Cannabis in California: The Growing Storm
http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/cannabis-in-california-growing-storm.html
26 March 2010
By Jonah Raskin
Cannabis is on the ballot: All eyes are on California
The man in the dark slacks and the blue jacket counted out 100 $100
bills and handed them to the woman in jeans and a faded T shirt that
said "Eat the Rich." She handed the bills to another woman with dark
glasses and turquoise rings on her fingers, and she sat down and
counted them. They added up. There was $10,000 on the table.
The man in the slacks and jacket walked out of the hotel room with
two-and-a-half pounds of organic California-grown marijuana. He was a
happy man; he had customers from Pacific Palisades to Pasadena in Los
Angeles who were eagerly awaiting their ounces, half ounces, pounds,
and even grams. He had a price and a product for everyone no matter
what their budget.
Call them potheads. Call them stoners. Call them what you will. They
smoke marijuana daily and they go to work. They pay taxes, and on
election day this coming November they will go to the polls to vote
up or down on a state-wide measure that would allow dealers to sell
ounces legally, an ounce at a time.
All the big-time politicians are against the measure. Jerry Brown,
the State Attorney General, and the former Governor, known popularly
in the 1970s as "Governor Moon Beam" is against it. So is the former
eBay chief executive Meg Whitman, a rabid conservative, who is the
leading Republican candidate.
Oddly enough, or perhaps not so oddly, many of the marijuana growers
themselves -- some of them cultivating indoors and some in
greenhouses -- are also opposed to legalization. "It will mean the
end of my business," one long-time grower told me. "I won't be able
to compete and to make the kind of money I make now. Legalization
will ruin me."
But the growers are in a minority. So are the dealers. The
overwhelming majority of people in the pot equation are the pot
smokers. There are millions of them in California (and elsewhere of
course) and by and large they are sick and tired of being made to
feel like criminals. They want pot to be legalized. They want to be
able to purchase marijuana in the same way they purchase shoes, hats,
tomatoes, and olive oil. They're perfectly willing for it to be taxed.
Many of them are "true believers." They feel that pot is practically
a sacrament. They insist that it is good for them -- good for their
hearts, their eyesight, their digestion, and, if they are cancer
patients, a remedy for loss of appetite and nausea. The medical
evidence increasing shows that they are right.
In the state of California, a place in which there are very few "true
believers," the true believers in the goodness of marijuana will play
a decisive role in whether or not the measure to legalize the drug
will pass or fail. Every day, in almost everything they do and
everything they say, they campaign for marijuana. When they smoke it
they share it; when they cook with it they hand out brownies to
friends and family members. They push pot constantly, and promote it endlessly.
Ever since 1996 when medical marijuana became legal in California,
they have been smoking in public -- in pot dispensaries, bars, and on
the streets. After 14 years, it is out of control -- at least by law
enforcement standards; it is not possible to take pot out of the
culture and the business of California without also imposing martial law.
And even that will not stop it. Thousands of Californians -- and
thousands of Americans -- have been arrested for possession of
marijuana in the last decade. And still the numbers of marijuana
smokers have grown. Arrests have inflicted hardship and pain on
California citizens from the Oregon border to Mexico.
At a time when the California budget is in deep financial trouble,
the promise of tax dollars from the sale of marijuana will be hard to
resist. And the call of marijuana as medicine will be hard to resist too.
In the next eight months, marijuana will be in the news in California
every week, if not every day. The opponents of legalization will
bring out the same old arguments. They will talk once again about
that old bugaboo "reefer madness." And in a way they are right.
Indeed, the pro-marijuana forces are mad. They are mad about the
persecution they have suffered. They are mad about the lies and the
distortions. They are so mad they are willing to fight in the open,
to take their cause everywhere in the State of California.
The gap that exists between the citizens of the Golden State and
their elected officials will become clearer and clearer. Marijuana
will be a wedge that will drive them apart -- except that some
politicians like State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano from San Francisco,
want legalization too. Ammiano is a true believer. To some he is a
saint, to others a devil.
The growing storm will focus in part around him and in Sacramento,
the state capitol. But no part of California can or will escape the
issue of the legalization of marijuana. And the eyes of the nation
will be on California.
--
[Jonah Raskin co-wrote the story for the marijuana feature length
movie, Homegrown, that stars Billy Bob Thornton, Hank Azaria, Kelly
Lynch, Ryan Phillippe, Ted Danson, Jamie Lee Curtis, and John
Lithgow. Raskin teaches media law at Sonoma State University.]
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Marijuana Made Simple
http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/jonah-raskin-marijuana-made-simple.html
29 March 2010
Jonah Raskin
A primer: Marijuana made simple
I was a latecomer to the world of marijuana. I remember in the
mid-1960s a friend invited me to a party and told me that there would
be pot there. You smoked it and you got high, he explained. I just
laughed. I thought that the idea was ridiculous. "Where do you go
when you get high?" I asked.
I didn't find out until a few years later when I was living in New
York. My friend, Aaron, who went on to law school and later became an
honest, ethical judge was the first person I knew who smoked
marijuana regularly. He smoked everyday. In fact, he has smoked
everyday for the past 45 years.
When I first met Aaron most of the marijuana that was available came
to the U.S.A. from Mexico; it was smuggled across the border. The
word "marijuana" comes from Mexican Spanish and in the early racist
campaigns against marijuana, it was associated with the image of
lawless, dirty, violent Mexicans.
The plant is the cannabis plant; it has many active ingredients, but
THC is probably the most important. I say "probably" because while
cannabis has been smoked for thousands of years -- that is a fact --
there are not a heck of a lot of reliable studies of marijuana.
That's because the U.S. government, which made cannabis illegal some
70 years ago, is afraid that government financed studies will show
that it has medical benefits.
It does have medical benefits, and since the 1990s it has been
recommended by doctors for all kinds of health issues and problems.
Indeed, it has greatly helped people suffering from HIV and AIDS. In
California, medical doctors tell patients -- who have cancer and who
are in pain or who have loss of appetite -- to smoke it. It
stimulates appetite. It is a pain reliever. That is proven.
The domestic cultivation of marijuana really took off in the late
1970s and the early 1980s in the more remote mountain areas of
Northern California. Many of the pot farmers were 1960s folk who left
the cities and went back to the land to homestead.
Rural life in Humboldt, Mendocino, Sonoma, and Santa Cruz proved to
be more challenging than the hippies realized. Marijuana came to the
rescue. It was the one cash crop that they could grow and take to
market and sell. The money they made enabled them to buy land, build
houses, and schools and send their kids to college.
The domestic cultivation of marijuana received a big boost when
Mexican marijuana was sprayed -- because of U.S. government pressure
-- with Paraquat, a poisonous herbicide. Understandably no one wanted
weed with poison.
The assault on marijuana came from all different directions including
the Reagan White House that initiated the "War on Drugs" -- a
misnomer if ever there was one. Of course, you can't make war on
drugs. The Reagan White House made war on people.
Nancy Reagan, the president's wife, helped to popularize the slogan,
"Just say No." Reagan's Attorney General Edwin Meese III insisted
that marijuana was "The Gateway Drug" and that it led users to
heroin, cocaine, and more. Of course, Meese, Reagan, and the
Reaganites never acknowledge the truth about drugs in America: that
tobacco and alcohol were the "gateway drugs," that young people
started by drinking beer and smoking cigarettes.
In the War on Drugs, Meese and law enforcement officials across the
nation violated the rights of citizens, and locked up thousands of
marijuana smokers. The persecution has not stopped.
The anti-marijuana propaganda has been relentless ever since the 1937
movie Reefer Madness. Of course, the movies have also popularized
marijuana, especially the comedies by Richard "Cheech" Marin and
Tommy Chong: Up in Smoke (1979) and Let's Make a New Dope Deal (1980).
In 1979, I went to Hollywood to make a marijuana movie. My idea was
for a remake of the black-and-white classic, The Treasure of the
Sierra Madre that's about gringo prospectors for gold in Mexico. It's
a tale of greed. My movie was to be about "the greed weed" and it
would be about hippies in California.
I sold the idea, and a treatment for the film, to producer and
director, Stephen Gyllenhaal -- the father of Jake and Maggie
Gyllenhaal -- but it took 16 years for it to be made. Homegrown was
finally filmed in 1996, the year that a medical marijuana initiative
was passed by citizens in California. By then there was also a whole
new generation of marijuana smokers and the producers of the film
realized that the subject was of interest to more people than aging hippies.
I was a consultant on the movie, and on the set. I have a tiny part.
Everyone in the movie had to sign an agreement not to use any illegal
drugs while the movie was made. The "marijuana" in the movie was not
real. The plants that are shown on screen were made from silk and
bamboo at a cost of $1,000 a plant.
Since 1996, marijuana cultivation and use has spread across the
country. Outdoor growers moved indoors. The quality of the marijuana
improved; often one puff is enough to get the smoker stoned. Recent
studies show that smoking marijuana is still on the rise. It seems to
be a part of the lives of millions of people -- though it is still
illegal by federal law. It is still classified as a Schedule I drug
which means that by U.S. government standards there are no medical benefits.
By last count, some 14 states now have recognized the medical
benefits of marijuana. Doctors recommend it to patients. Dispensaries
sell it at $45 for 1/8 of an ounce. The price varies, of course. As a
rule of thumb, the further the marijuana has to travel from the place
of cultivation the higher the price.
President Obama made a big difference in the world of marijuana when
he announced that the U.S. Justice Department would not make it a
priority to go after individuals who violated the marijuana laws. But
in 2010, Americans are still arrested and jailed for possession and
transportation of marijuana, and the prohibition of marijuana, which
began just as the prohibition of alcohol ended in the 1930s, may yet
go on and on.
Something, it seems, always has to be prohibited. Marijuana has long
been the fall guy. The plant that was smoked in China and India
thousands of years ago still does not receive the credit it deserves.
Will it ever become a medical hero? It is today to thousands of
people who suffered from cancer and other diseases, and it is beloved
by heads who like to get stoned.
But something inside me tells me it will be regarded as a bad boy for
some time to come. Alas, America is too Puritanical a place to allow
marijuana to be smoked freely and without fear of punishment.
--
[Jonah Raskin was the Minister of Education of the Yippies and a
member of SDS. These days he teaches media law at Sonoma State
University in Northern California. He has written 12 books, including
biographies of Allen Ginbserg, Abbie Hoffman, and Jack London. His
most recent book which is about organic farming is called Field Days.
He wrote the story for the marijuana movie Homegrown. He writes about
drugs for High Times magazine and he is keeping close tabs on the
campaigns to legalize marijuana in California. He is a regular
contributor to The Rag Blog.]
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