The Many Different Faces Of Cannabis In America

❝Pot legalization in Washington state has put at least one police dog out of work. The Labrador retriever, Phelan, is now obsolete for police work because he couldn't be retrained to ignore the scent of marijuana. The police department has purchased a new dog, trained to ignore the smell of pot. As more states legalize marijuana, more police dogs could be out of work, but maybe someone will give them a new job – helping forgetful pot smokers relocate their missing stash.❞
~ Thom Hartmann



The Many Different Faces Of Marijuana In America
Gene Demby National Public Radio June 12, 2013

On Tuesday, Vermont moved to decriminalize the possession of marijuana for quantities up to an ounce, replacing potential prison time for arrests with fines.

Peter Shumlin, the state's governor, made a telling distinction between weed and "harder" drugs when he announced the move. "This legislation allows our courts and law enforcement to focus their limited resources more effectively to fight highly addictive opiates such as heroin and prescription drugs that are tearing apart families and communities," he said.

The idea that weed isn't that big a deal and that governments need to readjust their priorities is pretty common. There's little vocal anti-pot government outcry, no temperance movement analog for cannabis. Recent polls have found that a majority of Americans think marijuana should be legalized.

Even our mainstream faces of stoner culture are generally silly, harmless and amiable (Jeff Spicoli, Cheech & Chong, Harold & Kumar, and whatever Snoop is calling himself these days) except when they're revered and saintly (read: Bob Marley). On TV, there was Weeds, a dramedy about an upper-middle-class widow who starts selling marijuana to make ends meet. Change the drug to something else like heroin or meth, drugs with more sinister reputations, and it becomes something much darker. You'd pretty much have to go all the way back to Reefer Madness to find a widely seen film that portrayed pot as dangerous or threatening. (And the whole reason we all know about that movie is because the concerns at its center are often mocked as kitschy and histrionic.)

Mona Lynch, a professor at the University of California, Irvine who studies the criminal justice system, says that stereotypes of marijuana usage in popular culture don't come across as very threatening. "There's not a lot of uproar around marijuana [as] a crushing problem," she says.

But this image of weed use as benign recreation or banal nuisance doesn't square with another great fact of American life — the War on Drugs. And more and more, that War on Drugs means marijuana.

Ezekiel Edwards, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Criminal Law Reform Project, says that 10 years ago, marijuana possession arrests made up 37 percent of all drug arrests. And now? "Half of all drug arrests are now marijuana-related," he says — and 9 in 10 of those are for possession.

The focus of the continuing law enforcement battle on marijuana lands disproportionately on people of color. The ACLU crunched some Justice Department numbers on drug arrests, and released a much-discussed report last week on their findings. The upshot: African-Americans are four times as likely to be arrested for possessing marijuana than whites, even though blacks and whites consume weed at about the same rate.

For blacks — and black men in particular — marijuana is a gateway drug into the criminal justice system.

"The thing that was shocking about the report was the pervasiveness, that this [disparity in arrests] is happening everywhere," Lynch tells me. "It's happening in small towns, big towns, urban and rural."

Both Edwards and Lynch say that part of the reason marijuana is getting more attention from law enforcement agencies is that police departments are being subsidized with lots of federal dollars to stop drugs, but the crack epidemic has since waned. "Institutions don't like to shrink," Lynch says. "It's actually a reverse kind of pattern — drug arrests are going up [even] as crime drops."

At the same time that marijuana's become a more central focus of the War on Drugs, there are plenty of business types who are already making their plans for selling marijuana after, uh, all the smoke clears. They're trying to give pot an altogether new face: as a widely available commercial product backed by big business. No one knows what that market might even look like quite yet, but it could be incredibly lucrative.

Might you be able to cop some weed at your supermarket behind the counter with cigarettes? Would your favorite coffee shop start selling some "extra special" lattes? What about an over-the-counter headache medicine packaged in a box with a little green leaf in the corner?

Seriously — it might not be that far-fetched.

Don Pellicer, a company that hopes to open marijuana stores in Washington and Colorado, is looking for investors. Vicente Fox, the former president of Mexico, was a guest speaker at a Don Pellicer event last week, and has said that he would grow marijuana if weren't against the law. "Once it's legitimate and legal, sure, I could do it," he told reporters. "I'm a farmer. Producers of all types can participate." (Fox, it's worth noting, used to run Coca-Cola in Mexico, and its sales jumped by 50 percent during his tenure.)

There are already vending machine companies working on cannabis-dispensing kiosks for retail stores for the people who don't want the hassle of humoring those talky connoisseur types. "The way we see it, when you walk into a shop, you don't need the expert or aficionado to help with selection," says the head of one such vending company. "The people who are using this in the recreational space — they know what they want, and they don't want to hear the whole spiel every time."

And there are all the industrial, non-psychoactive applications. Hemp fiber, which is especially strong, is already used in all sorts of textiles. One researcher told writer Doug Fine that a decade after weed became legal, a domestic hemp industry would sprout up in the United States to the tune of $50 billion a year — which would outpace the estimates of what smokable reefer would bring in.

"When America's 100 million cannabis aficionados (17 million regular partakers) are freed from dealers, some are going to pick up a six-pack of joints at the corner store before heading to a barbecue, and others are going to seek out organically grown heirloom strains for their vegetable dip," Fine wrote.

So now we have to reconcile the many different faces of marijuana — a jokey, pop-culture staple, a continuing fascination of law enforcement agencies whose attentions fall disproportionately on people of color, and the potential cash crop of a bright, green future.

Which of these will give way? Or will any of them?

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Ganjabars in Vending Machines,
Ain't that America, Home of the Free Baby.

Drug Prohibitions Hurt Science, Researchers Charge
By Phillip Smith, Stop the Drug War - Wednesday, June 12 2013
In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, a group of leading scientists argue that global drug prohibition has not only compounded the harms of drug use, but also produced the worst censorship of research in centuries. They likened the banning of psychoactive drugs and the subsequent hampering of research on them to the Catholic Church banning the works of Copernicus and Galileo. continued

UK’s Drugs Czar Fired For Marijuana Truths
The Effect of Controlled Substances Scheduling on Research
FDA-Approved Medical Marijuana Research Blocked

NeoConflicts of Interest

MJ Research Cut as Support Grows
Bush Barthwell & Drugs
Drug Czar linked to deception
Is The DEA Legalizing THC?

If a pharmaceutical product contains THC extracted from the marijuana plant, that would be a legal commodity. But if you or I possessed THC extracted from the marijuana plant, that would remain an illegal commodity.

U.S.Fort Schwag Mississippi
Ole Miss Home To Medical Marijuana Lab

Since the cannabis plant itself will remain illegal under federal law, then from whom precisely could Big Pharma legally obtain their soon-to-be legal THC extracts? There’s only one answer: The federal government’s lone legally licensed marijuana cultivator, The University of Mississippi at Oxford, which already has the licensing agreements with the pharmaceutical industry in hand.

Shame on the Drug Worrier Profiteers
* Policing for Profit
* Got SqWAT?
* Forfeiture $quads
* Money Grubbing Dung Worriers
* Religious drug treatment in Texas
* Kochroach & Aleech Drug Detention Centers



❝WE ARE speaking of a plague that consumes an estimated $75 billion per year of public money, exacts an estimated $70 billion a year from consumers, is responsible for nearly 50 per cent of the million Americans who are today in jail, occupies an estimated 50 per cent of the trial time of our judiciary, and takes the time of 400,000 policemen -- yet a plague for which no cure is at hand, nor in prospect.❞
~ Wm. F. Buckley Jr.

Why Police Officers Lie Under Oath

❝As someone who spent 35 years wearing a police uniform, I've come to believe that hundreds of thousands of law-enforcement officers commit felony perjury every year testifying about drug arrests.❞
The Joseph McNamara Collection
druglibrary.org/schaffer
Joseph McNamara is a former police chief in Kansas City, Mo. and San Jose, Ca.. He holds a doctorate in public administration and a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Why Do You Think They Call it DOPE?
* Cannabis Hemp: The Invisible Prohibition Revealed
* The Elkhorn Manifesto
* Marijuana and Hemp: The Untold Story
* The Nation of Apathetic Puppets By John Pilger
* Maintaining Dysfunction