Click here to register to attend.

If you haven’t, you should soon. Booking your travel a month out will save you money. And you won’t want to miss what former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson and current California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom have to say at the Opening Plenary!

The rest of the conference program is packed full with trainings, roundtable discussions addressing controversies within the movement, and panels exploring and sharing innovative approaches to reform challenges. Thursday evening you can stand up for justice at the No More Drug War rally at nearby MacArthur Park, hosted by dozens of local California organizations and emceed by KPFK radio personality Lalo Alcaraz.

And the activities and highlights don’t stop there…

Very soon we’ll be announcing three special Mobile Workshops – learning sessions that will take a select group of conference-goers out of the hotel and into the local community.

You’re also invited to host informal Community Meetings of your own during the conference. These meetings are meant to be your opportunity to organize reformers around action plans. They take place in open session rooms in the mornings, evenings and at lunch.

What do these Mobile Workshops and Community Meetings have in common? They’re only available to registered conference attendees – and they’ll be limited by space availability!

So register now…and I’ll see you in Los Angeles!

Stefanie Jones
Event Manager
Drug Policy Alliance

This year’s DPA conference will be held Wednesday, November 2 through Saturday, November 5 in Los Angeles @ The Westin Bonaventure. Over 1,000 reform-minded activists, non-governmental organizations, scholars, government officials, and religious and business leaders are expected to gather to explore and discuss effective and moral alternatives to warring against some drugs—notably marijuana.

This year’s attendees will have the opportunity to spend three days interacting with people committed to finding alternatives to the war on some drugs while participating in sessions given by leading experts from around the world. Don’t miss the opportunity to be a part of this event.

For more information on the DPA conference, scholarships and to enjoy earlybird savings for pre-registering, check out www.reformconference.org

We begin with the PBS NewsHour and their fine report featuring the Honorable Rebecca Kaplan from the Oakland City Council and Richard Lee, the founder of Oaksterdam University. For balance (I suppose) they also interview the police chief of El Cerrito, California, who provides the obligatory doses of “reefer madness” at around the 5:00 mark.

Once again, I have to ask the cop at the end of the piece: How many people who don’t smoke pot now are going to start smoking pot once it is legal, and how much is that going to cost? Whatever it is, make the tax on pot equal to that amount, minus the expenditures we’ll save on not arresting people and sending helicopters on weeding missions, and we’ve covered the costs! (Actually, since Miron estimates that we’d reap in revenues and savings around $14 billion annually from legalized pot nationally, you have to convince us that the brand new legal pot smokers who aren’t already smoking now would cost society more than that.)

We’re still trying to figure out how you inject marijuana (from Newsweek photo essay on pot propaganda)

That stupid retort that legal weed will cost society more than the taxes only works if you believe that nobody is smoking weed now and suddenly when it’s legal, everyone will smoke weed. 22,000,000 PEOPLE ARE SMOKING WEED THIS YEAR ALREADY! Whatever that costs us as a society, we’re already paying NOW without taking in any tax money!

Cannabis does not “add another vice” to tobacco and alcohol that costs our society so much more than their taxes bring in. Alcohol and tobacco use create huge medical bills and death. Cannabis does not. With three legal choices and cannabis being obviously safest, we’ll cut costs as people choose it over alcohol and tobacco, and raise tax revenues that are currently going to black marketeers.

Read more about Newsweek and FOX Business News after the break…

Next we have the series of article in Newsweek, which has seemingly devoted an entire issue to the subject of legalization. In “Welcome to Potopia”, they describe the section of Oakland known as Oaksterdam as “a model for what a legalized-drug America could look like.” Dr. Nora Volkow from NIDA and Prof. Mark Kleiman from UCLA are cited to provide the necessary balance, with the typical warnings that “It’s certainly true that this is not your grandfather’s pot,” as if our grandfathers were smoking nothing but ditchweed in the 1960′s. (Sorry, but Sgt. Pepper and Dark Side of the Moon were not composed by nor appreciated by people smoking ditchweed.) Our own Paul Armentano is quoted as well:

The fact that we now are debating it—at least in some parts of the country—is the result of a number of forces that, as MacCoun puts it, have created the perfect pot storm: the failure of the War on Drugs, the growing death toll of murderous drug cartels, pop culture, the economy, and a generation of voters that have simply grown up around the stuff. Today there are pot television shows and frequent references to the drug in film, music, and books. And everyone from the president to the most successful athlete in modern history has talked about smoking it at one point or another. “Whether it’s the economy or Obama or Michael Phelps, I think all of these things have really worked to galvanize the public,” says Paul Armentano, the deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and the coauthor of a new book, Marijuana Is Safer; So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?”At the very least, it’s started a national conversation.”

Newsweek also looks at the “green rush” in Los Angeles County in a piece called “The Wild West of Weed” and how District Attorney Cooley says “about 100%” of the dispensaries are illegal and that “the time is right to deal with this problem.” Weed dealer turned dispensary owner Jason Beck tells his story of suffering through a DEA “smash-n-grab” raid where the cops were trapped in his store thanks to all the bulletproof glass and “man traps” he had installed for security. “If we were real gangsta drug dealers, we could have sniped them all out,” Beck says, lamenting how the DEA destroyed all his security equipment and how $12,500 in cash just mysteriously disappeared.

The Newsweek series winds up with a look at Drug Policy Alliance’s Ethan Nadelmann, called “The Pro-Drug Czar” (a term I’d bet he’d disagree with… he’s not “pro-drugs”, he’s “anti-prohibition”). Ethan gives the readers some of the best sound bites on how the drug war is impacting our prisons, saying “We lock up more people on drug charges than all of Western Europe locks up for everything, and they have 100 million more people than we do. We have less than 5 percent of the world’s population but we have almost 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated population. We rank first in the world in per capita incarceration, and the drug war is the No. 1 driving factor.”

Then this morning we are told the folks over at Fox Business News are beginning a series looking at the legalization wave in America. There are no stories or videos to post yet, but you can be sure that when there are, we’ll report on them here at NORML.

The remarkable thing in these series of news stories are not that the mainstream media is covering the legalization issue, it is how they are covering the issue. The discussion is no longer “what about the children?!?” and the doom-and-gloom warnings of heroin in the 7-Elevens if we legalize cannabis. The discussion now focuses on the economic viability of the cannabis market and the 40-year-long failure of the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs™ to do anything to impede that market. The pot-pun headlines are fading away and the ledes of the stories are tilted favorably toward our issue. In the past the government anti-pot propaganda dominated the story and if any contrary view was even broached, it was reformers being thrown a bone deep in the closing paragraphs to offer a rebuttal that was often couched in derogatory, “here’s what the stoners say” language. Now our side is presented as the rational, common-sense, business-savvy side of the issue with the hysterical law enforcement propaganda given the end-of-article quotes, often couched in desperate, “here’s what the reefer mad say” language.

America is becoming convinced that legalization of cannabis makes sense from a public health, public safety, and economic standpoint. And we haven’t even begun bringing up how much money industrial hemp would bring us in a legalized cannabis world…

With the entire cabinet nominated (save for US Ambassador to the United Nations and director of the Central Intelligence Agency), who is President–elect Obama going to nominate as director of the Office Of National Drug Control Policy (a.k.a. ‘Drug Czar’).

To date, Obama and Co. have prioritized the cabinet nominations of:

Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Treasury, Secretary of Homeland Security, Attorney General, Secretary of Interior, Secretary of Commerce, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Secretary of Education, Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Transportation, Secretary of Labor, Secretary of Environmental Protection Agency, Secretary of Veteran Affairs, National Security Adviser, Director of National Intelligence, Director of National Economic Council, Director of Securities and Exchange Commission, US Trade Representative and Director of Office of Management and Budget.

But no Drug Czar (or Czarina)!

Obama told the media yesterday that his entire cabinet would be nominated before he is to begin his last semi-sane holiday break this week with his family. But as of 10AM this morning (eastern), there has been no nominee announced for ‘Drug Czar’.

Hmmmmm. One wonders why not?

Looks like one reputed nominee for Drug Czar, retiring Republican congressman Jim Ramstad of Minnesota is getting hung up in the political vetting process. Some in the media and in drug policy reform inform NORML that Atlanta police chief Richard J. Pennington might emerge as the potential nominee. Some speculate that current Drug Czar transition team leader, Dr. Don Vereen, might pull a ‘Cheney’ and offer himself up as the best person to head the ONDCP.

Whatever the case and whomever the nominee, is the ONDCP nominee and their staff going to closely adhere to Obama’s stated goal that health (and environmental) policy-making in his administration, unlike the current Bush White House, will be guided by contemporary and credible science—and not ideology or politics?

In Obama’s now weekly radio address, he asserted this morning that science and rational thinking is going to instruct much of his decision-making in the realms of education, public health and environmental protection. To demonstrate such, this morning Obama nominated two prominent scientists—not political hacks—to fill important science policy-making roles in his new administration (Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).

“Because the truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources – it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient – especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as President of the United States.”
-President-elect Barack Obama (December 20, 2008)

NORML certainly hopes that Obama’s professed support for science over political ideology logically extends to repairing and overhauling the country’s totally flawed and decidedly unscientific approach in administering a functional and economical criminal justice system—fueled in large part by antiquated and misguided illicit drug laws, notably the abject failure of 70 plus years of cannabis prohibition laws.

In the interim, please join me (and thousands of other drug policy reform supporters), with a bit-of-tongue-in-cheek, in advancing Drug Policy Alliance director Ethan Nadelmann, Ph.D as Obama’s next Drug Czar. Now that is change I can believe in!

Who President-elect Obama nominates for Drug Czar I believe will strongly demonstrate whether or not he genuinely believes in science as a guiding principle in replacing failed, feckless, racist and politically expedient law enforcement efforts to ‘control’ drugs with, ultimately, effective, commonsense, scientific and public health-based alternatives to America’s failed war on some drugs.