Drug WarRant

Via Stop the Drug War. League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) of California supports Prop 19. Another good endorsement to go along with the California NAACP, the National Black Police Association, and the Latino Voters League.

“The current prohibition laws are not working for Latinos, nor for society as a whole,” said Argentina Dávila-Luévano, California LULAC State Director. “Far too many of our brothers and sisters are getting caught in the cross-fire of gang wars here in California and the cartel wars south of our border. It’s time to end prohibition, put violent, organized criminals out of business and bring marijuana under the control of the law.”

For an ugly and ignorant reaction to this news, read Dennis Romero.

Check out C-Span at 9:15 am Eastern on Saturday, October 9

Allen St. Pierre of NORML vs. former DEA head Asa Hutchinson

I’ve been invited back to C-Span to debate and discuss the topics of cannabis legalization, and specifically California’s upcoming vote on Prop. 19, a measure that if approved by the voters will effectively
legalize cannabis in America’s most important state politically and
economically.

Former Drug Enforcement Administration chief and Republican congressman from Arkansas Asa Hutchinson has stepped up to argue in favor of the status quo and continuing into a ninth decade of Cannabis Prohibition.

The live interview is scheduled to broadcast Saturday morning (10/9/10) on C-Span TV, 9:15am – 10:00am (eastern…sorry west coasters!). Like most C-Span shows, the public is invited to ask questions or make short
commentary.

To watch online, go to: http://www.c-span.org/Watch/C-SPAN.aspx

This C-Span interview is likely the result of the Wall Street Journal
publishing an unprecedented jointly signed letter earlier this week by
every previous DEA administrator predictably calling for the Obama
administration to actively oppose politically viable cannabis legalization
voter initiatives in places like California (just the way they did).

Is the body politic (and the mainstream media that has so aptly aided and
abetted these technocrats’ blatant disregard for democracy, science,
compassion and common sense) really, really nervous about the cataclysmic blow that California voters are about to level on a self-evidently failed federal government public policy—another ‘war’ lost by government?

What do you think?

See you on the TV and kind regards,

-Allen St. Pierre
Executive Director
NORML

Some of the stuff that comes out in the circus of the upcoming Prop 19 vote is just amazing.

Scott Erickson writes in the Daily Caller: If pot is legalized, government will distort the market for it

What many in the drug legalization crowd fail to recognize is that government, in its infinite wisdom, will ultimately distort this newly legitimate marketplace to such a degree that it will render the perceived benefits of its creation insignificant. In its zeal to capitalize on what it sees as a major new source of revenue, government will popularize marijuana use among the general public and, through overzealous taxation and regulation, fail to reduce the aforementioned black market and all of its attendant criminality.

Case in point: California’s Proposition 19, while not setting a uniform standard for taxation of marijuana across the state, will allow individual localities the leeway to set their own standards of taxation on the sale and cultivation of marijuana. If Proposition 19 and Measure C — a related measure linked to the passage of Prop 19 — pass, localities will be able to tax marijuana at rates upwards of ten percent.

While Proposition 19 would make the possession and recreational use of marijuana legal in California, levying a ten percent tax on those selling it lawfully, coupled with a host of other fees related to its cultivation, will increase its cost to such a degree that many pot smokers will simply continue to buy their weed from sources unencumbered by the state’s regulations, e.g. drug dealers.

This does not bode well for the proposition that legalizing “harmless” drugs such as marijuana will lessen the prevalence of illicit drug dealers.

Upwards of 10 percent? You’re kidding. California’s sales tax is 8.25%. 10 percent is nothing. At a 10 percent tax, there’s no way that the black market could compete. Plus, the fact is, consumers prefer to purchase legally and are willing to pay quite a significant premium to do so.

So localities would have quite a bit of leeway in adding taxes. Their biggest concern will be competition from other localities. If one town raises taxes too high, the neighboring town with lower cannabis taxes will benefit from greater sales.

Keith Humphreys has apparently decided to go all out with this bizarre rant about dead tobacco consumers.

It apparently goes like this:

• Tobacco companies cause 40,000 deaths per year from cigarette smoking; therefore, don’t legalize marijuana.

Apparently, part of this strange equation involves big businesses that are unhappy with the low numbers of consumers that they’ve killed and want to increase that number. They will then hijack the legal marijuana business, make everyone want to buy an inferior product through advertising, and poison the product so that people, who have never died from marijuana, will start dropping dead all over the place.

To Keith (in an otherwise good post), it’s like big business is worse than the combination of Mexican Drug Cartels and Al Qaeda.

The other possible outcome is that AG Holder (and note this is rank speculation, I have not discussed this with him and have no idea what he will decide in the end) does not intervene at all. In that case the coming years will see either Big Tobacco having a line of lucrative, well-marketed cannabis products, or, a new industry created that more or less conducts itself like Big Tobacco.

and that links to…

“This law hands another product to market to tobacco companies or creates a doppelganger that will lobby with them,” Humphreys said. “I don’t want to see some 16-year-old kid who smokes a joint have his life ruined, but . . . this law is not just legalized use, it’s legalized corporate ownership [and] legalized marketing.”

Humphreys predicts that tobacco companies, which have been poised and ready to accept cannabis into their product line since the 1970s, will align their aggressive marketing tactics and billions of dollars in lobbying power to gain control of cannabis in California.

“It’s taken us 40 years to bring tobacco companies even modestly to heel, and tobacco still kills 40,000 people per year,” he said. “How about let’s show we can regulate one industry that sells an addictive plant before we take on another.”

What a scary concept: “legalized corporate ownership [and] legalized marketing.” That sounds like something that some kind of Capitalist Society might have. Not like a nice benign Nanny State that tells its citizens what’s best for them, and that sends armed and hooded peacemakers through the front door of their homes to make sure they don’t do something that’s bad for them.

Thank God we have Keith Humphreys here in the states to protect us from the horrors of consumer choice.

If you haven’t donated to Prop 19 yet, you still have time (see the link above), and you’ll be in some pretty darned good company.

Why We Donated $100,000 to Prop 19

I am President and co-owner of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, a 60-year-old company founded by my German-Jewish grandfather, Emanuel Bronner in 1948. Our family and over 60 employees in California produce the best-selling natural brand of soap in the United States. We use certified organic and fair trade vegetable oils, including non-drug hemp seed oil to super-fat the soaps for smoother lather and moisturizing after-feel. […]

Dr. Bronner’s buys 20 tons of hemp oil for our soaps from Canada annually. For nearly ten years the Bronner family has financially supported bringing back non-drug industrial hemp farming in the US as an environmentally sustainable crop that can be made into a wide variety of products including food, cosmetics, clothing, building materials and more.

I have decided to personally give a $75,000 donation to Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) for “Get Out the Vote” efforts to pass Prop 19 in California, the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010. Adam Eidinger and Alan Amsterdam, co-founders of Capitol Hemp Clothing and Accessories, have donated an additional $25,000 as well. Dr. Bronner’s will also provide the company’s promotional fire truck to “sound the alarm” on college campuses across California. We hope to mobilize younger voters who are the primary victims of the war on cannabis who know first-hand the lies of cannabis prohibition.

There’s a number of incredible stories in this one statement.

• One is the donation of $100,000, ten times what the alcohol distributors gave to the other side.
• One is the fact that the primary need for Dr. Bronner’s is industrial hemp, but he’s willing to put his money there for the sake of the future, even though this bill won’t directly do anything for the industrial hemp problem.
• And one is the fact of the heavy involvement of SSDP in campaigning for Prop 19. These young people are our future, and under the terms of the Prop 19 law that they are working hard to pass, they won’t even be able to smoke pot legally. Instead of whining about it like some of the anti-Prop-19 potheads, these young people know that the important thing is to change the paradigm — to stop prohibition. That’s the first step is breaking the beast, and then, eventually, we’ll find a way to treat those of an age to be sent off to die in wars as though they were human beings.

… but that’s not all!

Facebook’s Sean Parker Outdoes Moskovitz With $100K For Marijuana Bill

Sean Parker, co-founder of Facebook and Napster, has joined his former colleague Dustin Moskovitz by cutting a large check towards the legalization of marijuana.

Not to be outdone by America’s youngest billionaire Moskovitz, who gave $70,000 to California’s Proposition 19, Parker has donated $100,000 to the ballot initiative that would make it legal to possess the drug for personal use.

That’s right. The two founders of Facebook… $170,000. Not bad.

According to Sasha Horwitz, the New Media Coordinator for Proposition 19:

Founding fathers of the biggest social networking site in the world, Parker and Moskovitz’s contributions represent another sign that political influence in California is skewing younger and in the direction of Silicon Valley. The next wave in political organizing will begin with youth, and that may mean it will be born online. Parker and Moskovitz’s technical leadership taps into the generational shift in attitudes toward the failed drug war, which costs the state hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

…goes to Maia Szalavitz, in a very interesting analysis in Time Magazine: Prop 19 Analysis: Will Marijuana Legalization Increase Use?

Many questions remain about what will happen if Proposition 19 passes, but the only result I can unequivocally predict is that drug policy debates will finally become less theoretical — and much more interesting.

The case for legalizing marijuana by Gary Mason

There was a time, particularly when my children were young, when I wasn’t sure legalizing pot was such a good idea. But that old-school approach doesn’t hold up any more. The fact is, the war on marijuana has done far more harm than the substance itself. And every reason for legalizing it in the U.S. applies to Canada as well.

If I were to sum up one of our biggest challenges, it is helping people distinguish between the harms of (legal and illegal) drug misuse and the harms of drug prohibition.

There is justifiable fear and terror around the drug trade. Everyday we read and hear about the bloody drug war in Mexico that has taken the lives of at least 28,000 people in a little over three years. We see and hear about shootings, murders and violence in our cities because of the drug trade.

For too long, people have associated the violence with the drugs themselves, rather than the policy of prohibition.

Some very good stuff in there, and a nice job of laying out the options (although the “Fight it out in the courts” paragraph is a glib throwaway that shows a complete lack of understanding of Constitutional law).

Personally, I think Obama will follow the “Make some examples” option, just enough to make it appear that he’s tough, while trying to paint the “examples” as being distributors of drugs to kids, so as not to overly enrage the general pot-smoking population.

As Tom Angell from “Yes on 19” put it when I spoke to him, “If the president wants to further demoralize his base, stepping in and overturning the will of the voters of California on marijuana reform would be a great way to do that.”

This is an open thread.

Nice little story in southern Illinois about a sheriff who was being interviewed for a story about selling off seized cars.

According to sheriff Mearkl Justus…the most common drug resulting in property seizures…is marijuana.

But after thirty years as sheriff in St. Clair County, Sheriff Justus has reached a conclusion.

“It’s just a merry-go-round. I think some day, and I don’t think it’s very far off, I think maybe we’re going to see in Illinois, I think one day they’ll de-criminalize small amounts of marijuana. And I’m not too certain with what that won’t be a good idea.”

The video is worth watching as it expands on the story, and you get an actual feel for how one sheriff is coming to a realization.

And this isn’t in some enlightened community where it might be easy to make statements like that. Far from it. For example, one of the few comments to the story was:

who cares…..I hope it never happens…all it will do is to cheer up some n*&&#$

Via Phil Smith at Stop the Drug War

Peruvian President Alan García said Monday he is absolutely opposed to drug legalization and warned that legalizing marijuana will take society down the path toward euthanizing the elderly.

That’s right! It’s another tomato raid. This time, in the greenhouse of a Montessori school.

“We were all as a group eating outside as we usually do, and this unmarked drab-green helicopter kept flying over and dropping lower,” she said. “Of course, the kids got all excited. They were telling me that they could see gun barrels outside the helicopter. I was telling them they were exaggerating.” […]

Then other vehicles arrived and four men wearing bullet-proof vests, but without any visible insignias or uniforms, got out and said they wanted to inspect the school’s greenhouses. Pantano said she then turned the men over to the farm director, Greg Nussbaum.

And that’s how the heavily armored men discovered the tomato plants.

Patricia Pantano, the education director, said it best when she…

…questioned why such a commotion was necessary when anyone who asked would have been given a tour of the greenhouses.

“We’re sitting here as a teaching staff, always short on money, and we’re thinking, ‘Gosh, all the money it takes to fly that helicopter and hire all those people, it would be great to have this for education.’ ”