Screenshot of 11/23/09 USA Today website

(USA Today) PORTLAND, Ore. — At first glance, the Cannabis Cafe, in a former adult club called Rumpspankers, looks like any other coffee shop. Customers sip coffee while playing cards, working on computers, or sharing a meal.

But here, patrons also slip away to smoke joints and pipes in the back. And the cafe features a vapor bar, where customers can get the benefits of cannabis without the harmful carcinogens.

Fourteen states, including Oregon, allow cannabis to be cultivated and used for medical reasons, according to NORML. Maine this month became the fifth state to allow retail pot dispensaries, joining California, Colorado, New Mexico and Rhode Island, according to NORML.  But NORML officials say only Oregon has a place where any medical marijuana cardholder can socialize and use free, over-the-counter cannabis, which is dispensed by what the café calls “budtenders.”

“It really is a revolutionary model in that the cannabis isn’t being bought and sold,” said Russ Belville of Portland, who is national outreach coordinator for NORML. “This is the only place I can think of in the world where the cannabis is free.” Oregon law prohibits the sale of marijuana, although it can be exchanged among medical marijuana card holders.

NORML members pay $20 a month plus $5 per visit to use the cafe, which is open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday. It’s only open to registered medical marijuana patients, growers and caregivers who also belong to NORML.

So far, the concept has been a hit, organizers say and there has been no community protest. The 100-seat cafe opened at 4:20 p.m. Nov. 13, and about 300 people came through that night. Many brought donations of marijuana. “The cafe on its opening day ended up with more marijuana at the end of the day than at the beginning,” Belville said.

I’m sure there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth over USA Today’s line that “the Cannabis Cafe is the nation’s first medical marijuana smoking lounge.”  There is already the post “Portland’s Cannabis Cafe is not the first medical marijuana coffee shop in America” on the Examiner site, which goes into great detail about the Denis Peron-era medical smoke lounges in the Bay Area of the mid-1990′s.  Others have left comments about current lounges in California and Colorado dispensaries and even a “smoke room” in the back of one Portland head shop.

So, you’d think with all these open and operating cannabis smoke lounges in existence already, opening one in Portland wouldn’t be much of a story, would it?  I mean, any reporter from the AP, USA Today, New York Times, Reuters, Huffington Post, The Telegraph, or the Times of London, should be able to “cannabis café” or “marijuana lounge” into Google and instantly read all the press about these existing smoke lounges, right?  If they do those searches and find nothing to dispel the notion that Oregon’s café is the “first”, is that the fault of Oregon NORML for having a successful press release, the fault of journalists for bad fact-checking, or the fault of all the previously-opened smoke lounges to openly proclaim their existence?

That’s what makes this story a “first” – the open proclamation of a social outlet for patients that allows medication.  Dispensaries and head shops that allow for onsite consumption are not making that aspect of business publicly known.  Dispensaries and head shops are there primarily for the sales of marijuana and accessories, respectively.  This Cannabis Café exists first and foremost as a café; it is not trying to solve patients’ medical needs, but rather trying to provide a social outlet for people who happen to use cannabis medically.

The Examiner family of online newspapers is now featuring the retired locksmith (and thus, drug policy expert) John English as a regular columnist.  It seems his entire series of columns is dedicated to pushing reefer madness.

In “Marijuana Crosses the Placenta“, John tortures the language he’s named after with fine writing like this:

Effects on the fetus, though scientifically difficult to evaluate, for a variety of reasons, the detection of metabolites in meconium establishes fetal drug exposure. The effects on the babies after birth is obvious.

Judging from his various cut’n'pastes from scientific articles I doubt he understands, I think his argument is that women who smoke a lot of pot while pregnant risk harming their babies, so we should lock them up.  Wait’ll he sees the statistics on fetal alcohol syndrome!

In “Who Populates the Prison System“, John claims to debunk the idea pushed by “pro-drug advocates and their financial backers (Soros, Sperling, et al.)” that the prisons are filled with non-violent marijuana possessors:

# The massive numbers of people in prison for marijuana, are / were smugglers and distributors.

# These skewed facts ignore that when a person actually is incarcerated for simple possession, invariably it’s because they’ve cooperated and been allowed to plead to a lesser charge!

John doesn’t understand, though, that a “smuggler/distributor” of marijuana can be a pot possessor who made the mistake of keeping his two separate strains in two separate baggies, or keeps Ziploc sandwich baggies in his home, or owns a postal scale, or grew more than one plant, or keeps a legal firearm.  He also doesn’t realize that folks on parole or probation who get busted for possession technically go back to prison for their original crime, not the pot possession, so they don’t show up in statistics as pot prisoners.  But it is refreshing to see him admit that there are “massive numbers of people in prison for marijuana” as he beats up his strawman.

In “Losing Our Youth to Depression“, John explains that marijuana doesn’t treat depression, it causes depression:

The marijuana user is in a constant state of depression interspersed with “short bursts of feeling almost normal again.” The user, when he’s reached out and achieved that “high,” he has a temporary reprieve from that constant, marijuana-induced state of depression, but it returns as the “high” fades.

That’s the cause, the scenario . . . ; users seek, the non-depressed state, they perceive as a “high”. They’re wrong; it’s the state they were in before – it’s the absence of depression. Over and over, they’re drawn into the ‘fog of marijuana addiction’ which has caused them to perceive it wrongly. The user has unknowingly, only taken a step down a rung, on the ladder of normalcy!

So I’ll bet when John learns that the suicidal/homicidal Columbine shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and just about every high-profile school shooting you can name in the past twenty years involved depressed teens who were prescribed SSRI anti-depressants, he’ll be eager to pump out a few columns about how we should be locking up people in possession of Paxil, Effexor, Celexa, Prozac, Zoloft, Luvox, Anafranil, Lexapro, Wellbutrin, etc.

In “Addiction to cannabis and mental disorders“, John reveals the insidious evil of marijuana – the “potheads” are seducing our youth into their debauched lifestyle (I guess we’ve been borrowing strategy from the “gay agenda”):

The most convincing reason why potheads must remain criminals, why marijuana must remain illegal, is their targeting of children. That behavior in and of itself reveals that they suffer from a deep psychological insufficiency, a need to draw children into becoming like them – whether it’s a need to justify their own beliefs or some other motivation, it doesn’t matter! They’re damaging future generations and doing so intentionally.

You know who’s targeting children, John?  Pot dealers who aren’t required to check IDs, a million of whom are teenagers themselves.  You know who else targeted children?  Alcohol and tobacco companies with their “Budweiser Frogs” and “Joe Camel”, but since those drugs are legal, we were able to set strong advertising restrictions on those products, create effective anti-youth drinking and smoking educational campaigns, and reduced teen drinking and smoking to the lowest levels ever recorded.

In “What is wrong with smoking marijuana for medicinal purposes“, John cites a video of “Nathan Edelman” (he means Drug Policy Alliance’s Ethan Nadelmann), which is actually video of former NORML Director Richard Cowan taken way out of context to illustrate our alleged secret agenda of telling pot smokers to lie about how marijuana helps them medically so we can legalize all drugs (and, naturally, recruit the children into our debauched lifestyle).

When considering at this question, one must take into account two related issues: 1) that the whole plan to make marijuana legal was published in “High Times.” They issued a call, compelling users to come forward saying that pot helped their suffering.

And there’s another part: 2) that a survey showed that medical marijuana cardholders had been smoking pot for an average of 17 years! That in itself, brings the whole system under more suspicion – - – for what if, marijuana does cause one to think their “medicine” helps their condition when it is instead, actually causing or contributing to it?

Then, there’s two further question that needs to be asked:

1) What weed is smoked without the particulate matter, tars, and (over 400 chemical compounds in the smoke) not causing harm? The doctor’s oath is “First, do no harm.”

2) If people who were already breaking the law using an illicit drug for 17 years before the system allowed this pseudo-legal use, do they have the credibility to allow us to believe this actually helps?

If you were nauseous, in chronic pain, spastic, prone to seizures, or were losing your eyesight to glaucoma, and you smoked a joint 17 years ago and found it helped you medically, would you choose to live in misery for another 17 years until it became legal to use, just so you could have some credibility in John English’s view?

You can read more of my responses to John English in the comments sections of his articles in the hyperlinks above.  Feel free to leave some of your own comments, too.