According to correspondent Wyatt Cenac: “The nerds go into politics and they stick it to the cool guys by outlawing pot.  Today that shameful chapter in our nation’s history is finally over!”

Let’s just hope so (Wyatt apparently doesn’t know Barbara Boxer’s poor record on the marijuana issue…)

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Download the NORML Daily Audio Stash for 2009-01-20

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Photo I took from steps of the Capitol in Nov. 2006

What an incredible inauguration!  I am so hopeful moving forward with a president who I believe can be reasoned with.   A president who can speak and think in sentences with clauses and semicolons and complex concepts.  Hell, I’m happy the president can say “nuclear”!

On today’s Stash, Paul Armentano follows up on our coverage of the awful SB 212 bill in Montana that would deny patients medical cannabis for life if busted for cannabis DUI, which is defined so low that all patients would be considered DUI.  As always, Paul has the latest research on the topic of cannabis and driving.

Photo from today's Inauguration (wider lens)

Also we visit with Andrew Carroll, a young man in Keene, NH, who is practicing civil disobedience to demonstrate his protest of American marijuana prohibition.  The catch?  He doesn’t even use marijuana!  (Here I’ve been smoking pot for 18.5 years without so much as a sideways look from a cop and this guy barely older than that who doesn’t smoke is getting busted for weed.  How very strange.

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Download the NORML Daily Audio Stash for 2009-01-19

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Today’s Stash celebrates the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, the end of the Bush Administration, and the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama.  Despite some misgivings over Change.gov and cabinet appointments, I am so excited to see the new day dawning in America.  Yes, there are dark clouds hovering over us and worse storms ahead, but I can’t help but see the silver lining – that we just can no longer afford to arrest and lock up taxpayers for their cannabis use anymore, and we can no longer overlook an untaxed ecofriendly fuel-producing billion dollar crop anymore.  As Obama has said, this wasn’t about him, it was about us.  As Change.gov and Change.org have shown, we are ready to talk about legalization of marijuana!

It’s as if enough people who think the war on drugs is stupid have realized that enough people think the war on drugs is stupid.  We’ve realized that it’s OK to ask “Why are we arresting potheads?” and “How come we don’t just sell and tax pot?” without everyone thinking we, too, are potheads and even if we are, realizing that nobody gives a damn if you are so long as you do your job, pay your taxes, and be civilized.  Enough people have either smoked it, do smoke it, or know someone who smokes it to know the government is peddling nothing but lies to prop up a failed bureaucracy.  People know that one slacker stoner, but they also know ten more who are just regular working folks who toke.  People also know alcoholics and know they’d rather hang out with the slacker stoner, given a choice, and figure if we can tolerate alcohol, we can tolerate weed.

My guest today is Tom Daubert from Montana Patients and Families United (check ‘em out at http://mtpfu.org*) who is here to warn Big Sky listeners and rally Montanans to contact their state legislator to protest Senate Bill 212, which would strip medical marijuana patient protections for life if convicted of new cannabis DUI standards so strict no patient could ever pass.  In short: choose your drivers license or your marijuana license.

Then my full reading (with music and everything!) of my Cannabis Civil Rights essay posted below, if I may indulge, and in doing so, thank George Rohrbacher for inspiring me…

*That URL always cracks me up because the show Meet the Press is often abbreviated “MTP” on progressive lefty blogs I inhabit.

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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.

Read the rest of this entry by clicking here

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(Before we start: Change.gov is Barack Obama’s official transition website.  Change.org is not affiliated with Obama, but is a collection of non-profits lobbying the Obama Administration.)

The first time they asked The People what kind of change we wanted.  We overwhelmingly asked Barack Obama to legalize marijuana and made it the #1 question.  Obama answered “No” and offered no explanation.

The second time they asked The People what kind of change we wanted.  To balance the responses they created categories of requests instead of one big open poll.  We overwhelmingly asked Barack Obama to legalize marijuana, making it the #4 question overall and #1 within the National Security category (as “end the war on drugs”).  Obama didn’t even answer, but instead referred to the previous “No” and no explanation.

So now, the third time, Barack Obama’s Change.gov is opening up “the Citizen’s Briefing Book”, where once again, citizens can submit their policy ideas and vote on the ideas.  Guess which policy idea is #1 again, with “44,950 points” (whatever “points” are) as of this posting?

Ending Marijuana Prohibition
I suggest that we step back and take a non-biased “Science Based” approach to decide what should be done about the “Utter Failure” that we call the War on (some) Drugs.

The fact is that Marijuana is much less harmful to our bodies than other Legal Drugs such as Tobacco and Alcohol. And for the Government to recognize Marijuana as having Medicinal Properties AND as a Schedule I drug (Has NO medicinal Properties) is an obvious flaw in the system.

We must stop imprisoning responsible adult citizens choosing to use a drug that has been mis-labeled for over 70 years.

Click over if you like and vote.  It may get just as much notice as the first two times (none), but clicking is free and easy.  The effect of having one of the most popular issues rise again and again, only to be ignored, is building this story in the media.  We’ve got the people directly asking Obama three times to rethink the drug war, Change.org will present that same notion from The People tomorrow, and Congress had to resort to blackmail to get El Paso city leaders to shut up about it.  The ONLY person who doesn’t want to talk about this is Barack Obama, and that’s going to become a deadly meme for the “open and transparent, change we can believe in, government responsive to the people, reliant on science” aura Obama wants to build in his Administration.

(I think a few “Why Won’t You Talk About The Drug War?” signs at the Inauguration would be a beautiful site to see, don’t you?)

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