Download the NORML Daily Audio Stash for 2008-05-23

It’s Friday, May 23rd and it’s 4:20 somewhere in the world! I’m your host, “Radical” Russ Belville and this is your NORML Daily Audio Stash.

I hope you all have a great holiday this Memorial Day weekend. Monday I’ll be remembering some of our best interviews on the Daily Audio Stash over this past few months, featuring Tommy Chong, Dr. Mitch Earlywine, Douglas Hiatt, and many more.

For today’s show we visit with the E! network of cannabis news, CelebStoner.com’s Steve Bloom, who breaks down the latest cannabis celebrity news.

Then for our musical break we bring back some old friends, The Omega Project. You may remember my interview with Carlos as he and his girlfriend were facing some serious marijuana arrest charges. Well, they got by with just a fine and community service and they’re back on the Stash to make more great music. Today’s song is called simply “Leaf”.

To conclude the podcast I’m encouraging everyone to tune into my radio show on XM Satellite channel 167 tomorrow afternoon at 3pm Eastern. I’m interviewing Kevin Booth, director of the documentary “American Drug War: The Last White Hope” and we’ll be taking live calls at the bottom of the hour at 866-55-77-3-77. I’m excited to get this movie in front of my mainstream political audience.

Also, don’t forget about Pass the Stash – you can win a free autographed DVD of “Totally Baked” to be given away a week from today. You just need to send an email to stash@norml.org with your funniest first time pot smoking story. I’m going to help you get started by indulging a bit on my 75th podcast and telling you all my first time pot smoking story.

Finally, don’t forget that every Saturday we’re now posting the NORML Weekend Music Stash, where you can get all of the last ten songs from our daily musical breaks in one podcast, suitable for your weekend party pleasure. If you have a band that would like to be featured on our podcast, please send us an email at stash ‘at’ norml.org.

So sit back and relax with some White Widow and enjoy your NORML Daily Audio Stash…

On my nationally-syndicated radio show this morning I had a caller from Las Vegas.  I had been discussing the fallout from Senator Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and how his comments, while controversial, aren’t necessarily surprising.  I was referencing Wright’s sermon where he speaks of three strikes laws, drugs in the inner cities, and more young black men in prison than in college and asks, “God bless America?  No, God damn America…”

My caller took great offense to that and ranted about how Obama belonged to this “racist church” for twenty years, and I let him ramble a bit before I asked him about the truth of the disproportionate impact of the drug war on racial minorities.  He then called Wright’s claim about the CIA inventing crack to take down the inner city “bogus” and told me I was believing lies… and that’s where I let him have it.  I try not to be one of those talk radio hosts who shouts over his callers, but whenever I think of poor Gary Webb’s “suicide” after he exposed the connection between the CIA turning a blind eye to and at times assisting the trafficking of cocaine to the inner cities in order to fund black budget illegal wars in Central America, I get a bit upset. Especially when I’ve seen the interviews with the former CIA officers who acknowledged they did just that (well, they didn’t “invent” crack; that’s just CIA-funneled-supply meeting street-level-demand in the form of a few entrepreneurs with some rudimentary chemistry skills).

If you’d like to hear the show, it will be posted Sunday night to my website, RadicalRuss.net; just click on the speaker in the yellow box.  The caller in question hits at about the 42:00 mark.