(Credit: OpenSecrets.org)

How does President Obama go from a 2004 Senate campaign saying “The war on drugs is an utter failure and I think we need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws…” to his 2012 silence on the issue?  Why would a man who smoked pot as a teen, “frequently, that was the point” and whose mother died from cancer go from a 2008 campaign promise that he wouldn’t be “using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws” on medical marijuana to a 2011 war on medical marijuana states surpassing anything President George W. Bush ever attempted?

(Huffington Post) There are few industries with as much power in Washington as the pharmaceutical sector. Drug companies have spent $2.3 billion on lobbying and $183 million on campaign contributions since 1998, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The industry also maintains a war chest for advertising and grassroots lobbying aimed at altering public opinion. The ready money serves as a strong deterrent against any legislative proposal that would lower costs for consumers and profits for the drug makers.

This is from the “Auction 2012” series and it goes in detail to explain how pharmaceutical lobbying killed two provisions in the Obama Health Care Plan that would have lowered prescription drug costs for patients.  It also explains Big Pharma influence in killing the ability of Medicare to negotiate in bulk for lower prescription drug prices for seniors and maintaining a ban on import of lower cost prescription drugs from Canada.

So when when you know that two-thirds of patients at one clinic report substitution of marijuana for prescription drugs, when you know that medical marijuana states have the lowest prices for marijuana, you can’t help but think patients growing medicine in their yard or closet can’t be good for Big Pharma’s profits.

However, as pharmaceutical corporations keep squeezing the dollars out of patients’ pockets and into congresspeople’s war chests, they may be unintentionally creating more medical marijuana patients.

According to a 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation study, drug prescriptions rose by 39 percent while drug prices nearly doubled over the last decade. More and more individuals, hard pressed to pay for medications, are opting to abandon their prescriptions. In 2009, the number of patients who did not fill or pick up prescriptions increased by 23 percent from the previous year and 68 percent from 2006.

More people become aware of marijuana’s medical utility every day.  As those prescriptions become less affordable, more people will clamor for the herbal alternative.  More laws will pass, more prohibitions will fall, more people will know the truth about cannabis, the full utilization of this plant is inevitable.  The only question is how many more people will suffer and how much longer will it take to finally realize legalization?

This 2011 Reefer Madness propaganda is Anslinger Approved!

It’s end-of-year retrospective time!  While my colleagues on the NORML Blog (go check out the new look that matches the new site) are going to bring you the biggest marijuana news stories of 2011, here at The Daily Stash Blog we’re going to bring you stories that may have fallen through the cracks of other drug policy 2011 remembrances.

Today we bring you the Top Ten “Reefer Madness” Stories of 2011.  ”Reefer Madness”, of course, is the 1936 anti-pot propaganda film showing young people becoming crazed and violent on the effects of “reefer”.  Today, we use “Reefer Madness” as shorthand to describe the hysterical warnings by the anti-drug zealots as reported unchallenged by a complacent media.

Tomorrow we’ll look at the Top Ten Cannabis Science Stories of 2011.  Thursday we’ll cover the Top Ten “Stupid Stoner Stories” of 2011.  Friday we’ll cover the Top Ten People in Marijuana of 2011.

Top Ten “Reefer Madness” Stories of 2011 (audio mp3)

10. Oregonian editorial board hypes fears of medical marijuana and teen pot smoking

(The Oregonian – “Seeing through the smoke” editorial) It’s about time someone took action on the increasing number of medical marijuana dispensaries. … Right now, anyone, including teenagers, can apply [for a medical marijuana card]. A study done by Oregon Partnership found, for example, that 35 percent of students at Wilson High School and 46 percent at Marshall High School knew someone with a card.

Unlike the Oregonian editorial board, I check sources (I work for NORML: I have to.) The survey they refer to was addressed at a Marshall High community town hall meeting. The poll was conducted by students as part of a project called “SMASH” in a “confidential, random, peer-to-peer” survey – meaning one high school kid asking another high school kid. We have no control group, no control for confounding variables, not even a mention of the survey size or the randomness of those polled (maybe the SMASH kids are more likely to “randomly” speak to their friend, for instance, or stood in the hall and talked to anyone passing by who would answer.)

But besides all the methodological issues arising from trusting the polling data of high school kids talking to their friends, it’s important to note what their survey actually said:

PERCEPTION: Students surveyed believed that 8 out of 10 students smoke marijuana

REALITY: 7 out of 10 students DO NOT smoke marijuana

Kids surveyed thought 77.3% of others were smoking marijuana.  76.07% of kids never smoked marijuana, another 12.27% smoked it once or twice a month.  So, kids think 3 out of 4 other kids smoke pot when 3 out of 4 kids actually don’t.  Where, oh, where could the kids be getting the message that youth cannabis smoking is out of control, when, in fact, Oregon’s 12th grade monthly cannabis use rates have declined 14% (before | after) since 1999, when medical marijuana got underway in Oregon?

9. Papa John’s Pizza supports driver who reported medical marijuana patient to police

You would think that pizza delivery companies would understand who their customers are and that a great number of them smoke marijuana.  If you’re a pizza delivery company in Colorado, you’d understand that many of the marijuana smokers in your delivery area may be legally using cannabis for medicinal purposes.  But apparently Papa John’s pizza in Colorado doesn’t care too much about its drivers violating the privacy of its customers who are medical marijuana patients.

(9News) The man was smoking medical marijuana just before the pizza arrived on Friday evening. The delivery driver smelled the marijuana and called the cops. The Papa John’s employee, who was not identified, was concerned because the customer’s 9-year-old daughter was in the house.

8. The annual scaremongering about marijuana-laced Halloween treats begins now

L.A. County Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Glen Walsh said parents should definitely inspect the candy their children bring home after trick-or-treating.

Walsh said a pungent smell or an odd taste can serve as indicators on whether the food contains marijuana. As for the potency of the marijuana-laced prodcuts, Walsh said the level of THC, the chemical found in marijuana, can vary from zero to over 90 percent.

OK, so watch closely, parents.  You don’t want your kid getting a candy with 0% THC in it.  But if you find any of that 90% THC stuff, you can send it my way for proper disposal.

How stupid is this?  First off, if there is a person out there who would intentionally hand THC-laden treats to children, they are a criminal.  They’d be just as likely to poison Halloween treats or put pins or razor blades in them.. which is an urban legend with no truth to it whatsoever.

Second, if you are a person who uses THC-laden treats for medical or recreational purposes, why are you handing out a $20 “Buddafinger” when you could pass out a 20-cent “Butterfinger”?  You want to be so sure some kid you don’t know and won’t see gets high that you’ll spend 10 times more on Halloween candy?

7. Portland Reporter Anna Canzano: A medical marijuana-hating sheriff’s best friend

[Oregon Sheriff's Association President] Tom Bergin said at the rate Oregon is going, he believes Oregon is three times sicker than California. Why? Well, more than 90 percent of cardholders say they’re using pot to treat pain — not glaucoma or cancer — as the bill was initially marketed.

Here are the facts from the state’s medical marijuana program registry:

• There are 49,220 medical marijuana patients
• There are 44,756 patients who indicate chronic pain as a qualifying condition

So Canzano, Bergin, and every prohibitionist who scoffs at people in serious pain treating it with a non-toxic herb pull out their calculators and exclaim “90% of cardholders are using it for pain, not glaucoma or cancer!”  (The number is actually 90.9%.)

What Canzano distorts lies in the word “not”.  Under Oregon law, a registry cardholder can qualify under more than one condition.  The state even puts “A patient may have more than one diagnosed qualifying medical condition” right there on the website where you got the numbers to crunch.  Are we to believe people with cancer and glaucoma don’t suffer chronic pain as well?

6. Florida Woman Sues Over Being Arrested for Sage

A woman in Florida who was arrested for felony marijuana possession is suing for wrongful arrest. She might just have a case, she was charged with marijuana possession even though the bag they caught her with turned out to be Sage. 49 year old, Robin Brown says a Broward County Sheriff’s deputy caught her while she was bird watching back in March of 2009. He used his field kit on the herb she had in a bag, and said that in the field it tested positive for marijuana. The deputy sent the 50 grams of substance to a state crime lab.

Her lawsuit says that she was arrested before the test was performed. Her arrest was ordered by the Assistant State Attorney, Mark Horn, in June of 2009. She was arrested at her place of business, Massage Envy in Weston. She said that she was arrested in front of co-workers and her customers and subjected to a full body cavity search during her overnight stay in jail. When her lawyer discovered the herbs had not been tested a second time, he used the courts to force the tests which determined what Ms. Brown was contending all along, her sage was completely marijuana free.

5. Teen dies after plastic fumes scar lungs, media blames synthetic pot

The boy smoked the fake marijuana out of a plastic PEZ candy dispenser. The chemicals in the drugs caused extensive damage to his lungs. Brandon was put on a respirator in June and had a double lung transplant in September.

So, we’re to assume here it was the K2 that scarred the boys lungs and not the freakin’ fumes from the melting plastic of a PEZ dispenser?!?

Tonya Rice told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review newspaper Brandon was put on a respirator in June after smoking Spice fake cannabis, which is said to be ten times more dangerous than cocaine.

Not to be cruel or insensitive about the boy’s death, but he didn’t suddenly die from the acute effects of K2 use.  He used it in June, fell very ill, was given a double lung transplant, and died from an infection because of his lowered immune system in October.  So, to compare, we have cocaine, which can give you a heart attack by overdose and kill you the minute you snort / smoke / inject it, versus a synthetic cannabinoid smoked through plastic, requiring a double lung transplant, leading to a fatal infection four months later in the hospital that kills one boy.  We’re not trying to say K2 is safe – it isn’t – but it’s not “ten times more dangerous than cocaine”.

4. CASA’s Joe Califano blames marijuana for Arizona shooter

I haven’t seen press reports or talking heads discuss their concern about how easy it has been for this mentally ill young man to get marijuana. And there has been no mention of the potential of marijuana to spark latent psychosis and exacerbate schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.

So as we continue to think about this killer and his deranged mind, we should be asking this question: Is Jared Loughner an individual whose psychosis was prompted or exacerbated by the use of marijuana?

Gee, Joe, what do you think we ought to do?  Make marijuana illegal?  Lock up people who use it?  Break down their doors at night and shoot their dogs?  Use helicopters and infrared to eradicate the plant wherever it’s grown?  Throw billions at American and Mexican law enforcement for armor and weapons to fight its traffickers?  Train dogs to sniff it out?  Drug test employees, high schoolers, even middle schoolers to detect its use?

The facts are that 1% of the population exhibits schizophrenia, whether it is 1979 and 60% of high school seniors have tried marijuana or it is 1992 and 33% have tried it.  A study of 186 UK mental hospitals found no increase in schizophrenia or psychosis admissions, despite use rates of cannabis increasing greatly during that decade.

3. UK Daily Mail: Cannabis ‘kills 30,000 a year’

Cannabis ‘kills 30,000 a year’

Oh, dear.  From zero deaths* in 5,000 years of human use to ’30,000 a year’.  That sounds serious.  Let’s read on…

More than 30,000 cannabis smokers could die every year, doctors warn today.

Wait, “could die”?  We’ve gone from the active headline verb “kills” to the lede adverb “could”?  Usually you bury that wiggle room somewhere in paragraph umpteen.  Continue…

Professor John Henry, a leading authority on the drug, said the change – due to take place this summer – had undermined doctors’ efforts to highlight the risks.

He said: “Cannabis is as dangerous as cigarette smoking – in fact, it may be even worse – and downgrading its legal status has simply confused people.”

“May be” worse?  Where are the wards full of cannabis smokers?  Britain actually has some level of health care worthy of a civilized (civilised) people.  You’d think the National Health Service would bring these figures up.  It sounds like quite a cost to the government.

2. American Cancer Society says marijuana use can lead to amputation

Although it is rare, severe shutdown of blood circulation to the arms or legs has been reported in young people who smoked marijuana. In some cases, it was so severe that amputation was required.

In all my years beating back reefer madness, this is a first.  I have never heard a story of someone’s marijuana use leading to amputation.  I have covered stories of people who use marijuana for their already-existing amputation, since it is a superior medication for “phantom” pain, and I’ve covered one double-amputee diabetic’s eviction for her medical marijuana use, though.

1. Butt-chugging, vodka tampons, drinking bleach, and other parent-frightening urban legends

(KPHO) [School Resource Officer Chris] Thomas spends his days patrolling the halls of a Valley high school. He’s heard first hand how kids are getting tipsy.

“What we’re hearing about is teenagers utilizing tampons, soak them in vodka first before using them,” Thomas said.

“This is definitely not just girls,” Thomas said. “Guys will also use it and they’ll insert it into their rectums.”

Rather than the traditional beer bong you’d find at a college party, kids are sticking the tube elsewhere to get wasted.

They’re calling it “butt chugging.”

Rrrighttt… young teenage males, typically the most homophobic and self-conscious creatures on the planet, are dropping trou in front of their peers and inserting plastic tubes up their ass to chug beer.  And the vodka tampons?  Huffington Post reports that “the practice remains unverified despite multiple reports of incidents in the U.S. and elsewhere” and that a blogger “conducted her own informal trial to see whether the purported method worked“, where she notes the alcohol dissolves the glue and consistency of the tampon so much it couldn’t be inserted and that even if it were inserted, the burn you’d feel on your sensitive lady parts would not make this an enjoyable drunk.  Plus, the idea that it would help teens avoid detection with no alcohol on their breath is false, as alcohol metabolizes in your breath no matter how you ingest it.

Looks like police all around America are becoming aware of two solid, irrefutable, unimpeachable, constant truths:

1) The Law of Supply and Demand.

2) Americans everywhere like to smoke pot.

(Huffington Post) The price of marijuana in California has taken a dip over recent years, and that has motivated some to sell their cash crop out of state. As with most goods and services, pot prices are determined by supply, demand and quality.

A pound of the highest-quality marijuana could bring a grower $2,500 if sold to a dealer in Fresno, but as much as $5,500 to a dealer in Greensboro, N.C., according to the National Drug Intelligence Center, which looked at prices in mid-2010. Interviews with pot growers and others in the industry suggest the California wholesale price is closer to about $1,500 a pound if sold here.

Simone said the farther east you go, the more people are willing to pay. James Benno, director of Nor-Cal NORML, which advocates for marijuana users, doesn’t disagree.

“I’m not going to deny that kind of stuff goes on,” he said. “A lot of people are in this for the money. If you can get $4,000 for a pound in New York and $1,500 here in California, it stands to reason that people who are in this for the money are going to take it where the money’s at.”

The prohibitionists are pointing to the medical marijuana laws in California, Oregon, and Washington as fueling a flood of West Coast Weed that’s washing over their Midwestern, Southern, and Eastern states.  However, as California NORML points out, most of the dispensaries in his state are operating in a “closed loop” of supply and distribution:

“Medical marijuana is a small percentage of the California market,” he said. “The medical marijuana that’s being grown for the dispensaries is generally being done by patients in a fairly closed loop. I’m not going to say there’s no leakage there, but it’s insignificant compared to the enormous amount that’s being produced in non-medical markets.”

He’s right, in a sense, but that can’t be proven or even tested.  Marijuana is fungible.  A person isn’t a “medical marijuana grower” producing “medical marijuana” or a “drug dealer” producing “pot” – cannabis is cannabis.  Dispensary A may indeed only get its medicine from legit medical Grower B, but Grower B may be selling half to Dispensary A and letting half get trucked to Ohio to Dealer X.  Grower B may have acquired some product from illegal Grower Y and added that to his sale to Dispensary A.  There is really no possible way to know how much marijuana in a dispensary or on the street is “medical”.

Morgan Fox of MPP responds to the smuggling claims by pointing out how states need to have “dispensary systems … set up along strict guidelines“, like Maine, Rhode Island, and New Jersey.  New Jersey, Morgan?!?  Where there are six dispensaries in a state of nine million limited to producing three strains of less-than-10% THC?  Where patients aren’t allowed to grow their own plants?  With more systems like that there will be more demand among patients for that real medical-potency marijuana smuggled in from the West Coast.

I think it is foolish to try to pretend that medical marijuana on the West Coast hasn’t both depressed the retail price (“medical” and “recreational”) and contributed to interstate trafficking.  To do so is to ask the public to ignore their own common sense – they understand supply and demand.  If something’s cheap and plentiful here and not so plentiful elsewhere, someone from here will supply that demand there.

Instead, this is the opportunity we must take to pivot the discussion from medical marijuana to marijuana prohibition.  How does a pound cost $4,000 in New York and $1,500 in California?  Prohibition!  The only way to eliminate the smuggling is to make a California pound cost $4,000 or make a New York pound cost $1,500.  Since New York can’t change California’s laws, maybe it should enact its own medical marijuana law.  Nobody’s smuggling New York weed to California, after all.

We must get the public to see that marijuana use is inevitable.  They can think non-medical use is a dirty habit, a poor health choice, a moral failing, but what it is not is a crime.  Marijuana use is inextricably woven into our culture and prohibition merely criminalizes an otherwise peaceful and productive subculture and creates profit motive for smugglers.  Legalize it – nobody’s smuggling California Budweiser to New York, after all.  (They are, however, smuggling Virginia and North Carolina cigarettes to New York, thanks to extreme taxation… a lesson for post-prohibition when we begin taxing cannabis…)

I'm Jose Guerena. I served two tours as a Marine in Iraq. I fought foreign enemies to defend America. I was killed by American cops as I defended my family.

Radley Balko from Reason Magazine is my hero for his unparalleled coverage of police malfeasance in the service of armed no-knock raids, usually on drug suspects.  His reporting in the Huffington Post on the story of Jose Guerena, while shocking, is not surprising when you’ve read as many “botched drug raid”* (as HuffPo titles it) stories as I have.  Just peruse the database at http://cato.org/raidmap for a few minutes to get a feel for how the War on Drugs has become an actual shooting war with cops gunning down citizens who are often innocent of any crime or merely committing personal-use drug crimes.

In short, an armored and armed SWAT team was conducting no-knock raids on a set of homes believed to be involved in marijuana trafficking.  Jose Guerena, a Marine with two tours of Iraq under his belt, awoke from sleeping after working a night shift to the sounds of armed intruders breaking into his home.  Remembering that two of his wife’s relatives were murdered by home invaders and their three-year-old wounded, Jose orders his wife and four-year-old in the closet to hide while he grabbed his AR-15 rifle to meet the intruders.

When the cops see Guerena at the end of the hallway, they fire 70 rounds in 7 seconds, hitting Jose with 60 of them.  At first, cops claimed they saw the flash of his rifle’s muzzle, indicating he was firing, but later recanted and told reporters that actually Guerena’s AR-15 safety was still on as he was shot.  As Guerena lie bleeding to death, the cops prevented any paramedics from attending him for over an hour.  They claim it is because the raid was still a volatile situation… I guess, unlike the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, where medics were treating victims within minutes even as the scene had yet to be secured.

Please visit Huffington Post and read Balko’s coverage of the cops’ latest double-speak, innuendo, and outright lying as they desperately try to cover their ass over the senseless murder of an American veteran.  

*I hate the term “botched drug raid” when there is a no-knock SWAT raid on a drug suspect.  You’re breaking into a person’s home without warning, pointing guns, and somebody gets killed?  There’s nothing “botched” about that.  That is the intent of the raid: go in with overwhelming force, subdue suspects if you can, kill what fights back.

This is the ultimate result of the illegal marijuana market the Prop 19 traitors support

(Huffington Post) MEXICO CITY — Gunmen killed 15 people at a car wash Wednesday in a Mexican Pacific coast state where drug-gang violence has risen this year. It was the third massacre in Mexico in less than a week.

President Felipe Calderon, speaking at a forum on security, called for a minute of silence for the victims of the Tepic attack and two other massacres that have occurred since Friday: an attack on a birthday party that killed 14 young people in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, and a shooting at a drug rehab center in Tijuana that killed 13 recovering addicts.

The three attacks did not appear to be related. Such mass shootings have become increasingly common in Mexico, where drug-gang violence surged after Calderon launched an offensive against drug cartels soon after taking office in December 2006.

In April, 12 bodies, eight of them partially burned, were found in the fields outside the Nayarit town of Xalisco. Gonzalez, the governor, ordered schools to close early in June because of rising violence.

In other bloodshed in Ciudad Juarez, gunmen killed three undercover Mexican federal police officers as they waited for a person to cross a bridge from El Paso, Texas, authorities said Wednesday.

In an unrelated attack, a Chihuahua state police officer was killed Wednesday in his Ciudad Juarez home, said Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office.

In the northwest city of Culiacan, meanwhile, gunmen burst into a Red Cross hospital and kidnapped a young man who had been shot, said Martin Gastelum, a spokesman for the Sinaloa state attorney general’s office.

One of the main reasons the public supported the repeal of the 18th Amendment prohibiting alcohol is because they saw blood and bodies in American streets, bullet-riddled by the Tommy guns of gangsters like Al Capone.  The Depression and economic pressure are what convinced our leaders to abandon Prohibition, but it was moms worried about their kids caught in a bootlegger turf war crossfire that provided the popular support the politicians needed to move forward.

Unfortunately, like so many of our good paying jobs, we’ve shipped our drug gang violence to Mexico, where the bodies and bullets are out of sight, out of mind to any American not living in San Ysidro, Brownesville, and El Paso.  You can bet if it were Tulsa, not Tepic, if it were Worcester, not Juarez, if it were Torrance, not Tijuana, Americans would be screaming for an end to it and realize, even more than they do now, that prohibition of drugs is a cure worse than any drug addiction disease.  If it were suburban white teenagers in body bags, not nameless Mexican kids, we’d put an immediate stop to it.

Nothing is going to make this problem go away in one wave of a magic wand.  Prohibition of marijuana has to be dismantled in small steps and replaced with a legal regulated market, just as New York and California first refused to enforce alcohol prohibition and forced the feds to eventually relent and allow for creation of the legal alcohol market.  A YES vote on Prop 19 in five days is that first small step.  A NO vote on Prop 19 says you accept slaughtered Mexican teenagers as an unavoidable cost of Americans getting high.

Under Kerlikowske's reasoning, we never should have repealed Alcohol Prohibition, since alcohol made up less than 50% of Al Capone's overall profits.

Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake has posted video of the Just Say Now! campaign delivering a legalization petition to Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske.  Since the drug czar is required by law to oppose all legalization efforts, it is a bit like petitioning the Pope to bless an orgy, but it does make for some entertaining video:

(FireDogLake) This morning I joined with members of Students for Sensible Drug Policy and delivered 52,000 petition signatures to drug czar Gil Kerlikowske on behalf of the Just Say Now campaign.

Daniel Pacheco, a Georgetown University student from Colombia and a member of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, handed the petition to  Kerlikowske at a press conference held by his office at the National Press Club.  The petition asks President Obama to end the war on drugs and legalize marijuana.

Daniel asked Kerlikowske why he opposed legalizing marijuana, since President Calderon of Mexico has said it could be helpful in fighting the Mexican drug cartels. Kerlikowske said that since marijuana comprised such a small percentage of drug cartel profits, legalizing marijuana would not have any impact on their activity.

“I don’t think that if they lose a small part of their revenue from legalizing marijuana that they’re going to go to work for Coca Cola or Microsoft,” he chuckled.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ha ha ha!  Oh, that jokester!  So, the idea here is that since legalizing marijuana won’t put them out of business, we should continue to subsidize part of their business?  Because our prohibition of marijuana leads to the high price Americans pay for weed they could grow themselves, subsidizing the high profits the Mexicans make on marijuana, and then our tax dollars subsidize the Merida Initiative that buys more helicopters, drones, surveillance, ammunition, and police to fight the traffickers!  We also help arm both sides of the drug war, with official grants of weapons to the “good guys” and plenty of gun shops just over the border whose guns end up in the hands of the “bad guys”.

So, since the Mexican criminals are unlikely to go to work for Coca Cola or Microsoft if we take away their puny marijuana profits, we should continue to make criminals out of Americans who smoke a joint, Mr. Kerlikowske?

Ryan Grim at Huffington Post digs deeper into Kerlikowske’s new song and dance about the “small part” of Mexican drug trafficking organizations’ profits from marijuana:

(Huffington Post) Instead of defending the principle of prohibition, Kerlikowske quibbled with Pacheco’s statistic on how much of the cartel’s revenue comes from marijuana. “The number that has been often cited in the press — 58 to 60 percent of cartel revenues comes — was introduced by ONDCP in 2006. Unfortunately, the history is that it was based on 1997 information,” Kerlikowske said. “Everyone that recognizes these cartels clearly understands that their revenues have changed a lot since 1997. There are different drugs, they are involved with different criminal enterprises, so people that continue — and we really reject trying to continue to use a number that is now 13 to 14 years old, about how much money comes from marijuana. So, we strongly believe we see significantly less than the numbers cited from 14 years ago.”

Testimony to the Senate from both the FBI and DEA, however, confirmed the 60-percent figure in 2010.

How low a percentage of overall profits must marijuana reap before it’s no longer worth taking that business from the criminals?  30%?  15%?  5%?  Suppose we were talking about crippling Al Qaeda.  Do you suppose if we discovered an easy way to reduce the funding of terrorists by even five percent that our government officials would be dismissing the idea, simply because those terrorists wouldn’t then be forced to work at Starbucks?

Nobody thinks legalizing marijuana in America is suddenly going to turn murderous torturing drug trafficking criminals into Boy Scouts.  Surely most criminals are going to be criminals and will find new criminal enterprises if we legalize marijuana… but some won’t.  Some may become the new Joe Kennedys who turn their prohibited business into a lucrative legal business.  The question is whether we want to continue to give criminals a lucrative illegal business when there is no compelling reason to do so.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(Huffington Post) A transpartisan coalition of prosecutors, judges, cops, students, bloggers and political operatives on both sides of the aisle launched a campaign Tuesday to bring an end to marijuana prohibition, focusing on ballot initiatives in 2010 and 2012. The campaign, “Just Say Now,” gets its name from Nancy Reagan’s iconic anti-drug slogan from the 1980s that has become synonymous with the government’s black-and-white approach to drug policy.

“The stars are aligning in a very interesting way with Tea Party activists, who are generally libertarian,” said Aaron Houston, head of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, on a conference call Tuesday afternoon announcing the formation of the coalition. “On the right and left it’s a very popular issue.”

The campaign will be backing marijuana initiatives in 2010 in Arizona, Oregon, California, Colorado and South Dakota. The group will back initiatives in Nevada and elsewhere in 2012.

Bruce Fein, a member of the coalition, was Ronald Reagan’s associate deputy attorney general and is a prominent civil libertarian. “This is a fundamental issue of states’ rights,” said Fein.

A lead organizer of the campaign, Jane Hamsher, founder of Firedoglake.com, went on CNN Monday night to challenge existing notions about marijuana prohibition.

Can you think of another issue where you’ll find liberal bloggers and former Reagan staffers in agreement?  Where conservative stalwarts like the late Milton Friedman and William Buckley support the same position as Alice Huffman and the California NAACP?  Where “Tea Partiers” and “Netroots Nation” have a similar view?  Where a libertarian favorite like Rep. Ron Paul and openly gay liberal Rep. Barney Frank find common ground?  Where some former cops and the people they’ve busted agree the bust was unjust and unnecessary?

It’s beginning to feel like the only one who don’t support sensible marijuana law reforms are the people who represent The People.

What part of "Love thy neighbor as thyself" did you people not understand?

(Huffington Post) Far from signaling a Christian approval of using marijuana, Christian advocacy for decriminalization signals disapproval of the retributive response to drug abuse. Incarceration must be reserved for those who present real threats to the public safety of our communities, not for individuals struggling with addiction and marijuana abuse. As Christians, we already know the compassionate response to addiction is far more successful as a road to healing than the retributive one. Yet each year the prohibition of marijuana sends tens of thousands of youth — disproportionately black youth — into a cycle of incarceration and addiction with no light at the end of the tunnel.

Locking our up neighbors without a way to work towards healthy lives is a fundamental denial of compassion and love. Decriminalizing marijuana closes one pipeline into that cycle and makes it possible for more people to receive meaningful drug treatment. Prop 19 is about more than freeing up jail beds and raising tax revenue; it’s about firmly standing by the value of compassion and refusing to address social problems by locking our neighbors behind bars. Throwing away the lives of young people as a response to smoking marijuana only engenders a far greater sin than drug abuse.

“Love your neighbor as yourself” should not be seen as a personal virtue to be checked at the door of the county courthouse. Christian communities already provide perhaps the nation’s largest network of drug-addiction programs rooted in compassion and love. It’s time they advocated for public policies that align with those same values.

Ryan Grim at Huffington Post reports on the notion going round political circles that California’s Prop 19 (and, to a lesser extent, medical marijuana initiatives in Arizona and South Dakota, and dispensaries for medical marijuana in Oregon) will be for the Democrats what anti-Gay Marriage Equality amendments were for Republicans – the turn-out-the-base social wedge issue that helps their candidates on the ballot.

A survey making the rounds among strategists, which has yet to be made public, indicates that pot could be just the enticement many of these voters need: Surge voters, single women under 40 and Hispanics all told America Votes pollsters that if a legalization measure were on the Colorado ballot, they’d be more likely to come out to vote. Forty-five percent of surge voters and 47 percent of single women said they’d be more interested in voting if the question was on the ballot. Most of these were energetic, with 36 and 30 percent, respectively, saying they’d be “much more interested” in coming out to vote. Roughly half said it would make no difference. For Latinos, 32 percent said they’d be “much more interested” in voting and another 12 percent said they’d be somewhat more attracted to the idea of trudging to the polls.

Surge voters said they would support the measure by a margin of 63-35. Young single women would back it 68-31. Latinos, meanwhile, oppose it 52-46, according to the survey. “Whether it can pass or not is another question, but I think it’s clear that a marijuana legalization measure has the potential to increase turnout among voting groups that are critical to Democratic success in November,” said a Colorado Democratic operative, who, like most strategists employed by campaigns, prefers not to talk about marijuana on the record — highlighting the difficulty Democrats will have threading the political needle.

Turning out an extra few percent can be the difference between winning and losing in swing states, a reality Karl Rove exploited in 2004 by papering the nation with anti-gay marriage initiatives.

I think the Democrats are in for a surprise. See, Karl Rove and the Republicans really believed in the initiatives they were pushing. They had a frame for it – “one man one woman” – that resonated with their voters and the overall worldview espoused by most of their downticket candidates. So when that Religious Right base came out in 2004, energized to vote against dreaded homosexuals and for the continuation of all that was good, true, and Christian in America, they had George W. Bush and a whole slew of Republicans to vote for that echoed that sentiment.

What do Democrats have to offer the cannabis consumer who comes out for a 2010 election? Unlike Rove and the Republicans, the Democrats don’t really believe in these initiatives (publicly). Sen. Boxer, Sen. Feinstein (a former mayor of San Francisco, c’mon now!), and former Gov. / current AG Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown all publicly oppose Prop 19 (really, Jerry? You toked with Linda Ronstadt! Please!) Democrats can’t even go on the record to discuss this strategy. They haven’t yet framed it other than to murmur a bit about tax revenues, which is a lousy frame easily countered with “Well, if taxing crack made the cities money, should we legalize that?” Tax revenues resonate well within Assembly committee hearings, but they make for a ghoulish appeal to the average voter.

There’s also the disappointment factor. A lot of cannabis consumers were very excited about supporting Barack Obama for president. He wrote candidly of his youthful marijuana and cocaine use! No more “I didn’t inhale” bullshit; we even got an “I inhaled, frequently, that was the point.” He ran for Senate saying “The War on Drugs is an utter failure and I think we need to re-think and decriminalize our marijuana laws.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

And, honestly, he’s a black guy from Chicago and a constitutional law professor, so we figured he’s probably got a pretty good read on the realities of marijuana and how devastatingly unjust, ineffective, and harmful its prohibition is. We are the “surge voters” Grim is talking about, those of us “who were driven to the polls in 2008 through a once-in-a-generation mix of shame at the outgoing administration and hope in a new, barrier-breaking candidate.”

So we “surged”, in the real world and especially online, and got Obama elected. We even got him a massive majority in Congress. We were thrilled when he asked us online what items we’d like to see on the new administration’s agenda and multiple times we responded with “legalize marijuana”, topping almost every public survey and dominating with 16 of the top 50 questions in the largest survey. So what did we get in response? Something we in marijuana law reform simply call “The Chuckle”:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Democrats may still benefit from the cannabiphiles flooding the polls if only due to the “who else ya gonna vote for?” strategy championed by folks like Rahm Emanuel. But how long will it take some younger, Tea Party-friendly Republicans to realize they have a potential windfall of new, young, diverse voters if they steal the low-hanging fruit of marijuana legalization for their own?

Republicans already have the frames of “small government”, “personal responsibility”, and “states rights” to work within. If marijuana legalization in California passes by a wide margin and sees support from the women, minorities, and young people the GOP desperately needs to rebuild their party, how long before they begin framing the War on Drugs as the “big government”, “nanny state”, and “federal overreach” that it is? They’ve got revered conservative figures like William Buckley and Milton Friedman they can quote to bolster their position. They can easily point to the Democratic Congresses of the 1980s that created the mandatory minimums and the last three Democratic presidents who supported decriminalization and inhaled or didn’t inhale yet arrests kept increasing (at the greatest rate under Clinton, they’ll note).

The GOP isn’t quite there yet. Marijuana is still associated with hippies, counter-culture, leftism, atheism, communism, heathenism, and a few other isms the Republicans still rail against. When I was arguing for marijuana legalization back in my home state of Idaho, I used to ask the hippie-hating, pickup-driving, hardest-right Republicans I knew why, if they hated marijuana and hippies so much, did they support hippies making a living without ever paying taxes? “Why is it that you have to clock in at 8am every day,” I’d ask, “and 30% of your check is gone before you ever touch it because of taxes, while a hippie gets to sleep til Noon, grow a plant in a closet, never leave the house, and make twice as much as you do, and never pays a cent in taxes? It’s not like you see a bunch of hippies opening up brewpubs.” If the GOP can use their base’s continued engagement in the culture wars of the ’60s and ’70s by framinglegalization as the only logical way to control and punish (through “sin” taxes) the users of cannabis, they could radically revitalize their party.

Just in time for 2012 when a vocally pro-marijuana legalization, anti-prohibition former governor of New Mexico named Gary Johnson will be fighting for the Republican nomination.

(This is cross-posted in the Los Angeles section of Huffington Post – please feel free to surf over there and leave a comment that will be read outside our NORML forum.)

Evergreen Collective, one of many advertising at this year's THC Exposé in LA, promoting their $45 / 4-gram eighth ounce "specials".

Yesterday on our daily webcast for NORML we interviewed Dale Sky Clare, a spokesperson for Proposition 19, the initiative that will ask Californians to vote on a very limited form of marijuana legalization. We discussed the latest polling on the initiative from SurveyUSA, showing a 50%-to-40% lead for the measure.

We dug through the demographics to find that older and more conservative people are the only groups more likely to oppose the measure (no, really?), support is greatest among the young and in the Bay Area (who knew?), and support among comedians named “Cheech” or “Chong” is approaching 100% (OK, I made the last one up.)

But there is one growing demographic group that no poll has begun to track: medical marijuana dispensary owners.

Since the Regulate, Control, and Tax Cannabis Initiative was mercifully truncated to a headline-friendly “Prop 19″ by virtue of making it on the California ballot, I have been tracking on our NORML Stash Blog the stories of dispensary owners who are publicly opposing the legalization of the product they sell, even shelling out money they’ve made from selling marijuana to oppose its legalization!

Paul Jury just posted Legalize It? Ask a Guy Who Runs a Medicinal Marijuana Dispensary in which he speaks to Craig, a dispensary owner in Venice Beach, who is also opposed to Prop 19:

“I’ll give you two reasons,” Craig said. “One is big tobacco. Did you know that Phillip Morris just bought 400 acres of land up in Northern California? The minute marijuana becomes legal, they’ll mass produce and flood the market. And of course, they’ll add the same toxins they put in regular cigarettes to get you addicted, and very little THC, so you’ll have to buy more… In short, they’re going to ruin weed.” He gestured around his beloved shop, with every flavor of every strain, in its purist form, selling for at-cost prices. “I like the way things are now.”

Gee, there seems to be a whole lot of different "strains" of beer, even in Los Angeles!

Remember how alcohol prohibition ended in the 1930′s (probably not, but indulge me) and Anheuser, Busch, Coors, and Miller flooded the market with 3.2 beer and ruined alcohol? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could go to shops with every flavor of every micro-brew, in its purest form… oh, wait, I live in Portland, Oregon, the micro-brew capital of America and that’s what we have right now under alcohol legalization!

We have every flavor and potency of beer you can imagine plus people can go buy a kit and brew their own beer if they like. And there is wine, too, with a huge tourist industry that depends on people checking out vineyards and tasting endless varieties of vino. And there is whiskey, rum, tequila, vodka, brandy, and even super-potent Everclear in some states, all in their purest form, which is to say that used responsibly they won’t make you blind like a tub of Prohibition moonshine might.

The “Philip Morris / RJ Reynolds Toxic Addictive High-less Marijuana Market Flood” scare has been floating around the cannabis community like a stale hit of schwag for decades now. It’s a form of conspiracy theory thinking embraced by the kind of people who think you could plant 40,000 lbs. of explosives surreptitiously in a busy World Trade Center or convince all the world’s scientists and a very large soundstage crew to keep quiet about that faked moon landing for four decades. Here’s why it’s stupid:

• Prop 19 allows you to grow your own. If Philip Morris’ weed sucks, you’ll smoke your own or your friend’s.
• Prop 19 allows cities to consider sales. Bad toxic Philip Morris weed is the kind of competition a purveyor of hand-trimmed, non-keifed*, organic high-potency bud would want, wouldn’t she?
• Prop 19 allows cities to regulate production. They can dictate exactly what is or isn’t added to cannabis, how much is produced, by whom, and where.
• In order for Philip Morris to sell their weed, somebody has to want to smoke it. Nothing about Prop 19 makes Prop 215 or the dispensaries go away. In fact, it gives the existing dispensaries the potential to serve even more customers. So who’s buying this toxic addictive high-less marijuana?

Actually, it worked quite well if your goal is to build large profitable murderous criminal enterprises...

No, if you want to really understand what is going on here, look back to that alcohol prohibition and ask yourself how excited Al Capone was reading the headlines trumpeting its imminent repeal. It’s not a perfect analogy, as Capone was a murderous criminal thug and these dispensary owners are law-abiding businesspeople. And yes, dispensary owners, like Craig, often help destitute cancer patients for free, though one could counter that Capone and his gangs gave out free turkeys on Thanksgiving. My main point is that both are businesspeople dealing in a prohibited product.

Or just look back to the article on Craig:

He gestured around his beloved shop, with every flavor of every strain, in its purist form, selling for at-cost prices. “I like the way things are now.”

“Last month,” Craig explained proudly, “there were 24 operating marijuana collectives in Venice. A month from now, there will only be two. And we’ll be one of them.” With that, he opened the door to the inner sanctum. The “product” room.

Discount Relief Collective at this year's "Spring Gathering" in San Bernardino, advertising "Nothing over $45 / eighth. $15 for all grams."

Now, if you ran a business where you could sell your product for $5-$15 per GRAM or $200 to $800 per OUNCE, and you only had to compete with one other business in your local area, would you be excited about the prospect of many more competitors and prices dropping as much as 80%? Most of your customers already got their Prop 215 recommendation, so it isn’t as if legalization is going to bring you enough additional customers to offset the change in business margins.

Prop 19 means that marijuana retailers become more like other retail businesses, instead of the loosely-regulated turnkey goldmines they have been. That’s what Craig doesn’t like. Well, that and kids smoking pot:

“Two, legalization will mean more fifteen-year-old kids smoking pot. … If they legalize marijuana, there’s no chance that fewer 15-year-olds will smoke. And there’s a good chance that more will. Anything that will probably make more 15-year-olds put substances in their bodies, in my opinion, is a bad thing.”

Really, the “What About the Children?!?” argument? Right now, under prohibition, 85% of high school seniors and 69% of sophomores (a.k.a. fifteen-year-olds) find it easy to get weed. Right now, under prohibition, kids say it is easier to buy marijuana than alcohol. So it appears to me that locking up healthy adults for their marijuana use hasn’t really done much to stop teens from getting and using pot. How about we try letting adults smoke a joint, and when they go to buy it, they buy it from a regulated shop where only adults are let in and all IDs are rigorously checked, you know, like that alcohol kids find harder to buy.

More 15-year-olds smoke pot than tobacco... because we've really succeeded in preventing tobacco use among teens... and we didn't lock up a single adult to achieve this!

Besides, there is no reason to believe that youth use will increase. Since California passed Prop 215 in 1996, the regime Craig likes now, teen use of marijuana has decreased. Prop 19 makes the penalty for supplying weed to those under 21 as stringent as supplying alcohol to those under 21. And we’ve seen teen use of tobacco, a legal substance far cheaper and more addictive than marijuana, plummet in the past ten years through education, advertising restriction, social disapproval (no indoor smoking, for example) and strict ID requirements.

Craig and the other dispensary owners who oppose Prop 19 are the “I Gots Mine” element of the anti-legalization campaign. They’ve got the corner on a retail market worth billions, one that is only worth billions if you arrest 850,000 mostly-black-and-brown adults a year for participating in it. They’ve got their doctors happy to take a Benjamin or two to give you permission to use a drug safer than the aspirin you need no permission for. I wouldn’t want people to vote to change that, either…

…except that I think it’s just immoral to arrest people for smoking weed if we’re going to leave them alone when drinking alcohol. I don’t care if it is profitable to the state or detrimental to the dispensary industry – arrests for marijuana are wrong, period.

*”Kiefed” means to shake loose the crystals of THC from the product before packaging for sale. The crystals, or “kief” are collected and smoked or vaporized, and, being THC crystals, are very effective. Philip Morris will certainly need to use huge machines to process weed, which will certainly shake loose a lot of kief. One grower friend of mine says he will advertise for his prized buds with the slogan “Don’t let ‘em thief the kief!”