Seventy-eight years ago this November, Californians overwhelmingly voted to repeal a morally, socially, and economically failed public policy -- alcohol prohibition. Voters did not wait for the federal government to act; they took matters into their own hands. On Nov. 2, California voters have an opportunity to repeat history and repeal an equally bankrupt public policy -- marijuana prohibition. California lawmakers criminalized the possession and cultivation of marijuana in 1913, some 24 years before Congress enacted similar prohibitions federally. Yet today some 3.3 million Californians acknowledge using pot regularly, and the Golden State stands alone as the largest domestic producer of the crop. Self-evidently, marijuana is here to stay. The question is: What is the most pragmatic and effective way to deal with this reality? [continues 576 words]
According to a March 2010 report issued by the California Board of Equalization, medical marijuana dispensaries in the state generate as much as $1.3 billion in sales and $105 million in state sales taxes. Since it is estimated that medical marijuana consumers comprise less than 10% of the existing marijuana market in California, this total represents only a fraction of the revenue that will be generated when this commodity is legalized for all adults over age 21. It is time to bring long-overdue oversight to a market that is currently unregulated, untaxed and uncontrolled. Proposition 19 replaces decades of failed marijuana prohibition with a policy of sensible regulation. Paul Armentano National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws Vallejo, Calif. [end]
It's Time to End the Legal Harassment, Discrimination, and Criminal Prosecution of Adult Marijuana Users in California Simply Because They Are Healthy -- Prop 19 Will Do That. A majority of California voters now say that they back Proposition 19, which seeks to enact the most far-reaching marijuana law reforms anywhere in the United States. The immediate effect of Prop. 19, if passed, would be to provide legal protection to the individual marijuana consumer - that is the estimated 3.3 million Californians who are presently using marijuana for non-medical purposes. [continues 913 words]
Columnist Marcos Breton proposes that a significant portion of the 3.3 million Californians who use marijuana are addicted to pot ("Pot people are in denial about Prop. 19"; Our Region, Sept. 29). He bases this supposition on the following premise: "Answer this question: If you had to stop smoking marijuana forever, could you? My guess is that many couldn't quit if they tried." To which I'd reply, "So what?" No doubt some people may have difficulty arbitrarily halting an activity particularly a fairly innocuous one like consuming cannabis that provides them pleasure. Most Americans would have trouble giving up a scoop of ice cream after dinner, surfing the Internet, having sexual relations with their partner, or any number of similarly pleasurable behaviors or indulgences. Does that make them addicted? Does Breton really believe that society would be better off outlawing television because tens of millions of Americans enjoy tuning in week after week to "Dancing With the Stars"? [continues 253 words]
Big Alcohol's Decision to Squash Marijuana Law Reform to Protect Its Bottom Line Is Simply Politics As Usual. It is said that politics makes strange bedfellows, but there are arguably few stranger than the emerging alliance between two of California's most powerful political players: the police industrial complex and 'Big Alcohol.' Campaign finance reports from the Golden State disclose that the California Beer and Beverage Distributors -- a trade organization that represents over 100 beer distributors statewide -- is one of the primary backers of the lobby group Public Safety First, sponsors of the 'No on Prop. 19' campaign. [continues 768 words]
The media's take-away message from the recent Rand Institute report on regulating marijuana in California was this: Legalizing pot would lead to a decline in price, followed by an increase in consumption. Rand's actual conclusions, however, were far less newsworthy. A careful reading of the Rand study finds that its authors were uncertain of how significantly, or insignificantly, pot's retail prices or consumption would be impacted by legalization. Under the passage of Proposition 19 - the marijuana initiative before voters in November - the most likely answer is: not much. [continues 541 words]
The California Legislative Analyst's Office's recently published critique of Proposition 19, the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010, provides needed clarity to the ongoing debate regarding marijuana policy and offers a swift rebuttal to the doomsday scenarios touted by many of the measure's opponents. According to the Legislative Analyst's Office, the immediate effect of the measure would be to allow adults age 21 and older to possess and grow limited amounts of marijuana in the privacy of their own home. The agency estimates that halting the prosecution of these minor marijuana offenses would save state and local governments "several tens of millions of dollars annually," and enable law enforcement to reprioritize resources toward other criminal activities. [continues 492 words]
Editor's Note: The Author Is The Co-author Of The Book "Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People To Drink?" The latest screed by ex-law enforcement officer Lyndon Lafferty ("Don't let the marijuana myth live on," July 25) epitomizes novelist Upton Sinclair's famous quotation, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." Contrary to Mr. Lafferty's allegations, I neither claimed that marijuana is harmless nor that its consumption is appropriate for young people. Rather, I have asserted repeatedly that cannabis ought to be legalized and regulated. I come to this conclusion precisely because marijuana is a temporarily mind-altering substance and ought to be controlled accordingly. [continues 540 words]
The Record Searchlight's call for further scientific study on the safety and efficacy of marijuana (editorial, Tuesday) as a medicine is commendable, but hardly goes far enough. The real challenge is demanding that pundits, politicians, and the media actually pay attention to the research that is presently available. For example, in February investigators from the University of California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research publicly announced the findings of a series of randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials on the medical utility of inhaled cannabis. The studies, which for the first time in over two decades utilized the standardized FDA clinical trail design, concluded that marijuana ought to be a "first line treatment" for patients with neuropathy and other serious illnesses. [continues 489 words]
Critics' claim that marijuana is "too dangerous" a substance to allow for therapeutic purposes demonstrates a willful ignorance of the science surrounding its use ("Medical marijuana too dangerous, costly," June 30). For example, in February, the results of a series of randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials performed by the University of California concluded that inhaled cannabis is safe and effective as a medicine, particularly in the treatment of multiple sclerosis and neuropathic pain. Months earlier, the American Medical Association's Council on Science and Public Health reported, "Results of short term controlled trials indicate that smoked cannabis reduces neuropathic pain, improves appetite and caloric intake especially in patients with reduced muscle mass, and may relieve spasticity and pain in patients with multiple sclerosis." [continues 127 words]
Editor's note: The author is the co-author of the book, "Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?"(Chelsea Green, 2009). He will be discussing his book at the John F. Kennedy Library, Joseph Room, 505 Santa Clara Street, today at noon. Speaking privately with Richard Nixon in 1971, the late Art Linkletter offered this view on the use of marijuana versus alcohol. "When people smoke marijuana, they smoke it to get high. In every case, when most people drink, they drink to be sociable." [continues 540 words]
Your opposition regarding the proposed establishment of county-licensed medical marijuana "compassion centers" appears to be misguided. Under present law, qualified patients have the legal option to use marijuana therapeutically under their doctor's supervision. Yet the law fails to provide these patients with safe, legal, consistent above-ground access to their medicine. Senate Bill 2213 seeks to rectify this situation by providing patients with access to medical marijuana in a strictly controlled, state-regulated manner. Similarly regulated facilities are operating in New Mexico, and soon will be implemented in New Jersey, Maine and Rhode Island. [continues 117 words]
On Tuesday, members of the state Assembly will vote on California marijuana policy. The Public Safety Committee will vote on Assembly Bill 390, the Marijuana Control, Regulation and Education Act, which seeks to regulate and control the production, distribution, and personal use of marijuana for adults age 21 and older. Tuesday's vote will mark the first time since 1913, when California became one of the first states in the nation to impose criminal cannabis prohibition, that lawmakers have reassessed this failed policy. [continues 289 words]
There Has Been a Tidal Shift in Politics and on Marijuana Laws in America, From Obama Lightening Up on Pot Prosecutions to the Recognition of Cancer Prevention Properties. #1 Obama Administration: Don't Focus On Medical Marijuana Prosecutions United States Deputy Attorney General David Ogden issued a memorandum to federal prosecutors in October directing them to not "focus federal resources ... on individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana." The directive upheld a campaign promise by President Barack Obama, who had previously pledged that he was "not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue." Read the full story here. http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=7998 [continues 870 words]
The Government Keeps Pushing the BS That Pot Is Addictive and Has Serious Health Consequences. And No Wonder -- Lying About Pot Is a Lucrative Business. Marijuana's addiction potential may be no big deal, but it's certainly big business. According to a widely publicized 1999 Institute of Medicine report, fewer than 10 percent of those who try cannabis ever meet the clinical criteria for a diagnosis of "drug dependence" (based on DSM-III-R criteria). By contrast, 32 percent of tobacco users and 15 percent of alcohol users meet the criteria for "drug dependence." [continues 1237 words]
Writing in the book Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? (Chelsea Green, 2009), I argue that it is irrational for our society to condone, if not encourage, the use of alcohol -- an intoxicant that directly contributes to tens of thousands of deaths annually and countless social problems -- while simultaneously stigmatizing and criminalizing the use of cannabis, a substance that is incapable of causing lethal overdose and is associated with far fewer societal costs. Well now a new study, authored by researchers from the Centre for Addictions Research of British Columbia at the University of Victoria and the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse at the University of Ottawa has directly compared the societal costs of marijuana and alcohol, as well as tobacco, and the final tally isn't pretty. [continues 283 words]
If the editors at The Patriot Ledger truly believe that "to guide drug policy, you must take ownership of it," (Our Opinion: "Legislature wise to address legalization of marijuana," Oct. 20), then they should be advocating in support of legalizing and regulating marijuana - not opining against it. Only through state government regulation will we be able to bring necessary controls to the marijuana market. By enacting state and local legislation on the use, production and distribution of marijuana, state and local governments can effectively impose controls regarding: [continues 267 words]
The following is the testimony NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano will deliver on Oct. 28 to the California Assembly Public Safety Committee's special hearing on "the legalization of marijuana: social, fiscal and legal implications for California." Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, sponsor of AB 390, The Marijuana Control, Regulation and Education Act, is the chairman of the committee. By any objective standard, marijuana prohibition is an abject failure. Nationwide, U.S. law enforcement have arrested over 20 million American citizens for marijuana offenses since 1965, yet today marijuana is more prevalent than ever before, adolescents have easier access to marijuana than ever before, the drug is more potent than ever before, and there is more violence associated with the illegal marijuana trade than ever before. [continues 583 words]
Writing in the journal Science nearly four decades ago, New York State University sociologist Erich Goode documented the media's complicity in maintaining cannabis prohibition. He observed: "[T]ests and experiments purporting to demonstrate the ravages of marijuana consumption receive enormous attention from the media, and their findings become accepted as fact by the public. But when careful refutations of such research are published, or when later findings contradict the original pathological findings, they tend to be ignored or dismissed." A glimpse of today's mainstream media landscape indicates that little has changed -- with news outlets continuing to, at best, underreport the publication of scientific studies that undermine the federal government's longstanding pot propaganda and, at worst, ignore them all together. [continues 1145 words]
More than one-half of Americans now believe that smoking marijuana is less dangerous than drinking alcohol. That's according to the results of a just-released national telephone poll of 1,000 likely voters by Rasmussen Reports. By contrast, just 19 percent of respondents said that they believed that pot is more dangerous than alcohol. The public has it right. The law, which results in the arrest of some 800,000 Americans for marijuana violations annually, has it wrong. As I explain in my new book, "Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?" (I will be discussing the book at Panama Red on Friday at 5 p.m.), the risks posed by marijuana and alcohol -- both to the individual consumer and to society as a whole -- are far from equal. Quite literally, alcohol is an intoxicant; cannabis is not. [continues 487 words]
