Alternet.org’s editors recently asked me to compile a list of ‘the worst of the worst’ states to be busted for personal pot possession. Without further ado, here they are:

The 5 Worst States to Get Busted With Pot
via Alternet.org

[excerpt]

1. Oklahoma — Lawmakers in the Sooner State made headlines this spring when legislators voted 119 to 20 in favor of House Bill 1798, which enhances the state sentencing guidelines for hash manufacturing to a minimum of two years in jail and a maximum penalty of life in prison. (Mary Fallin, the state’s first-ever female governor, signed the measure into law in April; it takes effect on November 1, 2011.) But longtime Oklahoma observers were hardly surprised at lawmakers’ latest “life for pot” plan. After all, state law already allows judges to hand out life sentences for those convicted of cannabis cultivation or for the sale of a single dime-bag.

2. Texas — On an annual basis, no state arrests and criminally prosecutes more of its citizens for pot than does Texas. Marijuana arrests comprise over half of all annual arrests in the Lone Star State. It is easy to see why. In 2009, more than 97 percent of all Texas marijuana arrests — over 77,000 people — were for possession only. Those convicted face up to 180 days in jail and a $2,000 fine, even upon a first conviction.

3. Florida — According to a 2009 state-by-state analysis by researcher and former NORML Director Jon Gettman, no other state routinely punishes minor marijuana more severely than does the Sunshine State. Under Florida law, marijuana possession of 20 grams or less (about two-thirds of an ounce) is a criminal misdemeanor punishable by up to one-year imprisonment and a $1,000 fine. Marijuana possession over 20 grams, as well as the cultivation of even a single pot plant, are defined by law as felony offenses – punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. In recent years, state lawmakers have revisited the state’s marijuana penalties – in each case electing to enhance Florida’s already toughest-in-the-nation criminal punishments.

4. Louisiana — In Louisiana, multi-decade (or even life) sentences for repeat pot offenders are hardly a rare occurrence. Under Louisiana law, a second pot possession conviction is classified as a felony offense, punishable by up to five years in prison. Three-time offenders face up to 20 years in prison. According to a 2008 expose published in New Orleans City Business online, district attorneys are not hesitant to “target small-time marijuana users, sometimes caught with less than a gram of pot, and threaten them with lengthy prison sentences.”

5. Arizona — Forty years ago virtually every state in the nation defined marijuana possession as a felony offense. Today, only one state, Arizona, treats first-time pot possession in such an archaic and punitive manner. Under Arizona law, even minor marijuana possession offenses may be prosecuted as felony crimes, punishable by up to 18 months in jail and a $150,000 fine. According to Jon Gettman’s 2009 analysis only Florida consistently treats minor marijuana possession cases more severely.

For a comprehensive breakdown of state-by-state marijuana penalties, visit NORML’s online map here. To get active in changing the laws of your state, visit NORML’s ‘Take Action Center’ here, sign up for free NORML news and legislative alerts, get involved with your local NORML chapter (or start your own chapter here), and join national NORML.

Get active; get NORML!

Three of our favorite NORML Women (L-R): Anne Davis (NORML NJ), Madeline Martinez (Oregon NORML), Cheryl Shuman (Beverly Hills NORML 90210)

Daniela Perdomo has written a fantastic piece on Alternet entitled “The Secret to Legal Marijuana? Women” featuring a look at some of our favorite NORML women…

In 2005, only 32 percent of polled women told Gallup they approved legalizing pot, but this year 44 percent of them were for it, compared to 45 percent of men. In effect, women have narrowed what had been a 12-point gender gap.

Women are also smoking more weed. The most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that current marijuana use increased from 3.8 to 4.5 percent among women, while there was no significant statistical change for men.

…Cheryl Shuman, a 49-year-old optician in Los Angeles, would agree. Up until she started using cannabis therapy to treat her cancer, she was on a daily regimen of 27 prescription drugs, attached to a mobile intravenous morphine pump, and undergoing constant CAT and MRI scans. In 2006, her doctors told her she’d be dead by the end of that year.

This year, Shuman became the founding director of Beverly Hills’ National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) chapter — and she hopes to attract women to the cause.

…Enter Jessica Corry, a pro-life Republican from Denver. A mother of girls aged two and four, this 30-year-old newly-minted lawyer is widely hailed as a rising star in Colorado politics. … Mothers like Corry are drawn to marijuana regulation as part of a larger appeal that encourages the use of harm reduction to more pragmatically deal with substance abuse. … This year, there was a 37 percent increase in teens who said pot is easier to buy than cigarettes, beer or prescription drugs. Nearly one-quarter said they can get weed within the hour.

Those stats matter to women. In light of this, children and family will be included in the mission statement of the Women’s Alliance, a group NORML will launch next year. The coordinator, Sabrina Fendrick, plans to include mention of how current marijuana policy undermines the American family and sends mixed messages to young people.

Be sure to click over and read the entire article, as it also spotlights important female allies like Valerie Corral, Mikki Norris, and Debbie Goldsberry, who have all generously donated their time and expertise to our NORML podcasts and numerous NORML conferences, and my newest acquaintance, Deborah Small, who presented on my panel at the DPA Reform Conference last month. I agree with Perdomo; women will be the key to ending adult marijuana prohibition, just as women were key to ending liquor prohibition.

Ladies, won’t you join us? NORML is always looking for accomplished and confident women to join and lead chapters at the grassroots level all across the country. Send me an email at russ@norml.org and I can put you in touch with Sabrina and the forthcoming NORML Women’s Alliance as well.

“Cannabis-related disorders (CRDs), including cannabis abuse or dependence and cannabis induced disorders … are a major public health issue. … Nearly one million people are seeking treatment for marijuana dependence every year and sufficient research has been carried out to confirm that the use of cannabis can produce serious physical and psychological consequences.

“Currently, there are no medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of CRDs. Given the extent of the use of cannabis in the general population, and the medical and psychological consequences of its use … there is a great public health need to develop safe and effective therapeutic interventions. The need to develop treatments targeting adolescents and young adults is particularly relevant in view of their disproportionate use patterns.”

In other words, the federal government is spending millions upon millions of your dollars to solicit research to find a supposed ‘cure’ for alleged ‘marijuana addiction‘ — at the same time that it is spending virtually no money on clinical trials to assess the medical value of cannabis itself.

I try my best to cut through the BS (“One million people are seeking treatment?!” Um, more like 287,933 — and six out of ten of them were referred by the criminal justice system following an arrest.) in my latest Alternet essay, “The Feds Are Addicted to Pot — Even If You Aren’t,” which you can read and comment on here.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Feds Are Addicted to Pot — Even If You Aren’t
via Alternet

Marijuana’s addiction potential may be no big deal, but it’s certainly big business.

According to a widely publicized 1999 Institute of Medicine report, fewer than 10 percent of those who try cannabis ever meet the clinical criteria for a diagnosis of “drug dependence” (based on DSM-III-R criteria). By contrast, 32 percent of tobacco users and 15 percent of alcohol users meet the criteria for “drug dependence.”

Nevertheless, it is pot — not booze or cigarettes — that has the federal government seeing red and clinical investigators seeing green.

Read the entire article here.

The recent legislative hearings on cannabis regulation in Massachusetts and California notwithstanding, the fact remains that these debates are the exception, not the rule. In fact, voters in Maine and Colorado will decide on marijuana law reform ballot proposals today (Note: Check back here tonight for the results.) precisely because their elected officials outright refused to vote on the issues when they were put before them.

In short, prominent politicians continue to run away from sensible marijuana law reforms at the same time that the public is demanding them. Two longtime NORML allies, former High Times editor Steve Wishnia and former NORML Board Member Richard Evans, recently explored this phenomenon and offer some insight and possible explanations:

Pot Is More Mainstream Than Ever, So Why Is Legalization Still Taboo?
via Alternet.org

Almost every voter under 65 in this country has either smoked cannabis or grew up with people who did. Among its erstwhile users are the last three presidents, one Supreme Court justice and the mayor of the nation’s largest city. The pot leaf’s image pervades popular culture, from Bob Marley T-shirts to billboards for Showtime’s Weeds.

So why is actually legalizing it still considered a fringe issue? Why haven’t more politicians — especially the ones who inhaled — come out and said, “Prohibition is absurd and criminal. Let’s treat cannabis like alcohol”?

… One reason for the lack of urgent political pressure, says Deborah Small of Break the Chains, is that the people most likely to get busted for pot are the ones who “don’t have a political voice” — young people of color from poor neighborhoods.

… Washington State Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles says that many legislators, particularly in the state’s more conservative rural areas, “buy into the cultural stereotypes about marijuana,” such as the idea that it’s a gateway to harder drugs. The Seattle Democrat, who is sponsoring a bill to reduce the penalty for less than 40 grams of pot from a misdemeanor to a civil infraction, says … that law enforcement has largely opposed her decriminalization bill.

Writing locally in the Massachusetts Daily News Tribune, Evans questions why none of the state’s major party candidates have reached out to the 65 percent of state voters who elected last year to decriminalize marijuana possession statewide.

The Senate race and marijuana prohibition
via The Daily News Tribune

Odd, isn’t it, that all the U.S. Senate candidates, and the people who ask them questions trying to elicit their positions on issues people care about, seem to have forgotten that in the last election, a whopping 65 percent of the voters went for marijuana decriminalization?

If that many voters care about the marijuana laws, why do these candidates, who claim to have their fingers on the public pulse, ignore the subject?

… Politicians report little “noise” on this issue, mistaking silence for indifference, not fear. People are justifiably fearful about writing a letter, showing up on a mailing list, even sending an email with the “m” word in it. They have to be very careful about their jobs, their drivers licenses and the kids in school whose parents will talk. But put them in the privacy of a voting booth, and stand back!

… No living person is responsible for the marijuana prohibition laws. They were conceived three generations ago in a cultural and racial climate far different from our own, and very different from that to which we aspire.

Are we ready for a serious, sober discussion about repeal, without the usual winks, smirks and puns? Can we handle it? Will someone lead it?

And finally, speaking of “serious discussions,” it doesn’t get much more serious — and mainstream — than the persuasive and well-articulated arguments from longtime NORML-ally Jessica Corry, who has an amazing ability to tongue-tie both probitionists and Fox News hosts within three minutes! I’m just glad that she’s on our side.

Apparently my latest missive has hit a nerve — as it has quickly risen to become the most read story on Alternet.

5 Things the Corporate Media Don’t Want You to Know About Cannabis
via Alternet.org

1. Marijuana Use Is Not Associated With a Rise in Incidences of Schizophrenia

2. Marijuana Smoke Doesn’t Damage the Lungs Like Tobacco

3. Cannabis Use Potentially Protects, Rather Than Harms, the Brain

4. Marijuana Is a Terminus, Not a ‘Gateway,’ to Hard Drug Use

5. Government’s Anti-Pot Ads Encourage, Rather Than Discourage, Marijuana Use

Read the full text of the story here.

-Allen St. Pierre, Director, NORML

If Obama Is Pro-Science and Honest, He’ll Put the Kibosh on the Drug War

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet

Posted on December 23, 2008

One of the many things that made Barack Obama such a refreshing candidate was his frank and unapologetic admission of drug use. True, Anderson Cooper extracted curt “yeses” from some 2004 Democratic candidates when he asked them point-blank if they had ever smoked pot. But Obama has written openly and without prompting about his experiences, not only with marijuana, but cocaine, a “hard” drug. On the campaign trail he even joked about inhaling deeply — “that was the point,” he said more than once. Unlike George W. Bush, Obama didn’t hide behind evasive murmurs about “irresponsible behavior,” or turn his drug experiences into a setup for some maudlin born-again conversion story.

As recounted in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, Obama was a normal American kid. Which is to say he used drugs, had fun and survived. The book doesn’t romanticize the president-elect’s days of smoking pot and snorting “a little blow when [he] could afford it,” but it’s easy to take what details he provides and imagine him with his basketball buddies on some Oahu beach blazing bowls of Maui Wowie, alternately laughing until his guts hurt and sitting in quiet wonder before a magnificent pink-and-yellow Pacific sunset. Obama has even written about his pursuit of heroin’s moon-shot high. As a teenager, he went so far as to ask a junkie friend for an assisted first hit, but recoiled when presented in a deli freezer with the surgical tools of the mainliner’s trade: rubber tubing and second-hand syringe.

Partly because Obama was so reasonable and matter-of-fact about his own All-American experiences getting high, drug-policy reformers were among those most excited by his candidacy. If any aspect of America needs change, it is the country’s prohibitionist and punitive approach to drugs and drug use. Obama, it seemed, was the right politician to take an executive hammer to the cracked marble pillars of America’s disastrous war on drugs. Throughout the primaries and general election, Obama gently encouraged these hopes by advocating commonsense drug-policy reforms. He criticized federal paramilitary raids on state-sanctioned greenhouses and called for ending racist discrepancies in cocaine sentencing laws. (As a little-mentioned footnote to the first of these positions, Obama’s mother died from cancer five years before the Hawaii legislature legalized medical marijuana.)

Nobody expected Obama to tap Tommy Chong to run the Office of National Drug Control Policy. But maybe, just maybe, Obama would have the political courage to publicly acknowledge what an emerging majority of Americans now grasps: that the war on drugs is a failure, that it is unjust, and that it is an epic waste of law-enforcement time and resources.

Still a month before inauguration, the hopes of drug-policy-reform advocates have had their wings clipped several times, beginning with the announcement of the Democratic ticket.

“The pick of Joe Biden was my first sign of digestive tumult,” says Keith Stroup, founder and legal advisor of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). “Rather than oppose the Reagan-inspired War on Some Drugs, Biden became an enthusiastic supporter and legislative booster. He was at the center of creating the ONDCP [in 1988], mandatory minimum sentencing, civil forfeiture laws, the Rave Act, funding for DARE in public schools and the ad campaigns for the Partnership for a Drug Free America.”

NORML board member Dominic Holden says: “Biden is the drug war embodied.”

The selection of the emblematic Democratic drug warrior of the 1980s was followed by the selection of his 1990s counterpart, Rahm Emanuel. As President Bill Clinton’s liaison with the ONDCP, the incoming chief of staff advised on and defended that administration’s tough-on-crime punitive approach to drugs and its cowardly opposition to medical-marijuana initiatives and needle-exchange programs. While Clinton has since expressed regret over some of these positions, the tightly wound Emanuel has not.

Obama’s pick for attorney general, meanwhile, has a mixed record on drug policy reform that will hopefully be clarified during the expected Senate dogfight over his nomination. But the record is not encouraging. As D.C. attorney general in the 1990s, Eric Holder supported mandatory sentences of 18 months to six years for selling a range of drugs that included marijuana. He is also on record supporting the “broken windows” theory of neighborhood policing most closely associated with Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s NYPD and the conservative Manhattan Institute. Holder’s iron-fist drug politics find a public health counterpart in the confused mind of Obama’s Transition Team point man on the ONDCP, Don Vereen, who as recently as November explained his opposition to medical marijuana by saying, “[It] sends the wrong message to children.”

Which takes us to the drug czar throne. Here the rumors are worse than most would have DARE’d imagine. The Obama transition team has done nothing to dispel talk that Rep. Jim Ramstad, R-Minn., is a leading candidate to run ONDCP or the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. In either position, Ramstad’s nomination would make a joke of Obama’s pledge that his policy decisions will be made “based on facts,” not ideology and caveman politics. Earlier this month, hundreds of leading substance-abuse health professionals signed a letter to Obama expressing concern over Ramstad’s opposition to evidence-based HIV/AIDS-reduction practices such as methadone and needle-exchange programs, as well as his support for arresting medical marijuana patients and failure to co-sponsor any of the three bills put forward by the last Congress to eliminate the cocaine-sentencing disparity. But it gets worse. As Maia Szalavitz first reported on The Huffington Post, Ramstad funneled almost a quarter of a million dollars in federal money to an abusive church-run addiction program that sees drug addiction not as a health issue requiring medication and counseling, but as a “sin” that needs cleansing through the acceptance of Jesus Christ as lord and savior. Ramstad is such a Bush-league freak show that concern over his possible nomination has spilled beyond the small world of drug-policy-reform professionals. Last week, the Boston Globe editorialized strongly against his candidacy.

Of course, it’s possible that the views of people like Holder, Emanuel, Biden and Ramstad are no longer what they were. But reformers are concerned that there’s no way of knowing. “Because they haven’t spoken on these issues in so long, we have to go back to what they said in the ’90s,” says Paul Armentano, deputy director of NORML. “We hope they have evolved, or that at least Obama doesn’t listen to them if they haven’t. After all, the president sets the policy.”

Sound familiar?

Regardless of where Obama’s appointees stand and how much, if any, political capital he is willing to spend on drug-policy reform, the need to turn his campaign slogan into reality has never been greater. Last week, the Justice Department released numbers showing that 1 in every 100 Americans is now in prison, and 1 in every 31 is either behind bars, on parole or on probation.
For this grotesquerie we can thank the war on drugs. More than half of federal prisoners (95,000 people) are behind bars for drug-law violations — a record. Nationally, around half a million people are in prison on nonviolent drug charges. The Drug Policy Alliance estimates that this is a tenfold increase since 1980, totaling more than the entire prison population of Western Europe.

Reform advocates are realistic about the possibilities for progress in the coming years. Everyone agrees that a radical overhaul of U.S. drug laws, including ending the prohibition of marijuana, remains years if not decades away. But the major groups have clear goals for the first administration and are guardedly optimistic about meeting them.

The Drug Policy Alliance, the nation’s largest drug-policy-reform advocacy group, seeks the repeal of the federal syringe-exchange-program ban and an end to racist federal cocaine sentencing laws, which continue to punish low-level crack offenders 100 times more severely than powder cocaine offenders.

“Obama talked about his opposition to the syringe ban on the campaign trail and mentioned it again in his AIDS Day statement,” says Bill Piper, DPA’s director of national affairs. “And both Obama and Biden are strong supporters of reforming cocaine-sentencing laws. Even if Congress doesn’t pass a [crack cocaine] bill, the administration could instruct federal attorneys to ignore the law. We hope he’ll do so.”

Another law that reform advocates hope will be ignored is the blanket federal prohibition of marijuana, which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled trumps states’ rights to legally grow and distribute marijuana for medical purposes. Obama has criticized federal raids on state-sanction dispensaries as a poor use of federal resources, a popular position. The electoral politics of medical marijuana also favor progress on this front.

“One in four Americans now lives in a medical marijuana state,” Aaron Houston, director of government relations at the Marijuana Policy Project, explained to Reason magazine. “And medical marijuana outpolled Obama in Michigan by six points. Medical marijuana states, including Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, were essential to Obama’s victory, and continuing a federal war against a quarter of the country would make no sense.”

NORML, America’s pot-reform spearhead, will push for the establishment of a National Marijuana Commission, modeled on congressional commissions formed in 1970 and 1972 to study pot prohibition. Both prior commissions concluded in favor of decriminalization, and activists think it is high time to throw another national spotlight on the law that last year resulted in 870,000
marijuana arrests.

“Any serious commission today would come to same conclusion [in favor of decriminalization]. We’re willing to sit tight for a couple of years as Congress studies it,” says NORML’s Keith Stroup. “But we want high-profile hearings in the judiciary committees. We want to get our experts up there.”

Meanwhile, NORML will push Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., to reintroduce his decriminalization bill, HR5843, also known as the Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults Act. Co-sponsored by former presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, the bill would in effect decriminalize possession of up to an ounce. When introduced last year, it became the first bill to take
aim at prohibition since 1982.

Advocates may have their best ally not in the White House or in Congress, but in the economy. As state budgets shrink across the country, legislatures are often forced to choose between education and prison budgets. This phenomenon is most stark in California, where a budget shortfall and massive overcrowding has Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger talking about letting people go
and the legislature discussing sentencing reform.

“During the last recession, we saw an enormous number of states enact reform,” says DPA’s Piper. “This is the silver lining of an economic downturn. After the recession recedes, the reforms tend to stick, when the states realize they are saving money.”

If the economy ends up being the prime mover behind drug reform under Obama and the incoming Congress, it will be better than nothing, but still a sad commentary on the Democratic Party and American democracy in general. Polls and state ballot initiatives continue to show the public widening its lead ahead of their elected leaders on drug policy, who more often than not remain stuck in the 1980s, if not the 1920s. While changing the law ultimately falls upon Congress, Obama could help take his party and the country into the new century by using the bully pulpit to question the premises and effects of the drug war. If he chooses to do so, he is certainly surrounded by enough veteran drug warriors to provide political cover. Who knows? If President Richard Nixon could go to China, maybe Joe Biden & Co. can help Obama make the shorter but equally historic trip down Main Street to the local head shop.

Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

Outrageous Anti-Pot Lies: Media Uses Disgraceful Cancer Scare Tactics

via Alternet.org

[T]he media chose to selectively highlight data implicating cannabis’s dangers while ignoring data implicating its relative safety. In this case, the study’s authors (and, by default, the worldwide press) chose only to emphasize one small subgroup of marijuana smokers (those who reported smoking at least one joint per day for more than ten years). These subjects did in fact, experience an elevated risk of lung cancer compared to non-using controls. (Although contrary to what the press reported, even the study’s heaviest pot smokers never experienced an elevated comparable to those subjects who reported having “ever used” tobacco.) By contrast, cannabis consumers in the study who reported light or moderate pot use actually experienced a decreased cancer risk compared to non-using controls.

Read the full article here.