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.

Cue up to 2:15 in the video… nice punchline… even better follow-up!

Some days you wake up and the media gods have given you a priceless gift beyond measure…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Show 012 This Saturday, 9pm Eastern / 6pm Pacific

My deepest apologies to those of you who tried listening last Saturday to Show 011, the Grand Opening of the Oregon NORML Cannabis Café. We were beset by technical difficulties and could not complete the show.

I will solve the technical issues and return this weekend to Oregon’s first Cannabis Café. Oregon’s law does not allow for marijuana sales, but does allow patients to medicate “out of public view”. Any cardholder may freely exchange medicine with any other. So Madeline Martinez and Oregon NORML have created a private, members-only club for the social benefit of medical marijuana patients.

However, this is not a medical marijuana dispensary with a café; this is a café for medical marijuana patients. Patients can visit the smoke-free vapor bar where a budtender will load up one of six Volcano Vaporizers, fill the bag with the vapor of any one of more than twenty of the strains available, and cap it with a sterilized mouthpiece. Others bring their own pipes or papers and request a small ceramic bowl filled with their choice of freshly-ground cannabis strain and roll a joint as they play pool or smoke a bowl as they join in a card game. All sorts of café food and drink are available, though not alcoholic beverages (the owner surrendered his liquor license rather than fight with the commission over the use of cannabis in the café.) Many have questioned how this café can operate due to Oregon’s smoke-free laws, but the actual statutes in question specifically reference “tobacco smoke”. Thus, no tobacco smoking is allowed in the café.

Most amazingly, all the cannabis is provided free through the donations of local area medical marijuana growers. Oregon’s law provides for six mature plants, eighteen seedlings, but only twenty-four ounces of dried, cured marijuana. I say “only” and people’s jaws drop, wishing they could possess 24 grams, much less a pound and a half of marijuana. But that works out to four ounces per mature plant, which some growers are able to surpass, so they donate their excess to Oregon NORML for distribution to patients. In fact, on the day of the Grand Opening, the café had more marijuana at the end of the day then they had started with, thanks to generous donations.

While I attended on Saturday night, two officers from the Portland Police Bureau stopped by to investigate the operations. They were very friendly and just wanted to know where the medicating was taking place and how Oregon NORML was controlling the situation. They were pleased to learn how relentlessly ID’s and medical cards were being checked and that the front entrance was closed as a measure to help control the smell from permeating the public area. The police let everyone know that they had no intention of harassing the club or its patrons and that absent any complaints from neighbors the Cannabis Café would be free to operate.

Annual membership in Oregon NORML is required, since it is a private club, as well as monthly club dues, which go to support Oregon NORML’s lobbying and outreach efforts and pay the overhead of running the club, respectively. This Saturday, November 21, we’ll return to the café and speak to Madeline Martinez and these patients and hear their medical marijuana stories, as well as taking questions about the café from the live audience and our callers. It’s 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. Join us every Saturday Night, live, at http://live.norml.org from 9-11pm Eastern / 6-8pm Pacific.

We all know Judge Jim Gray is a powerful advocate for ending marijuana prohibition.  We all know David Evans is a rabid prohibitionist.  Let’s just skip to the fun parts and give you the bullet points from David Evans’ reefer madness:

(CBS News) David Evans: We cannot legalize marijuana because…

• Marijuana is far more powerful today than it was years ago… [Yes, because prohibition forces illegal producers to make the most potent product.]
• …it serves as an entry point for the use of other illegal drugs. This is known as the “gateway effect.”… [There is no "gateway effect", Institute of Medicine debunked that a decade ago and every serious study since has agreed.]
• Higher potency marijuana may be contributing to a substantial increase in the number of American teenagers in treatment for marijuana dependence…. [No, that's because of drug courts that sentence marijuana users to rehab.]
• Drug legalization advocates claim that marijuana is less dangerous than drugs like alcohol, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. However, studies … show that marijuana is not harmless but that it is toxic and addictive.  [Marijuana is notably non-toxic to healthy cells and organs and is not even as addictive as coffee.]
• The legalizers claim that as legalized drugs become less expensive, people will no longer need to commit crimes in order to pay for their drug use. The problem with this claim is that some drugs are already inexpensive. Marijuana, the most abused and addictive drug for young people, is very inexpensive….  [Really, you consider $10-$15/gram inexpensive for a young person?]
• Even supporters of drug legalization admit that “low prices would encourage use.” A good example of this is [crack] cocaine. … Higher levels of drug use cause increased crime, especially property crime to pay for the drugs.  [Wasn't this a discussion about marijuana?  So, then, you're saying the people who'd rob someone for money for that $400 ounce now will rob more people for that $40 ounce in the future?]
• Drug users, many of whom are unable to hold jobs, commit robberies and other crimes not only to obtain drugs, but also to purchase food, shelter, clothing and other goods and services. Even if drugs were legalized, addicts will still need to pay the rent and may resort to crime to do so.  [Uh, if marijuana is legal, marijuana users can keep their jobs or find new ones without being discriminated against for the metabolites in their urine.]
• …most violent drug related crime is committed because people are under the influence of drugs. The use of drugs changes behavior and causes criminal activity because people will do things they wouldn’t do if they were rational and free of the drug’s influence…. Cocaine-related paranoia is an example.  [Again with the cocaine!  Please, what crimes are being committed by people under the influence of marijuana, except for noodling too long on a guitar solo or not sharing the bag of Doritos?]
• If legalizing drugs will increase drug use, then drugged driving will also likely increase. Many studies show a clear correlation between drug use and motor vehicle accidents, trauma, and dangerous driving….  [If legalizing marijuana causes more people to choose it instead of alcohol, we'll have less dangerous driving!]
• Pot use among Dutch kids was very low before they “decriminalized” pot. It was about 5%. It is now approaching US levels but is still lower than the US. It has risen substantially due to the more relaxed attitude….  [Pot use among adults and teens in the Netherlands is half what it is in the US.]
• Your comment that increased pot use will not lead to more addiction is preposterous…. This argument does not work when we consider that drugs such as cocaine, heroin, and marijuana are dangerous and highly addictive.  [Cocaine and heroin are dangerous and highly addictive.  Can we please stick to talking about pot?]
• [Prohibition] keeps potential drug users from using drugs by virtue of the fear of arrest and the embarrassment of being caught.  [Right, all 22 million of us who will smoke this year are terrified, but it's not stopping us from using cannabis.]
• [Prohibition] helps drug users/addicts into treatment through the use of laws and drug courts that offer treatment as an alternative to incarceration.  [Helps drug rehabs, you mean, by providing them unaddicted people forced into rehab by courts.  Over one third of those attending marijuana rehab haven't even used cannabis in the past thirty days!]

Some other points to notice from Mr. Evans’ rants:

• He insists on calling us “legalizers”.  I call Evans a “prohibitionist” because he supports continuing the status quo of prohibition.  But to say that we support “legalization” of drugs is not semantically correct.  A “legalized” drug, as Judge Gray points out, would be something like aspirin, a substance that has no restrictions on marketing, age of use, sales, manufacture, and purchase.  We don’t call for that, we call for sensible regulations on marijuana not unlike alcohol and tobacco.  It would be more accurate to call us “regulators”.
• He must always bring drugs into the discussion – cocaine, heroin, and meth – because a discussion of the dangers of marijuana use alone doesn’t scare people anymore.
• He continues to harp on the negative consequences of drug use while ignoring the demonstrable consequences of drug money, which include corruption, violence, and terrorism.

There will be a part two to this debate on CBS News website tomorrow.

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

FOX's Female Celebrity Stoners, a.k.a. "my dream circle" (what, no Adrianne Curry?)

Hey, isn’t this Steve Bloom’s gig? FOX News has a slideshow of their top 29 celebrity stoners. Funny thing is, pot or not, it is a list of some of my favorite celebrities.

Does it seem to anyone else like FOX is trying to keep ahead of the pro-legalization curve? Their business channel hosted a weeklong look at marijuana with a fairly positive spin. They have Jessica Corry on speaking about Republican support for legalization. Could it be that Roger Ailes actually read my suggestion that Republicans could re-invigorate their brand and appeal to a brand new young demographic if they simply embraced their “government leave me alone” roots with respect to private adult marijuana use?

Watch out, Democrats, you’re getting outflanked on the legalization issue. FOX doesn’t make any move that isn’t coldly calculated to politically benefit conservatives.

Click here to view the embedded video.

10/30/2009 by Chris Goldstein

On October 19th the Ocean County College in Tom’s River, NJ hosted a debate on medical marijuana. A professor of Social Science, Brad Young, moderated.  The opposition was Terrence Farley, a former county prosecutor and the now head of the NJ Narcotics Task Force Commanders Assn. Farley is a vehement prohibitionist and we’ve sparred over this topic on television programs before.

I represented the Coalition for Medical Marijuana – New Jersey www.cmmnj.org

Neither of us saw the questions prior to the debate and this question was particularly interesting.  As an added bonus you get to see me address some of the reefer madness we encounter locally.

Essentially, “Should medical marijuana be covered by health insurance.”

Looking to see what started my rebuttal? – watch the Previous Debate Segment.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So I pose the question to you all: Should medical cannabis be covered by health insurance?

More about medical marijuana in New Jersey at www.cmmnj.org