I can’t do any better than MPP’s Bruce Mirken on this one:

(LA Times) Bruce Mirken, spokesman for the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project, ridiculed the effort. “Let me guess, they set a record number of plant seizures and marijuana has now been eradicated from California?” he quipped.

Mirken said the campaign has caused growers to move from private lands into wilderness areas. “This is an annual exercise in futility. Not only does it not do anything meaningful, it actually makes the problem worse,” he said.

It’s all part of California’s CAMP – Campaign Against Marijuana Planting – which over 27 years has been funding law enforcement to take helicopters into the hills so police can get paid triple time to pull weeds and then fly them all over the wilderness blowing their seeds across the land so the cops can go weeding again next year.  According to the report:

Los Angeles County, which has seen a whirlwind expansion in medical marijuana dispensaries this year, has notched another marijuana milestone. The county has moved to No. 5 for the amount seized in the state’s annual eradication campaign, with 340,187 pot plants uprooted — more than a fourfold increase.

Statewide, the 27-year-old effort, known as the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, found and destroyed almost 4.5 million plants in 41 counties, up from 2.9 million seized in each of the two prior years’ growing season. The amount has climbed steadily since 1996, when California voters approved the nation’s first medical marijuana law.

State officials put the wholesale value of this year’s eradicated marijuana at $17.8 billion.

Let’s see, the standard California sales tax, minus any county or local taxes, is 8.25%, so that eradication represents about $1.46 billion dollars in tax revenues.  Obviously marijuana has not been completely eradicated by CAMP and I think even the cops will tell you they’re only scratching the surface.  Let’s be generous and suppose they’re pulling up 10% of California’s outdoor crop.  That would be $14.6 billion in taxes going uncollected.  It’s even more money if we include indoor grows and figure they’re catching much less than 10% of the crops.

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ABC covers the proposal to legalize marijuana from an Assemblymember “naturally” from San Francisco.

I’d just ask that dispensary employee if he thinks the black market $15/gram pricing would drop under legalization and whether that would be better for “the people who really need it”.

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http://www.blogtalkradio.com/rvdradio/2009/07/15/RVD-Radio-with-Rob-Van-Dam

That was a lot of fun. I never quite get used to doing live talk radio without putting on my FCC filter.

Now really, Rob Van Dam, Paul and Me on the air with “Officer X”, is that even fair? That’s out of a wrestling script – three against one. And I relished every second of it. How many times do you see one of ours on the TV against two of theirs and a skeptical host?

Rob Van Dam will be speaking at the NORML CON in San Francisco, Sept. 24-26 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel. See http://norml.org/conference for details

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(Huffington Post) Three television stations in San Francisco and Los Angeles have rejected an ad promoting the legalization and taxation of marijuana, set to run on consenting stations and cable networks in the state beginning Wednesday.

Two ABC affiliates joined one NBC station in the decision to reject the spots. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, has called for a debate on legalizing marijuana.

“I think it’s time for a debate,” he said in May. “And I think that we ought to study very carefully what other countries are doing that have legalized marijuana and other drugs, what affect it had on those countries, and are they happy with that decision.”

KABC in Los Angeles and KGO and KNTV in San Francisco apparently aren’t interested in such a debate. “How can you debate it if they won’t air both sides?” wondered Bruce Mirken, a spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, which is behind the ad buy that he called “modest but not trivial.”

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NEW YORK (Huffington Post via AP) — The savage drug war in Mexico. Crumbling state budgets. Weariness with current drug policy. The election of a president who said, “Yes _ I inhaled.”

These developments and others are kindling unprecedented optimism among the many Americans who want to see marijuana legalized.

Doing so, they contend to an ever-more-receptive audience, could weaken the Mexican cartels now profiting from U.S. pot sales, save billions in law enforcement costs, and generate billions more in tax revenue from one of the nation’s biggest cash crops.

Said a veteran of the movement, Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance: “This is the first time I feel like the wind is at my back and not in my face.”

“For the most part, what we’ve seen over the past 20 years has been incremental,” said Norm Stamper, a former Seattle police chief now active with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “What we’ve seen in the past six months is an explosion of activity, fresh thinking, bold statements and penetrating questions.”

“The notion that we have to keep something completely banned for adults to keep it away from kids doesn’t hold up,” said Bruce Mirken, communications director of the Marijuana Policy Project.

As for Obama, the activists don’t expect him to embrace the cause at this point.

“Obama’s got two wars, an economic disaster. We have to realize they’re not going to put this on the front burner right now,” said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML, or the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. “But every measurable metric out there is swinging our way.”

Somebody cue Roger Waters… the tide is turning.

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Long stigmatized as political poison, the marijuana movement has found new allies in prominent politicians, including Representatives Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Ron Paul, Republican of Texas, who co-wrote a bill last year to decrease federal penalties for possession and to give medical users new protections.

“Look, I’m a libertarian,” [FOX News Channel host Glenn] Beck said on his Feb. 26 program. “You want to legalize marijuana, you want to legalize drugs — that’s fine.”

“We’ve been on national cable news more in the first three months than we typically are in an entire year,” said Bruce Mirken, the director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project, a reform group based in Washington. “And any time you’ve got Glenn Beck and Barney Frank agreeing on something, it’s either a sign that change is impending or that the end times are here.”

Beneficiaries of the moment include NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which advocates legalization, and other groups like it. NORML says that its Web traffic and donations (sometimes in $4.20 increments) have surged, and that it will begin a television advertising campaign on Monday, which concludes with a plea, and an homage, to President Obama.

“Legalization,” the advertisement says, “yes we can!”

But Allen F. St. Pierre, the executive director of NORML, said he had cautioned supporters that any legal changes that might occur would probably be incremental.

“The balancing act this year is trying to get our most active, most vocal supporters to be more realistic in their expectations in what the Obama administration is going to do,” Mr. St. Pierre said.

via Marijuana Advocates Point to Signs of Change – NYTimes.com.

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Massachusetts voters made history by approving a sweeping marijuana decriminalization law on Election Day, but campaign debates are reigniting as communities start to enforce the new rule.

The large margin of victory for the ballot initiative – 65 percent of voters approved the law – is already inspiring similar legislative efforts in other New England states, prompting close attention nationwide to the effects of a less stringent marijuana law.

Massachusetts is not the first state to decriminalize marijuana possession – 12 others have done so. But it is the first since the 1970s to eliminate criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of the drug, even for repeat offenders.

One major concern of some police officials: While marijuana remains an illegal substance, full decriminalization, as is the case in Massachusetts, removes officers’ powers of arrest, which means police can’t compel offenders to identify themselves.

“If someone is sitting on the front steps of City Hall smoking a bone, you can’t do much if they tell you they’re Donald Duck,” says Terence Reardon, chief of police in Revere, a city of 55,000.

Such complaints are overstated, say decriminalization advocates.

“People have tried to claim that [the identification issue] is a loose end, but in fact it’s no different than every other civil citation in Massachusetts, like jaywalking or in some communities drinking in public,” says Bruce Mirken, communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project, a national marijuana decriminalization advocacy group that helped coordinate the Massachusetts referendum campaign. “Miraculously, it’s a problem with marijuana.”

The new Massachusetts law specifically allows communities to draft their own public consumption ordinances, and dozens are considering doing so. The state attorney general’s office prepared a model bylaw that would levy an additional $300 fine, the state maximum, on people caught using pot in public.

via Anxiety in Massachusetts over softer marijuana law | csmonitor.com.

The last time one of these officials brought up the “Donald Duck” defense, I noted a Supreme Court case called Hiibel v. Nevada, that I think ruins that argument.  According to this 2004 CNN report:

The Supreme Court has again given police greater power to stop and question suspects, ruling Monday that a Nevada cowboy could not refuse to give his name to officers who tried to question him along a roadside.

He was arrested after he told a deputy that he didn’t have to reveal his name or show an ID during an encounter on a rural road in 2000. Hiibel was prosecuted, based on his silence and fined $250. The Nevada Supreme Court sided with police on a 4-3 vote.

In its ruling announced Monday, the justices upheld Hiibel’s misdemeanor conviction. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said, “Asking questions is an essential part of police investigation. In the ordinary sense a police officer is free to ask a person for identification without implicating the Fourth Amendment.”

According to an AP report, justices were told that 20 states have similar laws to the Nevada statute upheld by the high court: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont and Wisconsin.

Here at NORML we forwarded this on to some Massachusetts attorneys who told us they couldn’t find case law that said citizens must show ID, nor any case law that police may require ID.  I don’t know what law the AP report was referring to, but based on Justice Kennedy writing “a police officer is free to ask a person for identification” I think that police have some power to compel that identification.  Otherwise, as Bruce Mirken notes, how would parking tickets or jaywalking tickets ever work?

When I get a better answer to this question – do I have to show ID to police when being given a civil infraction? – I’ll post it.

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