalized status under New York State penal law.
In 2008, the New York City Police Department made 40,383 marijuana possession arrests-over 110 per day, and more than all the marijuana possession arrests under Mayors Koch, Dinkins and Giuliani combined. Most of those arrested are young, male and black and Latino
Professor Levine explains “In 2008, the NYPD made 40,300 lowest level marijuana possession arrests [NY State Penal Law 221.10] In 2009, the NYPD made 46,400 of these marijuana possession arrests. A 15% increase from 2008, and the second highest number of pot possession arrests ever, bested only by the year 2000 when the NYPD had five thousand more cops.
“As in 2008, those the NYPD arrested were 54% blacks, 33% Latinos, and 10% whites. In 2009, as in 2008, police arrested blacks for pot possession at seven times the rate of whites, and Latinos at four times the rate of whites. Most of the people arrested were under 26 years of age and about 30% were teenagers. 90% are male. Most of the people arrested are black and Latino teenagers and young men. In all of the arrests, marijuana possession was the highest charge or the only one.”
Noted Doug Greene of Empire State NORML, “Even though New York State decriminalized marijuana in 1977, New York City has become the marijuana arrest capital of the world,” He added “New York City’s prosecution of young, poor minorities for pot possession doesn’t come cheap, it cost taxpayers between $60,000,000 and $100,000,000 in 2008 alone. How can we justify these expenses when New York City is facing multi-billion budget gaps as far as the eye can see?”
-CBS changes position and allows NORML ad in Times Square-
“Money can grow on trees.” That is the message of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws Foundation (NORML) in a 15-second digital ad scheduled to debut in New York City’s Times Square this week. The advertisement, produced and paid for by NORML’s educational arm, The NORML Foundation, will air on the CBS Super Screen through May 31, 2010
With ‘marijuana’ already one of the most popular topics on the Internet, NORML proudly announces that the ‘Reefer Revolution’ has now found its way into the smart phone technology tsunami that is sweeping the world up into instant access and connectivity to important information and like-minded community.
Available for a .99 cent download from the iTunes webpage, the NORML app for iPhones now empowers NORML members and supporters to read the daily news, cannabis-related headlines and blogs; get educated on pending federal or state cannabis-related legislation and lobby their elected policymakers via pre-written email; listen to NORML’s popular daily podcast on-the-run; check out NORML’s active Twitter feed, Flicker photos and the organization’s YouTube channel of videos.
All of this from one application, located on one’s phone, for under $1 and in support of America’s oldest and largest pro-cannabis law reform organization!
Another NORML iPhone app is already in development that will feature the organization’s copyrighted list of state/federal cannabis laws, drug testing information, listing of criminal defense lawyers and NORML chapters nationwide. Additions to the current NORML app on iPhone, as well as creating similar programs for Google and Droid phones is currently underway.
NORML is also developing cannabis-centric games for mobile phone and Internet play.
I ascribe substantial credit for bringing about the rapid decrease in public support for cannabis prohibition to the advent and popularity of the Internet. Pre-Internet, both cannabis consumers and the general public had little-to-no access to verifiable and credible scientific or academic information regarding cannabis. Once NORML (and numerous other pro-reform organizations) could place large amounts of information online circa 1995, that anyone could read and download from the privacy of home, the opinion polls started to demonstrate a strong increase in the public’s discontent with cannabis prohibition laws.
Now that tens of thousands of scientific studies and medical reports can be read on mobile devices, pro-cannabis radio shows can be listened to on the bus or train and citizens fed up with prohibition laws can now contact their elected representatives anytime, from just about anywhere, smart phone technology is only going to 1) increase thenumber of citizen-advocates lobbying for cannabis law reforms, and 2) these ease-of-use mobile technologies also enhance the abilities of citizens to be more active in the ever-growing cannabis law reform movement, online community and commerce.
Many thanks to Red Aphid for their tireless efforts to code and work through the labyrinth of regulations and requirements at Apple to bring NORML’s first smart phone application to fruition.
I work this issue every day and am well aware of the racist nature of the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs. But even I wasn’t aware of the outrageous statistics comparing the Drug War to Jim Crow era. Michelle Alexander lays it all out in her new book, The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste:
There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.
The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades — they are currently are at historical lows — but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.
The drug war has been brutal — complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods — but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African American counterparts.
That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African Americans comprise 80%-90% of all drug offenders sent to prison.
The only thing more shocking to me than the new Jim Crow of the drug war is how few African-Americans are involved in ending it.
Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) has no African-Americans or Latinos on their board as far as I’m aware (MPP does not publish this information on their website, as far as I can tell)
Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) boasts three African-American men on their board of directors
Americans for Safe Access (to medical marijuana, or ASA) has no African-Americans or Latinos on their board
Medical Marijuana march in Madison, Wisconsin (I know Madison, Seattle, and Albuquerque aren't exactly Atlanta, Detroit, and Chicago, but there has to be SOME black people there, right?)
This sort of racial homogeneity is also found at the grassroots activist level as well. I coordinate NORML’s 95 active state, local, and college chapters and off the top of my head I can think of only one chapter not run by a white person (Oregon NORML’s Madeline Martinez, who, coincidentally, is that sole Latina on the National NORML Board).
When I speak at conferences and festivals to crowds ranging from 50 to 50,000, it is always a nearly unbroken sea of white faces looking back at me. When I participate in the marches and protests against the drug war, I rarely see black or Latino people carrying a sign.
My view from the stage before speaking at last year's Seattle Hempfest, the largest marijuana reform rally in the world.
The War on Drugs is primarily a War on Marijuana, which makes up 49.8% of all drug war arrests, 89% of those arrests for simple possession. In New York City, a black man is nine times more likely to be busted for pot than a white man and three times more likely to get a custodial sentence out of that arrest. Yet when we look at the cannabis community, the only place we find many African-American faces is in rap videos extolling the virtues of “the chronic”.
Where is the Martin Luther King Jr. of the movement to end the War on Drugs? Why is he or she not responding to the efforts to end the single greatest cause of racial inequality in this nation?
Is he or she dissuaded by the culture of the black church, which demonizes drugs and drug use to the point where those who support sensible drug policies are shamed into silence?
Drug Policy Alliance's Int'l Reform Conference in Albuquerque, 2009
Is he or she turned away by looking at the leadership of drug law reform and seeing no faces like theirs?
Is he or she already feeling like they wear a target for law enforcement on their back already based on skin color and don’t feel like exacerbating that by publicly standing for drug law reform?
Whatever it is, this white man who’s used cannabis for twenty years and never once had an interaction with police is urgently calling out to my black and Latino brothers and sisters to get involved with your own liberation!
New Jersey has become the 14th medical marijuana state
Since fourteen states have legalized the use of cannabis for sick and disabled people we here at NORML have reported on numerous stories of medical users harassed, arrested, and jailed by police. We have also reported on healthy adults in all fifty states whose lives are turned upside down by an arrest, sometimes losing student loans, jobs, children, pets, dignity, property, and freedom over a single joint, seed, or even a cannabis stem. When we and others bring up these insane injustices to the police who are making these arrests, we often hear the platitude that “cops don’t make the laws, we just enforce the laws.”
So why do we consistently see representatives of law enforcement opposing medical marijuana, marijuana decriminalization, and marijuana legalization efforts in state legislatures?
In New Jersey, the medical marijuana law was severely curtailed when the Assembly heard the unfounded assertion by a representative of New Jersey’s Fraternal Order of Police that “I’ve heard in California there’s a lot peripheral crime around these centers [medical marijuana dispensaries], I get that from the different law enforcement agencies around the country who I have regular contact with.” This is in direct contradiction of the findings of the Chief of the LAPD who stated: “Banks are more likely to get robbed than medical marijuana dispensaries.” The Chief was responding to the notion that there is greater crime around dispensaries and said “I have tried to verify that because that, of course, is the mantra. It doesn’t really bear out.”
ABC News / Washington Post Poll on public medical marijuana support
The attitudes of most in law enforcement are also contrary to the attitudes of the public. A recent ABC News / Washington Post poll found that support for medical marijuana is now at 81% nationwide, with a majority overall (62% nationwide) who support a system at least as open as Oregon’s OMMA where not-necessarily terminal patients can only qualify if they suffer a specific condition from a list and a majority of those who support medical marijuana (56% of the 81% who support it) supporting an open system like California’s Prop-215 where “doctors should be able to prescribe medical marijuana to anyone they think it can help”.
POLICE Magazine survey on police medical marijuana support
But according to a June 2009 survey in POLICE Magazine, even though a majority (54.6%) of police say they support medical marijuana, almost all of those who support it (88%) say it must be only under stricter regulation than we have currently in the medical marijuana states.
Support in 2009 for marijuana legalization ranged from 38%-53%, depending on the poll.
When asked about marijuana legalization overall, even for healthy adults, the American Public are also contrary to the opinions of law enforcement. The latest Angus Reid poll is the first to show majority American support for legalization (53%), while the latest Gallup poll puts support at 44%, its best mark in forty years of polling.
POLICE Magazine survey of police opinions on legalization
But according to the same POLICE survey, marijuana legalization has less than half the support among cops than among the public they protect and serve. Only 23% of police supported re-legalization of cannabis.
When asked why, specifically, those police who opposed re-legalization felt that way, eight in ten said that marijuana is a “gateway drug”, there was the danger of “people driving high”, and seven in ten cited the “harm to user and society”. Longtime NORML readers know that the gateway drug theory has been debunked by the Institutes of Medicine in 1999 and every reputable study over the past ten years. While everybody, especially NORML, discouragesdriving under the influence of cannabis, we understand that there are people behaving irresponsibly now and re-legalization would not encourage less responsibility, but more. Under re-legalization, money raised from taxes could sponsor anti-stoned-driving campaigns like the ones that have successfully reduced drunk driving.
Majority of Americans believe Marijuana is Safer
As for the “harm to user and society”, POLICE readers still felt by a margin of 3-2 that alcohol was “more of a threat to the community” than marijuana. (The survey does not record the support among police for reinstating alcohol prohibition to prevent alcohol’s “harm to user and society”, however.) This 39% of police who believe marijuana is safer than alcohol comes closest to matching public opinion, which shows now a slim majority (51%) believe marijuana is safer than alcohol.
If marijuana users are to be punished, 3 in 4 support no more than a civil fine
While the general public is barely approaching majority support for outright marijuana legalization, the public has long held the belief that any punishment for adult marijuana possession should be a fine only. Three out of four Americans (76%) believe that if marijuana users are to be punished, they should only be fined and not arrested and sent to jail. Yet the POLICE Magazine survey finds that two out of three cops (65%) think it is “worth law enforcement’s time to bust marijuana users”.
So do the police know something about the dangers of cannabis use that the American Medical Association, the American people, and the Arizona Attorney General do not? A cynic might think that police are merely acting in their own best interest, protecting their source of easy statistic-padding arrests and asset forfeiture bounty, but I’m more inclined to believe many of these front-line soldiers in the War on Marijuana are acting in good faith based on terrible misinformation about cannabis.
With great regret and chagrin to report, CBS has rejected a contract deal with NORML to place a pro-cannabis law reform advertisement on the biggest electronic billboard in Times Square (The CBS ‘Super Screen’ at 42nd St) claiming that the advertisement is too political. NORML had a contract for the 15 second spot below on the giant billboard (and a second one featuring President Obama and New York City’s high cannabis arrest rate with its shocking racial disparity in enforcement).
This of course makes no sense to have CBS reject a non-profit organization like NORML’s pro-cannabis law reform advertisement, when, during the Super Bowl on Sunday–the most watched TV event annually in the United States–CBS is scheduled to air a controversial anti-abortion television advertisement produced by the socially conservative non-profit group Focus on the Family (who, like apparently CBS, is anti-cannabis). Last year, CBS rejected an advertisement from the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org claiming it was too political as well.
The hypocrisy and double standard here is appalling. NORML and MoveOn.org ads are deemed ‘political’ and can’t be purchased and broadcast by CBS, but Focus on the Family can roll a political hand grenade in the form of an anti-abortion TV ad into American households on no less than Super Bowl Sunday for the full and desired effect of creating public discussion.
Worse, beyond the fact that CBS censors political speech, the company has no apparent problems making money off the general public’s strong interest in ‘marijuana’ as the network has established Marijuana Nation, an eye-ball sucking, archive-rich, comprehensive and well done webpage relating to cannabis found on the Internet (Ironically, CBS’ site competes with NORML and High Times’ general content for readers…).
There are numerous reasons why cannabis prohibition has lasted over 72-years, and when huge, mainstream media outlets (who control bill boards, radio and TV, etc…) pick and choose what organization’s free speech they support and those they don’t–recognizing that absent a vibrant and informed public discussion about needed public policy changes, like ending cannabis prohibition, those needed public policy changes take so much longer than they would organically absent the filter of mainstream, corporate-leaning mega media outlets.
Personally, I can only wonder what public discourse, with now even more corporate influence, is going to look like in America post the SCOTUS decision two weeks ago in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission.
Last week we began streaming our live show on Stickam and it has been a resounding success. The sound quality is crystal clear and we get the added advantage of a video-cam enabled chat room for all our listeners. Our show is live every weekday at 4pm Eastern / 1pm Pacific and the archive of every live show is now podcasted at 6pm Eastern / 3pm Pacific as the NORML Daily Audio Stash if you can’t catch us live. Check out the live page at http://live.norml.org and our blog/podcast at http://stash.norml.org.
2010 has begun with a bang! Last week we covered live votes in New Jersey on medical marijuana, live hearings in California on legalization, and live hearings in Washington State on both decriminalization and legalization. We are experiencing a wave of discussion around marijuana law reform like never before and NORML SHOW LIVE will be your source for the latest breaking news, interviews, and analysis.
This week we continue looking at our Government at Work. On Monday, Anthony Johnson and Lee Berger will join us from Oregon to discuss a proposed dispensary initiative, plus we get a report from Linda Adler with US Virgin Islands NORML live from the Bordeaux Rasta Fair. On Tuesday Alison Holcomb from the ACLU of Washington fills us in on the decriminalization and legalization bills in Washington and Matt Simon talks decriminalization in New Hampshire, with a special California Marijuana Report from Eric Brenner.
Wednesday we visit with SUNY Albany researcher Dr. Mitch Earleywine for some Cannabis Science, answering your questions about marijuana sent to 420research ‘at’ gmail.com. Thursday we take a trip down to Southern California with our friend and Hollyweed Comedian, Tere Joyce. And to round out your week on Friday we visit with High Times Senior Cultivation Editor Danny Danko to answer your grow questions in our Cultivator’s Corner.
We also feature a brand new Daily Toker Tune, with Roots Monday, Electric Tuesday, Irie Wednesday, Groovin’ Thursday, and Rockin’ Friday, brought to us by our NORML volunteer music editors. You can also log into our live chat one hour before the show for more Toker Tunes while we chat live and hang out for an hour after the show for more.
The first time I met Madeline Martinez, the executive director of Oregon NORML, she told me about her dream…a meeting place for medical marijuana patients, some space to hold classes, a very different vision of healthcare. I took a drive to Portland last week to see this dream come true; to Oregon NORML’s World Famous-Cannabis Café, a trip to a Future of our own making.
Set in an older blue-collar neighborhood in North East Portland, NORML’s Cannabis Café, occupies a building that was reputed to be a ‘speakeasy’ during Prohibition, alcohol Prohibition, that is. It includes a meeting/concert space upstairs for about 200+ people, in addition to the Café downstairs. Oregon NORML signed a lease this fall with the onsite restaurant operator and took over the business in November. NORML volunteers have been working there non-stop ever since, turning the building into the Cannabis Café. Its opening last month became a world-wide press event…apparently a lot more people than Madeline thought the NORML’s Cannabis Café was an idea whose time had come.
America is currently a crazy-quilt of regulation with the 13 states and counting that have legal medical marijuana. Think what it will look like when all 50 states finally have it! In July, a front page article in the Wall Street Journal announced to the world that the Feds were standing down from enforcement in states with medical marijuana laws, and that MEDICAL MARIJUANA IS NOW OPEN FOR BUSINESS. As I read this, I could imagine entrepreneurs from coast to coast starting to draft their own plans for the medical marijuana businesses, the Next New Thing.
Stephen DeAngelo, the founder of Oakland’s Harborside Health Center, the Bay Area’s largest medical marijuana dispensary, gave one of the most thought provoking speeches at NORML’s 2009 Annual Conference on this very important topic: When marijuana is finally legalized (and new polls indicate America has finally reached the tipping point on this political issue) and the dust has settled, what will the business end of marijuana eventually come to look like? Remember, we are talking about taking an underground multi-billion dollar business and bringing it above ground. This is BIG. There will be huge long-term societal consequences of legalization far beyond the river of tax revenues it will create, many of which will be determined by what physical form legalization takes. So, what will the legal marijuana business in America come to look like? Something big and corporate? Something along the lines of Pepsi, RJ Reynolds, Starbucks, Pfizer, or Budweiser companies that market similar kinds of products??? Big profits, huge advertising budgets and lots of political cash….OR…should legal marijuana be something very different?
Stephen challenged his listeners to see that right now we have the opportunity to shape that marijuana business future, to get something different than the standard corporate outcome …right now, we have the opportunity to create a different cannabis delivery system that isn’t just about the performance on the quarterly bottom line, like it is in the ‘Pepsi’ paradigm, we can create a system that serves the public while at the same time it provides community service…something more along the business lines of Newman’s Own Salad Dressings from whose revenues have come donations of almost $300 million to charities… Just think of that! The outcome for legal cannabis America could be vastly different, if we choose it…
Pain management is one of the places where the rubber truly meets the road in healthcare, a multi-billion dollar business. Non-toxic cannabinoid therapy has a very real place there. And non-toxic is good, as the very first rule of medicine should always be ‘to do no harm’. So, shouldn’t cannabis, from the get-go, do it differently than the Vicodin/Oxycodone ‘take these pills by yourself’ delivery model? After all, cannabis and all its users, medicinal or not, have been long defined by society as ‘counterculture’, so shouldn’t we be expected to do it differently, when we got our turn to create legal marijuana??? How about creating a non-profit medical cannabis delivery system whose central focus was on the patients, not profits for starters? Patients will have better results in chronic pain relief in the social setting of a Cannabis Café, where having people to talk to makes one’s problems feel lighter and one’s pain (medicated or not) easier to bear. Classes will be starting soon at the Cannabis Café on everything from aerobics, yoga, and weight management to plant propagation. Figuring out ways to provide free medicine to the indigent has been part of the design of the Oregon NORML’s Cannabis Café since its very inception. (Imagine that, the poor thought of first in the NORML model, not dead-last like in the standard corporate model.) Perhaps a “Buds on Wheels” program for shut-in medical marijuana patients, too…A hemp products emporium, you get it, a place for everything cannabis, and you, too.
At NORML’s Cannabis Café, feel better…get better And then…What if… patients could meet at NORML Cannabis Cafés all over the country and the revenues generated driving a host of programs, in the area of healthcare and post drug war reparations, like freeing the thousands in jail today on pot charges? Think about it. Is that the kind of future you want? We can have it.
About two years ago, to better understand medical marijuana from the patient’s viewpoint, I interviewed the first 45 people waiting to get into one of the bi-monthly Oregon NORML Medical Marijuana meetings. Virtually everyone I asked that morning willingly volunteered his or her medical history. I heard a long litany of construction, car, and motorcycle accidents, of broken bones, dislocated joints, failed surgeries, and cancer… people who made me wonder, “How in the world does this guy/gal sleep at night?” Then it would occur to me, “Oh yes, of course, the cannabis.” For them NORML’s Cannabis Café puts dealing with serious medical issues in social setting…and shows it can be fun, as well. No wonder it’s a raging success.
NORML’s Cannabis Café is getting better by the day, as this new evolving healthcare paradigm kicks in. America can definitely learn something from the good folks who are blazing the Oregon Trail with medical marijuana; the future IS ours for the molding.
Like the dutiful activists in Seattle protesting cannabis laws and supporting the victims of such outside of the local jail for nine straight years of Christmas days, Brazilian cannabis law reform supporters cheer the cultivator’s release from jail, celebrating, not condemning him.
A strong social indicator of governmental laws that do not enjoy mass public support–along with jury nullification–is when supposed ‘criminals’ are embraced and heralded as heroes.
NORML salutes the activists who not only slavishly work for cannabis law reforms but who also never forget about the tens of thousands of cannabis consumers, cultivators and sellers incarcerated in the United States.
Our brothers and sisters.
Christmas protest targets marijuana laws
SEATTLE – Protesters outside the King County Jail say non-violent drug offenders should be home this Christmas.
Vivian McPeak organized the pro-marijuana vigil.
“Hopefully it lets them know that they’re not languishing in there without attention,” said McPeak.
The past nine years on Christmas day, 5th Avenue and James Street in Seattle has been at the crossroads of marijuana legalization controversy.
Protestors held signs and waved down traffic. They say those staring down from county jail cells serving time for non-violent marijuana offenses should be with family.
“We just think that otherwise law abiding American should find alternatives to incarceration for marijuana use,” said McPeak.
****************
Inspired By American Citizen Activism To Reform Marijuana Laws, Brazilians Start Publicly Protesting Prohibition
I recently met William Lantelme at the Drug Policy Alliance’s conference in New Mexico and he has a popular cannabis-related webpage in Brazil (growroom.net) that he is starting to convert to a non-governmental organization to rally Brazilians to reform their American-like cannabis laws. He acknowledged being blown away at how organized, active and funded law cannabis advocates are in the US.
Inspired upon his return to Brazil, William organized the first of many planned pro-reform protests and public rallies where fans of Growroom.net recently came out to support a cannabis consumer who was busted for cultivating 10 cannabis plants.
“We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
-Ben Franklin, In the Continental Congress just before signing the Declaration of Independence, 1776
The headline alone provides sufficient irony “Marijuana Use Rises Among Teens; Cigarettes Smoking Lowest Since ‘75,” in that the long-stated goal of the federal government’s so-called anti-drug bureaucrats has been to reduce the use of cannabis consumption in America. Billions of taxpayer dollars and 20 million cannabis-related arrests later, the social data continues to consistently demonstrate the government achieving one stated goal–the reduction of tobacco use–but not significant reductions in cannabis use among teens?
What is the lesson here?
That with tobacco, the world’s most death-inducing and addictive drug, verifiable and credible health information (along with progressive, teen-deterring, but not black market-inviting taxes imposed by local and federal governments) have a better chance of achieving the federal government’s stated and laudable goal of reduced teen use–not criminal sanctions and prohibition laws.
Allen St. Pierre, Executive Director NORML/NORML Foundation
WSJ: Marijuana Use Rises Among Teens; Cigarette Smoking Lowest Since ‘75
By JENNIFER CORBETT DOOREN
Marijuana use among teenagers increased this year after previous declines, while the use of other illicit drugs like cocaine mostly declined.
According to an annual National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded survey of nearly 47,000 students, almost one-third of 12th-graders and more than one-quarter of 10th-graders reported using marijuana in 2009. Almost 12% of eighth-graders reported marijuana use, an increase from about 11% in 2008.
The survey, conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan, asked teenagers to report on the use of smoking, alcohol use and drug use, including non-medical uses of prescription painkillers and over-the-counter cold and cough products.
The report showed cigarette smoking was at the lowest point since the survey started in 1975, although the use of smokeless-tobacco products increased on some measures this year.
Researchers say the percentage of students who reported ever trying cigarettes has fallen dramatically.
Daily cigarette use by 12th-graders was 11.2%, a slight drop from 11.4% in 2008, while any use during the past 30 days was 20.1%, also a slight decline from 2008. Smokeless-tobacco use during the past 30 days in 2009 was reported by 8.4% of students in 12th grade, up from 6.5% in 2008.
Researchers said one of the reasons smoking rates have declined is that the percentage of students who reported ever trying smoking has “fallen dramatically.” For example in 1996, 49% of eighth-graders reported trying cigarettes, compared with 20% this year.
Alcohol use stayed about the same last year, with more than half of 10th-graders and about two-thirds of seniors reporting alcohol use in the past year.
The survey showed past-year use of cocaine decreased to 3.4% from 4.4% in 2008 among 12th-graders, along with declines in the use of hallucinogens and methamphetamine.
The use of over-the-counter cold and cough medicines to get high, however, edged up among all age groups, with 6% of 10th-graders reporting non-medical use of the products last year.
The annual survey also found continuing high rates of prescription-drug abuse, with almost 10% of 12th-graders reporting non-medical use of the painkiller Vicodin last year, the same rate as 2008. Almost 5% of high-school seniors reported using OxyContin for a non-medical use in 2009, a slight uptick from 2008.
Researchers said 66% of teens reported obtaining the prescription drugs from a friend or relative, while 19% said they received the drugs with a doctor’s prescription, and 8% said they bought the drugs from a dealer.
Now that tens of thousands of scientific studies and medical reports can be read on mobile devices, pro-cannabis radio shows can be listened to on the bus or train and citizens fed up with prohibition laws can now contact their elected representatives anytime, from just about anywhere, smart phone technology is only going to 1) increase the number of citizen-advocates lobbying for cannabis law reforms, and 2) these ease-of-use mobile technologies also enhance the abilities of citizens to be more active in the ever-growing cannabis law reform movement, online community and commerce.
