David Malmo-Levine forwarded an article he’s written as reaction to an online conversation in which many leaders in the marijuana movement are participating. Let’s call it the “Crossroads Debate”. Some folks, like Malmo-Levine, whom I’ll call “Medicalizers”, believe the proper strategy to fulfill our aim of ending adult marijuana prohibition is to continue expanding the the medical marijuana model under an “all use is medical” or “wellness supplements”, to keep broadening the conditions for which patients can get medical marijuana recommendations and to reduce the requirements for a patient to legally use cannabis until cannabis is treated as aspirin – a safe over-the-counter substance requiring no doctor and no registrations.
I and folks like Mickey Martin at CannabisWarrior.com, whom I’ll call “Legalizers”, disagree, believing that all use of cannabis is, indeed, not medical; it can be spiritual, recreational, and industrial, too, and we don’t need to have medical excuses to get high.
So in this “Crossroads Debate”, David Malmo-Levine concludes his article with:
The biggest mistake we could possibly make is to associate medicine only with the sick:
Mickey Martin – the “Cannabis Warrior” – makes that mistake in his latest blog. He argues that anyone who says “all use is medical” is also saying – in the same breath – that “every stoner is a patient”.http://cannabiswarrior.com/
2011/12/17/know-when-to-hold- em-know-when-to-fold-em/ What some of us are ACTUALLY saying – and all of us including Mickey should be saying – is that “all use is medical and – when the war on cannabis finally ends and cannabis is first regulated like wine and then eventually like coffee beans – nobody needs to be a patient any longer.”
Doctors are a temporary buffer against the police – they are not the end goal of those who recognize cannabis as a medicine (and who recognize each user as someone taking a medicine and feeling the medicinal effects and thus being a “medicinal user” regardless of whether they are abusing it or having fun or blowing smoke-rings or whatever).
Until marijuana is regulated like wine, people will need to use doctors to protect them from the police.
You’re asking the reader to accept that medical = wine = coffee. Nobody I know calls their after-dinner wine or before-work coffee “medicine”. I get that you want to “inclusivize” cannabis like herbology, acupuncture, whatever non-traditional healing wellness thing, but none of those are also something young people do to get high.
If the end point is “it should be treated like coffee”, then face the public and say, “it should be treated like coffee”. If it is a substance we should be able to use because we want to _____ (stay well, treat illness, commune with Jah, get laid, enjoy Jerry Garcia solos) then just say so! Personally, I like “treat it like wine” better; I support age limits and location restrictions for cannabis use (of course, my “age limit” would be 16 and my restriction would be “anywhere there’s not a ‘no smoking’ sign”.)
All this dancing around holistic medical wellness makes the public feel like there’s something at the core we can’t be honest about and we have to dress it up with euphemisms. No matter how holistically medically wellnessy cannabis is, mom and dad still worry about their teenager becoming a wastoid. Folks worry about you wrecking your car into them on your holistically medically wellnessy cannabis. The core we’re dancing around here is that marijuana can get you high – whether it’s “relaxation”, “recreation”, “wellness”, “stress relief”, “enhancement”, “medicated”, “lifted”, “stoned”, the name we give it does not change what it is.
Now, WE KNOW there’s more to fear from drunk teenagers and drivers on Oxycontin or cell phones, but those facts don’t make folks feel any less scared of the marijuana. It’s like saying, “Don’t worry about your kid surfing in June – shark bite attacks are much more prevalent in August.” Read some Drew Westen, some George Lakoff, even Frank Luntz or Karl Rove… people don’t vote and think reasonably and rationally, they vote and think from fear and self-interest.
We played the self-interest card with medical marijuana. The voter was forced to decide whether he/she would allow cops to imprison sick people and let them suffer without pot. This was a self-interest factor greater than the “I gotta protect society / my kids from dope” self-interest factor.
But now our opponents are trumping it with their fear cards. Mexican gangs are growing in the forests to supply medical marijuana! Drivers are stopped with hundreds of pounds of California or Colorado medical marijuana on its way to your state! Your kids are smoking more pot than in thirty years because medical marijuana makes them think it’s safe! Your neighbor is converting his house to a grow factory to profit from medical marijuana! There’s also a self-interest factor of the voter who feels he was bamboozled when he/she voted for medical marijuana every time he/she sees a “Get Your Card $45″ placard or hears an ad for another medical marijuana expo featuring Kottonmouth Kings or Cheech & Chong.
Now is the time to get to the fear and self-interest that works in our favor. Until the voter fears the status quo of prohibition more than the mystery of a new legal substance, fear of medmj adding to the “drug problem” is going to keep us in a defensive posture of approving stricter and stricter medical marijuana regulations You can’t get the medmj for anxiety wellness approved outside California so long as voters think “druggies” can fake anxiety.
So we should make them fear the unregulated dealer who panders to kids far more than a regulated clerk would. Fear the violence in Mexico that will spill over our border (more), lead our troops into a drug war on our continent (more), and nobody’s shooting anybody over Corona or Dos Equis. Fear the over-militarization of our domestic police and inevitable corruption and racial profiling that results from trying to stop adults from smoking a joint. Fear that someone who could use medical marijuana won’t be able to get it, because no matter how you craft a medical use law, someone won’t be “sick enough”, be able to afford the doctor visit and state registry, or afford prohibition-priced marijuana. Fear that the truly sick legit patients now have to suffer shortages or live in fear of both the illegal gangs of rippers and robbers and the legal gangs of SWAT and feds due to prohibition.
Then ply them with the self-interest of increased tax revenues, reduced crime, new industries, yada yada yada.
Now, here’s where someone usually says, “but we tried all that and it didn’t work; only when we did medical did laws really change!” I disagree; I think we tried all that and it did work; that’s what got us medical.”
Beginning Nixon’s drug war, marijuana legalization support was 12%. By 1977, after nothing but a “I smoke pot and I like it a lot” strategy, 11 states decriminalized and support was at 30%. Then it hit the Eighties and many factors, including cultural ties to cocaine, rejection of 1970s malaise / 1960s culture war, and bipartisan escalation of the overall drug war, led to legalization support dropping to 16%.
But those polls began inching upwards in the late Eighties and early Nineties, before anyone outside of San Francisco was putting “medical” with “marijuana”. We went from 1987 and a Supreme Court nominee being sacked for admitting smoking pot at Harvard to 1992 and a presidential candidate winning after admitting (kinda) smoking pot at Oxford. I’d venture that rise owes to Baby Boomers whose kids had left the nest then rediscovering pot and remembering it’s pretty cool, actually. I’d note also the rise of hip-hop during that period spreading love of “the chronic” from the coasts to the rest of youth of America. And the only message being spread back then in the bleak Eighties was Jack Herer’s (and others’) preaching about free and unregulated hemp, with medical use as just one aspect of this marvelous plant.
Then it was possible to pitch medical marijuana to a public softened to the notion that personal marijuana use wasn’t a big deal. I doubt Prop 215 does so well in 1986 or 1988. (I also don’t think it would do so well in a 2012 vote, if this were sunsetting and California had to vote to keep it exactly as is. Interesting to think about until somebody polls it.)
Times change – there is enough evidence for most people, from medical use they see and read about to more people’s own personal use, that the strategy of the 1970s – legalize it! – doesn’t face the same perils today. Support now is 50%, not 16%. People under 50 who’ve tried it amount to 52% of the population, not 30%. More than half (51%) know now that it is a safer substance than alcohol. Three presidents have tried it and the greatest Olympic swimmer ever famously inhaled during his greatness. Google abounds with factual references on cannabis and its users.
But people don’t change without the pain of staying the same being greater than the fear of change. The public is at the precipice, ready to leap to legalization, knowing it is the right path, but scared of how to get there and whether it is worse than just staying here at the ledge. ”Medical” doesn’t make them leap; “medical” is some other guy/gal on the precipice with their own issues. I don’t even think “regulation” and “taxation” work as well, as many Americans think those two things are inherently bad (thank Frank Luntz). I like to say “control” – it rankles the choir, to be sure (“No corporate / government control of cannabis!”), but to the public it evokes the counter, “out-of-control”, that many of them feel about marijuana (medical or recreational). I think a wise initiative drafter would pen the “Marijuana Control & Revenue Act” and get votes from the ballot title alone.
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I’m medical and I appreciate the fact that I’m somewhat protected in my state however… until it’s legal for all I’m still a second class citizen without many of my Constitutional protections that “other” people enjoy. Until the witch hunt ends for healthly people I’ll always be fair game for arrest until proven “sick”.
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I have forwarded to you a copy of the email you doubt exists, and would appreciate some sort of public acknowledgement.
It’s obvious your views have shifted since you wrote that letter, and that’s okay. Sometime between March and November 2010, they shifted, and you never told me until NORML was threatening to take away our charter.
NORML went so far as to accuse me of denying chapter members the right to express support for legalization. Keith even suggested I was publicly anti-legalization. Both untrue.
I’ve enjoyed our sparring, even learned a thing or two from it. But, when my honesty comes into question, I have the right to defend myself.
Robert Delaney
(Before I rant, I doubt I told you to have NORML meetings in private. Yes, the board of directors can have private meetings, but NORML Chapters official meetings are always open to the public. Where NORML Louisiana and I ran into difficulty is when you wanted to have it be an exclusively-medical-marijuana org and to squelch all talk of non-medical legalization on your website and forums. It’s one thing to say we’re going to laser focus on a medical marijuana bill, but NORML can never be anti-legalization or even shh-let’s-not-talk-about-legalization. Our Mission Statement is “to move public opinion sufficiently to achieve the repeal of marijuana prohibition so that the responsible use of cannabis by adults is no longer subject to penalty.” You can’t change public opinion on a subject if you squelch discussion of it.)
It’s not “forget medmj, push legalization” I’m trying to get across here. It’s “push all reforms as part of legalization” I’m working on. This “they’re ruining it for us” is exactly what I’m addressing – some imaginary ideal from the patients’ perspective that there is a “they” and an “us”.
Yes, some people “need to” smoke marijuana as opposed to “want to”. But it is this artificial distinction of who should be imprisoned over the same plant that has gotten us to this point. This idea that the “stereotypical stoners” are going to sit silently by and accept continued arrests and forfeitures lest they “ruin it” for sick people is as ludicrous as thinking you can set up a medical marijuana program and not have a sizeable number of the “stereotypical stoners” trying to find any way they can to game that system to avoid arrests and forfeitures.
It’s the Faustian Bargain of medical marijuana – saying really sick people deserve an exception to criminal prosecution maintains wins elections, but it underscores and bolsters the idea that criminal prosecutions should exist for healthy people’s marijuana use. Before, everybody was just a pothead getting high. Today, some people are legitimate patients deserving of compassion and the rest are potheads not just getting high, but abusing the medicine of the legitimate patients by defrauding a regulatory system. Now those chickens are coming home to roost and after fifteen years of medical marijuana and 13,000,000 arrests of “stereotypical stoners”, things have changed.
It’s honorable to be in Louisiana and to try to play the “how can you lock up the poor suffering patients?!?” card as if it is 1996-2004. We “stereotypical stoners” even stood back, kept quiet, and worked hard for other people’s protection from arrest and forfeiture for what we ourselves did back in 1996-2004. I just don’t think that hand can win anymore, or if it does, it wins such a restricted, secured, unworkable program as to be a moot point for most of the people you tried to help. Only six of the medmj states cover more than 10,000 patients; four of them cover less than 1,000. And each “victory” for medical marijuana in a state sets the precedent for the next one to be even more restrictive and unworkable. Maybe those “stereotypical stoners” in Louisiana heard your protect-only-sick-people pitch and thought, “Gee, California said that in 1996 and didn’t even try a legalization vote til 2010… are we going to have to wait another 15 years before someone is an activist leader for us?”
And, very soon, pharmaceutical science catches up with cannabis and every manner of pill, spray, inhaler, tincture, suppository, and patch is developed to take care of your wheelchair patients, without the pesky high and without the baggage of the “stereotypical stoners”. In that future, there are no “medical marijuana patients” – there are people receiving cannabinoid pharmaceuticals through their insurance provider and health maintenance organization, and there are people who grow and use a banned plant and get prison for it.
Now, if you’re fighting for the suffering patient and relieving that suffering is of paramount importance, than this doesn’t matter. If the goal is to relieve suffering, and if it happens via pill, spray, inhaler, tincture, suppository, or patch from Big Pharma OR a joint, pipe, vaporizer, or bong from your home garden, the goal is achieved either way. And given that the Big Pharma path is perceived to be the easier electoral strategy, one cannot be disrespected for making that choice.
However, if your goal is liberation of cannabis for all people for all uses, the medical marijuana route, I believe, is going to prevent achievement of that goal in the long run. Fighting for medical marijuana is going to get you medical marijuana, period. And for all the talk I hear from ASA leaders, Harborside leaders, and you with “Of course nobody should go to jail for any cannabis use, of course I don’t support lacking you up, Russ,” all the money and support and activism always go toward patients-only work, as is their mandate. It’s more than a little frustrating to see “stereotypical stoners” spending money in California dispensaries to profit a businessman who will spend money to defeat legalization proposals.
So the medmj orgs and leaders can focus exclusively on the patients and get a pass on “of course we don’t support locking you up, Russ”, but we get castigated as “No, MMJ/yes, legalization folks” when our focus is not just sick people or healthy people but all people who use cannabis? My stance for legalization is the most pro-medical-marijuana position possible! And I’d rather win with it in ten or twenty years than to go down a path where in ten to twenty years Big Pharma wins.
This is where someone will say, “But Russ, so-and-so will DIE by then without cannabis!” OK, then so-and-so can do like my stoner friends do and be very very careful about not getting caught, be extra vigilant for the sight of police, always know where the Febreze, Visine, and breath mints are, and so forth. Because I’ll tell you what, if both stoner dude and wheelchair dude are each caught with a half-ounce of weed in Louisiana, I bet wheelchair dude gets no worse a sentence and likely a better sentence than stoner dude. (E.g., Todd Blackburn, a NORML attorney in Amarillo, got an AIDS patient out of a minor possession charge on an affirmative defense (“I hafta use it or I suffer”) after a jury deliberated 11 minutes on the case. That’s a pot smoker walking out of a West Texas courtroom after being caught red-handed. Meanwhile, I just reported a similar story of a similar amount in Texas, and that stoner got two years.)
IT IS EITHER A TRAVESTY TO RUIN A PERSON’S LIFE FOR CANNABIS USE, OR IT IS NOT. WHY THEY CHOSE TO USE IT, BE IT NECESSITY OR WANT, DOES NOT MITIGATE OR MODIFY THE TRAVESTY. It is not someone’s fault they got stricken with multiple sclerosis, but it is also not someone’s fault they did not. And in this society we are constantly directed to provide equality to all; we passed ADA and HIPAA and other laws to ensure that handicapped and sick people got to be treated EQUALLY, not SUPERIOR.
“All use is medical”? How about “All use is nobody’s damn business”? Patients don’t have to wait any longer, they can get weed right now, often from a “stereotypical stoner” who’s been growing it for years. Pushing medical marijuana ahead of legalization makes non-patients wait longer – your statement shows once again you feel people who are sick are more deserving of protection from a cage for cannabis use than me.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m saying you’re wrong for me and wrong about medmj leading to legalization. Again, it is perfectly honorable to disagree with me if the end goal is only to ensure sick people don’t suffer. But don’t try to convince me you think equally that sick and healthy people shouldn’t be imprisoned for marijuana use when it’s clear you don’t think that we’re equal.
Russ, I really miss your daily rants!
Got arrested recently in WV…very sad now…Radical you give me a little bitof hope.
In 2010, I was fortunate enough to be involved with NORML as director of the NORML Louisiana chapter. The numerous events I participated in focused on the urgent need for safe and legal medical marijuana for patients in our state. Typical deep south conservative and draconian marijuana laws (New Orleans being the only exception) and attitudes are far removed from what national polls indicate, and (as Russ agreed during the creation of the chapter) regardless of the validity of the argument for legalization. medical marijuana access is the only reform Louisianians can reasonably expect to achieve in the foreseeable future.
Russ was explicitly supportive of our efforts, writing, “Go ahead and have NORML meetings in private, explain to members the strategy of being laser-focused on medical with the understanding that if this one reform can happen, we can move to broader reforms in the future,” in an email to me back in March ’10.
If states like Louisiana were in the minority, I would better understand the push for legalization over MMJ, but it’s not.
At one medical marijuana event sponsored by NORML Louisiana, the crowd in attendance appeared to be dominated by shouts of “legalize it for everybody!” and the like, and a lady suffering from MS rolled her wheelchair next to mine and said, “They’re ruining this for us. I’m here to say I need medicine, and these guys are drowning out the message with ‘Let’s get fucked up’ chants.”
Hoping for a show of support from local media was effectively dashed as the event looked, at least superficially, like a celebration by stereotypical stoners.
I don’t believe anyone should ever be arrested, or hassled in any way, for choosing to use cannabis for any reason. I believe it is a safer alternative to the pharmaceutical medications I was addicted to for years, and have felt with my own body and seen with my own eyes the relief it is capable of providing.
You recreational enthusiasts don’t deserve to be arrested, but remember: your choice to risk arrest was based upon desire (to get high), not necessity (medical relief). It doesn’t make one arrest more justified than the other, but in some cases, MMJ could mean the difference between life or death.
Any reasonable person, given exposure to the attitudes in most non-MMJ states (I often wonder how many No, MMJ/yes, legalization folks actually live in one) can only conclude that while legalization for all adults isn’t completely impossible, safe and legal medical access for all patients is certainly within our grasp.
I’m just saying. Pushing legalization ahead of MMJ will make patients wait longer, and there are patients who simply can’t wait. There are patients who don’t even know MMJ might help them. They should be at the forefront of MMJ activism, but prohibitionists are telling them MMJ is a ruse.
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“Medicalizers” want to transform people’s understanding from an “illness model” to a “wellness model.” That is, part of their perspective is a cultural critique of the emphasis on heroic interventions on the already sick.
That strikes me as a valid criticism and a program for cultural change.
As a strategy for cannabis law reform, however, it asks too much. It says: here’s this drug that you thought was just to get high; actually, people can smoke it all the time just to be well!
It’s no wonder many people don’t think that’s honest. They’re not ready to go along with the paradigm shift, so they reject the program.
The notion of recreational drug use is, for me, very problematic because it contains assumptions that may not always be true, and certainly do not need to be the case. Currently, for example, spiritual uses of cannabis would probably fall under recreation.
But that’s where we need to have the debate, like the fable of the guy looking for his lost key under the lamplight. That’s where a lot of the public is at, and to insist that the conversation can only begin when they turn everything they know about cannabis upside is asking too much.