Pubdate: Wed, 12 Mar 2014
Source: East Bay Express (CA)
Section: Legalization Nation
Copyright: 2014 East Bay Express
Contact: http://posting.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/SubmitLetter/Page
Website: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1131
Author: David Downs

REBRANDING WEED

The media's depiction of pot use is biased and god-awful. So a leading
marijuana law reform group is planning to provide something more
appealing and realistic.

Close your eyes and imagine a news story about weed on CNN or Fox
News. What images do they use? Maybe a picture of pot leaf? Sure,
sometimes. But often it's a sleazy-looking young dude draped in a lei
of marijuana flowers at a weed festival. Or it's an older woman with
bad teeth, unwashed hair, and marijuana-shaped sunglasses screaming in
the street during a protest. Last month, The New York Times
illustrated a news story about pot with a still image from a Cheech
and Chong movie.

Mainstream media visuals of weed are overwhelmingly negative and
biased, reformers say. So this year, marijuana law reform group the
Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) has launched a project to reframe the
depiction of cannabis in the media.

The DPA recruited a half-dozen volunteers from the Bay Area and
photographed them in medical cannabis dispensaries and in their homes.
Soon, the DPA will be giving away these stock photos to the press with
the hope of re-populating the media with normal-looking people using
medical marijuana safely and responsibly in real settings.

We dropped in on one of the DPA's photo shoots in January at the San
Francisco Patient Resource Center (SPARC) on Mission and 6th streets
in the city's SOMA district. During he shoot, DPA California
coordinator Amanda Reiman stood near the sales counter talking about
how the project started. "The white guy with a long beard in his
Sixties wearing marijuana sunglasses smoking a joint - we know that's
not what a typical medical marijuana user looks like. It's not fair.
It does not reflect reality."

In 2012, Reiman, who is also a lecturer at UC Berkeley's School of
Social Welfare, became a manager at DPA, which is planning on running
a marijuana legalization campaign in California in 2016.

New visuals are a key component of the future narrative of pot. In
January, Reiman reached out to medical marijuana patients through
activist groups and dispensaries on Facebook and got a huge response,
including from two women who volunteered to be models: 27-year-old
Paidamoyo Janet Azehko from Oakley and 38-year-old Mika Hamilton from
San Francisco.

San Francisco photographer Sonya Yruel shot the women as they grinded
cannabis flower buds with a small hand-grinder, loaded them into a
stainless-steel Volcano Vaporizer, and filled a bag with vapor.
Sunlight streamed into the dispensary.

While researching the topic, Yruel said she asked herself, "What is
the visual identity of medical marijuana? After googling it, she
discovered that there isn't much out there: someone smoking a joint, a
big pot leaf, a green cross.

During the photo shoot, Yruel made sure to get vertical and horizontal
shots of Azehko and Hamilton as they passed the vapor bag back and
forth. "I didn't want it to be too specific," Yruel said. "I want it
to look natural visually."

Prohibition is part of the reason that the media often depicts
marijuana users in a negative light, said Tom Angell, who runs
MarijuanaMajority.com. Since the drug is illegal, mainstream users are
closeted. They don't agree to media interviews or photos, and when the
press needs a photo, the only "out" spokespeople for the schedule 1
drug have tended to come from the margins of society: radicals,
adolescents, vagrants - people with little to lose.

Furthermore, regulated pot shops in San Francisco, Oakland, Denver,
and other cities do not or cannot allow non-patients inside, let alone
the media. Patient privacy is a huge concern. Cancer-stricken patients
are breaking federal law when they use cannabis and could lose their
jobs or worse if they show up on TV or the web or in a newspaper in a
dispensary. "Normal people don't want to be on-camera," said Nicholas
Smilgys, SPARC's community outreach director.

"It's sort of a vicious circle," Angell added. "I think that is why a
lot of politicians historically have acted as if there is no real
important constituency affected by this issue and why they've tended
to avoid it. They think it's all hippies and hip-hop heads.

"To the extent that DPA can help convince lawmakers that actually
businessmen use marijuana, moms use marijuana, reputable, respectful
people in society also use marijuana - that is going to help us change
the marijuana laws."

Azehko uses cannabis to treat rheumatoid arthritis. She works in
fashion and branding and knows the power of images. She said she hopes
the new photographs will get people to reassess what they think.
"There is nothing seedy or wrong here. This place [SPARC] is more
beautiful than the school I go to."

Hamilton said, "Pot has been portrayed as a party thing, going on on
the street corner. Well, it gave me my son." (Compounds in marijuana
are capable of modulating dysfunctions of conception.)

It's about time that we "make medical marijuana normal," said
Hamilton. Angell said media images have immense power. "We make
decisions based on how we perceive things visually much of the time,"
he said. "If it weren't important, newspapers wouldn't include photos
on the front page to try to grab the reader's eyes." 
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D