Question: So I know you're not supposed to say "bong" in a headshop...what about chillum? Like last time my friend bought one, he just pointed at it and asked if he could see it.
There's a few around here...Like The Shed is a national chain store that's all official and shit, they ID as soon as you walk in and refuse service if you say something suspicious...Then there's the little local places that I'm pretty sure don't care too much, I just want to be safe
Do you get high? If so, you have a lot of company. Although no country has yet legalized marijuana, almost half of the world’s 147 nations have, to some extent, decriminalized it. In the United States, according to an April 2009 Zogby poll, 52 percent of the population now favors legalization—the largest percentage ever.
Despite marijuana’s growing acceptance, most of our elected officials are still reluctant to advocate for the cause. As Rick Doblin, President of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)—a nonprofit that has advocated on behalf of medical marijuana since the 80s—points out: “Most politicians still won’t come out in favor of medical marijuana because they don’t want to appear pro-legalization. And they’re afraid of appearing pro-legalization, because they’re scared of being accused of wanting to give drugs to children.”
And it’s unlikely things will change anytime soon. Pot’s continued criminalization has been championed, sometimes overtly, often covertly, by powerful groups—among them law enforcement agencies, the alcohol and tobacco industries, pharmaceutical companies and the prison-industrial complex—who have repeatedly shaped laws and public opinion to reflect their views.
So weed remains a crime, albeit a very popular one.
Pot Arrest Statistics
Pot arrests are at a near-record high. According to FBI statistics, in 2009 more than 1.7 million people were brought in on marijuana-related charges—almost half of them (758,593 to be exact) for simply smoking pot (as opposed to growing or dealing it). According to “Lost Revenues and Other Costs of Marijuana Laws,” a report written by Drug Science public policy analyst Jon Gettman, enforcing America’s pot laws costs taxpayers an annual $10.7 billion. Not to mention the overburdening of our criminal justice system and disruption of the lives of those who find themselves with a criminal record for smoking an occasional joint.
“If an arrest leads to a conviction, as it often does,” says American Civil Liberties Union policy advocate Mark Cooke, “it can lead to a lifetime of collateral consequences. These include loss of employment, loss of housing, loss of voting rights, loss of federal financial aid for college, seizure and forfeiture of property, termination of child visitation rights and deportation for legal immigrants. If an arrest results in incarceration, the offender will face lower job prospects and have diminished earning capacity. Even if someone is merely arrested for using marijuana and doesn’t actually get charged, they will still bear the stigma of being labeled a criminal.”
Medical Marijuana as Miracle Drug
Meanwhile, medical marijuana has come to be seen as something of a wonder drug. Researchers have declared it one of the most successful palliatives in the medicine chest—beneficial in the treatment of pain, nausea, vomiting, premenstrual syndrome (PMS), lack of appetite, migraines, fibromyalgia, cancer, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, Lyme disease, obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), Tourette’s syndrome and many more. “There’s nothing in our current pharmacopoeia that comes close,” says Michael Backes, owner of the Cornerstone Research Collective, a Los Angeles-based medical marijuana dispensary and research organization.
All this pro-pot sentiment is not new. One of the earliest laws passed in the New World—a 1619 Jamestown colony law—required all settlers to grow cannabis (some of this was for domestic use, but much was at the “request” of our colonial masters who used the plant for everything from rope to medicines). Two hundred years later there were more than 8,000 hemp plantations in the colonies—with nothing less than 2,000 acres counting as a plantation.
So how did we get from hemp being as American as apple pie to U.S. prisons overflowing with marijuana offenders?
[-(
blue turbins
From Those Fishes - I Fingered An Old Bitch (i got Aids on my finger)
Hemp Under Attack Hemp is a British word for a number of varieties of the cannabis plant that contain very low amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the plant’s main psychoactive chemical, as opposed to marijuana—a variety of cannabis with high THC content. It was a respected part of agriculture in America until the dawn of the 20th century. That’s when everything changed—thanks primarily to xenophobia magnified by economic pressures.
Between 1900 and 1930, more than a million Mexican laborers poured over the border into the Southwest. Unfortunately, with jobs in short supply, especially during the depression years, Americans began looking for someone to blame for their economic woes.
Mexicans became a favorite target. And since the stereotype of the time was that these same Mexicans liked to smoke marijuana—in 1919 the Chicago Tribune called it “a weed from the Mexican desert”—it became guilt by association. From 1906 through 1927, California, Wyoming, Texas, Iowa, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Arkansas and Nebraska all passed legislation outlawing the pot-smoking habits of their immigrant populations. Some argue this effort was entirely motivated by economic factors, others feel it was plain old racial discrimination. In the mid-1920s, as CBS News recently reported, one senator told the Texas legislature: “All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff (pot) is what makes them crazy.”
Criminalization Moves East
Anti-pot laws spread to the eastern states after 1930, but this time the target user demographic expanded to include African-Americans—specifically those involved in the jazz scene. In 1937, the first director of the newly established Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger, told Congress: "There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, results from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others."
Anslinger’s racist tirades often showed up in newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst. Since Hearst owned considerable timber interests as well, many have claimed his devotion to the anti-pot cause was really a fear of hemp-based paper out-competing pulp paper for newspaper contracts. But Hearst had help.
In his 1985 book, The Emperor Has No Clothes, author Jack Herer concluded that the DuPont corporation had plenty to do with the criminalization of cannabis. DuPont owned the patent for creating plastics from coal and oil, and another for creating paper from wood pulp—two processes that would have been seriously threatened by hemp. Shoring up this claim is the fact that Andrew Mellon was both DuPont’s biggest backer and the Secretary of Treasury under Hoover, and it was Mellon who appointed Harry Anslinger to office.
Anslinger’s War on Drugs
Anslinger’s ambition and lack of scruples were legendary. Whether he was on the DuPont take (or just under orders from Mellon) really didn’t matter. He wanted power and fast—and saw old fears about marijuana as the ticket to ride. According to the authoritative Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties: “William Randolph Hearst, whose papers led the fight, offered Anslinger space in his papers and magazines, and Anslinger gladly availed himself of the opportunity. He filled article after article with scare stories that not only warned against alleged dangers of hemp, but also were overtly racist: ‘Two Negros took a fourteen-year-old girl and kept her for two days under the influence of marijuana. Upon recovery she was found to be suffering from syphilis.’”
Because of Anslinger, the Marihuana [sic] Tax Act of 1937 was passed, making the possession or transfer of cannabis illegal throughout the U.S. This law was declared unconstitutional in the 1969 Supreme Court case Leary v. United States (that’s Leary, as in Harvard professor turned LSD advocate, Timothy Leary), so Congress repealed the Tax Act and replaced it with the Controlled Substance Act of 1970, which kept pot illegal. And, excluding the use of medicinal cannabis, that’s about where we stand today.
Or stood.
Recent surveys have found that 41 percent of Americans have tried marijuana. While California’s Proposition 19, which would have decriminalized the drug’s recreational use, was defeated, it still garnered the support of 44 percent of the voters. Should legalization ever become the law, some experts feel we might not even notice the difference.
“We already know,” says Keith Stroup, head legal counsel for NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws), “that very few people are going to get up and not go to work tomorrow because marijuana is legalized. The gears of society will not grind to a halt. The biggest differences will be that the nearly 900,000 people who are arrested for pot each year will be spared a tremendous amount of pain. I also think driving accidents will go down. Surveys show that a lot of people won’t drink if they can smoke and, while cannabis impairs driving, studies also show that the accidents resulting from booze are significantly worse than those resulting from marijuana—drunk people speed up, stoned ones slow down.”
[-(
blue turbins
From Those Fishes - I Fingered An Old Bitch (i got Aids on my finger)
“No group is more opposed to the legalization of marijuana than law enforcement,” says NORML spokesman Allen St. Pierre. “They aren’t just arguing for preserving the current status quo—they want stiffer penalties and more restrictions and the reason is simple: it’s job security.” According to St. Pierre, at least 30 percent of the work of law enforcement currently revolves around marijuana prohibition, with pot accounting for more than 50 percent of all drug arrests.
Police groups clearly offer the most visible opposition to legal pot; they often work behind the scenes as well. In 2008, Eric Steenstraw, president of the industrial hemp activist organization Hemp Now, helped manage to get bipartisan bill AB 684, the California Industrial Hemp Farming Act, passed. This state law would have allowed California farmers to legally supply manufacturers with hemp seeds, oil and fiber that they now obtain from Canada, China or other places where growing the crop is permissible. Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill almost immediately. “I was told afterwards,” says Steenstraw, “that it was John Lovell—the main lobbyist for the California Narcotics Officers Association (and three other major California law enforcement organizations)—who got to the Governor. That was the only opposition we got and it was enough to kill the bill.”
While Lovell worked hard to get AB 684 vetoed, he actually had help. “There were 16 different law enforcement agencies who opposed the bill,” he says. “I only represented four of them. But Steenstraw’s correct about law enforcement’s opposition. There’s just no easy visual way to differentiate hemp from cannabis, and if this bill would have gone into effect, it would have seriously undermined major marijuana cultivation enforcement efforts.”
The Alcohol and Tobacco Industries
Alcohol industry product (iStack Photo)The idea that alcohol and tobacco companies would oppose looser restrictions on marijuana may seem odd. After all, both industries are in the business of making people feel good. But a number of researchers have found that pot turns out to be more of a substitute for alcohol and tobacco than a complement. In 2009, Amanda Reiman, a UC Berkeley social scientist, published a study in the Harm Reduction Journal showing that 40 percent of her patient population had substituted cannabis for booze at some point. Other studies found that when pot smokers can’t find marijuana they binge drink instead. Simply put: the tobacco and alcohol companies are worried about losing market share to weed.
In 1991, NORML used a Freedom of Information Act request to examine the funding records of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, a nonprofit that provides anti-drug resources to parents. They discovered that 50 percent of the organization’s capital came from the alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceutical industries. So embarrassing was this revelation that, according to St. Pierre, “ever since, these industries have tried to hide their marijuana opposition.”
But with legalization pressures mounting last summer, the California Beer and Beverage Distributors came out of the closet and donated $10,000 to Public Safety First, an organization fighting against California’s Prop 19. In a CNN interview about the donation, Mason Tvert, executive director of SAFER (a Colorado-based pro-pot advocacy group), said: “Every objective study on marijuana has concluded that it’s a far safer substance than alcohol. Clearly what we’re seeing here is that the alcohol industry is trying to prevent competition. They realize that marijuana is the next most popular recreational drug after alcohol and they want to insure the booze keeps flowing and the pot does not.”
Some experts also feel that these industries are actually playing both sides against the middle. “The tobacco industry has a long history of opposing legalization,” says St. Pierre, “but no one is better positioned to start selling legal marijuana. They already know how to process and market dried vegetable matter. In fact, a few years ago, when everyone was suing the tobacco industry, the court documents revealed that one of the big British tobacco companies—a company that specialized in menthol cigarettes—had run experiments to try and figure out how to mentholate cannabis and how to market the result to the African-American community.”
[-(
blue turbins
From Those Fishes - I Fingered An Old Bitch (i got Aids on my finger)
smoking has always felt fine to me but one night like two weeks ago i woke up in the middle of the night after smoking and couldnt breathe good at all, it was weird
Big Pharma and Government The Pharmaceutical Industry
In 2009, the global pharmaceutical market was worth $837 billion—and it’s on track to top $1 trillion by 2014. This is a lot of money to spread around, so when it comes to lobbying efforts, very few have this group’s clout. Mostly, Big Pharma gets what Big Pharma wants. And one thing it wants is for marijuana to remain illegal.
It’s not hard to figure out why. You can’t patent a plant—and that’s a big problem for pharmaceutical companies when it comes to medical marijuana.
Why?
Imagine a wonder drug able to provide much-needed relief from dozens and dozens of conditions. Imagine it’s cheap, easy to grow, easy to dispense, easy to ingest and, over millennia of “product testing,” has produced no fatalities and few side effects—except for the fact that it “reportedly” makes you feel really, really good. That would be quite a drug. Knowing all this, it’s easy to see why the pharmaceutical industry worries about competition from marijuana.
And besides its palliative prowess, researchers consistently find that patients prefer smoking marijuana to taking prescription drugs. In another study run by Reiman, 66 percent of her patients used cannabis as a substitute for prescription drugs; 68 percent used it instead of prescription drugs to treat a chronic condition and 85 percent reported that cannabis had fewer side effects than other medicines.
Early on, the pharmaceutical industry fought back by spending money on anti-pot efforts, but the same NORML investigation that fingered the alcohol and tobacco industries as heavy backers of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America found that Big Pharma was doing so as well. “They were so embarrassed by that revelation” says MAPS founder Rick Doblin, “that they mostly stopped spending money on anti-marijuana lobbying efforts.”
Since then, the pharmaceutical industry has shifted its focus to developing alternatives to medical cannabis, often taking the traditional reductionist approach. Specifically, these days, if a pharmaceutical company wants to turn a plant into a medicine they isolate the most active ingredient and make what’s known as a “single-compound drug.” Morphine, for example, is really just the chemical core of the poppy plant. This too has been tried with marijuana. Out of the 400 chemicals in marijuana, 80 of them belong to a class called “cannabinoids.” Out of those 80 cannabinoids, a number of pharmaceutical companies have tried reducing marijuana to only one: THC. But the results have been unsatisfactory.
“There are certain cases,” says Doblin, “where the single-compound formula works wonders. But it’s just not true in every case. The pharmaceutical industry keeps claiming they’re not worried about medical marijuana because they make a better product, but when you reduce cannabis to just THC, you lose efficacy and gain side effects.”
Government Entities
The U.S. government pours $15 billion into the office of the Drug Czar each year. And this total doesn’t include a few obvious items like the cost of imprisoning drug offenders, nor does it cover state or local funds spin-off entities like D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education)—which has an annual billion-dollar operating budget—or the dozens of other government agencies currently getting additional monies thanks to anti-pot laws. The problem is that all that money translates into jobs—lots of jobs—and it’s in the vested interests of all these agencies to oppose marijuana legalization.
The smoking gun in this equation, at least according to some critics, is the U.S. government’s reliance on propaganda in their anti-marijuana campaign. For example, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) 2008 Marijuana Sourcebook states that recent research shows marijuana is a “gateway drug” (it leads people to use harder drugs), even though scientists studying the issue keep finding the opposite. In 2006, a study published in the American Journal of Public Health, for example, found no evidence that marijuana acts as a gateway drug. And a 2002 report by the RAND corporation, an independent research group with a historically conservative bent, examined the historical data from 1982-1994 and found the exact same thing.
Furthermore, Congress is a reactive body. “The number-one rule in Congress is ‘get re-elected,’” says NORML’s Paul Stroup. “Until we can demonstrate that pot wins votes, Congressmen are going to play it safe. But if something like Proposition 19 passes and polling shows that it increased voter turnout, this could become a key wedge issue for Democrats.”
[-(
blue turbins
From Those Fishes - I Fingered An Old Bitch (i got Aids on my finger)
A prisoner serves his time. (iStock Photo)The business models for private prison corporations are all the same: buy land, build cells and let law-enforcement agencies fill those cells. With a marijuana arrest made every 38 seconds—more than 15 million since 1973—housing pot prisoners is big business. “Private prison corporations spend big dollars supporting anti-marijuana legalization groups for this reason,” says St. Pierre.
There are many others in the marijuana-conviction food chain. “Because judges now allow drug offenders to choose between treatment and jail,” says Mike Meno, spokesman for the pro-pot advocacy organization, the Marijuana Policy Project, “more people are now admitted to treatment centers for marijuana than any other drug. This [treatment center] revenue stream goes away if marijuana becomes legal.”
And then there are hundreds, if not thousands, of subsidiaries further downstream. Critics have pointed, for example, to helicopter manufacturers (whose products are used for pesticide spraying, drug-war enforcement, etc.), pesticide peddlers and, well, even drug lords. In a 2009 article for the Huffington Post, David Sterry reported that Joaquin Guzman Loera, reputed head of the infamous Sinaloa Cartel (and number 701 on the Forbes list of the wealthiest men in the world), officially thanked U.S. politicians for keeping drugs illegal and making him rich.
Sperry wrote: “According to one of his closest confidants, he [Loera] said, ‘I couldn't have gotten so stinking rich without George Bush, George Bush Jr., Ronald Reagan, even El Presidente Obama. None of them have the cajones to stand up to all the big money that wants to keep this stuff illegal. From the bottom of my heart, I want to say, gracias amigos, I owe my whole empire to you.’"
Regardless of the economic, medical and other benefits of hemp—and despite evidence showing marijuana may be safer than alcohol—pot remains officially lumped in with dangerous and highly addictive narcotics like cocaine, amphetamines and heroin. It’s no wonder, with so many powerful organizations secretly pursuing no-holds-barred anti-legalization agendas. Until they reverse their stance, it’s a good bet that pot will remain an illegal activity in America.
--
Steven Kotler is the author of The Angle Quickest for Flight, West of Jesus: Surfing, Science, and the Origins of Belief and A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life. His non-fiction has appeared in more than 50 publications, including the New York Times Magazine, LA Times, Wired, Popular Science, GQ, Outside and National Geographic. He writes The Playing Field, a blog about the science of sport, for PsychologyToday and is op-ed editor and chief investigative reporter for ecology site, EcoHearth.com. More at StevenKotler.com.
[-(
blue turbins
From Those Fishes - I Fingered An Old Bitch (i got Aids on my finger)
Comments
i bought a new pipe yesterdayzz
youz guyz wanna seeee??
Its fucking solid really thick
im digging it lol
i always just thought that was like a normall pipe lol
and back on the topic of being allergic to weed, one of my best friends is. if he smokes he gets a rash, headache, etc. it sucks.
Despite marijuana’s growing acceptance, most of our elected officials are still reluctant to advocate for the cause. As Rick Doblin, President of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)—a nonprofit that has advocated on behalf of medical marijuana since the 80s—points out: “Most politicians still won’t come out in favor of medical marijuana because they don’t want to appear pro-legalization. And they’re afraid of appearing pro-legalization, because they’re scared of being accused of wanting to give drugs to children.”
And it’s unlikely things will change anytime soon. Pot’s continued criminalization has been championed, sometimes overtly, often covertly, by powerful groups—among them law enforcement agencies, the alcohol and tobacco industries, pharmaceutical companies and the prison-industrial complex—who have repeatedly shaped laws and public opinion to reflect their views.
So weed remains a crime, albeit a very popular one.
Pot Arrest Statistics
Pot arrests are at a near-record high. According to FBI statistics, in 2009 more than 1.7 million people were brought in on marijuana-related charges—almost half of them (758,593 to be exact) for simply smoking pot (as opposed to growing or dealing it). According to “Lost Revenues and Other Costs of Marijuana Laws,” a report written by Drug Science public policy analyst Jon Gettman, enforcing America’s pot laws costs taxpayers an annual $10.7 billion. Not to mention the overburdening of our criminal justice system and disruption of the lives of those who find themselves with a criminal record for smoking an occasional joint.
“If an arrest leads to a conviction, as it often does,” says American Civil Liberties Union policy advocate Mark Cooke, “it can lead to a lifetime of collateral consequences. These include loss of employment, loss of housing, loss of voting rights, loss of federal financial aid for college, seizure and forfeiture of property, termination of child visitation rights and deportation for legal immigrants. If an arrest results in incarceration, the offender will face lower job prospects and have diminished earning capacity. Even if someone is merely arrested for using marijuana and doesn’t actually get charged, they will still bear the stigma of being labeled a criminal.”
Medical Marijuana as Miracle Drug
Meanwhile, medical marijuana has come to be seen as something of a wonder drug. Researchers have declared it one of the most successful palliatives in the medicine chest—beneficial in the treatment of pain, nausea, vomiting, premenstrual syndrome (PMS), lack of appetite, migraines, fibromyalgia, cancer, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, Lyme disease, obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), Tourette’s syndrome and many more. “There’s nothing in our current pharmacopoeia that comes close,” says Michael Backes, owner of the Cornerstone Research Collective, a Los Angeles-based medical marijuana dispensary and research organization.
All this pro-pot sentiment is not new. One of the earliest laws passed in the New World—a 1619 Jamestown colony law—required all settlers to grow cannabis (some of this was for domestic use, but much was at the “request” of our colonial masters who used the plant for everything from rope to medicines). Two hundred years later there were more than 8,000 hemp plantations in the colonies—with nothing less than 2,000 acres counting as a plantation.
So how did we get from hemp being as American as apple pie to U.S. prisons overflowing with marijuana offenders?
[-(
blue turbins
From Those Fishes - I Fingered An Old Bitch (i got Aids on my finger)
Hemp is a British word for a number of varieties of the cannabis plant that contain very low amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the plant’s main psychoactive chemical, as opposed to marijuana—a variety of cannabis with high THC content. It was a respected part of agriculture in America until the dawn of the 20th century. That’s when everything changed—thanks primarily to xenophobia magnified by economic pressures.
Between 1900 and 1930, more than a million Mexican laborers poured over the border into the Southwest. Unfortunately, with jobs in short supply, especially during the depression years, Americans began looking for someone to blame for their economic woes.
Mexicans became a favorite target. And since the stereotype of the time was that these same Mexicans liked to smoke marijuana—in 1919 the Chicago Tribune called it “a weed from the Mexican desert”—it became guilt by association. From 1906 through 1927, California, Wyoming, Texas, Iowa, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Arkansas and Nebraska all passed legislation outlawing the pot-smoking habits of their immigrant populations. Some argue this effort was entirely motivated by economic factors, others feel it was plain old racial discrimination. In the mid-1920s, as CBS News recently reported, one senator told the Texas legislature: “All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff (pot) is what makes them crazy.”
Criminalization Moves East
Anti-pot laws spread to the eastern states after 1930, but this time the target user demographic expanded to include African-Americans—specifically those involved in the jazz scene. In 1937, the first director of the newly established Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger, told Congress: "There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, results from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others."
Anslinger’s racist tirades often showed up in newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst. Since Hearst owned considerable timber interests as well, many have claimed his devotion to the anti-pot cause was really a fear of hemp-based paper out-competing pulp paper for newspaper contracts. But Hearst had help.
In his 1985 book, The Emperor Has No Clothes, author Jack Herer concluded that the DuPont corporation had plenty to do with the criminalization of cannabis. DuPont owned the patent for creating plastics from coal and oil, and another for creating paper from wood pulp—two processes that would have been seriously threatened by hemp. Shoring up this claim is the fact that Andrew Mellon was both DuPont’s biggest backer and the Secretary of Treasury under Hoover, and it was Mellon who appointed Harry Anslinger to office.
Anslinger’s War on Drugs
Anslinger’s ambition and lack of scruples were legendary. Whether he was on the DuPont take (or just under orders from Mellon) really didn’t matter. He wanted power and fast—and saw old fears about marijuana as the ticket to ride. According to the authoritative Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties: “William Randolph Hearst, whose papers led the fight, offered Anslinger space in his papers and magazines, and Anslinger gladly availed himself of the opportunity. He filled article after article with scare stories that not only warned against alleged dangers of hemp, but also were overtly racist: ‘Two Negros took a fourteen-year-old girl and kept her for two days under the influence of marijuana. Upon recovery she was found to be suffering from syphilis.’”
Because of Anslinger, the Marihuana [sic] Tax Act of 1937 was passed, making the possession or transfer of cannabis illegal throughout the U.S. This law was declared unconstitutional in the 1969 Supreme Court case Leary v. United States (that’s Leary, as in Harvard professor turned LSD advocate, Timothy Leary), so Congress repealed the Tax Act and replaced it with the Controlled Substance Act of 1970, which kept pot illegal. And, excluding the use of medicinal cannabis, that’s about where we stand today.
Or stood.
Recent surveys have found that 41 percent of Americans have tried marijuana. While California’s Proposition 19, which would have decriminalized the drug’s recreational use, was defeated, it still garnered the support of 44 percent of the voters. Should legalization ever become the law, some experts feel we might not even notice the difference.
“We already know,” says Keith Stroup, head legal counsel for NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws), “that very few people are going to get up and not go to work tomorrow because marijuana is legalized. The gears of society will not grind to a halt. The biggest differences will be that the nearly 900,000 people who are arrested for pot each year will be spared a tremendous amount of pain. I also think driving accidents will go down. Surveys show that a lot of people won’t drink if they can smoke and, while cannabis impairs driving, studies also show that the accidents resulting from booze are significantly worse than those resulting from marijuana—drunk people speed up, stoned ones slow down.”
[-(
blue turbins
From Those Fishes - I Fingered An Old Bitch (i got Aids on my finger)
Law Enforcement
“No group is more opposed to the legalization of marijuana than law enforcement,” says NORML spokesman Allen St. Pierre. “They aren’t just arguing for preserving the current status quo—they want stiffer penalties and more restrictions and the reason is simple: it’s job security.” According to St. Pierre, at least 30 percent of the work of law enforcement currently revolves around marijuana prohibition, with pot accounting for more than 50 percent of all drug arrests.
Police groups clearly offer the most visible opposition to legal pot; they often work behind the scenes as well. In 2008, Eric Steenstraw, president of the industrial hemp activist organization Hemp Now, helped manage to get bipartisan bill AB 684, the California Industrial Hemp Farming Act, passed. This state law would have allowed California farmers to legally supply manufacturers with hemp seeds, oil and fiber that they now obtain from Canada, China or other places where growing the crop is permissible. Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill almost immediately. “I was told afterwards,” says Steenstraw, “that it was John Lovell—the main lobbyist for the California Narcotics Officers Association (and three other major California law enforcement organizations)—who got to the Governor. That was the only opposition we got and it was enough to kill the bill.”
While Lovell worked hard to get AB 684 vetoed, he actually had help. “There were 16 different law enforcement agencies who opposed the bill,” he says. “I only represented four of them. But Steenstraw’s correct about law enforcement’s opposition. There’s just no easy visual way to differentiate hemp from cannabis, and if this bill would have gone into effect, it would have seriously undermined major marijuana cultivation enforcement efforts.”
The Alcohol and Tobacco Industries
Alcohol industry product (iStack Photo)The idea that alcohol and tobacco companies would oppose looser restrictions on marijuana may seem odd. After all, both industries are in the business of making people feel good. But a number of researchers have found that pot turns out to be more of a substitute for alcohol and tobacco than a complement. In 2009, Amanda Reiman, a UC Berkeley social scientist, published a study in the Harm Reduction Journal showing that 40 percent of her patient population had substituted cannabis for booze at some point. Other studies found that when pot smokers can’t find marijuana they binge drink instead. Simply put: the tobacco and alcohol companies are worried about losing market share to weed.
In 1991, NORML used a Freedom of Information Act request to examine the funding records of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, a nonprofit that provides anti-drug resources to parents. They discovered that 50 percent of the organization’s capital came from the alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceutical industries. So embarrassing was this revelation that, according to St. Pierre, “ever since, these industries have tried to hide their marijuana opposition.”
But with legalization pressures mounting last summer, the California Beer and Beverage Distributors came out of the closet and donated $10,000 to Public Safety First, an organization fighting against California’s Prop 19. In a CNN interview about the donation, Mason Tvert, executive director of SAFER (a Colorado-based pro-pot advocacy group), said: “Every objective study on marijuana has concluded that it’s a far safer substance than alcohol. Clearly what we’re seeing here is that the alcohol industry is trying to prevent competition. They realize that marijuana is the next most popular recreational drug after alcohol and they want to insure the booze keeps flowing and the pot does not.”
Some experts also feel that these industries are actually playing both sides against the middle. “The tobacco industry has a long history of opposing legalization,” says St. Pierre, “but no one is better positioned to start selling legal marijuana. They already know how to process and market dried vegetable matter. In fact, a few years ago, when everyone was suing the tobacco industry, the court documents revealed that one of the big British tobacco companies—a company that specialized in menthol cigarettes—had run experiments to try and figure out how to mentholate cannabis and how to market the result to the African-American community.”
[-(
blue turbins
From Those Fishes - I Fingered An Old Bitch (i got Aids on my finger)
The Pharmaceutical Industry
In 2009, the global pharmaceutical market was worth $837 billion—and it’s on track to top $1 trillion by 2014. This is a lot of money to spread around, so when it comes to lobbying efforts, very few have this group’s clout. Mostly, Big Pharma gets what Big Pharma wants. And one thing it wants is for marijuana to remain illegal.
It’s not hard to figure out why. You can’t patent a plant—and that’s a big problem for pharmaceutical companies when it comes to medical marijuana.
Why?
Imagine a wonder drug able to provide much-needed relief from dozens and dozens of conditions. Imagine it’s cheap, easy to grow, easy to dispense, easy to ingest and, over millennia of “product testing,” has produced no fatalities and few side effects—except for the fact that it “reportedly” makes you feel really, really good. That would be quite a drug. Knowing all this, it’s easy to see why the pharmaceutical industry worries about competition from marijuana.
And besides its palliative prowess, researchers consistently find that patients prefer smoking marijuana to taking prescription drugs. In another study run by Reiman, 66 percent of her patients used cannabis as a substitute for prescription drugs; 68 percent used it instead of prescription drugs to treat a chronic condition and 85 percent reported that cannabis had fewer side effects than other medicines.
Early on, the pharmaceutical industry fought back by spending money on anti-pot efforts, but the same NORML investigation that fingered the alcohol and tobacco industries as heavy backers of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America found that Big Pharma was doing so as well. “They were so embarrassed by that revelation” says MAPS founder Rick Doblin, “that they mostly stopped spending money on anti-marijuana lobbying efforts.”
Since then, the pharmaceutical industry has shifted its focus to developing alternatives to medical cannabis, often taking the traditional reductionist approach. Specifically, these days, if a pharmaceutical company wants to turn a plant into a medicine they isolate the most active ingredient and make what’s known as a “single-compound drug.” Morphine, for example, is really just the chemical core of the poppy plant. This too has been tried with marijuana. Out of the 400 chemicals in marijuana, 80 of them belong to a class called “cannabinoids.” Out of those 80 cannabinoids, a number of pharmaceutical companies have tried reducing marijuana to only one: THC. But the results have been unsatisfactory.
“There are certain cases,” says Doblin, “where the single-compound formula works wonders. But it’s just not true in every case. The pharmaceutical industry keeps claiming they’re not worried about medical marijuana because they make a better product, but when you reduce cannabis to just THC, you lose efficacy and gain side effects.”
Government Entities
The U.S. government pours $15 billion into the office of the Drug Czar each year. And this total doesn’t include a few obvious items like the cost of imprisoning drug offenders, nor does it cover state or local funds spin-off entities like D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education)—which has an annual billion-dollar operating budget—or the dozens of other government agencies currently getting additional monies thanks to anti-pot laws. The problem is that all that money translates into jobs—lots of jobs—and it’s in the vested interests of all these agencies to oppose marijuana legalization.
The smoking gun in this equation, at least according to some critics, is the U.S. government’s reliance on propaganda in their anti-marijuana campaign. For example, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) 2008 Marijuana Sourcebook states that recent research shows marijuana is a “gateway drug” (it leads people to use harder drugs), even though scientists studying the issue keep finding the opposite. In 2006, a study published in the American Journal of Public Health, for example, found no evidence that marijuana acts as a gateway drug. And a 2002 report by the RAND corporation, an independent research group with a historically conservative bent, examined the historical data from 1982-1994 and found the exact same thing.
Furthermore, Congress is a reactive body. “The number-one rule in Congress is ‘get re-elected,’” says NORML’s Paul Stroup. “Until we can demonstrate that pot wins votes, Congressmen are going to play it safe. But if something like Proposition 19 passes and polling shows that it increased voter turnout, this could become a key wedge issue for Democrats.”
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From Those Fishes - I Fingered An Old Bitch (i got Aids on my finger)
A prisoner serves his time. (iStock Photo)The business models for private prison corporations are all the same: buy land, build cells and let law-enforcement agencies fill those cells. With a marijuana arrest made every 38 seconds—more than 15 million since 1973—housing pot prisoners is big business. “Private prison corporations spend big dollars supporting anti-marijuana legalization groups for this reason,” says St. Pierre.
There are many others in the marijuana-conviction food chain. “Because judges now allow drug offenders to choose between treatment and jail,” says Mike Meno, spokesman for the pro-pot advocacy organization, the Marijuana Policy Project, “more people are now admitted to treatment centers for marijuana than any other drug. This [treatment center] revenue stream goes away if marijuana becomes legal.”
And then there are hundreds, if not thousands, of subsidiaries further downstream. Critics have pointed, for example, to helicopter manufacturers (whose products are used for pesticide spraying, drug-war enforcement, etc.), pesticide peddlers and, well, even drug lords. In a 2009 article for the Huffington Post, David Sterry reported that Joaquin Guzman Loera, reputed head of the infamous Sinaloa Cartel (and number 701 on the Forbes list of the wealthiest men in the world), officially thanked U.S. politicians for keeping drugs illegal and making him rich.
Sperry wrote: “According to one of his closest confidants, he [Loera] said, ‘I couldn't have gotten so stinking rich without George Bush, George Bush Jr., Ronald Reagan, even El Presidente Obama. None of them have the cajones to stand up to all the big money that wants to keep this stuff illegal. From the bottom of my heart, I want to say, gracias amigos, I owe my whole empire to you.’"
Regardless of the economic, medical and other benefits of hemp—and despite evidence showing marijuana may be safer than alcohol—pot remains officially lumped in with dangerous and highly addictive narcotics like cocaine, amphetamines and heroin. It’s no wonder, with so many powerful organizations secretly pursuing no-holds-barred anti-legalization agendas. Until they reverse their stance, it’s a good bet that pot will remain an illegal activity in America.
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Steven Kotler is the author of The Angle Quickest for Flight, West of Jesus: Surfing, Science, and the Origins of Belief and A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life. His non-fiction has appeared in more than 50 publications, including the New York Times Magazine, LA Times, Wired, Popular Science, GQ, Outside and National Geographic. He writes The Playing Field, a blog about the science of sport, for PsychologyToday and is op-ed editor and chief investigative reporter for ecology site, EcoHearth.com. More at StevenKotler.com.
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From Those Fishes - I Fingered An Old Bitch (i got Aids on my finger)
I am toasted and feeling good. B-)