The purpose of the Christmas Eve medical cannabis activists protest held in downtown Los Angeles was to deliver bags of coal for Christmas to the DEA because they were bad this past year by raiding medical marijuana dispensaries, stealing money and medicine along with items like cars and jewelry all under the so-called ‘color of authority’. Activists called on “President-elect Obama to keep his campaign promise and end the raids on the medical marijuana dispensaries here in California. To stop this wave of ‘domestic terrorism’ by President Bush’s Drug Enforcement Administration against California medical marijuana patients and providers.”

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It’s been twelve years since California voters approved the physician-supervised use, possession, and cultivation of marijuana, and it’s been nearly five years since the state legislature mandated that, “qualified patients … who associate within the state of California in order collectively or cooperatively to cultivate marijuana for medical purposes, shall not … be subject to state criminal sanctions.”

Too bad nobody told the cops.

According to papers recently submitted to Congress by the US Drug Enforcement Administration, representatives from the California Police Chiefs Association believe that they can simply override laws that they philosophically disagree with.

Here’s what Association President Steve Krull had to say about this matter in a 2006 letter to former DEA head Karen Tandy: “[A] concentrated effort [by the DEA in California] sustained over a period of time would send a strong message to local and county government that ‘medical marijuana’ is not allowed [in this state.]”

Except for the fact that it is.

Jacob Sullum over at Reason.com nails the situation here, but my added frustration comes from mainstream media’s utter failure to cover this story. Forget that this topic has any connection to marijuana; the larger and more far reaching issue here is that we now have physical evidence that a rogue group of law enforcement officers are trying to undermine democracy and the rule of law.

Perhaps if this sort of behavior was taking place in a foreign country, the US news media would be investigating the issue seriously. But instead the guilty parties are our own police officers, so the mainstream press simply sweeps the story under the rug.

Nothing to see here, except there is.

- Senators McCain and Obama:

If elected, will you create a Presidential Commission to study marijuana—its Prohibition, Budgetary, Social, and Health effects, and to make recommendations for marijuana law reform?

By George Rohrbacher, NORML Board Member

Federal law prohibiting marijuana dates from 1937. The Marijuana Tax Stamp Act was debated on the floor of the House of Representatives for just over a minute and against the wishes of organizations such as the American Medical Association. Cannabis, as it was then known, was a component of at least 28 patent medicines made by industry leaders such as Merck, Eli Lilly, and Squibb. With the passage of this law, not only did the legal sale and possession of cannabis end, but all American research into medicinal use of marijuana ground to a halt, and even the ages-old knowledge of marijuana as a medicine went into deep remission.

Today there is a whole universe of information on the subject of marijuana that is brand-new since the Shafer Commission last studied marijuana in the 1970’s. The information then available lead Nixon’s own handpicked commission come to a surprising conclusion: they recommended no legal penalties for adults possessing up 100 grams of marijuana. Nixon freaked out, flew into a rage, canceled print runs of the report, and refusing to read the document, he buried the Shafer Commission’s recommendations. Tricky Dick did exactly the opposite and started America’s full-scale War on ‘Weed’, instead. And now forty years later, the War on Pot continues to grind on, getting larger with each passing year. After hundreds of billions of dollars expended, after millions of people arrested, is it not time we studied marijuana again? Because, by every measure available, America’s current approach to marijuana has failed—and, in the words of former-President Jimmy Carter, it is “…doing more harm than good.”

Here are 8 pressing reasons why a Presidential Commission on marijuana is needed now:

1) By October 10, 2008, America will have recorded its 20-millionth marijuana arrest, with people of color and the young arrested in disproportionately large numbers. It is time for a re-assessment of marijuana policy, plain and simple.

2) In addition to the pain and suffering visited by these millions of arrests on “we-the-people”, our government expends about $25 billion annually on its pot prohibition efforts, funds that should be expended elsewhere in the budget.

3) In addition to huge costs on expense side, we lose billions in taxation revenue, as well. Because, despite all government efforts to eradicate it, America’s vast underground marijuana market continues on, just as it has for the last seventy years, creating crime where there need be none, churning out billions and billions of dollars in untaxed and unregulated commerce. A tax and regulate posture as a method of control, verses the ‘no control/out of control’ situation we have today where kids can get marijuana more easily than beer—which alternative should America choose?

4) Marijuana use and purchase has been legal for the last 30 years in The Netherlands. This is the world’s great marijuana legalization experiment—and proof positive that a modern society will not collapse when pot becomes legal. Holland’s tightly regulated cannabis sales have created enormous tax revenues, while at the same time, usage rates for Holland’s teens continues to remain at just half of the usage rates of America’s teens even under our draconian prohibition model.

5) There are more than a dozen states over the last dozen years (covering about 1/5 of the US population) that have passed medical marijuana laws, mostly by voter initiative. ‘We-The-People’ created America’s state-by-state crazy quilt of medical marijuana laws, now what have ‘we’ learned from these experiments?

6) The modern use of cannabis/cannabinoids as medicine, buttressed now by 17,000 scientific studies, validates humanity’s medicinal use of cannabis that has been going on for as long as recorded history. In any rational world, a non-toxic, useful drug like cannabis would have been re-scheduled long ago by the federal government from Schedule I, where it now resides with heroin, to Schedule III with most prescription drugs, or lower.

Why have the vested interests blocked cannabis from being rescheduled?

7) On 10/07/03 America’s own Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) received US Patent #6630507 for the use of marijuana’s active ingredients under the title, “Cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuro-protectants.” While HHS filed and supported this application, at the very same time, in other executive-branch Cabinet-level offices, at the ONDCP and the DEA, their legislative charters direct them to fight all use of marijuana as a medicine (the charters contain no standards to correct this prohibitionist posture if marijuana is shown scientifically to be useful as medicine). Either the HHS or the DEA/ONDCP must be wrong.

8.) A Presidential Commission hearing on the subject of marijuana law reform is a necessary exercise in government bureaucracy oversight, and is simply good government.

America, after our 20-millionth marijuana arrest—is that amount of human wreckage not enough? How much longer must our government pursue its failed policy of marijuana prohibition?

Presidential candidates McCain and Obama, show some guts, show some leadership and take the pledge: when you are elected, you will form a Presidential Commission via the National Academy of Sciences, or a like objective review body, to study marijuana.

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

NOTE: Now, all you fellow voters out there in Blog-ville: Help me out with this.

Help NORML.

Help America!

The Shafer Commission needs a 21st Century update. Does anybody think we need 10 or 20-million more marijuana arrests before Congress and the White House wakes up and changes our failed marijuana policies?

The Supreme Court has told us repeatedly not to expect a judicial ruling to fix this social disaster; the change, the correction, must come legislatively. Well, 20-million marijuana arrests is enough and a Presidential Commission is what’s needed at the onset of the next president’s tenure to provide the political cover and scientific validation for members of Congress to find the guts to take the votes needed to reform this sorry mess after 70 long, shameful, and pathetic years.

America eventually found the guts to end slavery, a social institution in place for over 200 years, evil and vile in its consequences but fiercely protected by special interests, even state governments; America can find the guts to end marijuana prohibition.

NORML has one of the largest cannabis-related archives in the world and it is replete with headlines that are hysterical, funny, shocking, propagandistic, dumb, witty, ironic and in the case of the front page splash of the September 14 Peninsula Daily News (Port Angeles and Sequim area of Washington State), revealing.

Click here for scanned story: copters.pdf

5-Day Copter Patrols Net 20 Pot Plants?!

Wow and with gas being priced such as it is, along with additional personnel and equipment costs, at what cost to the taxpayers is this folly? And, but of course, like most outdoor eradication efforts, no one was arrested for the cultivated cannabis found by the government’s eyes in the sky. Like me, don’t you want to know the per/plant cost to taxpayers for this kind of ineffective eradication efforts? According to the article the DEA funded the helicopter searches and it is unlikely to replicate this scale operation on the OP in the near future because of the paltry amount of plants eradicated.

By the way, the effort to eradicate cannabis plants growing in the OP was hampered by mountain and sea fog (Can you imagine that on the OP in the early fall?), which is important to note because most years five to six law enforcement personnel unfortunately perish nationwide in ill-fated and totally unnecessary domestic cannabis over flights with fog being cited as a major source of the crashes.

Let’s all work together to turn these anti-cannabis cowboys in the skies into revenue officers whose only job is to account for cannabis plants (and industrial hemp plants) as a source of regulated commerce and tens of billions annually in tax revenues.

In fact, the public and politicians should consider replacing an ineffective DEA with FACT:  Firearm, Alcohol, Cannabis and Tobacco, an updated division of ATF at the US Treasury.

Who among us doesn’t like to brag after a job well done? It’s human nature, right?

I mean, even the DEA enjoys boasting about their so-called ‘accomplishments.’ They even have their own (taxpayer funded) museum.

Given this fact, it’s both curious and notable that the DEA has suddenly ceased publicizing data regarding how many millions of feral hemp plants (aka ‘ditchweed’) law enforcement eradicate each year.

In previous years, upwards of 98 percent of all the pot seized by law enforcement was categorized as ‘ditchweed’ — a term the DEA uses to define “wild, scattered marijuana plants [with] no evidence of planting, fertilizing, or tending.”

For instance, in 2005 the DEA reported that cops destroyed some 219 million feral hemp plants versus only four million cultivated marijuana plants. DEA data for the year 2004 tells a similar story. Of the estimated 265 million marijuana plants destroyed by law enforcement that year, more than 262 million (roughly 99 percent) were classified as ‘ditchweed.’ In 2006, roughly 84 million plants seized by law enforcement (and more than 94 percent of all the marijuana eradicated) were ‘ditchweed.’

So, how much ditchweed did police confiscate in 2007? That would be anyone’s guess.

Upon referencing Table 4.38 (Number of marijuana plants eradicated and seized, arrests made, weapons seized, and value of assets seized under the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program, by State, 2007) in the latest version of the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, visitors will discover that the column that previously reported on ‘ditchweed’ seizures (in prior years’ tables, it was seventh column from the left) is now conspicuously missing.

So why would the DEA abruptly want to cease taking credit for destroying hundreds of millions of pounds of marijuana each year? Perhaps it’s because unlike cultivated marijuana, feral hemp contains virtually no detectable levels of THC — the primary psychoactive component in cannabis — and does not contribute to the black market marijuana trade.

Or perhaps it’s because the public was finally beginning to smarten up to the fact that they’ve been paying their police millions of dollars each year to do nothing more than pull a few weeds.

UPDATE!!! UPDATE!!!

Speaking of debate, my recent appearance on Dr. Drew Pinsky’s nationally syndicated radio show is now archived here. (Click on ’show audio’ for July 31, 2008.)

Dr. Drew and I spent 30 minutes discussing HR 5843 and whether the federal government has any business legislating what substances adults put into their bodies. By the end of the segment it appears that even the good doctor concedes that the answer is “no.”

Anyone who follows this issue closely knows that paid prohibitionists like John Walters and Scott Burns refuse to engage in debate with marijuana law reformers.  

In fact, several years ago the US Drug Enforcement Administration actually published and disseminated a publication, “How to Hold Your Own in a Drug Legalization Debate,” that recommended its employees decline invitations to publicly debate drug policy issues.

Given this environment, it’s refreshing to see the creation of a website like OpposingViews.com.

The new site, recently profiled by the Washington Post, faces off experts head-to-head on various hot-button political issues, including drug policy.

Ever wonder why drug warriors steadfastly refuse to debate reformers on drug policy issues? Just click here, here, and here, and you’ll have your answer.

In the seminal legal case challenging the US government’s mis-scheduling of cannabis under the 1970 Controlled Substances Act (CSA), NORML vs. DEA, at a crucial junction in 1988, which would have readily ended most administrative law challenges, NORML, et al (Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics, Drug Policy Foundation, etc…) won the re-scheduling argument before Drug Enforcement Administration Law Judge Francis Young.

This past week the Federal Communications Commission ruled in the infamous Janet Jackson ‘wardrobe malfunction’ that the $550,000 fine levied by the FCC against CBS was excessive and “arbitrary and capricious”.

Hmmm…“arbitrary and capricious”…where have I heard that phrase before regarding the actions of over-reaching government agencies?

On September 8, 1988, after 16 years of legal challenges from NORML and company, Judge Young ruled:

“…the marijuana plant considered as a whole has currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, that there is no lack of accepted safety for use of it under medical supervision and that it may lawfully be transferred from Schedule I to Schedule II.”

“The evidence in this record clearly shows that marijuana has been accepted as capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people, and doing so with safety under medical supervision. It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in light of the evidence in this record.”

The DEA ignored their own administrative law judge’s ruling, appealed the decision to the US Appeals Court in Washington, DC, and ultimately won their only phase of the case—the final phase of the case—in 1994 in a 2-1 decision, which in effect permits the DEA to in fact be ‘arbitrary and capricious’, and I’d throw in malevolent for good measure, in respects to cannabis.

Thanks to Ellen Komp at veryimportantpotheads.com for alerting folks to this interesting juxtaposition of the recent FCC decision and the DEA’s long tortured position on medicinal cannabis.

Lastly, Ellen points out that the ‘Lectric Law Library’ provides the definition of ‘arbitrary and capricious’ to mean: Absence of a rational connection between the facts found and the choice made.

Granted, those of us who work in drug policy reform knew this already.

Nonetheless, it’s doubly satisfying when a former longtime White House employee states the obvious.

The Failure of the Office of National Drug Control Policy
via Huffington Post

As an insider in the nation’s war against drugs, I spent almost fifteen years in the executive office of the President. Eleven of these years were in the Office of National Drug Control Policy where I served four of the nation’s so-called drug czars preparing the federal drug control budget, writing many of the national drug control strategies, and conducting performance measurement and analysis of the efficacy of those strategies. I left government in 2000, but continue to be highly involved in shaping drug policies and measuring performance in drug policy both nationally and internationally.

In the latest 2008 National Drug Control Strategy, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) — the federal executive office agency charged with shaping this nation’s national drug control strategy — claims that America has reached a turning point in the war on drugs. In reality, we have little reason to believe a significant change has occurred.

… Though Congress created ONDCP to formulate research-driven and performance-based policy, assess and modify policy through performance measures, and give a precise accounting of the federal drug control budget, ONDCP fails at all of those tasks. In the 90’s ONDCP created a performance measurement system for evaluating the effects of its policies on drug use, drug availability, and the negative consequences of drug use; however, this decade, no such performance measurement system has been utilized. As a consequence, policy is now flying blind resulting in lost opportunities for more success.

Naturally, the author ultimately fails to suggest any significant changes in US drug policy — such as legalizing cannabis for adults, or disbanding the DEA or the Drug Czar’s office — but, hey, it’s a start.

On April 29, 2008 House of Representative’s Committee on the Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) sent a 17-page letter to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Acting Administrator Michele Leonhart with pointed questions, a listing of over 60 medical marijuana dispensaries or patient cooperatives that have been raided by the DEA and federal law enforcement between June 2005 to November 2007 and numerous citations from local municipalities that are on the record of supporting patient access to cannabis and oppose federal intervention.

Excerpt from Conyer’s letter to Leonhart:

“Every month new science supporting the therapeutic value of cannabis is published. As a result, medical and scientific organizations, like the American College of Physicians and the American Psychiatric Association, are urging reform of laws that place in legal jeopardy physicians or their individual patients who may benefit from the use of cannabis. As the Administrator, you have the discretion to decide whether to continue heightened enforcement activities in California and in other states that have authorized the use of medical cannabis by qualified individuals. Please explain what role, if any, emerging scientific data plays in your decision-making process to conduct enforcement raids on individuals authorized to use or provide medical cannabis under state law.”

Read the entire letter and list of raided medical marijuana dispensaries and cooperatives here.

Let’s hope the DEA’s answers are as illuminating as the questions being asked by Chairman Conyers.

In mid-March the Reason Foundation published a report entitled ‘Illegally Green: Environmental Costs of Hemp Prohibition’. The report updates the precarious hemp industry in the United States and its continued struggles under absurdly strict federal laws that are meant to control the psychoactive strain of the plant, usually described as ‘marijuana’.

Hemp is legal for farmers to grow in virtually all countries where marijuana is still illegal (i.e, Canada, France, Great Britain, Switzerland, China, Romania, etc…), and to help highlight the non-sensible government policy Native Americans on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota will soon build a home constructed of hemp in conjunction with the 2008 Hemp Hoe Down.

“There are numerous environmental advantages to hemp,” said Skaidra Smith-Heisters, a policy analyst at Reason Foundation and author of the report. “Hemp often requires less energy to manufacture into products. It is less toxic to process. And it is easier to recycle and more biodegradable than most competing crops and products. Unfortunately, we won’t realize the full economic and environmental benefits of hemp until the crop is legal in the United States.”