I just happened upon this great cartoon from Twitter’s @ricklondon.

You can buy your own copy at Zazzle in various poster-sized forms.

Of course longtime NORML readers know this isn’t the first time we’ve seen marijuana in a bodybuilding gym (Gov. Schwarzenegger famously toked a doob in the film “Pumping Iron”.)

By the way, there was strong pot in the 60′s, too.  When the government tells you that potency has gone up, remember this is a sample of the potency of what they have seized.  Back in the day, the feds seized a whole lot of feral hemp – ditchweed that nobody tokes – and that dropped the overall average.

Cannabis potency overall may have doubled since the 60s and 70s, thanks to more indoor growing and selective breeding, but it’s nowhere near the 8x-400x (really!) more potent some prohibitionists claim.  Potency is irrelevant because THC is non-toxic; all more potent pot does is get you high with less of it.  Back in the day, you “smoked two joints in the morning” because that’s what it took to get high.  Now you smoke a bowl or two and get high, requiring less pot and therefore less smoke in your lungs.  Isn’t that a good thing?

COMMERCE CITY, Colo. (CBS4) ? The Army has made an unusual and unwanted discovery at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal northeast of Commerce City.

They are in charge of cleaning up the arsenal, a job that includes reseeding some areas. When their seed started to grow, they realized it was marijuana.

It isn’t commercial grade, but it’s still an illegal drug. It’s called ditch weed or feral hemp, the kind that grows in the wild in some places.

The Army blames the supplier for the snafu. It says it bought the mulch for its ground cover from a supplier in Kansas where the low-grade weed is common. Some of it apparently got mixed in with the grass.

Ditchweed like this is of such low THC percentage that smoking a field of it wouldn’t even get you a light buzz.  This feral hemp grows all over the Midwest, remnants of the 1940s “Hemp for Victory” program, where our farmers were allowed to grow industrial hemp for the war effort when Philippine and Chinese sources of hemp were taken over by the Japanese.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’d also note that whenever you hear of a task force, especially in the Midwest, crowing about how much illegal marijuana they’ve eradicated with a street value of one bazillion dollars, remember that 96%-98% of what they’ve ripped out of the ground is this non-psychoactive feral hemp.  That’s your taxpayer dollars in action, spent to send men with guns in helicopters to pull weeds in the wilderness.

My favorite Local Portland Lock-Picking Logic-Impaired Prohibitionist is at it again.  This time, the peril of stoned drivers!  John’s in full-blown reefer madness mode from the opening graf:

Ask yourself, do marijuana users, who can be found in the wee hours of the morning, staring at the “white noise” of a blank TV screen – off the air for hours, be competent drivers? Every druggie has laughed about having found themselves in that position.

What is this television channel in the 21st century that goes “off the air”?  John, it’s called the digital transition – your old Magnavox console with the built in 8-track and turntable won’t pick up our fancy-schmancy hi-def 24-hour digital channels, dagnabbit!

John provides a cut-n-paste of a study that says pot smokers are 3 to 7 times more likely to cause an accident.  He’s kind enough to provide footnotes to these esteemed scientist’s work.  But John’s been hammered in his comments section, by me and quite a few well-educated people, pointing out every flaw in his argument and every deficit in his scientific claims.  There is a simple explanation: John’s scientists are pure as the driven snow and our scientists are “druggies” with a self-serving agenda bankrolled by evil world dominating billionaires.

[I]n fact, those who leave comments, claim it’s just the opposite.Of course they’re users, trying to tell you that they’re fine to drive, … and they’ll refer to “studies”, proving just the opposite of what is only common sense, that using marijuana doesn’t impair drivers … so where’s the truth?  [T]here are seemingly competent scientists who are also users, and will evidently produce ‘studies’ to further their agendas, and/or those who pay them, and don’t forget; behind the scenes, there are also wealthy men and organizations willing to bankroll anything to further their goal of legalization.

And the next claim will make Dr. Earleywine and every other scientist who’s ever tried to get a grant to study the medicinal properties of cannabis fall out of their chair:

These scientists, … they’re also a concern, for those attempting to find the truth. Truth is, they’re under pressure: 1) if academics - they need to be a published author, (being published in the scientific and research field means more respect and impacts tenure issues) … 2) how better to get more grant money than to produce something controversial?

Oh, yeah, the money is just flowing for controversial marijuana studies.  Can’t you just stick to the standard reefer madness lines like “This ain’t your father’s Woodstock Weed”?

Understand also that the marijuana of this generation is not the same as their parents smoked!

Pot then, had a THC content of 1 – 3%. Now, the THC content is surging up to 25%. (That too will be covered in future articles.) One can expect an increase of physiological and psychological problems  with higher dosages.

Sure, the flower children were all smoking barely-above industrial hemp ditchweed.  That explains Laugh In, “be-ins”, massive afros, bellbottoms, and the Grateful Dead. all that lousy weak pot our parents were smoking.

I could cite the studies that show heavily-stoned drivers drive no worse than a .05 BAC driver, or that we tend to drive slower and leave more room, but also tend to wander a bit in the lane.  John would just say those are druggie scientists.  It doesn’t matter because nobody’s advocating for people to be allowed to drive stoned.  Making marijuana legal is not going to increase any smoking and driving, because the idiots who would do that are doing that now.  When marijuana is legal, police will still be able to bust drivers who demonstate impairment or poor driving.

So many of these prohibitionist fears are based on the notion that making marijuana legal will mean suddenly people will start smoking it. Out of nowhere we’ll have increased healthcare costs, lost productivity, impaired drivers, psychotic teenagers, and rampant crime.  You can only buy into that if you don’t know that 22 million people are smoking pot this year, 14 million monthly, 3 million weekly.  If the projected harms of legalized marijuana exist, we would have seen them by now because so many people have been smoking marijuana for so long!

Don’t smoke and drive, don’t drive impaired.  It’s all we ask of beer drinkers and they are far more dangerous drivers.

(Press-Democrat)UKIAH — State marijuana eradication teams are arriving on the North Coast today, two weeks earlier than usual.

The early start is expected to yield yet another record confiscation of pot plants, Gregory said. Local officials already are reporting higher seizures this year.

Statewide last year, federal, state and local officers who make up CAMP seized 2.9 million plants worth an estimated $11.6 billion. A separate federal effort last year bumped up the number of plants seized in California to 5.2 million.

The ever increasing numbers have confounded even marijuana advocates.

The price of marijuana has remained stable at about $300 an ounce, indicating there’s been little or no change in local supply and demand, said Dale Gieringer, of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

He said immigration crackdowns along the Mexican border have induced Mexican nationals to grow pot in California for distribution elsewhere in the United States rather than try to smuggle marijuana across the border.

Yet another waste of effort paid for by the taxpayers of California while tens of thousands of prisoners will be set free because there isn’t enough money in the budget to house them all.  If you are eliminating $11.6 billion worth of marijuana from the market and it doesn’t cause the market price to budge one cent, that should tell you that your efforts are futile.

However, don’t let the 2.9 million plants = $11.6 billion fool you.  Most – 96%-98%, depending on year – of the marijuana eradicated by the government is feral hemp, a ditchweed with such low THC content it won’t get you high.

Cannabis Culture called US NORML Executive Director Allen St Pierre and discovered the unthinkable: the US federal government is responsible for growing more outdoor weed than even the most green-thumbed gang of ganja lovers.

“In past years, hemp stock makes up almost 96% of the cannabis eradicated,” explained St Pierre. “It’s actually ditch-weed left over from the World War II crop that the US government grew for the war effort. They often claim it’s recreational, but it isn’t.”

Ironically, says St Pierre, the government is still hemp’s best farmer today.

“They will come for these crops with two or three helicopters, hauling large, rubber mesh bags with two and half to four tons of material that has largely gone to seed. On the way to the burn pit, 10 or 20 miles away, thousands of seeds drop out of the bags, and police literally seed their own jobs for the next year. Then they burn the hemp and take pictures for the media, claiming to have taken millions of joints off the streets. It’s a big dog and pony show.”

“You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
April 16, 1963

Today our nation honors what would’ve been this week the eightieth birthday of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., on the eve of the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th president of these United States.  I was sixty-four days old when an assassin’s bullet cut down Dr. King in the prime of his life.  Today I am six-hundred forty days older than Dr. King when he was killed.  Tomorrow I will see something few people my age and older thought we’d ever see, yet something Dr. King had dreamed from the start.

There remains a grave injustice to be battled, the most unjust of laws to be disobeyed, a law that by its definition is not rooted in eternal law and natural law: the man made code that declares nature itself to be illegal, the prohibition on cannabis.  Yet when I mention marijuana law reform in the context of the great civil rights struggles in America, so many are quick to dismiss me with snickers of derision.  ”You just want pot legal so you can get high!” is a common refrain.

Marijuana law reform is a civil rights struggle.  I will not attempt to equate this struggle to those of minorities, women, or gays and lesbians; however, there are some parallels among our fight and theirs and, indeed, some threads of drug law injustice are woven directly into the struggles of these groups.  The prohibition of drugs was one of the tools of oppression – the “Negroes” for their cocaine, the “Chinamen” for their opium, and the Mexicans for their marihuana.  It remains so today – while people use drugs at about the same rate regardless of race, African-Americans and Hispanics are disproportionately arrested, convicted, and serve longer sentences for drug use than white people.

Aside from the racist nature of the origins and applications, cannabis prohibition itself is an unjust law.  First consider that it isn’t merely against the law to possess, cultivate, traffic, buy, and consume marijuana – it is against the law to be marijuana.  Federal and state law enforcement spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours flying helicopters attempting to spot cannabis growing out in the wild.  Ninety-eight percent of what is seized is known as “feral hemp”, which is wild ditchweed with unsmokably-low levels of THC.  Officials rip up and destroy every plant they see whether it is owned or tended by any human, whether or not it could possibly intoxicate any human.   Logically, then, the ultimate goal of marijuana prohibition is not to simply stop humans from using it for intoxication, but to eradicate the species cannabis sativa L. from the earth!

Think of that: our official policy is the extinction of a species of life.  Certainly that’s not entirely new.  We’re dedicated to the extinction of all manner of microscopic life, after all, but that is a justifiable policy for self-preservation – we kill bugs that kill us.  I cannot think of another plant or animal we treat like cannabis.  Deadly plants like nightshade and belladonna are legal, annoying plants like poison ivy and poison oak are legal, even intoxicating plants like coca and poppy are legal when cultivated for prescription medications.  But the cannabis plant, the plant that cannot kill you is completely illegal*.  The plant that can provide the food, clothing, shelter, and medicine humans need to survive is illegal.  Nature itself is illegal.  How much more contrary to eternal law and natural law could this unjust prohibition law be?

The fight against cannabis prohibition, against this unjust law, is a civil rights fight.  This declaration will offend some people who will point to four centuries of slavery and Jim Crow, to lynchings and cross burnings, and to beatings and firehoses and condemn my declaration as making light of the plight of those who were truly oppressed.  I do not make light of those struggles, but I also recognize that civil rights are not a zero sum game and the degree and manner in which one is being oppressed are not what make the fight against oppression a just one.  Dr. King dreamed of a day when children would be judged by not by the color of their skin but the content of their character; I dream of a day when workers are judged not by the metabolites in their urine but the quality of their work.

Later in King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he writes:

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. …

I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law. …

The unjust law of marijuana prohibition is difference made legal.  The majority compels our minority to forgo our intoxicant, but does not bind itself to forgo their intoxicant.  The majority compels our minority forgo our medicine, but does not bind itself to forgo their medicine.  The majority compels our minority to forgo their religious sacrament, but does not bind itself to forgo their religious sacrament.  The majority compels our minority to forgo our source of food, fuel, and fiber, but does not bind itself to forgo their sources.

The majority may argue that they do not prohibit intoxication, medication, religious sacrament, or food, fuel, and fiber cultivation, so long as it doesn’t involve marijuana.  This to me sounds like the argument against same-sex marriage rights, that gays and lesbians are just as free to marry someone of the opposite sex as everybody else.  If we are given a right, but then proscribed from exercising that right in the manner that benefits us without a valid reason from the majority, it is not really a right.  When intoxication, medication, and sacrament are legal rights, but we are proscribed from using a demonstrably safer intoxicant, medicine, and sacrament, that is difference made legal.

No, we do not face the firehoses and the dogs and the lynchings, nor do we suffer in as great of numbers as did the African Americans Dr. King so graciously led in the years before my birth.  Our oppression is more subtle and codified into laws that restrict our housing, employment, and educational opportunities.  We do not tremble in fear of the midnight ride of white-robed vigilante Klansmen; our terror comes in the form of midnight no-knock raids of body-armored SWAT teams.

Like the civil rights struggles of the past, we work to change laws that oppress people, laws that enjoy support from the majority and are rationalized by tradition, religion, and junk science.  Unlike the civil rights struggles of the past, our constituency is an invisible group defined by lifestyle, not genetics.  That choice to use cannabis should not disqualify our fight to be treated as equals under the law.  After all, the choice to worship the God of your understanding is not genetic, it is a lifestyle choice as well, and our law recognizes that one cannot be discriminated against for that choice.  In fact, it is a bit ironic that one’s choice of God, a belief that cannot be proven by science to beneficial, is a protected right, yet one’s choice of cannabis, a plant that can be proven by science to be beneficial, is a federal crime.

The freedom to worship, of course, is an explicit right recognized by our First Amendment, but its foundation is in the inalienable rights given to us by our Creator, among them being Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness.  If that last one – the Pursuit of Happiness – doesn’t give me the right to smoke a joint so long as I don’t affect anyone else’s Life and Liberty, then the Constitution isn’t worth the hemp paper on which it was drafted.

Also from King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he writes:

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.

Today’s freedom fighters are the people like Eddy Lepp and Charles Lynch, providing aid and comfort to the sick and dying by growing and supplying them with medicine, only to face the rest of their natural lives behind bars because what they did was “illegal”.

Today’s “whites-only” establishments are the “drug-free” workplaces keep cannabis users confined to low-paying part-time or temp service jobs, while the rest of the workers are allowed all the alcohol, nicotine, and prescription medications they desire.

Today’s lynchings are the Rachel Hoffmans and Jonathan Magbies who are murdered by police negligence, solely over their use of cannabis.  Today’s institutionalized discrimination is the over 20 million in my lifetime whose lives are marked with the scarlet letter of a drug conviction, affecting their child custody, government assistance, college financial aid, employment opportunities, professional licenses, voting rights, and liberty.

The prohibition of cannabis ultimately degrades human personality and is against moral law.  It is an unjust law that cannot stand, and we have a moral responsibility to disobey it.  In doing so, we express the highest respect for the law.  On this day when we recognize the greatness of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Dream, and on tomorrow, when we see part of that dream fulfilled, remember that we don’t fight to “make pot legal so you can get high”; we fight because the Pursuit of Happiness is our right and caging us for our method of pursuit is unjust.

Smoking pot is our civil right!

Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,
Martin Luther King, Jr.

* I recognize that marijuana is legally grown at ElSohly’s lab at the University of Mississippi.  But consider that marijuana’s two purposes – to supply five people grandfathered in to the IND program and to provide marijuana for studies to prove how awful marijuana is to justify its prohibition.  In this metaphor it would be akin to saving a few vials of polio virus so you could use them to make vaccines.

Efforts to eradicate marijuana a positive for community

Officers take to the skies near the end of every summer and search some of [West Virginia's] most remote areas looking for fields where local ne’er-do-wells grow fields of marijuana.

The effort by law enforcement results in the destruction of numerous plots of the plant.

We applaud the effort by police to enforce the laws of the land no matter how difficult it might be.

Officers face booby traps and potential confrontations while on seek and destroy marijuana missions. It is more valuable to our communities to spend the money on eradication efforts than it is to allow people to grow this plant, enslave our children with addiction, and allow such dirty money to find its way into our local economy.

If we can get more of our pot farmers in jail, perhaps marijuana’s image in the community might suffer and usage could finally begin to decline.

We hope the all-too-frequent experience of finding a pot field, but never finding the cultivator does not dampen the spirits of our law enforcement community.

Our officers are fighting to defend the laws established to protect this nation.

Let’s do our part to help them accomplish this.

Anyone with information about marijuana growing in or around your neighborhood, please call your local detachment of the West Virginia State Police and let them know about it.

Let’s take a look at the fine job done by our drug warriors in West Virginia.  There happens to be this fantastic repository of the government’s marijuana eradication efforts in the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics Online.  According to Table 4.38.2005, “Number of marijuana plants eradicated and seized, arrests made, weapons seized, and value of assets seized”, Under the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program, by State, 2005…

WEST VIRGINIA

Total cultivated plants eradicated: 57,600
Total of those plants that were “ditchweed”: 0

Whoa.  All those plants you guys ripped up were indoor grows and tended outdoor grows?  The outdoor grows accounted for 98.5% of all the plants you ripped up, but not a single wee bit of that was ditchweed (the feral hemp plant that grows wild almost everywhere in America?  OK…

Bulk processed marijuana: 407 lbs.
Total value of assets seized:  $22,950

Hold on a minute.  I may not have gone to one of them fine West Virginia schools, but I still know my cipherin’.  According to a 2006 study by Jon Gettman (Marijuana Production in the United States), a pound of marijuana is $1,606 / lb, though police often cite $2,000 – $4,000 / lb.  Let’s say $2,000, because it makes the math easier.  407 lbs. of pot times $2,000 equals $814,000 worth of pot.

Now let’s assume those 57,600 plants each produce a pound.  I know, it’s asking a lot, but these are all well-tended 21st-century criminal enterprise not-your-father’s-Woodstock-weed outdoor gardens.  Besides, that’s a number police often use in estimates; let’s give Johnny Law the benefit of the doubt (because we observe the Golden Rule).  57,600 lbs. times $2,000 equals $115,200,000 worth of pot, plus the $814,000-worth of processed pot, that’s $116,014,000.

West Virginia has a 6% sales tax rate.  That seized marijuana represents $6,960,840 in tax revenue lost to that state.  That’s if it was sold once; keep in mind in a regulated market it could be sold in bulk to a wholesaler, split up for a retailer, and sold to a consumer, generating tax revenue every step of the way.  Also, I doubt the 57,600 plants was all of the plants in West Virginia, not by a long shot.

Jeffrey Miron at Harvard estimated that revenues and savings from taxing and regulating marijuana in West Virginia would raise $22-$23 million every year.  With tough times in the coal mining industry, hemp and cannabis farming and production jobs could power the new state economy.  From producing the worst greenhouse gas fuel to scrubbing the air with fields of hemp for cleaner biodiesel!