Best wishes and happy travels to one of America’s great authors of music, masters of the performance stage and American highways.

The cannabis law reform movement has never had a better, more honest or longer-serving goodwill ambassador for cannabis consumers as well as a dedicated proponent of hemp as an industrial crop that should be within the ambit of choices for the American farmer. Even on the rare occasion that Willie has been arrested on cannabis prohibition-related charges, the arresting law enforcement officers involved have oddly been embarrassed, giddy and ultimately honored to have the opportunity to meet Willie in person.

On one occasion in Texas in 1995, Willie was arrested for possessing a couple of hand-rolled cigarettes that just happen to consist of cannabis rather than tobacco, and in a totally unlikely scenario the local sheriff was the individual who bailed him out!

To the man who once smoked a joint on the roof of the White House and has donated the proceeds from events like the 2007 Austin Freedom Festival to support cannabis law reform advocacy, on behalf of NORML’s nationwide membership and chapters, as well as the board of directors, thanks for all your help and support for too many years.

Bonus: Check out this great video from Amsterdam last week featuring Willie and Snoop Dogg. I don’t know what your grandfather is doing at the age of 75, but can you imagine how cool it would be if he invited you to his sold-out shows in Europe and on-stage jams with Snoop?!

President Ulysses S. Grant’s timeless observations on:

* An “unjust war”
* Smuggling across our border with Mexico
* “Possession of the weed” and ineffectiveness of prohibition

by George Rohrbacher, NORML Board Member

April 27th is Ulysses S. Grant’s 186th birthday. The man buried in Grant’s Tomb still has insights to share with today’s candidates hoping to serve in the White House, and for all of us who would vote for them.

Grant won an appointment to West Point so he might further his education. He detested the work at his father’s tannery. His aspirations were to become a college mathematics professor. He had no designs on the military as a profession. But as fate would have it, Grant became one of American history’s great generals, commander of all Federal forces the last year of Civil War and, at the age of 46, President of the United States.

While in excruciating pain, broke, and dying from throat cancer, Grant wrote his memoirs in an attempt to leave an income for his widow. His good friend, Mark Twain, published them after his death. They were a huge commercial and critical success, ranking today among the best military autobiographies ever written.

In September of 1845, arriving with the invading United States Army at the Mexican boarder on the Nueces River, Grant reported on the very active business of smuggling. Illegal trade was the town of Corpus Christi’s primary reason for existence. But unlike today, the flow of the 19th century smuggling was from the United States into Mexico, not the other way around! Grant says, “The price was enormously high, and made successful smuggling very profitable. The trade in tobacco was enormous considering the population supplied.” The Mexican government maintained a tax monopoly on tobacco sales, which created a huge black market economic opportunity for those who would take the initiative, break the law, and supply the demand.

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Born the same year in 1970, Earth Day and NORML have grown up side-by-side. Today, millions of Americans will celebrate and be mindful of the basic message of Earth Day: Living in harmony with nature.

Frustratingly, NORML recently discovered through a tip from a supporter and a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that an anti-drug group based in Florida called Drug Free America Foundation (DFAF) in their zeal against anything having to do with cannabis harass major corporations and retailers to stop marketing all products that are made of hemp, books that educate about the plant and even CDs from musical artists that dare mention the word ‘hemp’.

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With all the bleak talk in America about the economy, including record fuel and medicine prices, one would think that elected policy makers and mainstream media would gravitate towards an obvious storyline on this day, April 15—America’s dreaded Tax Day—and that is the tens of millions of Americans who’d happily trade in the government-imposed label of ‘criminal’ for ‘sales taxpayer’.

Who am I referring too? Cannabis consumers like me, and maybe you as well. In fact, tens of millions of American cannabis consumers!

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By George Rohrbacher, NORML Board member

When Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, first strode onto the public stage in 1832 and stepped into American History, he was wearing a pair of hemp pants.

From many points of view, Abraham Lincoln was America’s greatest President. Besides guiding America though the Civil War, the most troubled passage since our nation’s founding, he possessed the keenest intellect of anyone to have ever lived in the White House. He also possessed the greatest understanding of the life lived by the common man of anyone who had been or will ever be elected President. Abraham Lincoln came from the dirt, the death, the toil, and struggle of the American frontier.

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

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

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

More than a whiff of pro-pot comedy will be in the air on April 20 at The Arlington Draft House as Rob Cantrell brings his ‘420 Comedy Hollidaze’ to NoVA.

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If you live in Tennessee please consider attending the first ever ‘Nashville Marijuana Movie Festival’, being held at the beautiful ol’ Belcourt Theatre. This is a benefit event to support NORML’s nationwide cannabis law reform advocacy efforts–including support for pending medical marijuana legislation in Tennessee.

Purchase tickets via the Belcourt Theatre

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Let’s hope for sanity’s sake that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is not as bonkers as so many editors and producers are today in the United Kingdom regarding the issue of cannabis. After foreshadowing his intent last week to re-classify cannabis to fetch a harsher penalty and direct police to make more arrests, Mr. Brown will apparently face a much anticipated advisory report from the highly respected, and rarely unobserved, Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) that, like virtually every major government report or commission review, advises for more, not less tolerance and punitive measures for cannabis consumers.

Will Brown kowtow to this current (and really bizarre) epoch of British media Reefer Madness or respect the ACDM’s logical and pragmatic recommendation not to increase the penalties for cannabis? Why does the British Home Office (and apparently the opposition Tory leader David Cameron as well) continue to pretend The Netherlands–and their ongoing, 35-year positive experience with controlled cannabis sales–does not occur just 95 miles away?

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NORML members have an opportunity to be part of history by hosting and attending special screenings of the comedic documentary Super High Me this April 20th. As you may have guessed from the title, this is a takeoff on the film Super Size Me—only in this case, Hollywood funnyman (and NORML supporter) Doug Benson replaces eating McDonalds with ingesting marijuana. He literally smokes, vaporizes, and eats medical marijuana around the clock for thirty days, all the while undergoing a number of tests to show exactly what the effect of marijuana on the human body is.

Most everyone has read or seen government-funded propaganda or questionable science regarding the health effects of cannabis, so enjoy the humorous exploration therein found in Super High Me (check out a clip).

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