Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

Cocaine isn’t our bailiwick here at NORML and personally I have a no-white-powders rule. But one of the biggest glaring examples of the racism of the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs is the Crack-Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity.

It works like this: if you’re caught with 5 grams of crack cocaine, you get the same mandatory minimum as someone caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine. Crack cocaine and powder cocaine, chemically speaking, are identical with respect to addictive potential and psychoactive effect.

The difference, of course, is that crack cocaine is used by urban poor black people and powder cocaine is used by suburban affluent white people. Generally speaking.

So Congress, controlled by huge Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate, is sending a bill to the Democratic president who campaigned on eliminating the crack/powder disparity. This bill will increased the trigger of a mandatory minimum for crack from 5 grams to 28 grams (an ounce).

Meaning that instead of a 500:5 disparity for white vs. black people’s cocaine, the disparity will now only be 500:28. For the math-impaired, that means that our cocaine sentencing laws will go from being 100 times more racist to blacks to being 18 times more racist to blacks.

I suppose I should be thrilled with any adjustment to mandatory minimums, but I have suffered one too many “compromises” by a huge Democratic majority and president I voted for who promised a whole lot of things I really believe in*, only to start negotiations in the middle, compromise to the right, and call it a victory for the left. (Funny, I don’t remember George W. Bush, with a barely-GOP majority, ever being stymied in pushing through Congress anything he wanted, except privatizing Social Security. And it was a Democratic Congress under Republican President Reagan who gave us this 500:5 mandatory minimum disparity in the first place!)

Chris Weigant at HuffPo nails how me and many others are feeling about this latest victory for bi-partisanship:

In true incrementalist fashion, Democrats have now made things slightly less unfair, but fell far short of actual fairness. It’s as if, right after the Civil War, Congress announced that black people would now count as four-fifths of a person, instead of the previous three-fifths — in other words, a step towards equality, but not exactly the giant leap of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Which makes it rather hard to praise such an effort, even though it does represent (some) progress.

This is landmark legislation, I realize. Moving away from the “lock them all up” mentality, for politicians, is remarkable simply because it does not happen often (read: “ever”). Backing down on Draconian drug laws is not exactly atop the priorities list of many politicians, because the ads attacking them for doing so just about write themselves. So I do applaud Congress for addressing the issue (both houses have now passed the bill).

While Congress did not have the courage of their convictions to do so this time around, they did take a baby step in the right direction. This is momentous, because it is the first such step in this direction in three or four decades. But I still can’t help but wish that Congress had tackled the problem not in such an incrementalist political fashion, but rather as an issue of rank inequality to be rectified by removingall of the legally-codified unfairness at once — to restore the concept of equal treatment under the law, rather than perpetuating (if slightly lessening) the inherent injustice which still exists.

* For example…

Holding accountable the companies that spied on us without warrants.

Ending extraordinary rendition of prisoners for torture.

Closing Guantanamo Bay

Ending “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”

Allowing Medicare to negotiate in bulk for lower drug prices.

“I won’t sign any health care reform bill without a public option.”

Ending DEA raids on legal medical marijuana states

Supporting Main Street over Wall Street.

I was just hoping for a change more meaningful than “He’s better than Bush”. Shee-it, I’M better than Bush!

Click here to view the embedded video.

On June 8, the House of Commons passed a bill to institute mandatory minimum sentencing for marijuana and other drug crimes.

Bill C-15 seeks to impose mandatory minimum penalties for marijuana and other drug offences, including 6 months for 5 marijuana plants.

Marc Emery, the founder of the BC Marijuana Party and publisher of Cannabis [Culture], is currently facing extradition to the United States on charges of distribution of marijuana seeds.

Recently, Emery announced he intends to plead guilty to the charges in exchange for a reduced sentence, to be served in the United States.

“Stephen Harper hates the marijuana culture. First they went after me, now they’re renewing their attack on the overall culture,” said Emery in a press release from Cannabis Culture. “If marijuana people don’t stand up against C-15, they’ll find their freedom replaced with the bars of a jail cell.”

The bill has been widely criticized by criminal justice experts, who point to the total failure of mandatory minimum sentencing in the United States to deter or reduce the amount of drug crimes occurring.

via News Article – Cord Weekly.

But who listens to experts these days, anyway.  So what if mandatory minimum sentencing has no effect on marijuana use, but a dramatically disastrous effect on our society and rates of incarceration?  That’s not what Stephen Harper and conservatives of his ilk care about, anyway.  It’s about votes.  It’s about being “tough on crime”.  It’s about culture war.  It’s about hating “hippies”.

What Harper is about to discover, however, is that marijuana is no longer the third-rail redheaded-stepchild political-football issue it used to be.  When only a quarter of the people supported legalization, when medical marijuana was still considered an oxymoron, and when few knew the difference between cannabis, coke, and crystal meth, you could beat the scary drug war drums and create a “tough on crime” aura around yourself.  But now a majority of Canadians support legalization, medical marijuana is grown by the government, and most people know full well that pot ain’t crack.

Stephen Harper’s about to get a lesson Michael Phelps and Kellogg’s know too well: we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take this anymore!

Download link: Secret Stash - Register to access

Download audio file (NORML_Daily_AudioStash_2009-03-20.mp3)

Hemp Headlines

1. Maxine Waters introduces bill to end mandatory minimums
2. UGA NORML Faces Hearing On UGA Trademark
3. Connecticut Poll: Decriminalize small amounts of pot
4. CBS News Poll: Americans Oppose Legalizing Marijuana

Cannabis Conversations

• Ngaio Bealum, comedian, publisher of West Coast Cannabis, on Oregon NORML benefit show tonight at Portland’s Bagdad Theater

Daily Toker Tunes by Marijuana Music Awards

• It’s a Rap Friday – ‘MaryJane’ by ill e. gal

Cultivation Corner with High Times’ Danny Danko

• Spring planting tips

Democrat introduces bill to end mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses via rawstory.com

Maxine Waters has just introduced The Major Drug Trafficking Prosecution Act of 2009 in the House. This bill would remove the mandatory minimums found in drug laws and give discretion back to the judge.

“This legislation will refocus federal prosecutorial resources on major drug traffickers and eliminate racial disparities created by the mandatory minimum sentences for power and crack cocaine,” said Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), who authored the bill

“In the 1980s, Congress passed two Anti-Drug Abuse Acts with the goal that federal prosecutors would go after major drug traffickers at the top of the food chain, instead of low-level drug offenders at the bottom,” Waters continued. “Lengthy mandatory minimum sentences were passed for most drug crimes. These mandatory terms are based solely on the weight and the drug involved, and, with very few exceptions, the courts cannot sentence below them.”

“Twenty years later,” she added, “mandatory drug sentences have utterly failed to achieve Congress’ goals.”

The text of the bill can be found here.  Her floor statement introducing the bill can be found here.

News – Pair get prison in pot case – sacbee.com
An El Dorado County couple – a physician and an attorney – were sentenced Wednesday in Sacramento federal court to five years in prison for conspiring to grow and distribute marijuana.

U.S. District Judge Frank C. Damrell Jr. said federal law left him with no choice but to impose on both Dr. Marion “Mollie” Fry and attorney Dale Schafer the mandatory minimum sentence.

But, to the delight of supporters who packed the courtroom, the judge allowed the pair to remain free on bail until their appeals have been decided.

The statutory minimum applied because of the number of plants – at least 100 – found by a jury in August to be the crux of a conspiracy to grow and distribute pot from their offices in Cool and their home in Greenwood.

Were it left up to him, the judge said, the punishment would be less. “It is a sad day, a terrible day,” he said.

At the conclusion of a grueling, emotional hearing, Damrell ruled the couple could remain free on $25,000 bail each pending the outcome of their appeals.

Mandatory minimum sentencing seems to me to be against the intent of the Framers of our Constitution. They wanted a government with checks and balances – Congress makes laws, but the President can check that with a veto. Presidents can sign laws, but courts can check that against constitutionality. But to take away the discretion of the judge to impose a sentence she feels is appropriate to the facts and circumstances of the case, and instead vest that authority in the statutes passed by Congress and signed by the President, makes the judge merely a rubber stamp for the judgment-free minimums passed by a Congress trying to appear to be “tough on crime”. (Visit Families Against Mandatory Minimums for more info.)

But there is one last check – the jury. Juries have the right of nullification – they can check any bad law by simply refusing to convict, regardless of the facts, evidence, or circumstances. A jury can simply say, “We refuse to convict this couple because the law itself is unjust,” even if they were caught growing a billion marijuana plants. Learn more about jury nullification at the Fully Informed Jury Association.

(HuffingtonPost) Hillary Clinton has come out against making retroactive the small change in sentencing guidelines that allows some people convicted under the overly harsh crack laws to have their sentences reviewed by a judge, and if they are found eligible, given early release. Most blacks affected will still serve more than a decade in prison for a nonviolent crime for which whites often escape incarceration entirely– but nevermind.

Hillary has bought into fears that this means a sudden massive release of an army of Willie Hortons. But over 90% of crack prisoners sentenced under these laws have no record of violent crime– and 94% were not classified as “kingpins” or even mid-level drug dealers. Further, the judge reviewing the sentences provides a safety net to ensure that those who are a risk to the public are not released early.

Obama, meanwhile, supports making the sentencing change retroactive. Even though politically, given his admission about his own drug use, he has far more to lose than she does by doing the right thing.

I remember when Bill Clinton was running in 1992. Here was a likable guy who had at least been around marijuana, even if he “didn’t inhale”, and he played saxophone, leading me to believe he’d at least been around some people who smoke marijuana. I was excited by the idea that we’d finally have a president who realized how destructive our War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs really is.

When Clinton came into office, there were about 300,000 arrests nationally of marijuana smokers. By the time he left, there were about 700,000. When California passed Prop 215 legalizing medical cannabis in the state, it was Bill Clinton’s administration that sent the jack-booted federal thugs to raid dispensaries and arrest patients.

Now we have Barack Obama, a candidate who, when asked about his admitting to marijuana use in his youth, said, “I inhaled, frequently. That was the point.” Would he finally be the president who does something positive to end the drug war? Or would he turn out like Bill Clinton and turn his back on us cannabis consumers?

I think this view on the crack sentencing provides us a glimpse into the possible administrations of the two Democratic candidates. Both have pledged they would end DEA raids on medical cannabis states; however, Hillary Clinton keeps touting her years of experience in the Clinton White House as First Lady, and that White House started the raids. If Hillary Clinton can’t support something as moral as fixing the racist laws on crack sentencing (5g of crack — inner city black’s cocaine — gets you the same sentence as 500g of powder — suburban white’s cocaine), I don’t much expect her to be any better on the marijuana issue.