The AP reports,

A medical marijuana dispensary at South Lake Tahoe has reopened, three months after shutting down following a raid by federal agents.

Patient to Patient Collective last week reopened next to its previous location, and plans to offer a full line of marijuana products to eligible patients.

Federal agents seized about 10 pounds of processed marijuana and a small amount of cash during January’s raid, but no arrests were made.

This is akin to the turtle poking his head out of his shell to look around and see if that little boy is going to try and cut it off again. In this metaphor, the little boy, Attorney General Eric Holder, promised not to target medical dispensaries, with provisions, and we are all waiting to see if he keeps his promise. With one exception, there have not been any further raids on dispensaries by federal troops.

But, therein lies the problem. The prohibition continues to fuel the black market, and the government has their finger on the grenade pin 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. At any time, the government can pull the pin and blow up every life involved in the legitimate cannabis industry in every medical marijuana state and people are scared.

[Therein lies another problem: the feds will only bust dispensaries that break state law, but the feds, not the state, get to decide if you broke state law.  There are no state charges filed for breaking that state law, whatever it was, only federal charges.  When you're facing federal charges in a federal court, you're not allowed to mention that you were following a state medical marijuana law. -- "R"R]

People are legitimately afraid of the federal government, and there are no protections for them. With only a small handful of congressional leaders willing to champion the cause, the entire House of Representatives have become a sniveling group of cowards afraid to lead their country because they believe their constituent support may suffer.

Contact your elected representative and let them know if they support medical marijuana laws then you will support them. They need to know who their support base is, then get active and get involved.

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(CBS) So far, there hasn’t been much negative reaction to the photo showing Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps smoking what appeared to be marijuana. 

A few years ago, it might have ruined his career, but so far it hasn’t — perhaps a sign of changing attitudes.

The seeming lack of outrage… may reflect America’s changing attitudes towards marijuana – an estimated $30 billion dollar industry in the United States alone.

While a majority of Americans still oppose the legalization of marijuana use, a new CBS News poll shows a big swing in opinion in recent years.

Twenty-seven percent supported legalization in 1979; 41 percent support it today.

Understand that when you get “41% support legalization”, that’s over 2 out of 5 people when asked, “Should marijuana be legalized” who will say “yes.”  That’s without any explanation of how, where, when, or for whom it will be legalized, so that includes the spectrum from “fine-only possession, jail for sales, cultivation, and trafficking” to “pre-rolled joints at the convenience store”.

When you change the question to actually define what you mean by “legalization”, the numbers rise.  In a 2001 Zogby poll, ten weeks after 9/11, we found:

Read the rest of this entry by clicking here

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“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.

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