“Radical” Russ here, awaiting a flight to San Francisco to take part in the International Cannabis Business Conference at the Hyatt Regency. What an all-star lineup! You’ve got former Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders, Tommy Chong in a CelebStoner stage interview, renown blogger and political pundit Andrew Sullivan, the Guru of Ganja Ed Rosenthal, and so many more!

I’ll be there covering the event for CannabisRadio.com – follow my social media accounts @RadicalRuss for my updates. We’ll also present special live episodes of The Russ Belville Show on Saturday and Sunday at 3pm Pacific with highlights from the morning’s keynote speeches and recorded and live interviews with speakers and vendors from the exhibition floor.

Anthony Johnson, Debby Goldsberry, and Ngaio Bealum helped preview the conference on my show – take a listen:

We also spoke with conference organizer Alex Rogers about this event and the future ICBCs in Vancouver BC and Berlin, Germany:

As Bernie Sanders approaches the New Hampshire Democratic Primary tomorrow night, he leads by almost 15 points in Huffington Post’s Pollster poll averages. Hillary Clinton barely eked out a 0.2 percent “win” in Iowa and now the Granite State could put Senator Sanders in the position of frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

This has led to a collective panic on the part of the Clinton campaign, her associated SuperPACs, and the very foundations of Wall Street.

Hillary Clinton’s $675,000 speaking fee benefactor, Goldman Sachs head Lloyd Blankfein, recently spoke to CNBC about Senator Sanders’ candidacy:

“It has the potential to personalize it, it has the potential to be a dangerous moment. Not just for Wall Street not just for the people who are particularly targeted but for anybody who is a little bit out of line,” Blankfein said. “It’s a liability to say I’m going to compromise I’m going to get one millimeter off the extreme position I have and if you do you have to back track and swear to people that you’ll never compromise. It’s just incredible. It’s a moment in history.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/lloyd-blankfein-bernie-sanders-218689#ixzz3zcCIbq5i

Blankfein is clearly worried that the people, through Sanders’ campaign, are waking up to who the real culprits are when the Obama economy posts record Wall Street numbers while Main Street’s still crushed by student debt and stagnant wages.

Meanwhile, Hillary’s husband, President Bill Clinton, this weekend struck out at Senator Sanders as well for continuing to press the point that Hillary’s top five career donors are the big financiers she claims she’ll rein in:

“ ‘Anybody that doesn’t agree with me is a tool of the establishment,’ ” Mr. Clinton said, mocking what he described as the central critique of Mrs. Clinton by Mr. Sanders.

But then Bill Clinton pivoted to a new strategy to try to rescue Hillary’s flailing campaign: painting the supporters of Bernie Sanders as evil sexist trolls.

“She and other people who have gone online to defend Hillary, to explain why they supported her, have been subject to vicious trolling and attacks that are literally too profane often, not to mention sexist, to repeat.” Mr. Clinton, growing more demonstrative, added that the liberal journalist Joan Walsh had faced what he called “unbelievable personal attacks” for writing positively about Mrs. Clinton.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/08/us/politics/bill-clinton-after-months-of-restraint-unleashes-stinging-attack-on-bernie-sanders.html?_r=0

This is clearly a new strategy, as David Brock, one of the Clinton SuperPAC coordinators, talked to POLITICO about how Millennials are overwhelmingly in favor of Senator Sanders, taking time to blame the evil sexist trolls.

“If you study what’s being said in social media, the media that millennials are consuming, it is filled with misinformation and vicious lies and sexism in terms that you can’t even repeat from his supporters, from other trolls,” Brock said. “And you wonder why there’s such a gap in the millennial preference for Sanders over Hillary. I think if people took a look at what they’re seeing, that would account for some of [the deficit] — the fact that they have a misimpression of her.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/david-brock-bernie-sanders-218954#ixzz3zcG7IONu

I live online, so I won’t for one second disagree that there are some evil, vicious, hateful trolls online. I keep a special log of some of the things they write about me.

But the other thing there’s an abundance of online is data. Young people today don’t take your word for anything; they can look it up on the phones, tablets, and desktops. They don’t argue at length, like my generation did, about who was that one guy who played in that one movie – they look it up on IMDb. They don’t guess about what percentage of the popular vote Bill Clinton won in 1992 – they look it up on Wikipedia (43 percent).

It’s quite telling to me that David Brock believes that if only the Millennials were getting their news from the old, respected, owned-by-six-major-corporations establishment media, they’d like Hillary Clinton much more than they do and they’d see through Bernie Sanders’ empty promises.

It seems to me like Millennials break much more for Sanders because of their access to decades of data and record on Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders. They can look it up for themselves and see that when she was a Goldwater Girl, he was marching for civil rights. They can compare their past positions and their present positions and find that Bernie’s rarely wavered on his issues, while Hillary’s had to “evolve” on many of hers, like only supporting gay marriage in 2013, when it was already a fait accompli. It is only natural that a large majority of young voters, who overwhelmingly support marijuana legalization, would support Bernie Sanders, the candidate that has sponsored a bill that would end federal cannabis prohibition.

But the biggest problem with the attack line about the trolls is that in 2008, Hillary lost to an unknown senator smeared as a “socialist” whose name began with a “B”. At the time, he had amassed a record number of individual donations and mobilized an amazing online presence that blew past Hillary’s campaign and secured the Democratic nomination.

I was hosting a political talk radio show at the time on XM Satellite. The trolls then weren’t evil sexist trolls, they were evil racist trolls, and they spewed forth bile every bit as repugnant and more so than what Hillary Clinton has endured thus far. If Brock wants “misinformation and vicious lies”, look no further than the “birthers”, the Rev. Wright attacks, and Obama as a Muslim Manchurian Candidate (yes, somehow an evil Muslim and a black separatist Christian simultaneously).

So, then, how was it that then-candidate Obama managed to beat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Primaries by a 16-point margin up to age 30 and by an 11-point margin up to age 45? Are evil sexist trolls more powerful than evil racist trolls, or did young people just start paying attention to trolls in this campaign?

11-year-old Benjamin Tiller will spend the rest of his childhood, until age 19, in the custody of the state of Tennessee. Benjamin was just convicted of the cold-blooded murder of 8-year-old McKayla Dyer. Benjamin had gone hunting often with his father and grandfather and had been trained in firearm safety. Benjamin got angry at McKayla in a spat over some puppies, so Benjamin retrieved his father’s shotgun in their mobile home, made sure it was loaded, aimed it out the window and fired a blast to McKayla’s chest.

Meanwhile, the 11-year-old son of Shona Banda is spending his childhood without his mother in Kansas. He had the audacity to tell school officials in his drug education class that their sinister claims about marijuana were unfounded. His mother uses cannabis to treat her Crohn’s disease and he’s well-educated on the subject. That led to calls to child protective services, who called police, who called a judge to get a warrant. They took Shona’s son away and arrested Shona when they found her cannabis medicine in their home.

Now guess which parent – Benjamin’s father or Shona – is facing child endangerment charges?

Just so we’re clear: the father in the first story taught his kid how to fire a shotgun, took him out to kill animals with a shotgun, and left a shotgun and ammo available to his unsupervised kid, who then straight-up murders a little girl.

The mother in the second story uses cannabis as medicine, taught her kid cannabis was a non-toxic medicine that saves her life, and the kid is not found to have ever ingested cannabis, who then tells the truth about cannabis in a drug education class in school.

OK, which one is facing the child endangerment charge – the father or the mother?

If you guessed the parent whose kid had access to accurate education about cannabis, you are correct.

If you guessed the parent whose kid had access to a shotgun and used it to murder, you are sane, but, unfortunately, also incorrect.

There are so many stories of marijuana consuming-parents (medical or otherwise) whose kids don’t smoke pot who then lose their children and face charges of child endangerment.

There are so many stories of gun enthusiast-parents (hunters or otherwise) whose children shoot and kill people who then keep their children and don’t face charges of child endangerment.

I’ve been thinking about this since back in late April 2013. Lindsay Reinhart was the chief petitioner for an initiative to legalize medical marijuana in Idaho. Lindsay suffers from multiple sclerosis and uses cannabis medically herself. She went out of town to the remote mountains and left her kids at home with an adult babysitter. Through a series of events police end up at her home, intimidate their way past the babysitter, find her medicine, and her kids are promptly taken by child protective services.

That very same week, a mother just a county away had left her three-year-old and her 10-month-old in her car while she ran back into the house. The three-year-old found the loaded handgun the mother had stored in the car and fired it, hitting the 10-month-old in the cheek. The mother hears the shot and dials 911. Later that night, she’s got her infant back from the hospital, her three-year-old was never taken, and county prosecutors filed no charges.

Maybe I don’t understand the concept of “endangerment”. It means to put something or someone into potential danger, doesn’t it? How could anybody possibly imagine that a child is in more danger from parents that use cannabis than parents that leave loaded guns lying around?

The latest results from respected pollster Quinnipiac University show that Senator Bernie Sanders, once down by 30 points nationally to Secretary Hillary Clinton, is now within just two points of the supposedly presumptive Democratic presidential nominee among voters who are Democrats or Democratic-leaning, and out-performs her against the three leading GOP candidates.

Feeling the Bern yet? Establishment Democrats sure are, as my colleague Anthony Johnson notes.

People Just Don’t Like Hillary Clinton

There are other numbers in this poll that spell doom for the centrist corporate occupation of the Democratic Party.

Fifty-six percent of the voters polled had an unfavorable opinion of Hillary Clinton, with just 39 percent favorable. A whopping 89 percent of Republicans view her unfavorably as well as 55 percent of Independents.

In other words, not even 2 in 5 voters like Hillary Clinton. And since just 3 percent of voters “haven’t heard enough” about her and only 2 percent refused to answer, there isn’t much room for change in these likability numbers.

Conversely, just 35 percent of voters have an unfavorable opinion of Bernie Sanders. He beats Clinton’s favorability by five points with 44 percent and 19 percent of voters “haven’t heard enough” about him to form an opinion. Suppose all 19 percent hear enough and break toward unfavorable. He’d still be two points less unfavorable than Clinton.

I’m betting the more the public hears, at least half of that 19 percent will begin to favor Sanders.

Among Democrats, Sanders’ 72 percent favorability approaches Clinton’s 75 percent, but just 2 percent of Democrats “haven’t heard enough” about Clinton, while 18 percent of Democrats “haven’t heard enough” about Sanders. Clinton’s unfavorability among Democrats is 22 percent and Sanders’ is just 10 percent.

I’m betting the more the Democrats hear, at least two-thirds of that 18 percent will begin to favor Sanders.

Among Republicans, Clinton notches 7 percent favorability to Sanders’ 13 percent, with just 2 percent who “haven’t heard enough” about Clinton versus Sanders’ 19 percent. Among Independents, favorability goes 53 percent to 39 percent in Sanders’ favor, with “haven’t heard enough” breaking 16 percent to 5 percent toward Sanders.

I’m betting Sanders will capture a fifth of the 19 percent of GOP and half of the 16 percent of Independents move in Sanders’ direction.

If the Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton, these are the numbers she’s stuck with, barring some political miracle that changes decades of public perception about her. She will motivate the Republicans, almost 9 out of 10 who dislike her, to turn out like no other candidate. Half the Independents don’t like her and even 1 in 5 Democrats don’t like her, which doesn’t bode well for her side of the get-out-the-vote effort.

America Doesn’t Need Two Republican Parties

What establishment Dems don’t seem to realize is that since 1993 when Bill Clinton first triangulated his way (literally*) into the White House, the party has lurched rightward and left behind much of the base. With Bill Clinton we got the Telco Act that consolidated television and radio into a few corporate hands, the repeal of Glass-Steagall that led to the 2008 crash, the crime bill that instituted 3-strikes and eliminated much of parole, the Dept. of Commerce actively working with Big Pharma to keep profits high, a more-than-doubling of marijuana arrests over his terms, NAFTA that sent American jobs abroad and opened the floodgates that built the modern Mexican drug cartels, and “an end to welfare as we know it” that put millions of mothers and children into deeper poverty.

It wasn’t Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades with Monica Lewinsky that cost Democrats the White House against the least-qualified Republican candidate ever in 2000. Much of it had to do with his Vice President being unable to energize his natural liberal base after Clinton turned the Democratic brand into Republican-Lite. How many times did Ralph Nader say there’s no difference between the corporate Democratic and Republican parties and how much more prescient does he seem now?

As for Obama, Mr. Hope-and-Change Democrat convinced many on the left that we’d be returning to some of those progressive principles. His incredible political talents combined with the fallout from the least-qualified Republican president in history enabled him to energize the base and generate what were then record-individual contributions and winning the presidency.

Obama outflanked Hillary Clinton, the establishment choice, on the left with grand, sweeping oratory that promised the best of progressivism would return to the Democratic Party. Yet she and the establishment Democrats still haven’t learned that there’s this untapped yearning for a real opposition party to the party of Big Business, Big Military, and Wall Street. They just can’t figure out how this Senator Sanders is doing so well with his grand, sweeping oratory promising the return of progressivism.

President Obama has achieved great successes that shouldn’t be overlooked, but he departed radically from the Campaign Obama as soon as he entered the Oval Office. Where was the investigation and prosecution of Bush-era torture? What happened to closing Gitmo? Why are we still drone bombing the hell out of the Middle East? Why do we still have soldiers there? Why are we still being spied upon? Yes, the Affordable Care Act is nice, but why was he so quick to cave on a public option? Why did none of those Wall Street bankers ever went to jail and why are their banks now bigger than ever? Why is the stock market is setting all-time records while we’re still laden with student loan debt and graduate degrees that get us nothing but dead-end McJobs?

Hillary Clinton now has decided to paint Bernie Sanders as the naïve dreamer, unprepared for the job she has worked for all her life, where she’ll continue keeping things a lot like they are under Barack Obama, the unprepared naïve dreamer she lost to in 2008, with maybe a few improvements she can eke out from Republicans and corporations.

If Hillary Clinton gets the nomination, the progressive left stays home and the regressive right comes out in droves.

Marco Rubio Crushes Hillary Clinton, Ties Bernie Sanders

The final damning nail in the Clinton campaign coffin from the Quinnipiac Poll is the hypothetical presidential match-ups question. Against the top three Republican contenders, Bernie Sanders outperforms Hillary Clinton.

Donald Trump is Hillary Clinton’s only hope. In that matchup, she would win by 5 points. But Bernie Sanders doubles that win with 10 points over Donald Trump.

Against Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton fights to a tie, but Bernie Sanders beats Cruz by 4 points.

But if the GOP gets smart (a big if) and nominates Marco Rubio, Hillary Clinton loses the election by seven points. The young Hispanic Rubio even fights Bernie Sanders to a tie.

If the Democratic party gets smart (a slightly smaller big if) and nominates Bernie Sanders, he ushers in a wave of progressive enthusiasm of which Barack Obama’s campaign only gave us a sample. Those down-ticket Blue-Dog Democrats that Clinton’s establishment cronies are warning will be harmed by Sanders at the top of the ticket will actually benefit from the energized turnout of voters previously disaffected by the rigged-system duopoly the voters have come to expect.

With his big win and the re-invigorated electorate demanding change, GOP members of Congress will have more pressure to work with a President Sanders. With that change also comes a change in perception for local and state Democrats that they don’t have to fear some of the old Cold War era anti-Democratic liberal smears.

Nominate Hillary Clinton and assuming she beats the Republican, we just watch as the rightward-tilt of the Democratic Party continues and another Wall Street bubble bursts with no Bush to blame it on. Wars in the Middle East will continue and new ones will be started, with American boots on the ground, no matter how many times Hillary Clinton says there won’t be – she’s never met a foreign hostility she didn’t engage.

And those GOP members of Congress, backed by 89 percent of their voters who hate her, will make the gridlock of the Obama presidency look like absolute comity by comparison.

Sorry, Hillary Clinton, but you’re the Susan Lucci of presidential candidates. No, wait, Susan Lucci was actually nominated 21 times and won once. It’s Super Bowl this weekend, so I guess Hillary Clinton is the Cleveland Browns of presidential candidates – a great team that was thrice denied entry to the big game.

* Remember, Bill Clinton won election in 1992 with 43 percent of the vote versus George H.W. Bush’s 37.4 percent and Ross Perot’s 18.9 percent.

UPDATE: The final tally gives Hillary→ back that 0.3 percent “victory”.

It’s past midnight now in Iowa, which means it’s now Groundhog Day. Formerly-presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary→* Clinton has to feel like she’s watching 2008 play out all over again as some unknown senator comes at her from the left and steals her guaranteed Iowa coronation.

As I write this, Hillary→ Clinton is up 49.9 percent to Bernie Sanders’ 49.6 percent, or as the Clinton News Network, CNN, reports it, Hillary→ is winning 50 percent to 49 percent, because they round down at .6 over at CNN when it makes Hillary→ look better.

Hillary→ has given her victory speech. She was probably counseled to not specifically announce that she had “won” Iowa, since 0.3 percent is well within the margin of error. The last thing this candidate who 60 percent of Americans believe is not “honest and trustworthy” needs is to get caught stretching the truth again. She instead issued a “sigh of relief”, a clever way to position herself as a “winner” of Iowa without saying so.

(While I was writing this, new results came in with Hillary→ at 49.8 and Bernie at 49.6, but at least CNN has updated their graphic to show both at 50 percent. So, down now to a 0.2 percent lead.)

The only “sigh of relief” she should be issuing is that Martin O’Malley stayed in the race. More of his supporters would choose Bernie Sanders if it had been a two-candidate race, and it would have been Bernie with the margin-of-error “win” in Iowa tonight.

While Hillary→ was trying to play the George W. Bush Florida Card from 2000 (call a statistical tie a “win” to set the frame that the other guy’s a sore loser), Bernie Sanders wasn’t playing any games and honestly admitted the two of them were “in a virtual tie”. Maybe that’s why the same poll that shows 3 in 5 Americans don’t trust Hillary→ shows that just about 3 in 5 Americans do trust Bernie, the best “honest and trustworthy” rating of any candidate from any party.

Bernie’s humility masks what was an incredible win tonight. Bernie had only polled in the single digits in Iowa at the beginning of the campaign. He faced off against the biggest fundraising machine politics has ever produced, backing the favored candidate of the Democratic Party establishment, the presumptive nominee with the most impressive résumé of any candidate in recent memory, and the cultural importance of electing the first female president.

And he fought her to a tie. Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist septuagenarian Brooklyn Jew from lily-white rural Vermont who promises to raise taxes, cut defense, and fight for free education and health care, used $27 average donations from 3.5 million individual donors to draw equal support from Iowa caucus-goers as a billionaire-supported multi-millionaire with celebrity name recognition third only to Oprah and Beyoncé.

From @BernieSanders #IowaCaucus speech:”We’ve received$3.5M individual contributions.And you know what the avr.contribution was?It was $27!”

— ege (@kemmyege) February 2, 2016

While Hillary→ was sighing, Bernie was the candidate who was addressing the problems of criminal justice and the need for reforms. With the FBI probing her use of a private email server and retention of Top Secret information upon it, I can understand why Hillary→ doesn’t want the public thinking too much about the criminal justice system she may soon be embroiled within.

Hillary→ Clinton’s time has passed. People from both parties, especially younger voters, are disaffected with all politics. The Sanders/Trump outsider phenomenon has happened because, as I wrote on Huffington Post, “It’s the Rigged System, Stupid”. This is the era of tolerance for gay marriage and legal weed; it took until 2013 for Hillary→ to “evolve” her support of the former and my colleagues Anthony Johnson and Romain Bonilla can tell you all about her terrible positions on the latter.

Hillary→ Clinton breathing a “sigh of relief” for winning Iowa by 0.2 percent over Bernie Sanders is like Apollo Creed celebrating his 15-round split-decision over Rocky Balboa; the fight should’ve never gone that far. New Hampshire’s next, and we all remember how Rocky II turned out.

* I refer to her as “Hillary→” because she was so thoughtful to put her political leanings into her campaign logo, it’s only fitting to remind everyone.

Tonight, I completed my appearance at the Idaho Marijuana Town Hall (where the anti-legalization side chickened out at the last moment). I sent out notice on social media about our more than 8,000 listeners on the live stream, and re-shared my article from earlier today in which I called Idaho’s Drug Czar and the Idaho State Police “chicken”.

That ended at about 9:30pm. My host drove my co-speaker Inge Fryklund and I to a Del Taco for late night eats, then we dropped her off. I got here to my room at a budget inn (literally “Budget Inn”) around 10:30pm. I turned up the heat, got into some sweats, and turned on the TV while I processed photos and audio from the days’ events.

I’m enjoying Billy Ocean singing on Jimmy Fallon’s show, it’s about 11:25pm and he’s just getting into “Caribbean Queen” when POUND POUND POUND POUND!

There’s loud knocking on my motel room door.

I go to the peephole and there’s some woman in a drab coat and some dude standing just off the edge of where I can see. “Who is it?” I ask.

“Beep beep! Could you open the door?” the man says.

I can’t hear, because Billy Ocean’s beautiful voice is between me and the door, “Who?” I ask as I’m fumbling for the unfamiliar remote’s mute button.

“B.P.,” the woman says. “Would you open the door, please?”

I’m thinking, why the hell are reps from British Petroleum at my door? “No, I won’t open the door.” I get the TV muted. “Who are you?”

“Probation and Parole,” the man proclaims, “Why won’t you open the door?”

Holy shit! “Why are you bothering me,” I answer angrily. “I am neither on probation nor parole.”

“We have a female parolee who is registered to this room here,” the man says, “can you just open the door?”

“There is nobody here but me,” I reply, “and you can check with the front desk that I’ve been registered in this room since morning.”

“Sir, why won’t you open the door so we can just check that she’s not here?” the woman says.

“Why won’t you go get a warrant? I’m not the person you’re looking for and nobody else is in here,” I tell her.

Obviously frustrated, the male says, “Look, we know you’re smoking pot in there, and that’s your personal business and we don’t care. But we’ve got other probationers staying here and we don’t want to see you fuck it up for them, so go take that shit somewhere else.”

Right. It’s 11:30pm and I’m going to go door-to-door by myself looking to get some strangers on probation to smoke pot with me.

“Whatever,” I reply, “come back with a warrant or leave me the fuck alone.”

And I watched them through the peephole as they turned and walked away.

I’m somewhere between pissed off and terrified. It’s now approaching midnight and there is no way I’m going to be able to sleep, wondering if the next POUND POUND POUND POUND I hear at 2am is accompanied by a warrant.

To answer the obvious question, no, I wasn’t smoking pot at the Budget Inn. Now, whether or not I may have ended up smelling like pot sometime between dropping off Inge and arriving at the Budget Inn… well, smelling like pot isn’t a crime.

Unless you’re in Idaho (or Wyoming or New Jersey) where they have misdemeanor penalties for being under the influence of marijuana, absent any actual possession.

There is really only one person here at the Budget Inn who would have any idea I smelled like pot, and that’s the guy who checked me in. Nobody here is awake and shuffling about after 10pm on a Tuesday night. The mostly empty parking lot would suggest there aren’t many people staying here tonight. I didn’t see the lights on in any rooms I passed on my way here.

So… does night front desk guy call cops when he smells a pothead checking in? Did police follow me and my host here to the motel to know where I was checking in to? Did somebody not like me reading from their website’s hilarious late-90’s-drug-cop-sourced anti-marijuana legalization position paper live to over 8,000 listeners, a crowd of 100 or more, and two representatives of the local media?

Naw, that’s narcissistic paranoia, right?

Whatever it is, it is a stark reminder of why I left behind my friends, family, and birthplace thirteen years ago. And why people who want legalization in Idaho are so afraid to speak up for it.

Hey, Idaho State Police and Boise's "Probation and Parole" cops that pounded on my motel room door at 11:25pm… I took that shit somewhere else, and the tax revenue and jobs, too.

A photo posted by Russ Belville (@radicalruss) on Jan 27, 2016 at 9:57am PST

I’m sitting in the offices of New Approach Idaho, the grassroots volunteer effort to legalize medical marijuana and decriminalize personal possession in the Gem State. They have flown me and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition speaker Inge Fryklund here to participate in a Marijuana Town Hall at the Boise State University Student Union Jordan Ballroom.

Appearing at the event with Inge and me in just five hours from now are Tate Fegley from Students for Sensible Drug Policy at BSU; Elisha Figueroa, the Director of the Idaho Office of Drug Policy (the state “drug czar”); Cody Jorgenson, a BSU Professor of Criminal Justice; Senator Curt McKenzie, a Republican state rep from Nampa (my hometown), and representatives from the Idaho State Police.

Or, at least, they were. We just received an email from Ms. Figueroa that she and members of the Idaho State Police will not be attending.

Ms. Figueroa insinuates that this has become a “pro-marijuana” event loaded with “radical speakers” who are “out-of-state” ringers, and objects to my desire to live-stream the event. From Ms. Figueroa’s email this morning, at about 10:30am local time:

I am disappointed by the continued manipulation of the marijuana forum by New Approach.  I shared my concerns with you last week, yet there has now been the last minute addition of another radical speaker from out of state. As a result, it has become clear that what was billed as a college forum for meaningful discussion has turned into a choreographed pro-marijuana rally. I had agreed to participate because of your stated goal of a balanced discussion on the issue of marijuana legalization with a speaker list made up of Idaho citizens and Idaho government officials. However, because that is no longer the case, I will not be participating in the forum. For your information, Ginny Gobel will be withdrawing as well. I regret the loss of what might have been a valuable opportunity for education and dialogue.

Apparently, the inclusion of Inge Fryklund from LEAP is what tipped the scales for the Idaho Drug Czar and convinced Director Figueroa to drop out of the town hall. (Maybe Ms. Figueroa saw Ms. Fryklund’s performance in Oregon’s televised marijuana legalization debate, where she mopped the floor with the Clatsop County District Attorney and the rehab doctor who claimed five kids have died from marijuana edibles in Colorado.) Ms. Figueroa then apparently counseled the Idaho State Police to withdraw as well, as evidenced by this email from about 12:30pm local time from Teresa Baker at the Idaho State Police:

I am sorry to cancel at on the day of the event but after consultation with the Office of Drug Policy we are going to set [sic] this one out as we are not sure we will add much to the discussion.  It sounds like you have plenty of speakers so I am sure you will be fine.  Thank you for the opportunity.

Nothing to add from the State Police, who wail to every local news outlet they can that the legalization of marijuana in Oregon and Washington is causing mayhem in Idaho. The Idaho State Police, who say “The interests of Idaho should be protected and maintained by those with a personal vested interest in securing a bright future for our children, free of the devastating effects of drug use,” have nothing to add to our marijuana town hall discussion?

It’s probably best they don’t step on a stage with Inge and me to try to defend some of their more outrageous beliefs, including:

Drug abuse impacts the family in forms of child abuse and/or abandonment, domestic violence, the incidence of violence when someone addicted commits a violent act against another for their money or their property, to satisfy their own addiction. There are also innocent victims who are murdered, raped or assaulted as a result of someone’s addiction which is the result of a lack of self-control.

Ah, Idaho can’t legalize pot because we’ll all go a-rapin’ and a-beatin’ and a-murderin’ the women and children. But feel free to enjoy all the liquor you can drink in one of fine taverns or restaurants. Everybody knows drunks don’t harm anybody.

[M]arijuana is considered a “gateway” drug, one which tends to lead users down a path towards the use of other drugs, such as cocaine and methamphetamine.

So, you’re afraid of marijuana because other drugs are harmful? The fact you have to demonize it as a “gateway” reveals the lack of dangers you could cite for marijuana. Look, for people under age 65, over half have tried marijuana – that’s over 100 million people. There are about 3 million people who use any other illegal drug but marijuana at the rate of at least once per month. In other words, it’s a gateway only 3 out of 100 people go through… pretty lousy gateway, huh?

The facts are that every major study, including the feds’ own 1999 Insititute of Medicine study, find the gateway theory to be a myth – marijuana use does not predict use of harder drugs. Actually, cigarette and alcohol use are better predictors of future drug use, but nobody calls them “gateway drugs” because the seller isn’t dealing crack and meth alongside the cigs and booze.

Alcohol and drugs are not the same. People drink not necessarily to become intoxicated. However, people use drugs for the sole purpose of getting high.

Ah, yes, the “drinkers drink to be social; stoners toke to get high” argument. It was just as stupid when Art Linkletter and Richard Nixon invented it in the 1970s. Tell ya what, Idaho State Police, the next time you’re having one of your grand soirees (since policemen don’t have balls anymore), replace all the wine with grape juice and all the beer with O’Doul’s (near beer) and tell us all just how social everybody was that evening.

The only reason this myth persists is because of language and framing. With alcohol, we have an entire vocabulary designed to shield us from the fact that not only is it a drug, it’s the most dangerous highly addictive drug on the menu, legal or illegal. You’re not taking drugs, you’re drinking. You’re not a drug user, you’re a social drinker. You’re not a drug addict, you’re a problem drinker or alcoholic. You’re not high, you’re buzzed. You didn’t overdose, you just blacked out. You’re not suffering an overdose, you’re just hung over.

Then consider the spectrum of drinking we all recognize. You go from a drink to tipsy to buzzed to drunk to sloshed to hammered and so forth. What is there for marijuana use? High and not high. Similarly, there’s no demarcation of users; you’re either a stoner/pothead or you don’t do drugs.

But I’m here to tell you there are all levels of pot smoking. You go from relaxed to lifted to high to medicated to baked to couchlock and so forth. Plenty of us use marijuana for social purposes. Hell, what could be more social than a circle of strangers passing a joint? I have yet to see any social drinkers pass around a stein of beer for a communal sip.

Since marijuana is considered a “gateway” drug, legalization of marijuana could be viewed as an inroad toward legalization of other substances – a dangerous precedent to set.

In the latest polls, 58 percent of Americans nationally support the legalization of marijuana. The next most popular drug for legalization is ecstasy, at about 10 percent. Other illicit drugs have never topped 8 percent in support for their legalization. That’s some mighty strong legal marijuana if smoking it makes people suddenly want to legalize crack.

There is proof that marijuana increases harmful and criminal behavior on the part of the user.

Then why have harmful and criminal behaviors in Colorado and Washington dropped or remain the same?

[M]arijuana use leads to chronic and interim effects from regular use, specifically with regards to decreased testosterone, reduced sperm count and motility, altered sperm structure (with chromosomal and DNA alterations), interference with ovulation and the hormone cycle in women, suspected mutagenic alterations in DNA of germ cell chromosomes, and embryocidal toxicity and development impairment in the fetus and newborn exposed in utero or in milk supply of newborns.

Right. I’ll be sure to tell Tommy Chong’s six kids, Willie Nelson’s seven kids, Bob Marley’s 12 kids, and every Rasta and hippie kid I meet.

[Drugs were legal] prior to 1914. And although data is lacking, there is good evidence that with one-third of today’s population, drug addiction was greater. That is why we outlawed drugs.

Nope, untrue. Data go back to about 1875 and show that throughout history and regardless of legality or prohibition, about one percent of the population has aserious drug abuse problem.

On average, marijuana users have 30% more fat than non-marijuana users.

So, what, everybody at the Wal-Mart in Nampa is a pot smoker? Seriously, the latest bunch of studies on the issue have shown that regular marijuana users have lower body-mass index than non-tokers.

The tax earned on marijuana would not be enough to cover the abuse created in our society.

So, then, show me the $200 million in social costs racked up in Colorado and Washington, since that’s what they’ve raised in marijuana tax revenue.

There is evidence which indicates that the carcinogens in marijuana are much stronger than those in tobacco. Also, numerous studies have found that marijuana causes pre-cancerous changes similar to those of tobacco.

And the hydrogen we find in water is far more explosive than the oxygen… yet, thanks to chemistry, two hydrogen and one oxygen atom together are completely non-explosive and inflammable.

Chemistry matters. While any burning vegetable matter smoke contains carcinogens, what else they contain makes a difference. Cannabis smoke contains THC, which federally-funded studies have shown is an anti-tumoral agent. When Dr. Donald Tashkin, the foremost pulmonary expert at UCLA Medical School, did a thirty-year study on longtime pot smokers expecting to find the link to lung cancer, he actually found that the pot smokers had a lower incidence of lung cancer than non-smokers. Further studies found we have lower rates of head, neck, and throat cancer, too.

Yeah, it’s probably better for the Idaho State Police and Idaho Drug Czar not to share a stage with me.

The Missouri Cannabis Restoration and Protection Act, a.k.a. Missouri True Legalization™ or The MO-CRaP Act, has come under scrutiny for possibly evading Missouri campaign finance laws. Under the statutes, all political committees must report the name, address, occupation and employer of anyone contributing $100 or more, either in a single donation or over the course of a campaign.

As reported by the Columbia Tribune:

Unlike most other initiatives, the campaign has not reported donors or spending to the Missouri Ethics Commission. Instead, costs are being paid by the Cannabis Restoration & Protection PAC, incorporated for $25 by Mark Pedersen of Kirkwood. [Organizer Nick] Raines directed questions about the financing effort to Pedersen, who did not respond to an email seeking an interview.

“The campaign is funded by everyone,” Raines said. “It is volunteers, basically. We are doing really well, and at last count we were more than halfway there.”

This is not the first unfunded, all-volunteer, True Legalization™ campaign I have covered. I’ve dealt with many a True Legalizer™ in California, Oregon, Washington, and Colorado who year after year promised their pie-in-the-sky initiatives would get on the ballot and pass.

I don’t cast aspersions on such campaigns because I don’t agree with their goals. I shine the light of reality on such campaigns because I’ve had too many friends waste time and money and get ripped off by such campaigns.

Worse, I’ve seen too many tokers get riled up by True Legalizers™ to fight against the professional legalization campaigns that have a shot of winning. If you’re running an all-volunteer campaign for marijuana reform in some place like Idaho or Wyoming, good for you, because that’s the only public discussion of reform those states are going to get.

But Missouri has a professional marijuana reform campaign that has a good shot at bringing medical marijuana to the state. If you’re going to spend time and money chasing unattainable phantoms of legalization when you could enact the actual reform of medical marijuana, which has been shown to be the predicate to marijuana legalization, I’m going to cast some aspersions your way.

I’ve recommended that when someone asks for your time and money to support a marijuana legalization campaign, you ask them the following three questions:

1) How well does your language poll?

2) How much money have you raised?

3) How many signatures have you gotten?

In light of this story, there needs to be a fourth question:

4) Which professionals have you hired to run your campaign?

If the True Legalizers™ in Missouri can’t even manage the basics of campaign finance disclosure, something that could seriously hamstring the campaign, you have to guess the answer to 4 is “nobody”.

It’s nothing personal. I’d love it if True Legalization™ could make the ballot and pass in Missouri. The only problem is this pesky thing called “math”.

After numerous attempts to discern the answers to questions 1 & 2, I’ve got nothing but stonewalling from supporters of the True Legalization™ campaign. But the Columbia Tribune article and other commenters have suggested that this campaign is over “halfway there” in gathering signatures for their amendment.

OK, let’s do the math. They need about 160,000 signatures from 6 of 8 Missouri congressional districts to qualify for the ballot by May 8. Then “halfway there” would be 80,000 signatures. Let’s hope for them that’s not their “halfway there,” because realistically, they need about 250,000 signatures, to account for what will surely be a validity rate of about 2/3rds. “Halfway there” would be 125,000 signatures.

I’ll be generous and assume they mean the realistic “halfway there.”

Now, this PAC they are using to conceal campaign funding was founded in mid-March 2015. Let’s use that as the starting point for “halfway there”. With ten months between then and now, “halfway there” works out to a rate of 12,500 signatures per month.

There remain less than four months between now and May 8. So, this all-volunteer shadow-funded campaign for True Legalization™ could be expected to pull in another 50,000 signatures.

So if the “halfway there” is aiming for the realistic 250,000 signatures, the 125,000 they have plus the next 50,000 are going to leave them about 75,000 signatures short.

These calculations could be wrong. Perhaps the campaign’s shadow PAC was formed in mid-March, but they didn’t start gathering signatures until later. But the earliest snapshot of their website calling for signature gathering is dated mid-June. If that’s our “halfway there” starting point, they’ve gathered signatures for seven months at a rate of 18,000 a month, which will leave them about 53,000 signatures short.

They need a quarter million signatures. They’ve got fifteen weeks. If “halfway there” is 125,000, they need 8,333 signatures per week.

Professional signature gatherers could easily accomplish this for $1 to $3 per signature, but the True Legalization™ campaign steadfastly refuses to offer any funding figures, so we don’t know if they have the $125,000 to $375,000 necessary to hire them (my guess: they don’t).

Keep in mind this is just the Herculean task of getting enough signatures to make the ballot. After that happens, there will be six months of time for campaigning, which the True Legalization™ campaign seems to be lacking funds to accomplish. You can be sure that the Missouri cops and rehabs won’t be lacking for funds and airtime to campaign against it.

And what a campaign it will need to be! This True Legalization™ would be far more expansive than any of the four currently legal states and the five states (CA, AZ, NV, MA, ME) considering legalization in 2016. Imagine the attack ads cops and rehabs will produce for True Legalization™ that proposes:

• No minimum age for the personal use of marijuana;
• No limits on personal possession of marijuana and extracts or cultivation of plants;
• No limit on the public display of marijuana; and
• Permission to legally drive while smoking marijuana.

So we’re to expect that Missouri, a state that barely notches majority support for strictly taxed and regulated marijuana, is going to embrace legalization that allows sixteen-year-olds to drive around town smoking a quarter pound of pot.

Don’t waste your time with the True Legalizers™. Put your money and effort into New Approach Missouri and actually accomplish something.

I’m a political junkie and have watched all of the Republican and Democratic presidential debates so far. If I were one of the moderators, these are the marijuana questions I’d ask the candidates for president:

Democrats

Senator Sanders, you’ve called not for rescheduling, but descheduling of marijuana. Would that mean moving federal regulation of marijuana to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives, or no federal regulation of marijuana whatsoever, ceding it all to the states?

Secretary Clinton, you’ve often said that you’re generally in support of medical marijuana, but that the issue needs more research. With over 28,000 studies currently in PubMed regarding cannabis, how much more research will it take for you to form a stronger opinion?

Governor O’Malley, you were the mayor of Baltimore, a city with drug dealing so rampant that two popular television shows chronicled it. But that drug dealing also is often the only working economy in many urban areas. Do you think legalizing drugs would reduce urban violence and how would you do it to ensure these urban areas and their people get to participate in that new legal economy?

Republicans

Mr. Trump, should a pot smoker in a state that’s legalized marijuana have full and unconditional Second Amendment rights?

Senator Cruz, you speak strongly about your reverence for the US Constitution. Which part of the Constitution do you believe gives the federal government the right to ban the industrial hemp crops our Founding Fathers farmed?

Dr. Carson, as a neurosurgeon, can you explain the functions of the endocannabinoid system within the human brain?

Senator Rubio, you gained notoriety for sipping a bottle of water as you delivered the Republican response to the State of the Union. Did you have a dry mouth from recently smoking pot?

Governor Bush, you have been candid about your daughter Noelle’s struggles with addiction. Yet as governor of Florida, you presided over a state that will take a pot smoker’s voting rights for life if he’s caught with 21 grams of marijuana. Do you only support compassion for drug users if they’re named Bush?

Governor Christie, you have said you would “crack down and not permit” marijuana legalization to continue in Colorado and Washington. As president, how many federal agents and troops are you willing to commit in those states to make that promise a reality?

Ms. Fiorina, you responded to a question about marijuana legalization by bringing up the tragic death of your daughter. Yet marijuana had nothing to do with your daughter’s death. Do you really see marijuana use as something on par with the struggles with hard drugs your daughter fought and lost?

Senator Paul, marijuana reformers look to Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side and you on the Republican side as most friendly to our cause. How would your treatment of marijuana in Paul Administration differ from the Obama Administration, and for that matter, a Sanders Administration?

Governor Huckabee, you have famously struggled with obesity throughout your life, even writing a book about the issue. Which do you think, marijuana use or obesity, is more harmful to a person’s health?

Governor Kasich, your home state of Ohio overwhelmingly rejected a marijuana legalization proposal. Do you believe Ohioans rejected marijuana legalization per se, or just the controversial monopolistic manner in which the proponents tried to legalize marijuana?

Governor Gilmore, you once said that marijuana is “not a substance, it’s a lifestyle”. Does that mean your opposition to marijuana legalization isn’t based on the science of the substance, but is rather part of a broader culture war?

Prohibition propagandists like the Joker to my Batman, Kevin Sabet of Project SAMUEL (Smart Approaches to Marijuana Use… Except Legalization), are desperately crying out to the media for attention to this report from the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) that explains how Colorado youth aged 12-17 now exhibit the highest rate of monthly teen marijuana use, now at 12.56%.

That’s one-in-eight teenagers toking at least once per month.

Joel M. Warner in the Int’l Business Times explains how Sabet frets about the media’s blackout of the news:

“What went through our heads was, ‘This is big news,’” says Sabet. “We felt this would absolutely reach a wide audience.” After all, the day before, the National Institutes of Health’s 2015 Monitoring the Future survey, which found that nationwide teen marijuana use had fallen slightly overall, had received widespread coverage. Wouldn’t this report generate major headlines, too?

Sabet rushed out a press release. Then he waited for the onslaught of calls he expected from reporters. Instead, all he heard was crickets.

Why the crickets? Because there are three problems the Sabets of the world have to deal with now that they didn’t have to contend with in the 1980s & 1990s…

1) Google

We no longer have to hear a scary statistic from a propagandist and take it at face value. Now we can actually look it up for ourselves.

Kevin Sabet runs to the media and, like Chicken Little, proclaims that the sky is falling in Colorado:

…Colorado now leads the country in past-month youth marijuana use, after legalizing marijuana in 2012. The state claims this dubious distinction after being in third place in the 2012-2013 report, and in fourth place in the 2011-2012 study.

[…]

Other states that have legalized marijuana finished in the top six:  the District of Columbia (4th), Oregon (5th), and Washington state (6th).

So the media look up the very report Sabet so desperately wants to be given scrutiny, and right there, under its heading, “CHANGES OVER TIME IN ADOLESCENT PAST MONTH MARIJUANA USE”, it reads:

On an individual state level, three states experienced a statistically significant decrease in the rate of adolescent past month marijuana use (Hawaii: from 9.55 to 7.65 percent, Ohio: from 7.36 to 6.04 percent, and Rhode Island: from 12.95 to 10.69 percent). The remaining 47 states and the District of Columbia experienced no change in past month marijuana use.

No statistically significant change. But it didn’t take a mathematics degree for most journalists to figure out that Colorado has been a top five monthly teen marijuana use state for five straight years, along with Rhode Island and Vermont, which haven’t legalized marijuana.

2) Excel

We no longer have to accept the scary statistics from propagandists because we can access the data for ourselves.

The Monitoring the Future survey has been conducted by the government since 1975. All the data are published online and you can import them into Excel (or any spreadsheet) and crunch the numbers for yourself.

Keep in mind that there was “no [statistically significant] change in past month marijuana use” according to the report’s authors. But if Kevin Sabet wants to play by his implicit rules that Colorado’s increase from 11.56% to 12.56% over the past year means something, then all those figures for all the states are in play.

The top 20 states for teen marijuana use have rates that are greater than the national average and they have been consistently for the past five years. They are all medical marijuana or legalized marijuana states, but with differences as to whether they have legal markets (dispensaries) or not.

Eight states have consistently been in the top ten (5 Year Rank Average): Vermont, Rhode Island, Colorado, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Washington DC, Oregon, and Washington. What changed in those states over the past five years?

1. Vermont: Got two dispensaries opened in 2013 and their rate didn’t change a bit (where “bit” <=0.3%);
2. Rhode Island: Got one dispensary opened in 2013 and they were one of three states with a statistically significant decline;
3. Colorado: Legalized in 2012 and their rate increased slightly (where “slight” > 0.3% but still statistically insignificant);
4. New Hampshire: Passed medical marijuana in 2013 and their rate didn’t change a bit;
5. Massachusetts: Passed medical marijuana in 2012 and their rate didn’t change a bit;
6. Washington DC: Legalized in 2014 after rate increased slightly;
7. Oregon: Tried to legalize in 2012 and rate didn’t change a bit, legalized in 2014 after slight increase;
8. Washington: Legalized in 2012 and rate increased slightly.

Marijuana legalization and reform doesn’t create marijuana smokers any more than legalizing gay marriage created gay people or passing the Civil Rights Act created black people. Where there are marijuana smokers, legalization and reform will happen because people by nature demand their rights.

3) New Media

The final nail in Kevin Sabet’s What About the Children?!? scare coffin is our vast superiority in the online realm. Just this author alone has more Twitter and Facebook and Instagram followers than all Kevin Sabet and all his Project SAM acolytes combined.

Then multiply by hundreds of people like me how are dedicated activists for the cause of legalization and the now-burgeoning industry of marijuana and marijuana media. So not only do we have facts, science, reason, logic, truth, evidence, compassion, and love on our side, we’ve got the megaphone now to broadcast it.

Gone are the days when the drug czar’s office could pay Hollywood scriptwriters to place anti-marijuana plotlines in sitcoms and family dramas. The readers of newspapers and watchers of the CBS Evening News are dinosaurs and the majority of the under 65 denizens of the new online world have tried marijuana for themselves at least once, most likely when they were teenagers.

You can’t scare them anymore, Kevin.

“How long? Not long, because ‘no lie can live forever.’”

On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I find myself contemplating how long it will take us to establish full marijuana legalization in America. Speaking on March 25, 1965 in Montgomery, Alabama, about the struggle for black civil rights, Dr. King answered, “How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

It was 103 years between the Emancipation Proclamation and Dr. King’s speech. It was 95 years between the 15^th Amendment and Dr. King’s speech. It was four-and-a-half months later that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law and another 43 years before the election of Barack Obama as president. Indeed, it was 146 years between Emancipation and the first black president, and that’s a long moral arc.

Much happened in the intervening 146 years to lead up to Obama’s election. The South endured a bitter period of Reconstruction. The KKK was formed and vigilante lynchings of blacks happened twice a week from 1880-1930 and continued to as late as my birth year, 1968 (or, 1998, if dragging James Byrd to death with a pickup truck in Texas is counted as a lynching). Football, baseball, and the military were integrated shortly after World War II. Schools were integrated and Rosa Parks and the bus boycotts began in the 1950s. Then comes Dr. King and the Birmingham Jail, the Edmund Pettis Bridge, and “I Have a Dream”.

In other words, civil rights for African-Americans developed incrementally over time through many personal and political battles. Dr. King pressed for every advance possible, but he understood that he lived in a nation of white supremacy and had to work within the political structures of his time. While Dr. King spoke on the National Mall in 1963 of “the fierce urgency of now” and warned of embracing the “tranquilizing drug of gradualism”, he was never deluded enough to think he could run for president in 1964 and win and thereby enact his civil rights agenda. He knew he had to pressure President Johnson and the white majority for the civil rights victories that were possible in 1965.

Dr. King, while believing that a colorblind society was the ultimate goal, knew that it would take many compounding lesser successes to achieve it. On the day before his assassination in 1968, he explained how he had “seen the Promised Land,” but that he “may not get there with you.”

Today the promised land for our community of cannabis consumers is the day when marijuana is as legal and accepted as alcohol, when a bud is as non-controversial as a Bud Light. However, we don’t get to that mountaintop to see the promised land without our Emancipation (decriminalization), integration (medical marijuana), and Voting Rights Act (limited legalization).

Which is why I get so incensed at what I call the Stoners Against Legalization – those pot smokers who want to jump right from slavery to Barack Obama, and in doing so, forego the victories we can win and enable the prohibition status quo to continue.

Medical Marijuana – A Missouri Legalization Compromise

Today I was alerted to a blog in Missouri that is dead set against legalizing medical marijuana in the Show-Me State. No, it’s not the website of the state police, the local drug rehab, or some mega church. It’s another example of the Stoners Against Legalization cancer that has metastasized. What used to be limited to stoners in medical marijuana states fighting legalization to protect their status quo has become stoners in prohibition states fighting medical marijuana for a mirage of True Legalization™.

It’s a very long, meandering, poorly-written read, but the gist of it is that the medical marijuana proposal from New Approach Missouri, backed by Show-Me Cannabis, and Missouri NORML, is a wolf in sheep’s clothing designed to enrich its backers, Big Pharma, “prohibition profiteers”, and the state; it’s laden with onerous and arbitrary rules and regulations stamped into the Constitution and only detracts from the all-volunteer-no-money-no-polling True Legalization™ that would treat marijuana like tomatoes.

It’s a trend that has held true since California’s Prop 19 in 2010 and throughout every campaign to legalize marijuana, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in effect for medical marijuana.

There will never be a legalization or medical marijuana plan that could make the ballot and pass that will satisfy these Stoners Against Legalization. There will always be some doom-and-gloom scenario they’ll paint where creating some measure of protection for cannabis consumers in the future is worse than the kick-in-the-doors-and-shoot-the-dogs prohibition they suffer now.

How can anyone take seriously an analysis that presumes “DHSS could potentially declare the penalty for having one single plant too many in a growing facility is $8,000,000,000,000”? Really?!? Eight trillion dollars? Why don’t they just declare that the penalty is 10 quadrillion dollars and bamboo shoots under the fingernails? And imprisonment in a cell surrounded by a moat guarded by sharks with friggin’ lasers on their heads?

The source of this infection is the deluded belief that marijuana should be treated like tomatoes. It’s that hippie-dippie, pie-in-the-sky, healing-of-the-nations fantasy that marijuana is perfect and all good and everybody else thinks of it that way. Instead of the cold, hard facts that even tax-and-regulate legalization doesn’t poll above 50% in Missouri, much less “treat it like tomatoes” legalization that would go down in flames from the minute the first attack ad airs proclaiming “New Approach Missouri wants to let your neighbor fill his back yard with stinky pot plants and pack his garage with drug-dealer-amounts of marijuana. Their proponents seriously think marijuana, a mind-altering drug that impairs the development of children’s brains, is like the tomatoes you grow in your backyard!”

And, of course, no infection of Stoners Against Legalization would be complete without the attendant NORML Supports Prohibition Delusion. Yeah, yeah, guys like Dan Viets, a winner of the Martin Luther King Association’s “Keeping the Dream Alive Award”, who have worked tirelessly over forty years for legalization for less money than most attorneys make, is secretly carving out a Goldman Sachs-like fortune by ending police harassment of medical marijuana patients and providing them safe access to medicine. That’s the ticket!

You know, just like how Greenpeace supports whale killing, NAACP supports black voter suppression, and ASPCA supports animal cruelty, because if any of those things were eliminated, those organizations would lose a lot of money.

“Nothing Less Than Total Legalization” = Continued Prohibition

What’s most pathetic about this is that finally, and ahead of most predictions, Missouri has the organization, funding, and language that could actually bring medicine to sick patients, but the Stoners Against Legalization would work with the cops, courts, rehabs, drug testers, and prison guards to maintain the status quo of prohibition, without having anything else to offer to defeat prohibition, except empty promises of all-volunteer signature efforts for treat-it-like-tomatoes “true 100% non-prohibitionist” legalization of “this amazing, non-toxic, miracle plant” that will never make the ballot and would go down in flames if it did.

Some of this is just jealousy. These people who so truly believe in marijuana really do want it legalized and are upset that they can’t get any support from successful organizations and deep-pocketed funders. They can’t accept that perhaps their failing strategy and tactics are the reasons why, so it must be some sort of elaborate conspiracy theory. You can see it in the “Why doesn’t NORML support our True Legalization™ plan?” wailing. They really think the only thing keeping them from electoral victory is that money and support, ignoring entirely that their plan for legalization doesn’t poll well and would lose in a landslide.

These people are the types who would have told their fellow slaves that the Emancipation Proclamation was bullshit, because it wasn’t “true 100% non-slavery” emancipation, since it didn’t guarantee voting rights, interracial marriage, and sitting anywhere on the bus (OK, stagecoach) immediately. That Abraham Lincoln is just a slavery-profiteer, they’d proclaim, and if he really supported black equality, he’d support True Emancipation that contains the Voting Rights Act, Loving v Virginia, and Rosa Parks all in 1862. They’d have mustered all the fellow slaves they could to fight for the Confederacy, promising that once the Civil War was over, they and their fellow slaves would convince all the plantation owners to sign their True Emancipation petition.

We all long for the day when we experience True Legalization™ of cannabis, but we don’t get there by denying the patients of Missouri the freedom to use medical marijuana. Every state that has legalized marijuana so far has legalized medical marijuana first, and the one prohibition state that tried to go straight to legalization suffered the worst defeat for legalization in 21^st century.

On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, it’s okay to have a dream of True Legalization™ for the future, as long as you’re awake enough to pursue the achievable legalization victories in the present.

Let’s play a mind game. See if you can discern the differences between the following two scenarios:

SCENARIO ONE: It’s a cold and lonely night. You can’t remember feeling worse in your life. If you could just get something, anything, to treat your ravaging sickness and ease your enormous pain. You stumble through the alley, hoping someone out here will be able to help. There he is! He’s got what you need! How much? Twenty-five? It was twenty last time! Yeah, you got twenty-five…

SCENARIO TWO: It’s a cold and lonely night. You can’t remember feeling worse in your life. If you could just get something, anything, to treat your ravaging sickness and ease your enormous pain. You flip through the channels, hoping some program on air will be able to help. What is that? Yes, you do feel that way! Ask your doctor? Well, maybe this one will help the other one work. You’re sure your insurance will cover it…

Stop. Go back, re-read, and examine what images you saw and feelings you felt in those paragraphs. Who are “you” as you read those? What are “you” suffering from in those? Was the “sickness” and “pain” mental or physical?

Now, ask yourself: which scenario involved a drug dealer?

Trick question. They both did.

Scenario One is the drug dealer scenario you see on NCIS CSI L&O alphabet crime drama shows that are perennial ratings hits. Scenario Two is the drug dealer scenario that pays the bills for the networks that run those shows.

It’s difficult for Americans to appreciate how strange it is that Scenario Two is allowed to flourish in our media. According to a 2009 World Health Organization report entitled “Direct-to-consumer advertising under fire”, the United States and New Zealand are the only developed nations that allow this.

A 2011 report in the journal Pharmacy & Therapeutics asked, “Direct-to-Consumer Pharmaceutical Advertising: Therapeutic or Toxic?” It explains how the first pharmaceutical ads happened in 1981, and throughout the 1990s and 2000s, rules and regulations regarding these ads evolved. Requiring the fine print disclaimers that only allowed for print advertising came first, but that was soon relaxed for television and radio to the brief “side effects” warnings.

Stop. Go back and re-read the titles of those reports. Right there is part of why we have a blind spot to the reality of Scenario Two. “Direct-to-Consumer” evokes the framing of economics and choice in the selling of prescription medications. Call it what it is – “Direct-to-Patient” advertising – and that more properly evokes the framing of medicine and health.

It also illustrates what this advertising is really doing – allowing drug pushers to bypass doctors and talk directly to patients about their health care needs.

In 1980, there was $12 million spent on these ads. It topped $5 billion by 2006 and 2007. Since dropping to $3.5 billion in 2012, prescription drug ad spending has rebounded to $4.5 billion in 2014, according to research in the Washington Post.

What’s that ad money spent on? Of the top five most advertised drugs, two of them (Cialis and Viagra) are erectile dysfunction pills. A half-billion dollars in 2014 was spent suggesting that men “ask your doctor” if Eli Lilly’s or Pfizer’s boner pill is right for them. Boner pills that, like marijuana and painkillers, have legitimate medical uses and have significant populations of recreational users, too.

Speaking of marijuana and painkillers, another half-billion dollars in 2014 was spent on advertising for Humira, an anti-inflammatory drug, and Lyrica, a treatment for neuropathic pain. Two conditions treated exceptionally well by medical marijuana.

As you read this, you may think I’m ranting mad about Direct-to-Patient advertising. But that’s not it. I’m a die-hard free speech kind of guy. Some of the FDA data on the effect of this advertising shows positive outcomes, like doctors reporting patients who saw pharmaceutical ads “asked thoughtful questions … the ad made their patients more aware of possible treatments … [and] made their patients more involved in their health care.”

However, the same survey found that doctors “believe DTC ads confuse patients about the relative risks and benefits … [and] cause patients to think that the drug works better than it does.” Doctors also felt “pressure to prescribe something when patients mentioned DTC ads.”

The American Medical Association recently voted for a ban on such advertising. The AMA claims the direct-to-patient advertising is “driving demand for expensive treatments despite the clinical effectiveness of less costly alternatives.”

Perhaps that’s the case and perhaps I could support such a ban. So what is it? Am I “free speech” or “ad ban”?

I’m both – so long as it is applied equally to pharmaceuticals, alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and any other legal drugs (and I’d be willing to consider processed sugar and fast food in that list).

We’ve legalized marijuana in four states, but in each we face restrictive advertising and marketing regulations. One such restriction is the ban on using cartoon characters to advertise marijuana, because doing so would be marketing it to the children.

Look through the images I’ve embedded in this post. Do any of those ads for Abilify, Celebrex, Jublia, Lamisil, Mirapex, Nasonex, or Zoloft seem to be marketing to children?

So if we’re going to have the attitude that the public health demands that there should not be direct advertising to consumers of drugs with potential detrimental side-effects, let’s do that and take the Budweiser, Viagra, and Nexium ads off the Super Bowl.

If we’re going to declare that capitalism and free speech demands that drug manufacturers shouldn’t be banned from talking to consumers about their products, let’s also allow legal marijuana producers to advertise with the same regulations. I’ll put marijuana’s side-effects up against any pharmaceutical’s side-effects any day.

I’ve only been superficially engaged in the story happening in West Idaho – er, Eastern Oregon – with Ammon Bundy and the armed Oregon militants holed up in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Mostly, I’m following the #YallQaeda and #VanillaISIS hashtags on Twitter, which aren’t really fair comparisons to the so-called Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, since al Qaeda and Vanilla Ice actually had a national hit.

These ersatz patriots have a complaint about some federal tyranny involving a mandatory minimum sentence handed out for a couple of guys, Dwight and Steven Hammond, who set fires that burned federal land. There’s actually some merit to the idea that terrorism charges shouldn’t be doled out for this sort of arson. Even the judge who sentenced the arsonists said a five-year mandatory minimum “would not meet any idea I have of justice, proportionality … it would be a sentence which would shock the conscience to me.”

The whole story just reminds me of the question I’ve been asking my conservative, gun-loving, redneck friends and relatives back home in Idaho for years: Why are you so hell-bent on supporting states’ rights, defending the Second Amendment, and fighting the tyranny of the federal government, but you never speak up about ending the War on Drugs?

This standoff in Oregon is the second time a Bundy has led fellow armed citizens in a stand-off against the federal government. Ammon’s father, Cliven, was that Nevada rancher who in 2012 faced off against government agents over his failure to pay grazing fees for his ranching on federal lands.

Supporters of Cliven Bundy went so far as to set up sniper positions, locked and loaded, against federal agents. The federal government never responded in kind and backed off without giving the militants the conflagration many of them wish for, just as they’re doing now in Burns.

Now, if Cliven Bundy had been growing a few thousand medical marijuana plants on his land, or Ammon Bundy was armed and occupying his home medical marijuana grow site, do you think the federal government would be so non-confrontational? Or would they send body-armor-clad agents with military-grade weaponry to raid the Bundys, lobbing flash-bang grenades into their toddler’s cribs and shooting their family dogs, and then sentence them to a ten-year mandatory minimum, like Eddy Lepp, or a five-year mandatory minimum, like Dr. Mollie Fry and Dale Schafer?

These Bundys talk a good game about getting the federal government out of the business of the states and the landowners. But are they upset that the federal government owns 54.5 percent of the land in the legalized marijuana states of Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington? Do they realize that means legal pot smokers can face federal charges if caught in over half of their state by an officer of the Forest Service, National Park Service, or the Bureau of Land Management?

Here in Oregon, #YallQaeda are holed up, begging for snacks and reacting badly to deliveries of bags of dicks, calling for other armed patriots to join their occupation of a building nobody cares if they hold.

Does #VanillaISIS realize that few of us pot smokers, now legal in this state, could bear arms to join them, since the Gun Control Act of 1968 forbids the selling of arms and ammunition to a person who is “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance”?

Funny how you never hear these militia-types address that issue. For decades now, they’ve warned us to resist federal efforts to register guns and gun owners, since that would be used to take away citizens’ Second Amendment rights. But in almost every medical marijuana state, that mandatory listing that costs you your gun rights is called a “patient registry”.

Do they not recognize that cultivating even one marijuana plant is a federal felony and a felony in many states, too? And that a felony conviction is grounds for disarming a citizen? Why do we not see the militia members occupying federal courthouses demanding an end to this tyranny? For that matter, where is the NRA in defending the Second Amendment rights of legal pot smokers?

I guess conservatives ignoring marijuana prohibition is one of the odd bits of political cognitive dissonance I just cannot explain, like how President Obama, who was allegedly born in a foreign country to an American woman, is not a “natural born citizen” eligible to be president, but Senator Cruz, who was actually born in a foreign country to an American woman, is a “natural born citizen” eligible to be president. It’s almost as if conservatives are deciding these Constitutional issues not by the merits of the law but rather by whom that law benefits. (Unlike liberals, who evaluate issues of privacy and extra-judicial killing based on which party holds the presidency.)

The Attorney General of Kentucky announced that his state will receive $945,114 as part of a Department of Justice settlement with Millennium Health, one of the largest urine drug testing laboratories in the United States, for its part in drug testing fraud against Medicare. Washington State will reap $426,000; Arkansas nets $121,568; and Idaho gets $41,019.

Those are just four of the 49 states and the District of Columbia that are beneficiaries of whistleblower lawsuits against Millennium Health. The lawsuits contended that the company violated the False Claims Act by convincing doctors to bill Medicare for medically-unnecessary urine drug testing and genetic testing. The whistleblowers will receive almost $32 million from the settlement for their actions.

It was alleged the company also violated the Stark Law and the Anti-Kickback Statute by providing urine drug test cups to doctors for free, on the condition that they use them for referring more urine drug tests to the laboratory.

“Millennium allegedly promoted indiscriminate and unnecessary testing that increased medical costs without serving patients’ real medical needs,” said U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz of the District of Massachusetts in a Department of Justice press release.  “A laboratory that promotes and knowingly conducts medically unnecessary drug testing operates unlawfully and squanders our precious federal health care resources.”

The settlement totaled $256 million. In response to that cost and other debts, Millennium Health filed for bankruptcy protection last November. Company owners asked the court to slash $1.15 billion in debt from its finances. They also agreed to pony up $325 million of their own money to cover the settlement and working capital costs, so long as they received legal immunity for their bilking of Medicare. As part of the settlement, Millennium did not have to admit any wrongdoing.

Millennium paid $50 million of the settlement to the government immediately so it could continue to bill Medicare, then listed the remaining $206 million owed to Justice as its largest debt.

Voya Investment Management protested the bankruptcy plan, arguing that it made a  $1.8 billion loan to Millennium, which didn’t disclose it was being investigated by Justice. Voya’s attorneys argue the bankruptcy plan would leave Millennium’s owners with more than $1 billion in profits and leave Voya “holding the bag”.

The Delaware bankruptcy judge approved Millennium’s restructuring plan three weeks ago, deciding that saving the drug testing company and its 1,200 jobs outweighed Voya’s claim of being fleeced for over a billion dollars under false pretenses. The company is back to processing urine drug tests and supporting anti-drug groups like Partnership for Drug-Free Kids. Nobody in leadership of the company lost their job.

When news broke today of the death Sunday of The Thin White Duke himself, David Bowie, my first thought was of that amazing cover of “Space Oddity” that Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded on the International Space Station.

It’s a fitting tribute to David Bowie that his lyrics are sung in the first music video in space. But did you know that cannabis and a sexy older woman helped create Bowie’s first major hit?

In the mid-1960’s the struggling folk singer Davy Jones could not break into the music biz. He was also being confused with another Brit, Davy Jones of The Monkees. He changed his name in 1965 and in 1967 released an eponymous debut album, “David Bowie”, that went nowhere.

Two years later in April of 1969, a 30-year-old single mother of two named Mary Finnigan is outside when she hears “This is Major Tom to ground control…” being sung from an apartment above hers. Mary shouts up at the music to ask who’s playing. Then 23 22-year-old David Bowie pops his head out the window and says, “Hello, I’m David.”

Mary responds, “Would you like to come downstairs for a cup of tea and some tincture of cannabis?”

That began a six-month relationship between the two, with Bowie moving in to Mary’s apartment. Mary’s children, Caroline and Richard, loved “Space Oddity”. “It should go to No 1,” said Caroline. “I hope it does because I’ll be able to impress my school friends.”

Indeed, “Space Oddity” became David Bowie’s first #1 single on the UK Pop Charts.

In her memoirs, Mary tells how she and Bowie often shared cannabis and hashish. However, Mary wasn’t ready to share in the same sexual proclivities of Bowie, who was involved with another woman, Angie Barrett (who’d later become the first Mrs. Bowie), as well as man, Calvin Mark Lee, and yet another woman man, Lindsay Kemp.

Fast-forward to the next decade. It’s March 22, 1976, and David Bowie is set to play a gig in Rochester, New York. At 2:25am, Rochester vice police arrest Bowie and Stooges frontman Iggy Pop, among others, and charge them with possession of 182 grams (about 4/10ths of a pound) of marijuana.

Bowie posts bond for everybody and he and Iggy make their ways to other concerts already on the schedule. Four days later, Bowie, charged as David Jones, pleads “not guilty, sir” to the City Court. The judge then set a date for a preliminary hearing on April 20, 1976 – that’s right, 4/20 – where Bowie could face up to 15 years in prison if convicted.

When asked if the arrest would affect any plans Bowie might have to return to Rochester again, Bowie answers, “certainly not, absolutely not.” Bowie lied, as he never did return to Rochester. Neither for a hearing, as a grand jury refused to indict him, nor for a concert, as he never played Rochester again.

In 2013, marijuana touches Bowie’s life again through his daughter-in-law. Bowie’s son, Duncan Jones, is a film director with a 33-year-old wife named Nadine Rodene. She developed breast cancer and used a cannabis tincture – similar to the one Mary Finnigan offered Bowie in 1969 – to fight the effects of chemotherapy.

Marijuana – the only drug that fights cancer and helps create the greatest music of all time… so long as its users aren’t imprisoned for fifteen years for possessing it. If Bowie had been convicted in Rochester, he could have been sitting in a New York prison instead of recording his 1983 comeback, “Let’s Dance”, which also launched the career of the incredible Texas blues guitarist, Stevie Ray Vaughan. It makes you wonder how many other great musical careers we lost out on because of marijuana prohibition.