Damn, Willie, we gots to find us a new way across Texas!

Like his friend, Willie Nelson, Rapper Royalty Snoop Dogg was busted on Saturday in the same town that Willie was last year. It is tough to find an alternate route from Western Texas into New Mexico. But if you are on a tour bus, and you are packing marijuana, you might want to try to anyway.

Snoop Dogg was arrested by US Border Patrol agents and detained in Sierra Blanca, Texas, after a Texas officer says he detected the odor of marijuana coming from inside of the his tour bus. That was enough for them to run a drug dog through the bus, where he sniffed out a prescription bottle that contained some joints, along with another small container with some marijuana in it as well that was in a waste basket in the back of the bus.

All in all, Snoop Dogg had about two ounces total, or just about the same that Willie Nelson was maybe found with last year (there was some dispute between the scene reports and the actual crime he was charged with). Snoop Dogg, whose real name is Calvin Broadus freely admitted the marijuana was his according to the arrest report.

Broadus does reside in California, and has a current medical marijuana card from that state. But, as you know, that doesn’t protect you outside of the state of California, so Snoop was issued a citation for misdemeanor drug possession and released. He was given a court appearance for on/or before January 20th. He is allowed to plead guilty and apy a $537 fine, otherwise, he can challenge the citation and make his case in court, although finding a jury of super cool people as Snoop Dogg’s peers in Sierra Blanca, Texas, might be a tough job.

Bobby B - Hempfest 2007

When you get involved with the cannabis community, you get to meet some of the most fascinating people.  I don’t know if it’s attributable to the herb, but they also tend to be some of the nicest people, too.

One such guy was Bobby B, a medical marijuana patient who passed away today in Portland following a long battle with illness.

Bobby B and Pimpin' Steve (photo by LK)

When I first met Bobby B, it was through my friend Smoke Dogg (yes, we all have strange nicknames).  Bobby was accompanied by his caregiver, Pimpin’ Steve, another patient a couple of decades younger than Bobby B.  They always made quite the couple of friends to shout out to at an event, the legally-blind Vietnam vet with his walking cane and the flashy b-boy-lookin’ young man in his freshly pressed white track suits and oversize cap.

Bobby B was a legendary grower in the south Portland area known as Sellwood.  His signature strain, Sellwood Thunder, was featured in a story about the Oregon Medical Cannabis Awards entitled “Garden of Weedin’” in the local Willamette Weekly:

Bobby B with NORML Girls, Jessie (another OMCA winner) and Kim (photo by LK)

During the tradeshow, I met a man named Bobby B., a towering, gray-haired Vietnam vet. Bobby B. grows Sellwood Thunder, a venerable Portland strain featured in High Times twice. He handed me a business card. A photo on the card’s reverse side showed Bobby posing by a luxurious green bush. The front of the card read: “Look for Bobby B.’s new hybrid, Thunder Jack.”

“I started growing Sellwood Thunder because it was known for being rich, full-bodied herb,” Bobby B. told me. “But most importantly, it had low smell, so it was hard for cops to detect. There would be times that you couldn’t even get a crop in because of law enforcement.

“Now, everything’s changed. I would say we have some of the best growers in the world here in Oregon, doing it legitimately. I still grow the same way I grew 20 years ago. But now I can show people what I do.”

Mark Stepnoski, Rob Van Dam, Sean Neumann at NORML CON 2009 (Photo by LK)

Bobby B was always very supportive of the efforts to reform marijuana laws, though he never considered himself a “joiner”.  ”I stay independent, even though I love NORML,” he once told me as we sipped lemonade and smoked some of that Thunder Jack on a sunny summer day on his patio in Sellwood.  ”This way I can support everybody and not piss off anybody.”  It was through Bobby B that I got to meet the former pro wrestler and current internet media star, Rob Van Dam.  Bobby put in the good word and we appeared on each other’s shows, leading to RVD appearing on a sports panel for us at NORML National Conference 2009 in San Francisco.

On those more frequent not-so-sunny days in Sellwood, we’d retire to his “coffeeshop”, a small shack of a cabin he built with his own two hands and admittedly narrow field of vision.  He laughingly showed us the places where walls would meet at not-quite 90-degree angles, doors with long triangles of gap to the floor, a through-the-looking-glass type of architecture Bobby called “blind chic”.  It was his little piece of Amsterdam with mementos of interesting places and fascinating times in a life well-led.

My favorite memory of Bobby B came from July of 2009.  Slightly Stoopid was on tour with Snoop Dogg on the Blazed & Confused Tour.  I was working with Oregon NORML to man an information table.  We all had tickets for the show, but in my capacity with NORML SHOW LIVE, I had two media passes as well.  I used them to get great backstage and onstage shots of the artists, including Tha Doggfather himself.  I returned to the booth to tear down and began thinking of how I might use the passes to get backstage and score an interview with Snoop Dogg, the #2 artist on my 420-interview bucket list (Willie is #1).

Bobby B, Snoop Dogg, Pimpin' Steve

That’s when Bobby B and Pimpin’ Steve come strolling up.  ”Yo, Radical,” Steve called out, “you still got those media passes?”

Sure, I answered.  Then Steve asks me if he can take the passes so he can get Bobby back to meet Snoop Dogg, that Bobby wants to meet Snoop Dogg real bad.  I didn’t even hesitate; I’ll probably have another chance or two to meet Snoop, but who knows when Bobby might get another shot.

Steve and Bobby took the passes and sure enough, ended up backstage enjoying the atmosphere with Snoop himself.  ”Man, they got along tight,” Steve told me later, “Snoop’s dad was in ‘Nam and they talked a whole lot about that.  Thanks, Radical, I know I’ll never forget it and I’m sure Bobby’s never gonna forget it!”

Bobby B, it was my pleasure.  My condolences go out to your family and to your friends who had the good fortune to know you longer and better than I had.

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Hemp Headlines

1. Illinois sheriff sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus ten years for trafficking marijuana and witness intimidation
2. Wyoming Supreme Court rules out-of-state medical marijuana doesn’t protect patients caught in Wyoming
3. Colorado teen forbidden to use medical marijuana lozenges in high school
4. Cameron Diaz claims she bought marijuana from Snoop Dogg in high school
5. Columbian drug traffickers use pigeon to deliver marijuana and cocaine to them in prison

Daily Toker Tunes

• Groovin’ Thursday: D Tension – “I’m So Old”

Southern California Scene with Hollywood Hemptress Tere Joyce

• Dawn Tullman from Porn Star Pundits

NORML Newsmakers

• Josh Schimberg from Texas NORML on decriminalization bill

In the wonkosphere (that curious amalgam of bloggers, political junkies, math nerds, and activists) there is a young man named Nate Silver who runs a website called FiveThirtyEight (the number of Electoral Votes).  He’s considered a guru of poll analysis and his predictions on electoral races are very accurate.  We’ver reported before on Silver’s work when he analyzed the history of marijuana legalization polling and predicted a 60% support level by 2022.

This time he’s analyzed the polls on California’s Prop 19 – the initiative to LEGALIZE MARIJUANA (I have to keep shouting that to the pot smokers threatening to vote no) – and found quite an interesting phenomenon.  When a machine asks you about marijuana on the phone, you’re more likely to be honest than when a human asks you.  Especially if you’re more likely to be targeted by cops for harassment over marijuana.

FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: The Broadus Effect? Social Desirability Bias and California Proposition 19.

What if voters are more likely to admit their tolerance for marijuana to an automated script, which may create the feeling of greater anonymity? Marijuana usage remains fairly stigmatized in polite society in America, enough so that even liberal politicians like Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Jerry Brown and Barack Obama have refused to state their support for legalizing the drug. But as most Americans between ages 20 and 55 have smoked marijuana, they may not consider it such a big deal in the privacy of their homes — or the privacy of the ballot booth.

This might also explain why the split is larger among black and Hispanic voters. Marijuana usage is almost certainly more stigmatized when associated with minorities, and drug possession arrests occur much more frequently in minority communities. This is in spite of the fact thatrates of marijuana consumption are only a smidgen higher among blacks than among whites, and are somewhat lower among Hispanics. (Although, note that the link I just pointed you to is also based on survey data, and so could be subject to some of the same biases.)

Nevertheless, it’s possible that we’re seeing some sort of Bradley effect in reverse, which I’ve reluctantly dubbed the “Broadus Effect” after the given name of the rapper Snoop Dogg, himself a frequent consumer of cannabinoid-rich products.

It’s a point I’ve made when I show the graphs of American use of cannabis.  Remember, these are people who are willing to admit to breaking state and federal laws when asked by an anonymous stranger on the telephone who’s representing the federal government.  So adjust upward.

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Hemp Headlines

1. Seattle Mayor-Elect: Legalize Marijuana
2. “It’s Complicated” given R-rating for scene of “pot smoking with no bad consequences”
3. Snoop Dogg’s youth football program leads to unbeaten Crenshaw High football team

Daily Toker Tunes

Brought to you by The Bastard

• Rockin’ Friday: Swank Sinatra – “Silverback”

CelebStoner.com Entertainment Report with Steve Bloom, co-author of Pot Culture: The A-Z Guide to Stoner Language and Life

• Discussion on the recent pot bust of Atlanta Falcon’s Jonathan Babineaux

(Huffington Post) LOS ANGELES — Football has long been the athletic stepchild at inner-city Crenshaw High School. Trophy cases are crammed with basketball awards. Gym walls are lined with hoops championship flags.

But the football team is undefeated this season and headed for the California state championship bowl game this weekend, and the coach attributes part of the success to an unlikely off-field source: rapper Snoop Dogg.

Nine of this year’s Crenshaw High School Cougars went through the 5-year-old Snoop Youth Football League, representing the first crop of varsity players to cut their teeth in the program. The league has produced standouts at other schools, but none has more players or a better record than Crenshaw.

I love it when one of our own gives back to the community.  Everybody knows Snoop Dogg as the pot-smoking rapper, so when he turns father-figure coach to kids in the inner city, spending over a million dollars of his own money to give them football, it’s great public relations for marijuana without even having to mention it.

But further along into the article there is this portion that really lifts me up:

But the league soon caught on, especially when fathers with criminal records learned they could coach, unlike most other youth sports. Broadus, himself a former gang member, has several convictions for drugs and weapons offenses, and if the league didn’t allow ex-cons, there wouldn’t be enough coaches.

The coaching exception has also reconnected boys with their dads, or at least with positive male role models in neighborhoods where fathers are often behind bars or otherwise absent.

The dads, many of them members of the rival Bloods and Crips, must agree to leave their gang disputes away from the field.

It got me to thinking about all of the opportunities that we are denied once we’re caught with marijuana and given the “drug criminal” stamp on our lifelong record.  With all the kids that could use more interaction with positive adult role models, it seems a shame that getting caught with weed twenty years ago could prevent a father from being his son’s Pop Warner football coach.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Say… combine the TomTom navigator with Snoop’s voice to the WeedTracker app…

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.

Do not adjust your monitor - this is not Photoshopped!

I finally got the photos from Junior and uploaded them to my online photo album. Check ‘em out!

Plenty of beer for everyone, but only invisible joints.

This song is more “country” than half the songs they’re playing on country radio these days.