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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Seventy-five years after the American people and its representatives in government rejected prohibitionists’ ‘great social experiment’ by repealing alcohol prohibition with the passage of the 21st Amendment, one of the leading anti-libation organizations of that era these days espouses Reefer Madness and pseudo-science.

According to WCTU: “Perhaps the greatest tragedy in the use of marijuana is the fact that the harm is so subtle that it is not realized by the user until severe damage has taken place.”

OK….

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From the cato-at-liberty blog:

This just in… A federal court in Argentina has decriminalized the personal consumption of drugs in that country. According to the court’s ruling, punishing drug users only “creates an avalanche of cases targeting consumers without climbing up in the ladder of [drug] trafficking.”

Last month at a UN meeting in Vienna, Argentina’s Minister of Justice, Aníbal Fernández, said that the policy of punishing drug consumers was a “total failure.”

Thanks to NORML Advisory Board member David Boaz for the tip.

Most of New York City’s millions of citizens, notably elected policymakers and the media from New York City, have no blooming idea that The Big Apple nearly tops the nation’s metropolitan areas in both per capita arrest rates for marijuana and racial disparity in enforcing cannabis prohibition laws. In supposedly ‘liberal’ and ‘tolerant’ NYC for every white person arrested, nine minorities are arrested.

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NORML’s letter to the editor of New York Times, April 15, 2008:

The April 15, 2008 article ‘Marijuana Smokers Were Poisoned With Lead In Leipzig’ is informative and perfectly underscores the need to legally control cannabis via regulation and taxation, rather than failed prohibition policies.

Seeking even higher profits in the already lucrative, prohibition-fueled business of cannabis distribution, untaxed and unregulated cannabis sellers in Leipzig Germany apparently added lead particles to their bags of cannabis to increase the product’s weight and value. This is hardly a surprise to observers of prohibition economics.

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Join Jackie ‘the Joke Man’ Martling (from Howard Stern’s Show) for a special screening of The Wackness (starring Sir Ben Kingsley) at the Roosevelt Field Mall theater in Garden City, April 24 at 8:00PM.

RSVP mandatory: SidneyFalco@falcoink.com

Enjoy!

Ron Fisher
NORML Outreach Coordinator
Washington, DC
ron@norml.org

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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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The arrest and prosecution of a professional, baby boom couple in Pennsylvania helps underscore the genuine waste of taxpayer dollars and overall ineffectiveness of government to stop adult citizens who want to use cannabis, as well as highlight a well known, but underreported fact among millions of victims of cannabis prohibition laws: Punishment in the modern criminal justice system does not necessarily equate with incarceration so much as it does a series of expensive civil fines, taxpayer-funded probation and drug testing services, loss of student loans and employment (and, consequentially therein, income taxes to city and state coffers) and access to health care services (because of an arrest, cannabis offenders typically will go from paying for private health insurance to relying upon taxpayer-funded services or charities).

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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.”