Senator Mark Leno in California has introduced a bill to protect patient’s right to work:

(HIGH TIMES) This week state senator Mark Leno has introduced a bill that he hopes will provide some measure of protection for medical marijuana users. The bill would prohibit employers from firing medical marijuana patients for consuming pot – as long as they’re not consuming pot while on the job.

Former Gov. Schwarzenegger vetoed a similar bill, also introduced by Leno, in 2007.

According to Leno, “The bill simply establishes a medical cannabis patient’s right to work … It astounds me that there would be any controversy around it.”

The bill would not protect employees with “safety sensitive jobs,” such as doctors, nurses, drivers and people who operate heavy machinery. Additionally, the bill would not permit patients to get high during work hours – should the bill pass, employers would retain the right to fire workers for being high on the job.

A medical marijuana employee's gift from his employer... courtesy of David Evans

These kinds of fixes to existing medical marijuana laws are important because there are companies blatantly discriminating against cannabis patients.  There also exists an organization dedicated to not only preserving this discrimination, but teaching you as an employer how to get away with this discrimination.  Because the Drug and Alcohol Testing Industry Association has only our society’s best interests and not their sales of pee tests at heart, you can now attend a seminar in how to properly put a sick and disabled person out of work and on the streets!

(OH&S) The Drug & Alcohol Testing Industry Association will begin its 2011 webinars on Feb. 9 with a presentation that will be of interest to safety managers and CEOs from Maine to Hawaii. Those two are among 15 states, plus the District of Columbia, that have medical marijuana laws in force. The Feb. 9 webinar by lawyer David G. Evans is titled “State Medical Marijuana Laws: The Potholes in the Road for Drug Free Workplace Programs.”

“Potholes”.  Get it?  The pot pun headline is just too irresistible for a prohibitionist.

So what will you learn in this live webcast that only costs you $49 to view?  According to the DATIA website:

Medical marijuana laws are becoming more common – currently 15 states and the District of Columbia have medical marijuana laws. While marijuana is still a federally banned drug per the Controlled Substances Act, these state laws are increasingly wreaking havoc for drug free workplace programs. What, if any, changes do employers need to make to their policies to address medical marijuana? What, if any, actions can employers take against employees with medical marijuana cards that test positive for marijuana? These and many more questions regarding medical marijuana and its effect on drug free workplace programs will be answered in the timely presentation.

Here’s the “havoc” being wreaked: When a medical marijuana patient has a job, it destroys any rationale for pee testing a healthy person for pot to get and keep a job. How do you justify firing Bobby Bonghitter for peeing dirty after a weekend party while not firing Petey Patient for peeing dirty for his glaucoma treatment?  As the Supreme Court told us, marijuana is fungible, so Bobby’s and Petey’s marijuana is the same marijuana.  Why is Bobby a danger and Petey is not?

The fact is neither Bobby nor Petey are a danger to the workplace.  Nobody can ever show us data showing cannabis consumers to be any workplace safety threat.  In Oregon when we challenged the business industry lobbyists, even they admitted they could not point to a single incident where safety risk, injury, or death was demonstrated concerning an employed medical marijuana patient based on their offsite, off-hours use of cannabis.

People like David Evans and DATIA, however, are more than willing to see all patients unjustly denied a right to work than to give up the cash cow of workplace pee tests for healthy people.  Because they are well aware of the fact that far more people use cannabis and it is detectable far longer than all the other illicit drugs combined.  Drug testing for all drugs other than cannabis would result in very few positive results, so few that it would be hard to justify its expense to any company.

In case the name David Evans sounds familiar, it’s because he is the director of the Drug Free America Foundation (motto: “Drug companies Free from competition with cannabis in America Foundation”).  You may remember him from these debates featured on CBS News between Evans and Judge James P. Gray.  Or from this appearance on CNN.

Click here to view the embedded video.

At Seattle Hempfest, the joint-to-ounce ratio is closer to 1:1

The Christian Science Monitor features a “one minute debate” between our own Paul Armentano and legendary prohibitionist Calvina Fay, executive director of the Drug Free America Foundation.  I have a question: what kind of pinners does Calvina Fay roll?

Legalizing marijuana use would substantially increase its already formidable costs to society. That’s because the initiative would allow individuals to possess up to about 120 joints and cultivate 25 square feet of plants, capable of yielding up to 240,000 joints.

Prop 19 legalizes an ounce of cannabis. 120 joints?  That works out to 236 milligrams per joint.  Seriously, is anyone out there rolling less-than-a-quarter-gram joints?

Calvina Fay likes to use the “joint” as if it is an international standard of measurement (25 square feet produces 240 kilojoints!  Almost a quarter of a megajoint!)  The point is to scare readers into thinking they are legalizing enough marijuana for a shady drug dealer to sell to hundreds of kids.

Prohibitionists use the same tactic when it comes to plant seizures.  Police will snatch up a dozen two-inch seedlings and tell you they would be worth $12 bajillion on the streets… unless they belonged to medical marijuana patients, then they’ll just let them die in an evidence locker.

In the real world, the US government is rolling 400 milligram joints for the four remaining federal medical marijuana patients.  That’s about 70 joints to the ounce.  Tokers I know here in the Pacific Northwest roll them at 750 mg to 1g per joint.  That’s 28 to 38 joints to the ounce.  Unless it’s Seattle Hempfest, and then you’ll find 1 joint to the ounce.

OK, Calvina, if you'll just tell us what "Cost" equals now and how much it will increase under legalization, we can figure our whether it is greater than or less than the $1 billion we're spending on prohibiting cannabis in California now.

Here’s another question: how much are these “formidable costs to society”?  Notice how they never quantify that?  What are the costs now, Calvina, and by what factor would they increase under legalization?  Whatever the costs are now, we’re paying that now.  Add to that the cost of keeping pot illegal that we’re paying now.  Subtract from that total how much we bring in from taxes… oh, wait, that’s zero, so never mind.

Whatever the increased cost equals, it has to be more than what we’d save in enforcement costs plus what we’d earn in taxes for your scare tactic to make any sense.  We’re spending $1 billion failing to stop anyone from smoking pot now.  Do you really think the increase in these mystery costs will equal or beat $1 billion, Calvina?

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.

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”.

(Calvina Fay) To date, only 6% of those using marijuana are using it to “treat” cancer, HIV/AIDS, and glaucoma. The remainder of the users are “treating” much less serious conditions such as muscle spasms, headaches and minor arthritis.

Yes, Calvina, use the scare quotes to convince people that those 6% with cancer, HIV/AIDS, and glaucoma are faking it.  In the previous graf you’re complaining that Colorado really meant marijuana to be used by those with “life-threatening” illness, then you mock those with cancer and HIV/AIDS.  As for the other treatments, the Amendment that 54% of the people voted for includes muscle spasms, migraine pain, and arthritis pain.

Recent articles coming out of the state’s news outlets report that the registration program has seen an increase of 2,000 individuals that have been added to the program just in the past month and that the number is expected to rise to 15,000 by the year’s end. Allowing pot shops where marijuana will be more readily available will only increase the number of applicants to an already widely abused program.

“Widely abused”, and yet all the nearly 9,000 registered patients saw a doctor, had one of the qualifying conditions, got a legal recommendation, and legally acquired medicine.  Calvina suffers from a particularly virulent strain of Reefer Madness called “The ‘So-Called’ Medicine of Last Resort™” – this idea that only people who’ve tried every other possible pharmaceutical unsuccessfully and are on their death bed with two weeks to live should be allowed to use medical marijuana.

Why is it when a state government sets up any other program aside from medical marijuana, a rapid increase in participants statewide is considered a success, but for medical marijuana it is considered “widely abused”?  If we end up with 15,000 Colorado patients by year’s end, that’s a state government successfully protecting 15,000 people from needless prosecutions that cost the state money.  That’s 15,000 marijuana users who’ve paid a fee to the government and registered their name and address with the state to use marijuana.  That’s 15,000 patients the state has given a safer alternative to hepatoxic pharmaceuticals.  By every measure, a success!

ABC Nightline journalist Lisa Ling, in a recent episode titled High Times, illustrates just how easy it is to get a “medical” marijuana recommendation in California. Statistics and the camera show that state “medical” marijuana programs are being widely abused and perfectly healthy individuals are easily able to acquire pot under the guise of medicine. Is this the type of media recognition that Steamboat Springs wants?

And it is exactly NOT that easy to get a recommendation in Colorado.  This is another strain of Reefer Madness, the “You Don’t Want Us To Be Like California, Do You?™”  The way it works is that you note that California’s Prop 215 is worded so doctors can make a recommendation for anything and that Los Angeles has more dispensaries than Starbucks.  Then you use that scary scenario in a state where doctors can only recommend based on fixed list of conditions, where there must be rigorous medical documentation of that condition, in a city where there are two dispensaries.

Before you vote, please examine the attached documents provided by the California Police Chiefs Association. They are dealing with dispensaries and related crime every day. As you can see from California’s experience, dispensaries are not worth the damage they create in communities. Do not allow the community of Steamboat Springs to suffer the same fate.

The attached documents Calvina presents include a 25 page listing of news stories about dispensary robberies, shootings, and raids, all of which are consequences of the illegality of cannabis for non-sick people which drives the price up to levels worth stealing and forestalls any calling of the police or setting in court any disputes which arise from buying, selling, and growing marijuana.  This same listing of robberies, shootings, and raids could have been composed in 1995 before any medical marijuana states existed.

Then there is a 40 page document from the “Friends of the DEA” giving recommendations to the Obama Administration on how to deal with dispensaries.  Lots of scare quotes around the word “medical” when referencing medical marijuana and a whole bunch of justification for locking up sick people who use medical marijuana in order to protect them from the dangers of a “crude plant material” not regulated by the FDA.

The coup de gras is a 56 page “white paper” from the California Police Chiefs Association telling all the sordid tales of how California is going to hell in a handbasket because it has medical marijuana dispensaries.  That’s 121 pages from Calvina & Friends – 122 if you count her letter – designed to scare Steamboat Springs city council about medical marijuana.

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.

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.”

Roger Morgan, Californians for Drug Free Schools, recalls being cyber stalked by a drug legalization supporter. “My emails were hacked, some files were damaged and erased and obscene emails were sent to colleagues under my name. I was threatened over a telephone relay system by the same individual. This person was traced back to the drug legalization movement. I know many other colleagues who have also been cyber stalked and it’s really a very menacing and costly act,” said Morgan.

That’s Roger Morgan, who believes that states should mandate that their public schools institute universal drug testing of students.  “Even if politically sensitive, the results from universal, non-punitive random drug testing for all students would be so astounding in terms of saved lives, dollars and creation of productive young people that in short order all parents and taxpayers would demand this protection.”

I’m still waiting for Roger to read the District Court’s decision in Tannahill v. Lockney Independent School District, where random, suspicionless drug-testing of all students was considered unconstitutional.  The Supreme Court has only upheld drug-testing for student athletes (Vernonia School District v. Acton) and kids in extra-curriculars (Board of Education of Pottawatomie County v. Earls).  Because, after all, if a kid does have a drug problem, we want to make sure he doesn’t get involved in other, healthier activities involving more responsible adult supervision.  Better that we make him a social outcast to punish him for his drug use.  That’ll get him off the drugs, or at least on to the alcohol we can’t really test for.

Calvina Fay, Executive Director of Drug Free America Foundation (DFAF) concludes, “Advocates for legalizing drugs are known for attempting to silence their critics. We have been subject to all forms of threats and harassment by the pro-drug lobby. Drug legalization is a controversial topic, but we must keep the debate respectful. That the other side is resorting to strong-arm lobbying tactics tells me they don’t have the facts to back up their assertions. They are desperate to win by any means, legal or otherwise.”

That’s Calvina Fay, the woman who wrote, in the most respectful tone possible, about medical marijuana in New Jersey, “Please ensure that your legislators are not misled — it is much more compassionate to ensure sick people are not being exploited by those who just want to make a quick buck peddling snake oil.”  Last year at a world forum on drugs, Calvina respectfully said, “Much of that movement is funded by a name that many of you know – George Soros, a convicted criminal who has publicly labeled himself as an atheist and yet has claimed that he is God… His philosophy is to destroy societies that he does not like and then recreate them using his “open society” model. He destroys by creating chaos. And what better way to create chaos in society than to have a drug-addicted population that dominates.”

Other Calvina Fay moments of respect with facts to back up her assertions:

• “…these advocates have pushed the envelope too far when they began espousing that it is the “human right” of individuals to use drugs and endanger not only their own lives but the lives of others. With rights, come responsibilities and that is something that drug users know or care very little about.”
• “The sad thing is that people smoking pot probably do feel better even if they are not getting better but they could also feel better by smoking crack cocaine or injecting heroin. Will these be the next drugs to legalize as so-called medicine?”
• “The drug legalization movement certainly has more money than we do but, we are on the right side.”

Now, once again, let me point out that the vast majority of folks in marijuana law reform are peaceful, respectful, intelligent adults who behave with the utmost in decorum.  But when a tiny few Americans who’ve had a war declared on them for 39 years, who’ve endured incarceration, loss of property and home, who’ve been frozen out of their career or schooling, who’ve lost custody of a child, who’ve seen a loved one gunned down by a police officer, who’ve returned from the horrors of war and been branded criminals for trying to self-medicate their PTSD; who’ve been lied to repeatedly and obviously by people like Andrea, Roger, and Calvina, when they snap and send a nasty email, yell at a speech, or shove someone, it’s not that hard to understand.  I don’t endorse it, but I understand it.  Honestly, I think the fact that Americans haven’t responded with more violence against a war declared on them testifies to what a good and decent people we truly are.

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.

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.