After hours and hours spent mastering FarmVille, you’re ready to upgrade from corn and soybeans to a real cash crop: marijuana. Weeds Social Club, a new game for Facebook, lets you grow and sell pot (and potted) plants online.

The game could eventually serve as a testing ground for new characters or stories to be incorporated into the actual show.

Launched on Monday, June 27, to complement the season premiere of Showtime’s Weeds, the game is just the latest brand extension for Hollywood producers who have already mastered action figures, TV shows, DVDs, apparel and more.

“Social games played on Facebook are the new frontier for film and television tie-ins,” according to Businessweek’s Douglas MacMillan. “This summer, two movies — Disney’s Cars 2 and Fox’s Mr. Popper’s Penguins — and a popular Showtime series will attempt build buzz and some extra revenue by featuring their characters in Facebook games.”

Without Jim Carrey’s comic stylings or Pixar’s anthropomorphic four-wheeled friends, though, Weeds is by far the most controversial project we’ve seen enter this space. Showtime — and, like it, HBO — can often get away with racier material because the content they produce is locked behind subscription models and shielded from the eyes of (most) children. While Facebook doesn’t officially allow kids under the age of 13 access to its network, we know there are millions with profiles anyway.

What are they — and the adults who have also been drawn to this extension — learning from their membership in the Weeds Social Club? The game allows users to buy and grow different strains of marijuana — “from downmarket ‘Schwag Weed’ to the pricier and more (virtually) potent ‘Jamaican Ganja,’” according to MacMillan — before harvesting and selling it.

All of the money that players earn selling their weed to a hooded-sweatshirt-wearing figure in the game can be spent on virtual flat-screen televisions, bongs and more. Andy Botwin, a character from the show, which is entering its seventh season, makes an appearance in the game, performing “tasks that correlate with the storyline from the latest TV episode.”

But the game will serve as more than just another way for the Weeds producers to get attention for their show. It could eventually serve as a testing ground for new characters or stories to be incorporated into the actual show, according to Curt Marvis, the president of digital media at Lionsgate,Weeds‘ distributor and producer. “In the social realm it’s a living, breathing experience,” Marvis toldBusinessweek, “one where you get a fan base of engaged users.”

The game was approved by Facebook and doesn’t break any laws, according to Ecko Code, the creators. Ecko Code, a social-game unit of Marc Ecko’s urban fashion empire, is working on creating games for other Showtime shows, including The Borgias and Dexter.

Unless you want to address marijuana’s illegality and the lives that are shattered by the effects of marijuana prohibition. In that case, the corporate media cannot have anything to do with you, even if you want to pay to broadcast the message of ending adult marijuana prohibition.

Case in point: CBS. At the end of June, CBS’s new internet radio venture, ChatAboutIt.com, contacted NORML. One of our advisory board, Ann Druyan, advertised her podcast in Talkers Magazine, an industry journal for talk radio. ChatAboutIt was interested in hosting Druyan’s show, but Druyan wasn’t interested in the offer.

This is where I come in. I am a talk radio professional, having hosted my show (The Russ Belville Show) on XM Satellite Radio and AM 620 KPOJ in Portland, for almost two years. I have guest-hosted for the extremely popular Bill Press Show in Washington DC. For the past year and a half, I have hosted NORML’s Daily Audio Stash, the organization’s daily news and interviews podcast. I contacted ChatAboutIt to discuss creating a new live talk radio show dedicated to this incredibly popular phenomenon around medical marijuana and marijuana legalization called NORML SHOW LIVE.

Throughout the negotiations, the salesman from ChatAboutIt was fantastic. He joined me and NORML’s executive staff by conference call. We emphasized that we are NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. We told them that we would have advertisers involved with promoting marijuana - legally, as they are co-ops and dispensaries in California and Colorado – marijuana-themed magazines, doctors, clinics, authors, musicians, and so on. We told them we would be talking about marijuana legalization, our web page would have marijuana leaves on it, callers would be talking about marijuana, and, oh, by the way, did we mention that the show was about marijuana?

It’s all good, we were assured by the salesman. He said he’d run it all by his VP and this was fine. He said we’d own all our content and we could run all our ads. We verbally agreed this was a go and all we needed to do was to raise the $6,000 necessary to pay for the first two months of broadcast. We explained that we’d need to produce some press releases to raise the money. To be sure we weren’t saying or promoting anything in any way that CBS would not approve, we submitted our release to CBS, which did make some changes. They approved of our revised release and we posted it on the NORML Blog and front page on Wednesday.

Thursday morning I receive a call from the salesman at ChatAboutIt. “People higher up” had seen the release “on the blogs” and they “will not green light your show”.

Now, CBS has all the right in the world to decide what to put on their airwaves or cyberstreams; I’m not crying “censorship”. If they want to pass up affiliation with the most recognized brand in marijuana and a professional live call-in show dealing with the hottest topic in the media, that’s their call.

What I am crying, though, is “hypocrisy”.

CBS's Showtime is airing the fifth season of "Weeds"

See, CBS owns Showtime. That very same Showtime that’s aired for the past five years the tale of Nancy Botwin, suburban pot-dealing mom on Weeds. A show that films many scenes in the legal marijuana clinics and dispensaries in California that would be our advertisers. A show that just this year signed contracts with NORML to allow display of our trademark in the scenes where it is shown in Weeds.

And it cannot be that CBS is OK with airing a dramatic interpretation of marijuana culture, but afraid of airing a serious news program about marijuana culture. CBS News has an entire web special feature entitled “Marijuana Nation” (not-so-coincidentally the tag line of NORML SHOW LIVE) devoted to all their news coverage about marijuana dating back to Mike Wallace in 1968.

CBS will show Weeds to make money off of people who like marijuana, but won’t allow its banner advertisements for Weeds to be seen on any website trying to keep those marijuana lovers from arrest and a criminal record. CBS will pepper their news coverage and websites with cannaporn* and cannabusiness, but won’t allow a non-profit organization attempting to legalize those industries to have a voice on their networks.

Case #2: In addition to hosting NORML’s podcast and social blog, I am NORML’s Outreach Coordinator. In this position I recruit activists from all across the country (even the US Virgin Islands) to organize NORML chapters. These independent affiliates host events, gather petition signatures, and provide education to the community to counteract the anti-marijuana propaganda from the government (such as our “drug czar” recently proclaiming – in California, no less – that “Marijuana is dangerous and has no medicinal benefit.”)

I was contacted by the tour manager for the “Blazed and Confused” Tour. The artists performing in the most pro-marijuana concert of the summer are Mickey Avalon, Bob Marley’s son Stephen Marley, San Diego rockers Slightly Stoopid, and Snoop Dogg, probably the most recognizable person alive associated with marijuana aside from Willie Nelson. They, particularly Slightly Stoopid, wanted NORML chapters to host marijuana information tables for the concerts and offered us the opportunity for free.

Pot leaf skull at Blazed & Confused tour at NBC Universal's Hard Rock this Saturday

I combed through my chapter listings and got them NORML booths for over half the shows. At the show in Portland I got to interview Miles from Slightly Stoopid and wander around backstage. The props for the Stoopid show were two massive five foot skulls with pot leaves on the forehead. Snoop’s show featured a huge backdrop reading “Tales from the Crip” and marijuana leaves were all around. Everyone performing at or attending this concert was very pro-marijuana legalization.

Yet this morning I’m contacted by the tour people who tell me they need to cancel the booth we have scheduled for the show last Saturday in Orlando. It seems the venue is the Hard Rock, and “because they are a Universal owned company they are much more conservative than your typical venue.”

Available from NBC Universal

This Universal, of course, is NBC Universal, the parent company to the MSNBC and CNBC networks that reported their highest ratings ever for their marijuana-themed news reports on the burgeoning cannabis business in California. The same NBC Universal that is happy to sell you Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie, Dazed & Confused, and Half Baked on DVD. The same NBC Universal that has no problem allowing Snoop Dogg to get the crowd at the Hard Rock in Orlando to chant “Legalize It”, but somehow can’t let a couple of college kids in NORML T-shirts hand out educational fliers about why we should legalize it.

Case #3: Another marijuana legalization organization, Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), produced an excellent TV ad calling for passage of a bill to tax and regulate cannabis for adults. The governor had recently called for an open debate about legalization and MPP created this thirty second ad to begin that debate:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Certainly a sober and non-sensational way to debate the issue. Yet when MPP offered the ad to California stations, Los Angeles’ KABC (ABC) and KTTV (FOX), San Francisco’s KGO (ABC), and San Jose’s KNTV (NBC) refused to accept the ad. KNTV said their standards department wouldn’t approve the ad. KGO issued an official “no comment.” KABC and KTTV didn’t even bother give the courtesy of a “no comment” – they would not respond to MPP’s inquiries.

I’ve detailed NBC’s and CBS’s profiting from cannabis culture. You’d think ABC, being a part of the Walt Disney Corporation, would generally shy away from profiting from cannabis culture. But a little digging shows they own Miramax films, which this year released Adventureland, a comedy about teenagers smoking and dealing weed while working at an amusement park and in 2001 offered Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, the adventures of two inveterate stoners who wrote a stoner comic book. FOX for eight years aired That 70′s Show, a ratings hit whose signature sight gag was teenagers sitting in a smoke-filled basement passing around a joint or bong (never seen, however), with the camera focusing on each character as they “passed the dutchie on the left hand side”.

So it is OK for the corporate parents of CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX to profit from movies and TV shows that satirize marijuana culture, but they have a “standards and practices” problem with their broadcast affiliates showing 30 seconds of a 38-year-old woman suggesting we should tax and regulate marijuana.

Keep in mind in these cases, we are talking about one part of the big media company raking in huge profits with shows about the marijuana community, while another part of the big media company refuses the free educational fliers, paid advertisements, and pay-to-play broadcasts BY AND FOR the marijuana community. Marijuana is the modern day minstrel show – we’re allowed on the air as long as we keep on our “greenface”, shuck and jive (or would it be “smoke and pass”?), and never forget our proper place.

By the way, the NORML SHOW LIVE mentioned in Case #1 will still be going on the air, as promised, on Labor Day Weekend. Unlike CBS, we keep our promises to our customers. The money raised will go into promotions and producing our show through the facilities of BlogTalkRadio.com, which was happy to accept our business, and quite frankly, offers us a better production technology at one-sixth the price. Tune in every Saturday Night at 9pm Eastern for two hours of intelligent discussion about marijuana legalization.

* Cannaporn is the news specials that like to show lots and lots of pictures of big green sticky buds and the people smoking them, usually the same stock footage they’ve run for years with the most stereotypical “stoner” types they can find, lots of pictures of bongs and tie dyes, some b-roll from a music festival, or body-armored police helicoptering in to chop down marijuana plants, while intoning the reefer madness du jour about increased potency, psychosis, or clandestine cartel grows and violence that wouldn’t exist in a legal market. In other words, not what you will find on NORML SHOW LIVE.

Despite the glamorization on the hit Showtime series ‘Weeds’, flashy documentaries on CNBC delving into the business side of California’s multi-billion dollar annual cannabis industry derived from Californian’s unprecedented 13-year old legal access to medical cannabis products—qualifying patients in the state (and there are hundreds of thousands of them currently) can access high-quality medical cannabis via 24/7 vending machines in cities like Los Angeles—is Rhode Island the little state that is saying ‘yes we cannabis’ the loudest via their legislature?

‘Californication’ Of Cannabis
While California is clearly at the vanguard of implementing major legal and policy changes in seeming conflict with the federal government’s 72-year old cannabis prohibition laws, in fact little ol’ Rhode Island is on the precipice of effectively breaking the federal government’s ban on the cultivation and sale of cannabis by joining New Mexico as the only states favoring medical cannabis laws to have state-sanctioned medical cannabis cultivators and retail outlets for qualifying medical patients.

While there are an estimated 1,800-2,000 medical cannabis dispensaries (or in the new post Mentch parlance, cannabis wellness centers) in California alone, few of them are genuinely, legally sanctioned under state laws to sell cannabis in a retail environment. However, this blooming of cannabis wellness centers in California has happened under the full view of law enforcement, state policy makers and the public health community. Californians have ‘Main Street’ access to cannabis in many parts of the Golden State, which has evolved entirely organically—in other words, the mores and values of most Californians largely accept cannabis use, whether for recreational or medicinal purposes.

A recent Field poll of California voters affirms this with 56% support for outright legalization.

In Rhode Island, there is no highly refined ‘cannabis culture’, or longstanding public cannabis law reform efforts to speak of—unlike Californians that have publicly debated ‘legalizing’ cannabis on numerous statewide ballot initiatives and legislative proposals going back to the early 1970s—yet, Rhode Island’s legislators, from both parties and chambers, in opposition to the Governor and numerous federal government’s anti-drug bureaucracies (i.e., DEA, ONDCP, NIDA, DOJ, FBI, etc…) first passed a ‘self-preservation’ medical cannabis law two years ago [a ‘self-preservation’ medical cannabis model is defined as a qualified patient, for which a severely limited number of medical ailments qualify for cannabis use (i.e., Cancer, AIDS, Glaucoma, Epilepsy and MS), can legally possess or grow a small amount of cannabis; there is no legal retail access to cannabis, seeds or plant cuttings (clones)].

The Little State That Says To Washington: ‘Yes We Cannabis!’
However, Rhode Island legislators, only two years after passage of the original medical cannabis laws, recognized that a self-preservation model is inadequate to serve the needs of sick, dying or sense-threatened patients who need whole-smoked cannabis and edibles. Again, in full opposition to the Governor and federal agencies, overrode their second veto to establish Rhode Island as the first bona fide state to legally sanction and license third parties to cultivate and sell cannabis (in the case of Rhode Island, the recent medical cannabis legislation has provided initial approval to three medical cannabis wellness centers for the entire state).

While New Mexico may have officially been the first state to pass legislation in 2007 that allows for the state-sanctioned distribution of medical cannabis to qualified patients, the medical cannabis program has been very slow to get-off-the-ground, and to date has issued a single permit, and no medical cannabis is expected to be lawfully sold in New Mexico for at least another 6 months to a year. Rhode Island, at its current breakneck speed of passing pro-medical cannabis law reforms, will very likely be the first state out of the gate to effectively end the federal government’s complete prohibition against cannabis distribution by cultivating and harvesting a crop of medical cannabis by early fall.

The Major Legal and Policy Implications Sparked By Rhode Island
If past serves as prologue, under the prior four presidential administrations (Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush), their Departments of Justice most certainly would have raced to federal court and sought to have any state law that allowed medical cannabis to be cultivated and distributed found to be in clear violation of the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, The Single Convention Treaty of 1961 (the international treaty that effectively made cannabis illegal throughout the world) and stare decisis.

Even numerous full-throated law reformers would concede the strong position the federal government had attained after eight decades of zealous enforcement of anti-cannabis laws.

However, Rhode Island’s challenge to the federal government’s cannabis prohibition becomes increasingly interesting to political observers and policy wonks in light of President Obama’s decidedly different take on the latitude he is comfortable providing states to craft their own medical cannabis laws.

To wit, 1) Attorney General Holder indicated in February that the DEA is no longer going to target and harass state compliant medical cannabis providers in states that adopt medical cannabis laws, and 2) In May, the executive branch issued a memorandum, interestingly entitled, ‘Preemption’ to all federal agency heads, in effect instructing them to no longer oppose states (or their voters) seeking greater autonomy to pass laws that may possibly be in conflict with federal laws (i.e., medical cannabis laws, etc…), and to only oppose them if there is a positive conflict with federal laws resulting in genuine risks to national security.

While it is hard to swing a dead cat in the Los Angeles-area these days without hitting the cued up patrons of medical cannabis wellness centers, Rhode Island looks to be the very first state to officially end cannabis prohibition, and the feds appear ready to stand down.

Now, if you’re a cannabis consumer or lover of liberty, this is ‘change’ one can believe in!