Another former Hempfest speaker trashing Hempfest: Eric Sterling

A few clips from Eric Sterling’s interminable rant against hemp rallies…

About sixteen or seventeen years ago, I was a featured speaker at some hemp rallies. I even had my name silk-screened on a rally T-shirt.

Of course, these rallies are not a debate, at all. Even as a “political” rally or protest, the hemp rally is a hodge-podge of bands, speakers, and clouds of smoke. I am deeply troubled that for much of the public the most common face of the politics of drug policy reform is teenager smoking a pipe at a pot rally. Does it need to be said that this is profoundly counter-productive? Well-meaning and passionate, but immature strategies and tactics keep holding back our movement.

350,000 people gather in a park, smoke marijuana, and nothing bad happens. How in the world is that not by some measure a political success?

We are told that marijuana smoking will make you lazy, yet the pot smokers who put on Hempfest organize a world-class NASCAR-sized event with no major incidents.

We are told that marijuana smoking leads to anti-social behavior, yet even when standing shoulder-to-shoulder in an 8,000 person traffic jam (as happened on Saturday), everyone is calm, polite, and respectful.

The drug policy reform movement has many organizational problems. In this paper I suggest that one of our reform movement’s most serious image and organizing problems are “hemp rallies.” I am using this term to describe any marijuana legalization or hemp legalization rally or festival at which marijuana is smoked, encouraged, or justified and at which persons college age or younger predominate.

A hemp rally is rarely a call to specific political action. It is a festival of marijuana use. It is an entertainment with excitement — being an outlaw and hoping to get away with it. The job of the speakers is to entertain the crowd. Inevitably, speakers extol the pleasure of pot smoking. We hear from the stage “Let’s get high!” “Let’s party!” We rarely hear calls to “Register to vote here. Join a political campaign here.” No one is here for a reasoned analysis or education. The repetition of cliches is always dependable.

Then you’re not listening to me speak at these rallies, Eric.  I both entertain and inform.  Thousands of young people now have the White House and Congressional comment lines programmed into their cell phones because of my speeches.  Thousands now know the holy trinity of police encounter replies — “I do not consent to a search”, “I wish to speak with my attorney”, “Am I being detained or am I free to go?” — and more about their Fourth & Fifth Amendment rights than they were ever taught in high school.  Thousands now know through my retelling of news stories the horrors of prohibition.

But “reasoned analysis” is the point of a drug policy conference, not a public rally.  I’ve heard those speeches at Hempfest and watched as the crowd fell asleep.  I’ll take 1,000 cliché-spouting young people to the polls over 1 middle-aged guy full of “reasoned analysis” any day.

Let’s face it, hemp rallies are not only a fraud as serious political events go, they are worse — they are advertisements of irresponsible drug use. Prohibitionists are on the mark when they describe hemp rallies as “pro-drug” events. We do not know that they contribute to the increase in juvenile drug use, but we do not know that they don’t.

The old “what about the children?!?” cliché is something I expect from prohibitionists; it hurts to hear it used by a supposed ally.  What about the children?  Sure, I saw lots of young people probably under age 18 at Hempfest.  I didn’t see them fighting or being anti-social.  I didn’t see them puking from alcohol overdoses.  Chances are the vast majority of them are good kids and will grow up to be good adults.  I counsel them onstage and in person to wait until they are eighteen, but you and I both know that many young people aged 12-17 will smoke pot anyway – so should that happen in secluded places with no adult supervision or in public where they are surrounded by adults, police, and medical staff?

Compare our events to the newsreel footage of political rallies of the 1930s and 40s. When serious political organizations staged an event, the male participants came in neckties; women wore dresses. People came to listen and to make a point with their presence. Drinking was unthinkable. The events were organized. People trained to be political organizers — not wannabe show business producers.

During the civil rights era, it was inconceivable that people would drink at a march or at a rally. The Civil Rights Marches were undertaken with sober reflection — they were led by preachers and were undertaken prayerfully. Look at the photographs of the 1963 great civil rights march on Washington.

I think all these button-down, I-used-to-speak-at-rallies-but-now-I’m-above-that critics ought to but together the 1930′s-style shirt-and-tie or 1960′s-style preacher-led rallies about which the author reminisces. I’ll be glad to speak there, too.

But I’ll bet ya 350,000 people won’t show up. I’ll bet ya you’re lucky if you get 350.

Those who organize fundraising concerts and parties to support drug policy reform (and those who attend) will need guidance about responsible drug use behavior. I commend MPP and DPA for leaving behind the rock concert model as the paradigm for drug policy reform fundraisers.

Yes, because a fundraiser at the Playboy Mansion priced well beyond the range of the average reformer is a far better model.  Nothing gets your average conservative Christian soccer mom on board for marijuana law reform than pictures of celebrities cavorting with “bunnies” at a pornographer’s house.

Personally, I’m tired of the “I’m not pro-pot, I’m pro-control” people denigrating the summer festival circuit. I am pro-pot. Many of these organizers and attendees are pro-pot. When you know that cannabis can stave off head and neck cancer, kills prostate cancer, doesn’t lead to lung damage, safely elevates mood, is a superior pain killer (among many medicinal uses), doesn’t lead to hard drugs, and can provide us a sustainable fuel source, nature’s best protein source, a carbon “sink” for greenhouse gases, and so much more, why would you moderate that stance because a few people (the smallest rate of any recreational drug) have problems with it or lying D.A.R.E. cops don’t like it?  How can you expect the undecided public to think pot legalization is OK when the button-down marijuana policy reform supporters like you are doing everything you can to divorce yourself from any inference that cannabis use is acceptable and cannabis is a wonderful thing?

I’m fully aware that the vast majority of attendees are at Hempfest for the party. In that respect I liken it to events like the Oregon Brewers Festival, an event one fifth the size that runs twice as long. (I have a request in with the Portland Police Bureau for a log of arrests from that fest, anybody want to bet it had more arrests for violent behavior than Hempfest?)  But nobody says that Teens Against Drugs & Alcohol should boycott the festival because it provides a pro-alcohol celebration; TADA shows up and uses the event to help educate about responsible use and “We Card” ID programs.  If my speaking at Hempfest educated just 1% of the attendees and motivated just 0.1% to register to vote and drove just 0.01% to become actively involved in marijuana law reform, I just educated 3,500; registered 350; and enlisted 35 new activists.

I call upon serious drug policy reformers to reform hemp rallies or end them. To associate our movement with hemp rallies makes our movement repellent to the most important constituencies we claim we are trying to reach.

Who?  The police?  The politicians?  Mom & Pop?  Evangelical Christians?  They believed all the bad things you claim Hempfest propagates before Hempfest existed and would still believe it even if Martin Luther King Jr. himself reincarnated on the Main Stage to lead a clean-cut tie-wearing audience in a chorus of “We Shall Overcome”.  To them, you’re just a dirty stinky hippie gone incognito.  No, Hempfest is about rallying our side to realize their power in numbers, not to try to convince the squares we’re something we’re not.  From the once-a-year-at-Hempfest toker to the daily pothead, there are 22,000,000 of us of voting age in America.  That’s more voting power than Texas or African-Americans (another point Hempfesters learned from my speeches).  The regular users – once a month or more – number 12.7 million adults; that’s greater than the memberships of the NRA, ACLU, NARAL, NOW, NAACP, Greenpeace, PETA, the Elks, and the John Birch Society COMBINED.  The true stoners – once a week or more – number 8.1 million adults; that’s greater than the US membership of the Mormon church.

But I never read about a Texan telling Texans to lose the cowboy hats and drawls because the dumb redneck image hurts the chances their bill will pass in Congress.  Nobody from NAACP tells the Million Man Marches to tone down the blackness a bit because it scares away the white folks they are trying to reach.  PETA doesn’t try to position themselves as “anti-cruelty” instead of “pro-animal” and the NRA will hold a pro-gun rally right after a deadly school shooting in the same town.  The Mormon Church, with only 5.5 million, managed to help invalidate the marriage rights of hundreds of thousands of gays and lesbians in California; they didn’t tell their members they needed to cut back on the Jell-O and stop knocking on my door Saturday mornings to get it done.

I really believe that a lot of this criticism is just bigotry, plain and simple.  “I’m a clean-cut, employed, well-educated, middle-class guy who likes to smoke pot,” I imagine they think, “and dammit, those dirty stinky tie-dyed patchouli-smellin’ reggae-lovin’ dreadlocked hippie kids are making me look bad for supporting  marijuana legalization!”  Well, guess what, Eric?  Without those hippies there would be no NORML (thus no MPP or DPA, since they were formed by former NORML staffers), no 13 decrim states, and no 13 medical marijuana states.  And how did those medical laws pass from 1996-2008 while Hempfest, Freedom Rally, and Harvest Fest were in full swing if nobody could “take seriously a rally that purports to be for medical marijuana when 99.9% of the marijuana smoked is done so recreationally, and with indifference to use by children?”

It’s a bit much to ask the hippies who’ve been driving the marijuana law reform bus for forty years to get under it because you want to smoke pot, too.  You might say, yeah, but maybe that’s why it’s taken 40 years and hasn’t happened… well, except for 13 decrim states and 13 medmj states and public support for medmj pushing 80%, decrim pushing 70%, and outright legalization pushing 50%.  I’d say it’s tilting at windmills; you’re never going to change the hippies, the hempfests, or the people who hate hippies and hempfests.  Go ahead and organize Squarefest, let’s see how that goes.