New to DVD today is Humboldt County, an introspective character piece by novice writer/director duo, Darren Grodsky and Danny Jacobs (both also act in the film). The film follows disenchanted medical student, Peter (Jeremy Strong), as he spends a summer lost within the confines of a marijuana commune hidden deep in the backwoods of Northern California. via DVD Review: Humboldt County – LAist: Los Angeles News, Food, Arts & Events.

Darren and Danny joined us as interview guests in the Sep 26, 2008 Stash.  I really loved this movie and my wife watched it for the first time last week and loved it, too.  This is not a “crazy dope comedy”, so if you’re looking for that, go rent Pineapple Express or Harold & Kumar.  This is a movie that explores the essence of the cannabis community as Peter exits “Babylon” and experiences the interaction of the Humboldt family – “fish out of water” tale.  This film features some of the most realistic depictions of pot farmer characters I’ve seen in a long time.

And besides, it’s got that lady from Six Feet Under (Frances Conroy) and the doctor from Deadwood (Brad Dourif), two of my all-time favorite HBO shows, so you know the acting is good.

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Tonight is the premiere of the HBO Documentary Films presentation of “Ganja Queen”.  The movie tells the story of Schappelle Corby, which I’ve detailed before on the Stash and on my own blog.  Corby was landing in Bali on a flight from Australia when airport officials discovered nine pounds of marijuana in her bags.  Corby claims the marijuana was not in her bag when she left Australia.  The defense claims she was the victim of a airport smuggling ring that used unsuspecting passengers’ bags – a smuggler working in baggage at the Australian airport would put the marijuana in the bag and a smuggler working in baggage in Bali would off-load the marijuana from the bag.  There was even testimony from a Bali prisoner who claims to have overheard two other prisoners discussing how they had botched a similar smuggling assignment from Australia to Bali.

But the Indonesian courts aren’t very forgiving of drug crimes – smugglers and dealers can be given the death penalty.  Prosecutors wanted the courts to sentence Corby to life in prison.  Instead, for smuggling nine pounds of marijuana into Bali, she was sentenced to twenty years in prison, where she still sits today.

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Just for comparison: I thought you’d also like to know that the same month Indonesian courts were sentencing Schappelle Corby to 240 months in prison for nine pounds of marijuana, they were also sentencing Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir for his role in the 2002 Bali [nightclub bombing] blasts that killed 202 people.  The Indonesian court upheld his sentence of thirty months.

Got that?  Conspire to kill hundreds, you get 2½ years; smuggle pounds of pot, you get 20 years.

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(TIME Magazine) We write a television show. Measured against more thoughtful and meaningful occupations, this is not the best seat from which to argue public policy or social justice. Still, those viewers who followed The Wire — our HBO drama that tried to portray all sides of inner-city collapse, including the drug war, with as much detail and as little judgment as we could muster — tell us they’ve invested in the fates of our characters. They worry or grieve for Bubbles, Bodie or Wallace, certain that these characters are fictional yet knowing they are rooted in the reality of the other America, the one rarely acknowledged by anything so overt as a TV drama.

[T]his [drug] war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end? State and federal prisons are packed with victims of the drug conflict. A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. — and 1 in 15 black men over 18 — is currently incarcerated. That’s the world’s highest rate of imprisonment.

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right,” wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy — the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn’t resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do — and what we will do.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

The writers of The Wire are referring to jury nullification, an American right of juries to decide the fairness of a law and not just the application of that law. A jury can choose not to enforce a law even if they believe a defendant is guilty. This check on legislative power dates back to colonial times even before our Independence Day; however, modern courts have refused to allow defense attorneys and judges to even mention to jurors that they have this power. For more information on jury nullification, visit the Fully Informed Jury Association at www.fija.org.

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