By George Rohrbacher, NORML Board of Directors, medical marijuana patient

NORML’s 38^th annual conference in San Francisco, convened September 24-26, was the best attended, ever. Held at the Grand Hyatt, downtown, under classic San Fran weather conditions: 78 degrees and sunny, with the fog creeping up over the hills and a river of fog laying atop the water, streaming in from the ocean through the Golden Gate, sailboats, freighters…the sun-drenched surrounding hill…all of which was to be seen from the hotel’s restaurant on the 36^th floor. Medicating could be done, down at street level, on the plaza surrounding the hotel. NORML’s annual conference was held downstairs in the grand ballroom and adjoining meeting spaces. Well, my brothers and sisters in the movement to legalize marijuana, we kicked ass this during this amazing weekend!

Travel author Rick Steves, publisher and comedian Ngaio Bealum and others on the 'Pot, Parenting and Prohibition' panel

The caliber of the presenters and breath of topics @ NORML 38.0 was just astonishing; everything from martial artists using cannabis just before the fight for calming and focus, to how current tax court decisions are shaping the trend toward a wider range of services delivered to patients at dispensaries, to a deep and satisfying look into the science of the exceptional safety profile and utility of cannabis as a medicine. And, if you couldn’t have been there in San Francisco with us, now for the very first time in history, you can attend conference from anywhere in the world, free, on the Internet, simply by visiting NORML’s 38^th conference broadcast.

I arrived in San Francisco early enough the day before Conference started to do the NORML “walk through” with Grand Hyatt hotel staff. My morning had started at home at 4:00am doing chores before the two-hour drive to the airport, then my flight to SFO and transport to the Hyatt, only to find out that I was one of the 57 attendees who were being bumped to other hotel properties for one night, because a nasty overbooking computer-glitch. The cynical among us made muffled comments that this “glitch” might have something to do with the US Customs Service/Homeland Security Conference in progress at the hotel the day of NORML’s arrival. The overbooking problem ruffled a few feathers, but we got over it quickly and everyone with a reservation at conference was booked onsite by the end of the first day. The Grand Hyatt staff was awesome in dealing with the mess. And after all, really, how can you be in a bad mood anyway, you’re in San Francisco at a NORML Conference???

A tiny case in point: on day 1 of Conference, during our 4:20 afternoon break, as several hundred of us medicated on the plaza, San Francisco’s Thursday Green-Transportation Bike Protest, with police escort, pedaled by, a significant number of their ranks biking buck-naked…

As I lay in bed that night, finally in my rightful hotel room, my head a-buzz with all the people I’d talked to and some of the world’s finest cannabis, I pondered why NORML Conference was so much fun, and why I had gotten such a huge emotional lift from the day’s events. Sure, I was seeing old friends, making new ones, the common struggle and all of that…but as I continued to think about it, I realized that while those were all important elements of it, but they did not account for the power of what I was feeling.

Then it struck me! Just three weekends before NORML’s Conference, over the Labor Day weekend, my wife and I had held our daughter’s wedding on our ranch, with 70 campers and 120 guests for a sit-down dinner under a tent set up next to our home. We had the first rain in 14 weeks and rainbows the day of the ceremony. The feelings I was getting from the first day of NORML’s Conference was something very much akin to those same feelings that welled up inside that big tent during my daughter’s wedding. Yes. NORML, too, was a meeting of family, self-chosen family, the very tip of an iceberg, a worldwide network of people who, with cannabis, are strung through the heart.

The more I thought about all the people I’d talked to that first day, our wheelchair warriors, our intellectual samurai, our organizers at ground zero…the more I realized that almost to a person, they were at NORML’s 38^th annual conference because there was a truth that must be told, a wrong that must be righted, sick people who must be cared for, the defenseless defended…they were there in San Francisco primarily because their hearts demanded it, their internal compass of right-and-wrong would accept no less.  And, after all the many years of losing our battles, after 20 million marijuana arrests, the tide has started to turn…

We are winning on many fronts now…but, it is not over, there is so much left to do, please help. Join the fight; please join NORML, if you haven’t done so already. And, I hope to see you at the 39^th annual conference, next year.

Or, how the Barr Amendment killed a paraplegic over a single lousy joint…

Happy Valentine’s Day, Jonathan—We have not forgotten you!

By George Rohrbacher, NORML Board of Directors, medical marijuana patient

I love my own children beyond all measure. They range from 33-to-26 years old, three sons and a daughter who’ve returned to me a lifetime of love and four grandkids, with three more on the way. It is from this perspective that I first heard of the death of Jonathan Magbie and continue to think about him today.

In October of 2004, I arrived in Washington DC for a NORML Board of Directors meeting, having just flown in from the west coast. It was late Friday afternoon. In NORML’s office, Allen St. Pierre, our Executive Director, slid the second section of that day’s Washington Post across the desk to me. There, above the fold, was a news story that made me sick to my stomach.

The article was about the death of Jonathan Magbie, a 28-year old black wheelchair-bound paraplegic, a first offender who died while serving a ten-day jail sentence for the possession of one single lousy joint! The year was 2004, it happened right in our nation’s capitol, Washington DC. At the epicenter of the “Land of the Free”, the cops and courts had put a paralyzed man in jail for pot! He died of respiratory collapse on day-four of his ten-day sentence in the custody of our government.

Judge Retchin’s sentence, ‘ten-days-in-the-hole’ was a cruel response to Jonathan’s honest and forthright answers that he used marijuana to help ease his pain and that he intended to use marijuana again, after he was released. After all, the people of Washington DC had voted overwhelmingly for medical marijuana in 1998—it passed with a 69% yes vote! But then, the marijuana prohibitionists in Congress constructed the Barr Amendment, a federal appropriations rider that blocked the implementation of the will of Washington DC’s voters: So, District of Columbia, if you want your operating money from the federal government, to hell with the voters’ say on medical marijuana.

A victim of alcohol, one of America’s lethal but legal drugs, Jonathan Magbie was struck and paralyzed for life by a drunk driver. Shown here with President Ronald Regan, Jonathan Magbie was a national poster boy for MADD, at the age of 8.

Before Judge Retchin was a young man who had been in a wheelchair for 24-years, ever since, as a four-year old child, Jonathan had been hit, with tragic irony, by a drunk driver and paralyzed for life. For two and a half decades, Jonathan was imprisoned inside his own body, a punishment so cruel that no judge’s sentence could ever come close to matching it—until the application of Washington DC “justice”.

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Which American political leader has the guts and foresight to become “the William Wilberforce” of the great campaign to end marijuana prohibition?? Your place in history is waiting.

By George Rohrbacher, NORML Board Member, medical marijuana patient

The inauguration of President Barack Obama is a historic event; both personal conversations and world media coverage are pregnant with its significance. That our new president came to Congress representing Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, is a sweet and wonderful irony. Abraham Lincoln came up from obscurity and poverty by the full employment of his wits and ambition. Revered throughout the world, Lincoln personified America is at its core, America is at its best; a meritocracy passionate about the welfare of its people.

The world has heard the term “historic” applied to the Obama Inauguration so often over these last few months, it is easy to lose sight just what “historic” means in this case: 150 years ago this half-black man would not been feted in Washington DC and sworn in to occupy the most important job on planet Earth; but no, Barack Obama could have been bought and sold like cattle just six miles down the road in Alexandria, Virginia. For more than the first 200 years of America’s history, slavery was defended from both the pulpit and the state house. The South saw the Emancipation Proclamation as “fiendish”, a “triumph of fanaticism.” Lincoln saw it as “the one thing that will make people remember I ever lived.”

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Today America Celebrates Ben Franklin’s 303rd Birthday

By George Rohrbacher, NORML Board of Directors, medical marijuana patient

Of all of America’s Founding Fathers, only Benjamin Franklin was a signer of all three of our country’s essential documents, The Declaration of Independence, the Treaty that ended the Revolutionary War and the United States Constitution. Benjamin Franklin was also the only Founding Father who actively campaigned against the institution of slavery. As a scientist, Benjamin Franklin, the man who learned to control lightning, was as revered and world-famous in his day, as Einstein was in his. Franklin, among many other things, gave us the conceptual framework we still use every time we think about things electrical. He was the first to describe electricity as having positive and negative charges. Ben Franklin’s fingerprints are everywhere one looks in 21st Century.

Ben Franklin has often been called “the first American”, because, in so many ways, he embodied the brash new nation he helped create. His talents as an inventor and scientist are legendary. Consider a few of the useful creations that Ben left us: bifocal glasses, the woodstove and the lightning rod. They were all inventions he chose not to patent because he saw they were so potentially useful to the general public. They were among his many gifts to humanity. As the statesman, Ben Franklin was as essential to creating our new nation, as was George Washington, the soldier. Franklin’s unique combination of charm, celebrity and brilliance brought France in on our side of the Revolutionary War with the troops, navy and money necessary for us to win. As a proud citizen of a free society, Ben’s genius also flourished with his social inventions like the volunteer fire department, the lending library, the community hospital and, what has become, the University of Pennsylvania. As a writer, his prime work is The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, a bestseller, never out of print since it was written, nearly 250 years ago. It is the true story of a runaway printer’s apprentice who, at the age of 17, stole himself from his older brother to whom he was indentured until he was 21 years old. Franklin’s Autobiography is the original blueprint to the ‘American Dream’ of how to become a self-made man. Horatio Alger and Dale Carnegie, are simply Ben’s 19th and 20th Century adherents and proselytizers. Today in the 21st Century, self-help books cover whole walls in bookshops. Franklin was the author the world’s very first best-selling book in the self-help genre.

I made a few comments at NORML’s National Conference, this past October, about why I believe that NORML is a legitimate offspring of Ben Franklin’s social genius. On my flight home, I looked out the airplane window and I saw Ben waving back at me.

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This is the last week for submissions to NORML’S VIDEO AD CONTEST. There is $10,000 in cash prize money waiting for the America’s best answers to the above question.

By George Rohrbacher, NORML Board of Directors, medical marijuana patient

America has witnessed the unfolding of a series of unprecedented historic events that portend great change for war on cannabis. The federal war against the plant entered into its 71st year this fall, from the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, to Nixon’s invention of the ‘war on weed’, to Bush’s expanded war against cannabis and the sick and dying that has being playing out in the dispensaries and patient coops of our country’s medical marijuana states—for generations, our federal government has used every means short of public hangings to deter Americans from using cannabis, and it hasn’t worked.

This war on the cannabis plant and its consumers has been a complete and utter failure.

Over 100 million Americans have used cannabis in their lifetimes, including our new President-elect, and about 20 million Americans used pot just this last week. The perverse nature of ‘pot prohibition’ is that it guarantees that marijuana is easily available to our children, the very group of citizens we say we are trying hardest to protect.

In early October 2008, America made its 20-millionth marijuana arrest, topping a record 872,000 arrests in 2007, 90% of which were for the possession of a small amount of pot. Vast sums of taxpayer’s money continue to be wasted every day in America’s failed cannabis prohibition efforts. A simple, but revolutionary change to a tax and regulate posture on cannabis a from to our current “war on weed” policy could have a combined net positive effect on our increasingly strapped federal and state budgets by as much as $50 billion annually to the good. And, to top this off, America’s cannabis users want to be taxed!!! We want to be treated normal. We are pleading for it!

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By George Rohrbacher, NORML Board Member, medical marijuana patient

By a huge margin, 3,008,980 to 1,792,870, Michigan’s voters approved a ballot measure legalizing physician directed medical marijuana, making it America’s thirteenth state to legalize medical marijuana. State medical marijuana laws now cover over 25 percent of the nation’s population. Michigan became the first Midwest state to join this growing green fraternity.

click to enlarge

Michigan Voters Pass Medical Marijuana Initiative Into Law, 83-0

A review the Michigan State Auditor’s website and their county-by-county election results proves interesting reading. Medical marijuana won in every single county! All 83 counties in the state of Michigan—urban, suburban, or rural passed the measure, and by a margin of over a million votes. It had won in farming, logging, mining, and manufacturing counties! Everywhere the question was asked in Michigan on November 4, the electorate said yes to medical marijuana. In the state’s five largest urban counties, the margins were enormous, an eye-popping 2:1 vote for marijuana.

Medical marijuana received 130,000 more votes in Michigan than even the Obama victory did.

What a vote like this means is that in every part of Michigan, in every school district and voting precinct, every family and every church, in every community, that the people, one by one, have learned the undeniable truth of the utility of marijuana as a medicine—a ‘Truth’ with no expiration date.

The publics’ first-hand knowledge on the subject (over 100 million Americans have tried pot themselves) is finally overcoming the wall of 71-years of lies and distortions about medical marijuana by our federal and state governments. The American public is slowly re-learning the truth about marijuana as a medicine, one person, one patient, one family, one neighbor and one election at a time.

When Uncle Bob uses cannabis for his MS, and Mom needed pot when she underwent chemotherapy for breast cancer, and the kid next door uses it for his migraine headaches…the government can’t continue to lie to the voters anymore that pot is used only by ‘slackers who’re faking illness just as an excuse to ‘get high’. Sorry Congress and Executive Branch, America has seen too many instances where medical marijuana works, and works well. And, there are also now 17,000 scientific studies on the subject!

The great state of Michigan, as a microcosm of America, showed November 4th we, as a country, have passed our tipping point on medical marijuana. Knowledge is tyranny’s biggest enemy. In the 2008 election, the Michigan voters showed, no matter how thick the government lays on the propaganda, nothing can cover up the truth about marijuana as medicine.

-2008 MICHIGAN ELECTION RESULTS-

MEDICAL MARIJUANA (YES)

3,008,980 63%

MEDICAL MARIJUANA (NO)

1,792,870 37%

BARACK OBAMA 2,875,308 (57%)

JOHN MC CAIN 2,050,655 (43%)

-MICHIGAN COUNTIES WON-

MEDICAL MARIJUANA (YES) = 83 (100%)

MEDICAL MARIJUANA (NO) = 0 (0%)

BARACK OBAMA 48 Counties (57%)

JOHN MC CAIN 35 Counties (43%)

In 1937, when marijuana was outlawed against the American Medical Association’s recommendation, cannabis was a component of at least 28 patent medicines made by many pharmaceutical companies still in business today. This national prohibition not only removed cannabis from use as a medicine, but has also produced the social wreckage of 20 million arrests (with an additional 2,200 arrests daily) and today’s pot prohibition bill to taxpayers approaching $25 billion annually.

With the ever-growing national realization that cannabis is one of “the safest therapeutically active substances known to man…”, the American people are taking back their rights to cannabis as medicine, one state at a time. Starting in California in 1996, thirteen states (eight states via voter initiative – five via state legislation) have now taken back their rights to marijuana as a medicine. After this week’s massive victory in Michigan, it is a clear sign that this culture war over medical marijuana is finally over, and the American people (and science) have won—the citizenry refuse to be denied the use of pot in their medicines chest any longer.

President-elect Obama immediately upon taking office should seat a national commission to update the Shafer Commission and bring forward national legislation to address this vital health care and social issue.

- 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.

By George Rohrbacher, NORML Board member

An odometer roll over effect of sickening proportions is about to happen this October: American law enforcement will make its 20-millionth marijuana arrest. Regrettably however, our country will not be one step closer to any solution of this “problem” than we were when the federal government first started arresting people for cannabis seventy-one years ago today, with the first federal cannabis prohibition arrest of Samuel Caldwell.

Halfway through this epoch in American history known as cannabis prohibition, Richard M. Nixon’s own handpicked Shafer Commission studied cannabis for nearly two years and concluded: no criminal penalties for adult possession of 100 grams of marijuana.

Nixon was shocked by their findings and tried to bury the Shafer Commission’s report. Nixon instead proceeded with the “don’t try to confuse me with the facts, I’ve got my mind made up” approach to governance, and the full-scale war on cannabis commenced.

After four decades, this institutionalized war on ganja and its users grows larger with each passing year. This war on otherwise law-abiding cannabis consumers has created literally millions and millions of unnecessary tribulations, taxpayer costs and casualties. In the period 1965-2007* there were 19,342,363 arrests for cannabis offenses, 89% of them for the possession of a small quantity of cannabis. Just before Election Day 2008, cops will arrest their 20-millionth man (or woman) for cannabis.

And if you’re a regular ol’ cannabis consumer or a medical cannabis patient in need of one’s medicine, that tragic 20 millionth arrest could be you!

Could be it be me, or one my loved ones!

At the current pace of arrest, the 20-millionth cannabis arrest will happen by Oct. 10, 2008, within a week of the 71st anniversary of America’s very first federal cannabis arrest of the terminally ill Sam Caldwell in 1937.

Who will he or she be, this unlucky person? Who will be the 20,000,000th victim of arrest during America’s cannabis prohibition?

Watch out! It could be you!

*1937-1965 marijuana arrest data is sketchy, but this adds many tens of thousands more arrests to the total. 2007 was the worst year on record with a total of 872,721 marijuana arrests, up 5% from 2006.

**The numbers of Americans arrested for marijuana offenses now are so huge, perhaps the only way to get a grip on the humanity of this prohibition-driven social disaster, is to think of just a few of the people who have paid the ultimate price since I joined NORML’s Board of Directors in 2004, those who actually lost their lives in the enforcement of cannabis prohibition.

John Walters, Bush’s Drug Czar, appearing on C-Span recently said, “We didn’t arrest 800,000 marijuana users…that’s [a] lie… The fact is today, people don’t go to jail for possession of marijuana. Finding somebody in jail or prison for possession of marijuana is like finding a Unicorn. It doesn’t exist.” Well, Walters is either lying or not reading his FBI Crime Reports, or both. Please, take an extra moment and look through this list of four cannabis prohibition victims to see if you can find a ‘Unicorn’.

1) Jonathan Magbie, RIP: Washington D.C., died Oct. 30, 2004. A wheelchair-bound, 28-year old, African-American paraplegic who needed a respirator to breathe at night. Jonathan was sentenced to 10 days in jail for the possession of one single joint. His mother tried frantically for days to get Jonathan’s respirator to him through the jail’s paperwork. He died on the fourth day of his jail sentence from respiratory failure, just a few miles from the White House, ONDCP, DEA and other multi-billion federal bureaucracies waging a war on cannabis, when in stark reality their war is directed at folks like Jonathan Magbie.

2) Timothy Garon, RIP organ transplant patient from Washington State, died May 1, 2008. Timothy was first on an organ transplant recipient list until a prohibitionist medical administrator busted Timothy off the list because Timothy tested positive for the medical marijuana that had been legally recommended and administered by his own doctor. Timothy died in Seattle while his case was under appeal.

3) Rachel Hoffman, RIP, 23, Tallahassee, Fl was last seen alive on May 7, 2008. After two small quantity pot arrests, and a search of Rachel’s home that found a little more, the cops forced Rachel to go undercover without telling her parents or lawyer, by using the fear of the much more serious charges that might be filed against her if she didn’t do what the police demanded. The cops then placed Rachel on a baited hook and went trolling for sharks. The Tallahassee police department sent Rachel out to try to make a crack and firearms buy. Rachel Hoffman was found dead in a nearby county two days later.

Then there is cannabis prohibition’s first official victim…

Samuel R. Caldwell, RIP, America’s first federal marijuana arrest, Denver, CO, Oct. 5, 1937. Arrested for selling two joints the day federal prohibition laws went into effect and was sentenced just two days later to four years in Leavenworth. Sam died of stomach cancer before his sentence was up. Sam Caldwell, America’s first incarcerated medical marijuana patient!

Just four ‘Unicorn’ sightings from America’s 20-million marijuana arrests…and remember: 872,000 annual cannabis arrests, 2,390 arrest per day, 99 arrests per hour, one every 37 seconds. Just imagine how many more ‘unicorns’ there are, and are you like me when I say I’m insulted that a cabinet level officer in the Executive Branch has to lie to downplay the negative and costly effects of his $25 billion a year bureaucracy’s failure to actual control cannabis cultivation, sales and consumption.

Hey Walters, how about some tax stamps for cannabis consumers just like your friends in the alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceutical industries enjoy?

“We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For.” — Pueblo saying

While the staff at NORML and the NORML Foundation assiduously avoid including funding requests in their blog posts and news alerts, as a NORML Board member I’m asking you to join the other board members and I in helping to expand NORML’s uniquely important educational, legislative and litigation programs—as well as allowing the national office to be as supportive and responsive as possible to the organization’s growing networks of both state chapters and lawyers.

I will be moderating a panel at NORML’s upcoming 37th annual national conference in Berkeley entitled: What If We Arrested 20 Million Americans—And No One Cared?

These public conferences are the most important political gatherings of the year for the cannabis law reform community and I hope you, your family and like-minded friends can join us October 17-19. Conference details found here.

NORML Advisory Board Member and travel author Rick Steves addresses 100,000 @ 2008 Seattle Hempfest

By George Rohrbacher, NORML Board Member

The largest marijuana legalization rally in the world, Hempfest, is held annually on the third weekend of August at Myrtle Edwards Park on the Seattle waterfront. This free marquee event usually attracts well over 200,000 people in attendance and Hempfest ’08, Aug. 16-17, was no exception, if not the record—because the weather on the Seattle waterfront was perfect for a mass gathering! The total number of attendees might well have topped 300,000.

Saturday was blazing hot, or as blazing hot as it can get along the shoreline of Puget Sound. The sky was clear blue and the sun was very intense. As the afternoon progressed, it increasingly reflected off the water onto the crowd, near record amounts of fund-raising “Legalize It!” water were consumed by the crowd. This day was Seattle at its very best—and at its most tattooed—and at its most skimpily dressed.

Thankfully Sunday started off slightly overcast and a notch cooler, because by 4:00pm on the second day of the event, crowds in the 2-mile-long park were so thick that the density of the people on the pathways and the open spaces was virtually the same. The music and the message of marijuana legalization rocked continually all weekend long from the four stages set-up about a ¼- mile apart along the linear waterfront park. At each stage after each band finished playing, and as the next band was setting up, activists, such as myself, Rick Steves, Allen St. Pierre, Keith Stroup, and several other NORML board members, along with a boatload of other fine folks regaled the public about the 71 years of negative societal consequences from the prohibition of marijuana. This was the fifth Hempfest I was privileged to attend as a speaker. My speech topic this year was “America’s 20-millionth marijuana arrest is coming on 10/10/08”. I got to wail away at the bustling crowds on this topic from the three music stages over two days and I spoke at the Hemposium stage on “Abraham Lincoln, Hempster.” Hemp can now rightfully claim 3 out of 4 at Mt. Rushmore!

So, how does all this happen, how does this huge fun and glorious “protestival”, this FREE Hempfest come into being? Dozens of bands playing on 4 stages, dozens of speakers, seminars and demonstrations, put in front of hundreds of thousands people along the gorgeous Seattle waterfront, and ALL FOR FREE? How is this possible? The answer: Hempfest is one of America’s largest All-Volunteer Events! The bands play for free. The speakers speak for free. There are 54 crews, totaling about 1500 volunteers, some working year-round, that make this modern marvel called “Hempfest” happen, from permitting and planning months in advance to picking up the very last piece of paper when all the shouting’s over, it’s the Hempfest volunteers that make this incredible thing happen, and it’s been that way for all 17 years of Hempfest’s existence. The $200,000 for direct expenses, electricity, port-a-potties, etc, come from booth rentals, contributions, and water sales. But the real backbone of the enterprise, is the hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours, that is what brings this marvelous creation, Hempfest, to life each year. Virtually every volunteer I’ve ever talked to, tells me that their involvement, their participation in Hempfest, their contribution to making Hempfest happen is one of the most important things that they did that year. It’s pride. It shows. It shows everywhere at every level at Hempfest.

Three years ago while walking Hempfest, I came upon the command detail of the Seattle Police Department, four sergeants, a patrolman or two, and some important guy with scrambled eggs on his hat. As a grey beard, a former member of the state legislature, a board member of NORML, I stopped to thank them for serving and then quizzed this group on how this detail differed from patrolling the professional football or baseball stadiums with crowds of near the same size. The oldest sergeant laughed and said, “Patrolling Hempfest—a two day event—is like patrolling a Girl Scout picnic compared to dealing with the drunks at Safeco Field, 80 games plus a year.” The whole bunch nodded their heads in agreement. And the sergeant was right, because leaving the encounter only a few minutes later, in a particularly tight clutch of people, someone bumped up against me from the side, and we, immediately, almost instinctively, both apologized, and then moved on, both our good buzz and good nature still intact. Stoners get along, go figure. In the three years since then, I’ve talked to dozens of cops at Hempfest and they have all told me pretty much the same thing—the 200,000 plus stoners are so peaceful, that patrolling Hempfest, as a police detail, is seen by most police as almost a vacation day.

Saturday evening, after I’d gotten done speaking on the mainstage, my son, a family friend, and I were leaving the backstage enclosure. As we walked along the fence near the stage, there in our path was a blue-jeaned butt facing us, and as we passed, the owner straightened up slightly, it was Vivian McPeak, the Hempfest Director. He was picking up trash. Vivian, who had coordinated this huge army of 1,500 volunteers, working non-stop for weeks, was also in charge of the mainstage and had just introduced the band that was playing, had run outside with a trashbag on his free moment. As we walked by, I grabbed my son’s arm, pointed to Vivian, and said, “See, that’s the biggest boss of Hempfest there, picking up trash in the middle of his main stage shift. There’s true Leadership. He leads by example. Hempfest is not only one of America’s largest but one of its finest all-volunteer events.”

So, how many great bands and speakers can you take in the cause of cannabis legalization? How many semi-naked sun worshipers could one watch in two beautiful sun-drenched days? Hempfest is the best place I know of to come find the answer to these kinds of questions. So set your calendar, third weekend in August and I’ll see you at Hempfest ’09, and help us end marijuana prohibition. Come to Hempfest next year and volunteer, or just pick up a sack of trash on our way out, either way, the very act of volunteering warms that spot in your body just above your stomach and just below your heart, the seat of contentment, the seat of real happiness.

Thank you Hempfest for showing the way.

By George Rohrbacher, NORML Board Member

George and Ann Rohrbacher with family in 1988. This photo captures the mid-point in George’s 40 years of cannabis use.

Fatherhood.

It was the fall of 1969, about six weeks after Woodstock, my senior year at the University of Denver. I had just moved into an apartment two blocks off campus. Tuesday, my first day in the new apartment, I’d borrowed a frying pan from the next-door neighbor, a young woman, tall and shapely with long honey-brown hair. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I’d stood out on her porch for several minutes with the borrowed frying pan in hand, stunned.

The next day, on Wednesday evening, I looked up to see someone knocking on my un-curtained living room window—a short guy with wild eyes and a goatee. There was a big, big smile on his face. He held up a nice fat joint pinched between his thumb and forefinger. With the other forefinger he pointed next door. My gorgeous new next-door neighbor had sent him. She wanted to meet me! Did I go? Hell yes!! No one need ask me twice after such inducements.

Minutes later, in her apartment, we fired up that doobie. We had an unbelievably fun time together. Ann, my new neighbor, was not only good looking, but she was smart, interesting, and friendly, too—as beautiful on the inside as she was on the outside. To my eyes, Ann glowed like a homing beacon. I walked her to class on Thursday and wrote her a poem. On Friday, we flew to Seattle to meet her parents. A little over a week later, I asked her to marry me—that was 38 years and many pounds of pot ago.

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