Paul Armentano is the deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and co-author of “Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?” His guest column appears on The Hill’s Congress Blog. ========= Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske, along with five previous drug czars (including former ‘high roller’ William Bennett), recently penned an op/ed in the Los Angeles Times condemning California’s Proposition 19 , The Regulate, Control & Tax Cannabis Initiative of 2010. It is no surprise that America’s present and former drug czars oppose the passage of [...]
Sep 052010
Sep 052010
Héctor Aguilar Camín is a historian, a novelist and the publisher and editor of the Mexican magazine Nexos. Jorge G. Castañeda was Mexico’s foreign minister from 2000 to 2003 and teaches at New York University. Their column endorsing Proposition 19 as a powerful tool to fight Mexican drug violence appears in the Washington Post. ============ MEXICO CITY — On Nov. 2, Californians will vote on Proposition 19, deciding whether to legalize the production, sale and consumption of marijuana. If the initiative passes, it won’t just be momentous for California; it may, at long last, offer [...]
Our view: An empty warehouse filled with marijuana? Sounds like a nightmare Chico shouldn’t encourage. At first it sounded like a joke, the Chico Enterprise-Record opines in this editorial. Somebody wants to take a huge vacant building near the Chico Municipal Airport and fill it with 600,000 square feet of marijuana plants, an indoor grow the size of five Chico Wal-Marts. Only it wasn’t a joke. The proposal came from a serious businessman, who is kicking tires in an attempt to expand his Los Angeles-based venture, Plant Properties Management, LLC. Jason Oh, 36, learned of [...]
Sep 012010
Norm Stamper is a 34-year veteran police officer who retired as Seattle’s chief of police in 2000. His column endorsing Proposition 19 appears in the Huffington Post. ============== Imagine it. Grownup Californians making a choice that should never have been denied them in the first place. Proposition 19, the Regulate, Control, and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010 would allow adults in that state to possess up to an ounce of marijuana for personal consumption; to use marijuana in a non-public place; and to grow the weed at a private residence in an area not to [...]
I hate to spoil the ending, but here it goes: “It should not go unnoticed, as you head to the polls in November, that the most strident opponents of California’s Prop. 19 are the drug lords and growers who stand to lose their tax-free fortunes.” Jeff Ackerman, editor/publisher of The Union in Grass Valley, achieves must-read status with today’s excellent column on Proposition 19. ================== I’ll bet a beer that most of you would have no problem finding a gin and tonic, if booze was illegal today. Guys like Al Capone would see to that. [...]
Aug 302010
Would our state be better off if more Californians were stoned? We don’t think so, writes the editorial board of the Palm Springs Desert Sun. (See Bud’s quickie rebuttal below.) Legalizing marijuana would lead to more people driving under the influence. Lanny Swerdlow argues on this page that it would free up police from pursuing drug abusers and generate $1.4 billion in new state tax revenue. Police officials tell us the impact would be minimal. Swerdlow cites the state Board of Equalization on the tax projections, but we’re not convinced. Marijuana is cheap and easy [...]
Aug 272010
Bud’s note: London Independent columnist Johann Hari offers this stinging indictment of drug-war violence in the Huffington Post. To many people, the “war on drugs” sounds like a metaphor, like the “war on poverty.” It is not. It is being fought with tanks and submachine guns and hand grenades, funded in part by your taxes, and it has killed 28,000 people under the current Mexican President alone. The death-toll in Tijuana — one of the front-lines of this war — is now higher than in Baghdad. Yesterday, another pile of seventy mutilated corpses was found [...]
Aug 262010
This commentary was written by Gil Kerlikowske, John Walters, Barry McCaffrey, Lee Brown, Bob Martinez and William Bennett, directors of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in the administrations of Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. It appears here in the Los Angeles Times. Californians will face an important decision in November when they vote on whether to legalize marijuana. Proponents of Proposition 19, the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010, rely on two main arguments: that legalizing and taxing marijuana would generate much-needed revenue, and [...]
Dr. Timmen Cermak, president of the California Society of Addiction Medicine, wrote this guest opinion column for the San Francisco Chronicle. For more information on the scientific evidence behind cannabis, visit the California Society of Addiction Medicine’s website. ========== Like so many political debates in our society, the argument over Proposition 19, the initiative to legalize marijuana in California, is portrayed as good vs. evil, black vs. white, us vs. them — while nobody is looking objectively at the medical science of marijuana. If research does enter the debate, each side touts the scientific bits [...]
Bud’s note: This editorial appeared Friday in the Bakersfield Californian. I’ve added a couple of editorial comments of my own at the end, and you can too using the form below the post. Everyone’s got an opinion, right? ============== It’s well past time for the courts to give California cities and counties a definitive answer on the legality of medical-marijuana dispensaries. Conflicting state and federal laws are sending contradictory messages to law enforcement agencies, medicinal-marijuana advocates and the communities they all call home. Those laws are interpreted and enforced with degrees of vigilance that can [...]
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