This week we’ve seen three usually staid mainstream media outlets – Newsweek Magazine, the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and FOX Business News – examining the growing movement in California and nationwide to discuss the inevitable re-legalization of cannabis in America.  [UPDATE:Apparently the FOX Business Channel (not FOX News) will have a series called "High Noon" beginning Monday at Noon ET / 9am PT.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Without a doubt the question I’m most often asked professionally is this: “Why is marijuana still illegal?”

The common inference behind this question is that there must be some behind the scenes cabal of Big Pharma, Tobacco, and Alcohol executives conspiring to keep cannabis illegal. By contrast, the real culprits behind pot prohibition are far more overt.

Law enforcement organizations — including cops, district attorneys, prosecutors, prison guard unions, sheriffs, and narcotics officers associations — remain the primary force working against sensible marijuana law reform.

Case in point? Look no further than these two egregious examples:

Los Angeles County D.A. prepares to crack down on pot outlets
via the Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said Thursday he will prosecute medical marijuana dispensaries for over-the-counter sales, targeting a practice that has become commonplace under an initiative approved by California voters more than a decade ago.

“The vast, vast, vast majority, about 100%, of dispensaries in Los Angeles County and the city are operating illegally, they are dealing marijuana illegally, according to our theory,” he said. “The time is right to deal with this problem.”

Cooley and Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich recently concluded that state law bars sales of medical marijuana, an opinion that could spark a renewed effort by law enforcement across the state to rein in the use of marijuana. It comes as polls show a majority of state voters back legalization of marijuana, and supporters are working to place the issue on the ballot next year.

Even prior to the passage of California’s passage of Prop. 215, cannabis dispensaries — the same sort of dispensaries that D.A. Cooley now unilaterally defines as a “problem” — operated openly, and without incident, in L.A. County. Today, over 1,000 such operations exist in Los Angeles. District Attorney Cooley has now arbitrarily declared that “100%” of these dispensaries are acting illegally based not on a court decision, but rather on his own personal anti-pot bias.

Do a majority of public of L.A. county share D.A. Cooley’s view that open market, regulated medi-pot transactions are, in fact, a “problem?” Not at all. Does the will of the voters actually matter to their District Attorney? Not at all.

According to a separate story from the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, D.A. Cooley “was one of dozens of guests at a recent conference … in which the topic was the ‘eradication of medical-marijuana dispensaries in the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County,’ according to a flier advertising the event hosted by the California Narcotics Officers’ Association.”

This, of course, would be the same California Narcotics Officers Association that just last month issued the white paper: “California Police Chiefs Association Position Paper on the Decriminalization of Marijuana.” You can read the entire position paper here (Have a potent anti-emetic handy!), but here’s some excerpts.

“Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, was passed by California voters in 1996 on a ballot initiative promoted by those who subscribe to the idea that all drug use should be legalized.”

“It has become clear, despite the claims of use by critically ill people that only about 2% of those using crude Marijuana for medicine are critically ill. [Editor's note: Predictably, no statements, including this bogus percentage, are actually cited with any supporting documentation.] The vast majority of those using crude Marijuana as medicine are young and are using the substance to be under the influence of THC and have no critical medical condition. … Marijuana is being abused by people who have no serous medical condition and simply like to be intoxicated on Marijuana.”

“Marijuana as a smoked product has never proven to be medically beneficial and, in fact, is much more likely to harm one’s health.”

“The thought of decriminalizing Marijuana or allowing taxation of Marijuana is bewildering. The thought that a group of individuals would want to advocate for decriminalization of a substance that the state of California has deemed to be carcinogenic is alarming. [Editor's note: Alcoholic beverages and aspirin -- along with over 300 other substances -- are also included on California's Prop. 65 list of official carcinogens. I suppose the CNOA would argue that these substances ought to be illegal as well.]

“The use of intoxicating and addictive substances fuels crime and destroys lives by creating addiction and dependency. Children are victims of abuse and neglect at the hands of parents or caretakers who live in addiction. Young adults are particularly vulnerable to addiction. Relaxed attitudes toward drug use place them at greater risk of addiction. Clearly legalization of Marijuana will lead to great use by those who would not use if it were not legal. [Editor's note: Virtually every study on this subject finds just the opposite outcome. You can read summaries from a couple dozen or so here, here, and here.] This increased use will lead to negative outcomes.”

“Much as we see in the use of other controlled substances,
people who become addicted to Marijuana and cannot afford to maintain their addiction will turn to crime in order to supply themselves with their drug of choice.”

“Marijuana is not and never will be good for the success, education, and well-being of our society. When a person examines the two known abused drugs in our society, alcohol and tobacco, from a Public Health standpoint, those two substances would be recommended today to be banned. [Editor's note: And apparently the CNOA would be in full support of such a ban.] The California Police Chiefs Association clearly understands that this will not occur. But, the discussion of Marijuana is important especially in light of the money being infused by the Drug Alliance [Editor's note: Who are they?] and their ability to prey on unsuspecting compassionate people of our great state.”

Who is really behind marijuana prohibition. The answer should be obvious.

Analysis by Richard Cowan

Even though California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has joined the calls for a debate on marijuana prohibition itself, there is still a lot of confusion about the legal status of the supposedly less controversial topic of “medical marijuana”. 

On April 2nd the Associated Press reported that Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton “called on the City Council to speed up the drafting of stricter regulations on medical marijuana clinics, calling current state law ‘Looney Tunes’.” (Oddly, the story was reported on the San Jose Mercury-News website, but the LA Times only covered it in a blog.)

Bratton was right, but for the wrong reasons. He claimed, “They pass a law, then they have no regulations as to how to enforce the darn thing and, as a result, we have hundreds of these locations selling drugs to every Tom, Dick and Harry.”

First, if the dispensaries are selling any “drug” other than cannabis, the police do not need any action by the LA City Counsel to raid them. Find any of them selling hard drugs, and the medical cannabis community will support closing down the offenders.

That is not a rhetorical point. It is important to note that one justification for the dispensary system is that it keeps medical cannabis users from having to go to “street dealers” in order to get their medicine. However, in the broader context of cannabis prohibition in general, the California medical marijuana dispensary system does the same thing that the Dutch cannabis “coffee shop” system has been doing for decades. The Dutch call it the “separation of the markets for soft and hard drugs.” One consequence of this “separation of the markets” is that the Dutch have a much lower use of hard drugs, especially heroin, among young people than does the US.

Inasmuch as marijuana has always been much more readily available to young people than to sick and dying older people, would Chief Bratton really prefer that young people get their marijuana from “street dealers” – who may also sell hard drugs? See T’was Another Great Victory. Teen Marijuana Use Down; Oxy Use Up. Teen Cigarette Use Went Down More Than Teen Marijuana Use.

Second, the dispensaries are not selling to just anyone. They require a special form of identification that establishes the fact that a doctor has approved of the patient’s use of cannabis. (That is all that is required by state law, and – critically – all that is allowed by Federal law.)

“Street dealers” do not require any identification, and most teens say it is easier to get marijuana (on the street) than it is to get alcohol from licensed stores.

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

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