Personal Marijuana Use

Police don’t just get the facts wrong about the dangers of marijuana and the impact of commonsense reforms like decriminalization. Frequently, they’re wrong about marijuana itself, making wild claims about the street value of the latest bust or exaggerating plant yields to make small growers sound like major traffickers. If you think you’ve heard it all, here’s a cop from Massachusetts who says an ounce equals 200-300 joints:

According to Lt. Danny Maguire of the Weston Police Department, "The biggest challenge we have is to convince people that, just because the law has changed, marijuana has not become 'legal,' and that the problem of drug addiction is still just as severe as always. There is also the danger that people will think it’s actually OK, under the new law, to smoke a joint or two and get behind the wheel of a car."
…
One ounce of marijuana is the equivalent of 200 to 300 joints, according to Maguire.

This is just shockingly crazy and wrong. Researchers have estimated the average size of a joint between 0.4 and 0.9 grams, which would equal 30-70 joints per ounce. If you roll more than 70 joints from an ounce, they’ll be empty toothpick-sized joints with more paper than pot. They won’t even work and no matter who you are, I’m sure you know someone who can assure that this is true.

Claiming that you can roll up to 300 joints from an ounce is a total lie. It’s hilarious to anyone who’s ever smoked or even seen a joint. It’s like claiming a bag of skittles will serve 300 people, when there’s actually only 70 Skittles in the bag and most people don’t find an individual Skittle very satisfying anyhow.

So what the hell is this guy talking about? He’s angry that voters in Massachusetts decriminalized possession of up to an ounce of marijuana, and he’s trying to pretend that’s a huge amount of pot. It isn’t. His lie, on the other hand, is enormous.

They might as well have displayed a link to ONDCP.gov across the screen for an hour. CNBC's Marijuana, Inc. couldn’t have been more sensationalist if John Walters wrote the screenplay and Bill O’Reilly did the interviews. I’m serious, it was that bad.

Of course, it’s impossible to know how the casual observer may interpret a propaganda trainwreck such as this, but for me it crossed the threshold of absurdity to the point of almost becoming useful. If one factual concept emerged unscathed from this, it is that there is simply nothing you can do to stop the marijuana economy. Marijuana, Inc. painted California as a veritable narco-state, thrown into anarchy by liberal values and unscrupulous profiteers. If there’s a lesson in there other than the fact that our marijuana laws are a disaster, I must have missed it.

The great irony of this is that, whether they like it or not, CNBC is selling their product to the same exact market. Who do they think watches this stuff? Just turn off the sound and you’ve got sixty minutes of first-rate pot porno to accompany the musical selection of your choice. They used blatant pot porn to promote it, so they know exactly what they’re doing.

Something is seriously out of balance when CNBC puts out an obnoxious propaganda program, while simultaneously hosting an online poll that favors decriminalization at 97%. They even felt compelled to put this disclaimer on their comment section:

**As of this posting, CNBC has only received comments favoring decriminalization of marijuana.

Marijuana sells in the media for the same exact reason it sells in the street. The only difference is the media still feels the need to cut their marijuana merchandise with some nasty shit. If the mainstream media wants to sell us pot, that’s fine. But give it to us straight.

Obama’s Change.gov website has created yet another feature for soliciting ideas from the public. This time it’s called the Citizen’s Briefing Book and you can vote on ideas or submit your own. The winning ideas will be printed out and handed to Barack Obama, so he can wipe his ass with them.

Unsurprisingly, the most popular idea is legalizing marijuana, yet again. This has really escalated to the point of absurdity and if the new administration hasn’t figured it out yet, this will continue until they either give us an intelligent response, or stop asking us to post ideas on their website.  

If, like me, you’re becoming cynical about this whole process, shake it off. Go to the website and vote. There is no way of measuring the impact of our repeated domination of Change.gov, but it is intuitively greater than zero. They wouldn’t keep doing this if it didn’t mean something to them.

Paul Armentano’s latest piece at The Hill looks at evolving public attitudes about marijuana policy and the drug war. This is exactly how drug reform politics need to be framed from now on. It sounds like something I would write, probably because Paul is an awesome guy who’s always right about everything.

Which amendment was it again that says you can talk about stuff and have opinions on things?

A former Mountlake Terrace police sergeant whose views supporting the decriminalization of marijuana led to his dismissal in 2005 has won his job back and an $815,000 settlement from the city and Snohomish County.
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Wender had publicly challenged and criticized the department and its commanders over the years on a number of issues. He is affiliated with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a Massachusetts organization of police officers who oppose the current tactics used by police to fight drug crimes. Among its other members are former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper. [Seattle Times]

Wow, watching LEAP take the law-enforcement community by storm is a glorious thing to behold. It’s only going to get better.

While prosecutors in Massachusetts still can’t figure out what "decriminalization" even means, Arizona’s top drug enforcer is talking about legalization:

Attorney General Terry Goddard said Tuesday he might be willing to consider legalizing marijuana if a way can be found to control its distribution - and figure out who has been smoking it.

Goddard said marijuana sales make up 75 percent of the money that Mexican cartels use for other operations, including smuggling other drugs and fighting the Mexican army and police.

He said that makes fighting drug distribution here important to cut off that cash. He acknowledged those profits could be slashed if possession of marijuana were not a crime in Arizona.[East Valley Tribune]

Not only is all of this completely dead-on, he said it at a frickin’ massive drug bust press conference! Are you kidding me!?

Goddard's comments came following a press conference Tuesday announcing the breakup of a major ring that police said has been responsible for bringing about 400,000 pounds of marijuana into Arizona each year since 2003.

I guess somebody forgot to give Goddard the script. Ya know, the one where you’re supposed to use these big busts to declare epic progress with pillows of schwag piled to the ceiling and crow that you’ve crippled the cartels pretty bad this time.

Check out this blog post calling me a hippie and accusing me of overreacting to Obama’s rejection of marijuana legalization. This dude is cool though, I think, so it’s all good. But the whole thing misses the point of my post.

I never thought Obama was going to legalize marijuana. I was commenting on the absurdity of creating a whole Change.gov campaign and then using it to uphold the status quo. Obviously, Obama isn’t going to go change-crazy from day one, but this is a massively controversial issue, as evidenced by its #1 ranking on his site. Using Change.gov to reject popular and much-needed changes is ironic, and while I never expected anything more, I’m certainly not going to give him a pass just because his political posturing is painfully predictable.

Here’s a fun article interviewing college students in Massachusetts about their opinions on the new marijuana decriminalization policy. Unsurprisingly, most of them are all for it, but check out this remarkably candid response from an opponent:

Ed Finch, a 20-year-old sophomore from Franklin, voted against decriminalization for a couple of reasons. One was "purely financial," he said. His father is a Boston police officer who gets a lot of overtime when he has to go to court after a marijuana arrest, Finch said.

Yeah, I guess that’s pretty cool if the drug war is paying your tuition, bro. Imagine my surprise that none of the police officers who campaigned bitterly against decrim ever mentioned how much overtime the new law would cost them. It took a college student to concede the rank selfishness that drives police to defend marijuana prohibition.

Of course, it’s not just about money. It’s also about spite:

But his other reason is based on his own experience.

"I was frustrated with my stoner friends. They’re obnoxious, but I put up with them," Finch said.

Well, maybe we should pass a law that says Ed Finch’s friends watch too much Family Guy and never introduce him to any cute chicks.

Did anyone notice how the marijuana legalization question was ranked #1 on Obama’s Change.gov site, but he answered the question 4th? Not only did Obama’s team fail to explain the "no" answer, but they didn’t even honor the 1st place popularity rank the question earned when it drew the most votes from the public.

There’s nothing surprising about any of this, but it is indeed perfectly emblematic of the profound lack of seriousness with which this issue is treated in our political culture. The marijuana question was answered second to last and received the shortest response of all the questions. It’s just not something our political leadership wants to talk about. There is scarcely anything less important to them than this and they’d really appreciate it if we stopped asking about it.

But we won’t stop. Certainly not now. Perhaps we appreciate the symbolism behind Obama’s Change.gov campaign even more than its authors do. Yes, we surged at the opportunity to push forward ideas long relegated arbitrarily to the political fringe. We seized upon this new venue for unfiltered political dialogue, an entirely unclaimed territory in which we had yet to be told we were unwelcome. We clutched it in our collective fist, squeezed it with all our might, and recoiled in disgust when it squirted us in the eye.

Sure, we got burned, but we saw it coming. They didn’t see us coming. They never could have imagined that this experiment with online democracy would find us standing at the front of the line. They shook their heads, sighed and joked that this is what you get when you let the frickin’ internet dictate political priorities.

Well, it’s fine with me if they think that, because they’re the ones kissing the internet’s ass in the first place. Will they now retreat to the editorial pages and go back to letting the pundits tell them what the people want?

Much has been made of the fact that a marijuana legalization question was ranked #1 when President-elect Obama opened his Change.gov website up to questions from the public. In an open vote, the public spoke loudly and clearly that marijuana reform was the very first issue that the new President should address. For our trouble, we’ve been rewarded with the sorriest excuse for an answer that Obama’s transition team could possibly have provided:

Q: "Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?" S. Man, Denton

A: President-elect Obama is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana.

Care to elaborate? You see, we all knew what the answer was. The point was that we all wanted to know why.

As frustrating and insulting as it is to witness an important matter brushed casually to the side without explanation, Obama’s answer actually says a lot. It says that he couldn’t think of even one sentence to explain his position. Within the vast framework of totally paranoid anti-pot propaganda, Obama couldn’t find a single argument he wanted to associate himself with. That’s why he simply said "No. Next question."

All of this highlights the well-known fact that Obama agrees that our marijuana laws are deeply flawed. He‘s said so, and has back-pedaled recently for purely political reasons. If Obama’s transition team tried to give an accurate description of his position on marijuana reform it would look like this:

Q: "Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?" S. Man, Denton

A: President-elect Obama will not use his political capital to advance the legalization of marijuana. While he agrees that arresting adults for marijuana possession is a poor use of law enforcement resources, he believes that the issue remains too controversial to do anything about it.

It’s really that simple, which makes our job quite difficult. Any ideas?

Update: Paul Armentano says to keep doing what we've been doing and I agree. The fact that we've provoked dialogue about marijuana reform on the President-elect's website is quite remarkable. The "Open for Questions" feature will reopen for new questions soon and we'll be back to push drug policy reform to the top yet again.

On that note, please be advised that the site we're talking about is Change.gov, not Change.org. Change.org has been linked repeatedly in the comment section below, but that is not Obama's site. It fills a similar role and is worth visiting, but that's not where we should focus our energy if we want to directly confront Obama himself. I'm a little concerned that mixing these sites up could dillute our message, so please stay focused on Change.gov. I will post something when the next round of questions is open.