Five of the last eight people to get the major party nomination for president have been admitted pot smokers (Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Bush, & Obama)

Hey, Stashers, join me in giving a warm welcome to our new intern here at the Stash, Amanda.  She will be handling the “Politicians on Pot” series here at the Stash.  That’s where we take the constituent letters our congressmembers and senators send to cannabis consumers when we ask for their support of marijuana regulation, decriminalization, or medical use.

If you’d like to do your part to end prohibition, write three letters: one for both of your senators and one for your elected representative.  When they reply to you, send us that reply to stash@norml.org and we’ll post it on the Stash so everyone in the nation knows where your reps stand on marijuana issues.

And yes, Amanda is earning college credit while helping end marijuana prohibition.  You can, too!  Just send me an email with the subject “Intern Application” to learn how you can earn credit while devoting time to something you love.  (Warning: We do have a drug test… but the good news is, it’s multiple choice.)

(Seattle Times) Tim Lincecum just did a conference call with reporters to talk about winning the Cy Young Award for the second year in a row. I’ll have some of his comments on that in a bit, but at the end of the call, Lincecum made a statement on his recent traffic stop in Hazel Dell, Washington, about four miles north of the Oregon border, on Oct. 30. It’s the first time he’s talked about the incident.

Lincecum was stopped for speeding, and handed over 3.3 grams of marijuana and a pot pipe after officers smelled marijuana.

Lincecum was facing misdemeanor marijuana charges, but county prosecutors and the 25-year-old pitcher agreed to a plea agreement in which, as this San Francisco Chronicle story explains, he admits to one count of buying or selling a pot pipe, an infraction, in return for having misdemeanor charges of possessing the marijuana and the pipe dropped. Lincecum agreed to pay a $372 fine, but Clark County District Court Judge Darvin Zimmerman has still ordered Lincecum to appear in a Vancouver, Washington court on Dec. 22 for an arraignment. At that time, the plea deal will be presented and most likely approved, according to the Chronicle story.

At any rate, here’s what Lincecum said today (the guidelines for the conference call were that all questions were to be about baseball, and Lincecum said this is all he can say about the matter right now):

“I made a mistake and I regret my actions earlier this month in Washington. I want to apologize to the Giants organization and the fans. I know as a pro athlete I have a responsibility to conduct myself appropriately on and off the field. I certainly learned a valuable lesson from all of this. I promise to do better in the future.”

Another half-assed apology from another superstar pro athlete.  Is he apologizing for his use of marijuana or for speeding through Hazel Dell?  What is he promising to do better in the future, use cruise control?  I guess it is a good thing that athletes like Phelps and Lincecum apologize for their “mistake” without ever claiming that smoking marijuana itself is the mistake, instead of getting caught being the mistake.

Still, I’m just happy that Lincecum must appear in Clark County court for arraignment.  I’m putting together an informative protest in Vancouver, WA, on Tuesday, Dec 22, won’t you join me?

JACKSON COUNTY, Miss. (FOX 10 TV) – A Mississippi high school teacher is behind bars and facing fines up to $1 million, all for growing marijuana at his St. Martin home.

Narcotics officers from two agencies searched the home of 51-year-old Patrick Charles Walker on Wednesday, November 15. Walker is a teacher at St. Martin High School.

During the search, agents found marijuana plants growing inside and outside Walker’s home. They also seized marijuana that had been recently harvested, as well as stuff to grow marijuana, like fertilizers, nutrients, fans, and Ultraviolet grow lights.

If convicted, Walker faces a fine up to $1 million and up to 30 years in the state penitentiary.

In other news from Mississippi high schools:

Desoto County, Ms (My FOX Memphis) – A substitute teacher is behind bars after Desoto County Sheriff’s deputies arrested him Monday, for allegedly having sex with multiple underage students.

23-year old Joey Johnson of Horn Lake, Mississippi is charged with multiple counts of sexual battery. Johnson is alleged to have had sex with at least two 16 year old students while working as a substitute teacher at Lake Cormorant High School near Walls, Mississippi.

Johnson isn’t the only Mississippi teacher facing charges. Last week, 22-year old Tyler Bigham, a music teacher at Desoto Central High School was arrested and charged with sexual battery for allegedly having sex with a 17-year old student at a park.

(Smoking Gun) A Mississippi teacher admitted to cops that she had sex with a 15-year-old male student to whom she sent explicit text messages and trysted with in her Jaguar, which bore the license plate “GRRRRR.” Those are just some of the sleazy details in a Biloxi Police Department report detailing Rebecca Dawn Bogard’s alleged sexual assault of the boy, who the 27-year-old educator taught at the Biloxi Alternative School.  Bogard… is facing felony sexual battery charges. She has been suspended with pay and is free on $50,000 bail.

LONG BEACH, MS. (WLOX) – A former teacher faces new sex charges. Police say Joseph Eugene Council, 33, of Long Beach confessed to having a sexual relationship with 17 year old girl.

Until May, Council taught band and choir at Pass Christian Middle and High Schools. Council was taken to the Harrison County Jail where he was being held pending $75,000 bond. Long Beach Police say the investigation is continuing and ask anyone with information about the case to call 228-863-7292.

Four different Mississippi teachers involved in sexual relationships with minors.  Their bonds were set at values between $50,000 and $100,000 dollars.  Mississippi law sets the bar for statutory rape at age 16, so only the female teacher in the Smoking Gun piece might have been charged with rape.  But in her case, and the other teacher cases, the charges are set to felony sexual battery, defined as:

§ 97-3-95. Sexual battery.

(1) A person is guilty of sexual battery if he or she engages in sexual penetration with:

(a) Another person without his or her consent;

(b) A mentally defective, mentally incapacitated or physically helpless person;

(c) A child at least fourteen (14) but under sixteen (16) years of age, if the person is thirty-six (36) or more months older than the child; or

(d) A child under the age of fourteen (14) years of age, if the person is twenty-four (24) or more months older than the child.

(2) A person is guilty of sexual battery if he or she engages in sexual penetration with a child under the age of eighteen (18) years if the person is in a position of trust or authority over the child including without limitation the child’s teacher, counselor, physician, psychiatrist, psychologist, minister, priest, physical therapist, chiropractor, legal guardian, parent, stepparent, aunt, uncle, scout leader or coach.

§ 97-3-101. Sexual battery; penalty.

(1) Every person who shall be convicted of sexual battery under § 97-3-95(1)(a), (b), or (2) shall be imprisoned in the State Penitentiary for a period of not more than thirty (30) years, and for a second or subsequent such offense shall be imprisoned in the penitentiary for not more than forty (40) years.

So remember folks, if you’re a high school teacher in Mississippi, growing marijuana plants in your own home is as reprehensible as having sex with your teenaged students.  Oh, wait, I’m sorry, it’s worse.  The felony sexual battery charges don’t carry a $1,000,000 fine.

(NBC Miami) When you think of the world’s most prolific pot smokers, certain names come to mind: Snoop, Cheech and Chong, Willie Nelson.

How about Irvin Rosenfeld?

The 56-year-old Fort Lauderdale stockbroker will put his name among the greats when he sets a world record tomorrow for weed consumption while lighting up his 115,000th joint.

One of the few people I know can smoke me under a table - Irv Rosenfeld at NORML CON 2006

The best part is that it’s all legal.

Rosenfeld’s pot has been provided by the government since 1982, when he became a patient in the Federal Drug Administration’s Investigational New Drug Program. Grown on a farm on the campus of the University of Mississippi, the weed is delivered to a local pharmacy where Rosenfeld gets it by the bushel.

Rosenfeld suffers from a rare bone disorder called multiple congenital cartilaginous exostoses, which causes severe pain, alleviated by a healthy dose of ganja.

He’s been getting 300 joints every 25 days for the past 27 years, and said he smokes between 10 and 12 per day.

The sad thing for Irv is that the ganja the feds grow for him is the schwaggiest of the schwag.  This is the marijuana grown by Dr. ElSohly in Mississippi and it’s about 4%-5% THC.  They don’t bother to manicure the bud much before grinding, so the joints contain stems and leaves and the occasional seed.  So don’t be too surprised when he tells you that smoking it doesn’t get him high.

I’ve also had the pleasure of knowing another of the four remaining IND patients, Elvy Musikka.  She has the benefit of being both a federal medical marijuana patient and an Oregon state medical marijuana patient.  She can tell you better than anyone the difference between federal schwag and Oregon’s finest, and the race isn’t even close.

What’s really disturbing is that the government set up this “Investigational New Drug Program” in 1978 and to this date they haven’t done a bit of investigation.  Irv, Elvy and the other two patients have never been surveyed or studied by our government to determine how these decades of medical marijuana use have affected the humans using it.  It might make you think our government never really wanted people to know how effective medical cannabis can be, huh?

Of course, this is comedy from Reason.TV, but it does make a huge point.  The cost of our favorite herb is artificially high due to its prohibition.  When we make our local, state and federal governments re-legalize marijuana, the price we pay for it will come closer to the cost of production.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What are you waiting for?  Write that letter to your government officials.  This includes your local government.  Comment on those ”reefer mad” news articles and educate the masses.  Don’t just sit there on your couch and wonder when… Do something and make it so… Now!

(Jessica Corry – Huffington Post) Denver is a city in love with its newspapers. Even in 2009, many residents still cling to the scent and grime of fresh newspaper print. But as the recent loss of the city’s beloved Rocky Mountain News still lingers, the focus now turns to saving the publications remaining. In an ironic twist of fate worthy of its own front page feature, essential revenue could come from the most unlikely of sources. Marijuana.

Denver’s top alternative weekly, Westword, gets it. On both sides of its most recent edition’s back cover, 32 medical marijuana dispensaries advertised their services. In addition, in the publication’s “alternative healing” section, nearly nine additional pages were packed with similar plugs.

While the Denver Post has run a series of front page stories over the last month chronicling the brewing debate over how or whether to increase regulations on dispensaries, it has been slower getting into the advertising game, running quarter page ads from a handful of dispensaries, with plans to expand advertising access through a special section devoted to dispensaries and other alternative health outlets.

While most of American business is mired in a rut, for medical marijuana providers in California and Colorado, business is booming.  But it’s not just the sales of marijuana that provide jobs and tax revenue to the state.  There are also all the construction, advertising, rent, utilities, and other expenses these businesses pay that creates jobs for others.  At Oregon’s Cannabis Café, which doesn’t sell any cannabis at all, they are doing the same amount of business in a day that used to take all week to generate, and that’s just the sales of café food and beverages.  The café also charges a monthly membership fee and a cover charge minimum at the door.

This is why I always scoff at estimates of money to be made from legalization of cannabis.  I believe those estimates are extraordinarily conservatove and don’t even begin to factor in all the ancillary industries that will be formed to support the legal cannabis market.  The increase in sales of Ziploc baggies alone could bring enough tax revenue to hire more teachers and cops or fix some roads.

(USA Today) Tim Lincecum of the San Francisco Giants won his second consecutive National League Cy Young Award Thursday, becoming the first repeat winner in the major leagues since Randy Johnson won four times from 1999 to 2002.

Lincecum got 11 of 32 first-place votes and 100 points overall in the voting by the Baseball Writers Association of America and beat the St. Louis Cardinals’ Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright in one of the closest races in the award’s history. Carpenter had nine first-place votes and 94 points, and Wainwright had 12 first-place votes and 90 points.

Yes, the same guy who was popped in Washington State for a personal amount of weed is the best pitcher in the National League for two years in a row.  We begin the year with eight-time gold medalist Michael Phelps smoking a bong and we end the year with two-time Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum smoking a bowl.  Can we finally dispense with the notion that marijuana smoking turns you into an unaccomplished slacker loser?

NORML SHOW LIVE provides you with exclusive access to Oregon’s world-famous Cannabis Café, this Saturday Night from 6pm-8pm Pacific.

You’ve read about it on the Reuters wire, New York Times, the Times of London, and even Al Jazeera, USA Today, and the Associated Press will be bringing you the story soon, but only “Radical” Russ can get you inside the first café exclusively for Oregon’s 21,000 medical marijuana cardholders.

Madeline Martinez from Oregon NORML and the NORML Board joins us to describe how her vision of a cannabis café has become a reality. We also speak to the patients in the café enjoying cannabis liberty in a way few outside Amsterdam enjoy.

We’ve upgraded to the latest 4G WiMax wireless technology to bring you the best remote audio possible from the café. Cannabis Karri will be screening your calls from back in the studio and Cousin Kenny will take your questions online via our live chat window.

It’s two hours of live talk radio from the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Hosted by “Radical” Russ Belville, NORML SHOW LIVE features a recap of the week’s top stories in medical marijuana, consumer cannabis, and industrial hemp; interviews with the top cannabis activists, politicians, scientists, doctors, actors, musicians, and comedians; and your calls live at 347-994-1810.

(The Romeo Observer) Members of the Northwest Zero Tolerance Coalition learned that new marijuana laws are leading to strains on law enforcement.

Assistant Prosecutor Bill Dailey of the Macomb County Prosecutor’s Office spoke to the coalition about some of the drug use problems he has seen in the county, mainly with medical marijuana.

He said he is concerned it will be more readily available to students due to people owning medical marijuana cards that grow their own plants.

“I think there is going to be more marijuana available to our young people and I think that it’s because there is now a lawful way for it to be out in the stream of commerce,” he said. “The same thing has happened with Vicodin and OxyCotin pills.”

I think if medical marijuana were as toxic, addictive, and laden with side effects as Vicodin and OxyContin, that statement would scare me more.  Or if I didn’t know that in the medical marijuana states that have been at it long enough to collect data, fewer teens are using marijuana and their use rates are declining faster than the national average.

“Not to offend anybody, (but) in my opinion, it’s pretty amorphous criteria to get a card,” Dailey said. “There are people I know who have got a card for asthma, which is kind of surprising.”

I don't think Georgine would be offended; I think she'd see it as a teachable moment.

Well, you wouldn’t be surprised if you met Georgine DiMaria or any one of the dozens of medical marijuana patients I’ve met who use cannabis to treat asthma.  THC is a bronchodialator – it opens up the breathing passages – and other cannabinoids work as anti-spasmodics.

He said that the offices don’t want to bug people who are lawfully following the program. He said that part of him wonders why the state didn’t just totally legalize it so there could be quality control and regulation instead of the current “middle ground.”

That part of you would be called the “logical” part, Mr. Prosecutor.  Surprisingly, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard that refrain from law enforcement.  “Just legalize it,” one cop told me, “either it’s illegal for everybody or it’s legal for everybody, but this in-between some-legal some-not shit is impossible for us to deal with.”

We’re working on it.  In the meantime, the way you folks in law enforcement have gone about scaring the hell out of people regarding marijuana for the past seventy years has made it very difficult for us to just legalize it.  Only people’s compassion for the desperately sick and disabled people suffering with pain has allowed us even this tiny bit of marijuana regulation for a small subset of its users.  So if the slow process from prohibition to regulation temporarily makes your jobs a bit more difficult, excuse me if hundreds of thousands of marijuana patients and twenty million marijuana arrestees don’t shed a tear.

(Los Angeles Times) In the end, despite a sophisticated filtration system, it was the smell that smoked out the marijuana-growing operation located just 25 feet from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Topanga station in Canoga Park.

LAPD officials said officers began noticing the smell of pot Tuesday morning, investigated, got warrants and closed down the indoor farm within eight hours.

Three men were taken into custody earlier Wednesday after officers served a search warrant on the warehouse in the 8400 block of Canoga Avenue.

Growers had built three rooms in the building — one for seedlings, another for medium-sized plants and one where harvesting was apparently conducted, police said. The lights were controlled so they wouldn’t overheat, watering systems were automated and oxygen levels were supplemented by carbon dioxide tanks, according to police.

Oh, for the life of me, I cannot even begin to imagine the cognitive processes and critical thinking that went into this particular choice of real estate for this particular commercial venture.  Wait a minute, yes I can…

BRAD: Dude, check it out, I found an awesome place to grow pot!

JEFF: Oh, gnarly!

BRAD: It’s not in the best location, though.

JEFF: I see the globe right there.

BRAD: Well, yeah, it’s in California.  No, dude, I mean, like, it’s right next to the cop shop.  You know, the po-po!  The five-oh!

JEFF: I know that dude.

BRAD: Yeah, so I’m kinda worried that they’ll figure it out and bust us.

JEFF: Those guys are f…

BRAD: You’re right, man.  Besides, check it out, they’ll never figure it out.  I got these awesome air filters and we’ll seal up the whole inside with caulk!

JEFF: Hey, bud, what’s your problem?

BRAD: No, caulk, you know, like you use to seal up window cracks and stuff!

JEFF: Totally.

BRAD: So whaddaya say, are you in, brah?  Look at all this amazing weed, huh?  We’re gonna make a lotta money, dude, and we’re doing it all just 25 feet away from the LAPD!  Are you in?

JEFF: I am today.

(we hear sirens, police bursting in…)

OFFICER HAND: Am I hallucinating here? Just what in the hell do you think you are doing?  What are you people, on dope?

JEFF: You dick!

BRAD:  Aw, this really sucks.  How did you find us?  Hey, you don’t have to hit us!  Ow! Ow!

JEFF: That was my skull! I’m so wasted!

(Thanks to the site MovieWavs.com for what shall be a very entertaining podcast segment!)