Download the NORML Daily Audio Stash for 2008-02-26

Remember, the government estimates that there are millions of Americans that have smoked marijuana in the past month. Congressmen are known to change their votes when they get a few hundred calls about an issue. If Congress had to hear a million phone calls asking for an end to adult marijuana prohibition, it would be a reality. Call your Congress at 202-225-3121 – they’ll ask your zip code and put you in touch with your elected officials. It still is a government of We the People, but you have to step up and do your part.

Tuesday is Government at Work day on the podcast, and coming up after the news, we take a look at marijuana related bills from around the country. Then we talk with NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano about the recent conference on drugged driving held in Washington DC by the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.

Next we get our groove on with a British jam band called Giles and their song, “Freedom”. Then it’s on to my interview with Fort Lauderdale criminal defense attorney Norm Kent about his recent article, “Pushing 60 with Pot”, and his thoughts on growing older in the cannabis community.

So sit back and relax with your favorite strain – this is the Daily Audio Stash.

NORML Board Member Norm Kent wrote a great article for CounterPunch about growing older in the cannabis community. It made me remember something an older pot-smoking friend once told me about drugs: “You hardly ever meet an old speed freak, an old junkie, or very many old alcoholics. But there’s a whole lot of us old stoners!”

Norm Kent: Pushing 60 with Pot
I am close to being a senior citizen. Though I will always think of myself as a student at Hofstra who was the 19 year old President of the Sophomore class, I am turning 58 this year. Damn, 60 is around the corner!

You know what that means? When I open a newspaper in the town I have lived in for the last thirty years, I know the people in the obituaries. I am older than some of them. When the city councilmen go to jail for the bribes they always seem to take in every city everywhere, I realize they are kids I grew up with. That means I smoked dope with them, got laid with them, partied with them, and got drunk with them.

If you are from the 1960’s, let’s be honest. Pot was the least of the things we did. There were mushrooms and Quaaludes, acid trips with LSD, body painting, psychedelic and psychotropic drugs up the yin yang tree. So a little weed was just a nominal high. By the time we were 20, we were reading about classmates who overdosed on Heroin.

The Baby Boomers are hitting retirement age and the bong! It’s one of my stock responses to some prohibitionist reefer madness argument. They say something stupid like “Marijuana smoking causes cancer!” and I reply, “Yeah, that’s why cancer rates went up so much right after the Summer of Love… oh, wait, they didn’t. Don’t you think if marijuana caused huge health problems, a lot of those Baby Boomers would’ve had those problems in the 1970s? By the 1980s, at least!” (My other favorite is the reply to the claim that marijuana causes infertility: “Yeah, that’s why there aren’t any Rastafarian babies, right?”)