I reported yesterday on the Israeli research on THC and PTSD.  TIME Magazine has a post written by the wonderful Maia Szalavitz covering the study.  The post itself is fantastic, but I don’t know if Ms. Szalavitz or an editor came up with this awful headline:

Dude, Where’s My Trauma? Marijuana Could Treat PTSD

I’ve got friends who are Vietnam and Gulf War vets who suffer to this day with PTSD.  But they are a whole lot better off here in Oregon.  While Oregon doesn’t recognize PTSD as a qualifying condition for a medical marijuana card, these fellows have plenty of chronic pain from injury to qualify for a card.  To a man they tell me they just could not go out in public and function without it.

I also read day after day so many news stories and so many pot-pun headlines that I’ve become sick of them.  So maybe I’m the wrong guy to judge; what do you think?

This is the comment I left for TIME:

Congratulations, TIME, you’re my 2009 Winner for the NORML Daily Audio Stash Worst Pot-Pun Headline of the Year. An Ashton Kutcher stoner movie reference to preface a medical miracle that far too many Vietnam vets already realize and far too many Iraq and Afghanistan vets are denied now. You narrowly eked out a win over:

KTVU San Francisco: “Puff Puff Tax” (coverage of Assemblymember Tom Ammiano’s historic cannabis legalization bill in California.)

Kansas City Star: “A tiny Joplin, Mo., suburb has rolled itself a fat one” (coverage of the town passing a symbolic medical marijuana ordinance.)

The Oregonian: “Sex-for-marijuana sting in Tigard goes to pot” (coverage of police using Craigslist to lure guys into prostitution busts with girls in singles ads who will “party” for “420″.)

Willamette Week: “High-Jacked” (coverage of a rural 53-year-old medical cannabis patient in Oregon who was threatened at gunpoint and beaten with a golf club in a home invasion robbery attempt.)

Willamette Week had won last year for “Working Spliffs”, its coverage of attempts by business and law enforcement lobbyists to deny medical marijuana patients the right to work.

Seriously, the article is great, but the pot-pun headlines have got to go. The prohibition of cannabis is a serious issue, but the media continue to frame it with ridiculous double entendrés that would be completely forbidden if the topic were women, gays, race, or religion, to name a few. It is bad enough that the constraints of headlines force editors to use “pot” instead of “cannabis” and search engine optimization dictates the use of “marijuana” if there’s enough room for “cannabis”.

Medical miracles in cancer, pain, spasticity, and other treatments are being denied, even the research into them is being denied, because of the prohibition of cannabis. Supermajorities of people in every part of the country support medical access to cannabis. Yet the politicians lag behind the people, partly because they don’t take it seriously or fear ridicule in the media.

Treat the issue with more respect, please.

Russ Belville
NORML Outreach Coordinator
Host – NORML Daily Audio Stash podcast

(KOIN 6) PORTLAND, Ore. – A café set to open next week in northeast Portland will be serving up more than your morning latte.

Café Rumpspankers (yep, that’s the name) will open next week serving coffee and sampling different types of marijuana for Oregon Medical Marijuana Cardholders to try.

Per state law, only members of Oregon’s Medical Marijuana Program are allowed in.

The Oregon chapter of NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) will run the café which will open November 13th on Northeast Dekum.

The café will be the first of its kind in Oregon and will be similar to those found in Europe.

Flock to the website of KOIN (ABC affiliate) in Portland, my minions, for they have an online poll asking whether you support this “type of business.”  It’s barely a “Yes” at this point – 50.4% when I first voted!

Whoa.  I just tweeted it before I wrote this post and now it’s up to 54.6%.  Correlation ain’t causation; maybe they just aired it on the news and more people clicked in.  Or maybe, just maybe, I have the power to sway online polls in 140 characters or less!  Bwaa-ha-ha-ha!

2009 Gallup Poll shows young Western Liberal Democrats to be most in favor of legalization. Please try to act surprised.

PRINCETON, NJ — Gallup’s October Crime poll finds 44% of Americans in favor of making marijuana legal and 54% opposed. U.S. public support for legalizing marijuana was fixed in the 25% range from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, but acceptance jumped to 31% in 2000 and has continued to grow throughout this decade.

The highest level of support for decriminalizing the use of marijuana today is seen with self-described liberals, among whom 78% are in favor. In contrast, 72% of conservatives are opposed. Moderates are about evenly divided on whether the use of marijuana should be legal, although they tilt against it (51% vs. 46%).

Gallup also finds a generational rift on the issue, as 50% of those under 50 and 45% of those 50 to 64 say it should be legal, compared with 28% of seniors.

Public mores on legalization of marijuana have been changing this decade, and are now at their most tolerant in at least 40 years. If public support were to continue growing at a rate of 1% to 2% per year, as it has since 2000, the majority of Americans could favor legalization of the drug in as little as four years.

Americans are no more — and no less — in favor of legalizing marijuana when the issue is framed as a revenue-enhancement tool for state governments. Regardless of how the question is asked, 53% of Americans living in the West — encompassing California, where the issue could be on the ballot in 2010 — support legalization.

It’s not a question of if cannabis will be re-legalized; it is a question of when, where, and how.  Stats guru Nate Silver has opined that overall support for re-legalization should top 60% by 2022/2023 independent of any other factors but the continuing movement of Baby Boomers into retirement age.  However, we here at NORML don’t really want to see another 11 million arrests between now and then, so we urge all of you to contact your elected officials to help us prove Mr. Silver to be too pessimistic.

Show 004: Three special episodes live from NORML National Conference!

NORML’s new talk radio program, NORML SHOW LIVE, will be streaming for three days at the 2009 NORML National Conference, “Yes We Cannabis”, live from the Grand Hyatt Hotel in San Francisco. These special three-hour episodes will be available at live.norml.org at the following special times and archived for download later just fifteen minutes after broadcast:

1. Thursday, September 24
   11:00am – 2:00pm Pacific Time
2. Friday, September 25
   11:00am – 2:00pm Pacific Time
3. Saturday, September 26
   3:00pm – 6:00pm Pacific Time

The show will be hosted by “Radical” Russ Belville, but with very limited commercial interruption and the occasional narration.  After the shows broadcast remotely in the difficult wireless environment of Portland’s Kelley Point Park and the noisy backstage of the Boston Freedom Rally, Russ is excited to present an indoor event that will take its audio directly from the conference PA system.

Thursday’s show will begin with a presentation by Dr Brooks J Kelly, Ph.D, Chief science officer for Genovations Laboratory, Cannabis Therapeutics, and then will feature panels on Individual Patients, Caregivers, and Small Patient Collectives in California and other medical marijuana states, including:

Patient and Caregiver rights under 215/SB420

• Possession: current caselaw and statutory law
• Cultivation: current caselaw and statutory law
• Transportation: current caselaw and statutory law
• Obtaining Cannabis: where and how to get it
• Patients Not Authorized to:
  distribute to other patients
  distribute “excess” to clubs
  engage in conduct harmful to others

Cannabis Patient rights (or lack thereof):

• No right to protection from employment discrimination
• No protection from Feds or other states
• Student loans
• Section 8 housing
• Small collectives: formation, cultivating, obtaining of medicine, money considerations
• Interaction with Law Enforcement

Your panelists will include Dr. David Bearman, Chris Conrad, Omar Figueroa, Esq., Zenia Gilg, Esq., Dr. Frank Lucido, and your moderator is William Panzer, Esq.

Friday’s show will begin with a panel on Pot Politics 2009 and Beyond.  A record number of state legislatures debated marijuana law reform in 2009; a nationwide panel of experts discusses our progress.  Our moderator is Keith Stroup, Esq., NORML, speaking on Federal Legislation, and also includes:

• Chris Goldstein, Director, Penn. For Medical Marijuana
• Rob Kampia, Executive Director, Marijuana Policy Project
• Dan Linn, Executive Director, Illinois NORML
• Madeline Martinez, Director, Oregon NORML, member of NORML’s board of directors
• Jesse Stout, former Director of RIPAC
• Ken Wolski, RN, Director, Coalition for Medical Marijuana NJ

We follow with a luncheon with travel author and NORML advisory board member Rick Steves presenting the ACLU DVD: ‘Marijuana: Its Time for a Conversation’, and close by asking “Has support for legalization reached a critical mass/tipping point?”  According to national polls, public support for legalizing marijuana has never been higher. Why now? And how do we mobilize this public support into political change? Leaders in the drug law reform movement discuss these trends, and what they portend for future reform efforts.  Our moderator is Dave Fratello, Coast Campaign Group, and the panel includes:

• Dale Gieringer, Ph.D, Director, CA NORML; member of NORML’s board of directors
• Rich Lee, Proprietor of ‘Oaksterdam University’ and Campaigner for ‘The Regulate, Control, and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010′
• Harry Levine, Ph.D, Queens College

Saturday’s closing show will feature a look at Marijuana Legalization As a Local, State, Federal Revenue Stream. In today’s sagging economy national, state and local leaders are looking for alternative streams of revenue. They should look no further than to America’s #1 cash crop: cannabis.  Our moderator is Dale Gieringer, Ph.D, Director, CA NORML, and the panelists include:

• Jon Gettman, Ph.D
• Rebecca Kaplan, Oakland City Council
• Mark Kleiman, Ph.D, UCLA

We follow with a panel on Cannabis and Athleticism. Some of the nation’s top athletes discuss why today’s pros are turning to cannabis — and away from alcohol and painkillers — off the field, and question why pro sports leagues are continuing to sanction those who do.  Our moderator is Steve Bloom, Author, Pot Culture; editor, celebstoner.com and the panelists include:

• Toby Grear, MMA fighter,
• Sean Neumann, Documentary Filmmaker; former ESPN producer
• Mark Stepnoski, Former All-Star NFL football player, NORML Advisory Board
• Rob Van Dam, Professional wrestler

Our three-part special show concludes with a talk from Rick Steves, TV host/best-selling travel author, NORML Advisory Board

Please join us for unparalleled access to the heart of marijuana law reform, nine total hours of content from the best and brightest minds in the movement, all absolutely free for you on the internet, courtesy of the donations of stakeholder cannabis consumers and liberty lovers all across this country who donate to and volunteer with NORML.  Mark us as a favorite on BlogTalkRadio and post us on your Twitter and Facebook with the tag #NORML.

The 2008 National Survey on Drug Use & Health was released today.  This is the annual survey where federal surveyors go door-to-door asking people if they smoke, drink, and do drugs.  So keep in mind as you review these figures that these represent people aged 12 and older who are willing to admit to breaking state and federal laws when asked by a total stranger at their doorstep.

Use of Marijuana is up again for nearly every age demographic and frequency of use

Lifetime Use of Marijuana:  In 2007, 40.6% of Americans admitted to trying cannabis at least once in their life.  This year, the figure rose to 41%, representing an additional 2 million Americans who’ve smoked pot, for a total of 102,404,000.  Youth marijuana use rose for 12-, 13-, & 15-year-olds and declined slightly for 14-, 16-, and 17-year-olds.  At ages 18 & 19, lifetime use remained topped 40%, and for adults in their twenties, over half have tried marijuana (ex. age 20 = 49.8%).  Lifetime use figures for thirty-somethings declined to mid-48% levels.  The highest lifetime use rates were reported among Americans in their forties, with 55.1% of those 40-44 and 57.6% of those 45-49 having “experimented a time a two in their youth”, as President Bill Clinton once said.  More than half (53.2%) of people in their early fifties have tried marijuana.

If you meet someone aged 20-55, flip a coin.  Heads they’ve smoked pot, tails they know someone who has.

Regular Adult Use of Marijuana: Focusing now only on adults aged 18 and older, we find that 43.7% of all adults – a record 98,296,000 people – have tried marijuana.  But also, past year (annual) and past month use of marijuana has risen among adults.  A full 10% of all adults used marijuana at least once in the past year – 22,531,000 people – and a full 6% of all adults have consumed cannabis in the past month – 13,546,000.  This represents 593,000 new annual tokers and 784,000 new monthly tokers since the 2007 survey.

Is it really conceivable that 10% of the American people are criminals this year? The current US prison population is 2.1 million – is it really possible that this month there are almost six-and-a-half times more criminals on the streets than behind bars?

Prevalence of Adult Marijuana Use:  For the 22,531,000 adults who used marijuana this year, we find those users to be using more often.  Among 18-25-year-olds, infrequent use (<12 days in a year) dropped from 31.9% to 30.6%, and for those 26 and older, it dropped from 34.1% to 33%.  Among annual users, 41.1% of 18-25-year-olds tokers and 39.2% of the over-25-year-old tokers are using at least 100 days per year.  That makes 9,006,000 adults who are using marijuana at least 100 days per year and 3,586,000 who are nearly daily (300+ days per year) tokers.

That means there are more adult daily tokers than the population of Connecticut. There are more adult weekly tokers than the population of New Jersey.  There are more adult monthly tokers than the population of New York.  There are more people in America who’ve tried marijuana than the populations of California, Texas, New York, and Florida combined.

Hey, any time more than half of Americans think something good about marijuana, we're happy.

…but 44% think marijuana is equally as dangerous or more dangerous than alcohol!

Fifty-one percent (51%) of American adults say alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Just 19% disagree and say pot is worse.

But 25% say both are equally dangerous. Just two percent (2%) say neither is dangerous.

Younger adults are more likely than their elders to view alcohol as the more dangerous of the two.

Unmarried adults are more critical of alcohol than those who are married. Those with children at home think alcohol is more dangerous than those without kids living with them.

This finding surprised me, as I figured parents with kids at home would be more likely to succumb to reefer madness hysteria.  Is it really possible that a majority of parents would rather catch their kid smoking a joint than drinking a beer?

As California looks for solutions to its ongoing budget problems, 47% of voters in the state say marijuana should be legalized and taxed. Nearly as many (42%) oppose the state legalizing and taxing the drug.

Nationally, 41% of likely voters think the United States should legalize and tax marijuana, but 49% are opposed.

President Obama’s new drug czar Gil Kerlikowske has signaled a shift away from the decades-old war on drugs toward more emphasis on health treatment for drug users. However, 54% of voters say illegal drug use is primarily a criminal justice issue rather than a matter of public health.

This I would attribute to the other illegal drugs and the tendency of their users to commit more crimes.  I’d like to see the question narrowed down to just marijuana use; is it an issue of public health or criminal justice?

Only 28% of voters believe that the legalization of marijuana in the United States would help to reduce drug-related violence in Mexico.

This number shows that we haven’t done a good enough job educating people about the contribution of marijuana to the profits of the Mexican cartels.  Even with Arizona’s attorney general and others estimating 60%-70% of cartel profits stem from marijuana trafficking, it seems the people haven’t gotten the word.  They also may believe that even if we did dry up their major funding source through marijuana legalization that the cartels would just shift their profits and violence to controlling the trafficking of hard drugs.  Nobody ever stops to consider how the cartels are going to magically create millions of new American cocaine and heroin users to make up for the loss of marijuana business, especially when marijuana users would have greater access to a better product under legalization.

There is a reason there is no Cocaine Culture or Heroin Times magazines.  Cocaine and heroin use most often are addictions; marijuana use is most often a lifestyle.

Barneys New York in Beverly Hills is celebrating the Woodstock spirit by selling $78 “Hashish” candles in Jonathan Adler pots with bas-relief marijuana leaves; Hickey offers $75 linen pocket squares or $120 custom polo shirts bearing the five-part leaf; and French designer Lucien Pellat-Finet is serving up white-gold and diamond custom pot-leaf-emblazoned wristwatches for $49,000 and belt buckles for $56,000.

After decades of bubbling up around the edges of so-called civilized society, marijuana seems to be marching mainstream at a fairly rapid pace. At least in urban areas such as Los Angeles, cannabis culture is coming out of the closet.

Public sentiment is more than anecdotal; earlier this year, a California Field Poll found that 56% of California voters supported legalizing and taxing marijuana. Last month, voters in Oakland overwhelmingly approved a tax increase on medical marijuana sales, the first of its kind in the country, and Los Angeles Councilwoman Janice Hahn has proposed something similar for the City of Angels. “In this current economic crisis, we need to get creative about how we raise funds,” Hahn said in a statement.

Smoking pot used to be the kind of personal conduct that could sink a U.S. Supreme Court nomination (Douglas H. Ginsburg in 1987) and embarrass a presidential candidate (Bill Clinton in 1992). Today, it seems to be a non-issue for the current inhabitant of the Oval Office; Barack Obama issued his marijuana mea culpa in a 1995 memoir.

Richard Laermer, a media and pop culture trend watcher and author of several books, including “2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade,” points to Bill Maher as a bellwether of change. “Ten years ago, he would have been taken off the air.” (”Real Time With Bill Maher” airs on HBO.) Now, he’s “a totally mainstream comic who consistently talks about how much pot he smokes.”

(CBS News) SHOULD THE USE OF MARIJUANA BE MADE LEGAL?
Demographic	Yes	No	Don’t know
Total	41%	52	7
Men	44%	51	5
Women	39%	53	8
Under age 35	52%	38	10
Age 35 and over	36%	59	5
Northeast	44%	48	8
Midwest	43%	49	8
South	35%	59	6
West	46%	48	6
Liberal	55%	35	10
Moderate	41%	52	7
Conservative	33%	64	3

Hooray, young Western liberals support legalization! My people! (Oh, wait, I’m 41! I only act and feel like a 27-year-old. Well, they say cannabis use does cause time distortion…)

I’d caution you about feeling too glum about the report and thinking, “Only 41% support legalization?”  Think about the question, the bare bones “Should the use of marijuana be made legal?”  Not “made legal for adults,” just “legal”.  Understand also that when many people hear that question, the word “legal” to them invokes a frame of “accepted”, “promoted”, “safe”, “approved”, and “encouraged”.  In that frame, 41% support is an amazing number.  Imagine the results if the question was “Should the users of marijuana be arrested?” or “Should marijuana be taxed and regulated like alcohol?” or “Should federal prohibition of marijuana be eliminated, leaving the states to set marijuana regulations?”

Remember that asking people to imagine legalized marijuana for many of them is akin to asking them what double-necked spooplegorps from planet Xenious look like.  Few people are alive today who can remember picking up cannabis tinctures at the general store, and even most of them were only children at the time.  “Legalized marijuana” is an oxymoron to most, and after decades of demonization, few are going to turn on a dime and accept that all the years of reefer madness they’ve been fed by government are lies.

That’s why I encourage activists not to promote how great things will be under legalization – the money raised/saved, the lives unbroken, the planet revitalized by a new green hemp economy – because it is like telling people how great Earth will be after the spooplegorps visit here.  What must be done first is to prepare their minds by making them focus on how awful prohibition is.  Make them understand the money wasted, lives broken, and planet raped for resources because of marijuana prohibition.  Only when they realize that accepting the status quo is a danger to them personally will they be ready to listen and accept alternatives.

(By the way, double-necked spooplegorps look a lot like former drug czar Bill Bennett, only they have a paler skin tone and never double down on a pair of tens.)

(CBS News Graphic) Uh, 41% for, 52% against now, but both "Yes" and "No" bars are same height?

A CBS News Poll released today finds that 41 percent of Americans think the use of marijuana should be made legal. Fifty-two percent disagree.

The percentage supporting legalization has varied a bit recently. In March of this year 31 percent favored legalization but the number was higher in January at 41 percent, matching what it is now.

Thirty years ago just 27 percent thought the use of marijuana should be made legal.

Younger Americans are more likely than those who are older to support legalization.

OK, folks, sometimes I’m stoned, so help me with the graphic.  They tell us their new poll shows 41% approval and 52% disapproval for the legalization of marijuana, yet when I look at the “Now” columns in the graphics, I see a “Yes” and a “No” hovering equally at 41%.

Then I see that just four months ago, about 30% approved and about 65% disapproved.  Wow, what a shift in public attitudes in just four months!

Then, two months before that, people again equally approved and disapproved of pot at about 40%.  Gee, people are fickle.

Finally, thirty years ago, “Yes” and “No” were both at about 25%, with about 5% “Don’t know” and somehow a mystery 45% who aren’t accounted for.

I may be a stoner, but apparently I have a better grasp of visual data than CBS’s graphic arts department.

Three out of four Americans believe the “war on drugs” is a failure and can never be won. Serious people like Sen. Jim Webb, former Mexican president Vicente Fox, Congressmen Barney Frank, Charlie Rangel, Steve Cohen and others, even a growing body of right-of-center analysts and politicians have been saying it’s time to fundamentally reshape our approach to drug control.

So, why this divide between massive public opposition to current policies and the positions taken by our leaders? Fear, of course. They’re afraid of being punished for touching what has been perceived, mistakenly, as a third rail issue.

And the cause of this “drug war dementia”? I’m guessing it has something to do with a brilliant 2004 poll on the topic of medical marijuana. The poll asked two questions, the first confirming what had already been shown over and over again: that about 70 percent of people support the idea of legalizing marijuana, at least for medical purposes.

But then, pollsters asked something interesting:

“Regardless of your own opinion, do you think the majority of people support making marijuana medically available, or do you think the majority opposes making marijuana medically available?”

The result? In Rhode Island, where the poll was conducted, only 26.5 percent thought that most people support medical marijuana.

The lesson here? While many of our elected representatives privately support serious changes to our failed drug laws, they believe they are alone. They think if they stick their necks out they’ll be handed their heads come election time.

Which is why we must rise up and let our elected officials know they are safe to support drug law reform. And in considerable political danger if they do not.

via Norm Stamper: Progressives Push Against Drug War: Will Dems Listen?.

This is also why we must come out of the cannabis closet and make ourselves known as the responsible, taxpaying, normal-with-an-a, law-abiding-(except-that-law) citizens that we are.  When the only public image of the cannabis community is the “stoner”, the people who support our issue will only do so quietly, lest they be lumped in with the “burnouts”.

Never has this point been so crystal clear to me as during this last weekend’s family campout for Independence Day.This was a campout for my wife’s immediate family, which sounds like a cozy get-together until you realize she is the fifth of fifteen kids.  When all the brothers and sisters plus their spouses and children gather, it’s an event with about sixty people.  Most of the younger brothers and sisters are former marijuana smokers, but they’ll tell you they “outgrew that” or “had to become a mom/dad”.  Yet four of them were eager to stop by our tent for a puff of Oregon’s finest.

That’s right – tent.  It was such a 180° from last weekend’s Mountain High Camping Weekend, where I gathered with an all-male group of cannabis activists and medical marijuana patients.  Pipes, bongs, joints, and vaporizer bags were plentiful and marijuana buds and hash were openly shared by all.  But at this weekends’ family festivities, my tent had to be set up in the furthest corner and all my tokes had to be surreptitiously sneaked behind zippered doors.

One cousin, three years older than me, came in and offered to light us up with what he had brought from Idaho.  It was that sad golf-divot-looking, alfalfa-smelling pressed brick Mexican schwag that I’d last seen six years ago before moving to Portland.  “Put that away,” I chided, “because not only will that not have the slightest effect on me, but I also won’t smoke anything that’s killing innocent Mexicans.”  He explained that chunk of hemp pressboard was all they could get in Idaho; I explained how 7,000 Mexicans are murdered per year as cartels smuggle that crap to the states.  We then lit up the fine crystally Oregon bud.  He was just one hit in when his eyes sparkled.  That was all he needed, he said, and it showed.

This cousin then explained to me how he used to smoke cannabis regularly, but now he had become a father and had to “play grown-up” and couldn’t do that anymore.  I had taken a vow of neutrality for my wife that I would shelve my political persona for the weekend (just “Russ”, not “Radical Russ”) – so I didn’t tell him about all the incredible parents I know who are regular cannabis smokers.

Later that weekend, this cousin got very drunk and slept away most of the next day with a splitting hangover… while his child was taken care of by the rest of the adults.  So much for “playing grown-up”.

Which leads me to the booze.  I will not make the obvious joke about my wife’s family’s Irish heritage and the bottle – this scene could’ve played out in any American family of any heritage.  But all weekend, every day, cooler after cooler of beer was filled and emptied.  At the center camping table where toddlers sat to eat and play were bags of chips, cookies, candies, and one-third of the table covered with bottles of gin, rum, vodka, tequila, whiskey, and liqueurs.  One female cousin got particularly “well served” and babbled and laughed to the point where my eleven-year-old niece is teasing her for being “a drunk”.

I don’t mean to paint this picture to show my wife’s family as reckless or irresponsible.  Those kids are well-watched, they know that alcohol is for adults, and everyone drinking there handles their alcohol responsibly (even if that is to responsibly puke in the bushes away from camp).  Nobody drives, gets violent, or allows the kids to drink.  But as I watched this scene, I wondered just how much of a turd in the punchbowl I would’ve been if I had simply loaded a bowl in my Starfish Designs pipe and smoked it as I enjoyed the campfire.

Every one of them who were drinking, even to excess, are fine responsible parents with great kids.  It wouldn’t occur to any of them that becoming parents meant they had to stop drinking to become “responsible”.    Yet to a person every one of them offers some sort of excuse that growing up and becoming parents forced them to stop smoking cannabis.  When I dig deep enough, I find that it is their fear of legal sanctions and losing their kids that is the true reason.

And now we get back to that Rhode Island poll where almost 3 out of 4 people support medical marijuana, but only think 1 out of 4 of their neighbors do.  These in-laws of mine, they know their cannabis use doesn’t make them bad parents, but they think others would consider them bad parents if their cannabis use was known.  They don’t know what to tell their kids about cannabis if they used it; they don’t know how to tell their kids that they should always obey the law and respect police, except when it comes to mommy and daddy’s smokable plant.  With alcohol they can say, “wait til you’re older”.  With cannabis, they are so conditioned to think of it as an act of juvenile rebellion that they feel immature and irresponsible when they use it.

I think next year, after the kids go to sleep, I will have to just take out a joint and start smoking it.  Especially after the umpteenth offer of alcohol from one of my in-laws, which I refuse every time with, “No thanks, I’m only choosing safer drugs in my old age.”