The Daily Beast has a breezy new piece by Anneli Rufus, surveying recent “scientific studies” on pot, some pro-, some con-.   What’s remarkable is that this piece was published at all, with such flair and cheerful skepticism. Does it signify an Awakening, at long last, of the media to the BS that sustains prohibition, now that the readers, listeners and viewers are starting to get it? Brava to editor Tina Brown, who leads the edge of everything she touches.

In a recent study funded by the National Institutes of Health and released to the press by the American Medical Association, researchers determined that long-term marijuana use did not impair pulmonary function in humans. The results of the study are not remarkable; indeed, if it were otherwise, bodies would have been piling up for years, as Ed Brecher (author of Licit and Illicit Drugs, 1972), used to say. What’s remarkable is that the U.S. Government funded a study that did not report only adverse effects of marijuana. This is an extraordinary development, suggesting that NIS, at long last, may no longer be willing to carry the water for prohibition, and is willing to put science before politics.

The news from Canada is that the Liberal Party, one of the three major political parties, has endorsed regulation and taxation of the cannabis industry. Over the next few months, expect party activists and leaders to acknowledge gradually that the resolution has attracted popular support, not repelled it, whereupon the other parties will follow, and Canada will help lead the US out of the dark realm of prohibition.

A recent Angus Reid poll reports that 55% of Americans support legalization!

The big news from the Bay State is that a proposed medical marijuana initiative has been filed with the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office for the November, 2012, ballot. There are hurdles to be crossed before it reaches the ballot, including the defense of a probable challenge from the Massachusetts Attorney General, who is extremely intolerant on all matters marijuana. If the organizers get past that hurdle, then they have a lot of signatures to collect and verify. The legislature will have a chance to pass it too, before it goes to the voters. I have put up a website page on this topic and will follow developments closely.

The measure is apparently being financed by an out-of-state benefactor, and will be run by a professional PR firm in Boston. This reminds me of 1928, when the AAPA, the leading anti-prohibition organization, was taken over by Pierre DuPont and other titans of American industry, moving the well-meaning and impassioned amateurs aside. They managed to amend the U.S. Constitution in five short years, a remarkable achievement, and an unlikely one if the amateurs remained in charge.

When full legalization is achieved, our first task will be to erect a monument to medical marijuana.

A few weeks ago, I had occasion to spend an evening with a retired cop, whose career had been devoted in no small part to the enforcement of laws we both now agreed should be repealed.  It began, he told me, in the 70s when the mayor of his city received complaints about people smoking pot in public, especially parks where families were present. The mayor called the chief, and the chief produced results, by sending their youngest man to hang out in bars and concerts to bust small-time dealers. The more people they arrested, the more publicity they got, the more their budgets expanded, and that meant equipment, promotions and glory (and, apparently, later remorse).

As for the clamor for arrests, I asked if there had been a spike in auto accidents, or ER admissions, or any other adverse effects on public health or public safety.  “Of course not,” he chuckled. “It was about seeing people smoking pot in public.”  In other words, it was not the effects of marijuana consumption, but the visibility of marijuana consumption that drove their campaign against the weed.

With that tale in mind, consider the latest formulation of legalization, this one from Colorado. Sensible Colorado has proposed an amendment to the state constitution declaring legal, among other acts, “Consumption of marijuana, provided that nothing in this section shall permit consumption that is conducted openly and publicly… .” This language is deftly crafted so as not to preclude the possibility of legal public use under some circumstances in the future, when public attitudes about marijuana, post-repeal, have metamorphosed, and when candor will no longer threaten one’s liberty. But, it allows them to trumpet the fact that the amendment “does not legalize public use.”

The Colorado measure is certainly not the first to declare respect for existing prohibitions on public use (most do), but deserves mention for its prominence in the text.

We can go on and on about how legalization best protects the public health and safety, but controlling visibility of marijuana use–offensive though that may be to some consumers–is a small price to pay for the retirement of criminal sanctions.

The recent  introduction of HR 2306, by Congressmen Barney Frank and Ron Paul, is hugely significant. It does for marijuana what the 21st Amendment did for alcohol, removing marijuana from  the federal Controlled Substances Act, and recognizing the right of states to prohibit or control commerce in marijuana. Enactment of such a measure will be necessary if states are to tax and regulate without fear of federal interference.

It’s called the “Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2011.”  I love it that the term “marijuana prohibition” is included, but I would have called it the “Right To Tax Act of 2011,” broadcasting the prospect of new revenue to states and municipalities.

Congressmen Frank and Paul are heroic to introduce it, and deserve the acclaim and gratitude of the nation. It is the necessary first step to the repeal of federal marijuana prohibition.

My local newspaper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, recently ran a letter from a Mr. Krzeminski of Easthampton complaining that marijuana decriminalization (enacted by Massachusetts voters in 2008) makes enforcement of the prohibition laws against big-time dealers nearly impossible. “In addition to drawing huge monetary rewards,” he gripes, “they are doing so on a tax-free basis.”

Mr. Krzeminski’s indignation that the marijuana industry enjoys an exemption from paying taxes is welcome indeed, and represents an important shift in public attitudes. What’s changing is not that more people feel kindly toward marijuana; it is that more people feel unkindly toward marijuana prohibition, like Mr. Krzeminski.

Perhaps without realizing it, he is in the vanguard.

An interview on Fresh Air with Dan Okrent, author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, prompts a recollection of Prohibition (1920-33), its repeal, and the lessons for us as cannabis law reformers. It’s a timely subject, as this November, PBS will be airing a new Ken Burns film on the subject. Hopefully it will stimulate public debate over marijuana prohibition and its repeal. Having read Okrent’s fine book, and pondered these questions, here, in my opinion, are the most salient lessons for us in the story of alcohol prohibition and its repeal:

1. The voters, not the politicians, repealed alcohol prohibition, and it will be the voters, not the politicians, who will repeal marijuana legalization.

Throughout the 20s, hardly any elected official dared speak up against prohibition, as to look “wet” in those days carried the same baggage as being pegged as “soft on drugs” today. Beginning with Massachusetts in 1930, and in eleven states two years later, voter initiatives repealed state prohibition laws (“little Volsteads”), thus ceding the burden of enforcement entirely onto federal officials. In the campaign for president, voters had the choice of a “dry” candidate–the incumbent, Herbert Hoover–or the “wet” candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The issue barely surfaced during the campaign, but everybody knew who supported what, and Roosevelt won by a landslide. That election was enough to prompt a repeal resolution in the Congress, sent for ratification NOT to state legislatures, but rather to “conventions in the several states.” Will brilliant legal engineering work by pro bono lawyers, voters in every state were given the opportunity, in the privacy of a voting booth, to say what they thought of the 18^th Amendment. And they seized that opportunity, producing ratification in only nine and a half months, the fastest ratification of any amendment except for the 11th—a technical correction—but there were only 13 states then.

2. It wasn’t about alcohol, it was about prohibition. And it’s not about marijuana, it’s about prohibition.

For years the drys dominated the debate with their denunciations of the sin and evil of alcohol, but by the end of the decade, everybody knew that however bad booze was, prohibition was a lot worse. That was not only the winning message; it happened to be the truth. Our challenge as legalizers is steer the debate away from whether marijuana is a good or bad thing, as that is a question that will never be resolved, to whether criminal prohibition, and concomitant official opprobrium, is the best policy, regardless of whether it is good or bad. The case we need to make is not that pot is good, or even that it isn’t all that bad. The case is that its prohibition is pernicious to us as a people. It provides a tool for oppressing minorities, it forces us to propagandize our children, it blights the lives of people who get caught, it screws taxpayers and it divides us: parents vs. kids, employers vs. employees, citizens vs. police. And if there’s anything we don’t need more of, it’s things dividing us.

3. Seize the rhetoric.

Rhetoric doesn’t mean verbiage; it means the strategic use of language, and our forbears employed it deftly. For example, drys commonly claimed to support “temperance,” when what they really wanted was abstinence. The WONPR revealed this linguistic corruption by advocating for “true temperance,” meaning moderation, the correct definition of the term. Similarly today, we often—though not so much recently—hear support for the status quo expressed in terms of opposition to “drug abuse,” meaning “use,” whether harmful or not—an equally corrupt use of the language, employed, as Anthony Lewis said in a piece about George Orwell, for the sale of corrupt policies.

A vacuum in the marijuana debate is good names for the two sides of the question. Eighty years ago, there were the Wets and the Drys. The terms were terrific because they fit nicely in newspaper headlines and were inoffensive, but more especially because it was understood that being “wet” did not mean you were a drinker; rather, it meant simply that you held prohibition in disfavor. Today, we need some good, catchy terms for the two sides of our question, and it must similarly be clear that on our side are not simply cannabis users, but people who do not use it but are OK with people who do. In other words, the two sides are the pot-tolerant and the pot-intolerant.  How to say that monosylabicably is the challenge. Help!

4. Be prepared.

The principal historian of repeal, David Kyvig, likened repeal to pulling a cork out of a champagne bottle. You pull, and tug, and grunt, and nothing happens. Then you pull and grunt some more, and suddenly there’s NO stopping it. That could happen with marijuana. All it will take will be some triggering event, I don’t know what, but marijuana prohibition could fall like the Berlin Wall, and it is important that we give serious consideration of the role that legal marijuana will and should play in our society, and how we can best achieve the common goals of prohibitionists and anti-prohibitions alike: the protection of public health and safety, the minimizing of abuse, and the encouragement of responsibility among adults who choose to use it. Hence this site.

It’s Memorial Day, 2011, and this site is back on line after a reincarnation from Dream Weaver to Word Press. Please report bugs, and I will work them out as the gaps are filled in. Thanks for your patience.