One’s very first impressions of Steve Bloom’s and Shirley Halperin’s Pot Culture, An A to Z Guide to Stoner Language and Life are of extremely high quality publishing, immense and comprehensive review of pot culture and a passion for cannabis.

Said with a degree of cocksureness, there are not too many people in the world the director of NORML would fear in a ‘pot culture’ quiz, however, I quiver at the prospect of facing Bloom and Halperin in such a contest! I’d be hard pressed to identify a better written and published pro-cannabis polemical, especially its ability to chronicle pot culture through the lens of pop culture, notably the entertainment industry.

The expansive photos, nifty graphics, along with Steve Marcus’ eye-catching cartoon art are of immense high quality, reflect the authors’ mastery of subject matter and demonstrate genuinely hard publishing work (the photo credit work alone appeared to be a full time job). Abrams Image, the book’s publisher, has produced a publication equal to the authors’ passions.

One of the book’s features I particularly like are the numerous celebrity guest contributions and commentaries, among the many:
-Adrianne Curry writes about ‘How to hide the smell’
-Kal Penn opines on ‘Playing a movie stoner’
-Melissa Etheridge on ‘Medical Marijuana’
-Tommy Chong writes the book’s introduction
-Jonah Hall demonstrates ‘How to make apple pipe’
-Redman teaches ‘How to roll a blunt’
-Matthew McConaughey ‘Talking Dazed’

Written in an easy to read A to Z format, there are virtually no ‘stoner’ questions left unanswered, from ‘when did 4:20 start?’ to ‘what are the most stoner-friendly movies and TV shows?’ Pot Culture ably melds pop culture, politics and activism into a very informative and entertaining mix—not usually an easy task for a polemical, but Bloom and Halperin pull it off well.

Steve is a lifetime member of NORML and a frequent contributor to NORML’s daily podcast, Daily AudioStash.

Upon completing Pot Culture I came to a familiar affirmation regarding cannabis prohibition: The more the government prohibits cannabis, rejects law reform efforts, spends tax dollars on enforcement and tries to suppress pot culture, the more the pot subculture (and economy) flourishes, expands effectively unabated and is ever-increasingly being embraced by mainstream media and culture.

Along with a pleasant, informative and comprehensive tour de force of the intersection of cannabis and commerce, Bloom & Halperin’s Pot Culture profoundly demonstrates the resiliency of cannabis consumers in the face of a historically alcohol-dominant culture and so-called stoners’ abilities to create a nurturing and sustained pot culture.

Interested in reading Pot Culture? You can do so and join NORML’s law reform advocacy efforts at the same time. Nice twofer!

Happy Birthday Lester from everyone at NORML!

For the past 7 years the Louisville Late Night TV Show has been celebrating the past, present and ongoing profound contributions of Harvard Medical School Professor Dr. Lester Grinspoon, M.D, (retired) to stop the arrest of responsible marijuana smokers and advance the use of marijuana as a medicine with their annual Louisville “Lester Grinspoon Day.”

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By George Rohrbacher, NORML Board Member

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

Fatherhood.

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

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

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

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A three-judge panel of the California appeals court in San Diego heard oral arguments on Tuesday, June 10, on the suit earlier filed by the counties of San Diego and San Bernardino against the state of California and San Diego NORML, claiming the state medical marijuana law was in conflict with federal law and therefore unenforceable. San Diego and San Bernardino Counties are appealing the earlier dismissal of their suit by a San Diego Superior Court judge, finding the state had acted properly.

San Diego NORML had been named in the lawsuit because the group had publicly threatened to sue the county for failing to implement the state’s medical marijuana law, Proposition 215 and SB 420. San Diego NORML was represented in this matter by Adam Wolfe, Esq., staff attorney with the ACLU Drug Law Reform Project based in Santa Cruz, CA.

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One of the only things that makes me madder than seeing the day in, day out waste of public resources and abuse of citizens’ rights associated with pot prohibition are some of the absurd stepchildren born of the government’s zeal in trying to enforce cannabis prohibition laws, quash popular culture and stymie entrepreneurialism.

Case in hand, a federal bureaucracy, the US Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau is harassing a family-owned microbrewery in Northern California for some creative marketing, while looking the other way regarding the advertising practices of a huge, politically powerful beer company.

Treasury technocrats are taking umbrage with the Mt. Shasta Brewing Company’s use of bottle caps imprinted with ‘Try Legal Weed’, claiming that beer (AKA a drug) can’t have a drug reference, even when the reference is the name of the brewery’s hometown and last name of the city’s (Weed, California) 1880s wood baron founder (Abner Weed).

Mt. Shasta Brewing Company’s already sold 400,000 brews with names like Shastafarian Porter and Mountain High IPA (an additional catchy slogan on these notable craft beers: ‘A Friend in Weed is a Friend Indeed’), and had started printing up an additional 400,000 bottle caps in February when the feds put the kibosh on these funny and effective marketing double entendre.

Vaune Dillmann, Mt. Shasta Brewing Company’s 61-year-old owner and a former cop, irked by the government’s heavy handedness and lack of a sense of humor, is vexed by the obvious double standard that the feds don’t harass Budweiser for their now ubiquitous slogan ‘This Bud’s for you’.

Dillmann tells the LA Times’ Eric Bailey, “They Sell Bud. We Sell Weed”.

The ‘Weed’ beer debacle reminds me of a another recent and equally absurd government effort to ‘protect’ citizens from marketing imagery prohibitionists and well intending public health officials don’t like…

Mainstream Media is Finally Catching On Regarding Law Enforcement Excesses and Human Tragedies Associated With Cannabis Prohibition

I spoke extensively last week with Willamette Weekly’s James Pipkin and on Monday with ABC’s Marcus Baram about NORML’s monitoring and gathering case examples from around the country where medical patients, notably medical marijuana patients, are being denied organ transplants. Marcus’ and James’ articles continue to cast more needed antiseptic light on this disturbing public health practice of official discrimination against otherwise lawful medical cannabis patients.

Heads up: Additionally, the Willamette Weekly has exposed the tragedy that confronts medical patients in Oregon — that no hospital in the state will perform organ transplants on patients who test positive for cannabis, even if they are in compliance with the state’s medical marijuana laws and are in the state’s medical marijuana patient registry.

Like the recent tragedy in Tallahassee regarding the tragic death of 23-year old Rachael Hoffman resulting from her being recruited as a ’snitch’ for the local narcotic officers, the general public and maybe more importantly the general news beat media (AKA, mainstream media) have started to really bore down hard on the human tragedies that arise daily from cannabis prohibition–both in criminal enforcement of the laws, as well as how the prohibition trends upwards into important public institutions, such as in the delivery of medicine to sick, dying or sense-threatened medical patients.

Via our voices, collective consciousness and continued effective uses of employing empowering communication mediums like the Internet (i.e., webpages, podcasts, blogs, online videos and active online social networking), we can advance the long held goal and belief that an informed general public is the best path forward to ending cannabis prohibition may now finally be upon us.

I was heartened to see the Ventura Star editorialize against denying medical marijuana patients access to organ donor banks.

As the saying goes: We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!

Let’s keep the collective pressure on the media, opinion and policy-makers to replace prohibition laws with viable, and common sense-based public policy alternatives.

Thanks to CA NORML’s Dale Gieringer, Ph.D and NLC member/2008 Aspen Legal Seminar faculty Doug Hiatt, Esq. for getting into the ABC news article!

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Actor, TV’s ‘Price is Right’ host and libertarian activist Drew Carey casts some anti-septic light in the direction of a drug prohibition-related case for ReasonTV that features a father protecting his daughter, our country’s drug war-fueled criminal justice system and the death penalty.

I first read about this troubling case from Mississippi in the war on some drugs in 2006 in a column written by Reason editor Radley Balko.

Read and watch more here.

The Tallahassee Police Have Much To Answer For Regarding The Murder Of Rachael Hoffman

For the last few days I’ve receive email from the Tallahassee area from NORML supporters claiming to either know or be friends with Rachael Hoffman, that she was busted a few weeks ago and accused by police for selling a small amount of cannabis and possessing MDMA was squeezed by local police to become a snitch, and that, disturbingly to them all, she had been missing for a few days. They were genuinely in fear of her life.

In the last 48 hours, police arrested two suspects in Rachael’s disappearance, and early yesterday she was confirmed murdered.

Today, as the general public around Tallahassee and Florida learn more about how the police used this young woman for controlled drug buys, the public comments found online and on local radio talk shows demonstrate terrific outrage directed towards the police.

Thankfully.

I spoke with Rachael’s mother Margie Weifs late yesterday afternoon. Talk about a difficult conversation. What do you say to a mother who has just found out that her only daughter is dead? A beautiful daughter dead not at the hands of cannabis, but the police agency that chose to bust her for pot (or, as Tallahassee law enforcement are calling pot in this case, narcotics), wire her and send her towards men who were reportedly buying and selling hard drugs, actual narcotics, to ensnare them for future arrest and prosecution?

To say that Rachael’s mom is not confused, angry and wanting answers to this terrible tragedy in Tallahassee would be a woeful understatement. After the answers, she tells me she wants justice in this case.

Watch the video of Tallahassee’s Chief of Police here trying to explain why getting murdered was Rachael’s fault, not the police’s. Further, watch here the Police Department’s Public Information Officer get grilled by Florida media about police procedures.

Did the police follow proper procedure in using Rachael for controlled buys? See the Tallahassee Police’s ‘rules and procedures’ for using snitches here and here.

There is an outpouring in Tallahassee from Rachael’s friends and family to try to heal, and then to organize against both the recruitment of young girls by police to be wired confidential informants and the general prohibition of cannabis.

In Margie’s view, her daughter would be alive today, going into a Mother’s Day weekend, but for a country that does not tax and control cannabis.

Ms. Hoffman is hardly the first young person induced by police to set up other possible illicit drug users who has been killed because they’d hoped their cooperation with police was going to lead to some modicum of deferential treatment from the prosecutor’s office.

PBS’ Frontline examined the disturbing and increased use of confidential informants by federal and local law enforcement in the award-winning SNITCH. But, unfortunately from my biased viewpoint, few in the mainstream media have cast light on police tactics in their daily and futile efforts to enforce prohibition laws (an exception here is the reporting of Reason Foundation fellow and Cato Institute researcher Radley Balko).

Health and Self-Preservation Tip: If law enforcement ever approach you (or a loved one) regarding a cannabis-related offense, and then seek to recruit you to became a confidential informant or a snitch, ‘just say no’ as your life (or that of a loved one) may be in danger.

A number of phone calls and emails to NORML this afternoon strongly indicated that federal law enforcement raided a number of companies yesterday and today that manufacture and/or market what are commonly known as ‘detoxification’ products. The target of SWAT-like teams was records and computer equipment.

That is story #1 as there are no federal laws that ban ‘detoxification’ products.

However, more oddly in my view is the reported confiscation of the unreleased DVD ‘A/K/A Tommy Chong’. How is that possible? Even if Tommy (a member of NORML’s Advisory Board) agreed in his 2005 plea bargain on federal paraphernalia charges to ‘not profit from his past criminal activities’ it seems unlikely to me federal confiscation of otherwise First Amendment-protected speech and expression could possibly be legal. Especially, on the heels of Tommy already publishing a best-selling book detailing his nine month incarceration in federal prison, the humorous and insightful ‘The I Chong: Meditations From The Joint’.

So, if I understand correctly, the federal attorney who first prosecuted Tommy in 2005, Mary Beth Buchanan, authorized some of these raids and the confiscation of the Chong DVDs, which are about…well, her prosecution of Tommy and his resulting incarceration.

OK…

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On April 29, 2008 House of Representative’s Committee on the Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) sent a 17-page letter to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Acting Administrator Michele Leonhart with pointed questions, a listing of over 60 medical marijuana dispensaries or patient cooperatives that have been raided by the DEA and federal law enforcement between June 2005 to November 2007 and numerous citations from local municipalities that are on the record of supporting patient access to cannabis and oppose federal intervention.

Excerpt from Conyer’s letter to Leonhart:

“Every month new science supporting the therapeutic value of cannabis is published. As a result, medical and scientific organizations, like the American College of Physicians and the American Psychiatric Association, are urging reform of laws that place in legal jeopardy physicians or their individual patients who may benefit from the use of cannabis. As the Administrator, you have the discretion to decide whether to continue heightened enforcement activities in California and in other states that have authorized the use of medical cannabis by qualified individuals. Please explain what role, if any, emerging scientific data plays in your decision-making process to conduct enforcement raids on individuals authorized to use or provide medical cannabis under state law.”

Read the entire letter and list of raided medical marijuana dispensaries and cooperatives here.

Let’s hope the DEA’s answers are as illuminating as the questions being asked by Chairman Conyers.