COME NEW YEAR'S DAY, in Washington state and Colorado, marijuana will be legit, courtesy of two ballot initiatives. How do you create a legal business out of an illegal one? After 13 years of Prohibition, the country at least had an earlier legal liquor market to refer to. That's where Mark Kleiman comes in, the go-to expert on these matters. A UCLA professor of public policy and author and coauthor of books like "Marijuana Legalization," he's heard all the jokes about "hemperor" and "your serene high-ness." He was consulted by Washington state's liquor control board, which has to come up with the nuts and bolts for the new law and which asked him for, well, the straight dope. [continues 1233 words]
Legalizing It Seems Like A Good Idea In These Cash-Strapped Times. But There Are Many Reasons To Just Say No. Barack Obama is probably getting more letters than Santa Claus this year. The transition office's mailbox must be full of pleas: "Dear President-elect Obama: I really want a My Little Pony Pinkie Pie -- Love, Susie," and "Dear President-elect Obama: I really want a Mustang hybrid model that will sell half a million units in the first year -- Love, Alan Mulally." [continues 883 words]
Under Homeland Security's 'Secure Flight,' Your Union Card or Reading Preferences Could Help Keep You Off a Plane. Don't look now -- by which, of course, I mean do look now. Look at all the ink and airtime lavished on the titillating stories about Southwest Airlines threatening to boot a couple of passengers off flights unless they tidied up their ensembles. A student/Hooters waitress had to tug her miniskirt down and pull up her neckline, and a man flying home to Florida had to turn his T-shirt inside out to hide its "Master Baiter" joke tackle-shop logo. [continues 810 words]
Believe in the American credo, do you? Second chances, bootstraps, clean slate, all that? Good for you. I do, too. Let's see whether you still do after reading this. A vast class of men and women -- maybe 13 million of them -- live under an unbreakable glass ceiling. They committed a crime, and they helped to put that ceiling in place themselves. But isn't there a statute of limitations on punishment? Can't someone help them turn that glass ceiling into a sunroof? [continues 889 words]
Why should a prison past keep someone from punching a time card? BELIEVE IN the American credo, do you? Second chances, bootstraps, clean slate, all that? Good for you. I do too. Let's see whether you still do after reading this. A vast class of men and women -- maybe 13 million of them -- live under an unbreakable glass ceiling. They committed a crime, and they helped to put that ceiling in place themselves. But isn't there a statute of limitations on punishment? Can't someone help them turn that glass ceiling into a sunroof? [continues 880 words]
Guess which one of the following remarks -- all made by Supreme Court justices during last week's arguments about California's medical marijuana law -- was uttered by the Supreme from the Golden State: * 'Go to the FDA and say, 'Take this off the dangerous drugs list. . . . Medicine by regulation is better than medicine by referendum.' " * "Seems to me the sensible assumption is they're going to get it on the street." * "If we rule for the respondents in this case, do you think the street price of marijuana would go up or down?" [continues 743 words]
The Supreme Court Is Being Asked to Do What Lawmakers Fear. Guess which one of the following remarks -- all made by Supreme Court justices during this week's arguments about California's medical marijuana law -- was uttered by the Supreme from the Golden State: * "Go to the FDA and say, 'Take this off the dangerous drugs list. Medicine by regulation is better than medicine by referendum.' " * "Seems to me the sensible assumption is they're going to get it on the street." [continues 798 words]
"It is possible to keep cannabis out of the hands of street dealers and away from children if we tax and regulate it." Dale Gieringer, of the Oakland Civil Liberties Alliance and a past president of NORML, the marijuana legalization group ... with a notion that could wipe out the budget deficit in less than a month. Quoted in the Oakland Tribune. [end]
There were moments yesterday when I had to keep looking around me -- at the desk with the federal judge sitting way up there, at the Great Seal of the United States etched into the green marble, at the blue-blazered federal marshals -- to remind myself where I was, and what I was doing there: This wasn't an awards ceremony, it was a criminal sentencing for a felon. Through Judge A. Howard Matz's courtroom have come cases of prostitution, bribery, Rampart lies, stolen dope, crooked lawmen and a lawsuit over Britney Spears and roller skates. Many words have been used to describe the felons who have stood where defendant Scott Imler stood yesterday, but the words I heard yesterday weren't words I'm used to hearing about a criminal -- and especially not from the judge who was about to sentence him. [continues 1280 words]
Some of the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court are getting up in years. Odds are that they know someone, or soon will know someone, who has some wasting, killing ailment. Maybe that crossed at least one of the nine minds this week -- perhaps Anthony Kennedy's, or Sandra Day O'Connor's, the one from California and the other from Arizona, two of nine states with laws allowing the medical use of marijuana for just such illnesses, laws the Supreme Court has now begun scrutinizing. [continues 573 words]
Justice may or may not be blind, but it sure dresses funny. With permission from Superior Court Judge John Cosgrove, many jurors in a Placer County marijuana trial today will file into the courtroom in Halloween costumes. The Auburn jury will be hearing the defense's side in the case against Steve Kubby, on trial for alleged possession of marijuana with intent to sell. Now, even without a jury tricked out for trick-or-treat, Kubby's is not your routine marijuana case. In July, he lost a runoff for the Libertarian Party's vice presidential nomination. And Kubby was a force in the 1996 campaign that passed Proposition 215, allowing the medical use of marijuana. He has adrenal cancer and says that marijuana keeps him alive. Prosecutors contend that he was growing enough marijuana to keep many people alive. [continues 64 words]
Pick a cliche that applies: reaping what's been sown, making your bed then lying in it, chickens coming home to roost. Home to the Rampart Division. Home to the LAPD. Home to the courtroom. Already, in the noxious wake of the Rampart bad-cop scandal, the L.A. city attorney's office is noting an uptick in acquittals and hung juries, a few more jurors telling prosecutors they just didn't believe the cops in the witness box. Two streets over, in the district attorney's office, some prosecutors are beginning to come back from court with tales of defense attorneys tearing with renewed zest into police credibility, like a mongoose after a cobra. [continues 783 words]
You sit in criminal courtrooms long enough, you can pick out the types: the iceberg dude who swaggers to the bar of justice like the urban gunslinger he fancies himself, the punk prince who won't admit he's in way over his head, the wild-eyed neophyte who is just beginning to realize that this isn't a video game simulation. Then there is the type who is getting on in years, sadder, yes, and maybe wiser, but wiser too late because here he is, back in a courtroom again, just as George Rounds was on Thursday, in Department F in the Santa Monica courthouse, to hear his sentence for the $5 pebble of crack the cops found in his jeans last year. [continues 756 words]
Imagine the man on the witness stand is accused of killing another man, and has pleaded not guilty, contending that he acted in fear of his own life. The prosecutor asks: "Sir, you told several versions of what happened that night. Initially, you said you believed the victim had a gun and was about to shoot, and so you shot him first. "Then you told investigators, Well, he didn't actually have a gun, but it looked like he was reaching for what could have been a gun, and so you shot him. "Finally, five days after the incident, we hear from you that the victim's wife tackled you as the victim appeared to be going for a gun, and you shot him. "Now sir, which is the truth? [continues 726 words]
In last November's election, I received 4,305,746 fewer votes than did Gray Davis, which is to say I received none at all, while he was elected governor. That, however, does not inhibit me from peeking figuratively over his shoulder at the stuff that's landed on his desk in these last days of the legislative session, and telling him what I think he ought to be thinking. Among the stuff in his "to-do" pile is Assembly Bill 518. This is the fourth time such a bill has landed on the desk of a California governor, but the last three it was a different governor, Pete Wilson, and he vetoed all of them, three up, three down. [continues 732 words]
When I ran across the word in some English novel, I had no idea what it was, but it sounded gorgeous, and I can still approximate the sentence: "It was the privilege of a peer of the realm, upon being found guilty of a capital offence, to be hanged by a silken rope rather than a common hempen one." Hempen--what a sublime word. But what the heck did it mean? Therein lies, or hangs, the tale. Hempen is the adjective form of hemp, and hemp used to mean an abundant cash crop cultivated throughout the country for fiber, rope, canvas, paper. Now it means guilt by association, because in almost every characteristic except the one that can get you high, hemp is virtually the same plant from whence comes marijuana, cannabis sativa. [continues 799 words]
In the '70s, the key to untangling any political conundrum was to follow the money. In California in the '90s, it may be that the secret is to follow the smoke. State Sen. John Vasconcellos will be getting a top award next week from the liberal Drug Policy Foundation. He, in turn, will present the foundation's journalism award to Garry Trudeau, the creator of the "Doonesbury" strip. Here's the smoking press release element: Vasconcellos is getting the award for his legislative proposals supporting medical marijuana research, in the wake of Proposition 215. He is also the same fellow who crafted the California Task Force to Promote SelfEsteem, Personal and Social Responsibility, which was savagely mocked in the nation's newspaper comics pages in 1987 by . . . Garry Trudeau. [continues 64 words]
