Three out of four Americans believe the “war on drugs” is a failure and can never be won. Serious people like Sen. Jim Webb, former Mexican president Vicente Fox, Congressmen Barney Frank, Charlie Rangel, Steve Cohen and others, even a growing body of right-of-center analysts and politicians have been saying it’s time to fundamentally reshape our approach to drug control.

So, why this divide between massive public opposition to current policies and the positions taken by our leaders? Fear, of course. They’re afraid of being punished for touching what has been perceived, mistakenly, as a third rail issue.

And the cause of this “drug war dementia”? I’m guessing it has something to do with a brilliant 2004 poll on the topic of medical marijuana. The poll asked two questions, the first confirming what had already been shown over and over again: that about 70 percent of people support the idea of legalizing marijuana, at least for medical purposes.

But then, pollsters asked something interesting:

“Regardless of your own opinion, do you think the majority of people support making marijuana medically available, or do you think the majority opposes making marijuana medically available?”

The result? In Rhode Island, where the poll was conducted, only 26.5 percent thought that most people support medical marijuana.

The lesson here? While many of our elected representatives privately support serious changes to our failed drug laws, they believe they are alone. They think if they stick their necks out they’ll be handed their heads come election time.

Which is why we must rise up and let our elected officials know they are safe to support drug law reform. And in considerable political danger if they do not.

via Norm Stamper: Progressives Push Against Drug War: Will Dems Listen?.

This is also why we must come out of the cannabis closet and make ourselves known as the responsible, taxpaying, normal-with-an-a, law-abiding-(except-that-law) citizens that we are.  When the only public image of the cannabis community is the “stoner”, the people who support our issue will only do so quietly, lest they be lumped in with the “burnouts”.

Never has this point been so crystal clear to me as during this last weekend’s family campout for Independence Day.This was a campout for my wife’s immediate family, which sounds like a cozy get-together until you realize she is the fifth of fifteen kids.  When all the brothers and sisters plus their spouses and children gather, it’s an event with about sixty people.  Most of the younger brothers and sisters are former marijuana smokers, but they’ll tell you they “outgrew that” or “had to become a mom/dad”.  Yet four of them were eager to stop by our tent for a puff of Oregon’s finest.

That’s right – tent.  It was such a 180° from last weekend’s Mountain High Camping Weekend, where I gathered with an all-male group of cannabis activists and medical marijuana patients.  Pipes, bongs, joints, and vaporizer bags were plentiful and marijuana buds and hash were openly shared by all.  But at this weekends’ family festivities, my tent had to be set up in the furthest corner and all my tokes had to be surreptitiously sneaked behind zippered doors.

One cousin, three years older than me, came in and offered to light us up with what he had brought from Idaho.  It was that sad golf-divot-looking, alfalfa-smelling pressed brick Mexican schwag that I’d last seen six years ago before moving to Portland.  “Put that away,” I chided, “because not only will that not have the slightest effect on me, but I also won’t smoke anything that’s killing innocent Mexicans.”  He explained that chunk of hemp pressboard was all they could get in Idaho; I explained how 7,000 Mexicans are murdered per year as cartels smuggle that crap to the states.  We then lit up the fine crystally Oregon bud.  He was just one hit in when his eyes sparkled.  That was all he needed, he said, and it showed.

This cousin then explained to me how he used to smoke cannabis regularly, but now he had become a father and had to “play grown-up” and couldn’t do that anymore.  I had taken a vow of neutrality for my wife that I would shelve my political persona for the weekend (just “Russ”, not “Radical Russ”) – so I didn’t tell him about all the incredible parents I know who are regular cannabis smokers.

Later that weekend, this cousin got very drunk and slept away most of the next day with a splitting hangover… while his child was taken care of by the rest of the adults.  So much for “playing grown-up”.

Which leads me to the booze.  I will not make the obvious joke about my wife’s family’s Irish heritage and the bottle – this scene could’ve played out in any American family of any heritage.  But all weekend, every day, cooler after cooler of beer was filled and emptied.  At the center camping table where toddlers sat to eat and play were bags of chips, cookies, candies, and one-third of the table covered with bottles of gin, rum, vodka, tequila, whiskey, and liqueurs.  One female cousin got particularly “well served” and babbled and laughed to the point where my eleven-year-old niece is teasing her for being “a drunk”.

I don’t mean to paint this picture to show my wife’s family as reckless or irresponsible.  Those kids are well-watched, they know that alcohol is for adults, and everyone drinking there handles their alcohol responsibly (even if that is to responsibly puke in the bushes away from camp).  Nobody drives, gets violent, or allows the kids to drink.  But as I watched this scene, I wondered just how much of a turd in the punchbowl I would’ve been if I had simply loaded a bowl in my Starfish Designs pipe and smoked it as I enjoyed the campfire.

Every one of them who were drinking, even to excess, are fine responsible parents with great kids.  It wouldn’t occur to any of them that becoming parents meant they had to stop drinking to become “responsible”.    Yet to a person every one of them offers some sort of excuse that growing up and becoming parents forced them to stop smoking cannabis.  When I dig deep enough, I find that it is their fear of legal sanctions and losing their kids that is the true reason.

And now we get back to that Rhode Island poll where almost 3 out of 4 people support medical marijuana, but only think 1 out of 4 of their neighbors do.  These in-laws of mine, they know their cannabis use doesn’t make them bad parents, but they think others would consider them bad parents if their cannabis use was known.  They don’t know what to tell their kids about cannabis if they used it; they don’t know how to tell their kids that they should always obey the law and respect police, except when it comes to mommy and daddy’s smokable plant.  With alcohol they can say, “wait til you’re older”.  With cannabis, they are so conditioned to think of it as an act of juvenile rebellion that they feel immature and irresponsible when they use it.

I think next year, after the kids go to sleep, I will have to just take out a joint and start smoking it.  Especially after the umpteenth offer of alcohol from one of my in-laws, which I refuse every time with, “No thanks, I’m only choosing safer drugs in my old age.”

{{Well, look what was sitting in my draft folder.  I posted the July 4 podcast to the feed, but forgot to post the on the blog.  Hey, it was a holiday and I was working, so cut me some slack, Jack…    “R”R }}

Happy Independence Day!  Remember, the patriots who signed their name to a death sentence on July 4, 1776, faced the most insurmountable odds you can imagine.  (Picture Puerto Rico declaring independence from the US if we really didn’t want them to.)  Britain was the greatest global empire on the planet and had the best military and navy.  But dedicated freedom fighters who stuck to their principles of equality and freedom overcame the odds and established the first nation created for a purpose, not born of race, geography, religion, ethnicity, or station.

They were hemp farmers and cannabis users and they were flawed men of their times, considering the slavery, genocide, and second-class treatment of women and minorities that they accommodated, but they instituted a framework in the Declaration that aspires to a greater ideal – that we are endowed with the rights of Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness, that all men (in the “human” sense) are created equal, and that just governments rule by the consent of the governed.

We’re striving for that “more perfect Union” referred to in the Constitution.  We overcame slavery, we’re repairing Jim Crow, we’ve recognized most women’s and minorities’ rights and we’re working on recognizing them all.  We’re far more diverse and tolerant than most anyplace on Earth even though we still have our pockets of bigotry, ignorance, and hatred.  Enlightenment is not achieved overnight or even over two centuries because it is a continuous process.  We’re better every generation.  And this generation will be the one to finally restore America to her hemp roots and reassert our natural right of sovereignty of mind and consciousness.

Download the NORML Daily Audio Stash for 2008-07-04

Download audio file (NORML_Daily_AudioStash_2008-07-04.mp3)

We’ve got Steve Bloom from CelebStoner.com with us with the marijuana entertainment connection, and I give you my take on the Declaration of Independence, the Drug War Revision.

Eleven score and a dozen years ago the United States of America began with the Declaration of Independence.  There will be much reflection on our founding document today.  Our Founders pledged their lives to stand up for their natural rights and fight together against the tyranny of an oppressive and unresponsive government.

As a proud American freedom fighter against the drug war, I pledge the same.

Scribbling with quill and ink on parchment*, Thomas Jefferson, a slave-owning hemp farmer, wrote these ironic words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,

Though it would take a century to end the slavery and another century to recognize fully the legal equality of most men and women, we still fall short of the ideal.  The drug war disproportionately arrests, incarcerates, and disenfranchises African-Americans and Hispanics.  And all drug users of any ethnicity are chattel in the modern slavery – for-profit prison labor.  All men are created equal, but afterward their urine can be tainted, and those men need not be treated equally by government or in commerce.

…that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Unless your pursuit of Happiness involves personal use of certain mind-altering substances and unless your Life depends on the use of medical marijuana.  Then you are going to lose your Liberty.

–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

Unless the governed want to legalize uses of marijuana, then Governments derive their just powers from the Drug Czar.

–That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

It is long past time we alter this drug war government.  I do not believe our government needs to be abolished, but the government must recognize the Natural Right of the people, so long as they harm no others, to make use of the plants in nature, and none more so than the cannabis hemp plant that was a required crop in the American colonies.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

And there is our problem.  We are disposed to suffer, because while 830,000 of us are arrested each year for smoking marijuana, in that same year 25 million of us smoked marijuana.  When only 1-in-30 of us are arrested, and few who are arrested are imprisoned, we feel the evils are sufferable.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

It is our duty to change this government.  35 years of abuses and usurpations, pursuing the same Object – suppressing our rights, stealing our property, and robbing our Liberty – is quite long enough.

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

• He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
• He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

The governors of several states have passed medical marijuana laws, and in others, the people have passed these laws, and yet our Executive Branch will not allow the laws to function. Several other states have passed laws to permit industrial uses of hemp, and the Executive will not assent to those laws, either.

• …He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
• He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

Justice is denied through the use of mandatory minimum sentencing, which renders the opinion of the judge moot and requires the judge to be dependent on the will of the Legislative and Executive.

• He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
• He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

DEA, ONDCP, NIDA, SAMSHA, PDFA, and more new offices, with officers sworn to harass our people. And the militarization of our domestic police force is a standing army in our midst.

• … For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

Or if we are given that trial by jury, we are forbidden to mention our right to jury nullification, and the jury is forbidden to hear all of the facts of the case.

…In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

We have changed laws in our states.  We have petitioned the government to study cannabis, and when their studies call for an alteration of our government and the abolition of prohibition, those studies are hidden from the people and the tyranny continues.

…And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

And that’s where you’ll find me this Fourth of July (my personal eighteen-year anniversary of smoking my first joint) — pledging my Life, my Fortune, and my sacred Honor to end this insane prohibition against cannabis hemp.  If you consider its vital role in the founding of our country, you would consider it our national plant.  America’s roots are hemp root, and it is time we all declare our Independence from a government that suppresses our natural rights.

* Alas, the popular notion that the Declaration – and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights – were written on hemp paper is not true.  Those documents are parchment (animal skin) housed at the National Archives.  That’s not to say there weren’t drafts and copies of those documents written on hemp paper, which was a popular medium of the times.  Jefferson was quite engrossed in hemp farming as well.