There is a great article out on AlterNet that is worth a read…

Will Pot Ever Be Legal in This Schizoid Country? | DrugReporter | AlterNet
Marijuana occupies a bizarrely paradoxical place in American culture. Its use is widespread, commonplace among the young and ubiquitous in popular culture. Yet it remains highly illegal, and talk of legalization is usually deemed political suicide.

Here are five signs that pot should be legal soon — and five reasons why it probably won’t.

Click the link to read the whole thing.

Hollywood gets political with its stoner movies
Pot, stalk and smoking pipe barrels. Devil weed. Mary Jane. Playing twister. Reefer. No matter what you call it, cannabis continues to spark debate in popular culture. More than 70 years into the drug’s prohibition at the hands of U.S. lawmakers, it seems Hollywood is ready to blow smoke in the face of current policy.

The proof can be seen in a new crop of films that don’t just depict glassy-eyed potheads giggling at moronic gags in the tradition of Cheech and Chong, but go much further, suggesting pot as the symbolic cure for personal and cultural oppression.

Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke (1978) was the first film to show rampant pot use without exacting a moral price for all that fun, offering an emotional and cultural antidote to overt anti-drug films such as Reefer Madness.

Around the same time Cheech and Chong started their big screen puffing, the American government banned the word “hemp” from all school text books, insisting any mention of the once powerful hemp industry (predicted to be the No. 1 crop in the U.S. by Popular Mechanics in 1938) would only confuse youngsters who didn’t understand the difference between useful hemp fibre and the combustible of choice among teens.

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Wow, I’m having a real time trying to get this new studio wired up with the new computer.  All sorts of buggy little problems.  There will be a new Daily Stash posted just as soon as can iron it all out.

NiagaraThisWeek.com: Article: Hundreds rally for legalized marijuana
Honking car horns coming from vehicles as they passed a parkette near Hwy. 420 got a crowd of 200 cheering in solidarity.

With the smell of ganja in the air Sunday, people rallied to show their support for the legalization of marijuana at the 420 marijuana march, a peaceful protest aimed at showcasing the need to abolish marijuana prohibition.

With similar demonstrations in Toronto and Hamilton that same day, marijuana enthusiasts marched down Victoria Avenue and down Clifton Hill to Queen Victoria Park with their protest signs and flags held high … all while lighting up a joint in the process.

One of the supporters at the rally was Derek Pedro, who is a legalized user of marijuana. Suffering from migraine headaches, muscle spasms and joint pain, Pedro said marijuana has helped reduce his suffering.

“I need to get high to feel medicated,” Pedro said. “But everywhere I go I feel like I need to hide myself to smoke. I feel the public doesn’t understand that there are positives to marijuana use. Prohibition gives it a bad name.”

Alison Myrden, who represents the group, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a non-profit educational group whose mandate is to lower incidents of death, disease, crime and addiction through ending prohibition, has suffered from symptoms of chronic Multiple Sclerosis. The symptoms include extreme facial pain and the need to walk with a cane.

Myrden said marijuana helps get her through the pain and has reduced the number of painkillers she takes each day.

“Prohibition doesn’t work,” Myrden said. “If it was legalized, people wouldn’t be looking at the streets to find it. Something has to be done to change the laws. In my perfect world, all drugs should be legal.”

There is a sentence that will scare your average person: all drugs should be legal.  To most people, that conjures up a society gone berserk, with trippin’ space cadets, zombie junkies, thievin’ tweakers, and utter chaos in the streets.  We can’t legalize drugs, they protest, because that would encourage people to do drugs!

I’ve got news for them: drugs require no encouragement.  People are doing drugs, even though they are illegal.  The chaos in the streets is already here and most of it is a direct result of the prohibition, not the drugs.  It’s funny to me how the drug warriors see prohibition (the lack of laws controlling drugs) as a method of control and they see regulation (taxes and laws to control drugs) as a recipe for disaster.

Out drug war is based on the wrong metrics, and those are (a) how many people are using drugs and (b) how much drugs are they using?  Both measures are irrelevant.  If half of all North Americans lit up joint every day for the next month, would that be bad?  By the drug war metrics, yes.

But what would the results be from that massive smoke-in?  Are there fewer crimes?  Less drunk driving?  Fewer prescriptions for toxic pharmaceuticals?  A reduction in violence?  A windfall for snack manufacturers?  See, it’s not how many people or how much drugs that we should worry about, it’s the harm that does or does not result from the drugs.

And with marijuana, most people know that there is little societal harm, if any, from the responsible adult use of marijuana.  Even those who think marijuana is harmful believe that harm is pretty much reserved for the marijuana user, and rarely believe that it’s causing more harm than alcohol or nicotine.

I’m cutting up clips from the new DVD “Totally Baked” and it is taking longer than I’d thought.  That, and I overslept  But it will be worth the wait, I promise!

We get all sorts of emails here at NORML.  Many are from supporters and people who have found themselves in a marijuana bust.  Every so often we get letters from the prohibitionists and cannabiphobes who want to eradicate the plant from nature.

But you might be surprised that there is a small subset of pro-marijuana people who are very anti-legalization.  This recent email gives you an idea:

Don’t be a fool, marijuana is America’s largest cash crop. Why do you think they LET YOU use it for “medicinal” (any bullshit reason you can think of) purposes? Keep it illegal. Keep America out of marijuana’s bottom line because through out the past, they have been treating us users like needle junkies. And you want to let them in on what marijuana and what us believers have worked so hard to create? I’m 22 years old I’ve been smoking since 14 years old and selling since 15. I would never pay tax to some asshole organization that tried their hardest to keep me oppressed. You can rally as much as you please, but it is useless. I am not supporting 420 because of what that number originated from. Don’t fall for America’s lies. Everyday is “420″, keep it illegal and keep the money it brings on the streets, among the people. Those bastard fat cat politicians are already bleeding us dry with oil, war, alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, and whatever else we might need that will make them a buck. Please don’t bring so much attention to marijuana. It is all that some people have.

All I can think of is that 22-year-old young person serving time after the seven years of not-getting-caught-selling luck runs out.  This is the attitude of “I gots mine”; the writer has all the weed he needs and has never been busted, so why should the writer care whether 830,000 others got arrested or 70,000 others are serving time for pot.

One of the saddest consequences of this War on Marijuana is to create an entire generation (or two, or three) so hostile to law enforcement and good government.  Make no mistake, statistically speaking marijuana is a young person’s drug; most tokers quit voluntarily at about age thirty.

There exists a huge underground market in marijuana, no doubt about it.  And for many of our young people, facing an economy where the choices are “minimum wage service job” or “mountains of student loan debt”, the prospect of eeking out a decent living by selling weed is very enticing.  What occupation will pay the bills of your current “weed guy” once you are legally able to get it at the liquor store?  What would the actual unemployment figures be, especially in our urban centers, if everyone currently surviving on pot prohibition profits had to apply for assistance?

But the writer identifies the wrong villain here.  It’s not the politicians, it’s the prohibition.  The writer steadfastly refuses to pay a tax to an oppressor, so the solution is to allow the oppressor to keep the tool of oppression?  If the writer thinks greedy government will make a buck off of marijuana taxes, what does the writer think of the greedy government and asset forfeiture, cheap prison slave labor, and bloated drug war budgets, or the drug testing, drug rehab, and prison industries whose bottom line depends on a steady stream of marijuana arrests?

No, this writer just wants to be left alone to deal weed, tax free, regulation free.  Admittedly this is most businessman’s dream scenario.  But if you think prohibition keeps the money “on the streets”, you’re wrong, unless you think $300-$450/ounce is a reasonable price for a dried weed.  Every dollar of pot prohibition profit represents a gardener serving hard prison time, a mom losing her kids, a student losing a loan, a kid losing a dad, an employee losing a job, a professional losing a license, a poor person losing a home, and a good citizen losing their reputation.

Editorial: Medical marijuana merits state support
At a time when researchers are plunging into the rainforest in search of new medicines, there’s growing consensus that a humble herb easily cultivated here may help patients struggling with cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis and other painful, difficult-to-manage conditions.

The herb, whose slim, multi-pronged leaf makes it instantly recognizable, is marijuana. The Minnesota Senate has already approved a measure that would make Minnesota the 13th state to legalize its medical use. The House will likely vote this spring. Lawmakers, as well as the governor, should give the bill careful yet open-minded consideration and make it a reality.

There’s solid and growing data on the medical benefits of marijuana and its active compound for treating neuropathy (which causes extremity pain), multiple sclerosis, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and chemotherapy-induced nausea and appetite loss. While other treatments are available, there are situations in which marijuana may work best. Doctors should be able to make this call.

The New England Journal of Medicine has editorialized in favor of marijuana’s medical use. In January, the nation’s second-largest group of physicians, the American College of Physicians, weighed in, also in favor.

Minnesota’s [medical marijuana law] is nine pages, and written more tightly [than California’s law] to limit abuse. Unlike California, it requires qualifying patients to register and carry an ID card. Patients, who must have a health professional’s approval to qualify, are also not allowed to grow their own; they’d buy marijuana from a registered nonprofit. There’s still potential for abuse. But as Oxycontin illustrates, that can happen with any prescription drug.

Most western states and a handful in the northeast protect patients whose doctors have decided marijuana is the best treatment option. For the most part, the laws have worked well, without the worst-case scenarios feared by law enforcement. It’s time for Minnesota to ensure that its sickest patients have all the treatment options they need.

The people are way ahead of the politicians on this issue.  Kudos to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune for seeing through the reefer madness and endorsing such a sensible piece of legislation… though I have my reservations about patients not being allowed to grow their own medicine.  Why not allow people who are suffering to treat themselves independently?

Our look at “Stoners in the Mist” got us a mention in the Washington DC gossip blog “Wonkette”.

Iowa Senator Tom Harkin didn’t go nearly far enough when he suggested that smoking pot makes you sell your children. Thankfully we have anti-drug organization Above The Influence, which has created a series of documentaries tracking the behaviors of savage pot smokers on “Cannabis Isle.” Watch as this old white man goes out of his way to stare at two teens smoking pot in a basement by themselves, then spends hundreds of millions of dollars on new technologies to crack down on them. The War on Drugs is in full swing on Cannabis Isle.

Here are some of the funniest comments from their readers:

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As you might guess, I do a lot of web surfing putting together these podcasts. Sometimes I find things that just won’t work in audio. Here’s one, a cartoon from Dustin out at Dustinland, who is just as sick of the ONDCP’s anti-drug commercials as we are. Click the thumbnail to see the full-size version.

NORML’s Paul Armentano wrote a nice opinion piece in the Vallejo (CA) Times-Herald. They had written about the new record 1 in 99.1 Americans in prison figure. The first reply he got back in the comments section claims to be from a narcotics officer. It provides a great illustration of someone in the deepest throes of drug war addiction:

Let me give you a an Narcotics supervisors ideas. First, No money, aid, nothing from the U.S. to countries who allow drug manufacturing. No U.S. travel for it’s citizens to these countries (no tourists). Any country who wants our money and help MUST allow our military (narcotics officers) into it’s country to stop the manufacting of drugs if they cannot do it. This also means stopping the manufacture of drugs in Afganastand unstead of allowing it because it’s the countrys main product.

Next, in the U.S. stop wasting money on telling the kidds No to Drugs as you can see IT JUST DOES NOT WORK. Next, for any tho manufactures or sells drugs first offense 10years. Second offense Life……….3rd offense Life w/o parole. Now this is for a larger quanity. Lastly, for juveniles selling we set up a School/prison where they go for high school and have no one to sell drugs to.

Next, No drugs in prison and any Guard, Attorney, ets who is caught bringing it in gets 25 years…….No time off.

Think about this! Drugs are brought into this country with no problem yet we think small weapons of mass destruction cannot come in easily. How about spending the time, money and energy to sniff out drugs that we have on stopping the terrorists.

I could go on put there are a lot of businesses in America that do not want drugs to go away because it is American big business like oil.

Bob (Logan, IL)

First of all, no aid or tourism to any country that manufactures drugs? Since marijuana grows wild everywhere, does that mean we don’t get to travel anywhere? And then you want to use our military to invade countries that can’t wipe out a weed? Do we even have that much military?

Then you want from ten years to life with no parole for drug offenses. If you think 1 in 99.1 Americans in prison was something, if this gets enacted, it would be about one in ten. Harsher penalties do not equal less drug use. It’s not like someone about to smoke a joint thinks, well, it’s OK, I’ll only go to prison for a year. What, they raised it to ten years? Well, then, no more weed for me. One year would be OK, but ten years is ridiculous!

Finally, no drugs in prison? Excuse me while I get up off the floor from laughing. That’s already the rule and lawyers, guards, etc. who get caught bringing them in already face hard time. And the idea about the prison/school for druggie juveniles - hey, what a splendid idea! Prisons have worked so well to keep adults off of drugs that we should extend that model to our children in school.

We’ve seen the DEA tactic in California: threaten the landlords who rent to marijuana dispensaries, which are legal under California’s Prop 215, but illegal under federal law.

Back in my home state of Idaho, my county sheriff proposed requiring all landlords to drug-test all prospective tenants, because, I suppose, there aren’t enough homeless drug addicts in America.

So as our nation slowly reawakens to her hemp roots, as more states pass decriminalization and medical marijuana laws, more landlords are caught in a bind between showing compassion by renting to a state-authorized medical marijuana patient and breaking a federal law by aiding and abetting in growing and storing a controlled substance.

I found this question-and-answer segment on a website called Mortgage 101, and the answer was surprisingly rational!

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More prohibitionists are weighing in on the New Hampshire House passing a measure to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana. Let’s see what sort of reefer madness will justify this latest editorial:

Concord Monitor - Mistake to weaken state’s marijuana laws
The quarter ounce of marijuana the House refers to is in no way a “small amount.” In fact, a quarter ounce of marijuana can equate to 14 joints - not the seven that has been reported.

Or two joints, if you’re Dr. Bob Bitchin, Ph.D, M.A., B.A., B.M.F.…  Sorry, couldn’t resist.  So, exactly how is a quarter ounce rolled into fourteen joints scarier than the same quarter ounce rolled into seven joints?  Is that like getting a better deal on your large pizza by cutting it into sixteen slices instead of twelve?

The Monitor cites a study done by a Harvard psychology professor in the 1970s. However the marijuana of today is not the marijuana of the 1970s. It is significantly stronger, with some reports estimating today’s strength to be five times that of a comparable amount from that time period. We have seen some types of the drug with such a high potency that “just a couple of joints” can lead to serious impairment.

The old “this ain’t your father’s Woodstock pot, this is superpot!” argument.  This is often used because so many parents have tried marijuana in the past and realize it isn’t the killer weed the prohibitionists claim it is.  First of all, pot today is more or less as potent as you could get in the 1970s.  Secondly, THC isn’t hazardous, so more of it doesn’t equal more danger, it equals less smoking.  Marijuana smokers smoke to get high.  If the marijuana is potent, they smoke a little of it and get high.  If it is less potent, they smoke a lot of it and get high.  Since the prohibitionists also like to argue (falsely) that marijuana smoking causes lung cancer, wouldn’t smoking less of it be a good thing?

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Travel author and TV host Rick Steves posted this column in Seattle’s largest newspaper. He’s also a member of the NORML Advisory Board.  You can also listen to my interview with Rick Steves at the 2007 NORML Conference where he cited many of these same points:

We need to get smart about marijuana
Europe, like the U.S., is dealing with a persistent drug-abuse problem. But unlike us, Europe, which treats drug abuse primarily as a public health issue rather than a criminal issue, measures the success of its drug policy in terms of pragmatic harm reduction.

Europeans seek a cure that isn’t more costly than the problem. While the U.S. spends its tax dollars on police, courts and prisons, Europe fights drug abuse by funding doctors, counselors and clinics. European Union policymakers estimate that for each euro invested in drug education and counseling, they save 15 euros in police and health costs. Similar estimates have been made for U.S. health-based approaches by the Rand Corp. and others.

When it comes to marijuana, European leaders understand that a society must choose: Tolerate alternative lifestyles or build more prisons. They’ve made their choice. We’re still building more prisons.

According to Forbes magazine, 25 million Americans currently use marijuana (federal statistics indicate that one in three Americans has used marijuana at some point), which makes it a $113 billion untaxed industry in our country. The FBI reports that about 40 percent of the roughly 1.8 million annual drug arrests in the U.S. are for marijuana — the majority (89 percent) for simple possession.

Rather than act as a deterrent, criminalization of marijuana drains precious resources, clogs our legal system and distracts law enforcement attention from more pressing safety concerns.

Like my European friends, I believe we can adopt a pragmatic policy toward marijuana, with a focus on harm reduction and public health, rather than tough-talking but counterproductive criminalization. The time has come to have an honest discussion about our marijuana laws and their effectiveness. We need to find a policy that is neither “hard on drugs” nor “soft on drugs” — but smart on drugs.

I’m reminded of Bob Saget’s cameo in the movie Half Baked.  The recent litany of “marijuana addiction” stories always offend me as a person who has struggled with real addictions to speed and alcohol, whose father was damn near killed by addictions to speed, alcohol, and nicotine, whose grandfather was killed by addiction to alcohol, whose grandmother was killed by addictions to pharmaceuticals.  To paraphrase the late Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, “Mary Jane, I suffered with addiction: I knew addiction; addiction was a friend of mine. Mary Jane, you’re no addiction.”

I’m told that there are some people who do have serious dependency issues with marijuana.  But that is nowhere near the physical and psychological hell suffered by a heroin addict, alcoholic, or cigarette smoker trying to quit.  This press to label “marijuana addicts” is just the latest reefer madness salvo to keep funding the perpetual drug war prison/rehab industrial complex.  Paul Armentano, our Deputy Director, picks up on this theme as he notes that a full one-third of these “marijuana addicts” haven’t even used marijuana for over a month!  If you can find any treatment facility for alcohol, heroin, cocaine, meth, or nicotine addicts that contains even one addict who hasn’t used in a month, I’ll be amazed…

NORML Blog » Blog Archive » SAMHSA: One-Third Of Marijuana ‘Treatment’ Admissions Haven’t Used Pot!
According to a recent UPI news wire story, researchers are now proposing prescribing the psychoactive prescription drug Lithium to so-called ‘pot addicts’ to help them kick the habit. But just who are these alleged ‘addicts?’

According to the latest statistics from the US Department of Health and Human Services, a startling high number of US government-defined marijuana ‘addicts’ don’t even smoke pot! That’s right, according to a recent DHS report, more than one-third of Americans entered into drug treatment with a primary diagnosis of marijuana ‘dependency’ haven’t used pot in the month prior to their admission.

How’s this possible? It’s possible because the majority of folks admitted to ‘drug treatment’ for pot don’t need treatment at all, but were arrested and ordered by a judge to attend rehab in lieu of going to jail.

Nevertheless, the White House touts this phony ‘data’ as evidence that marijuana is allegedly more dangerous than cocaine or heroin, and NIDA touts these numbers as evidence to support multi-million dollar ‘Cannabis Addiction Centers.’

Looking for the truth about marijuana use and dependency? Look no further than my recent Alternet.org essay on the subject here, or you can ‘digg’ it here.

On my nationally-syndicated radio show this morning I had a caller from Las Vegas.  I had been discussing the fallout from Senator Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and how his comments, while controversial, aren’t necessarily surprising.  I was referencing Wright’s sermon where he speaks of three strikes laws, drugs in the inner cities, and more young black men in prison than in college and asks, “God bless America?  No, God damn America…”

My caller took great offense to that and ranted about how Obama belonged to this “racist church” for twenty years, and I let him ramble a bit before I asked him about the truth of the disproportionate impact of the drug war on racial minorities.  He then called Wright’s claim about the CIA inventing crack to take down the inner city “bogus” and told me I was believing lies… and that’s where I let him have it.  I try not to be one of those talk radio hosts who shouts over his callers, but whenever I think of poor Gary Webb’s “suicide” after he exposed the connection between the CIA turning a blind eye to and at times assisting the trafficking of cocaine to the inner cities in order to fund black budget illegal wars in Central America, I get a bit upset. Especially when I’ve seen the interviews with the former CIA officers who acknowledged they did just that (well, they didn’t “invent” crack; that’s just CIA-funneled-supply meeting street-level-demand in the form of a few entrepreneurs with some rudimentary chemistry skills).

If you’d like to hear the show, it will be posted Sunday night to my website, RadicalRuss.net; just click on the speaker in the yellow box.  The caller in question hits at about the 42:00 mark.

Calling B.S. on the Idea of ‘Marijuana Addiction’ | DrugReporter | AlterNet
The U.S. government believes that America is going to pot — literally.

Earlier this month, the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse announced plans to spend $4 million to establish the nation’s first-ever “Center on Cannabis Addiction,” which will be based in La Jolla, Calif. The goal of the center, according to NIDA’s press release, is to “develop novel approaches to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of marijuana addiction.”

And what does the science say? Well, according to the nonpartisan National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine — which published a multiyear, million-dollar federal study assessing marijuana and health in 1999 — “millions of Americans have tried marijuana, but most are not regular users [and] few marijuana users become dependent on it.” The investigator added, “[A]though [some] marijuana users develop dependence, they appear to be less likely to do so than users of other drugs (including alcohol and nicotine), and marijuana dependence appears to be less severe than dependence on other drugs.”

Most importantly, unlike the withdrawal symptoms associated with the cessation of most other intoxicants, pot’s mild after-effects do not appear to be either severe or long-lasting enough to perpetuate marijuana use in individuals who have decided to quit. This is why most marijuana smokers report voluntarily ceasing their cannabis use by age 30 with little physical or psychological difficulty. By comparison, many cigarette smokers who pick up the habit early in life continue to smoke for the rest of their lives, despite making numerous efforts to quit.

Further, pot lacks the profound abstinence symptoms associated with most legal intoxicants, including caffeine.

As always, it’s worth clicking the link to read the full story.  You only have to follow the money to understand why there is a push for creating in the public’s mind a false stereotype about “marijuana addiction” - that creates jobs for “marijuana rehab” and “marijuana drug testing” and prescriptions for drugs like lithium to relieve the “addict’s” craving for the ganja!

Opinion | Let’s talk about marijuana | Seattle Times Newspaper
As a nation, we spend at least $7.5 billion annually enforcing our marijuana laws. In 2006, the latest year for which we have numbers, a record 830,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana — 89 percent of them simply for possessing it.

Our criminal-justice system wastes time and resources with these low-level marijuana-possession cases while half our violent crimes go unsolved. And those facing the judge are disproportionately African American and Latino.

Indeed, the consequences of an arrest for even a small amount of marijuana can haunt someone for the rest of his or her life. We have met and heard from people who lost or were denied jobs, had their homes raided and their property seized, lost child-visitation rights, and had their medical marijuana confiscated.

We realized Prohibition was creating a lot of new problems and solving few, if any, of the old ones. States now control alcohol sales and consumption. And our tax dollars are more effectively directed at regulation, public education and treatment for those whose use becomes problematic.

It is time for a conversation about marijuana. Check out the ACLU of Washington’s project: a 30-minute informercial featuring travel author Rick Steves.

Ending America’s Domestic Quagmire by Paul Armentano
A growing number of political pundits are questioning America’s military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some are beginning to draw parallels to lawmakers’ much longer domestic war effort: the so-called war on drugs. The comparison is apropos.

America now spends nearly $50 billion dollars per year targeting, prosecuting, and incarcerating illicit-drug users. As a result, the population of illicit-drug offenders now behind bars is greater than the entire U.S. prison population in 1980. Since the mid-1990s, drug offenders have accounted for nearly 50 percent of the total federal prison population growth and some 40 percent of all state prison population growth. For marijuana alone, law enforcement currently spends between $7 billion and $10 billion dollars annually targeting users – primarily low-level offenders – and taxpayers spend more than $1 billion annually to incarcerate them.

However, in contrast to politicians who call for a review of the U.S. military’s Middle East policies, few lawmakers are demanding a timetable to bring about a cease-fire to the war on drugs – or are even calling for a reduction in the number of “troops” (i.e., narcotics detectives, DEA agents, et cetera) serving on the front lines. They ought to. If American lawmakers want to take a serious look at the United States’s war strategies, let them begin by reassessing – and ending – their failed war here at home.

The problem is that the United States’ economy has been built on a foundation of war. Whether it’s war against our own citizens for taking drugs or war against another country for other reasons (some legitimate, others not-so-much), many government agencies owe their livelihood to war. It makes it very difficult, then, to call for an end to these wars without providing a vision of how we’ll repair the economy to reflect a peacetime foundation. Or as Upton Sinclair put it, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Commentary from activist Laird Funk here in my home state of Oregon.  Laird was one of the exceptional people who helped to pass Oregon’s Medical Marijuana Act in 1998.  He writes about the contracting, drug rehab, and drug-testing lobbies who are pushing for discriminatory laws that would allow to fire registered users medical cannabis solely for their possession of a medical marijuana card:

NORML.ORG US OR: OPED: The Bulletin Supports Medical Marijuana Discrimination
Fire ‘em all! That is the thrust of your Feb. 25 editorial calling for laws allowing Oregon workers who therapeutically use marijuana to be immediately and arbitrarily fired, regardless of where or when they used their medication. Darkly hinting of problems in the workplace, you see danger in even such basic tasks as driving a car. Clearly you agree with the position of Associated Oregon Industries that the number of Oregonians lawfully registered with the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program is a serious and burdensome problem which actually ranks as an emergency!

Reviewing available information, including the number of accidents caused by therapeutic marijuana-using workers cited by AOI, we find the following: 1998, 0 accidents; 1999, 0; 2000, 0; 2001, 0; 2002, 0; 2003, 0; 2004, 0; 2005, 0; 2006, 0; and from 2007, 0! Yes, there is a story in those numbers, and it has a lesson to be learned - a lesson that fits right in between those we learned from other stories, like Chicken Little, whose sky was falling, and the boy who cried “wolf,” who felt neglected and made up claims of danger.And so it has been that for the last three legislative sessions, AOI’s “Chicken Little,” Don Harmon, has teamed up with a small rotating cast of ditto-heads in the role of the boy who cried “wolf” to call for emergency legislation to deal with the growing problem of therapeutic marijuana-using Oregonians actually having jobs and being productive members of society.

But even they had to answer “none” when asked by Rep. Peter Buckley how many accidents had been caused by those workers. Some emergency!

Each of the ditto-heads prefaced their remarks with claims that they themselves had voted for the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act, but then claimed that the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program had become riddled with fraud and abuse and that the number of registrants was both proof of that claim and a real problem for Oregon employers.

But patient numbers are not evidence of abuse - convictions are.

One thousand, eight hundred convictions a year would be an abuse rate of 10 percent.

But by most accounts there are fewer than 1 percent, or 180 OMMP registrants, annually arrested for violating provisions of the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act and, of course, far fewer convictions. Ninety-nine percent compliance seems OK to me. It is noteworthy that, by law, registrants who are convicted of violations must report that fact to the OMMP and may not be registered as a grower for five years.