Marijuana legalization is the hottest topic in the media these days.  MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, FOX, NatGeo, and CBS News have presented special features on marijuana business, medical marijuana, and the marijuana legalization movement.  Google Trends is showing double the interest in searches and news hits for the term “marijuana legalization”.  Showtime’s hit series Weeds, about a suburban mom turned pot dealer, is entering its fifth season.  Everywhere you look, corporate media are happy to profit from America’s most popular herb.

Unless you want to address marijuana’s illegality and the lives that are shattered by the effects of marijuana prohibition.  In that case, the corporate media cannot have anything to do with you, even if you want to pay to broadcast the message of ending adult marijuana prohibition.

Case in point: CBS.  At the end of June, CBS’s new internet radio venture, ChatAboutIt.com, contacted NORML.  One of our advisory board, Ann Druyan, advertised her podcast in Talkers Magazine, an industry journal for talk radio.  ChatAboutIt was interested in hosting Druyan’s show, but Druyan wasn’t interested in the offer.

This is where I come in.  I am a talk radio professional, having hosted my show (The Russ Belville Show) on XM Satellite Radio and AM 620 KPOJ in Portland, for almost two years.  I have guest-hosted for the extremely popular Bill Press Show in Washington DC.  For the past year and a half, I have hosted NORML’s Daily Audio Stash, the organization’s daily news and interviews podcast.  I contacted ChatAboutIt to discuss creating a new live talk radio show dedicated to this incredibly popular phenomenon around medical marijuana and marijuana legalization called NORML SHOW LIVE.

Throughout the negotiations, the salesman from ChatAboutIt was fantastic.  He joined me and NORML’s executive staff by conference call.  We emphasized that we are NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.  We told them that we would have advertisers involved with promoting marijuana - legally, as they are co-ops and dispensaries in California and Colorado – marijuana-themed magazines, doctors, clinics, authors, musicians, and so on.  We told them we would be talking about marijuana legalization, our web page would have marijuana leaves on it, callers would be talking about marijuana, and, oh, by the way, did we mention that the show was about marijuana?

It’s all good, we were assured by the salesman.  He said he’d run it all by his VP and this was fine.  He said we’d own all our content and we could run all our ads.  We verbally agreed this was a go and all we needed to do was to raise the $6,000 necessary to pay for the first two months of broadcast.  We explained that we’d need to produce some press releases to raise the money. To be sure we weren’t saying or promoting anything in any way that CBS would not approve, we submitted our release to CBS, which did make some changes.  They approved of our revised release and we posted it on the NORML Blog and front page on Wednesday.

Thursday morning I receive a call from the salesman at ChatAboutIt.  “People higher up” had seen the release “on the blogs” and they “will not green light your show”.

Now, CBS has all the right in the world to decide what to put on their airwaves or cyberstreams; I’m not crying “censorship”.  If they want to pass up affiliation with the most recognized brand in marijuana and a professional live call-in show dealing with the hottest topic in the media, that’s their call.

What I am crying, though, is “hypocrisy”.

CBS's Showtime is airing the fifth season of "Weeds"

See, CBS owns Showtime.  That very same Showtime that’s aired for the past five years the tale of Nancy Botwin, suburban pot-dealing mom on Weeds.  A show that films many scenes in the legal marijuana clinics and dispensaries in California that would be our advertisers.  A show that just this year signed contracts with NORML to allow display of our trademark in the scenes where it is shown in Weeds.

And it cannot be that CBS is OK with airing a dramatic interpretation of marijuana culture, but afraid of airing a serious news program about marijuana culture.  CBS News has an entire web special feature entitled “Marijuana Nation” (not-so-coincidentally the tag line of NORML SHOW LIVE) devoted to all their news coverage about marijuana dating back to Mike Wallace in 1968.

CBS will show Weeds to make money off of people who like marijuana, but won’t allow its banner advertisements for Weeds to be seen on any website trying to keep those marijuana lovers from arrest and a criminal record.  CBS will pepper their news coverage and websites with cannaporn* and cannabusiness, but won’t allow a non-profit organization attempting to legalize those industries to have a voice on their networks.

Case #2:  In addition to hosting NORML’s podcast and social blog, I am NORML’s Outreach Coordinator.  In this position I recruit activists from all across the country (even the US Virgin Islands) to organize NORML chapters.  These independent affiliates host events, gather petition signatures, and provide education to the community to counteract the anti-marijuana propaganda from the government (such as our “drug czar” recently proclaiming – in California, no less – that “Marijuana is dangerous and has no medicinal benefit.”)

I was contacted by the tour manager for the “Blazed and Confused” Tour.  The artists performing in the most pro-marijuana concert of the summer are Mickey Avalon, Bob Marley’s son Stephen Marley, San Diego rockers Slightly Stoopid, and Snoop Dogg, probably the most recognizable person alive associated with marijuana aside from Willie Nelson.  They, particularly Slightly Stoopid, wanted NORML chapters to host marijuana information tables for the concerts and offered us the opportunity for free.

Pot leaf skull at Blazed & Confused tour at NBC Universal's Hard Rock this Saturday

I combed through my chapter listings and got them NORML booths for over half the shows.  At the show in Portland I got to interview Miles from Slightly Stoopid and wander around backstage.  The props for the Stoopid show were two massive five foot skulls with pot leaves on the forehead.  Snoop’s show featured a huge backdrop reading “Tales from the Crip” and marijuana leaves were all around.  Everyone performing at or attending this concert was very pro-marijuana legalization.

Yet this morning I’m contacted by the tour people who tell me they need to cancel the booth we have scheduled for the show last Saturday in Orlando.  It seems the venue is the Hard Rock, and “because they are a Universal owned company they are much more conservative than your typical venue.”

Available from NBC Universal

This Universal, of course, is NBC Universal, the parent company to the MSNBC and CNBC networks that reported their highest ratings ever for their marijuana-themed news reports on the burgeoning cannabis business in California.   The same NBC Universal that is happy to sell you Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie, Dazed & Confused, and Half Baked on DVD.  The same NBC Universal that has no problem allowing Snoop Dogg to get the crowd at the Hard Rock in Orlando to chant “Legalize It”, but somehow can’t let a couple of college kids in NORML T-shirts hand out educational fliers about why we should legalize it.

Case #3: Another marijuana legalization organization, Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), produced an excellent TV ad calling for passage of a bill to tax and regulate cannabis for adults.  The governor had recently called for an open debate about legalization and MPP created this thirty second ad to begin that debate:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Certainly a sober and non-sensational way to debate the issue.  Yet when MPP offered the ad to California stations, Los Angeles’ KABC (ABC) and KTTV (FOX), San Francisco’s KGO (ABC), and San Jose’s KNTV (NBC) refused to accept the ad.  KNTV said their standards department wouldn’t approve the ad.  KGO issued an official “no comment.”  KABC and KTTV didn’t even bother give the courtesy of a “no comment” – they would not respond to MPP’s inquiries.

I’ve detailed NBC’s and CBS’s profiting from cannabis culture.  You’d think ABC, being a part of the Walt Disney Corporation, would generally shy away from profiting from cannabis culture. But a little digging shows they own Miramax films, which this year released Adventureland, a comedy about teenagers smoking and dealing weed while working at an amusement park and in 2001 offered Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, the adventures of two inveterate stoners who wrote a stoner comic book.  FOX for eight years aired That 70’s Show, a ratings hit whose signature sight gag was teenagers sitting in a smoke-filled basement passing around a joint or bong (never seen, however), with the camera focusing on each character as they “passed the dutchie on the left hand side”.

So it is OK for the corporate parents of CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX to profit from movies and TV shows that satirize marijuana culture, but they have a “standards and practices” problem with their broadcast affiliates showing 30 seconds of a 38-year-old woman suggesting we should tax and regulate marijuana.

Keep in mind in these cases, we are talking about one part of the big media company raking in huge profits with shows about the marijuana community, while another part of the big media company refuses the free educational fliers, paid advertisements, and pay-to-play broadcasts BY AND FOR the marijuana community. Marijuana is the modern day minstrel show – we’re allowed on the air as long as we keep on our “greenface”, shuck and jive (or would it be “smoke and pass”?), and never forget our proper place.

By the way, the NORML SHOW LIVE mentioned in Case #1 will still be going on the air, as promised, on Labor Day Weekend.  Unlike CBS, we keep our promises to our customers.  The money raised will go into promotions and producing our show through the facilities of BlogTalkRadio.com, which was happy to accept our business, and quite frankly, offers us a better production technology at one-sixth the price.  Tune in every Saturday Night at 9pm Eastern for two hours of intelligent discussion about marijuana legalization.

* Cannaporn is the news specials that like to show lots and lots of pictures of big green sticky buds and the people smoking them, usually the same stock footage they’ve run for years with the most stereotypical “stoner” types they can find, lots of pictures of bongs and tie dyes, some b-roll from a music festival, or body-armored police helicoptering in to chop down marijuana plants, while intoning the reefer madness du jour about increased potency, psychosis, or clandestine cartel grows and violence that wouldn’t exist in a legal market.  In other words, not what you will find on NORML SHOW LIVE.

The Lisa Ling / Explorer documentary “Marijuana Nation” re-airs tonight on the National Geographic Channel at 7pm ET.

Download the NORML Daily Audio Stash for 2008-12-03

Download audio file (NORML_Daily_AudioStash_2008-12-03.mp3)

Today’s Stash features an interview with John Holowach, director of the documentary “High: The True Tale of American Marijuana“.  Then we get some Cannabis Science with Dr. Mitch Earleywine and a look at the “gateway theory” that says marijuana will lead to meth.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Last night’s “Explorer” documentary on the National Geographic channel entitled “Marijuana Nation” did a decent job of exploring the issue of cannabis in North America.  However, it did leave unchallenged some drug war assertions about cannabis.

Drug warriors in the film, as well as Lisa Ling’s own narration, sounded the alarms about the “Not Your Father’s Woodstock Weed” we’re using today.  One figure cited was that the pot most people smoked in the ’60s was about 3-4% THC while what we smoke today can be up to 20%.  That’s kind of like saying the alcohol of the beer we drank in the ’60s was 3.2% while the rum we drink today can be up to 75%.  There was potent pot back in the ’60s and there is schwag around today.  The government’s own figures on THC levels of seized cannabis show the average has only doubled.

The question never answered about the potency is “So?”  It was obliquely referenced by the Canadian grower who responded to Lisa Ling’s question, “So this bud would get you very high?” by asking “Sure, but what is ‘high’?”  He pointed out that it could never kill you, you can’t overdose on it, and that you could eat lots of it and you’d just go to sleep.

That’s a start.  But people who’ve never used cannabis, and especially those who’ve used alcohol, have a misperception about what being high is.  They compare it to alcohol, which has different stages of intoxication, leading from happy and fun through aggressive and belligerent and on to puking and hangovers.  So they may attach that same frame to cannabis, figuring that with the new “super-pot”, it must somehow be different, differently intoxicating, differently addictive, and will affect personality differently.  They don’t understand that Cheech & Chong smoked a whole joint to get high while we today smoke a couple of puffs to get high.  High is high.  If Cheech & Chong smoked six joints, they’d go to sleep.  If we smoke one joint, we go to sleep.  The pot is no different, it just takes less of it to get high, which is better for your lungs.  It’s like that concentrated laundry detergent – it doesn’t clean your clothes any better, it just takes less of it to do laundry.

Another issue I have is with the selection of interview subjects.  We had drug warriors telling the prohibitionist’s side, medical growers and dispensary owners telling the medical side, but where were the stories from the activist side?  Where were Keith Stroup, Rob Kampia, Ethan Nadelmann, etc.?  I would trade any one of the many shots of Marc Emery with his four-foot bong and attendant “pretty ladies” for just one activist.

As a result, the harms from the prohibition of cannabis get the short shrift.  Brief mentions were made about the prison population and marijuana arrests, but never were any of the other nasty effects of prohibition mentioned.  No mention of transplant patients being denied for the medical marijuana use.  No mention of college girls murdered in drug stings gone bad.  No mention of college kids losing financial aid.  No mention of losing child custody over pot use.  No mention of drug raids gone bad and the people who die from them.

Lisa Ling also never approached the subject of how much we’re paying for this war on marijuana.  She did note whatever figures the DEA gave her on how much the illicit marijuana market is worth, but never the multi-billions we’re spending in a futile effort to stamp out the marijuana market.  Again, something Keith, Rob, or Ethan would’ve addressed in an instant.

However, as mainstream marijuana documentaries go, this one wasn’t bad.  It avoided most of the reefer madness generalities and balanced its time between drug warriors and cannabis enthusiasts.  The Canadian marijuana “forest” was excellent – the more people see that it’s only a plant, the better.  The various shots of cannabis consumers were good, though, again, I could do with less Marc Emery.  I give Lisa Ling the benefit of the doubt by assuming that she had to make do with 45 minutes of content (with commercials) and trimmed the documentary down to “what’s happening in marijuana” from “what’s happening in marijuana and marijuana law reform”.

Overall grade: B-

Marijuana Nation is playing on the National Geographic channel right now… if you’re reading this at 10pm Eastern.

Tune in tonight, Tuesday, December 2 at 7pm to the National Geographic Channel (satellite or cable) for the premiere of “Marijuana Nation”, a documentary by journalist Lisa Ling that looks like a very reasoned, objective look at the pro- and con- sides to the war on marijuana.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bloomberg.com:
Arts and Culture
Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) — Here’s some holiday cheer: At least one U.S. industry is not only booming but avoids government intervention like the plague. When these folks need a bailout they call their lawyers, not their lobbyists.

“Marijuana Nation,” which airs tomorrow on National Geographic Channel at 10 p.m. New York time, is an intriguing look at the U.S. marijuana business, estimated to turn a tidy $65 billion annual profit despite an often perilous sales environment.

Anchored by Lisa Ling, former co-host of “The View,” this hour-long show presents enough market stats to make an analyst salivate.

Marijuana, first used as an intoxicant in China some 5,000 years ago, is now the most widely used illegal substance in the world, according to Ling. About 200 million people use pot in one form or another and the market is growing steadily, with 2 million Americans projected to try it for the first time this year.

California is also benefiting from sales of medical marijuana, which brought an estimated $3 million in tax revenue to Oakland in 2003.

Ling dons a helmet and fatigues to join a bust deep inside California’s Sequoia National Forest, where she rappels from a helicopter like a special-ops warrior. Public land is popular with pot farmers; in 2007 more than 250,000 plants were seized in this forest alone.

Yet these efforts seem futile. Law-enforcement officials say growers often plant five plots, assuming two will be seized by police and/or “pot pirates” while animals will eat the equivalent of another. That leaves two plots that can produce millions in profits.

Remember that Alcohol Prohibition ended not necessarily because there was a recognition of Prohibition’s failure.  That was widely understood, but it was the economic desperation of the Depression that finally nudged Americans to repeal Prohibition – we just couldn’t afford it.

I don’t think the drug war will end, but I do think it will shift.  As the Mexican border becomes more dangerous from cocaine, heroin, and meth trafficking, and as US cities and states begin to see these drugs as a bigger scourge (especially meth), I think the attitude will change to reflect that we can’t afford to aggressively police marijuana when resources are scarce to fight those other drugs.

Allen St. Pierre alerted me to this upcoming documentary on the National Geographic Channel this Tuesday, December 2, called “Marijuana Nation“.  The trailer makes this film look very promising as an objective look at the ridiculous failure that is marijuana prohibition.

Click here to view the embedded video.