They poured into Myrtle Edwards Park on the Seattle waterfront Saturday -- thousands of cannabis-lovers in Seattle to network and celebrate their favorite green plant.

Some listened to activists discuss the benefits of medical marijuana. Others roamed the park looking for the newest models of bongs.

Yet more lounged about on the grass listening to live music and openly smoking joints. Meanwhile, police officers walked by impassively, tolerating the pungent odor of marijuana smoke.

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Marijuana has an image problem.

That's not the only problem with it, but its image probably keeps it lurking in the shadows: People who smoke pot are unkempt, unruly, counterculture. Best just to drink scotch or pop OxyContin.

If marijuana had the ad agencies that cigarettes have had, it would be legal, too.

I'm not craving a joint. It's not my thing, but I noticed that Hempfest is coming up this weekend.

Speakers at the Seattle festival will try mightily to pull the weed from darkness.

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Event Aims to Be More Eco-Friendly

That aroma you're picking up as you walk near Myrtle Edwards Park or downwind from the Olympic Sculpture Park this weekend?

Smells slightly sweet, familiar even, with hints of patchouli and body odor? Does it bring back memories of dorm-room chats or crowded, sweaty concerts?

Yeah, you got it.

It's time for the country's biggest "protestival" - Seattle Hempfest - - on Saturday and Sunday. All "Reefer Madness" jokes aside, this is a serious event that is expected to draw more than 150,000 people who support reforming laws pertaining to marijuana - especially legalizing the domestic production of that less fun strain, hemp. Of course, some people might be there to check out a festival at which being stoned is no big deal. It's open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. each day.

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KOMO Television Takes Pot Activists' Cash, Refuses to Air Pot Activists' Infomercial

A local television station claims an infomercial hosted by travel writer Rick Steves promotes the use of marijuana and is consequently refusing to air it. But Fisher Communications, which owns KOMO television, collected thousands of dollars without airing the show.

"It supported that people smoke marijuana," says Jim Clayton, KOMO's vice president and general manager, about the drug-policy-reform infomercial. "Smoking marijuana is illegal and we don't promote things that are illegal on our television station," he says. "We don't tell people to go rob banks, either."

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Rick Steves Talks About His Crusade to Legalize Pot, Trips to Amsterdam

PBS's affable man of travel, Rick Steves, was none too happy when he heard Seattle's KOMO television had refused to run an infomercial he hosted about marijuana laws. After all, KOMO's parent company, Fisher Communications, accepted thousands of dollars in fees to record the program at its studios.

We reached the globe-trotting host in Brussels before he returns home to address the throngs at Seattle Hempfest in Myrtle Edwards Park this weekend, August 16 and 17. He speaks both days at 4:20 p.m., of course. He will probably give the standard rap that has astounded mainstream media-using his immaculate reputation to push for decriminalizing marijuana. After hearing his stump speech for several years, The Stranger wanted to ask Steves about his favorite place to get stoned, whether his crusade to legalize pot is making progress, and how hippies are making his job harder.

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You don't have to visit Nicaragua to get busted for pot. Every year in King County, the FBI reports, police arrest around 4,000 pot smokers.

Yes, Seattle voters made pot possession the city's lowest law-enforcement priority in 2003-Seattle officers arrest people for pot possession at about one-tenth the rate of the state as a whole-and thousands of people will be toking freely at Hempfest this weekend (Sat Sun Aug 16 17 from 10 am to 8 pm in Myrtle Edwards Park). But you can still get busted, particularly once you leave the city limits.

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An advertisement featuring a marijuana leaf that's on the sides of some Intercity Transit buses has drawn complaints from two residents and one of IT's own bus operators.

The complaints concern the content of the Olympia Hempfest ad, which includes the image of a marijuana leaf and the phrase "Equal Rights are for Everybody," said Meg Kester, an agency spokeswoman. The Olympian also received a complaint about the advertisements.

Intercity Transit forbids advertising on its buses that is obscene, defamatory, racist, sexist or "that is directed at producing imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action." The agency does not endorse any issue or product advertised on its buses, the exception being self-promotion, according to its policies. All political and issue advertisements identify who sponsored them.

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Crop Could Surpass Grapes In Value This Year

WAPATO, Wash. - Across central Washington's fruit bowl, farmers are buying vineyards, hoping to establish roots in the area and capitalize on the booming wine industry.

Authorities believe some of the buyers are living in Mexico and their vineyards are producing tens of thousands of illegal marijuana plants - - a crop that could easily surpass grapes in value this year.

Law enforcement officials in the Yakima Valley already have converged on seven vineyards that had been converted to marijuana operations this summer. At least five had been recently purchased - the buyers are still being tracked - and one had been leased to pot growers by an unknowing owner.

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An advertisement featuring a marijuana leaf that's on the sides of some Intercity Transit buses has drawn complaints.

Intercity Transit received complaints from two residents and one bus operator about the content of the Olympia Hempfest ad, which includes the image of a marijuana leaf and the phrase "Equal Rights are for Everybody," said Meg Kester, an agency spokeswoman. The Olympian also received a complaint about the advertisements.

Intercity Transit forbids advertising on its buses that is obscene, defamatory, racist, sexist or "that is directed at producing imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action." The agency does not endorse any issue or product advertised on its buses, the exception being self-promotion, according to its policies. All political and issue advertisements identify who sponsored them.

The quoted language is taken from a landmark 1969 U.S. Supreme Court case on the limits of free speech, Brandenburg v. Ohio.

For more information, see Page A1 in Monday's Olympian.

[end]

Is it possible that methamphetamine, for more than 20 years Clark County's most sinister illegal drug, can be controlled?

The addictive stimulant is still flowing freely into the community in the hands of Mexican smugglers, officials say.

That's one reason the number of local meth labs raided here has been small, officials say. It's easier to just buy it.

But change may be coming, said Cmdr. Rusty Warren with the Clark-Skamania Drug Task Force.

Mexico last year tightened its restrictions on pseudoephedrine, the ingredient in many cold medicines that's the most common way to cook meth.

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I would like to provide insight to the question posed by columnist Julie Muhlstein on July 25 ("Heroin death raises questions on education.")

Today's Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) may not be the DARE with which most are familiar. Gone is the old-style approach to prevention where an officer stands behind a podium and lectures students. The new DARE curriculum includes officer-facilitated work, role playing, discussion groups, utilization of research-based refusal strategies, and decision-making skills that help the students develop and assess choices they make in life. Students also see for themselves, via stunning brain imagery, tangible proof of how substances diminish mental activity, emotions, coordination and movement. Mock courtroom exercises bring home the social and legal consequences of drug use and violence.

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The TV program is titled "Marijuana: It's Time for a Conversation," but it's unlikely many viewers of network stations will be talking about it.

Of the three local network stations, only one agreed to run the show, produced by the American Civil Liberties Union and hosted by travel writer Rick Steves.

KOMO-TV turned down the ACLU this week; KIRO-TV never got back to the group at all. KING-TV ran the program in March -- but only at 1 in the morning.

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One week after Seattle police returned hundreds of patient files and a computer hard drive taken in a raid from a University District medical marijuana cooperative and local prosecutors declined to press charges, federal drug agents have gotten involved in the case.

Drug Enforcement Administration agents on Friday took control from Seattle police of about 12 ounces of medical marijuana and about 2 pounds of less-potent leaves seized from co-op head Martin Martinez, according to the DEA. Martinez operates Lifevine, a private collective of patients who work together to grow their own medical marijuana.

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What do a Seattle cop, an Edmonds travel writer and the ACLU have in common? They all want to legalize marijuana, and not just for medical purposes. As Seattle's annual Hempfest returns to Myrtle Edward Park this month, these odd bedfellows are putting Seattle at the center of a national conversation about marijuana reform

Hempfest: August 2006. On the shores of Puget Sound in Seattle's Myrtle Edwards Park, a hard rock band wraps up its set. Amid vendors hawking colorful bongs, hemp knapsacks and Love Your Mother bumper stickers, the crowd of 20- and 30-somethings applauds.

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Disturbing, depressing and darned near too sad for words, the death of 17-year-old Sean Gahagan raises all sorts of questions.

Heroin? Really? A bright, artistic boy with a recently minted Kamiak High School diploma died last week after using heroin?

That's what detectives with the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office suspect. In addition to the teen's death, The Herald reported Tuesday that two of his friends were rushed to emergency rooms after they also allegedly used heroin.

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Monday's editorial, "Return the pot," [Times, July 21] was exactly right in saying that medical marijuana seized from Martin Martinez, head of the Life Vine cooperative in the University District, should be returned.

Based on all information now available, Martinez was acting within the parameters of Washington's medical-marijuana law, and police have no right -- and no logical reason -- to keep his property.

The editorial did have one small factual error, however: There are now a total of 12 states with medical-marijuana laws, not 11: Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

That number could become 13 this year: A medical-marijuana initiative will be on Michigan's November ballot, and early polls have shown it leading.

Bruce Mirken, director of communications of the Marijuana Policy Project

San Francisco

[end]

The police raid on Martin Martinez, a Seattle man who uses marijuana to dull the chronic pain from a motorcycle accident, made the page-one headline last Thursday: "Was Pot Raid Justified?" Martinez's lawyer, Douglas Hiatt, insists vehemently that it was not.

In Seattle, the topic of medical marijuana and the law leads quickly to Hiatt. A native Chicagoan, 49, this blue-jeaned barrister is vehement often, his deep voice rising quickly to indignant italics.

His cellphone rings. "I gotta take this," he says. "Hello? Yes ... No . No, we're not going to do that! Look, this is my client ... Yes, I'll be there." Click.

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Assume that you're riding in someone else's car, and the driver or another passenger lights up a joint. Then the driver goes through a red light and is stopped by a police officer, who recognizes the smell of marijuana and arrests everyone in the vehicle. The Washington Supreme Court on Thursday ruled unanimously that a 29-year-old precedent allowing searches and arrests of all occupants in that circumstance violates the privacy provisions of the state constitution.

It was the correct ruling. Justice Charles Johnson wrote that privacy protections "do not fade away or disappear within the confines of an automobile." David Zuckerman, attorney for the defendant in the case, which stems from a 2006 traffic stop in Skagit County, said the practice has "led to an awful lot of innocent people getting handcuffed by the side of the road just because they happened to be in a car that smells of marijuana."

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The Seattle Police Department was right to return a laptop and patient records seized during a raid on a University District medical-marijuana cooperative.

Unless police and King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg have evidence of criminal wrongdoing, they should also return 12 ounces of marijuana and several bongs.

Marijuana is a mind-altering substance and recreational use ought to be prohibited. But voters have said, and the law agrees, that this reasoning doesn't extend to using the drug for medical purposes. Cleared of criminal charges, Martin Martinez, who heads the Life Vine cooperative in the University District, has a right to reclaim his property.

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Regarding John Sleeper's July 16 column, "Wage war on teenage drug abuse":

Student involvement in after-school activities like sports has been shown to reduce drug use. Sports keep kids busy during the hours they are most likely to get into trouble. Forcing students to undergo degrading urine tests as a prerequisite will only discourage participation in extracurricular programs.

Drug testing may also compel marijuana users to switch to harder drugs to avoid testing positive. This is one of the reasons the American Academy of Pediatrics opposes student drug testing. Despite a short-lived high, marijuana is the only illegal drug that stays in the human body long enough to make urinalysis a deterrent.

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