Pubdate: Sun, 26 Jan 2014
Source: Columbus Dispatch (OH)
Copyright: 2014 The Columbus Dispatch
Contact:  http://www.dispatch.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/93
Author: Maria L. LA Ganga, Los Angeles Times

ONE NATION UNDER POT?

SEATTLE - The new year is shaping up to be one of the marijuana
movement's strongest.  The first legal pot storefronts in America
opened to long lines in Colorado this month. Washington state is
poised to issue licenses for producing, processing and selling the
Schedule I drug - once officials sift through about 7,000
applications.  Signature gatherers have been at work in at least five
other states to put marijuana measures on the ballot in 2014. On
Wednesday, organizers announced they had gathered more than 1 million
signatures in favor of putting a medical-marijuana measure before
voters in Florida, a high-population bellwether that could become the
first Southern state to embrace pot.

"Florida looks like the country," said Ben Pollara, campaign manager
for the effort in the Sunshine State.

"If Florida does this, it is a big deal for medical marijuana across
the country."

Three months ago, a clear majority of Americans for the first time
said the drug should be legalized - 58 percent of those surveyed,
which represents a 10-percentage-point jump in a year, according to
the Gallup Poll.

Such acceptance is almost five times what Gallup found when
public-opinion polling on marijuana began in 1969.

Last month in California, where a legalization measure went down to
defeat in 2010, the Field Poll reported what it called its first clear
majority in favor of legalizing pot: 55 percent of those polled,
compared with just 13 percent in 1969.

"What has happened now is we have reached the national tipping point
on marijuana reform," said Stephen Gutwillig, deputy executive
director of the Drug Policy Alliance, an advocacy group.

"Marijuana legalization has gone from an abstract concept to a
mainstream issue to a political reality within a three year period."

The Obama administration said last year that it will not interfere in
states that allow commercial marijuana sales, as long as they are
strictly regulated. But pot remains illegal under federal law, and
messages from authorities are mixed.

James Capra, chief of operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration, told a Senate panel recently that "Going down the path
to legalization in this country is reckless and irresponsible."

But in a lengthy New Yorker interview published last Sunday, President
Barack Obama said of legalization in Washington state and Colorado
that "It's important for it to go forward because it's important for
society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people
have at one time or another broken the law, and only a select few get
punished."

Obama said of marijuana, "I don't think it is more dangerous than
alcohol."

The big question, of course, is why attitudes toward marijuana are
shifting. The answer, according to pollsters and drug policy experts,
is a complicated stew of demographics, personal experience, electoral
success and the failure of existing drug policy.

To Alison Holcomb, the American Civil Liberties Union attorney who
wrote the ballot measure that legalized recreational marijuana in
Washington state, the "enormous jump" in approval of legalization in
just a year does not reflect "changes in attitudes about marijuana
specifically. Rather, it's a change in attitudes about whether it's OK
to support marijuana-law reform."

In other words, Americans don't necessarily like pot more than they
used to. The percentage of those who have tried it has stayed in the
30 percent range for three decades. Rather, Americans are fed up with
criminal penalties that they say are neither cost-effective nor just.

Those looking for evidence of marijuana's new momentum need look only
to Jan. 8.

That's the day that supporters of recreational pot delivered about
46,000 signatures to election officials in Alaska - 50 percent more
than required - to put a legalization measure one step closer to a
vote in the largely Republican state.

That afternoon in deeply Democratic New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a
former prosecutor with a history of opposing the drug, announced a
modest medical-marijuana pilot project.

"Research suggests that medical marijuana can help manage the pain and
treatment of cancer and other serious illnesses," Cuomo said. He
appeared uncomfortable, giving the subject only 27 seconds in a nearly
90-minute State of the State address.

As Cuomo noted, an increasing number of states have enacted
medical-marijuana laws. California was the first, in 1996, followed by
20 others and the District of Columbia.

The embrace of medical marijuana to ease the effects of ills such as
Alzheimer's disease and seizures is one reason that support for
marijuana has continued to grow. The drugs that Riverside, Calif.,
attorney Letitia Pepper, 59, took to slow the progression of her
multiple sclerosis caused side effects worse than the disease itself,
which causes numbness, loss of dexterity and temporary loss of vision.

The only relief, Pepper said, came when she began using marijuana in
2007. Today, she is gathering signatures to get the California
Cannabis Hemp Initiative 2014 on the ballot.

Pepper grew up, she said, as "a good girl. My homework was done. I
knew marijuana was illegal." She tried it once when she was 25, didn't
like it and left it behind - until she needed it to help her function.

Pepper's improvement wasn't lost on her mother, Lorraine, 85, of
Oceanside, Calif. She takes it, too, for pain that has not improved
since she had hernia surgery two years ago.  
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