The Cannabis Network

“Money can grow on trees.”  That is the message of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws Foundation (NORML) in a 15-second digital ad scheduled to debut in New York City’s Times Square next week.  The advertisement, produced and paid for by NORML’s educational arm, The NORML Foundation, will air on the CBS Super Screen through May 31, 2010.

“Regulating the adult use of marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol could raise over $30 billion annually in new tax revenue, while saving an additional $15 billion per year in law enforcement costs,” NORML Foundation Executive Director Allen St. Pierre said.  “This tax season, why not ask your elected politicians why the federal government continues to spends billions of tax dollars enforcing this failed and archaic public policy.”

Fifty-three percent of Americans now support legalizing marijuana, according to the results of a December 2009 Angus Reid survey of over 1,000 adults nationwide.

The NORML Foundation’s ‘Money Tree’ ad will appear eighteen times per day on the CBS’s digital billboard, located on 42nd Street.  Approximately 1.5 million people walk by the billboard each day.

In January, CBS and the NORML Foundation entered into a contractual agreement to air the NORML Foundation ad, beginning on February 1, 2010.  However, representatives from CBS and Neutron Media abruptly pulled the ad prior to its scheduled air date, stating that its content did not comply with the network’s outdoor advertising standards.

Last month, representatives from the political advocacy organization Change.org organized an online petition targeting CBS Broadcasting and demanding the network to reverse their decision.  Nearly 10,000 people signed and sent the petition.

CBS formally changed their position shortly after receiving the petitions.

“NORML would publicly like to thank Change.org for taking on this important political and First Amendment issue,” St. Pierre said.  “We would also like to thank the thousands of concerned citizens who contacted CBS on NORML’s behalf.  Without your participation, this important NORML ad campaign would not have been possible.

“Finally, NORML would also like to extend its appreciation to the CBS Corporation for responding to the will of its viewers, and acknowledging that marijuana law reform is a topic deserving of such a prominent public forum.  Over 20 million Americans have been arrested for marijuana violations since 1965. It is time to end 70-plus years of federal marijuana prohibition with a policy of legalization, taxation, regulation and education.”

The ‘Money Tree’ is anticipated to be the first of two planned ad buys.  The second advertisement is scheduled to debut in Times Square on April 20, 2010 – in conjunction with the informal marijuana celebratory holiday ‘4/20.’

Founded in 1970, NORML is the nation’s oldest and largest grassroots organization advocating on behalf of marijuana law reform.  The NORML Foundation was founded in 1997 to support public education, research, stake holder organizing and impact litigation.  In 2009, NORML Foundation launched the first-ever nationwide television ad campaign calling for the regulation of marijuana by adults.

With ‘marijuana’ already one of the most popular topics on the Internet, NORML proudly announces that the ‘Reefer Revolution’ has now found its way into the smart phone technology tsunami that is sweeping the world up into instant access and connectivity to important information and like-minded community.

Available for a .99 cent download from the iTunes webpage, the NORML app for iPhones now empowers NORML members and supporters to read the daily news, cannabis-related headlines and blogs; get educated on pending federal or state cannabis-related legislation and lobby their elected policymakers via pre-written email; listen to NORML’s popular daily podcast on-the-run; check out NORML’s active Twitter feed, Flicker photos and the organization’s YouTube channel of videos.

All of this from one application, located on one’s phone, for under $1 and in support of America’s oldest and largest pro-cannabis law reform organization!

Another NORML iPhone app is already in development that will feature the organization’s copyrighted list of state/federal cannabis laws, drug testing information, listing of criminal defense lawyers and NORML chapters nationwide. Additions to the current NORML app on iPhone, as well as creating similar programs for Google and Droid phones is currently underway.

NORML is also developing cannabis-centric games for mobile phone and Internet play.

I ascribe substantial credit for bringing about the rapid decrease in public support for cannabis prohibition to the advent and popularity of the Internet. Pre-Internet, both cannabis consumers and the general public had little-to-no access to verifiable and credible scientific or academic information regarding cannabis. Once NORML (and numerous other pro-reform organizations) could place large amounts of information online circa 1995, that anyone could read and download from the privacy of home, the opinion polls started to demonstrate a strong increase in the public’s discontent with cannabis prohibition laws.

Now that tens of thousands of scientific studies and medical reports can be read on mobile devices, pro-cannabis radio shows can be listened to on the bus or train and citizens fed up with prohibition laws can now contact their elected representatives anytime, from just about anywhere, smart phone technology is only going to 1) increase the number of citizen-advocates lobbying for cannabis law reforms, and 2) these ease-of-use mobile technologies also enhance the abilities of citizens to be more active in the ever-growing cannabis law reform movement, online community and commerce.

Many thanks to Red Aphid for their tireless efforts to code and work through the labyrinth of regulations and requirements at Apple to bring NORML’s first smart phone application to fruition.

I work this issue every day and am well aware of the racist nature of the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs. But even I wasn’t aware of the outrageous statistics comparing the Drug War to Jim Crow era. Michelle Alexander lays it all out in her new book, The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste:

• There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
• As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
• A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
• If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades — they are currently are at historical lows — but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.

The drug war has been brutal — complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods — but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African American counterparts.

That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African Americans comprise 80%-90% of all drug offenders sent to prison.

The only thing more shocking to me than the new Jim Crow of the drug war is how few African-Americans are involved in ending it.

• The board of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) is composed of 14 white men, 1 white woman, and 1 Latina (Full disclosure: this board is my employer)
• Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) has no African-Americans or Latinos on their board as far as I’m aware (MPP does not publish this information on their website, as far as I can tell)
• Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) boasts three African-American men on their board of directors
• Americans for Safe Access (to medical marijuana, or ASA) has no African-Americans or Latinos on their board
• Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) has one African-American on their board

Medical Marijuana march in Madison, Wisconsin (I know Madison, Seattle, and Albuquerque aren't exactly Atlanta, Detroit, and Chicago, but there has to be SOME black people there, right?)

This sort of racial homogeneity is also found at the grassroots activist level as well. I coordinate NORML’s 95 active state, local, and college chapters and off the top of my head I can think of only one chapter not run by a white person (Oregon NORML’s Madeline Martinez, who, coincidentally, is that sole Latina on the National NORML Board).

When I speak at conferences and festivals to crowds ranging from 50 to 50,000, it is always a nearly unbroken sea of white faces looking back at me. When I participate in the marches and protests against the drug war, I rarely see black or Latino people carrying a sign.

My view from the stage before speaking at last year's Seattle Hempfest, the largest marijuana reform rally in the world.

The War on Drugs is primarily a War on Marijuana, which makes up 49.8% of all drug war arrests, 89% of those arrests for simple possession. In New York City, a black man is nine times more likely to be busted for pot than a white man and three times more likely to get a custodial sentence out of that arrest. Yet when we look at the cannabis community, the only place we find many African-American faces is in rap videos extolling the virtues of “the chronic”.

Where is the Martin Luther King Jr. of the movement to end the War on Drugs? Why is he or she not responding to the efforts to end the single greatest cause of racial inequality in this nation?

Is he or she dissuaded by the culture of the black church, which demonizes drugs and drug use to the point where those who support sensible drug policies are shamed into silence?

Drug Policy Alliance's Int'l Reform Conference in Albuquerque, 2009

Is he or she turned away by looking at the leadership of drug law reform and seeing no faces like theirs?

Is he or she already feeling like they wear a target for law enforcement on their back already based on skin color and don’t feel like exacerbating that by publicly standing for drug law reform?

Whatever it is, this white man who’s used cannabis for twenty years and never once had an interaction with police is urgently calling out to my black and Latino brothers and sisters to get involved with your own liberation!

I work this issue every day and am well aware of the racist nature of the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs. But even I wasn’t aware of the outrageous statistics comparing the Drug War to Jim Crow era. Michelle Alexander lays it all out in her new book, The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste:

• There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
• As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
• A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
• If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades — they are currently are at historical lows — but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.

The drug war has been brutal — complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods — but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African American counterparts.

That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African Americans comprise 80%-90% of all drug offenders sent to prison.

The only thing more shocking to me than the new Jim Crow of the drug war is how few African-Americans are involved in ending it.

• The board of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) is composed of 14 white men, 1 white woman, and 1 Latina (Full disclosure: this board is my employer)
• Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) has no African-Americans or Latinos on their board as far as I’m aware (MPP does not publish this information on their website, as far as I can tell)
• Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) boasts three African-American men on their board of directors
• Americans for Safe Access (to medical marijuana, or ASA) has no African-Americans or Latinos on their board
• Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) has one African-American on their board

Medical Marijuana march in Madison, Wisconsin (I know Madison, Seattle, and Albuquerque aren't exactly Atlanta, Detroit, and Chicago, but there has to be SOME black people there, right?)

This sort of racial homogeneity is also found at the grassroots activist level as well. I coordinate NORML’s 95 active state, local, and college chapters and off the top of my head I can think of only one chapter not run by a white person (Oregon NORML’s Madeline Martinez, who, coincidentally, is that sole Latina on the National NORML Board).

When I speak at conferences and festivals to crowds ranging from 50 to 50,000, it is always a nearly unbroken sea of white faces looking back at me. When I participate in the marches and protests against the drug war, I rarely see black or Latino people carrying a sign.

My view from the stage before speaking at last year's Seattle Hempfest, the largest marijuana reform rally in the world.

The War on Drugs is primarily a War on Marijuana, which makes up 49.8% of all drug war arrests, 89% of those arrests for simple possession. In New York City, a black man is nine times more likely to be busted for pot than a white man and three times more likely to get a custodial sentence out of that arrest. Yet when we look at the cannabis community, the only place we find many African-American faces is in rap videos extolling the virtues of “the chronic”.

Where is the Martin Luther King Jr. of the movement to end the War on Drugs? Why is he or she not responding to the efforts to end the single greatest cause of racial inequality in this nation?

Is he or she dissuaded by the culture of the black church, which demonizes drugs and drug use to the point where those who support sensible drug policies are shamed into silence?

Drug Policy Alliance's Int'l Reform Conference in Albuquerque, 2009

Is he or she turned away by looking at the leadership of drug law reform and seeing no faces like theirs?

Is he or she already feeling like they wear a target for law enforcement on their back already based on skin color and don’t feel like exacerbating that by publicly standing for drug law reform?

Whatever it is, this white man who’s used cannabis for twenty years and never once had an interaction with police is urgently calling out to my black and Latino brothers and sisters to get involved with your own liberation!

The ten-year ban handed down to veteran rugby league player Vince Whare makes him another casualty of injustice in our 35 year-old war on drugs, said New Zealand NORML President Phil Saxby today.

The Canterbury Bulls’ prop has just been suspended from any involvement in sport for a decade by the Sports Tribunal of New Zealand after testing positive for cannabis use. He tested positive for cannabis twice before, once in 2005 and then again in 2006.

“The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) code requires third-time doping offenders to be banned for at least eight years, but cannabis is no more a performance-enhancing drug than alcohol”, Mr Saxby said. “What would happen to sport if all alcohol-using players were banned after 3 drinking offences?”

“This is blatant discrimination against a man who chooses to relax with a substance that’s better for his health than alcohol. That cannabis is illegal has no bearing on his ability to play rugby, nor his right to play the game.”

“If sports bodies are concerned about their image, the focus should be on alcohol, not cannabis,” said Mr Saxby. “Half of all serious violent offences and one third of all offences in New Zealand are committed by offenders who have been drinking; while alcohol is associated with almost fifty percent of all reported incidents of sexual violence.”

“How is it that Robin Brooke can be drunk and grope a girl and not get banned? Sports bodies have a double standard – you can be publicly drunk and behave indecently, but receive more lenient treatment than if you simply get caught for smoking a joint at home. Is that really what we want young people to believe?”

“Whare’s punishment at the hands of the Sports Tribunal is far harsher than any court would have handed down. For the next ten years, this man can no longer have anything to do with the game he loves and is very, very good at. He can’t coach, he can’t run the line, or referee or be an official. This sentence is almost medieval in its harshness!” Mr Saxby concluded.

NORML New Zealand is far and away the most successful and active international chapter of NORML.  Fully 8% of the web traffic I get here on the Stash is from New Zealand, making it the country second only to the US in web traffic here.

While NORML’s primary mission is to end adult marijuana prohibition in America, we are proud of the international chapters, like the one recently formed in Spain, NORML España, carrying on the NORML legacy and mission in other countries.  If you are outside the USA and would like to help form your country’s national NORML Chapter, send an email to start@norml.org.

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1. Argentinan prosecutor going after grandmother who planted two marijuana plants, despite personal possession and cultivation being legal in the country
2. Guam faces 10 years for 750 plants, or life in prison if he doesn’t cooperate over the next ten years in cases agains other marijuana offenders
3. Surprising number of candidates in Utah standing for ending marijuana prohibition

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