We're not legalizing the why or how, we're legalizing the what. If you legalize it only for certain reasons, you retain the criminality of using it for the wrong reasons.

Once again, Discovery Channel Weed Wars star and Harborside CEO Steven DeAngelo was interviewed on a cable news channel.  This time it’s not MSNBC or FOX where DeAngelo is dismissing recreational marijuana smokers, it’s CNN.

DeANGELO: As for recreation, I don’t believe that very many people really, truly use cannabis for recreation — or anybody, really. What is recreation? Recreation is not something you can smoke or something you can swallow or something you can rub on your skin. It’s not a commodity. It’s an experience.

I see.  So when I’m loading this bowl, bringing it to my lips, lighting it and inhaling the smoke, and experiencing the high that follows… that’s a commodity?

Bill Clinton just called.  He wants his dictionary back.  By these definitions of “recreation”, people selling “recreational vehicles” are really just selling “vehicles” (a commodity) that don’t become “RVs” until someone drives them and experiences the “recreation” of camping.  What a bunch of malarkey!  So, Steve, this bud in my hand is just a commodity that you sold $20,000,000 worth last year and when I smoke it just for the hell of it, I’m not using it recreationally (an experience), I’m using it medically (an experience).  When I toke because I’m struggling to write another way to impugn this stupid “there is no recreational use” mantra, I’m using it medically, just like my friend with Crohn’s who will waste away and die without it.  The college kid at the Cypress Hill concert who has a recommendation for insomnia puffing away in the daytime in the “medication area”, I guess he’s using it medically so he can get a good nap in the mosh pit.

This dismissal of recreational use is just a continuation of DeAngelo’s “All Use is Wellness” campaign that seeks to fool the federal government into dismissing IRS 280-E claims against his business.  The only hope he has is that the public perception of Harborside is one of a completely legit medical cannabis distributor only providing medicine to sick people.  If anyone suspects that a reasonably healthy person might be accessing Harborside meds just to enjoy themselves – in other words, recreationally – then selling the “why is Uncle Sam using drug dealer laws against medicine suppliers?” argument is a harder sell.

And pardon me for saying so, but we lose credibility points for both medical marijuana and legalization every time the skeptical, judgmental public sees the guy in pony tails and his hirsute tie-dyed dress-wearing male business partner on TV claiming the obvious recreational pot smoking running in the segment’s introduction is “wellness”.  There is medical use of marijuana; the cases are too numerous and obvious for the public to ignore.  But there is recreational use of marijuana, also with numerous and obvious examples for the public.  The more you try to tell the public to disbelieve their own two eyes and call recreational use “medical”, the more they think the “medical” thing is a ruse just to bring about recreational use.

In other words, you’re not bringing people closer to legalization by conflating recreational with medical use; you’re driving them further away from acceptance of medical use!  (See: South Dakota 2006 & 2010, Oregon 2004 & 2010, no home grow medmj laws in NJ, DC, DE, AZ, and the 2011 CBS News Poll where 52% believe medical marijuana is being used “for other purposes”.)

Let’s just be honest.  We smoke pot and we like it a lot.  It is none of the government’s business or concern, no matter why we choose to use.  We deserve as much respect as beer drinkers and cigarette smokers.  ”All Use is Nunya”.

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Radical Rant

• 10 Reasons Why Overweight Drinking Smoking Gambler Bill Bennett is Wrong on Legalization

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

Former US Drug Czar Bill Bennett recently penned an op-ed on CNN.com entitled “Why Barney Frank and Ron Paul are wrong on drug legalization” in response to the two congressmen filing HR 2306, the bill to end federal marijuana criminalization.  Paul Armentano has already attacked this quite well on the NORML Blog, noting the bill “does not “legalize drugs” or even so much as legalize marijuana. Rather, this legislation removes the power to prosecute minor marijuana offenders from the federal government and relinquishes this authority to state and local jurisdictions.”

That’s where I’m going to take over and attack the substance of Bennett’s op-ed, because the casual reader might be persuaded by some of his faulty reasoning.  In passing, I’d also like to note that Bill Bennett has enjoyed fatty foods to excess, consumed toxic and addictive alcohol and tobacco regularly, and once admitted to an $8 million dollar gambling habit, so forgive me if I grant Bennett’s proclamations on “virtue”  and healthy lifestyle choices the same respect as I give celebrities who tell me to go vegetarian to save the environment while they’re flying cross-country on private jets.

1. Never talk about “legalizing marijuana”, always talk about “legalizing drugs”.

This is the prime directive of prohibitionist prose.  ”Legalizing marijuana” is actually becoming quite popular.  Nobody is really that afraid of marijuana.  But drugs, why, that’s terrifying (heroin, cocaine, and meth, oh my!)  Never mind that Barney Frank and Ron Paul didn’t submit a bill to legalize drugs but merely de-penalize cannabis; Ron Paul once said he’d legalize heroin and that’s all Bennett needs to justify the link.

Here’s how you defuse this Bennett Bulletpoint:  Should all drugs be legal?  Well, cocaine and meth are already “legal”, in that they are Schedule II drugs that can be prescribed in the United States.  ”Legal” is a broad spectrum that ranges from over-the-counter aspirin for any age with no ID at the convenience store to strictly-carded 21-and-over alcohol at the liquor store to seriously-restricted operating room morphine.  So, sure, all drugs should be legal, but where they land on the spectrum is what matters.  Heroin ought to be closer to the “operating room legal” and cannabis should be closer to the “alcohol legal”.

2. My God, What About the Children?!?

Starting with the basics, keeping drugs illegal is one of the best ways to keep drugs out of the hands — and brains — of children. We know three things here: First, children who don’t use drugs continually tell us one of the reasons they don’t is precisely because they are illegal.

How many adults did we arrest for smoking and drinking to get those rates to fall so much?

No prohibitionist worth his salt will pen an op-ed without appealing to the safety of the children.  It’s one of the few effective pieces of rhetoric they still have.

One quick bit of jiu-jitsu you can use on this one: “So, is it your claim that the only effective way we can protect children from marijuana is to imprison adults who use marijuana?  If so, how is it that we reduced 12th grade lifetime drinking rates from the 90% range to around 75% and reduced smoking rates from 75% to about 40% without imprisoning any adults for smoking and drinking?”

Bennett cites some stats about perceptions of risk and social disapproval being the reasons kids don’t take drugs.  So how is it that in the Netherlands, a place that socially tolerates and places little perception of risk on adult cannabis use, the rates of lifetime cannabis use are half that of American 12th graders and one-third that of American 15-year-olds?  Sure, the kids who don’t smoke pot tell you they don’t because it is illegal, but what difference does that make among the two-out-of-five high school seniors who have?

Second, keeping drugs out of the hands of children is the best way to prevent drug addiction generally, as study after study has confirmed that if we keep a child drug free until age 21, the chances of use in adulthood are next to zero.

I guess I’m the “close to zero”; I smoked my first joint when I was 22 years old.  But what Bennett hides is the fact that we aren’t keeping cannabis out of the hands of kids.  Kids consistently rate cannabis as easy or fairly easy to get (ranging from 80% to 90%) and more than a quarter of kids say they can get it within a few hours.

3. We have enough problems with legal drugs; why add another?

Third, we don’t need to guess at hypothetical legalization schemes. Our experience with legally prescribed narcotics has already proven it, and we now have an epidemic. This, despite doing everything the theorists have asked, from oversight to regulation to prescription requirements.

In this case, though, we’re talking about things like OxyContin that are highly addictive, unlike cannabis.  And couldn’t part of that epidemic be due to massive advertising by pharmaceutical companies that tout the pill as the answer to all life’s maladies?  Or pharma reps that hand out free samples and encourage doctors to distribute them like candy?  And in some cases, didn’t some of these opioid users get addicted because a doctor couldn’t prescribe a safer, more effective, non-addictive remedy because it’s Schedule I?

Regardless, Bennett’s point only makes sense in a fantasyland where the current policy of prohibiting marijuana has no downside.  We’re not “adding another” legal drug, we’re recognizing that regulating cannabis reaps more benefit and causes less harm than prohibiting it.  Speaking of those harms…

4. We must keep it illegal to keep it expensive!

Normalizing, de-stigmatizing, and legalizing illegal drugs lowers their price and increases their use. As a recent RAND study on California found, legalization of marijuana there would cut the price by as much as 80% and increase use from as little as 50% to as much as 100%. Just what California, just what our society, needs.

So is Bennett arguing here that only the high price of marijuana protects us from total destabilization of our society?  Funny that he should be in favor of artificial price supports for street-corner dealers and Mexican drug gangs.  A price cut by 80% in a regulated market means that what little black market dealing that would occur would have the tiniest of profit margins.  You’d be as likely to see a big-time violent black market weed dealer under legalization as you’d find a big-time violent black market Budweiser dealer today.

As for twice the use, we don’t need to guess those results, because use was about twice what it is today back in 1978-1979.  Oh no, we might have wars in the Middle East, expensive gasoline, crumbling schools, mass unemployment, inflation, ridiculous fashions, and horrible dance music… not like today.

5.  We’re doing it for your own good!

As any parent with a child addicted to drugs will explain, as any visit to a drug rehab center will convey, those caught in the web of addiction are anything but free. And it is not because of their incarceration or rehabilitation, it is because of the vicious cycle of dependency, waste and brain damage addiction and abuse cause.

How about problem gamblers, Bill?  Were you “anything but free” when you were caught in that addiction?  How in the world were you free to say your “gambling days are over” in 2003 without the heavy hand of the state and the threat of force and prison to help you?

I don’t make light of the addictive nature of hard drugs like heroin, cocaine, meth, nicotine, and alcohol.  But the fact that millions of Americans voluntarily stop using cannabis for weeks or months to pass a workplace pre-employment pee test shows cannabis isn’t terribly addictive.

6. It’s Not Your Father’s Woodstock Weed!

Let us make no mistake about this, either: Marijuana is much more potent and causes much more damage than we used to know. Today’s marijuana tests on average at more than 10% THC (the psychoactive ingredient). We are even seeing samples of more than 30% THC. This is compared to the relatively lower levels of THC most legalizing proponents were more familiar with in generations past (under 4% in the early 1980s, even lower in the 1960s).

Oh, so then you’d be OK with us legalizing the 4% THC cannabis, then?  You were telling us it was terribly dangerous then, so it must be double super-duper dangerous now!

Here’s the thing, Bill; marijuana is not like the craps table.  It’s not like the $1000 craps table that busts your bank account ten times faster than the $100 craps table.  People smoke weed to get high.  If they have 5% THC weed, they’ll smoke a joint.  If they have 20% THC weed, they’ll smoke a quarter of that joint.  When you consider the smoke is the only harmful part of pot smoking, smoking 1/4th as much is a good thing, no?

By the way, Bill, you’re revealing your ignorance when you claim “lower in the 1960s”, because the technology to test THC potency didn’t exist then.

7. It’s Really, Really Bad for Teenagers!

Chronic adolescent marijuana use has been found to be associated with “poorer performance on thinking tasks, including slower psychomotor speed and poorer complex attention, verbal memory and planning ability.” We are seeing study after study finding adolescent marijuana use responsible for “disrupted brain development” in teens. Worse, we are seeing more and more studies showing teen marijuana use linked to psychosis.

Have you ever seen the brain scans or checked the accident and fatality stats of a teenage binge drinker?  They will show you far more damage than any pot smoking teen would.  Again, you tell of this awful fate awaiting our children that requires locking up adults for pot, yet no such standard is required of alcohol?  Why is that?

8.  Nobody Really Goes to Prison for Pot

As for the high incarceration rates for simple marijuana use and possession, it is a myth. As government documentation actually shows, over 97% of sentencing on federal marijuana-related charges is for trafficking, less than 2% is for simple possession. Indeed, the only National Review authority with federal prosecutorial experience that I know of backs this point up: “Actual enforcement is targeted at big distributors. People who merely possess drugs for personal use well know they are substantially safe no matter what the statutes say.”

Federal charges.  The vast majority of marijuana arrests and sentencing happen at the state level.  Which leads me to wonder why the federal statutes still carry a one year and $1,000 misdemeanor penalty for simple possession of any amount?  We don’t really arrest anyone for possession, so that’s why it is vitally important it remains illegal?  How can marijuana be simultaneously so dangerous we must imprison those who supply it but so innocuous we rarely imprison (white) people who demand it?

Besides, the prison sentence isn’t the only consequence of a drug arrest.  Drug convictions place you into second-class citizenship where you can be legally denied jobs, housing, assistance, education, and more on that basis alone.  Also, understand that something as simple as keeping two strains in separate bags, owning a scale, or planting a single plant lands you in felony territory for “intent to sell” or “manufacturing” charges.

9.  The Dutch / Californians / British / Coloradans Now Regret Tolerating Marijuana

Citizens are trying to put the genie back in the bottle, from Northern California (where residents have complained that medical marijuana has “spawned crime, drug cartels and teenage pot use”), to the Netherlands (where drug tourism, use by minors, and border trafficking has increased), to England (where apologies have been made for endorsing decriminalization in light of the subsequent growth of teen drug treatment needs), to Colorado (where easy access has increased demand, “made a mockery” of the legal system, and is increasingly endangering public safety).

California: Places with the greatest amount of medical cannabis acceptance also voted yes on Prop 215 to legalize marijuana.

The Netherlands:  Use by minors has increased everywhere in Europe, even in the strict anti-cannabis countries.  Drug tourism and border trafficking are the result of prohibition in the rest of the E.U., not liberalization in Holland (indeed, if Germans could get hash in Hamburg, they’d not visit Maastricht).

England:  The growth of teen drug rehab admission for cannabis has to do with (as in America) the increasing use of “drug courts” and alternative sentencing that sends teens to rehab instead of 3 months to two years of jail.

Colorado:  This state loves its medical cannabis law and is reaping millions in tax revenues, so much that the state actually has a medical marijuana revenue enforcement division.  It’s not going anywhere, Bill.

10.  If We All Unified Behind the War on Drugs, It Would Work!

We have an illegal drug abuse epidemic in this country and it has not been given enough attention. But the cultural messages, as much as the law, matter. When we unified on this, as we once did, drug use went down. When we let up, as we now have, use increases.

Bennett likes to think that the “get tough” policies of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s led to less drug abuse and the “touchy feely” policies of medical marijuana in the 1990s led to more drug use.  However, note that cannabis arrests actually decreased 20,000 from the beginning of Reagan to the end of Bush I.  Drug use also rose during the 1970s when Nixon was declaring “all-out war” on drugs and cannabis use rose even as Bush II was raiding medical marijuana states and using the same mandatory minimum sentences Reagan and Bush I used.

Drug use goes in cycles and has many factors that affect it.  The question isn’t whether legalization will cause harm; it’s whether it will cause less harm than the prohibition that exists now.  Since the Frank/Paul bill merely ends federal penalties for cannabis, states can still continue prohibiting it.  Maybe a few of them legalize.  Then those states can be the “laboratories of democracy” that Justice Brandeis theorized about and we can really determine which policy works better for the people.

This just in from our correspondent George Orwell:

(CNN) — Law enforcement officers may secretly place a GPS device on a person’s car without seeking a warrant from a judge, according to a recent federal appeals court ruling in California.

Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Oregon in 2007 surreptitiously attached a GPS to the silver Jeep owned by Juan Pineda-Moreno, whom they suspected of growing marijuana, according to court papers.

But he appealed on the grounds that sneaking onto a person’s driveway and secretly tracking their car violates a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy.

“They went onto the property several times in the middle of the night without his knowledge and without his permission,” said his lawyer, Harrison Latto.

The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the appeal twice — in January of this year by a three-judge panel, and then again by the full court earlier this month. The judges who affirmed Pineda-Moreno’s conviction did so without comment.

Latto says the Ninth Circuit decision means law enforcement can place trackers on cars, without seeking a court’s permission, in the nine western states the California-based circuit covers.

This case will surely reach the Supreme Court.  A Washington DC appeals court came to a different conclusion, saying that cops need a warrant to place electronic surveillance on your car.  A former Justice Department attorney compared it to the “old fashioned surveillance” of having a cop in an unmarked car tailing your every move.

He even went on to say that just because your car is in your driveway, on your private property, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy that prevents then from affixing electronic tracking devices on your car.  He says you have to build a fence or put your car in the garage to keep cops from tampering with it and gleaning your every move in public with no court approval or supervision.

When these civil liberties cases come up, I always use what I call the Founding Fathers Time Machine Test.  Imagine sitting down with Founding Fathers and explaining this case:

RUSS:  OK, gentlemen, enough questions about my time pod.  I only have a little time to tell you about something terrible happening two centuries in the future.  Something perhaps you can prevent by adding a few words to this “Bill of Rights” you’re working on.  See, the court decided that the state has the right to put a GPS on your car…

JEFFERSON:  A jeepiess?  What is a jeepiess?

MADISON:  What is a car?

RUSS:  OK, in the future… well… first off, a car is like your horse-drawn carriages, except it needs no horse for propulsion.  Almost everyone has one and it is the primary way of moving people and goods from place to place.  In our future, you really can’t do business or be employed without one in most places.

JEFFERSON:  Remarkable.  And the jeepiess?

RUSS:  It’s initials – G, P, S.  It is a technology we have in the future that allows you to accurately track the location of anything on the planet within a few yards.

WASHINGTON:  This is madness.  Such a thing isn’t possible.

RUSS:  Well, Mr. President, it is.  We’ve put men on the moon, harnessed the power of the sun, and can instantly view places all over the globe.

JEFFERSON:  So this GPS, what does it do, exactly?

RUSS:  It’s hard to explain, but imagine that everywhere you went, there was a government clerk going with you, cataloging every location you visit and every route you took to get there and every time of the day you went.  Then imagine the government clerk never sleeps and is invisible and you can’t possibly detect him in any way.  And that the government can assign that clerk to you without your knowledge and without a court determining that there’s a reasonable chance you’re breaking the law.

MADISON:  Tyranny!

JEFFERSON:  My friend Mr. Madison is correct; this is scarcely the philosophy of a free and just society!  If this stranger’s prophecy rings true, our noble experiment in liberty is extinguished in a mere two centuries.

WASHINGTON:  Surely our descendants must be an educated people.  I cannot fathom our great country, founded with the blood of patriots against the tyrant of London, turning to tyrants themselves without compelling reason.  For what purpose do the agents of the state seek to violate the sacred privacy of the People?

RUSS:  To prevent them from growing hemp.

WASHINGTON:  Prevent?!?

RUSS:  Yes.  Some Americans like to smoke the dried flowers of hemp, so our government arrests and imprisons them for cultivating it.  We even force workers to surrender cups of their urine for testing to prove they aren’t smoking dried hemp flowers.

JEFFERSON:  “Hemp is of first necessity to the wealth & protection of the country!”

RUSS:  Some of us are aware of that, too, Mr. President… whoops, I mean, “Mr. Ambassador”… yet 850,000 are arrested over hemp every year…

MADISON:  Charlatan!  I had set aside my skepticism to hear your tale based on your strange dress and the odd contraption in which you arrived, but to prophecy that America would ever abandon her principles of equality and fairness to seek and punish citizens for growing hemp is an absurdity worthy of Jonathan Swift!  Now leave us alone so we can protect the rights of citizens that might actually be proscribed by the state.

WASHINGTON:  America punishing hemp farmers… I guess they’d have to punish us, eh, Thomas?

JEFFERSON:  What a fantastic tale.  Begone, odd visitor.

Your car on private property isn’t private.  War is peace.  Freedom is slavery.  Orwell was right.

President Obama’s Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske and President Reagan’s Drug Czar Bill Bennett appeared on the May 20, 2010 edition of The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. So an anti-legalizer and an anti-legalizer are here to tell you why legalization of marijuana is a bad idea.

I felt that there should be somebody from our side rebutting their obvious nonsense.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Her comedy show at the Fillmore was called "Aisha Tyler is Lit" - make your own assumptions about her cannabis use

Yeah, Anderson, it had to be the buzzer… Did Anderson mention at the end that he was playing for “Friends Indeed”?  You know what they say about friends in need… Oh, it’s “Friends In Deed“.  Gotcha.

If only Cheech could have said, “Why are you so surprised, Anderson?  Carl Sagan was a daily cannabis consumer and it didn’t seem to affect his brain very much.”

Psst.  Anderson… it’s Aisha TYLER, not Taylor… one of my favorite comedians and schoolboy crushes.  On her website, she mentions:

“I feel confident, as do many, that it is only a matter of time before medical marijuana is legal in all 50 states, and having several members of my family who have gone through painful cancer treatments, I know very well how helpful medical marijuana can be for both alleviating pain and improving appetite and reversing weight loss.”

(CNN) In supermarkets across the world products containing palm oil regularly fly off the shelves — soaps, chocolates, margarine, cosmetics.

Most consumers have no idea that they contain palm oil which often hides behind the label of “vegetable oil” and even less of a clue that conservationists are singling it out as being one of the main driving forces behind deforestation.

It is fast growing with high yields — global demand now tops 40 million tonnes a year and is central to the economies of Malaysia and Indonesia.

But the rampant tearing down of Indonesia’s natural forests have made this tropical nation the world’s third largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Already, 85 percent of Sumatra’s forests are gone and what is left is disappearing at an alarming rate.

Sumatran orangutans are expected to be the first great ape to become extinct — due to the loss of their natural habitat, just one of many species threatened because of unchecked deforestation.

Sorry about your home forest, Clyde.

Hmm, it sounds like if we want to save our primate cousins and the atmosphere we breathe, we need to come up with a fast-growing, high-yield seed oil crop that doesn’t lead to deforestation and acts as a huge carbon sink for greenhouse gases.

Let me give you a moment to see if you can think of one off the top of your head.

I decided to look up the website of the American Palm Oil Council to see what sort of benefits we get from deforesting Indonesia and wiping out an ape species so we can have Valentine’s chocolates.  For comparison, I got some information from various sources on hemp seed oil.

Hemp seed oil can’t completely replace palm oil.  Palm oil produces the most oil per hectare of any seed oil crop and is a better frying oil than hemp seed oil.  But obviously hemp seed oil can make products like soap, shampoo, plastics, and biodiesel as well or better than palm oil, with the additional benefit of providing stalks for fiber, seeds for food, and flowers for medicine.  Hemp requires few pesticides and no herbicides and we don’t have to wipe out any orangutans!