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.

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”.

As my eyes moved down through the text of the Post story, in this horrible tragedy, I began to see how easily this loss could have been my own. Jonathan was the very same age as one of my sons. When I finished reading and I looked back up at Allen, there were tears streaming down my face. The Washington D.C. courts could just as easily have killed one of my own sons! And over what??? I screamed…Over what??? Jonathan had died in the hands of our government over one single friggin’ joint!!! Jonathan’s family had faithfully cared for him, all his 28-years, despite the horrendous health complications of being paralyzed below one’s chin. But, after just four days in the care of Washington DC’s jailers, they had killed him!

No one took responsibility for the death of Jonathan Magbie. With the help of the ACLU, Mrs. Scott, Jonathan’s mother, successfully sued Washington DC and was recently granted a large undisclosed award. But, as any parent can tell you, no award could ever compensate for the lost of a child.

And, why, oh why, was Jonathan arrested and put in jail, in the first place? MARIJUANA.

Jonathan was just one of the 20-million Americans who’ve been arrested on marijuana charges, and 89% of them, just like Jonathan, for a very small amount intended for personal use. Bush’s Drug Czar, John Walters, recently claimed that jailed marijuana offenders are as rare as unicorns. Well, what about Jonathan Magbie, the Patron Saint of Unicorns, who died for one joint, jailed just blocks from the White House and Drug Czar’s very own plush and cozy office?

The Congressional marijuana prohibitionists continue using the Barr Amendment to tell Washington DC’s voters to take their will and “shove it”. These beltway prohibitionists encourage local D.C. judges that they want to see a lot see more of that good old ‘Retchin justice’. You say a 69% voter approval rating for medical marijuana in D.C.? Well—screw that!! Congress’ pot prohibitionists, like the Republicans’ minority leader, couldn’t care less if DC’s voters had given the measure 99% approval. The arrest, conviction, sentencing and subsequent death of Jonathan Magbie is the ultimate implementation of the Barr Amendment. Jonathan’s blood is on the hands of all members of Congress who voted for it.

The War on Drugs is, in reality, a war on the people who use drugs; coercion and incarceration, the prime tools of the trade. As a way to demonstrate just how tough the courts are with those ‘so-called medical marijuana patients’ in our nation’s capitol, Judge Retchin decided, paralyzed or not, Jonathan Magbie needed to be taught a lesson. Well Judge, what do you think he learned?

And…what should America learn from the death of this innocent and defenseless young man, Jonathan Magbie, Patron Saint of Unicorns?

THE BALLAD OF JONATHAN MAGBIE
© 2006 George Rohrbacher and NORML

Confined to a wheelchair ever since he was four years old,
The life of President Regan’s poster boy has needlessly run cold.
No matter that Jonathan Magbie was paralyzed below his chin
He got a death sentence for using pot as his medicine.

Over a single lousy joint, he got hauled up before the law,
Ten days in the hole! Judge Retchin hammered with her claw.
Up under the jailhouse this first-offender would be sent,
A-Gasping for air, Magbie’s jailtime would be spent.

Chorus

If Jonathan’s story doesn’t break your heart, you ain’t got one
If this family’s tragedy doesn’t cry for Justice, there is none.
What ya’ gonna’ tell a frantic mom how you’ve killed her son
A casualty in the war that can’t be won.

Demented justice…Judge Retchin’s justice…

Prison life is tough, so much tougher when you’re driving with your chin
Officials pointin’ everywhere, “ain’t my fault we killed poor Jonathan”.
Washington D.C.’s voters said medical cannabis was “O.K.”
And then, our stinkin’ Federal politicians blocked the People’s say.

Slowly drowning in a mucus mess
Jonathan’s dead now, let’s call the drug war a success
So what about jailing a cripple, over a little blunt of weed?
Did this cruel and unusual punishment meet some social need?

Chorus

If Jonathan’s story doesn’t break your heart, you aint’ got one
If this family’s tragedy doesn’t cry for justice, there is none.
What are ya’ gonna’ tell a crying mom how you’ve killed her son
He’s as dead as if you’d shot him with a gun.

Demented justice…Judge Retchin’s justice…wretched injustice

When Jonathan smoked the ganja to make himself feel right,
He puffed away his pain with the safest drug in sight.
That one bud could bring a hurtin’ man, ten un-do-able days in jail,
Then compassion, common sense, and Justice–even human kindness fails.

Burying your child is the hardest thing that’s ever to be done in life.
A death caused by those charged “to protect and serve” cuts deeper than any knife.
We’re left with chains of earthly bondage, now that Jonathan’s been set free,
Let’s ask ourselves, is this the world we want for him, or you and me?

Chorus

If Jonathan’s story doesn’t break your heart, you ain’t got one
If this family’s tragedy doesn’t cry for Justice, there is none.
What ya’ gonna’ tell a grievin’ mom how you’ve killed her son
Another casualty in the war that can’t be won.

Demented justice…our country’s Retchin justice… it’s a wretched injustice

***

Listen to George Rohrbacher read ‘The Ballad of Jonathan Magbie‘ here.

Wedgwood 2009: People of color are arrested and incarcerated for marijuana at rates hugely disproportionate to those of whites. NORML has updated the world-famous anti-slavery medallion produced in 1787 by Josiah Wedgwood. This medallion was the visual symbol of the first successful movement working to end slavery in the world. This image was about as famous, in the 18th and 19th centuries, as the peace symbol is today. Wedgwood produced 20,000 of these anti-slavery medallions. In the campaign to change public opinion on the issue of slavery, the image became a touchstone. The slave trade was finally ended in England in 1807.

NOTE: Josiah Wedgwood’s daughter was Charles Darwin’s mother. Born 200 years ago and on the very same day as Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin’s hatred of slavery shaped his views on human evolution.

The NORML Jonathan Magbie MUSIC CHALLENGE:

NORML challenges other musicians to take this meager effort forward…to write a better song, to record your own version of this song, to perhaps write different music for these words, or produce a hip-hop or rap version, country, blues, or whatever. But—let ART do its part in telling Jonathan’s story.

How can we sit by and not say something about Jonathan Magbie to others? The pain and tragedy of this story is so deep, what else but music could express it? Can you help? Send NORML your recording of “The Ballad of Jonathan Magbie”.

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.”

An Englishman blazed the long torturous path that ran through Abraham Lincoln on to the end of slavery in America. William Wilberforce, as a Member of Parliament, devoted his life, his entire political career and personal fortune to righting one awful wrong: to ending slavery and the abominable slave trade. Wilberforce started his anti-slavery campaign in 1789 with a 4-hour speech to introduce the very first bill ever heard in Parliament that would outlaw the hugely profitable slave trade. This speech is still revered today, 220 years later.

Wilberforce’s slave trade bill did not pass that year, nor the next…nor the next. For 18 years, he continued to re-introduce bills to abolish the vile slave trade before final passage came in 1807. This was humanity’s first real step toward ending slavery, an evil “social institution” that has been with man since the dawn of recorded history. Wilberforce’s revolutionary change in English law threw the full weight of the British Navy against the slave trade on the high seas, and, for perhaps the first time in human political history, social and ethical issues out-ranked economic ones. The British Government eventually paid 20-million pounds sterling to free slaves on British soil. America, instead, paid in blood during the Civil War for its nearly 3,000,000 slaves, whose value, in 1850 dollars, stood at $1.2 billion.

Before the War, an inflamed Georgia State Legislature went so far as to offer a $5,000 reward to any bounty hunter willing to bring a Boston anti-slavery agitator back to trial in Georgia. Imagine the full power of legitimate government in America behind something as wrong as that—you have just imagined marijuana prohibition.

Looking backward, we know unequivocally today that Wilberforce and Lincoln were on the right side of history. Looking forward, we know just as surely marijuana legalization is on the right side of history, as well—and NORML has the facts to prove it. If President Obama would appoint one, a Shafer Commission 2.0 would make that very clear to all the rest of America.

“Drug prohibition is America’s most tragically failed social policy since slavery,” was an observation made by my fellow NORML board member, Jeffery Steinborn, a Yale-educated lawyer who has practiced criminal defense law for over 40-years in Seattle. The insight Jeff shared with me, he said, had originated with Norm Stamper, former Seattle Chief of Police and former Assistant Chief of Police of San Diego. Ever since then, I’ve been wrestling with the pull of Norm’s awful truth. To call slavery a “social policy” is thoroughly correct in this context—yes, America had the choice as a society whether, or not, to allow slavery, just like today we have the choice to end marijuana prohibition. Economic interests of the slaveholders trumped the ideals that founded our country, just as today entrenched interests against marijuana legalization continue to trash those very same founding ideals (try on “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, for starters).

The degradation of our freedoms, the corruption of our police and legal system and the open disregard of law by the general public are a few of the institutional costs of this prohibition. The human costs, the personal costs to the 20-million Americans who have been arrested on marijuana charges, those costs are so high they are near impossible to calculate. Adding to that carnage, America’s patients, denied safe access to medical marijuana, pay the cost in pain and suffering that could be relieved by, “marijuana, the safest therapeutically active substance known to man”. 17,000 scientific studies have been published on the effects of this ancient herb and the human body’s endocannabinoid systems that respond to it. Science falls on deaf ears when it comes to our Congressional “don’t try to confuse me with the facts” marijuana prohibitionists.

All branches of government, state and federal, are in a world of budgetary hurt in the opening days of the Obama Administration; and, this problem is going to get dramatically worse in the coming years. County, city and state governments have reported huge declines in revenues in the fourth quarter of 2008. Sales taxes collections were down 6.5%, corporate income taxes have fallen 22%, and even formerly recession-proof lottery ticket sales are down, from more than 4% in Texas, to down 10% in California. Unlike the federal government who can just grease the presses at Treasury and start printing money, many state governments have a balanced budget as a requirement of their state constitutions. Revenues and expenses have to balance; they must either raise revenues or cut programs—it is just that simple. All 50 states are engaged in a ‘ten-alarm budget fire drill’ at this very moment. Every single fee, tax and expenditure is being re-examined. An example: ten states are currently eyeing a hike in the alcohol sales tax, something that will spread nationwide as the municipal budget disaster deepens. How much longer can American government ignore the $35-billion tax revenue gusher of marijuana legalization?

What kind of a message do we send to our children when we close their libraries and parks due to lack of tax revenue?

Are we too stupid to collect taxes on America’s multi-billion dollar marijuana business?? Our government has listed marijuana as one America’s most valuable agricultural crops every year for over the last quarter of a century—as marijuana will be again, next year. So, when is America going to WAKE UP AND TAX IT!!!??

Marijuana re-legalization must come from Congress, before our states can properly do their job. Otherwise, we get the crazy-quilt of regulations we have today with 13 states and their ‘quasi-legal’ medical marijuana.

While at the same time as creating new tax revenue for state and local governments, marijuana legalization would strike a huge blow for FREEDOM and LIBERTY in America and would significantly reduce CRIME:

*By ending marijuana prohibition, not only would we create new tax revenue streams, but our communities would be able to redirect the $10-15 billion dollars of criminal justice resources annually wasted chasing, arresting and jailing marijuana users and re-dedicate those precious dollars to finding lost children, tracking sex offenders or to catching and convicting rapists and murderers.

*The re-legalization of marijuana in America would prevent the arrest of at least 900,000 people next year from their adding to the more than 20-million already arrested for pot since 1965.

*The re-legalization of cannabis would also allow America’s farmers to grow industrial hemp so that Detroit’s bail-out cars could be produced with domestically grown hemp fibers in their door panels, not foreign-grown, and that goes double for all the hemp in the hundreds of beauty and health food products that line the shelves of our nation’s stores.

It will take great leadership in Congress to put us on the right course and make marijuana legal in America, again. But, the American People are already way out ahead of most politicians on this issue, just take look at the landslide marijuana votes in Massachusetts and Michigan this past November! So—who will be the “William Wilberforce” of the great campaign to end marijuana prohibition?? Which political leader has the guts and foresight to step forward and say: “It’s time to tap a North Slope-sized tax revenue gusher, because it’s time to let the American people and their marijuana go free!”??

Abe Lincoln once said, “Slavery is like having a wolf by the ears, you’re afraid to let it go, and you’re afraid not to.” Today drug prohibition is like having a pitbull by the ears, you’re afraid to let it go, and afraid not to. But ending marijuana prohibition, more than half of all drug arrests, is a very easy thing to do. To re-legalize marijuana all it takes is a simple majority in both House and Senate, and the signature of President Obama… It’s time for a Change!

The parallels between two American social institutions, marijuana prohibition and slavery, are many: 1.) millions and millions of people end up in bondage; 2.) once in the system, you are a marked for life; 3.) a Draconian police state is required to fully enforce laws of either kind; 4.) in bondage, one loses a citizen’s inalienable rights; 5.) both social institutions, slavery and marijuana prohibition, are thoroughly racist from their inception to their operation; 6.) both the slave trade and the marijuana trade create vast profits for the wrong elements in society; 7.) both social institutions deeply divide and scar America, and pray primarily on people of color, breaking their families apart; 8.) neighboring countries involved with the “trade” become destabilized; 9.) the proponents of slavery and marijuana prohibition attract the lovers of incarceration and coercion, who, while defending their flawed and inhumane views from the pulpit and the state house, vigorously resist any re-examination of their “facts” or reasoning; and 10.) both have disastrous long term outcomes for America.

*Vested economic interests who prosper under marijuana prohibition

*Governments overlooking Billions in untapped taxes–
There is sitting silently, a waiting tax gusher, a North Slope-sized gusher of tax revenue just waiting, with at least $35 billion annually begging to be collected. America could start that flow of tax revenue next month—all we have to do is just legalize cannabis!

*The Face of Modern American slavery?
Baltimore, Maryland–60% of the black males aged 18-35 are either incarcerated, under indictment or on parole. (Wall St. Journal)

People of color are arrested and incarcerated for marijuana at rates hugely disproportionate to those of whites. NORML has updated the world-famous anti-slavery medallion produced in 1787 by Josiah Wedgwood.

This medallion was the primary visual symbol of the first successful movement working to end slavery in the world. This image was about as famous, in the 18th and 19th centuries, as the peace symbol is today. Wedgwood produced 20,000 of these anti-slavery medallions. In the campaign to change public opinion on slavery, the image became a touchstone.

The slave trade was finally ended in England in 1807. NOTE: Josiah Wedgwood’s daughter, Susannah, was Charles Darwin’s mother. Born 200 years ago and on the very same day as Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin’s hatred of slavery shaped his views on human evolution.

Harry J. Anslinger is the person most responsible for the arrest of 20-million people in America on marijuana charges. The first Drug Czar (1930-1962) used racial slurs and manufactured news stories to make marijuana illegal in an unsuspecting United States. Anslinger next used America’s political and economic power in the UN and in international treaties to spread the virus of marijuana prohibition around the globe like the AIDS. President Obama’s half-brother, George, just arrested for marijuana possession in Kenya, has Harry Anslinger, the Great Enslaver, to thank for his manacles.

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.

I was seated aft of the wings, watching the flaps extend to slow the aircraft for landing. I noticed from each of the tailing edges of the wing’s struts, there was a little antenna-looking thing, about as long as a ballpoint pen. I wondered, were those things some version of Ben Franklin’s lightning rod? The flight attendants couldn’t tell me, but I collared a pilot and asked him. “You bet,” he answered, “those are kind of negative lightning rods. As the air rushes over the wings, these little rods help drain off any charges the airplane builds up flying. With those little rods dissipating the plane’s electrical charge, they make aircraft far less likely to be hit by lightning.” Yes, kindly old Benjamin Franklin had been looking back at me from the tailing edge of that wing strut, after all.

Ben Franklin was born in Boston, Massachusetts in Jan 17, 1706, in an age dark with superstition and just fourteen short years after the Salem witch trials had been held. Not only were witches seen as real, witches were so greatly feared they were seen as needing execution by pressing, drowning, burning and hanging, or all of the above. Natural phenomena were so poorly understood that the Devil often got the blame for their occurrence. For example, if lightning struck your house or barn, it was seen as a sign that you deserved it. People might stand back let your lightning-struck building burn, as God intended, and work to save only “innocent” buildings around it. Franklin’s revelation, and kite-in-the-thunderstorm proof, was that the lightning in the clouds was the very same stuff as the static electricity created by brushing your hair or rubbing your socks on the carpet, just present in vastly larger quantities. It was also Franklin’s brilliant and revolutionary deduction that one could safely discharge lightning striking a building by channeling the charge down a wire to a rod buried three feet into the ground, still a foundation of today’s international fire protection codes.

By explaining and controlling one of nature’s most fearsome phenomenons, Ben Franklin’s elegant gift to humanity of the knowledge of what lightning really was, swept away before it countless generations of hocus pocus, superstition and ignorance on the subject.

After arriving as a runaway youth in Philadelphia with nothing more than two loaves of bread under his arms while eating a third, and through the full employment of his wits and ambition, by the age of 35, Ben Franklin was a rich man. He was a great success as a businessman, both printer and publisher. Along the way, Ben Franklin also invented franchising as a way to speed the creation of his wealth. By hiring and training the very best and brightest employees he could find, and then sending them off to other colonies with the capital sufficient to set up Franklin-style print shops there, they created a sizable income stream that was sent back home to Philadelphia. Ben was soon financially set up for his new life as one of the great scientists and statesmen of modern history. By the age of 42 Ben retired from business for good. The invention of science has always been regarded as one of mankind’s greatest achievements; Ben Franklin soon became one of the history of science’s great practitioners. At the age of 47, Ben was awarded the Copley Medal, his era’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize in Physics.

In 1787, Josiah Wedgewood produced 20,000 of these medals in porcelan and sent one of them to Ben Franklin, who said he was tormented by doubts while looking at it.

But of all the gifts Ben Franklin left the modern world, one of the most precious and productive, and something he is rarely credited with as its inventor, is the service club, the voluntary association of free people who come together and, by joint action, make their communities better…you know—the Kiwanis Club, Rotary, NORML! Ben Franklin, as a young printer, started such a club, the prototype of all future service clubs and nonprofits. It was called, Junto. They met every Friday night in a room above a tavern. It is during these club meetings where the first lending library came to life, the University of Pennsylvania, the volunteer fire department and the community hospital got their legs under them. Junto was the place where good ideas became community action; this is Ben Franklin’s brilliant organizational legacy that led directly to NORML.

Well, just how well are we modern day folks at NORML caring for Ben’s precious intellectual legacy? First, the Great Experimenter would probably ask, “How is the experiment going?” NORML’s website could connect him with 17,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies in the burgeoning field of Cannabinoid/endocannabinoid research and to 2,500 cataloged articles from the general press on the subject of marijuana.

As a writer, publisher and businessman, Ben Franklin would revel in the world-wide web and its potential. NORML’s website and blog are visited by up to 40,000 people every day, about 3.8 million unique visitors per year. Our website is stocked with over 10,000 pages of closely vetted information on the subject of marijuana, and from our online lending library of information, each day, every single day, the public downloads and prints off, in their own homes and offices, between 1.25-to-1.5 million pages from NORML’s website! That makes it about 10-million pages per week, or 500 million pages per year—all printed off by the end-user without requiring a single postage stamp for delivery!!! (A penny saved is still a penny earned—just as Poor Richard taught us so many years ago.) I think old Ben would be very proud of NORML for this wonderfully frugal, but revolutionary and growing success in the world of information dissemination.

The scientific method and proper intellectual rigor applied to the problems at hand were extremely important to Ben Franklin, all throughout his long life; these are organizational values that have been instilled since the beginning of NORML by our Board of Directors. In addition to our well-known legal tradition and the support of the over 500 attorneys of NORML’s Legal Committee; NORML’s scientific tradition forms the second, interlocking intellectual backbone of our organization. In the nearly 40 years of NORML’s existence, many luminaries in the area of science and science education have served/or are serving on the NORML’s Board of Directors. Here is just a small sampling from the long distinguished list of men and women of science who have helped make NORML what it is today: Dr. Benjamin Spock, M.D., the ground-breaking and best-selling pediatrician; Dr. Andrew Weil, M.D., world-recognized pioneer in alternative medicine; Dr. Kary Mullis, PhD., Nobel Laureate Chemistry 1992, for work upon which is based all DNA replication and cataloguing work that has been done since; Dr. Louis Lasagna, M.D., the first scientist to prove experimentally that the placebo effect was real; Dr. Lester Grinspoon, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus, Harvard Medical School; Dr. John P. Morgan, M.D., Professor of Pharmacology and a noted Pharmaco-ethnomusicologist; and Ann Druyan, President of Cosmos Studios, and co-writer and co-producer with her late husband, Carl Sagan, of the beloved Emmy and Peabody Award winning Cosmos Series for PBS. NORML Board Members, all.

Yes, indeed, I think Ben Franklin would be very proud to have spawned NORML, just as we are, proud to be Ben’s offspring.

HAPPY 303rd BIRTHDAY, BEN! THANKS FOR EVERYTHING! LET FREEDOM RING!

*Thanks to Robert Melamede, PhD for the chart

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!

As it has been long said, all politics is local. Well, politics is personal, too. I, like the rest of America, had the opportunity, for the first time in my life, to vote for a highly qualified black man for President. In casting my vote for Barack Obama, I helped set right something that happened to my family when I was a little kid in grade school—there was a cross burned on our lawn. We lived in Auburn, Alabama during the Montgomery bus boycotts and my dad (a research scientist) and the rector of our church had been talking to “the wrong people”, the Klan wanted us to stop. I’ve been waiting for about a half-a-century for the proper way to say, “fuck you”, to those racist cross-burning crackers and the slave owning culture that spawned the attitude. In casting my vote for President on Nov. 4th, the wonderful catharsis I felt in that act of voting told me this was a perfectly elegant way of doing just that.

In this last election, all across the nation, marijuana, too, got down and personal, winning 9 out of 10 electoral contests, including the stunning, nearly 2-to-1 medical marijuana victory in Michigan, and the huge decriminalization initiative win in Massachusetts. ‘The People’ are way out ahead of their elected officials on marijuana issues. Politics are tidal— and the tide is coming in on the issue of marijuana law reform.

These are very unusual times for the topic of marijuana and media recognition. For many years now, they’ve had a deaf ear to us, or worse yet, spouted the prohibitionist party line. About the only way the media would touch the marijuana topic was a Rambo/SWAT Team piece about the takedown of a grow op with helicopters, night vision goggles and the works—and saying virtually nothing about us, the Market, us, the tens of millions of Americans using cannabis to make our lives better.

But things have changed in a big way just these last few months. Marijuana is now a hot topic!

Stories with in-depth coverage are popping up everywhere. What just happened? Has this current financial meltdown given us a moment of clarity?

Has it not been made plain to practically everyone that we all secretly recognize that marijuana is about the only chronic public ‘problem’ our government can fix almost instantly—something we can readily turn from a people-destroying budget liability into a huge tax-generating asset, simply by a change in the law?!

That’s one reason, I think, marijuana legalization is on Change.org’s top ten things that the public thinks need fixing. That’s a reason, I think, Allen’s St. Pierre’s marijuana blogs on RollCall/The Hill generated more responses than any other blog they’ve ever run, ever. National Geographic has just released a very popular hour-long piece on marijuana. And the parade of mainstream media programs slated for broadcast this January should continue to well educate (probably shock) the general public about the costs and horrors of not cannabis, but, more importantly, cannabis prohibition.

Well, dear NORML supporters (and presumed lovers of liberty), you’ve got one week left—so, get out your video cameras or flash animation programs, enter NORML’s contest, take a swing at $10,000 in cash prizes, and help us make our case to the incoming Obama administration.

Just imagine a world without marijuana prohibition…all the taxes collected and patients cared for, farmers cultivating and industry accessing American-grown industrial hemp, prohibition’s failed and cruel people-destroying program cancelled with its recourses re-directed to rebuild this country (a progress that is called “good governance”). So, where do we start on this process of changing America’s ganja laws?

1) President Obama needs to appoint a marijuana study commission, a Shafer Commission 2.0, to gather the evidence needed to support the required final vote on law reform.

2) The first marijuana decriminalization bill introduced In Congress in 28 years was before the last Congress and a new bill is pending! Congressional hearings on marijuana law reform are coming!

3) When the decriminalization bill is re-introduced into this 111th Congress, then it is up to all of us to effectively lobby for the necessary number of votes to finally change this damn law, and bring home some of the real change America voted for this last November.

NORML’s “What President Obama should know about marijuana?” Ad Contest ends on January 15. The videos will be posted to www.norml.org (as well as to NORML’s Facebook and MySpace pages) January 20 until midnight, Monday, January 26 allowing the public to “vote” for their favorite video ads.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We were married in June of 1970, standing on a hill watching a sailboat race in Puget Sound. Six years later, the first of our four children was born and with him came the start of decades of parental responsibilities. I found Fatherhood to be one of the very best things to ever happen in my life, except perhaps for Grand fatherhood. The marathon challenge of raising children was exactly what Ann and I were on this earth to do. Our three sons and daughter are now 25-to-33-years old. They are the recent graduates of Yale, Lafayette, Colgate, and Cornell. Three of our four children also competed in Division I athletics; and all have graduated from the college they started at, and within four years, too. Two are married and currently Ann and I have four grandchildren.

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Regardless that our marriage was a product of the ‘60’s—flower power and all that—I turned out to be a strict and loving parent. We farm and are in the cattle business. We live on a ranch three miles from our next-door neighbors. When our kids were growing up with no TV, or cable, or Internet to sop up time and attention—we were like families of an earlier era, we talked to each other instead. Our children all learned to read long before they went off to school—because in our family, you read a book if you were bored—or went out to play, or invented a game. Zero time was spent hanging out at the Mall. No school grade lower than a “B” was ever acceptable at our house. And, of course, while living on a farm, there were always plenty of chores to do. Mealtimes at our house were always together. My wife, Ann, and I saw chief among our many jobs as parents was the gradual hand-off, to our kids, of the reigns that controlled their own lives—and we tried to make that hand-off at the very earliest time possible. We were here on this planet to be their parents, not their friends; our job was to prepare them to fly away. We pushed plenty of extra curricular activities: 4-H, sports, etc. Burning off childhood’s energy properly builds strong kids and is the key to every parent’s sanity. At least two sports each per child was our prescription. If not sports then, theater or band. Our simple policy with kids and drugs: NONE. No Beer, Booze, or Wine. NONE. No prescription drugs, no Pot, no Pop—and of course, no Tobacco. The one thing that sets us off from most other parents was we never allowed our kids Caffeine in any form, none. We’ve never let soda pop into our home, though, we do keep tea and coffee to re-supply visiting adult addicts. And, surprise—our four kids, as adults, aren’t addicted to caffeine today. This was our parental drug program: Leave all drugs alone. Be a kid when you are a kid, you are going to have plenty of time to be an adult for the rest of your life.

Another word about the ubiquitous CAFFEINE, America’s one and only true “gateway drug”(if there is such a thing): Caffeine is now available in caffeinated candy and so-called “energy drinks” that are really nothing but sweetened “drug drinks.” Espresso shops are on every corner for a shot of “mini-meth”. Children don’t need any damn caffeine, ever. And kids sure don’t need the 12 teaspoons of sugar and/or corn syrup per glass or the swirl of industrial chemicals that pop is made from—wake up America, this isn’t food for young growing bodies. Young brains and psyches have plenty of internal challenges without “getting a buzz on” in the process. The maturation of the human neurology is a slow and delicate process and psychoactive drugs have no business there. Getting high, in any form, should be treated just like driving a semi-truck or skydiving; it is a potentially hazardous undertaking reserved ONLY FOR ADULTS.

The majority of the people I know who have had real problems with alcohol and drugs got started young—usually sneaking their folk’s booze or prescription drugs when they were 13 or 14 years old. Really bad habits easily get started then, before the competing good habits are firmly rooted. My wife and I were very frank and open with our kids, from the very earliest ages, about the dangers of drugs—about the heroin, cocaine, and alcohol induced nightmares of two of Ann’s youngest siblings, the DWIs that Grandpa got, or the Uncle that had to be lead, in an alcoholic stupor, off to bed every night, or the another Uncle arrested for drunk and disorderly who also got picked up for a DWI and had to call cross-country from jail to arrange for babysitting for his child that he’d left home alone.

As an example of the prophylactic effects of this straight-forward approach had on our children, this metered but raw, unfiltered family reality—one of our sons, because of the alcoholic problems within our large extended family, made a secret pledge to himself not to drink alcohol until he was 21—a promise he kept, while his peers, America’s under-aged college kids, slurped up over 1/5th of our nation’s annual booze consumption. A toxically drunk roommate at Yale pleaded to our son, “Please, don’t let me die…please, don’t let me die…” That roomie lived, but several of our daughter’s schoolmates didn’t, in an alcohol-related disaster at Colgate. My parental observation after seeing our kids go through a total of 16 years of undergraduate education is that ALCOHOL is by far the most dangerous drug on American college campuses—nothing else is even close. At the same time, the evidence continues to show that the worst danger of using pot is simply being arrested for it.

Ann and I both come from large families. Our combined siblings and their spouses (first and second choices) total 29 people, baby-boomers all. We all grew up in the ‘60’s, and, as a group, more than any other previous generation of Americans, we sampled from the full menu of drugs and alcohol. Well, now 38 years later, which substance has proved to be the most dangerous drug for this sample group of 29 baby-boomers? BOOZE wins, hands down, as America’s most dangerous drug! What was our family’s drug wreckage caused by alcohol over the last four decades? Eight of my brother-in-laws and sister-in-laws, nearly 1/3 of our group, have ended up with severe alcohol problems requiring intervention of some type. No one in this entire group of 29, my children’s baby-boomer aunts and uncles, had similar problems with marijuana.

As part of the larger effort to protect our kids while they were growing up in a very rural area (and I do mean rural, until two years ago there wasn’t a single traffic light in our entire county), it was best for all concerned that I be extremely quiet and stealthy about my marijuana use—it was for my children’s safety, so the state or local cops didn’t rob them of a parent by arrest. Our kids are grown and gone now. But today, my primary parental job of protecting my children has changed. Now to best protect my grown children and grandchildren; I must get loud and active and help to change America’s insane, destructive, and counter-productive marijuana laws before one of my offspring or their friends gets caught in this legal meat grinder.

My wife, Ann, during all her child-bearing and rearing years, for our children’s safety used no drugs whatsoever, I mean, rarely even an aspirin—while at the same time, I evolved, leaving alcohol behind entirely, I evolved into a cannabis-only man.

As they were growing up, with all this frankness over the drug problems of aunts and uncles, did my kids know their Dad was using marijuana? Sure, you bet they did—but it wasn’t until they figured it out on their own when they were older. I didn’t use pot in front of them.

Every day I went out to check the cows or hiked into the woods to get high—very much like the millions of middle-aged suburban moms and dads who will be out willfully walking their dogs tonight, walking along, feeling their cannabis in private. But inside families there are very few real secrets that can stay covered for long. So, no matter how secretive I was being about my marijuana use, the kids eventually knew it—plus, come on, they’d seen pictures of their Dad during the ‘60s in the family photo album, and they also could probably could smell it occasionally on my breath. As for my own views on the subject of marijuana—I was silent about them, completely unlike my openness in any other area of my life.

Here I was, an honest, ethical man, devoted to his wife and children, a tax-paying involved citizen, law-abiding in every way, every way except for one—I absolutely refused to let the government tell me I couldn’t use cannabis. But as my kids grew up, I never defended marijuana to them, I just stood quietly by and let the state propaganda machine do its worst, and I trusted that my kids would be able sort out the truth when they got older.

By 1980, the government started confiscating farms and homes all over the country for the growing even small amounts of pot. I stopped raising my own marijuana for the safety of our farm and my family. I’d practically killed myself during very tough economic times during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s holding on to our family farm of 1,100 acres. I wasn’t about to let some over-zealous cop steal our farm over a couple ounces of weed! I started buying my marijuana on the black-market like everyone else and paying that black-market price. For the last 30 years, I’ve been a farmer too cautious to grow his own.
I love the wonderful feeling of well being that the ingestion or inhalation of cannabis vapors gives to me. The active ingredients, the cannabinoids, lubricate my brain in some marvelous and non-toxic way, releasing torrents of thoughts from which I get to dipnet the most interesting. Getting high, sitting on a rock or tree stump out in the woods, communing with the natural world, is a form of sublime and holy meditation for me—something I have done joyously and reverently for nearly forty years now and something I hope to continue doing for the next forty years. Humanity has been cultivating marijuana for its psychoactive effects since the dawn of agriculture. For many thousands of years the Hindus have used the psychoactive properties of cannabis in seeking the spiritual side of life on this earth. They believe cannabis to be a holy sacrament, expressly given to humanity for our use—a similar view can be found in the Bible, on page one, Genesis: 1:29-31: God said, “Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed which is on the face of all the earth…To you it will be meat”(cannabis seeds are 33% protein)…and God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.”

But what about the Partnership for a Drug Free America, etc.? What a sad sick joke these self-righteous, government-funded groups are in our over-caffeinated, pill-popping, alcohol-addled society. America’s athletes and racehorses are on steroids, our society is saturated, dripping with drugs of every description, prescription and otherwise, with more coming on line every day (there are reportedly 400,000 prescription and over-the-counter ‘drugs’ available in America). Every trip to the family doctor is expected to end with a prescription written for some magic substance.

Well, in this environment, what should you tell your kids?

My universal drug safety rule of thumb: 1) avoid all drugs that are toxic and have an easily achievable poisonous dose, 2) also avoid all drugs that give you a hangover and/or withdrawal symptoms. (Cannabis, of course, causes neither; it is truly nature’s gift to humanity, the safest of all psychoactive and therapeutic substances), and 3) Stick to non-toxic natural psychoactive substances.

With our kids all grown up now, all gone from the nest, what about my marijuana-aided walks from years ago? Do I still do them? You bet, every chance I get—at least 5-times a week. I learned something during all those trips out to the woods to get high when the kids were at home: Those walks are very good for my heart, very good for my chronic back pain and bum leg, and very very good for my spirits. Hiking up Badger Mountain to see the mists rising out of Swale Canyon and to hear a red-tailed hawk calling out to me…Or, to see the Sunrise, or Sunset…For some reason, walking, and stretching just works better for me on ganja. I enjoy it more. I appreciate it more. I do it more often. Now, as a farmer pushing 60-years old, I still find myself doing a lot of the very same physical labor I was doing when I was 25-years old. Luckily for me, I live in Washington State; a medical marijuana state after the voters (by a wide margin) trumped our state’s politicians by voter referendum in 1998.

As I see it, the prime ingredients of a long and happy life are good-loving, exercise outdoors, whole grains, fruit, and vegetables, beef and seafood, fresh air, pure spring water, and marijuana.

Our children have all now grown into fine young adults, what do I have to say to them now about marijuana? What will I say to my grandchildren, when they are old enough to have this conversation?

Here it is:

Father’s Day 2008My Dear Ones,

Marijuana has been proven one of the safest therapeutically active drugs known to mankind. I have used it with little or no harm for 40 years. My mind still finds cannabis fun and enlightening after decades of inter-cranial adventures, and, as an adult, should you choose to employ a drug for such purposes, marijuana is the only drug I would recommend. For me, pot is fun and is very easy to walk away from, if need be. Also, cannabis possesses healing properties I’d ever dreamed or suspected possible. And as I continue to age, and I require more healing from my sports and work-related injuries, trusty cannabis helps me maintain my quality and love of life.

Much Love,

Dad (and now Grandpa)

15 years ago my daughter asked me for the truth, the whole truth on this subject. I avoided giving her an answer then, and have been ashamed of myself ever since. Here it is Sweetheart, better late than never.

Since Nixon was president, there have been 20 million Americans arrested for marijuana, casualties of our government’s war on weed. It’s time for America to wake up and fix this problem, it’s time to tax and regulate marijuana. Stop the pot war now! Support NORML & contribute.