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

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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.

Related posts

• Speaker Pelosi, we’ve BEEN “in touch” about marijuana – will you do something NOW? (7)
• Rep. Beto O’Rourke: 70% now back drug legalization resolution (0)
• NORML’s Paul Armentano in AlterNet: Marijuana Reform Is Part of the Progressive Agenda, So Why Are Obama’s Drug Cops Already Making Pot Raids? (0)

“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

Related posts

• Phelps Apologizes for Marijuana Use (18)
• Is Phelps Getting Off Easy? (0)
• 14-time Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps’ marijuana bong photo (18)

NORML.ORG US CO: Preparing For 4/20 Pot Smoke-Out
Student smokers, in perhaps the cliched easy-going fashion associated with marijuana, are getting ready for the annual 4/20 celebration on the University of Colorado campus.

Official smoke-out T-shirts sold online simply say: “University of Colorado. April 20. Farrand Field.”

Every year, thousands of people gather on the CU campus April 20 for the unofficial pro-pot celebration — and at 4:20 p.m. a cloud of smoke mushrooms above the crowd. The event is said to have grown from a northern California tradition.

CU police this year are bracing for a large crowd.

Alex Douglas, who does public relations for NORML’s CU chapter, said there also will be a screening of the documentary “Super High Me” in Cristol Chemistry Building, Room 140. The group plans to rally for the legalization of marijuana with signs and banners on Norlin Quad.

CU police Cmdr. Brad Wiesley said the department will likely need to pay overtime to its officers to monitor the event, given the possibility that the smoke-out could be heavily attended.

“We will obviously have a presence,” Wiesley said. “We certainly don’t condone, support or otherwise sanction this event.”

In past attempts to snuff out the event, campus police have turned sprinklers on the crowd and taken pictures of student smokers, posting them online and offering rewards to those who could identify them.

Wiesley, though, was mum on this year’s planned tactics.

“We don’t give our playbook to the other team before the game,” he said. People have the right to protest for marijuana law reforms, “but, breaking the law in order to change the law is not how our democratic society works,” he said.

Uh, Commander Wiesley, if I may enlighten you with a quote from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from his Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

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.”

…Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

Marijuana prohibition is one of those unjust laws. The power majority made our use of an intoxicant (marijuana) illegal, but keeps their use of an intoxicant (alcohol) legal. Dr. King was addressing the social and legal segregation of blacks and whites; I’m addressing the social and legal segregation of tokers and drinkers. Breaking unjust laws in an act of civil disobedience is a long tradition in this nation… even for us cannabis consumers.

Related posts

• CelebStoner’s Steve Bloom’s exclusive Boulder 4/20 Pics (0)
• 4/20 Round-Up: Up To 1,000 Attend Marijuana Rally At Denver’s Civic Center Park (0)
• 4/20 Round-Up: At pot rallies, things get hazy at 4:20 (0)