Remember the days when the marijuana talk was two or three of them vs. one of us?  Now it’s two of ours vs. one of them as Law Enforcement Against Prohibition’s Neill Franklin and NORML’s Founder Keith Stroup go against (Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Non-Tobacco) Drug Free America’s Queen of Reefer Madness, Calvina Fay on CNN:

I wish Keith could have gotten through at the end there. When Calvina says that the drug gangs aren’t going to just become law-abiding businessmen, I’d absolutely agree! They surely will continue trying to traffic cocaine and heroin and humans and otherwise behaving badly. But the point is they won’t have marijuana profits to fund all that! Sure, they’ll still be criminals, but they won’t be wealthy criminals. There are always going to be criminals, but we shouldn’t turn them into the kind of criminals who can afford rocket launchers and six-figure bribes.

She sure gives it her all with her little catchphrases, though. “Crude marijuana”, “selling drugs to our children”, “fooled into thinking marijuana is medicine” and so forth. It’s so refreshing to see her claim that there really is no change in administration policy because the Bush Administration never went after the sick and dying, just the big bad drug dealers, and to have two people smacking her down, followed by the host showing poll numbers demonstrating rapid increase in support for legalization and super-majority support for medical marijuana.

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Calvina Fay is the head of the Drug Free America Foundation (formerly known as “Straight, Inc.”, read up on that horror story!) and founded with Betty Sembler a group called “Save Our Society from Drugs”.  One of our readers forwarded to me a plea written by Calvina Fay begging the Steamboat Springs city council to oppose new dispensaries, or as she calls them, “pot shops”.

Dear City Council Member:

I am writing to you on behalf of Save Our Society from Drugs (S.O.S), a national nonprofit drug policy organization with concerned members in your community. It is my understanding that you recently passed a 90-day moratorium on any new marijuana dispensaries, allowing the two existing facilities to remain open while you determine how to regulate such establishments. I am writing to encourage you to vote “No” on any item that could potentially escalate the use and possession of drugs in this community.

Wouldn’t that acronym be S.O.S.F.D.?  Were you high when you came up with it?  Never mind, continue…

As of May 31, 2009, the Marijuana Registry Program has 8918 individuals that legally hold marijuana ID cards. In 2000, when voters in Colorado passed an amendment legalizing marijuana as a so-called medicine, they did so believing that marijuana would only be made available to those who had exhausted all other medical options and/or were suffering from a life threatening illness.

One of my favorite crime-fighting powers of prohibitionists is their ability to read the minds of thousands of voters in the past.  Let’s look at Colorado’s Amendment 20; just what did the voters say “yes” to by a 54% vote?

(Colorado Amendment 20) Ballot Title: An amendment to the Colorado Constitution authorizing the medical use of marijuana for persons suffering from debilitating medical conditions… defined as follows…. Cancer, glaucoma, positive status for human immunodeficiency virus, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or treatment for such conditions; A chronic or debilitating disease or medical condition, or treatment for such conditions, which produces…: cachexia; severe pain; severe nausea; seizures, including those that are characteristic of epilepsy; or persistent muscle spasms, including those that are characteristic of multiple sclerosis; or Any other medical condition, or treatment for such condition, approved by the state health agency.

Hmm… I don’t see anything in these definitions about exhausting all other options or one’s illness being not just “debilitating”, but “life-threatening”.  In fact, I see “chronic or debilitating medical condition which produces severe pain or severe nausea”, a lower threshold for pain and nausea treatment than most medical marijuana states’ language calling for “chronic pain” or “chronic nausea”.

Read the rest of this entry by clicking here

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More video from the continuing Anderson Cooper series, “America’s High: The case for and against pot”:

My dos centavos:

#1 Oh, go get a glass of water! It’s tough enough breaking the stoner stereotype (”stoneotype?”) when your eyes naturally look half-lidded anyway, but to add the audible smacks of a dry mouth makes it even harder.

#2 When David goes for the FDA route, decent comeback on “we’d love to”, but how can you miss mentioning the FDA warning released hours earlier that says Zicam may kill your sense of smell? Or uttering the word “Vioxx”? Also need to point out the disingenuousness of the FDA route and bolster medical marijuana’s acceptance by picking up on Anderson’s AMA comment – “the AMA says there isn’t enough scientific proof of medical marijuana, despite 17,000 peer-reviewed studies that prove it, but when we try to get scientific studies of marijuana from the government, NIDA refuses to allow them to take place

#3 When David goes to the “alcohol and cigs cost more to society than the taxes they bring in”, decent comeback on how harmful they are and marijuana’s safer, but still leaves viewer with impression there will be increased usage and costs from legal marijuana. I’d add, “David, almost everyone who wants to — 22 million adults annually — use marijuana NOW, so we’re already absorbing any of these ‘imaginary costs’ you mention, while also taking in $0 in tax revenue and spending $7.7B on prohibition. Taxing existing marijuana users would bring in $6.2B and eliminate $7.7B in prohibition costs, so these imaginary costs from the few new users would have to top $13.6B/year for your theory to make any sense. Also, if these new users were giving up other drugs and alcohol in favor of marijuana, overall costs for drug and alcohol abuse in this nation would drop.”

Overall, nice job discussing a complicated issue in the sub-five minutes you were given. But I think the days where we need be polite and respectful to our prohibitionist opponents on TV are over. These people need to be treated like the liars they are and our responses should become a bit more forceful in that respect. The people are largely on our side and are thirsting for someone to smack down one of these opponents of liberty.

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This is the latest press release from the (Non-Alcoholic, Non-Phamaceutical, Non-Tobacco) Drug Free America Foundation:

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The arrest of the Connecticut Vice President of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws for violent threats against State Senator Toni Boucher has brought to light more incidents of verbal abuse, physical intimidation and harassment by other drug legalization activists.

Dr. Andrea Barthwell, a prominent treatment professional, recently spoke of her experiences. “They are not above using misinformation, intimidation, and retribution to advance their goals. As a long time advocate for the prevention and treatment of drug abuse, I have been harassed and threatened in person and on blogs by people and groups who support the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) agenda,” said Barthwell.

That’s Andrea Barthwell, former Deputy Drug Czar under George W. Bush.  Speaking of misinformation, she once said, “If there were compelling scientific and medical data supporting marijuana’s medical benefits that would be one thing, but the data is not there. The claim of one individual who has used marijuana does not medical data make.”  As a long time advocate for providing marijuana to the sick and dying people who gain relief from it, I have been harassed by Barthwell when she said, “The people who are advancing marijuana as a medicine are perpetuating a cruel hoax that exploits our compassion for the sick. They are using patients’ pain and suffering in an attempt to change America’s drug control policy. Marijuana is a crude plant product that most definitely is not a medicine.”

I’m still waiting for the medicinal marijuana patient to tell me to stop “using” them and repeal Oregon’s medical marijuana law, Andrea.  By the way, Andrea now works for a pharmaceutical company that takes marijuana in “crude plant product” form and makes a spray out of it for medicinal properties (check out Pete Guither’s excellent post on the subject).  The manufacturer touts that the product is a “whole plant extract” that contains all the compounds found in “crude plant product”.  You know, the one that Andrea says “is most definitely not a medicine.”

Read the rest of this entry by clicking here

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There was a point in my professional career as Deputy Director of the Drug Free America Foundation when I supported the prohibition of marijuana as medicine. But then, I experienced a change of heart, if you will; a moment of clarity, an epiphany. After seriously investigating the issue, and getting beyond the rhetorical arguments of both sides, I began to realize that the prohibitionist viewpoint against the use of marijuana as medicine largely ignored three things, which are so embedded in the fabric of American society and reflective of our cultural values that their truth is almost self-evident.

First and foremost, the issue of marijuana as medicine is largely a states’ rights issue. From a purely Constitutional point of view, individual states are empowered to chart their own legislative courses, and act as autonomous, self-determining governing entities that are best suited to adopt laws regarding the health and welfare of their citizens. At the latest count, thirteen states have enacted medical marijuana laws either by ballot initiative or legislation. Unfortunately, the federal government up to now has selectively used the federalist tenet of states’ rights only when it’s politically convenient to do so.

Second, it’s an issue of the relationship between physician and patient. Based on long-standing tradition, custom, and practice, the relationship between doctor and patient is sacrosanct. Fundamentally, the treatment regimen prescribed or recommended by the physician is a private matter. The government simply has no business intruding on a patient’s prescribed or recommended course of treatment.

Third, it’s an issue regarding the greater domain of a citizen’s right to privacy. As Justice Louis Brandeis so eloquently opined in 1928, we as citizens of the United States have “the right to be let alone.” And, as Erwin Griswold, the former dean of the Harvard Law School remarked in 1960, “the right to be let alone is the underlying principle of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.” So fundamental is this right to privacy is that it has been applied to a panoply of situations that have undergone and withstood judicial scrutiny, and clearly substantiated in a host of Supreme Court decisions dating back nearly one hundred years.

via Opposing Views: OPINION: Former Drug Free America Director Endorses Medical Marijuana.

First we get former Drug Czar McCaffrey telling us that now that he’s out of office, he really doesn’t care if adults smoke marijuana.  Now we get the former director of Drug Free America recognizing the prohibitionist viewpoint is fatally flawed.  At this rate, we should have Nancy Reagan smoking blunts with John Walters sometime around 2023…

However, I want this former director to explain to me how his third point doesn’t also apply to the non-medical use of marijuana by adults.

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TheHill.com – Former anti-marijuana lobbyist switches sides
The last time the House debated medical marijuana, David Krahl trod the halls of Capitol Hill lobbying against the legislation as deputy director of the Drug Free America Foundation.

Now, he’s ready to lobby for allowing medicinal use of marijuana, and do anything he can to support it.

So far, no one has asked him for help, but in a recent letter to medical marijuana bill sponsor Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.), he proclaimed that he’d reversed his position on whether cannabis can be a medicine.

“Being away from the Drug Free America Foundation allowed me an opportunity to take a fresh look at the issue,” Krahl said. “I don’t have skin in the game anymore.”

He had joined the foundation in July 2006. At the time, the foundation’s executive director, Calvina Fay, noted his 25 years of experience in criminal justice and human services and said, “His anti-drug philosophies, along with his experience, will be a great fit.”

Foundation officials were caught off guard by Krahl’s reversal, saying they hadn’t heard of the letter until a reporter called about it. But they said they’re happy that lawmakers still aren’t trying to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes.

“I don’t believe one person changing their position gives any credibility to the other side on this,” said foundation spokesman John Pastuovic.

Yet when they find former marijuana users who had a problem with harder drugs, the drug warriors won’t hesitate to use ex-potheads’ change of position to lend credibility to their “gateway theory”.

Earlier this year former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr, the author of the Barr Amendment that squashed DC’s overwhelming vote in favor of medical marijuana, has switched positions and now lobbies for Marijuana Policy Project.  Then there are the thousands of members of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition who want sensible marijuana regulation.

Lots of former prohibitionists have switched over to our side.  I can’t think of any of us who have switched over to support arresting people for marijuana.

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