For three decades now, our opponents have framed this issue from the standpoint that they care more about the health and safety our young people than we do — that we’re just a bunch of self-centered pot-heads that are willing to sacrifice the lives of our young people so that we can catch a buzz. Well, it’s time for us to respond.
NORML’s 37th annual national conference, “It’s Not Your Parents’ Prohibition,” takes place this week – on Friday, October 17 and Saturday, October 18 – at the Doubletree Hotel & Executive Meeting Center in Berkeley, California.
Today there is a whole universe of information on the subject of marijuana that is brand-new since the Shafer Commission last studied marijuana in the 1970’s. The information then available lead Nixon’s own handpicked commission come to a surprising conclusion: they recommended no legal penalties for adults possessing up 100 grams of marijuana.
How mad and frustrated does that make you? Want to turn that frustration into a positive direction?
College and art students, graphic designers, animators, cartoonists, flash animators, filmmakers, documentary-makers, activists, NORML chapters, senior citizens, medical marijuana patients, victims of marijuana prohibition laws, concerned citizens and cannabis consumers in general—the five decade-old movement to reform marijuana laws is calling for your time and talents, and you maybe the winner of some serious holiday cash for your stash.
While the prohibition of cannabis is absurd, the ban on the plant’s non-psychoactive components is even more mind-boggling — particularly when it’s apparent that these compounds possess amazing therapeutic properties. Case in point: cannabidiol (CBD).
A just published scientific review by Sao Paulo University (Brazil) researcher Antonio Zuardi reports that there’s been an “explosive increase” of interest in CBD over the past five years. It’s apparent why.
NORML has one of the largest cannabis-related archives in the world and it is replete with headlines that are hysterical, funny, shocking, propagandistic, dumb, witty, ironic and in the case of the front page splash of the September 14 Peninsula Daily News (Port Angeles and Sequim area of Washington State), revealing.
While Hubbard may have had tongue firmly in cheek, the suggestion that it is PROHIBITION, not the responsible use of cannabis by NBA players—similar to the current alcohol, tobacco and prescription drug use policy that NBA players, like most every worker in the country, work under—there is an obvious mutuality and bridge to gap between the cannabis law reform community and professional sports associations, like the cannabis-laden NBA.
The numbers of Americans arrested for marijuana offenses now are so huge, perhaps the only way to get a grip on the humanity of this prohibition-driven social disaster, is to think of just a few of the people who have paid the ultimate price since I joined NORML’s Board of Directors in 2004, those who actually lost their lives in the enforcement of cannabis prohibition.