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1. NAACP comes out in support of ending the War on Drugs as a civil rights issue
2. Study from UC Santa Cruz looks at the demographics of medical marijuana patients

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1. Increase in marijuana rehab admissions roughly matches increases in marijuana arrests
2. Dad’s photos of 2-year-old son handling marijuana equals child abuse?
3. Free marijuana for food bank donation at Santa Cruz area dispensary

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SANTA CRUZ – Campus leaders are reaching out to parents of first-year students in an effort to curb the annual unsanctioned April 20 “4/20″ marijuana festival this year.

According to a recently-sent e-mail from Felicia McGinty, vice-chancellor of student affairs, delivered to inboxes of UC Santa Cruz freshman parents, “I encourage you to talk with your student about his or her plans for 4/20. Ask direct questions about the choices they make and express your expectations regarding marijuana, alcohol or other drug use. Although students may not initiate discussion on this topic, your opinions and expectations can influence their behavior.”

The letter also details plans to ban overnight guests on campus from Friday, April 18 through Monday, April 20 – the day that the impromptu event annually attracts thousands to Porter Meadow at 4:20 p.m. to eat, inhale or otherwise consume copious amounts of cannabis. In past years, a gray haze quickly formed over the meadow as thousands of revelers lit up and continued smoking throughout the late afternoon. While many of those participating are UCSC students, many, campus leaders have said, are not.

University of California at Santa Cruz Banana Slugs. Seriously.

To further discourage the event, the letter said, UCSC will limit bus service to campus, tow illegally parked cars and further discourage those not affiliated with the university from showing up. Last year, neither parking tickets nor barricades across campus entrances could stop those who wanted to join the celebration.

In her e-mail, McGinty wrote: “While similar ’4/20 celebrations’ occur simultaneously on college campuses across the United States, over the past four years the event here at UCSC has grown in numbers, with many of the participants being visitors with no investment in our UCSC community. The growth in scale of this activity has become a concern for both the University and surrounding community.”

Parents wanting more information can e-mail studentaffairs@ucsc.edu.

You let your child go to a school which has a banana slug for its mascot and now you’re just getting around to the “don’t smoke pot” conversation?

Stashers, I want to encourage you to email Student Affairs at ucsc.edu, but let’s not have them turn us away as ranting potheads.  Instead, send an email as if you were a concerned parent.  That will take them more time to politely answer, instead of just hitting “delete” in their email program.  I’ve sent this email:

I recieved your email and was SHOCKED to find out you have a pot smoking festival on your campus!!!!!! I didnt pay $25000 to send my daughter to some hippie commune!!!  Why should I have to have a talk bout what shes doing on 4/20 to keep her away from YOUR POT SMOKING FESTIVAL??? How bout you just NOT have the festival?

I’ll let you know what kind of answer I get. 

Valerie Corral was a guest on our show and spoke about Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana, or WAMM, as part of my interviews with Wendy Chapkis and Richard Webb on their book, “Dying to Get High”.  Now Valerie is facing the loss of the land and the WAMM collective.

News & Culture | WAMM founders Valerie and Michael Corral face the loss of their land and the end of a dream
But as of July this past summer, the land that the Corrals called their home for over 20 years is slipping away. Because of a perfect storm of factors—plummeting donations to WAMM, the DEA raid of the property in 2002, death and taxes—Valerie can no longer afford to stay in her home, and WAMM is losing its iconic garden. “I’m exhausted,” says Valerie. “I’m losing my land, the place I thought that I’d be buried.”

Though the situation is complex, Ben Rice, an attorney who has represented the Corrals for the last 15 years, blames the situation solely on the federal government. Without the DEA’s continual assault on California law, medical marijuana organizations would not be raided, would not spend their savings on legal defense and would not lose precious donations due to spooked members. “WAMM is sort of the soul of the medical marijuana community,” says Rice. “This never would have happened if the feds had taken the time to look at what WAMM was about and who Mike and Val were.

“For them to lose this property—they’ve given everything they have to WAMM, and this is what they get for it. It’s so, so sad.”

There is something seriously wrong with this country when a selfless person like Valerie, who at great legal risk to herself gives her whole life to helping patients, is persecuted and bankrupted, but then executives of the Big Three US automakers are each flying a private corporate jet to Washington to ask for taxpayer bailouts, when all they’ve done is act completely selfishly as they’ve mismanaged Detroit to near bankruptcy.

Council OKs smoking pot in WAMM tent – San Jose Mercury News
SANTA CRUZ — Medical marijuana patients will once again be allowed to smoke dope in San Lorenzo Park this Saturday, after city leaders temporarily lifted a smoking ban to allow for a festival celebrating the medicinal herb.

The decision came after testimony from more than 20 patients who reasoned and pleaded with the Santa Cruz City Council to allow them to inhale their medication while partaking in Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana’s annual WAMMfest. Some accused council members of growing old and more conservative, while others said Santa Cruz was losing both its compassion and its weirdness.

The catch, however, is that the ban was not lifted for the entire park. Instead, those with a medical marijuana identification card only will be allowed to smoke inside a tent designated for that purpose.

Council members approved the proposal on a 5-1 vote, with Councilwoman Lynn Robinson voting against the measure and Mayor Ryan Coonerty absent.

Robinson said she does not like making exceptions to rules that the city requires everyone else to follow.

Imagine if you were in charge of a city park and there was a festival going on, but before anyone could enter, they were tested to see if they were on any painkillers like oxycodone or acetominophen, or on any mood stabilizers like Prozac or Xanax.  And if they were on any of these drugs, they’re not allowed to attend.

Councilwoman Robinson believes that WAMM was asking for an exception to a rule that everyone else follows.  But that rule was a rule against smoking in the park – tobacco or cannabis.  Since there is no “medical tobacco”, then the ban was against “recreational smoking”.

WAMM didn’t ask for that; they asked that their members would be allowed to be and get medicated.  Everyone else who goes to that park is allowed to be under the influence or take their legally-ingested medication; why should medical marijuana patients be any different?  If a healthy person was at the event and got a headache, they’d be allowed to take an aspirin in plain view; why can’t the legal medical marijuana patient take their medicine?

Again, it’s that untenable dichotomy between “legal sick person” and “illegal healthy person” when it comes to marijuana, and the patients have to fight and scratch and beg to be allowed to medicate hidden from view in a tent, lest sensitive public eyes unwittingly see someone smoking weed.  Until marijuana is legal for all, patients will continue to be “separate but equal” in public accomodations.

Council could lift smoking ban for pot fest – San Jose Mercury News
The smoking ban in city parks could be lifted for the second time since it passed three years ago, as city leaders are considering allowing medical marijuana patients to light up during a festival at San Lorenzo Park at the end of the month.

“It’s not like a recreational marijuana event,” said Councilman Mike Rotkin, who supports the temporary lifting of the city’s 3-year-old ordinance that bans smoking in parks.

“It’s not a smoke-in, it’s not like the 4/20 thing up on campus,” Rotkin said.

That April 20 event attracts thousands of people to Porter Meadow at UC Santa Cruz each spring to celebrate the so-called 4/20 cannabis culture holiday.

Instead, the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana would like the ban lifted so its 200 members can self-medicate while they enjoy the organization’s annual festival. Wammfest, a medical marijuana, hemp and music festival, is scheduled for Sept. 27.

“As patients, its really important to have access to the medicine in the most indiscreet and reasonable fashion,” said Valerie Corrall, co-founder of WAMM.

The item will be considered on the City Council’s consent agenda today. The council unanimously approved a similar temporary suspension of the smoking ban for last year’s event.

A closed tent will be available at the festival for those who need to administer their prescription drugs, and no pot will be for sale or distributed, Rotkin said.

Santa Cruz police reported no problems with last year’s festival. But after Measure K was passed with 60 percent of the vote in 2006, Santa Cruz police are forced to make adult marijuana-related crimes on private property a low priority.

Remember when people were allowed to smoke cigarettes in airplanes and elevators?  Now you can’t smoke a cigarette in a public park, but you can smoke marijuana!  What a country!

Seriously, though, this is a wonderful victory for Valerie and the movement.  Police will always tell you our cannabis community events are by far the most peaceful scenes they have to patrol.  A reporter asked police at the Seattle Hempfest, with its 150,000 people how it compared to patrolling Seahawks or Mariners games where beer is served, and the police said Hempfest was “a Girl Scout camp” compared to policing half the number of beer drinkers.

And while I support perfectly healthy people smoking weed in the park, there is no doubt that many patients would have no possible way to enjoy a nice sunny day in nature without being able to medicate.  Life is tough enough when you have a debilitating injury or illness – letting them smoke cannabis in the park is the compassionate thing to do.

Register-Pajaronian Online
A string of marijuana raids in Santa Cruz County this week uncovered pot growers stealing water and electricity from property owners, the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office Narcotics Enforcement Team reported.

During the past month, the sheriff’s office NET investigators had received a complaint about power theft occurring at [a] home. The complaint alleged that the owner of the home had “bypassed” the electrical meter to obtain un-metered power after PG&E had disconnected the power due to lack of payment…. PG&E estimated that MacFaden had stolen in excess of $2,000 worth of power by using the “bypass.”

A “bypass” occurs when a person taps into the power-supply line prior to the power entering the meter box, where the meter records how much power is consumed. MacFaden had fastened the “bypass” onto the hot supply wires where they entered the weather head (which is placed on the roof). PG&E officials said that MacFaden could have died or severely electrocuted himself had he touched the energized supply wire while removing the “bypass.”

You know what story you never read about?  Someone illegally bypassing electrical power or illegally diverting water to run their home beer brewing business.  Once again, the prohibition of marijuana doesn’t make the market go away, it just forces the market underground.  Since growers can be detected and arrested based on investigation of power records, growers then find ways of getting un-metered power.  And the incredible profits available from prohibition make it worth risking electrocution and fire.

Police: Pot-smoking event in UCSC meadow a moral slap in the face” – San Jose Mercury News
SANTA CRUZ — For those who arrest people who use, abuse or sell drugs, Sundays pot-smoking festival at UC Santa Cruz was “a moral slap in the face to the cause,” said Rich Westphal, task force commander with the Santa Cruz County Narcotics Enforcement Team.

Despite efforts by the university to control access to campus, thousands of people, many of them students from UCSC and other California colleges, gathered at Porter Meadow to commemorate the so-called 4/20 cannabis culture holiday.

UCSCs once student-only gathering to smoke marijuana is now known nationally. It has grown to 5,000 people strong over the years, its popularity attributed to articles published in high-profile magazines like Rolling Stone and High Times Magazine — along with newer forms of social media, like YouTube.

Though smoking pot is illegal, no one was arrested at the weed-smoking exhibition that unfolded Sunday.

And that’s because Santa Cruz is one of the cities that has voted to make enforcement of marijuana laws the lowest priority for police.

As I scan the news reports of 4/20, I’m finding very few arrests and no reports of violence or disruptive, anti-social behavior.  Most police understand that marijuana smokers are not a threat to ordered society.  Ask any cop whether he or she would like to try to control 5,000 marijuana smokers or 5,000 beer drinkers in public.

Like other articles, this one tries to scare the reader by bringing up the two shibboleths still trotted out by drug warriors, “Driving While Stoned” and “What About The Children?”  Concerned citizens called to wonder why police weren’t arresting attendees for DUI as they left the gathering, and some teenagers were able to get into the gathering.

For the former, could it be that most police recognize that a couple puffs on a joint isn’t the biggest traffic danger in the world?  Or perhaps the people who drove away didn’t show any signs of driving impairment?  Until taxicabs and buses are the only vehicles I see entering or leaving bar parking lots, I think our police have far more drunk drivers to worry about than stoned drivers cruising a little too slow, missing their freeway exit, or idling at the In’N'Out drive-thru window.

As for the latter, whether it is alcohol or marijuana, teenagers will get a hold of it.  Marijuana is far less harmful.  But if this were a outdoor microbrew festival, the legality of beer lets security and police set up restricted areas with checks for ID and sometimes ID wristbands.  You don’t see any spontaneous open-air beer festivals popping up nationwide – since it is legal we can do a better job of keeping the minors out.