Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 1:25 pm | By: Radical Russ
AMSTERDAM, Nov 5 (Reuters) – The Dutch are among the lowest users of marijuana or cannabis in Europe despite the Netherlands’ well-known tolerance of the drug, according to a regional study published on Thursday. Among adults in the Netherlands, 5.4 percent used cannabis, compared with the European average of 6.8 percent, according to an annual report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, using latest available figures.
A higher percentage of adults in Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic and France took cannabis last year, the EU agency said, with the highest being Italy at 14.6 percent. Usage in Italy used to be among the lowest at below 10 percent a decade ago.
The policy on soft drugs in the Netherlands, one of the most liberal in Europe, allows for the sale of marijuana at “coffee shops”, which the Dutch have allowed to operate for decades, and possession of less than 5 grams (0.18 oz).
The full report is available here. Some interesting stats of note:
While 41% or 102 million Americans have tried cannabis in their lifetime, only 22% or 74 million Europeans have. Interestingly, there are about the same number of Europeans as Americans who will use cannabis this year (about 22 million) and this month (12 million), but of course that represents a lower percentage of population since America has 304 million and Europe has 491 million.
While cannabis represents 49.8% of all drug law arrests in America, it represents between 55% and 85% of all drug offenses in the majority of European countries.
While 25% of American 15-16-year-olds have tried cannabis in the past year, only 15% of European 15-16-year-olds have. The same percentage of 15-16-year-olds in the Netherlands used cannabis in the past year as in the USA, 25%.
The greatest decrease among European countries in the prevalence of cannabis use among young adults aged 15-34 has occurred in the United Kingdom since 2003, where past year use has dropped by a third. Incidentally, 2003 was the year the UK downgraded cannabis to a Class C offense, essentially decriminalizing it.
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 2:29 pm | By: Radical Russ
(Change.org Criminal Justice) Advocates for marijuana reform frequently argue that the drug should be legalized because it’s safe. This is generally true, and I support legalization for this and many other reasons. But when it comes to driving and safety, legalization advocates often go a step too far — claiming that driving under the influence of marijuana is not dangerous and that marijuana causes zero deaths each year. These misleading arguments are harming the reform movement.
In the next couple of paragraphs the author calls out the authors of “Marijuana is Safer”, so I’ll leave that to Paul Armentano to cover. I’ve never claimed that driving under the influence of marijuana is not dangerous, though I have pointed out how it is safer than driving under the influence of alcohol or driving while text-messaging.
I also am increasingly perturbed by a society that thinks nothing of parking lots at bars and .08 BAC laws having zero tolerance for the notion of cannabis-using drivers. The fact that we have a per se standard of .08 BAC for alcohol-using drivers means that at below .08 BAC, the state has to prove you were actually too impaired to drive, not simply that you’d been drinking. We tolerate the idea that a big guy like me (6′0″ 260lbs.) might be able to drink one beer and be OK to drive, but the notion of driving after one puff off a joint is unthinkable? We tolerate people driving their cars to bars for the express purpose of becoming impaired knowing full well that not 100% of them have designated drivers, but were supposed to worry that legalizing pot will lead to blood on the highways?
So, I want to say to the commenters who frequently write here and elsewhere that driving under the influence of marijuana is not risky: you’re wrong. Not only are you wrong, but you’re spreading a dangerous myth that could cause deadly accidents and will hurt the chances for marijuana reform in the United States. To those who cite that stat that alcohol causes 75,000 deaths each year in the U.S. and marijuana causes zero: you’re wrong, too. Marijuana causes far, far fewer deaths than alcohol (maybe 0.1%) , but the number is not zero. Fatal accidents like this one and this one confirm that.
It’s always funny to me how one or two stories of people being helped by medical marijuana are just anecdotes that don’t scientifically prove anything, but one or two stories of a person pleading guilty to a fatal marijuana DUI wreck proves how dangerous marijuana and driving are.
The author, I believe, is purposefully excluding the context under which most of us say “marijuana never killed anyone”. I am always referring to marijuana being non-toxic and incapable of overdose. I try to be careful and only cite the 35,000 alcohol deaths from chronic conditions like the 18,000 whose livers fail or the 4,500 who suffer strokes and heart attacks or the 2,200 who get cancer. I try not to include the 40,000 whose alcohol use causes acute conditions like the 14,000 who wreck their car, boat, or plane or the 19,000 who fall, commit suicide, or are murdered, or the 2,200 who freeze, burn, or drown.
If we want to include all of the ways in which marijuana might lead to death of its users, then, indeed, it is false to say nobody ever died from marijuana. First we’d have to add in all the people who’ve been shot by police, murdered by dealers, or died choking on their own vomit due to lack of medical marijuana in a prison cell. We’d have to include people like the two drivers in the examples above, plus all the people who fell off a cliff because they tripped while stoned and the people who die of a heart attack from the obesity they got from the munchies. As you admit, that number is still probably 0.1% the deaths compared to alcohol under all conditions, which is why we are also careful to say marijuana is not harmless, but it is far less harmful than alcohol and tobacco. (Even that percentage is high, I think, as that would be 75 pot-related deaths per year.)
To show that we’re serious about responsible reform, marijuana reformers need to take a stand against driving under the influence of pot. Each of us can do our part.
Fine, I’ll take that stand: if your consumption of marijuana has led you to be as impaired as someone with a blood-alcohol content of 0.08 or above, do not drive a car. If you’re at a public event, wait to drive for as long as they force the beer drinkers to wait before you get behind the wheel.
Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 1:12 pm | By: Radical Russ
While most Portlanders are all too familiar with cafés of the coffee-serving variety, there’s a new café coming to town worth noting.
It’s Oregon’s first cannabis café (a concept common elsewhere around the globe) and it will be run by Oregon NORML
It’s scheduled to open Friday, Nov. 13, naturally at 4:20pm.
Sadly, only members both of the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program and NORML can partake in the experience (the café is legal under the guidelines of the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act), but maybe they’re accepting applications for servers. Snacks and items from sellers like Stoned Made will be available, along with a full range of pot to sample. The café will be a resource for the medical marijuana community, and Oregon NORML also hopes to provide seminars and classes there.
Friday, Nov. 13, 4:20pm. Rumpspankers, 700 NE Dekum St, Portland. For the Grand Opening, the entry fee will be $25, which covers the first month of membership and an all-day entry pass.
This new cannabusiness operates under two premises from the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act. One, cardholders are allowed to freely exchange marijuana with each other for “no consideration” – that is, no buying, selling, trading, favors, gifts, or exchanges. Its the reason you’ve never heard of much federal interference with Oregon’s medical marijuana program: there’s no commerce involved. (Isn’t interesting how dangerous marijuana is to the authorities when people are making money off of it, but when it’s exchanged freely by over 25,000 cardholders, there’s not enough danger to the public for the feds to be interested?
Two, patients are allowed to medicate so long as they are not “in public view”. A private club for a membership-based organization in a building with its windows covered by drapes is out of public view. Oregon NORML will be strictly carding all entrants o the café to verify cardholder status.
We discussed the café with Madeline Martinez, director of Oregon NORML, on the last NORML SHOW LIVE. She tells us, “It’s exciting because there are so many of our most vulnerable patients who have no real social outlets. They can’t really go to concerts or clubs because they can’t medicate and nobody can really enjoy themselves if they are forced to sit in pain. At our café patients can relax and meet others, learn about the program, sample different strains of medicine to find what might work best for them, they can get some snacks and drinks and even purchase some great stuff from Urb Age and Stoned Made and others that helps support the community.”
Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 10:31 am | By: Radical Russ
America's longest serving non-violent marijuana offender, Robert Platshorn, a.k.a. The Black Tuna, served 29 years in prison for marijuana smuggling
We’re back in studio this Saturday for our special Halloweed show! Our guest is ROBERT PLATSHORN, a.k.a. “The Black Tuna”. We’ll be discussing his life as America’s longest-imprisoned (30 years) non-violent marijuana offender, once referred to by President Carter’s attorney general as one of the “slickest, most sophisticated pot smugglers of the 70’s.” Read all about it in Platshorn’s book, “The Black Tuna Diaries”.
The original High Times cover of the Black Tuna story in 1981
We’re also broadcasting from the site of NORML’s West Coast Media HQ Halloweed party, with guests such as Oregon NORML’s Madeline Martinez and UrbAge Designs‘ Scott Gordon. Plus your calls about the scariest marijuana moments in your life. It’s live talk radio from the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 7:11 pm | By: Radical Russ
(ABC News) Convicted con man Bernard Madoff, who slept on luxury linens and dined at the finest restaurants, is now sleeping in the lower bunk of a two man cell in a federal prison, with a 21-year-old convicted drug dealer for a roommate and a child molester cooking his pizza, according to a new victims’ lawsuit filed by the lone outsider to visit him behind bars.
Which one of these three people do you think we could save some money on incarcerating?
A man who ripped people off for hundreds of millions of dollars of investments;
A man who sexually abused children;
A man who sold drugs to willing customers.
I don’t know what drugs the 21-year-old was selling and who he was selling to, but it is ridiculous to think he belongs in the same cell as Bernie Madoff.
Madoff should feel comfortable among the former drug dealers given his long association with office messengers who provided him and his wife Ruth with large amounts of marijuana over the years, according to accounts by former employee in a new book by ABC’s Brian Ross, “The Madoff Chronicles.”
As the former Madoff staffers told Ross, Bernie liked to let off steam.
“Especially in the early days, a messenger known in the office as Little Rick would be dispatched to Harlem to bring back marijuana for Bernie and others in the office.”
Well, I don’t know if you feel comfortable with a street drug dealer just because you had an in-house drug courier, but whatever. All I know is that tokers like Bernie and Ruth Madoff give the rest of us a bad name.
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 11:42 am | By: Paul Armentano
By any objective standard, marijuana prohibition is an abject failure.
Nationwide, U.S. law enforcement have arrested over 20 million American citizens for marijuana offenses since 1965, yet today marijuana is more prevalent than ever before, adolescents have easier access to marijuana than ever before, the drug is more potent than ever before, and there is more violence associated with the illegal marijuana trade than ever before.
Over 100 million Americans nationally have used marijuana despite prohibition, and 1 in 10 — according to current government survey data — use it regularly.
The criminal prohibition of marijuana has not dissuaded anyone from using marijuana or reduced its availability; however, the strict enforcement of this policy has adversely impacted the lives and careers of millions of people who simply elected to use a substance to relax that is objectively safer than alcohol.
NORML believes that the state of California ought to amend criminal prohibition and replace it with a system of legalization, taxation, regulation and education.
The case for legalization and regulation
Only through state government regulation will we be able to bring necessary controls to the commercial marijuana market. (Note: Nonretail cultivation for adult personal use would arguably not be subject to such regulations, just as the personal, noncommercial production by adults of beer is not governed by such restriction.) By enacting state and local legislation on the retail production and distribution of marijuana, state and local governments can effectively impose controls regarding:
which citizens can legally produce marijuana;
which citizens can legally distribute marijuana;
which citizens can legally consume marijuana; and where, and under what circumstances such use is legally permitted.
By contrast, the criminal prohibition of marijuana — the policy the state of California has in place now — provides law enforcement and state regulators with no legitimate market controls. This absence of state and local government controls jeopardizes rather than promotes public safety.
For example:
Prohibition abdicates the control of marijuana production and distribution to criminal entrepreneurs (i.e. drug cartels, street gangs, drug dealers who push additional illegal substances);
Prohibition provides young people with unfettered access to marijuana (e.g., according to a 2009 Columbia University report, adolescents now have easier access to marijuana than they do alcohol);
Prohibition promotes the use of marijuana in inappropriate and potentially dangerous settings (e.g., in automobiles, in public parks, in public restrooms, etc.)
Prohibition promotes disrespect for the law and reinforces ethnic and generation divides between the public and law enforcement. (According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, 75 percent of all marijuana arrestees are under age 30; African Americans account for only 12 percent of marijuana users but make up 23 percent of all possession arrests).
Marijuana is not a harmless substance — no potentially mind-altering substance is. But this fact is precisely why its commercial production and distribution ought to be controlled and regulated in manner similar to the licensed distribution of alcohol and cigarettes — two legal substances that cause far greater harm to the individual user, and to society as a whole, than cannabis ever could.
Taxing and regulating cannabis in a manner similar to alcohol will bring long-overdue state oversight to a commercial market that is presently unregulated, uncontrolled and all too often inundated by criminal entrepreneurs.
While this alternative may not entirely eliminate the black-market demand for cannabis, it would certainly be preferable to today’s blanket, although thoroughly ineffective, expensive and impotent, criminal prohibition.
Voters nationwide, and in California in particular, support ending criminal marijuana prohibition. This past spring, 56 percent of California voters expressed support for taxing and regulating marijuana in a statewide Field poll.
Doing so would give greater control to state law enforcement officials and regulators by imposing proper state restrictions and regulations on this existing and widespread marijuana market.
I urge this committee to move forward with the enactment of sensible regulations for legalizing marijuana.
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SPECIAL EDITION – Full Live Audio from Tommy Chong / B Real / Lou Dog panel at Cypress Hill Smokeout, moderated by Steve Bloom from CelebStoner.com
Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at 8:45 pm | By: Radical Russ
What a day! Cypress Hill just delivered a literally smoking set to a crowd of 20,000 fans. Deftones are up next and Slipknot closes the show.
I arrived today just in time to catch the musicians panel with Tommy Chong, B Real, and Lou Dog from Kottonmouth Kings. B Real said he was “nervous as shit” to be on stage with Tommy Chong. Tommy spoke of his prison time and earning street cred. I got the whole panel and will play it as a two-parter for Mon and Tue Stash.
Then I did the legalization panel with Allison Margolin, Debbie Goldsberry, and Ed Rosenthal. At one point, Ed commanded everyone to stand up and shout “we are the majority!”
From there we went live at 4:00 with NORML SHOW LIVE. It was hectic trying to get to the stage where Cheech & Chong performed. Security kept moving me from place to place.
They only did their musical bits. Cheech led off with his Cousin Red character sintin’ country. Chong followed with Blind Melon Chitlin singing a song full of Michael Jackson references. Cheech did Alice Bowie and “Earache My Eye” in full pink leotard. There was also a remixed “Born in East LA”, Cheech doing “Mexican Americans” and Chong doing a new version called “(They Don’t Like Being Called) Beaners.”. They closed with “Up In Smoke” – I’ve got the whole thing on NORML SHOW LIVE.
We then spoke with Craig Beresh from Southern California NORML as we hustled from one area to another trying to find a place where our combination of wristbands would allow us to go.
I was lured into a cabana with a gentleman running a non-profit dispensary association, and later I happened upon Sarah, the owner of the Bambu company. They have a great new clothing line out at Nordstroms and she told me what it’s like to run this centuries-old company.
And that leads to now, where I’m waiting in a cabana for Cannabis Karri to find me as we party the night away. She did an amazing job hosting NORML SHOW LIVE. It’s so great that she would help me so much with the show production, but also the driving. Weed promotes strong friendships – we’ve been tight since the early ’90s. She’ll say it was worth it to chill with Adrianne Curry (Karri is a reality show fanatic.)
We’re winning and events like this prove it. Live Nation put on.a world class event here. Massive amounts of money are generated here strictly from a young hip-hop/hard rock demographic. Marijuana is everywhere, even flying around on 50-yard banners towed by airplanes. Exhibitors here have beautiful young women greeting the crowd and posing for photos like a major tech or sports car show. Pot is happening!
Life here is so far away from growing up in Nampa, Idaho, and still so far away for too many people. I hope our efforts give you a little look at what freedom looks like as we wash over this country eastward from the California Coast. It is coming faster than you think.
Posted from my BlackBerry – please forgive my big thumbs for any typos!
RevRayGreen: Barney Frank Present When Partner Arrested for pot-- http://bit.ly/1XpM2R
RevRayGreen: KMK 11/17/09 VAL AIR ballroom DSM
bullbog: that's crazy. I had a NORML black t-shirt on. It was hell of a show
RevRayGreen: dude I was probably 4-5 seats from you then
bullbog: 4th row center. I wish I was closer.
RevRayGreen: were in in the orchestra pit 4th row? or 4th row center, that's where I was bu slightly to the right
RevRayGreen: our show ______v'''''''
RevRayGreen: catch our chow tomorrow online Carl'sCannabis Corner
www.macswordlive.com 12-2 PM you can go there now and find archived shows
bullbog: revraygreen after looking at your pic from last nite. I'm pretty sure I seen you. I regonize you from the march in May
Just Legalize It: nothing really cool dealing with marijuana happens in massachusetts.... it sucks.... other than the boston freedom rally... but one thing a year isnt enough! i want to move to [...]
bullbog: went and seen cheech and chong last nite.My sides were hurting within the first 10 mins. Can't wait to see them in there Legalize it tour.
WakeUpDead: Just got done with an all day Bubble bag session. Stocking up for the winter dry spell. MMMM Hash!
Just Legalize It: i hear ya russ.... it sucks because the marijuana community is gaining much more ground than the hemp community.... if we combined then it would be an unstoppable force.... i [...]
Radical Russ: Wish we could, but every time we try to combine with hemp activists, they say, "stay away, you legalizers!" They don't want to be associated with psychoactive cannabis in [...]
mr reuben: hopefully everything goes well Krispy. It would be nice to see a norml chapter at my old school.
Maine: Voters To Decide Next Week On Medical Marijuana Expansion Measure; Colorado: Breckenridge Voters To Decide Next Week On Eliminating Pot Penalties; California: Lawmakers Hold Historic Hearing On Marijuana Legalization; New Hampshire: Senate Fails To Override Medical Marijuana Veto. […]
Gallup: Majority Of West Coast Voters Back Marijuana Legalization; Pot Arrests Responsible For Majority Of Marijuana Treatment Referrals; DOJ To Federal Prosecutors: Do Not Focus Resources On Medical Marijuana. […]
California: L.A. District Attorney Intends To Prosecute "100 Percent" Of County's Medical Marijuana Dispensaries; Maternal Tobacco and Alcohol Use, But Not Marijuana, Associated With Psychotic Symptoms In Offspring, Study Says; 'Hemperor' Jack Herer Released From Hospital. […]
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. Moderator: Steve Bloom, Author, Pot Culture; editor, celebstoner.com * Toby Grear, MMA fighter * Sean Neumann, Documentary Filmm […]
Cannabis Law Reform's Missing Link: Law Enforcement Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper; LEAP and NORML Advisory Board; Author of Breaking Rank Putting the Mexican Cartels Out of Business Mexican drug cartels now employ over 100,000 soldiers and are responsible for nearly ten thousand deaths per year. Their largest source of income is marijuana. […]
No surprise, again: Use of marijuana in The Netherlands among lowest in Europe
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