Drug WarRant

In Redding, California, a group of property owners were meeting, in part, to discuss their concerns about medical marijuana collectives expanding.

Moments before Wednesday’s Mission Square property owners meeting, someone dressed in a green Grinch costume with a giant imitation penis attached stepped out of a limousine and walked into Giff’s Steakburger – the site of the meeting.

The Grinch announced to Mission Square owners that a new cannabis shop – Hampton Collective – would open in the former Humor Shop space on the north side of the shopping center.

I would have loved to have been there to take a picture of that moment, but… really? limousine, Grinch, giant penis? What was the thought process there?

“I don’t know, I was just trying to be funny. I guess it didn’t work out,” Bobby Martin, who dressed up as the Grinch, said by phone Thursday.

Good guess.

I think there’s a lesson here for us. One of the things we can do as drug policy reformers is to be aware of how we present ourselves.

Maybe Bobby Martin is a Grinch with a giant penis at home, but when going to talk to the property owners association, he should think about how they might feel about an endowed Grinch (rather than just whether he thought it was funny) and he could decide to change outfits. He could always put on his Grinch outfit again later when he goes out on the town with his friends.

The key here is to be aware of your audience. This doesn’t mean you have to sell out — you just need to know what makes them tick.

The easiest thing, of course, it to be right for your audience. Obviously, if you’re a LEAP member who is a former police officer and you look like a police officer with short hair while you stand in front of the Kiwanis Club talking about reform, you’ve got an advantage.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to be a police officer to talk to Kiwanis. I have had successful Kiwanis talks. It means that you need to understand what interests them and talk to their interests. You don’t need to lie or hide anything. Just simply tie back your long hair, put on a clean, pressed shirt, and talk to them earnestly and intelligently about issues that concern them.

Consider Tommy Chong. He has a lifetime of his entire persona being pretty much the ultimate stoner joke. And yet watch him sometime when he’s seriously talking about drug policy. He’s intelligent, articulate and engaging.

I have a workshop that I’ve conducted with others and by myself called “Elevator Arguments.” (Here’s the handout (pdf)) Part of the idea is to be able to come up with cogent drug policy reform argument in 30 seconds. Concise and to the point. But part of it is also to tailor that argument to your audience. And I let the workshop participants put me on the spot (I love this part). They call out a type of person and, on the spot, in 30 seconds, I tell that person why they should support drug policy reform.

It’s a good exercise, and a good skill to have.

How many of these could you speak to about drug reform in a way that would resonate with them?

• Soccer mom
• Parent who lost a child to drug overdose
• Republican party leader
• Democratic party leader
• Business leader
• Someone who just lost their job to the economy
• Police officer
• Teacher
• Rush Limbaugh
• Hillary Clinton
• Conservative Christian
• Abortion rights advocate
• African-American leader
• Farmer
• Poor family in the inner city plagued by crime
• Rich white guy
• Senior citizen
• Union member
• Your mom

You don’t have to stop being yourself to do this. You can still be a Grinch with an enormous penis. But you do have to pay attention to the interests, needs, fears, and desires of the people you want to convince. And not just in a superficial, caricaturized way, but to really understand them.

Understanding how other people tick doesn’t lessen your sense of who you are, it enriches it.

I got this rather… interesting… email today:

Hello and Good Day,

My company runs a network of online users in the United States looking online for medical marijuana.

I reviewed your site and felt it may be an excellent source to direct our members to when they are searching online for medical marijuana or dispensaries.

I would like to discuss this with the person that makes decisions for your institution. So that we can possibly work to simply direct our network of online users looking for your service.

I look forward to talking with you soon.

Best Regards,

Eddie Perez
Sr. Medical Marijuana Search Agent

Sorry, Eddie. That’s not really what we do here. But I love your title!
(And thanks for calling me an institution.)

Texas DA Accused of Stealing From Motorists Wants To Defend Herself With Money She’s Accused of Stealing From Motorists – Radley’s got another one of those true stories you just can’t make up.

ALL Medical Marijuana Dispensaries to be outlawed by City of LA. This would require any marijuana patients in L.A. to drive somewhere else, or grow their own. This is bad news, but, to put it in perspective…. medical marijuana patients in Illinois were heard jointly playing the world’s tiniest violin for them.

SANHO TREE: The drug war has failed, so what’s next?

Get Serious about Decriminalizing Drugs; Others Are by Tim Lynch and Juan Carlos Hidalgo at Cato

DrugSense Weekly – a weekly review of the most interesting or relevant articles in the press and on the web related to drug policy reform.

Drug War Chronicle – weekly update of drug war news and analysis from Stop the Drug War.org.

Via LEAP’s blog is this video from a press conference held by Police Chief George Gascon of San Francisco.

The press conference was about shutting down illegal marijuana grow operations, but someone actually asked him whether legalization might be an answer to some of our problems, and he noted:

Obviously, it’s speculation… we can go back to the days of prohibition — you know, when alcohol was prohibited — people found ways to deal with the manufacturing and production of alcohol and a lot of violence came as a result of that. Alcohol was legalized; some of that went away. It’s hard to tell.

Could you have imagined an active police chief answering in that way 10 years ago?

Yes, the United States leads the world once again, and I’m sure when they go up to the podium to accept their award, the first one thanked will be the War on Drugs.

That’s right — the latest worldwide incarceration figures are out.

The United States has the highest prison population
rate in the world, 756 per 100,000 of the national
population […]

Almost three fifths of countries (59%) have rates below
150 per 100,000. […]

More than 9.8 million people are held in penal
institutions throughout the world, mostly as pre-trial
detainees (remand prisoners) or as sentenced prisoners.
Almost half of these are in the United States (2.29m),
Russia (0.89m) or China (1.57m sentenced prisoners). […]

Prison populations are growing in many parts of the
world. Updated information on countries included in
previous editions of the World Prison Population List
shows that prison populations have risen in 71% of
these countries.

Check out the numbers…
Continue reading →

The Drug Policy Reform Conference is coming up November 12-14 in Albuquerque, NM.

I really wish I could attend. Unfortunately, work requires me to be in Baltimore at that time. I really loved the last one in New Orleans — what a great time to connect with other drug policy reform leaders from around the world. I did quite a bit of blogging from that conference, and right now, I’m looking for one or two people to guest-blog the conference, so those who can’t be there can follow along.

Wow. The Stiletto Stoners piece was powerful, and it’s got legs. Next stop, The Today Show, where they actually say that pot is better for thinking than alcohol, and that the biggest problem (although not that big) is that it’s illegal.

Sept. 30: Psychiatrist Dr. Julie Holland and Joanna Coles from Marie Claire magazine discuss why some young professional women are turning to marijuana to help them unwind.

[Sorry about the Hulu, but that’s how NBC shares their clips. Hulu tends not to be available outside the country, although this site may have a workaround.]

See more on this at The Raw Story [Thanks, Servetus]

If only it were so…

Venezuelan state TV today broadcast an excerpt from “Family Guy” as an example of how the U.S. promotes drug use. The clip features Stewie, the matricide-obsessed infant son of Peter and Lewis Lois Griffin, singing a song extolling the virtues of smoking weed.

“We can observe how [the U.S. government] promotes and incites the population to consume that drug there,” said Tarek El Aissaimi, Venezuela’s Interior Minister. “There’s no subliminal message. It’s an animated cartoon where you can observe perfectly how they promote consumption and moreover they foster the legalization of marijuana.”

Of course, this is just Venezuela’s back-handed way of getting back at the U.S. for faulting Venezuela’s efforts in our war on drugs.

It’s also possible that this post is merely an excuse for me to show this delightful clip again…

A Bag Of Weed – The most amazing home videos are here

By the way, in case you were trying to place it, the song is set to the tune of “Me Ole Bam-boo” from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Prince of Pot’s Sentence Reeks of Injustice and Mocks Our Sovereignty, Ian Mulgrew, Vancouver Sun

Emery’s Jail Term Longer Than for Some Violent Crimes […]

It is a legal tragedy that in my opinion marks the capitulation of our sovereignty and underscores the hypocrisy around cannabis. […]

He is being handed over to a foreign government for an activity we are loath to prosecute because we don’t think selling seeds is a major problem. […]

“There isn’t a single victim in my case, no one who can stand up and say, ‘I was hurt by Marc Emery.’ No one.”

He’s right again.

Emery is facing more jail time than corporate criminals who defraud widows and orphans and longer incarceration than violent offenders who leave their victims dead or in wheelchairs.

Whatever else you may think of him — and I know he rankles many — what is happening to him today mocks our independence and our ideal of justice.

‘King of Pot’s’ Punishment Was No Surprise, Editorial, Nanaimo Daily News

Nobody should shed any tears for Canada’s self-proclaimed “Prince of Pot.” […]

His misguided supporters consider him a martyr for the cause of marijuana decriminalization. He is nothing of the sort. Emery is a calculating businessman who flouted the law.

His punishment should be a surprise to no one.

U.S. DEA Finally Gets Its Man by Paul Armentano

Just over four years ago, former U.S. DEA administrator Karen Tandy announced to the world that her agency had struck “a significant blow … to the marijuana legalization movement” by indicting Canada’s so-called ‘Prince of Pot,’ Marc Emery. […]

But lets not kid ourselves. Marc Emery was hardly a high level target because he sold marijuana seeds to the U.S. — a simple google search will yield dozens of listings of competitors that presently engage in similar activities. No, it wasn’t so much what Marc did […] as it was what he did with his money that aroused the ire of U.S. anti-drug officials.

And we have Karen Tandy’s own words to prove it.

A couple days ago, I gave you a bunch of links about the drug policy conference held in El Paso last week. With the last minute dropouts of the Drug Czar and the Border Czar, the conference had turned into a predominately reform-minded group, including LEAP, SSDP, local officials, and others, with admittedly varied views on the degree of reform, with the exception of one DEA rep.

This article gave some sense of that…

More than two dozen drug experts, academics, border journalists and law enforcement officials gathered to compare notes for three days about drug policy, coming from Mexico, the United States and even Colombia.

Two seemingly unlikely advocates of radical change at the conference were Terry Nelson, a retired federal agent, and James Gray, a California state judge, both of whom once sent drug offenders to prison. […]

The conversation was more choir practice than robust debate, as a consensus emerged that the enforcement-driven policy isn’t working. […]

Over three days of discussion, one voice was heard loudly defending the present policy.

“Ultimately what we are talking about is the obligation of the state to protect its citizens,” said Anthony Placido, who leads the Drug Enforcement Administration’s intelligence program.

Now compare that to this UPI story on the conference.

DEA official says don’t end drug war

EL PASO, Texas, Sept. 28 (UPI) — A top U.S. narcotics official told a conference on the border drug war that aggressive law enforcement must remain part of strategy to curb drug trafficking.

Anthony Placido, head of intelligence for the DEA, said drugs by nature were “mind-altering substances that destroy human life and create violence” and needed to be fought vigorously.

Hmmm… kind of sounds like he was the only one there. Do they reference the more than two dozen others speaking at the conference?

There were also calls for decriminalization of some drugs by proponents who said drugs were too well entrenched in the United States and that the law of supply and demand was too strong to resist.

Ah, yes. Good job, UPI. You managed to completely reverse the story.