The Kent Vent

A Felon for Life

2012-01-08T11:37:00.002-05:00

By Norm Kent

I was trying to think of the most common questions I am routinely asked as a criminal defense lawyer- other than the predominant one, “How can you defend a guilty person?”. I will answer that on another day.

What's right behind that one? The most recurring inquiry for a lawyer representing someone charged with a crime, is if you can win your client a “withheld adjudification.” And everyone wants to know just what that means. Of course everyone wants to be acquitted or have their cases dismissed. But if the odds of that are unlikely, you want to know what is the next best alternative.

Well, first of all, there is no such thing and no such word as “adjudification.” I don’t know how the common occurrence of misstating the word came about, but a court may do one of two things with the disposition of your case- it can adjudicate you guilty, or withhold adjudication of guilt. An adjudication means you have been found guilty and are stuck forever with that finding, in this lifetime and the next. It means you have a permanent criminal record, which can never be sealed or expunged, removed or eliminated, absent a legislative change or pardon from the Governor.

An adjudication of guilt on a felony strips you of a breadth of your rights as a citizen, not only your right to vote but to hold a variety of public service jobs, as well as professional licenses. It takes away your driver’s license for two years, and it impacts your right to collect government benefits. Thus, if you are entering a plea to a criminal charge anytime anywhere, you want to seek a withheld adjudication of guilt, whether it is for a misdemeanor or felony.

In Florida and elsewhere, that is becoming more and more difficult. For example, if you enter a plea to drunk driving, courts have no discretion. It is mandatory that they adjudicate you guilty. Fortunately, that is not a felony, so some of your rights are preserved. But more and more criminal acts are coming under the penumbra of mandatory adjudications, the most frustrating of which are battery cases against law enforcement officers.

Very often, the battery charges evolve out of barroom brawls in which intoxicated patrons do not even know what is going on at the time. Sometimes a good Samaritan attempting to render aid to a police officer is seen by an arriving officer as possibly assaulting their fellow officer. They are then suddenly struggling with one officer while trying to help the other. In the melee that follows, they wind up in jail too. In other instances, of course, people, good people sometimes do get drunk, and then they act badly. There are no second chances.

Even though it is only the least serious felony, a third degree, if you strike a cop carelessly in a moment of anger or intoxication, you are likely to become branded a felon for life. In addition, more and more legislators are now talking about expanding the concept of mandatory adjudications to many other offenses. Florida, for example, now includes fleeing from a police officer as one of those offenses. Heaven help you if you do not hear those sirens.

A misdemeanor is less serious than a felony. In fact, the word ‘misdemeanor’ is derived from the Latin phrase for ‘misbehavior.’ Unfortunately though, if you are ever adjudicated guilty, even of only a misdemeanor, you will never, under Florida law, ever be able to get your record expunged. And if the adjudication is for a sexual offense, you can be barred from working in nursing homes, schools, and a variety of venues. Those that plea out may be having deal with those pleas for the rest of their life, as these cases generally can never be expunged or sealed. An expunction erases a criminal charge from your ‘record.’

Two years ago, I handled a case for a drag queen, Tiny Tina, who had been adjudicated for engaging in a lewd act in 1976, when she hosted a wet jockey contest at the Copa Bar. In the year 2010, she was denied a job at an assisted living facility when a state records search revealed that 34-year-old finding of guilt. Fortunately, I eventually had that horrible ruling overturned.

Indeed, it is getting tougher to seal or expunge any record of your arrest for misdemeanors or felonies. For example, charges that are now disqualifying, and make you ineligible for an expunction, include sexual offenses, acts of domestic violence, battery, residential burglaries, stalking and fleeing police. State law allows you only one expunction ever, and only if you have never been ‘adjudicated.’

When the term ‘adjudication’ is used in traffic court, the meaning is drastically different. You see, traffic tickets are considered only ‘civil infractions.’ Therefore, if you are found guilty and ‘adjudicated,’ it simply means that you are getting points assessed against your driver’s license by the Department of Motor Vehicles. It does not mean that you have been found guilty of a crime. If that is the worst thing that ever happens to you, then you will have lived a very decent life.

Many people come to Florida on vacation and wind up on probation. Many come from urban populations where certain behaviors are threated more leniently and liberally. In Dade County, however, the average traffic ticket will cost you about $250. In Broward, if you commit a felony, you are more likely to go to jail than almost any county in the state. Sell just one ounce of marijuana to an undercover police officer and our state attorney’s office will make you a plea offer of no less than 18 months in Florida state prison.

Ultimately, these harsh laws present grave consequences to the average citizen who makes one costly mistake. It means that a momentary lapse today can mean a lifetime of explaining it away tomorrow. What it means is your record and your life can become subject to permanent public scrutiny, accessible to anyone- friends, enemies, lovers, creditors, employers, credit agencies, and anyone with a computer that has Internet access.

We live in a country where one out of every 100 adults is either in prison or under some form of judicial probation or supervision. For Hispanics and African Americans, those statistics are even more dramatic. Too many acts have been declared illegal, and too much government has restrained our liberties. Florida is one of those places. Keep it in mind the next time you go off to party. The sun tans as well as burns.

Reefer Madness

2011-11-07T15:47:00.002-05:00

By ETHAN NADELMANN

MARIJUANA is now legal under state law for medical purposes in 16 states and the District of Columbia, encompassing nearly one-third of the American population. More than 1,000 dispensaries provide medical marijuana; many are well regulated by state and local law and pay substantial taxes. But though more than 70 percent of Americans support legalizing medical marijuana, any use of marijuana remains illegal under federal law.

When he ran for president, Barack Obama defended the medical use of marijuana and said that he would not use Justice Department resources to override state laws on the issue. He appeared to make good on this commitment in October 2009, when the Justice Department directed federal prosecutors not to focus their efforts on “individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana.”

But over the past year, federal authorities appear to have done everything in their power to undermine state and local regulation of medical marijuana and to create uncertainty, fear and confusion among those in the industry. The president needs to reassert himself to ensure that his original policy is implemented.

The Treasury Department has forced banks to close accounts of medical marijuana businesses operating legally under state law. The Internal Revenue Service has required dispensary owners to pay punitive taxes required of no other businesses. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives recently ruled that state-sanctioned medical marijuana patients can not purchase firearms.

United States attorneys have also sent letters to local officials, coinciding with the adoption or implementation of state medical marijuana regulatory legislation, stressing their authority to prosecute all marijuana offenses. Prosecutors have threatened to seize the property of landlords and put them behind bars for renting to marijuana dispensaries. The United States attorney in San Diego, Laura E. Duffy, has promised to start targeting media outlets that run dispensaries’ ads.

President Obama has not publicly announced a shift in his views on medical marijuana, but his administration seems to be declaring one by fiat. The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Michele M. Leonhart, a Bush appointee re-nominated by Mr. Obama, has exercised her discretionary authority to retain marijuana’s classification as a Schedule I drug with “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.” And the pronouncements on marijuana, medical and otherwise, from Mr. Obama’s top drug policy adviser, R. Gil Kerlikowske, have been indistinguishable from those of Mr. Bush’s.

None of this makes any sense in terms of public safety, health or fiscal policy. Apart from its value to patients, medical marijuana plays an increasingly important role in local economies, transforming previously illegal jobs into legal ones and creating many new jobs as well, contributing to local tax bases and stimulating new economic activity. Federal crackdowns will not stop the trade in marijuana; they will only push it back underground and hurt those patients least able to navigate illicit markets.

Perhaps not since the civil rights era has law enforcement played such an aggressive role in what is essentially a cultural and political struggle. But this time the federal government is playing the bully, riding roughshod over states’ rights, not to protect vulnerable individuals but to harm them.

At the federal level, there have been few voices of protest. Senior Democrats on Capitol Hill shy away from speaking out. Republicans mostly ignore the extent to which anti-marijuana zealotry threatens core conservative values like states rights, property rights and gun ownership.

Mr. Obama briefly showed a willingness to challenge the drug-war mind-set that permeates the federal drug-control establishment. He needs to show leadership and intervene now, to encourage and defend responsible state and local regulation of medical marijuana.

Ethan Nadelmann is the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance.

Obama Betrays Promise as Feds Crackdown on California Dispensaries

2011-10-10T22:01:00.003-04:00

Betrayed by Barack

By Norm Kent

In a complete betrayal of his campaign promises and inaugural initiatives, federal prosecutors in the Obama Administration last Friday launched a crackdown on medical cannabis dispensaries in California. Welcome to the new world.

The ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign includes a warning that the targeted shops must shut down and cease operating within 45 days or face criminal confiscation of their property- even if they are operating legally under the state's 15-year-old medical marijuana law.

Like the government once did with pornographic video shops, the tenant is not the only party targeted. Landlords are simultaneously admonished that their leases violate federal regulatory guidelines, and they are complicit in the criminal enterprise. They are advised that they must terminate the lease and take steps to evict the tenants, or the government will seize their entire shopping centers for acquiring illegal assets as the fruits of a criminal enterprise.

Some of the letters prosecutors sent out also warned the state and city-licensed dispensaries of enhanced federal penalties if their businesses happened to be within a thousand feet of schools or playgrounds.

Four US Attorneys gathered on Black Friday in Sacramento to announce the ultimatums delivered to at least 38 dispensaries throughout the state. Declaring that federal law “took precedence over state law and applies regardless of the particular uses for which a dispensary is selling and distributing marijuana," they told the proprietors they just don’t give a damn what laws California has enacted and whether their dispensaries are in compliance with local municipal ordinances or not.

“We are the kings,” they said, and you shall do our bidding or ‘go directly to jail.’ Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. To them, it was a game, and they were the game makers.

The US Attorneys, wearing suits invisibly emblazoned with a hammer and sickle, announced that any dispensary that remained open “would be subject to criminal prosecution and civil enforcement actions,” including the seizure of real and personal property. No discussion. No debate. Just jail and seizures, fines and forfeiture.

The position is a 180-degree reversal from the Obama Administration’s optimistic and inaugural promises implying that those dispensaries, which were in compliance with state law, could operate without fear of federal intrusion. You could almost see it coming.

The new road follows the appointment of a drug czar who was not sympathetic to dispensaries. It follows months of threats and warnings from local federales. And it follows months of IRS audits and bank actions refusing dispensary accounts.

The Obama Administration’s false promises were a misleading ruse, lulling supporters to expand and enhance dispensaries throughout California. This law enforcement initiative reflects that Obama was either never supportive of medical marijuana efforts or is transparently powerless to supervise the very US attorneys he has appointed.

Either way, this new legal initiative will send a message not only to the sixteen states that have enacted medical marijuana laws. It will intimidate and warn others not to even try. Threatened municipal officials will see what is happening in California and back off everywhere else. Prohibition has returned, in a big, federal way. Thanks, Mr. President.

To his credit, Rob Kampia, Executive Director of the Marijuana Policy Project, was one of the first persons to condemn the administration. He published a column in the Huffington Post entitled: “Obama- From First to Worst on Medical Marijuana.”

In March 2008 Gary Nelson, editorial page editor at southern Oregon's Mail Tribune, interviewed Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who at the time was running for the Democratic presidential nomination. When Nelson asked Obama about federal policy regarding Oregon's medical marijuana law, which had been approved by voters a decade before, Obama declared, "I'm not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue." Oh, really?

Two months later Obama added that he would stop the DEA’s raids on growers since “our federal agents have better things to do, like catching criminals and preventing terrorism." As columnist Jacob Sullum wrote yesterday, Oregon medical marijuana growers who were raided by the DEA last weekend probably are wishing that guy had been elected president.

As for those enterprises which legitimately invested their life savings in starting a ‘cannabiziness’ which complied with local and state regulations, and offered a public service to those who found marijuana had legitimate medical uses, well they are just damn well out of luck. Who ever said the government was going to be fair? Who ever believed the government could not be ruthless?

"We are currently zoned correctly, we are in a discrete location not near any schools," said Chris Morganella, who is on the board of directors for Capitola Healing Association in Santa Cruz. "I cross my fingers and hope our landlord doesn't get that letter, because then he'll want to break the lease. But I signed a five-year lease, and that will have to play out in court too." It does not matter what you signed Chris. You are playing Lotto with your freedom. Tomorrow could come, and tag, you are it.

The government says they are targeting the larger establishments, which meet ‘threshold’ requirements. They say they want to arrest international traffickers as opposed to lower-level workers, but you can’t trust anything they say. They say they want to speak with one voice and maintain a statewide ‘measurable standard’, which inhibits commercial distribution and drug trafficking for profit. They think their motives are noble but their measures are only going to scare off the sickest of the sick and the neediest of the needy. The smallest businesses are hurt by their effort.

The limousine and laptop liberals who come out and defend the US attorneys will say that these were not medical establishments anyway, just veils for illegal distribution centers. The truth is all distribution should be legal anyway.

The truth is that in ballot after ballot and state after state the citizens of America, from students in colleges to baby boomers wondering where their 401k’s went, are thoughtfully voting to reform marijuana laws. We just have an intransigent federal government, ineptly governed by misguided law enforcement officials, who can’t or won’t hear the voice of the people singing- or smoking, as the case may be. We are the cast of Le Mis, and our voice is of angry men who have to rise and rise again. Just pass the vaporizer in the meantime.

As the dispensaries close under the threat of enforcement action, the growers and cultivators will go underground again. The buyers and dealers will go back to the streets. But Marijuana, Pot, Cannabis, and Weed will not go away.

What will go away is the potential revenue stream lawful distribution could have generated, the public safety regulation would have brought, and the access medical patients so desperately need.

Marijuana prohibition as a policy has failed, and our government, led by a man who has openly admitted smoking marijuana in his past, has betrayed us once again. Maybe a million-man marijuana march on the White House is what we need next. Occupy That.

A Florida attorney who can be reached at norm@normkent.com, Norm Kent serves on the NORML Board of Directors.

A miscarriage of justice on marijuana

2011-08-10T16:24:00.001-04:00

FROM THE UK GUARDIAN....

US police are using a flawed scientific test in drugs busts that gives 'false positives' to strongarm citizens into plea bargaining

The Duquenois-Levine test, widely used by police in the US, can detect marijuana, but also gives 'positive' results for numerous other commonly occurring substances. Photograph: Linda Lewis/Getty Images

As if America's highly-publicised "war on drugs" were not already facing a credibility gap, two US superior court judges – one in Washington, DC, another in Colorado – are raising questions about whether the federal Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and police departments are using "pseudo-scientific" drug identification methods to bust hundreds of thousands of suspected drug users, many of them inner-city minority kids. A flawed drug test means that innocent people are being locked up as suspects, deprived of their due process rights, and then pressured to accept plea bargains, whether they're guilty or not.

At issue in the growing controversy is whether current drug identification methods, including the widely-used "Duquenois-Levine test", can verify – and how accurately – that the substance police seize during an arrest is the one they say it is. The test, a variation on simple techniques first employed in the 1930s, exposes the suspect substance to a liquid chemical, and if it turns a certain colour – purple, in the case of marijuana – it's deemed likely to be the real thing.

But according to leading defence experts, including Heather Harris, a highly-trained chemist who's gone head-to-head with DEA lab "experts" and won, there are hundreds of legal substances, many of them readily available commercially, or in nature, that would normally turn purple under the exact same test conditions. Which means the Duquenois test, while ruling marijuana "in" as one theoretical possibility, perhaps, can't confirm its presence, either – at least, not "beyond a reasonable doubt", the legal threshold required for a conviction.

But that hasn't stopped police from using the test widely. In one recent case in Florida, police descended on a middle-aged woman bird-watcher in a public park and busted her after noticing a leafy substance in a package in her purse, which later turned out to be sage she'd purchased as incense for her home. The woman tried to inform the police about sage's medicinal and spiritual uses, and even Googled the manufacturer's website on her laptop, which matched the branding on the package. But the police busted her anyway, after the substance turned purple in a lab test. She's now planning to sue for damages.

In fact, the problem of "false positives" in drug tests isn't just limited to substances that appear to resemble marijuana. In Canada, the owners of a family-based chocolatier business were fingered as dangerous drug dealers by a Duquenois field test, and found themselves in jail.

The chocolate case may seem extreme but it's happening all across America, experts say. That's, in part, because of the pay incentives involved. Police can earn large amounts of overtime pay by conducting routine drug busts, especially after hours; they even have a name for the practice: "collars for dollars". In New York, where possession of less than an ounce of marijuana was decriminalised some years ago, marijuana drug busts have not declined; they've skyrocketed – from 5,000 to roughly 30,000 annually – in part, because police find the practice so lucrative.

Of course, Duquenois-Levine is not the only DEA-approved drug test available. A far more conclusive test, known as GC/MS, using far more advanced techniques, can also be performed, but defendants and even many lawyers are rarely aware that they can insist on such a test, or have much incentive to do so.

And, in fact, even the GC/MS test is increasingly under fire, because the DEA doesn't have standard lab protocols to govern its use, and has angered judges, including those in Washington and Colorado, by overstating the test's reliability in court. In one recent case, a Colorado superior court judge threw out all of the DEA's testimony in a drug case after its witness, under cross-examination, failed to demonstrate that the GC/MS testing conducted at one of its 18 national labs was reliable. It's a legal precedent that has the DEA reeling, experts say.

Of course, many people arrested for drug use and possession are undoubtedly guilty as charged – how many is unclear, though, because plea bargaining is so commonplace. But using manifestly flawed drug identification tests to charge defendants, or pressure them to plead guilty, is hard to square with a defendant's right to due process. And the DEA and local police, by relying on such methods, are in danger of damaging even their "good" cases, making a further mockery of the "war on drugs", while leaving ordinary citizens more at risk than ever.

You Are Right to Remain Silent: Just Shut Up

2010-12-13T23:46:00.003-05:00

You Are Right to Remain Silent:
Just Shut Up
A Criminal Defense Lawyer’s Advice to Tokers

By Norm Kent
NORML Board of Directors

After 35 years of practicing law in the trenches of state and federal courts, I have narrowed my advice for all my clients down to one, simple, direct sentence: “Shut Up.”

No kidding. Really. Just shut up.

Living in Florida, I have come to love deep-sea fishing. Enter my law office, and on my walls, above my desk, staring and glaring at my clients, is a stuffed, six-foot steel blue Marlin. Below the fish is a plaque that reads: “Behold the beautiful, majestic Marlin. He would not be here if he had not opened his mouth.”

When you are a 7-year-old kid growing up, and your mom catches you with your hand in the cookie jar, you inevitably and sheepishly try to come with an excuse. Mom pushes and prods you to confess, and you do. She then hugs and kisses you, and you make up as she tells you everything is going to be all right.

It does not work that way with a cop when he pulls you over. The police are not your parents. The sheepish lie you first tell him becomes a prior inconsistent statement that is going to be used in a court of law against you. The cop does not hug you, kiss you, and make up. He searches you, arrests you, and locks you up. So what you should do is just shut up.

Do not bargain with cops, negotiate with cops, or promise deals you cannot deliver on. The promises they make on the street are not binding in the courts where prosecutors charge you. Deal with the reality that if you are caught with drugs you are now the prisoner of a drug war. In war, you are only required as a prisoner to give your name, rank, and dog tag number. Do not give consent to search your car, your person, or invite cops back to your home. Do a Nancy Reagan: just say no.

As my friend William Panzer says, an Oakland, California based criminal defense attorney, also on the NORML Board of Directors, "If everyone kept their mouth shut, half the people in jail would not be there. The cop’s job is to put you in a cage and anything you say beyond identifying yourself helps them put you there." His advice too: "Shut up."

My advice is that if you are carrying drugs, prepare yourself for jail. Don't carry lots of cash that will be forfeited to the State. Instead, keep dog bones in your car. This way, when police tell you they are going to keep you sitting in handcuffs by the side of the road- in the hot sun or cold wind- while they retrieve a canine to search your vehicle, you can offer the dog some treats when he arrives. In the meantime, shut the mouth up. This is not the time to bemoan your fate in front of the officer and reflect that you were only ‘doing a favor for a friend.’ The cop will not give you a bone. He will transcribe your confession.

I would be a liar if I told you that ‘shut the mouth up’ works in every single instance. If you are carrying a loose joint in a ‘decrim’ state and you own up to a cop, he may let you go with a reprimand. But let’s face it; if you are carrying felony weight cannabis, a couple of beans, or some crystal, you are headed to jail. The US Constitution does not say your job is to make the police and prosecution’s job easier by telling them how and where you got it. The US Constitution says your right is to remain silent. Use it; don’t lose it. Just Shut Up.

You may think you are already guilty. Far from it; you are not. If the state cannot prove it, it is not a crime. It is their job to prove the case above and beyond a reasonable doubt. It is not your job to tell them all the contraband is yours so their job becomes a snap while they snap handcuffs on you. So just shut the mouth up.

Show police your driver’s license, insurance card, and registration. Show them your McDonald’s discount Big Mac card if you must. But do not be a dope and show them your dope. Abraham Lincoln once wrote that many men are foolish but that some “speak and remove all doubt.” Be one of those that leave arresting officers with doubt. You might get rewards for confessing in a church. You do not in a courtroom or on the street to a cop. Just shut up.

The most recent and recurrent law enforcement technique being employed presently is the notorious ‘knock and talk’ on your front doorstep at your home. They are ‘trick or treating’ for an admission. Armed with anonymous and non-verifiable information that you are cultivating marijuana on your premises, cops ‘drop by’ for a chat, seeking your permission for a search.

They like to make it seem they are coming over for coffee, investigating a zoning violation, or looking for a lost cat. They are not. They are looking for you to let a cat out of the bag that you are growing at home. Think of it this way: if they had enough information to believe you were doing something illegal, they would not be there asking for permission. They would have already secured a warrant and smashed in your door.

In these situations, the officers have no valid basis to even be on your property, let alone a warrant to enter. You have no legal obligation to answer their questions. You most certainly do not have to invite them in. They tell you though they ‘know’ pot is there and it will go ‘so much easier on you’ if you cash in your stash. No, it won’t. You will go to jail when you did not have to. You will have foolishly waived a right you never should have given up. So just shut up, and show them the door.

Far too many times, and for too many years, I have watched young men and women get arrested while feeling some sort of moral obligation to simultaneously say to cops: “You got me!” I think it goes back to mom and the cookie jar. But guess what? You are not Dorothy, and we are not in Kansas anymore. So just shut up, because what you do not say cannot be used against you in a court of law. What you do not say may prevent you from being there in the first place.

G-Rated Version.

Tim's Anniversary

2010-11-05T12:13:00.003-04:00

This is the anniversary of the date World Series star and Cy Young award winner Tim Lincecum was cited for misdemeanor marijuana possession in Washington State.

Washington State Patrol reported smelling marijuana when Lincecum initially rolled down the window, and upon inquiring about the smell Lincecum produced 3.3 grams and a pipe.

I guess life went on, and we all survived. He did not do too bad either.

The 26-year old Lincecum went to Liberty High School in Renton, WA just a few miles away from where he got popped.

He remained in the Pacific Northwest when he went on to play college ball at the University of Washington, and throughout the years.

His friend blogged about his arrest last year: "He didn't go all Andre Agassi on us and end up on some crystal meth, and Lincecum was not driving under the influence at the time. He was cited for going just 14 MPH over the posted 60 MPH speed limit.

The stretch of highway that he got pulled over in is a well-known spot for speed traps, because it is located just a few miles from the Oregon border where speed limit changes about every 20 yards.

Seriously, the speed limit is ridiculous.

It goes from 45 through Portland, then to 55, and back up to 60 before it hits a cool 70 a few more miles north.

Regardless of the speeding or weed involved, Lincecum has no prior history of indiscretions and no tarnishes on his record up to this point, so can’t we just give him a break on this one?"

Tim did not win the Cy Young in 2010. He won something better, a World Series championship ring. And proof once again for all Americans that a joint here and there does not stop you from being a championship athlete.

Marijuana Legalization Stocks

2010-10-30T11:07:00.003-04:00

By Stockerblog.com

Friday, October 29, 2010

On Tuesday, November 2, California residents will be voting on Proposition 19, the ballot measure that, if passed, would legalize limited quantities of marijuana for recreational use. This has created plenty of fodder for news reports.

The New York Times just reported on the marijuana related domain name land grab. UPI reported that a marijuana dispensary in San Francisco would give away free joints whenever the Giants hit a home run during the World Series.

And to top it off, The Wall Street Journal posted an editorial by billionaire investor George Soros, in which he says he supports the legalization of marijuana.

Unfortunately, most of the plays on legalization involve very low cap stocks, according to the list of 20 marijuana stocks at WallStreetNewsNetwork.com.

However, for the medical use of marijuana and its derivatives, there are larger companies that produce such products as Marinol, a trademark of Solvay SA (SVYSF.PK) and Nabilone, marketed as Cesamet by Valeant Pharmaceuticals International (VRX), which trades on the New York Stock Exchange. Nabilone, a synthetic cannabinoid, is used to treat chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, anorexia, and weight loss in AIDS patients.Valeant also markets Fluorouracil, a cancer treatment drug, and Diastat, a seizure drug. This $4.38 billion market cap stock trades at 30 times earnings, and pays a yield of 1.4%. Earnings for the latest reported quarter were up 41% year over year on a 23% increase in revenues. The company will have its next earnings announcement on November 4. Par Pharmaceutical Companies (PRX), a $1.14 billion market cap company markets Dronabinol, a form of Tetrahydrocannabinol or THC. However, this is a small part of the business as the company markets dozens of other drugs. The stock has a PE ratio of 13.9 and trades at one times sales. Earnings will be reported November 3. GW Pharmaceuticals (GWPRF.PK) produces Sativex, an oral spray with tetrahydrocannabinol and cannabidiol, which is used to treat multiple sclerosis patients, and also for treating pain in cancer patients. Earnings for the quarter ending March 31 were negative. The company will be reporting earnings on November 23. To see the complete free list of twenty marijuana stocks, which shows the symbol, PE ratio, price sales ratio, yield, market capitalization, and business description, go to WallStreetNewsNetwork.com. Disclosure: Author didn't own any of the above stocks at the time the article was written.

Comedian’s Video Supports Pro Pot Legalization Drive

2010-10-28T02:41:00.002-04:00

Miami Beach, FL (Oct 26th, 2010) Last week, comedian Steve Berke launched an online political campaign in support of Proposition 19 in California with the recent release of his latest music video, "Should Be Legalized", a political commentary on Eminem's music video "Love The Way You Lie."

The campaign, supported by NORML (National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws) was generating huge internet buzz, and had amassed 108,000 views within 2 days, when YouTube flagged it for being offensive, thus requiring users to login to view the video, killing the video's chance at becoming viral. "We were on pace to reach 1 million views within a week, and our video was rallying supporters of Prop 19 and decriminalization in every state that had it on the ballot. Then YouTube flagged us for being offensive and killed any chance we had at reaching our potential audience. Their censorship of this video is similar to the Internet censorship that takes place in repressive countries like North Korea and China.

"YouTube failed to give any reason to Berke for flagging the video and it is presently inaccessible to the vast majority of worldwide. “The flagging system does not have a system of recourse and re-review,” stated Berke.Fort Lauderdale attorney Norm Kent, on the Board of Directors at NORML, is among those who are outraged.

"We will not let YouTube squash a vibrant political campaign the week before the historic November 2nd elections. Videos of rapper Snoop Dogg smoking marijuana are not flagged as offensive, but a song that merely names him as a marijuana user is? YouTube is effectively freezing a viral political movement as it gains momentum in time for a critical vote. They must remove the flag. If they do not, we will pursue the matter further until they do.”

NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre adds, "YouTube’s building a wall around Steve Berke’s video makes no sense in light of dozens of other videos that depict normal cannabis use. YouTube, whether it means to or not, is stifling legitimate political discourse regarding an important initiative vote in California next week that seeks to legalize and tax cannabis.”"I just don't understand it," said Berke. "People smoking marijuana in videos on YouTube go unflagged, but our video, that involves actors merely pretending to smoke marijuana as political satire, is flagged immediately."

“In Eminem’s video, alcohol abuse, spousal abuse, sexual assault, arson and murder are all prevalent and the video is not censored in any way. In fact, YouTube runs ads against it, not only profiting off the video, but also making it viewable to all ages at all times,” Berke added.

The link to Eminem's "Love The Way You Lie" is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uelHwf8o7_U&ob=av3e

The link to Berke's "Should Be Legalized" is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdIYVWA0dr0

Guest Blog: Free Marc Emery

2010-10-16T22:51:00.003-04:00

Canadian businessman and law reform activist Marc Emery is a political prisoner of America’s federal government. Arrested in 2005 for selling high quality cannabis seeds to willing American cannabis consumers and medical patients, he now sits in a federal prison in Washington state costing taxpayer’s thousands of dollars per month, while at the same depriving Canada of an otherwise lawful and tax-generating businessman, and Marc’s family and friends of his presence in their lives.

Below is a request from Marc’s lawyer and cannabis law reformer Kirk Tousaw to help raise $8,500 to retain an expert in treaty transfers between Canada and the United States so that Marc can serve the reminder of the time he must be in the criminal justice system back in Canada.

Please join NORML in supporting this effort to help expedite the day Marc can return to Canada, his wife, businesses, (primarily Cannabis Culture Magazine) and to his full-throated advocacy for cannabis legalization in Canada.

An American prison is no place for Marc.

I think most every cannabis law reform activist in the US feels guilty that our government decided—if only for pathetically symbolic reasons, like the persecution by the feds of Tommy Chong for selling bongs a few years earlier—to arrest, persecute, extradite and incarcerate Marc for what is effectively legal these days in medical cannabis states like California, New Mexico, Colorado, Rhode Island, Montana and Maine.

Please read the info below from Kirk on how we can all help Marc out.

Thanks in advance and kind regards!

I write on behalf of Marc Emery, recently sentenced to five years in prison for selling cannabis seeds as part of his effort to “overgrow the government” and provide funding to the marijuana legalization movement. Marc made millions in this highly successful campaign and gave every dime away to activist causes and groups. When arrested in 2005, he had only $11.00 in his bank account. And now he needs our help more than ever.

As part of our effort to have Marc repatriated to Canada, he hopes to hire US lawyer Sylvia Royce, an expert in treaty transfers between the United States and Canada. Ms. Royce will handle the US side of the process while I will continue to assist Marc with the Canadian undertaking.

In order to retain Ms. Royce, Marc needs to raise $8,500.00, and he needs to do it by the end of October. We are hoping to do it in one day with a Free Marc Emery Money Bomb on October 16, 2010. A money bomb is a one-day fundraising effort designed to achieve a specific goal. In this case, it is raising enough money to hire Ms. Royce. Any extra funds will go toward future legal fees.

I know that you value Marc’s activism, dedication to our shared cause and sacrifice. Five years is a long time to be a political prisoner. Our profound hope is that he can at least serve that time in Canada, near his family, friends and loving wife, Jodie Emery.

I’m asking you to be a part of this Money Bomb in the following ways. First, consider making a donation from your organization. Second, publicize the Money Bomb to your membership through posting on your website and distribution through your email network

With your help, I know that we can achieve our goal of raising $8,500.00 on October 16, 2010. If you are willing to donate, your commitment to do so will be recorded and announced on the day of the Money Bomb.

Thank you.
Kirk TousawExecutive DirectorBeyond Prohibition Foundation

Time to Get Mad as Hell

2010-10-12T01:31:00.003-04:00

Gay suicides, gay bullying, and anti gay preachers make the airwaves while gangs brutalize and attack gay teens and gay bars. And gays respond with cocktail parties? It is time for a new breed of leaders willing to stand up and take the reigns. Here is what one guy said years ago, and he was right then, and is right now.

The original “Mad Prophet of the Airwaves” from the 1976 movie Network:

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore.

We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, “Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.”

Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad.

You’ve got to say, “I’m a human being, God damn it! My life has value!”

So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”

I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell – “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!… You’ve got to say, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it:

“I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”

Peter Finch (who played Howard Beale) died of a heart attack shortly after appearing on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson to promote Network. I remember watching the show that night, then reading Finch’s obituary in the paper the next day.

Peter Finch was posthumously awarded the Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of Howard Beale.

Face Book Opens it Wallet

2010-10-10T03:01:00.003-04:00

California's ballot measure to legalize marijuana has a new friend: Facebook co-founder Sean Parker has given $100,000 to back the proposal.

Parker's donation was reported in Proposition 19 campaign finance filings this week.

If NORML or other pot supportive organizations can move from begging for dollars at marijuana festivals to gaining supportive incentives from corporate America, we could reach further so much quicker. We have America on our side. We just need to get out the message. That takes some money, and invites your help.

Parker is not the first big Proposition 19 donor with ties to the social networking site. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has made two donations totalling $70,000, including a $50,000 contribution last month.

Neither Parker nor Moskovitz are still with Palo Alto-based Facebook, but both still have ownership stakes. Recent estimates put the value of the privately held company as high as $33.7 billion.

"What's interesting here is that (Parker) is a member of the generation that really gets it," said Stephen Gutwillig, a spokesman for the Drug Policy Alliance, the main beneficiary of Parker's contribution. "We think he's pivotal to the future of drug policy reform in the country."

The 30-year-old served as Facebook's first president and helped transform the company from dorm-room project to big business. Parker and Moskovitz have become household names since the recent release of "The Social Network."

The film chronicling the contentious origins of Facebook was No. 1 at the box office last week
Asked for a comment as to why he’s backing the legalization of marijuana, Moskovitz just sent this statement:

“More than any other initiative out there, Prop 19 will stabilize our national security and bolster our state economy. It will alleviate unnecessary overcrowding of non-violent offenders in our state jails, which in turn will help California residents.”

Moskovitz made his debut on Forbes list of 400 Richest Americans last month thanks to his 6% stake in Facebook, the social networking site he helped co-found.

He has since left Facebook and now runs a startup called Asana, backed by several of Facebook’s earliest founders.

Twenty five years ago, NORML used to get donations from the Playboy Mansion to help launch our effort for marijuana legalization. Playboy represented cutting edge journalism for the modern male, much as the way Facebook does represent cutting edge communication for the networking American. It looks like time is catching up to our movement. It's about time, too.

Renowned Marijuana Activist Passes Away- LA Times Report

2010-04-24T08:44:00.003-04:00

John Hoeffel
LA Times
courtesy of

Jack Herer, an energetic advocate for marijuana legalization who was a mesmerizing presence on the Venice Boardwalk and achieved worldwide renown after he wrote a treatise extolling the virtues of hemp, died April 15. He was 70.

Herer suffered a debilitating heart attack in September, minutes after he delivered a typically pugnacious pro-pot speech at the Hempstalk festival in Portland, Ore., insisting that marijuana ought to be smoked morning, noon and night. "You've got to be out of your mind not to smoke dope," shouted Herer, dressed in a green short-sleeved shirt and shorts made from hemp. "It is the best thing the world has ever had."He never recovered and died at home in Eugene on tax day.

"Dad has not filed taxes in over 30 years, so it was wonderful he died on tax day, it really was," said his son Mark Herer, who is the president of The Third Eye, the family's smoke shop and hippie wares store in Portland.Herer researched and wrote an exuberant book that became the bible of the movement to legalize hemp, a non-psychoactive strain of marijuana. "The Emperor Wears No Clothes," which was first published in 1985, has sold more than 700,000 copies. In it, Herer wields extensive documentation to ridicule the government's ban on hemp cultivation and to highlight the plant's versatility as paper, fiber, fuel, food and medicine.

The book made Herer into one of the most recognizable figures in the marijuana movement and converted him into a pop icon memorialized by a strain of cannabis. For decades, Herer, known as the Emperor of Hemp or the Hemperor, crisscrossed the country, rhapsodizing about the wonders of weed.Bruce Margolin, one of L.A.'s best-known marijuana defense lawyers, recalls that Herer was always trying to teach people about hemp. "At that time I was ignorant of it like everyone else," he said. "He educated me and many, many other people through his book and his lectures."

Herer was born June 18, 1939, in New York City, the youngest of three children, and served in Korea as an Army military police officer. He discovered his mission in Los Angeles after he moved to the city in 1967 with his wife and three sons to work at a neon sign company. He tried marijuana two years later and quickly became engrossed in learning about it. "He was always a very curious person about everything. He read everything he got his hands on," said Vera Donato, who was married to Herer from 1960 to 1969.

In the early 1970s, he wrote "G.R.A.S.S.," which stood for "Great Revolutionary American Standard System." It promoted a 1-to-10 scale for grading marijuana. He also began to invent drug paraphernalia.In 1973, he launched a relentless effort to legalize marijuana in California, working year after year on initiatives that failed, often in league with Ed Adair, a head shop owner who died two decades ago.

In 1980, the two became co-commanders of Reefer Raiders and set up camp on the lawn of the federal building in Westwood, openly smoking joints for the media. A year later, they pushed their own measure.Herer opened a head shop in Van Nuys called High Country and recruited other owners to help fund his initiatives.

In 1983, he ran afoul of a new state law that made it a misdemeanor to sell devices to use with illegal drugs. Police confiscated more than 6,000 items in two raids. Three years later, Herer was convicted and ordered to pay a $1,500 fine and serve two years' probation.In the 1980s, he could frequently be found at an information booth on the Venice Boardwalk, a gregarious man who showed obvious pleasure in trying to persuade skeptics.

"I think the thing that motivated him the most was his love and respect for planet Earth and that he was a kind and good-hearted person just naturally," said Jerry Rubin, a fellow activist who was often stationed nearby. "He was doing a consciousness-raising lifetime exercise."Herer researched "The Emperor Wears No Clothes" for years, scouring the archives of the Library of Congress for evidence that he believed the government suppressed when marijuana was outlawed in 1937.

The book, updated many times, sparked a hemp resurgence, and he became a circuit-riding preacher. In 1990, Herer addressed 60 rallies in 48 places in one six-week stint.At 6 feet and 230 pounds, with unkempt hair and a bushy beard, Herer was an imposing, but not intimidating figure, a bearish counterculture holdout who was often found in tie-dyed shorts and a T-shirt with a pot leaf overlaid on an American flag on the front and a history of hemp on the back.

Herer had a heart attack and stroke at a hemp festival in 2000. He boasted that his rehabilitation was aided by cannabis oil. When he concluded his last speech, he said, "Come over to my booth, over there, and I will see you next time.""He didn't write the script, but you couldn't write it better," Mark Herer said. "Dad has a speech, the crowd cheers and he walks off into the sunset."

An Open Letter to the President for my Mom and Widows of Veterans

2009-12-13T10:03:00.006-05:00

Jesse Kent

Law Offices of Norm Kent
110 Southeast 6th Street Suite 1970
Fort Lauderdale, Fl 33301
954 763 1900

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C,

Secretary of Veterans Affairs
Eric K. Shinseki
810 Vermont Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20420

Dear Concerned Public Servants,

My name is Norm Kent. I am an attorney in Fort Lauderdale, writing on behalf of my mother, Gertrude, living in a nursing home in Sunrise, Florida. She is a surviving spouse of a veteran, a soldier, and an American hero who fought overseas to defend freedom here at home.

On or about February of this year, I processed an application for Widow’s Pension Benefits on behalf of Mom. My dad, Jesse Kent, served bravely during World War II, in the 376th Infantry, and rose from the rank of Private First Class to Staff Sergeant, up through his discharge at the Separation Center in Fort Dix on August 31, 1945. I have enclosed Dad’s picture when he was in the service overseas for you to see. I keep it hanging in my office.

When my dad came home from combat duty overseas in Europe, from various battles in numeorus theaters to landing on Utah Beach with the Fighting 94th during D Day operations, his first son, and my older brother- Richard, had already been born. Dad served admirably, and as a member of the Antitank Company, was even awarded an Honorary Certificate of Service for exemplary conduct against the German forces on the battlefield in Germany, early in 1945. It was awarded to him by Captain Frederick Bucky, Jr., the Infantry Adjutant.

Dad would often tell us stories of combat operations, and what it was like to be a soldier living in a field on 'Creamed Chipped Beef'; how he wanted to make it home to see his son. He did, and he raised three of them, who survive him today.

My brothers, Alan and Richard, and me, well, we are most proud of our Dad for having earned the Bronze Star Medal on February 4, 1944 for meritorious achievement in ground operations against the enemy in the European Theater of Operations, during the Rhineland Campaign,. It was awarded by the President of the United States of America. That star, and the plaque evidencing it, also hangs proudly in my office. These are the memories of my dad, who passed away too young, in July of 1987, only 72 years of age.

Do me a favor. As you respond to my letter, think of my dad, won’t you? And think of his widow, my mom, in a nursing home, turning 88 years old last week. My family, including my older brother Richard, who was born in 1944 while Dad was still fighting overseas, celebrated Thanksgiving with her just a few weeks ago.

When I visit my Dad at his gravesite next week, for the Holidays, when I wheel my mom to his stone in her wheelchair, please tell me how I can explain to him why it has taken the United States of America over ten months to process his widow’s claim for a pension benefit.

You see, on October 1st of this year, after waiting eight months, I received a letter from the Department of Veterans Affairs that you had in fact acquired everything you needed to process the claim, but remarkably, the correspondence stated the claim could not go forward because my dad’s death certificate did not sufficiently indicate the cause of his death.

Dutifully, as a good citizen, trying to accommodate the bureaucracy that is our government- and the rules that are so particularized they are virtually insane, I rushed out to the Bureau of Vital Statistics and swiftly re-sent an updated death certificate within a week. Apparently, it got there too fast for you, because two months have now passed, and today, on December 17, I received the following note from the VA in Philadelphia:

“We are still processing your application for PENSION. We apologize for the delay.”

You said the same thing to me on April 9 of this year:

“It is our sincere desire to decide your case promptly. However, we have a great number of claims, so action on yours may be delayed.”

I wish you all a Happy Holidays, of course. I hope you enjoy this time with your family and friends. But I am here to tell you I do not accept your apology, and I find your delays offensive and unacceptable. It should not take 65 days for the widow of a United States veteran who put his life at risk for this country 65 years ago to collect the benefits she is lawfully entitled to, let alone over ten months. So NO, then, I DO NOT accept your apology.

An America that cared more about its veterans would consider and care more for the elderly women who survived them; many of whom do not have sons who are lawyers- able to help them find marriage certificates from 75 years ago, discharge papers from 65 years ago, or death certificates from 25 or 30 years ago. First, the process you employ for citizens to gain rights they should already have is inexcusably delayed. Second, that difficulty is compounded by an arduous road of paperwork requirements for so many who are so unable.

I was fascinated to learn that there are private for profit financial service companies that aid those who cannot help themselves; that instead of our government reaching out, there are profiteers taking away. This is their right to work for a profit to serve a public need. But if we had a government that was serving public needs companies like this would not need to exist. Somehow I just don't think that our soldiers who lose their lives overseas in battles for our freedoms ever anticipated that their widows would have to cut checks to private companies to process benefit applications. I don't think it was the last thing on their mind as they took a bullet for the red, white, and blue.

My Dad was very proud of the country he served and the life he lived. He would not be so proud of the legacy you are leaving his wife and thousands of other widows who are told up front when they apply for relief for benefits from the Human Services Department the wait is long and the delays great; that is ‘just the way it is.’ That is the way it must not be.

For too long too many of our citizens have accepted the apathy without challenging it. But that is not the way my dad and hundreds of thousands of other veterans helped us win a war. They did not just lie down and take it. So do me a favor, just mark down in your books that I will not join the list of those who quietly acquiesce to administrative neglect and inexhaustible delays as routine practice. I will prosecute my mom’s rights with the same zeal and energy that my dad, her husband, fought for this country. I will not lie down and look the other way at indifference.

Finally, let me say I am not trying to threaten anyone to win one case for one woman, who matters an awful lot to me. I am trying to send a message and press a claim that the program you are administering is a colossal embarrassment to the citizens of the United States and the persons it is intended to serve. Ten months? Please! It speaks for itself. You need to do better.

You see, you are still asking soldiers to fight and die for our country, in wars and battles that are far more questionable then World War II. Your decisions are making new widows who also will one day have to negotiate these elaborate requirements for dependency and disability. Can we do something today to make it easier on them tomorrow? As long as you are sending soldiers to battle, will you consider those who they are leaving behind?

Sincerely,

Norm Kent

Thanks for Life

2009-11-30T11:58:00.002-05:00

As a cancer survivor, I have much to be thankful for.

It is not just that I have been in remission for ten years, it is that in this past decade, I have tried to maximize and appreciate the time I have been given- to do and see the things which make life worth living.

Of course, like everyone else, I have been weighed down by work, realities, and the daily drudges we all experience. But this man Jack Rushton, surviving life as a quadrapelegic, as a sit-down comedian, captures the essence of energy and resolve in the face of adversity.

We may not believe in everything he does, but you can believe in the way he does it. Like Jack, I cannot explain why some survive and others do not. As Charlie Brown has said, through the voice of Charles Schulz, sometimes your number just comes up. Until that time, make each day count ought to be more than the aspiration of a cancer survivor. It is a message for all of us.

Adam Lambert’s Erotic Performance Deserves Praise

2009-11-24T19:27:00.001-05:00

Not Just Dorothy Anymore

By Norm Kent

"Part of what I love about being a live performer is that sometimes you just are in the moment and sometimes things just happen.."

-Adam Lambert

I come to praise Adam Lambert, not to bury him.

This is an artist I really want to meet.

When a bunch of gay activists complained a few months ago that he was not political enough he told them to leave him alone and let him sing. When Out Magazine complained he was not supportive enough of gay rights, he told them to screw off with a series of four letter words. He basically has sent a message that he is going to be his own man, set his own agenda, and carve out his own musical path.

Adam Lambert has asked to be accepted, if at all, as a performer, and not to worry about his role as a political activist. The gay community has somehow demanded of him to be something he is not. But in his own way, on Sunday, he became, if not a gay rights activist, America’s most notable gay performer. In a small way, with a simple act, he displayed more courage than any gay artist ever before him- in case you are listening, Barry Manilow.

Sunday, America got a taste of this erotic and emerging male Madonna. Sending shockwaves throughout the audiences at the American Music Awards, he performed a number while allowing a male to simulate fellatio upon him, only moments after sharing a deep erotic kiss with his male keyboardist. For good measure, shades of Elvis Presley, he grabbed his crotch. Oh, not to mention the boys on leashes.

His cutting edge and groundbreaking performance should probably be commended by Gay America for its brash and open display of male upon male sexuality. It was not at the Human Rights Campaign and not at ABC. The latter promptly canceled Lambert’s scheduled performance on Good Morning America set for Tuesday morning.

Still, moderate gay activists were called out to local news stations to suggest that there was a double standard in actions by heterosexual performers compared to gay ones. Surprise. But a group of timid leaders, afraid to shake the status quo, also have been opining that Lambert used an ‘inappropriate’ forum to stage his exhibition. Yeah, tell that to Janet Jackson. If a woman does this, half of male America cheers in approval. Hypocrisy Heaven.

Here is the deal, America. Gay men kiss. Gay men grab crotches. That is what we do, preferably in private, but if it is on stage, during a performance, at nite, under the lights, designed to elicit sensuality and excitement, don’t be shocked; don’t be surprised. It is us. It is real.

Throughout the American Idol series, Adam Lambert demonstrated his ability to remain within the rules and comply with prime time TV guidelines and standards. But here he was at the American Music Awards, a show for stars and theatrics, and he brashly displays his sexuality in a way no gay male performer ever had before. That is gutsy. That is courage. No apologies from me, and good for him.

Complaints poured in about the sexually charged performance to ABC, which aired the AMA and GMA,. Supposedly, more than 1,500 people complained. Not surprising. Might even lead to a fine with the FCC. Not surprising either. As an entertainer, it may be a small price for the international exposure stars yearn for. Now who did he lose American Idol to? Can't even remember the dude's name.

Let’s keep this in mind. I mean it is not like he declared lives expendable to put an unsafe car on the road. He did not put lead based paint in children’s toys. Or, if you saw this evening's news, he did not become a crib retailer knowingly marketing unsafe dropside baby cribs. Corporate America did that for decades. All Lambert did was show who Lambert was: a sensual gay performer who has made no attempt to conceal his homosexual bent. He pushed boundaries. And? That is what an artist does; should do.

Lambert summed it up best: "You know honestly, if I offended some people... it's apples and oranges. I'm not an artist that does things for every single person," he told Access Hollywood, "I believe in artistic freedom and expression, I believe in honoring the lyrics of a song, and those lyrics aren't really for everybody either."

Without even trying to be an exponent for free speech, artistic expression, or gay rights, in one small way, Lambert is becoming one anyway. I think it is great that he kissed a male drummer on stage, and was the first performer in America to openly do so. The sad thing is that it took until December of 2009 to get there.

Heterosexual artists have played the sensuality and sexuality card on stage for decades with no consequence or criticism. Adam Lambert is sending a cross across the bow of America to let them know gay men can also. In doing so, the kid is becoming a pioneer in his own right. Good for him. If you can’t accept it, that is your problem, not his.

If he needs a lawyer to defend him, he has got one in this writer.

Doctors Light Up a Joint as AMA Steps into 21st Century

2009-11-15T11:44:00.005-05:00

"Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest
therapeutically active substances known to man."
-- DEA Administrative Law Judge Francis Young

Docket No. 86-22. 1988.

Doctors Light Up a Joint

by Norm Kent

Better late than never, I suppose.

After decades of burying their head in the sand, the country's largest physician group, the American Medical Association (AMA), has reversed its long-held position that marijuana has no medical value. Now that the whole country has caught on, they have decided to jump into the ocean and see if they can’t swim and catch up to the ship that has left shore.

This is why the gay rights battle and pot advocates have so much in common. This decision is like the American Psychiatric Association saying there is nothing wrong with homosexuality years after gay rights professionals have formed coalitions in professions from law enforcement to medicine.

Nevertheless, to their belated credit, the AMA has called for a review of marijuana's status as a ‘Schedule 1’ drug with ‘no accepted medical use’ under the federal Controlled Substances Act. As a ‘Schedule 1’ controlled substance, in the same category as heroin, ecstasy and LSD, the federal laws for possession remain unduly harsh and the public access even for medical testing remains severely limited.

Reducing marijuana's federal classification even just to Schedule 2 -- the same class as cocaine, methadone, oxycodone and morphine -- would allow for more testing on the medical effects of marijuana. Since the government’s purported unwillingness to accept marijuana as an herb with medicinal value has been based on their allegation that all we have is limited anecdotal evidence, the scheduling conundrum becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. The powers that be have been shouting we do not have enough evidence to reclassify while inhibiting the very research which could prove it. Politically savvy perhaps, but morally unconscionable.

Consequently, the rescheduling of marijuana is a critical battle that marijuana advocates must win. There is a terrible comfort zone the political left can succumb to if we find satisfaction that a particular administration is easing off on law enforcement. Political power is temporary. Those in office today can be voted out tomorrow. But those in office tomorrow will still have to follow the law in effect on that day. Thus, battles must be fought in courtrooms and legislatures. Laws must be changed now to insure change is permanent. Rescheduling initiatives must go forth.

Social activists have to understand that without pressure centrists will drift to the comfort zone of the right. The reason close to a million Americans are still getting arrested every year for marijuana possession is because so many people could care less about the laws and assume it is perfectly okay to light up where you want when they want. But some of you wind up like the South Florida judge, Lawrence M. Korda, who had spent 30 distinguished years on the bench. He decided to light up a single joint during a rock concert in a Hollywood, Florida park, and after a series of humiliating front page articles documenting his arrest, was forced to resign his position.

You can’t let up if you have the ball. For marijuana reformers, like gay rights proponents, the wave is on our side. We can’t get off the board. You have to ride it out and carry it to a new tomorrow. Yes, gay marriage may have lost a 31st state vote in Maine last month, but more significantly, scores of communities nationwide are extending homosexual couples the rights and privileges afforded heterosexuals, under the umbrella of domestic partnership ordinances. If your community is not, contact a city commissioner near you today.

It's been 72 years since the AMA has officially recognized that marijuana has therapeutic benefits. It’s been 30 years since Administrative Law Judge Frances Young ruled that rescheduling should occur. He was overruled by Presidents, politics, and the DEA. See Fred Gardner’s article about Judge Young here online in Counterpunch from early this Spring: http://www.counterpunch.org/gardner03022009.html

After three decades, it is time to honor Judge Young’s decision that cannabis has the capacity to provide medically based options in pain relief treatment. We know what they are, from taming nausea for cancer stricken patients to reducing neuropathic pain in those so suffering, whether from AIDS or multiple sclerosis or comparable ailments.

As stated by Aaron Houston of the successful Marijuana Policy Project, "Marijuana's Schedule I status is not just scientifically untenable, given the wealth of recent data showing it to be both safe and effective for chronic pain and other conditions, but it's been a major obstacle to needed research." The truth is more people died from spinach last year than pot. And a thousand people a year, I understand, overdose from aspirin. You don’t die from pot, just maybe ‘jones’ out a bit if you don’t have it.

The government has maintained a legally inconsistent position for decades regarding the scheduling of marijuana as an illegal drug with no justifiable medical uses. Even today, our government continues to operate the remnants of its once popular ‘Compassionate Use Protocol’ program, which allows the DEA to distribute marijuana cigarettes under a prescription to those deemed medically worthy to receive it. New applications have been denied for two decades. Only four patients are still alive who still receive medical marijuana thusly.

Ask yourself this: how can the government go into court and say there is no medical use for marijuana when its own DEA was and has been distributing it to dozens of patients for two decades? It is a case we must undertake again.

In changing its policy, the AMA said its goal was to clear the way to conduct clinical research, develop cannabis-based medicines and devise alternative ways to deliver the drug. But it is a lot more than that. Now it is time to pressure your congressman to pressure the Obama Administration to pressure the DEA to insure that the rescheduling occurs, and marijuana is removed from that list of drugs which can still lock your ass up in prison for years. Make no mistake about it. This change is not just about medically based research. This change is about insuring your freedom. It’s about preventing future lawmakers from using the ‘drug war’ as a tool to inhibit your liberty.

Freedom is a nice thing to have, and repressive pot laws are a stupid reason to take it away.

Breckinridge Lights Up the Slopes

2009-11-04T07:27:00.003-05:00

Don't know about you, but I am going skiing.

Last nite, the Colorado ski town of Breckenridge voted overwhelmingly to legalize marijuana.

Early returns Tuesday night showed the proposal winning with 72 percent of the vote. The measure would allow adults over 21 to have up to 1 ounce of marijuana.

The measure is largely symbolic because pot possession remains a state crime for people without medical clearance. But supporters said they wanted to send a message to local law enforcement to stop busting small-time pot smokers. So basically you have the population of a community telling the police to back off. Not surprising at all.

In Tallahassee, Florida, a few years ago, when students from FSU NORML initiated a successful petition drive to make pot enforcement a low priority, the city commission sued, alleging that they could not interfere with state enforcement. You can't sue to suppress a vote though, can you?

Breckinridge sent a message last nite that thousands of Americans all over this country are fed up with pot laws. It is also an indicator there is popular support for their new medical dispensaries statewide.

'Geraldo at Large' Suggests Medical Marijuana Will Become Law of the Land

2009-10-25T11:48:00.009-04:00

http://www.counterpunch.org/kent10302009.html

updated/newer version now online

A whopping 63% of Fox News viewers have endorsed the Obama Administration’s decision to stop targeting medical dispensaries in California. The disclosure was made by Geraldo Rivera last nite on his popular show, ‘Geraldo at Large.’

Geraldo presented more than just a fair and balanced report. The news item clearly distinguished the marked differences between the casual user of marijuana for recreational or personal medical use and traffickers operating illegal Mexican drug cartels, which everyone acknowledged should be targeted for enhanced enforcement. Rivera even applauded Attorney General Eric Holder for his new and rededicated efforts to stop that illegality, inserting into his news report the AG’s announcement of a raid last week, which netted 300 suspects nationwide.

Ann Coulter, of course, came on to criticize Obama, but she is a howler monkey who stands on the end of the branch and shrieks at anything Barack and Friends do or do not do. Even she had a hard time coming down too hard on smokers, preferring to just attack President Obama. Surprise. When Geraldo then turned to conservative Mike Huckabee for a countervailing viewpoint, he tempered his criticism of the new policy by recognizing that every governor has to set its priorities. The best objection he came up with was that if the Obama administration wanted to “change the law, go ahead and change it, but don’t keep a law you are not going to enforce.” That is a far cry from stating this was bad policy, a poor change, and counter productive to our nation.

What viewers eventually saw on the piece Geraldo did was a presentation that medical marijuana will soon be the law of the land, and the 15 states which already provide for it are a precursor to a national future. You could almost sense that was the direction Geraldo was headed when he opened with a segue featuring Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin at a ‘Smoke Out’ rally in LA. It was then followed by a white-collared businessman explaining to the audience that he ran a lawful, state-compliant dispensary which was busted by the feds. Phil Smith, that gentleman, then explained how he had just spent ten months in jail with hardened criminals and murderers. That too is a far cry from the day and time when marijuana growers were presented to American audiences as hardened criminals. Geraldo even scoffed at the way we once thought of marijuana, with a scene from 'Reefer Madness' dropped onto the set in the background.

As he waded through the piece on medical and legal pot, Geraldo even postured this was an issue that crossed ideological lines; that Americans across the board do not want pot law enforced harshly against our citizens. Coming from the barrios of New York City, having grown up in the 1960’s, and spending decades with celebrities in the media, Geraldo uniquely understands how pervasive and personal marijuana is in the American psyche. In fact, as he recovers from knee replacement surgery, I would not be surprised if instead of using Percocet daily he tried out some Purple Haze. (I don't know, I'm just saying...)

The bottom line is Geraldo is one of America's best, grittiest and most seasoned journalists, who has covered stories from mistreatment in mental institutions to mass murders. He knows where 'pot' fits into the scheme of things- enough so that he could joke and poke at this story, recognizing as he does our nation has greater issues, more pressing problems. Personally, I got the opportunity to work with him 20 years ago on a story about runaway kids in Fort Lauderdale, and he is a guy willing to get his hands dirty to make his stories true.

When NORML (www.norml.com) recently held its annual convention in San Francisco, former Mayor Willie Brown opined that “we should legalize pot because as many people are using it recreationally as are using it medically.” Prop 215 author, activist Denis Peron, once stated: “all use is medical.” Last year, NORML’s founder, Keith Stroup, and Rick Cusick, the Publisher of High Times, along with 50 students from local colleges, were foolishly arrested for smoking joints at a ‘MassCann(abis)’ convention in the Boston Commons. The next thing you know Mr. Stroup was testifying before Massachusetts legislative committees to change the laws in the Bay State. Those statutes have now been amended to provide for the medicinal use of marijuana.

One of my clients, Elvy Mussika, is amongst the last of those getting marijuana from the United States government on a now abandoned program entitled the ‘Compassionate Use Protocol.’ Under the plan, the DEA grows experimental marijuana at the University of Mississippi and freeze-dries it for distribution in a prescription can to Ms. Mussika, a grandmother fighting the intraocular pressures associated with Glaucoma, which constantly cause pain in her eyes. 'Smoke 3x daily,or as needed for pain' the jar reads.There are thousands and thousands of other Americans similarly situated, who only want to use pot to relieve pain. For them, marijuana is medicine.

Then there are the Michael Phelps of the world, using bongs and water pipes and rolling papers to get high and give themselves a buzz, for fun's sake. They too should not be criminalized or denied scholarships to school, should they? Some may not win gold medals in swimming pools, but they should not be posting bail in county jails, either. They may not find themselves as guests of the Jay Leno show, but they should not find themselves as guests of the local sheriff either, should they?

It would seem that even Fox News agrees.

Fox News Network versus Team Obama

2009-10-22T18:05:00.007-04:00

This past week the Obama Administration said that it does not view the Fox News Network as a credible news organization because it has an agenda and a perspective inconsistent with neutrality.

As if to prove the point for them, Fox’s terror dogs immediately went on the attack, led by Karl Rove, asserting that the President is creating a Nixon-like ‘Enemies List.’ Talk about stretching the truth. The ‘enemies list’ created by 1970’s-era President Richard Nixon was a master list, created by the President, to engage in secretive and illegal surveillance on prominent citizens who disparaged or disagreed with the government. Rahm Emanuel, on the other hand, stated rather routinely that Fox News ought to be called out for its transparent lack of neutrality while presenting news to the American people. Quite a difference.

Bill O’Reilly, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, Greta Van Sostern, and then Bill Hemmer, also entered the fray for Fox News, championing their individual liberties, while remarking that Obama’s team was trying to silence a free press; that they were being ‘bullied.’ So the most powerful network on television struts out its stars to reach their massive audiences, and comes to the table shrieking that their rights are being infringed, their freedoms shattered, their lives ruined. Boo hoo! Cry me a river. Who are they kidding? This is hardly a network being silenced.

Fox is a media outlet. It relished every moment of the attack, one long overdue. Frankly, it is about time that liberals fought back, firmly and angrily. What the Obama administration showed is why they got to the White House. They do not run. They stand their ground. They do not apologize for who they are. And they will not stand idly by as Foxnuts seize misrepresentative quotes and misleading soundbites to falsely demonize decent Obama appointees as extremists and radicals.

For years, we have heard all the nasty things about the liberal media. We have listened as right wing commentators took over the AM radio stations beating and bashing those humane liberals who have fought for a 21st century society which embraces diversity. We have been demonized for supporting everything from the right of handicapped to have access to public facilities to allowing for salmon to swim upstream.

Surprise for the right. Guess what, gays are getting married and society is not collapsing. People smoke marijuana medicinally and children are still going to school and learning to read and write. We liberals are right about wrong foreign wars, corporate exploitation of citizens and making health care affordable and accessible. But our voices have not been loud enough. It is about time that changed. Many of us are strong on crime. We believe Rush Limbaugh should have gone to jail for drug trafficking years ago, the new White House should investigate illegal torturing by the military, and maybe Dick Cheney ought not be allowed to carry a rifle.

Accordingly, the Obama Administration’s David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, and Anita Dunn should not be censored for firing back, they should be celebrated. Any administration represents a point of view, sets an agenda, and argues its cause. If the Fox News Network opposes it, as they clearly do, then so be it. They have a right to write too. But the administration has no duty to pander to its activist agenda. Fox may brag it is fair and balanced, but there are many, this writer included, that believe their presentations are tilted and unbalanced, leaning to the rabid right and the wrongfully righteous.

As a network, it makes for delightfully entertaining programming. They are the best at what they do. Fox is ingenious at getting under the liberals’ skin, but it has not done much but get them ratings. The Democrats’ control the House, the Senate, and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It is now not only the obligation of Fox but its duty to call the administration to task for its achievements and appointments, its policies and its practices. That they do so on an entertaining and creative venue like Fox News simply requires Team Obama to rise up to the challenge with good governance and a capable administration. Achieve that goal and it is the best answer that will ever be written. But every news entity has a right to question authority, and challenge those in power. So too may those in power evaluate whether the critiques are credible and the criticisms just.

A feud between the Obama Administration and Fox is not to be demeaned and denigrated. It ought to be publicized and promoted. Each may become better voices at effectively getting their message out, and both can prosper from the discussion. Fox will get more viewers, and Team Obama may get to refine, streamline, and more effectively present their voice. Neither should be silent or intimidated.

Fox just has to own up to what columnist John Batchelor wrote this week: they may present the news, but they are in show business. So is every campaigner that gets elected to office today with its slick brochures and television marketing. Let’s be real. The most articulate conservative commentators only land in the tv studio after getting prepped in a dressing room for hair and makeup.

We are all mad men and we only get madder if we deny that essential truth. The only significance of the Obama War on Fox is that Fox got to War on Obama. It made for a good show. And that is all that counts in the end, except maybe if you really care that Americans are still dying in a foreign war that has lasted longer than all the combined years of World War I and II. You see, Steve Doocy, you are no Walter Cronkite. And that’s the way it really is.

Update:

If the White House wants to lose support, let them make choices like yesterday's colossal error. Let me talk of 'Fools on the Hill.' This is the context with which Team Obama will be known if they intemperately attempt to exclude Fox from its place at the table. You can't deny them 'pool' coverage. You can't exclude them from the debate. Win the battle of ideas on the playing field. Don't look like children who run off and say the 'balls and bats are mine and you can't play.' That is the way the White House is going to look if they attempt to isolate and marginalize Fox.

The White House did that yesterday by saying the Pay Czar, Ken Feinberg would not be made available to Fox. That was just moronic. Fox does not deserve that, and it does not become the White House. If you don't debate Fox you disgrace yourself. Challenge the ideas, not the institution.

Holy Rollers! Boy Uses Bible As Rolling Papers

2009-09-29T13:45:00.004-04:00

A 16-year-old boy who used a page from his Bible as a rolling paper for a marijuana joint was charged with drug possession, an Erie County sheriff deputy's report said.

The boy's mother called deputies at about 11:35 p.m. Tuesday, asking them to meet her at a car wash on Ohio 101.

The mother said she saw her son smoking in his bedroom and found a small bag of marijuana in his night stand, the report said.

The mother told deputies her son "was smoking a marijuana cigarette using a page from his Bible," the report said.

Now that truly is a religious experience: a holy roller. Better than a medical necessity defense- it is a first amendment defense of religious freedom. Shades of the Ethiopian Coptic Church.

Pot and The Right to Pursue Happiness

2009-09-22T13:28:00.002-04:00

By Norm Kent

During his tenure as the Fort Lauderdale Police Chief, the late Ron Cochran was one day asked how he relieved the stress of his tension-filled job: “Like everyone else” he quipped, “I smoke a joint.”

“Only kidding”, he quickly added to the reporter.

Well, I’m not kidding. And neither are twenty million Americans every day. They use marijuana medicinally and recreationally, but the bottom line, is ‘Weeds’ is more than a TV show on HBO. It is a way of life for good and decent people who openly inhale without apology.

Marijuana may be the second-largest cash crop in America. But we will never know until all the farmers who grow can openly distribute it. I can guarantee you this. When the day comes that the weed can be legally grown, openly marketed, and its revenue streams can be lawfully traced, we will have a new growth industry in America that rivals corn. Hemp has multiple uses. Heck, it was used as rope for our paratroopers in World War II. If it worked for George Bush, it can work for you.

In our free marketplace, where there is a demand there shall be a supply. When the late William F. Buckley recommended legalizing marijuana twenty years ago, he framed it in economic terms: “A profit of 2,000 percent is a powerful engine to try to stop in a free society.” When financial gurus were called into California last year to seek out new ways to generate income streams to prevent the imminent bankruptcy of the state, it’s no surprise that one of the recommendations postured to state legislators was the legalization and taxation of marijuana growth and distribution. Why fight what you cannot stop? Why not employ a tempered truce instead of a useless war?

The crusade to ban marijuana is unquestionably harmful. You criminalize an innocent portion of the population. You turn politicians into hypocrites. You lay the foundation for corruption in law enforcement. You deny the reality that an informed public can make educated decisions about substance abuse. You ignore the scientific truths that marijuana has historically had socially redeeming qualities and medical value.

In support of its pogrom against decency, we watch helplessly as our Government denies students scholarships and mothers welfare. Law enforcement conducts invasive aerial dragnets and unconstitutional searches which trespass on fundamental American privacy rights. We provide for courts to sanction feudal-like forfeitures of personal property for carrying some weed in your car or growing it on your own. And we justify it in the name of a law that should be off the books anyway.

The routine police pronouncements of major pot seizures involving millions of dollars and thousands of plants are reminiscent of Vietnamese war body counts, where the Government sold a bill of goods to the public while our generals promised ‘light at the end of the tunnel’. That same fraud today inaccurately suggests that drugs are evil, and criminality evolves from the use, misuse, and abuse of those drugs. The real abuse however, comes from the enforcement mechanisms our government has improperly created and wrongfully maintained. Now the government has become the criminal, and its judicial system ratifies injustice.

I am not content, though, with saying pot should be legalized because the Government’s activities are a far more criminal than they are just. I am not content with saying taxing weed today is our way of balancing budgets tomorrow. I am for legalizing marijuana because it is responsible and just legislation that preserves the dignity of the human being while maximizing individual liberty.

Pot users don’t smoke reefer anymore because they want to rebel, turn on, tune in or drop out.

Pot smokers don’t get high because marijuana is less harmful than alcohol, though it is.

Pot smokers don’t light up because they want to dis their parents, challenge their government, or need to make a political statement.

Pot smokers smoke in the privacy of their own home, or in their backyards, or on their porches at night, simply to enhance their spirit and enjoy their lives. Some use it to relieve pain, ease stress, and tame diseases which were not of their own making. For some it is recreation, others medication. What matters is that the choice is theirs, the right ours.

Our government protects many rights, and our country was born with a bill of them. The first of these is a right to pursue happiness, one our courts have somehow forgotten to guard or jealously protect.

As NORML gathers in California this weekend, let us reaffirm the principle that ‘Yes We Cannabis’ because it is perfectly normal to consume marijuana. And after 30 years we have shown there are responsible users, from Presidents to police chiefs to your neighbors next door.

The Obama Follies: Can Anyone Here Play This Game?

2009-09-15T10:24:00.005-04:00

Have you seen some of those recent chase videos where the driver of the reckless and weaving car fleeing police turns out to be a 10 year old kid?

I am beginning to get the feeling that the Obama Administration has about as steady a hand on the wheel of national security that these kids have over the cars they are pilfering.

As I was getting ready to write a memorial column about 9/11, a breaking news flash comes across CNN that as the Presidential motorcade is crossing the Potomac River, the Coast Guard is firing ten rounds at a suspicious vessel in the restricted waters nearby.

As the day unfolds, we find out that it was a pre-planned training exercise which the Coast Guard maybe just forgot to tell anyone about. In fact, the Coast Guard postured that to ensure “its readiness posture” they conduct training scenarios on a daily basis. Really? They customarily shoot off rounds and volleys of live ammunition as a Presidential Motorcade is driving by?

In the back of my mind, there is the memory last April, of the US Air Force One Jet flying over the Hudson accompanied by fighter pilots, which turned out to be a government sponsored promotional photo shoot. All it did was trigger thousands of people to evacuate their offices as memories of 9-11 resurfaced. I can see it now: the next time a 747 lands in the Hudson, citizens are going to think it’s a movie crew.

I remember a Jimmy Breslin book about the hapless New York Mets, who finished the season 40-120. It was called “Can’t Anybody Here Play this Game?” I am beginning to think it is about the Obama Administration, whose first American achievement was “vetting” Cabinet members, half of whom it seemed cheated on their taxes, had illegal housemaids, or skeletons in their closet. Can you imagine what the media would have done if it was a Republican administration trying to get away with this stuff?

The week started with Americans hearing how we are losing the war in Afghanistan and the candidate who said he was bringing troops home said 45,000 more would be going there, as we heard of our bloodiest losses in years. But the real news from the Afghan front came not on the battlefields. Instead, we heard of nude and lewd parties running rampant in the embassy living quarters, courtesy of the security guards we are paying to be there. And in a shrewd tax saving effort, we are now assigning American personnel to to watch over the embassy's security guards. So we are going to watch the watchers. This is no Abu Ghraib, but is it far behind?

We said for years Ronald Reagan was a Teflon president, with nothing sticking to him, but Obama is living like a kid on a water slide. Nine months into the new administration, all we have is an expansion of the old war, with no hope in sight of it ending. The only thing in sight is American soldiers targeted by insurgents while getting killed far away from home.

It is about time that liberals and progressives start holding Mr. Obama to task. The latest outrages are coming on the marijuana front. While the Obama Administration announced early on they were going to stop raiding medical marijuana dispensaries in California, those raids have continued as if President Bush was still in power. His new director of anti drug policy has not modified his stance on pot reform, but remained intransigent, and very little in the way of progressive reform has been delivered, despite early promises.

I am one of the President’s supporters, and I am still confident progressive changes are around the corner. But the corner is beginning to seem like William Westmoreland’s Vietnam War Proclamation that ‘we see the light at the end of the tunnel’. Yeah, and that light is a 15 watt bulb. Heck, some us are still ‘waiting for Godot.’

A government has to move forward on many fronts at once, and it is impossible to expect improvements immediately. It is possible to expect, however, that the new leaders are making their mark, setting their goals, and leading the way to a new direction. I cannot think of a single Cabinet member that has made a marked difference in anything anywhere. Except maybe they got there because they survived that vetting process I joked about earlier.

I remain faithful to the truths that the President espouses, but as my credit cards get cancelled, my credit lines eliminated, I am wondering why only the banks got bailouts. I am wondering why we are giving more credit to the institutions that robbed us instead of the individuals who helped us build our communities. I am wondering how one year after we gave banks millions of dollars that Bank of America executives are still getting trillion dollar payoffs for leaving the disasters they created and coddled, manufactured and mishandled, played out and perpetuated.

I am wondering just wondering when the American dream became the American nightmare, and when the economic crisis will end. I am not sure we have seen the worst. What happens when the airlines come and ask for the bailouts auto dealers did? What happens when commercial properties start crashing the way residences did, and stores like Macy’s and Sears shut their doors? What happens if food prices start to rise?

We are so busy fighting alligators every day I am concerned that we have lost sight of the greater battle to drain the swamp. And there is nothing about a government throwing dollars at every problem which suggests to me that things will change soon. I run an office of five persons and our Blue Cross costs annually are greater than the annual working wage of most Americans. It almosts pays to get sick and not work, just to get value for dollar. But then there are no jobs out there anyway.

So as Jimmy Breslin once wrote of the 1962 NY Mets, I ask, 'Can anyone here play this game?'

Rest In Peace: A 9-11 Tribute

2009-09-11T19:23:00.002-04:00

On this day of loss and remembrance, where so many of us lost so much; where those of us born and raised in New York saw our heart and soul torn asunder, one piece comes to mind above and beyond all others.

Written by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, it speaks for itself and will forever be imprinted in my mind.

REST IN PEACE
by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

I am a World Trade Center tower, standing tall in the clear blue sky, feeling a violent blow in my side, and
I am a towering inferno of pain and suffering imploding upon myself and collapsing to the ground.
May I rest in peace.

I am a terrified passenger on a hijacked airplane not knowing where we are going or that I am riding on fuel tanks that will be instruments of death, and
I am a worker arriving at my office not knowing that in just a moment my future will be obliterated.
May I rest in peace.

I am a pigeon in the plaza between the two towers eating crumbs from someone's breakfast when fire rains down on me from the skies, and
I am a bed of flowers admired daily by thousands of tourists now buried under five stories of rubble.
May I rest in peace.

I am a firefighter sent into dark corridors of smoke and debris on a mission of mercy only to have it collapse around me, and
I am a rescue worker risking my life to save lives who is very aware that I may not make it out alive.
May I rest in peace.

I am a survivor who has fled down the stairs and out of the building to safety who knows that nothing will ever be the same in my soul again, and
I am a doctor in a hospital treating patients burned from head to toe who knows that these horrible images will remain in my mind forever.
May I know peace.

I am a tourist in Times Square looking up at the giant TV screens thinking I'm seeing a disaster movie as I watch the Twin Towers crash to the ground, and
I am a New York woman sending e-mails to friends and family letting them know that I am safe.
May I know peace.

I am a piece of paper that was on someone's desk this morning and now I'm debris scattered by the wind across lower Manhattan, and
I am a stone in the graveyard at Trinity Church covered with soot from the buildings that once stood proudly above me, death meeting death.
May I rest in peace.

I am a dog sniffing in the rubble for signs of life, doing my best to be of service, and
I am a blood donor waiting in line to make a simple but very needed contribution for the victims.
May I know peace.

I am a resident in an apartment in downtown New York who has been forced to evacuate my home, and
I am a resident in an apartment uptown who has walked 100 blocks home in a stream of other refugees.
May I know peace.

I am a family member who has just learned that someone I love has died, and
I am a pastor who must comfort someone who has suffered a heart-breaking loss.
May I know peace.

I am a loyal American who feels violated and vows to stand behind any military action it takes to wipe terrorists off the face of the earth, and
I am a loyal American who feels violated and worries that people who look and sound like me are all going to be blamed for this tragedy.
May I know peace.

I am a frightened city dweller who wonders whether I'll ever feel safe in a skyscraper again, and
I am a pilot who wonders whether there will ever be a way to make the skies truly safe.
May I know peace.

I am the owner of a small store with five employees that has been put out of business by this tragedy, and
I am an executive in a multinational corporation who is concerned about the cost of doing business in a terrorized world.
May I know peace.

I am a visitor to New York City who purchases postcards of the World Trade Center Twin Towers that are no more, and
I am a television reporter trying to put into words the terrible things I have seen.
May I know peace.

I am a boy in New Jersey waiting for a father who will never come home, and
I am a boy in a faraway country rejoicing in the streets of my village because someone has hurt the hated Americans.
May I know peace.

I am a general talking into the microphones about how we must stop the terrorist cowards who have perpetrated this heinous crime, and
I am an intelligence officer trying to discern how such a thing could have happened on American soil, and
I am a city official trying to find ways to alleviate the suffering of my people.
May I know peace.

I am a terrorist whose hatred for America knows no limit and I am willing to die to prove it, and
I am a terrorist sympathizer standing with all the enemies of American capitalism and imperialism, and
I am a master strategist for a terrorist group who planned this abomination.
My heart is not yet capable of openness, tolerance, and loving.
May I know peace.

I am a citizen of the world glued to my television set, fighting back my rage and despair at these horrible events, and
I am a person of faith struggling to forgive the unforgivable, praying for the consolation of those who have lost loved ones, calling upon the merciful beneficence of God/Lord/Allah/Spirit/Higher Power.
May I know peace.

I am a child of God who believes that we are all children of God and we are all part of one another.
May we all know peace.

Gay Couple Wins False Arrest Suit

2009-08-27T23:13:00.001-04:00

SOUTH FLORIDA BLADE

Gay man wins $45,000 after false arrest
Plaintiff claimed police targeted him for being gay

By DMITRY RASHNITSOV
AUG. 27, 2009

Claude Lessard, the plaintiff in a 2003 case of false arrest at John U. Lloyd State Park in Dania Beach, is taking home $45,000 from the state of Florida.

Lessard, an openly gay local junior high school teacher, filed suit against the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and park officer David Pius in March 2005, after being arrested at the park for what he said was a case of anti-gay bias. His suit included charges of false arrest, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution stemming from an incident that took place in the park in July 2003.

The state, without admitting fault, decided to pay Lessard the $45,000 for damages rather than continue to fight the case.

Lessard’s attorney views this as not only a victory for gay men who are harassed at public beaches and parks, but also a legal step that gives gays another right in the fight for marriage equality.

"Our office is grateful we could help remind law enforcement authorities that gay men will no longer tolerate abuses of their civil rights, and when those rights are violated unjustly, the State will be held financially accountable,” said Norm Kent, Lessard’s attorney. "The settlement is ample proof that the government tried to whitewash and cover up the case from the start, but through the tenacity of our office, and courage of our client, we saw it to a just end. The amount they paid showed it was not just nuisance value. "

The arrest occurred during the afternoon of July 23, 2003. Lessard said he was walking along a trail in the park when he saw a man being arrested. At the time, Lessard said he was mindful of newspaper articles in which numerous gay men had alleged that they were harassed, cited for dubious trespassing violations and falsely arrested in the park.

According to Lessard, when he encountered a man along the trail whom he thought was just a park visitor, he commented to him, “Watch out. They’re arresting someone over there.”

The man Lessard encountered turned out to be a police officer. He accused Lessard of obstructing an undercover operation in the park. Park officers had been conducting undercover patrols because of reports of sexual activity in the park. But Lessard said he was there only to enjoy the beach and park on a sunny day. Lessard thinks he was targeted for arrest simply because he was a gay man in the park, according to the lawsuit.

Lessard was charged with “obstruction of justice” and jailed for 15 hours. His car was towed, and he had to pay $136 to retrieve it. Later the state dropped the charge but Lessard was so outraged about how he was treated that he sued the state for false arrest, which was reported by the Blade in 2004 (then called Express Gay News). An internal investigation by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in 2004 concluded that there was no evidence that park officers acted inappropriately, violated any statute or policy, or targeted anyone in the park based on sexual orientation. Along with the monetary award, the case also establishes significant victory for gay couples seeking legal rights for their partnerships.

Lessard’s domestic partner of 27 years, Jocelyn Goulet, is also named as a co-plaintiff in this case; as a result, the judge also set case-law for Broward County establishing gay couples, who are registered as domestic partners, the right to sue together under “loss of consortium” just as straight couples would. Loss of consortium laws state that if one spouse is injured and is suing for damages, their spouse can also sue because they cannot complete their marital duties. Lessard is currently out of the country and is unavailable for comment.

Incarcerex: Marijuana Folly on Video

2009-08-23T02:03:00.002-04:00

Every now and then you come upons something which lends meaning to the words that a picture is worth ten thousand of them. Then this video is worth 100,000...words that is. Thanks to Lynn Appleby, the Cannabis Action Director Network in Vermont, for sharing this on Facebook, so I could further disseminate it on my blog.

Streakout

2009-08-09T18:04:00.000-04:00

Kinda speaks or streaks for itself, doesn't it?

Richie Havens at Woodstock

2009-08-09T17:09:00.001-04:00

Forty years this week. Reflections as the days unfold.

Obama Image Stirs Legal Battle on Pot Poster

2009-08-08T21:55:00.004-04:00

-- With buzz about the Obama Joker poster still in the air, another reworking of the president's image is causing a stir.

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws has produced a psychedelic, '60s-style poster featuring a photo of college freshman "Barry" Obama smoking. Above his super-bad Panama hat is the slogan: Yes We Cannabis.

Artist Sonia Sanchez created the poster for NORML's annual conference using a picture taken at Occidental College in 1980 by the future president's classmate Lisa Jack. In the original photo, Obama is holding a real cigarette to his lips. Sanchez tweaked the smoking material to fit her theme, but otherwise the image is unchanged.

The pro-pot group never sought Jack's permission, even though it is selling the poster as well as giving it away to conference-goers, NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre acknowledged in an interview with The Washington Post.

Jack told the Post she's "very irritated" and does not want her work, which is on display at a Los Angeles gallery, used in this way.

NORML believes it's protected by "fair use" rules, but it's far from a clear-cut case. Ashby Jones writes on The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog it "just might take the cake as Best Fair-Use Smackdown Ever."

In this case, all the players are known. The Obama Joker poster that has gone viral on the Internet in recent days is more mysterious. No one seems to know who created the image, in which Obama's face is painted like Heath Ledger's character in 'The Dark Knight.' The original photo was taken from a TIME magazine cover. The posters first appeared in Los Angeles.
"The Obama-as-Joker picture can be viewed as the evil twin" of Shepard Fairey's famous 'Hope' poster, David Ng observes in the Los Angeles Times Culture Monster blog.

Fairey, a Los Angeles artist, based his iconic red, white and blue image on an Associated Press photo. The AP is suing Fairey, accusing him of violating its copyright. Fairey is countersuing, claiming he changed the original picture enough to be covered under "fair use" as a work of art.

THC Expo is Dawn of a New Day

2009-07-09T19:11:00.002-04:00

"If the people will lead, the leaders will follow."

Unfortunately as I recovered from a respiratory ailment, I was unable to attend the THC Expo in Los Angeles a month ago in June.

But it was the beginning of a new day, with pot advocates, medical propositionists, gathered together with positive energy, recognizing cannabis is medical, cannabis is tolerable, cannabis is progressive.

Teenager Pushes the Envelope

2009-07-09T19:07:00.001-04:00

Probably not the brightest way to become Johnny Appleseed or spread the cause of marijuana law reform.

Medical Marijuana Vending Machine now Available in California

2009-04-03T00:23:00.002-04:00

Live from my San Francisco home, I just want to tell you it works. Saw it last week in Los Angeles. Tested it out. Renewed my medical marijuana card. I am good to go. No more Hershey's chocolate bars for me. Now it is the real thing!

Talented Actor Now a Total Fruitcake

2009-04-02T07:39:00.004-04:00

So what does Hollywood do to people anyway? Here is Joaquin when he was part of the human race.

Early this morning Joaquin Phoenix jumped off the stage during a short performance at a Miami Beach nightclub and confronted an audience member. Security guards dragged Phoenix back onstage and escorted him away.

It's unclear whether the confrontation -- and his pledge to quit acting and start rapping -- was real or a put-on. Actor and brother-in-law Casey Affleck, who has been recording a documentary on Phoenix's entry into the music business, captured the performance on camera.

In October, Phoenix's publicist confirmed he was making the career switch. In January he performed at a Las Vegas nightclub and the next month he made a strange appearance on David Letterman's "Late Show." Actor Ben Stiller lampooned that appearance at the Oscars.

You have heard of phoenix rising. We are seeing phoenix descending. You almost know what is coming next. Rehab. Apologies. Contrition. Or reclusiveness, loss, and abandonment. So tragic, they will say. So self induced, I will say. He is becoming the Mike Tyson of Hollywood.

This guy needs a joint.

Police Chief Slams Obama for Making Joke of Marijuana

2009-03-29T09:10:00.003-04:00

Guest Blogger, former Seattle Police Chief, Norm Stamper Speaks Out

The president is busy. He's got important things to do, like rescuing the economy, saving jobs and mortgages and industries. But we ought not to let him off the hook for his frivolous dismissal of a widely popular question he faced in Thursday's Online Town Hall

At the top of the televised event, the president announced that of the 3.5 million votes on the thousands of questions received in advance, one topic "ranked fairly high." It was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and encourage job creation. He responded: "The answer is no, I don't think that is a good strategy to grow our economy." He then asked rhetorically what the question says about "the online audience."

Get it? His in-the-flesh audience got it, chuckling politely at the allusion to a Stoner Nation plugged in to the "internets." The problem for Mr. Obama is that marijuana reform was at or near the top of the list of all questions in three major categories: budget, health care reform, green jobs and energy. Our leader doesn't seem to understand that millions of his interlocutor-constituents are actually quite serious about the issue.

Which is not to say that drugs, particularly pot, doesn't offer up a rich if predictable vein of humor. Cheech and Chong's vintage "Dave's not here!" routine is still a side-splitter. As Larry the Cable Guy would say, "I don't care who you are, that's funny right there."But there's nothing comical about tens of millions of Americans being busted, frightened out of their wits, losing their jobs, their student loans, their public housing, their families, their freedom...

And show me the humor in a dying cancer patient who's denied legal access to a drug known to relieve pain and suffering.

Having just returned from Minnesota whose state lawmakers are entertaining a conservative, highly restrictive medical marijuana law, I can tell you what's not funny to Joni Whiting.

Ms. Whiting told the House's Public Safety Policy and Oversight Committee of her 26-year-old daughter Stephanie's two-year battle with facial melanoma that surfaced during the young woman's third pregnancy. The packed hearing room was dead quiet as Ms. Whiting spoke of Stephanie's face being cut off "one inch at a time, until there was nothing left to cut." She spoke of her daughter's severe nausea, her "continuous and uncontrollable pain."Stephanie moved back to her family's home and "bravely began to make plans for the ending of her life." The tumors continued to grow, invading the inside and outside of her mouth, as well as her throat and chest. Nausea was a constant companion. Zofran and (significantly) Marinol, the synthetic pill version of THC, did nothing to abate the symptoms. Stephanie began wasting away. She lost all hope of relief.

Joni's other children approached their mother, begged her to let their sister use marijuana. But Ms. Whiting, a Vietnam veteran whose youngest son recently returned from 18 months in Iraq, was a law-abiding woman. And she was afraid of the authorities. There was no way she would allow the illicit substance in her house. As she held her ground, her grownup kids removed Stephanie from the family home. Three days later, wracked by guilt, Joni welcomed her daughter back. "I called a number of family members and friends...and asked if they knew of anywhere we could purchase marijuana. The next morning someone had placed a package of it on our doorstep. I have never known whom to thank for it but I remain grateful beyond belief." The marijuana restored Stephanie's appetite. It allowed her to eat three meals a day, and to keep the food down. She regained energy and, in the words of her mother, "looked better than I had seen her in months."

Stephanie survived another 89 days, celebrating both Thanksgiving and Christmas with her family.

Shortly after the holidays, Stephanie's pain became "so severe that when she asked my husband and me to lie down on both sides of her and hold her, she couldn't stand the pain of us touching her body."Stephanie died on January 14, 2003 in the room she grew up in, holding her mother's hand. A mother who, as she told the legislative committee, would "have no problem going to jail for acquiring medical marijuana for my suffering child."

Following Joni Whiting's presentation, it was all I could do to hold it together during my own testimony. Such was the power of this one woman's story. And of the sadness and rage roiling inside me as I reflected on the countless other Stephanies who are made to suffer not only the ravages of terminal illness and intractable pain but the callousness and narrow-mindedness of their leaders.

When I finished my testimony, a local police chief, a member of the committee, angrily accused me of disrespecting the police officers in the room--who'd shown up in force, in uniform, to oppose medical marijuana. Wearing a bright yellow tie with the lettering "Police Line, Do Not Cross," the chief charged me with placing more stock in the opinions of doctors than of Minnesota's cops. Guilty, as charged. Who are we, I asked him, to substitute our judgment for that of medical professionals and their patients? Who are we, for that matter, to deny the will of the people.

There's much value in humor, even during times of pain and tragedy. So long as the joke is not at the expense of the suffering.

It's been a bad couple of weeks for the president. His Leno comment about the Special Olympics while self-deprecating and not malicious was certainly tone deaf, followed soon after by his casting gratuitous aspersions at serious advocates of marijuana reform. But Barack Obama is a decent and honorable man, compassionate and wise. I can't believe he would do anything other than what Joni Whiting did if, God forbid, he faced similar choices within his own family. I can't believe he doesn't realize the political value of taking a more reasoned, courageous stand on drug policy reform in general. Or of at least providing honest, thoughtful answers on the issue.Perhaps we should show him what's in it for him?

Perhaps we should make certain that in every future "town hall" the president is reassured of the seriousness of the legions of voters working to end cruel and ineffective drug laws.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/norm-stamper/marijuana-no-laughing-mat_b_180378.html

Meet Me: I Am Patient Number 380206011

2009-03-07T12:50:00.004-05:00

Meet Me: I Am Patient Number 380206011

By Norm Kent

Today I am going to come out of the closet as a Bi-Coastal pot consumer.

I lead two lives; one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast.

In Fort Lauderdale, I own a townhouse where I have resided for over a quarter of a century. In this community, I am a lawyer and a spokesman for NORML, very active in drug law reform. But I cannot practice what I preach. That would be illegal.

In California, however, I found a small town near Berkley, east of San Francisco Bay, where I may retire. It is Walnut Creek, a hamlet, I understand, that has more open public spaces than any other village in America. There, I may eventually choose to grow my own pot. I am allowed to do so.

In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where I practice law, and get people out of trouble for growing pot, I have to defend people who do what I am entitled to do in California legally. You see, the rules are different here. Life can thus be a bit conflicted.

In early 2006, my Florida roommate, after learning he was HIV positive, decided to move back to his hometown of San Francisco. As a pot consumer, he realized he could now get a medicinal recommendation for marijuana and grow pot legally under California law. The Florida laws are not so kind or generous. Cultivation of any amount is a second degree felony.

We went to San Francisco together, to a community I have visited and loved since the early 1970’s, from my first spectacular drive up the Pacific Coast highway. We found and rented a small apartment in the Haight.

It has been thirteen years since California voters enacted Proposition 215, which allowed citizens to utilize marijuana for medical purposes if a person had a legitimate need. As a recovering cancer patient, I more than qualified for a medical marijuana recommendation.

I sought out a legitimate physician, not one running a medical marijuana mill. I came with a full set of medical records tracking my unenviable medical past, including recent spinal surgery. The doctor thoughtfully reviewed with me the medical risks associated with the use of cannabis. Not that I did not have a little experience. I mean, I am 60 years old this year. My friends’ kids go to Bonnaroo. I lived through Woodstock.

After the screening, my physician then appropriately certified me as an individual who could benefit from the medical use of cannabis. Just like that, I became patient number 380206011. I then proceeded to a medical dispensary, proudly armed with a State of California Medical Marijuana Identification Card.

As a California patient, I am empowered to acquire cannabis lawfully at medical dispensaries. Under the California Health and Safety Code, I am also entitled to grow up to six plants of my own in my little apartment on the bay. I do not have to hide them from the authorities.

I joined the Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Cooperative, and was issued a Growers Certificate. It affirms that any herbs I cultivate at home would be grown for my personal medical use. I was now at liberty to grow my own medicine. It is still called pot in Florida. We call it medicine in California.

Today, therefore, the same medicine I can consume lawfully in California I have to prevent people from going to jail for in Florida. It makes no sense. Fourteen states and scores of communities across our country have either decriminalized or ‘medicalized’ marijuana. It is not good enough. Americans still face one very large federal stumbling block.

A state may pass its own laws, but so too may the federal government pass laws which preempt those state laws. In the case of marijuana, that is what Washington has done. Our federal government claims marijuana is not medicine. As such, it criminalizes all marijuana possession, use, or cultivation, regardless of what the states do.

At first, patients were lucky. In 2003, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal government had no right to arrest or prosecute medical marijuana patients- as long as what they possessed was for personal use. The United States Supreme Court reversed that ruling in 2005. Thus, as we sit here today, in 2009, federal law enforcement officials can prosecute medical marijuana patients, even if state authorities will not; even if they reside in a state where medical marijuana use is protected by state law.

Under our Constitution, the police power of the state is to be exercised by the state. California authorities are not disobeying federal laws by not enforcing them. They are not legally obligated to do so. Nor is Florida obligated to follow California laws. Just because you have a medical right to possess cannabis in California does not give you a legal right to grow or possess it in Florida. Though some clients of mine have tried, you can’t get stopped for smoking in Miami Beach and pull out a medical marijuana card from Santa Monica. It won’t fly. Tell it to your bondsman.

Welcome then to my conflicted life. I am permitted to grow my own medicine lawfully in my California apartment. If I were to do that in Florida, police could raid my house and the Florida Bar could seize my card. Instead of representing a grower, I would need a lawyer to represent me. Florida would not care that I am patient number 380206011 in California. What is wrong with that picture?

The cannabis I purchase in a dispensary in Berkeley I can carry in my car and consume in my living room. If I am flying back to Florida though, I cannot carry it with me. That would be a federal crime. But if I am relaxing at an airport bar in either San Francisco or Fort Lauderdale, I can order and consume Crown Royal and Coke. What I can’t get on both coasts is justice. That is far more elusive, and does not come in a bottle.

One national reform group has spent 40 years trying to stem the tide of repression and advance the rights of marijuana consumers. They say it is normal to smoke pot. Their name is NORML, the National Organization to Reform the Marijuana Laws. If there was ever a time to be part of their effort, it is now, as the new administration in Washington has said they are going to put an end to the drug war madness. They have said they will end the raids on medical dispensaries.

We need to see that deed and action follows words and promises.

We need to send a message to our legislators that the silent majority of Americans support vast and overriding changes to repressive drug laws which have incarcerated too many for too long. Join NORML in that effort.

We need to show that moral authority is on our side.
Spread the word and you will spread the seed.

.

No Oscar for Citizens Protesting Unjust Federal Marijuana Laws

2009-02-23T08:03:00.006-05:00

No Oscar for Medical Marijuana Providers

by Norm Kent

There will be no Oscar awards for this real life ceremony coming to Los Angeles today.

Protesters will righteously and defiantly gather on the corner of Main Street and Temple St outside the federal courthouse at 12:00 PM on Monday, February 23.

They will be medical marijuana patients and advocates unified to protest strenuously the upcoming sentencing of Charles C. Lynch, who was convicted for operating a medical marijuana dispensing collective in Morro Bay in August of last year.

The organizers have no red carpet. They just want to draw public attention to Lynch's case hoping against hope that Judge Wu will use his discretion to impose a lenient sentence on the 46-year old Lynch, who could face decades in federal prison. That would be Change we can believe in.

"People need to know that Charles Lynch is going to federal prison even though he was obeying state and local law," event organizer Cheryl Aichele told the online paper, Salem.News.com, "It is not fair that he should be caught in the crossfire between state and federal law." But he is and if we do not do something about it, he will be gunned down.

California is one of thirteen states in which medical marijuana is legal, but federal law prohibits its use under any circumstances. That means that though Mr. Lynch obeyed local and state laws, he becomes a national and federal prisoner. That means he is a victim of American injustice at its worst.

Mr. Obama became President on January 20. Of course, he wanted time to catch up and assume the role. But you do become president on Day 1, and you have to assume the role from the moment you take the oath, flubbed or not. There is no time for Mr. Lynch. His sentencing is in less than a month.

Yes, I read that on February 4, a White House Spokesman named Nick Shapiro said that President Obama did not want to waste federal law enforcement resources circumventing state medical marijuana laws. Then have the guts to do something about it now. Then please let's find a reporter in the White House pool to ask these questions before Mr. Lynch is sentenced.

Mr. Shapiro opined that he expected the President's new appointees to consider this when setting policy for their agencies. How about having one of them show up at the sentencing for Mr. Lynch? How about directing the US Attorney to stand down? I am available if they want to send me.

Just as Ed Rosenthal in San Francisco was not permitted to present evidence his growhouse was for medical consumers, the prohibitive Federal Rules of Evidence denied Mr. Lynch from presenting any testimony whatsoever about medical marijuana, Mr. Lynch's city business license, or California state law. A jury thus only heard that some man was selling marijuana to line his pockets. Thus, Mr. Lynch was convicted on all counts.

Drew Carey's account of Mr. Lynch's struggle with the federal government on Reason.tv helped the case to receive national media attention. Ed Rosenthal was sentenced to a day in jail. Will our government ask that Mr. Lynch serve any more?

Today, a quiet Monday in L.A., thousands of people will be talking about the Oscars, and as the Hollywood types watch the news this evening, one will see this rag tag band of protestors rallying around the federal courthouse. Somewhere someone will say 'This will make a good film.'

While gay people were being beaten mindlessly in alleys for decades, someone may have said the same for Harvey Milk. Maybe in 20 years some actor will play the role of a Tommy Chong, busted senselessly, incarcerated unjustly, and released to make a difference.

But for Mr. Lynch and his family, there is no time today for a movie tomorrow. This is real life. Unless our President and his administration does something, he is going to jail for years.

Protesters will gather on the corner of Main Street and Temple St outside the federal courthouse at 12:00 PM on Monday, February 23. The street address for the federal courthouse is 312 North Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles. If you are in LA, grab a joint, cop a sign, and be there. It will not get you into the Academies, but it will make you a star.

Here are some related links, courtesy of Americans for Safe Access:
White House Statement on Medical Cannabis: safeaccessnow.org/article.php?id=5665
Picture of Lynch at Chamber of Commerce ribbon-cutting ceremony for his dispensary: safeaccessnow.org/img/original/Lynch_Photo.jpg
Drew Carey/Reason TV documentary short on Lynch: reason.tv/video/show/413.html
Recent Los Angeles Times story on the trial: latimes.com/news/local/la-me-weed26-2008jul26,0,6418930.story
Friends of Charles C. Lynch website: friendsofccl.com

A Chorus of Gay Voices Made Themselves Heard in City Elections

2009-02-18T04:36:00.002-05:00

Gay Voices Were Heard in City Elections

By Norm Kent

Some people in the gay community may be disappointed that Fort Lauderdale did not elect a gay mayor, but there is more still to be proud about. In the media, some have suggested gays failed. Not so.

First of all, two credible gay candidates marshaled nearly 40% of the vote in a city where our outgoing mayor spent the last two years demeaning our credibility.

Second, the incoming mayor is now, and has been an ongoing friend of the gay community. In fact, Jack Seiler once served as the Mayor of Wilton Manors and was an early supporter of the Express Gay News that I founded, the precursor to the very South Florida Blade you are reading today.

Third, the elections in Fort Lauderdale enticed many gay candidates to launch campaigns, and Coleman Prewitt is in a runoff for one open commission seat. The candidate he opposes, Romney Rogers, is a long time resident with entrenched establishment ties, and loves his city, but he has never loved or supported the gay community. However, you do not hear him bashing it openly, either.

More significantly, starting with the ‘Flush Naugle’ rallies last year, the gay community of Fort Lauderdale has sent a message to all future candidates in this growing metropolis. We have declared ourselves to be part and parcel of the process that is governance. We will not sit silently by while people in power accost or abuse who we are.

We have sent a political message that we are a strong and mobilizing force who can deliver votes to our supporters. More importantly than that, we have reminded our neighbors that we are partners in our community, and we own businesses, raise families, and care about the health and safety of our streets and schools. We are no longer scapegoats to be accused. We will not be indifferently ignored. We are the shared participants in a greater good.

There was a time, and it was not that long ago, when a human rights rally in South Florida would gather a dozen activists. Now a parade in Wilton Manors pulls together a hundred organizations with thousands of activists. We take for granted how much we have achieved. We are not unlike a tag from an old Virginia Slims television commercial promoting a popular cigarette for women, ‘You’ve come a long way, baby.’ And courageous leaders like Dean Trantalis helped bring us there.

It may be that gay mayoral candidates lost a race in the city of Fort Lauderdale. But never again will a mayoral candidate demean the gay community without subjecting himself to public approbation and putting his political career at risk.

If I were to start listing all the gay and lesbian leaders in Broward alone, now running for office and serving the community on a commission or in some capacity, this column would run too many words, and I would leave too many out. Suffice it to say, we are making a difference.

You have to remember there was a time when being gay would disqualify you from public office. Today, it may offer you a political base. I would say this to those who are gay and seek office though. Sell us something other than your sexuality. Come to us with a history of involvement and activism, courage and commitment. The straight community may care about who you are sleeping with. We don’t.

The message the gay community sends to Fort Lauderdale today is not that we are on the outside looking in, fighting for rights we do not have. Our collective voice has affirmatively established us as partners in the future. We have a place at the table. It did not come easy, was not turned over willingly, and cost us dearly. Finally, maybe after all these years, people are beginning to see us for who we are and what we achieve in our neighborhoods, instead of just who and what we do in our bedrooms.

The Case Against Michael Phelps

2009-02-05T23:32:00.002-05:00

The Case Against Michael Phelps

Why it is more Hype than Substance
By Norm Kent
On this blog, I do not give legal advice. I express legal opinions. The one everyone is asking about is can Michael Phelps actually be charged? After all, there is no proof there was anything in the pipe at all. There is no controlled substance to present to a court. There is not even a pipe which could lead to a paraphernalia charge. So how can they possibly prosecute him?

In my law office I have a steel Florida Marlin, stuffed by an ichthyologist, which I caught off the shores of Key West, in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.Under the fish, there is a plaque which reads, “Behold the bright, blue Marlin; this creature would not be here today had he not opened his big mouth yesterday.”Michael Phelps should have come by and read it. His publicized admission that he toked from a bong at a frat party in a South Carolina dorm has stirred a whirlwind of controversy and put him in harm’s way.

The real bad news came from the sheriff in the jurisdiction where Michael allegedly toked up, with a pronouncement that he was going to investigate the case to see if he could prosecute young Mr. Phelps.The sheriff’s public information teased the media: “The Richland County Sheriff's Department is making an effort to determine if Mr. Phelps broke the law. If he did, he will be charged in the same manner as anyone else...”

Sheriff Leon Lott then commented to a local newspaper about the quality of his case. He stated that “this one might be a lot easier since we have photographs of someone using drugs and a partial confession. It's a relatively easy case once we can determine where the crime occurred.'' Not so, Sheriff Lott. You are leaving out a lot.

First and foremost, look at Michael’s exact words, never acknowledging he smoked pot. Instead, there was a carefully worded admission that he engaged in regrettable behavior. It might even have been written by a publicist, more worried about that Speedo endorsement than a criminal prosecution. That does not a confession make. Score lap one for Phelps.

Second, what if some classmate who was at the party decides to turn the bong over to the authorities, instead of selling it on E Bay? If they find Michael Phelps’ fingerprints on it, along with residue of cannabis sativa, he can arguably be charged with possession of drug paraphernalia, since the pipe is supposedly packed with pot. But how would you know months later that the pot was not added after the fact? How would you prove it was the same bong? The Phelps defense would be that there is no continuous chain of custody which can establish there was contraband in the pipe at the time he held it in his hand. There is no way to show what was in the pipe when he held it. Phelps would win the second leg.

Third, the pictures alone are insufficient as a matter of law to sustain a conviction for possession of drug paraphernalia. Someone would have to come forth and authenticate it as an actual pipe. Someone would have to come forth and attest to the fact that they took the photo. Without real parties to affirm and swear to the authenticity of the alleged contraband, the evidence is entirely circumstantial and legally inadmissible. Phelps wins again.

Fourth, since the law prosecutes possession, and there is no way to prove that there was ever pot in the pipe when Michael exercised dominion and control over it, the charge would be subject to a Motion to Dismiss for failure to establish evidentiary proof of the contraband. Proof of possession typically requires an assertion by a drug testing laboratory, which is an arm of the sheriff’s office to swear that the substance with which you are charged is actually illegal. There is no pot to test. Phelps wins a fourth round.

Venue, or location is important too. In order for any prosecution to be initiated by a law enforcement agency, someone will have to come forward with a sworn statement and independently establish the location of the alleged act. Typically, a second degree misdemeanor is not an extraditable offense. All Michael has to do is stay out of South Carolina. Phelps wins a fifth lap.

However, do not lose sight over the fact that Michael’s unsolicited statement could be used in tandem with witnesses to convict him after the fact. Just as you do not need a body to establish a murder, if the sheriff brought in a witness who said he put pot in the pipe, a second person who said ‘I handed Mike the pipe with pot in it’, a third person who said ‘I saw Mike smoke the pipe with pot in it, and I am sure it was pot based on my experience,’ and tied that up with Mike’s admissions and a picture, who someone could say was taken contemporaneously with the criminal conduct, he could arguably go down.

But even then there is a problem for the prosecution.Under the legal doctrine of Corpus Delicti, a defendant's confession or admission of guilt cannot be introduced until after the state has presented evidence showing that a crime has in fact occurred. So Phelp's admission cannot come into play or even be used as evidence until the commission of an actual crime is established through other, substantial competent evidence.

This last scenario would require testimony from other witnesses who were at the bong party with Michael. These persons would have to come forward and admit to their own conduct as either equally guilty culprits or co-conspirators. It means they too would be putting their own scholarships and educational privileges at risk, and they are not sitting with millions of dollars in endorsements.

In essence, I suspect that very soon the Sheriff will publish a statement that after ‘due diligence,’ his ‘investigation’ revealed an insufficient basis upon which to proceed. And maybe the next time Mr. Phelps gets caught with marijuana he will stand up and courageously say: “It’s normal to smoke pot. I am an Olympic gold medal winning athlete and it has not impaired me one bit.”

If he does, I will invite Michael to join the NORML advisory board. I will even buy him his own bong.

10 Reasons to Get High About Pot in 2009

2009-02-01T21:23:00.003-05:00

Ten Reasons to Get High About Pot in 2009

By Norm Kent

Okay, it is only February 1st, and more people this year have already died from peanut butter than pot.

Seriously, when you think about what has crossed the pages of our nation’s conscience in the past month, you have to wonder why we are all not getting high.

With thanks to Michael Phelps, I have ten good reasons to believe drug law reform will ‘take’ this year. Here is why.

Number One: The President

First of all, we elected a President who has admitted inhaling, and whose half brother just got arrested in Kenya for possession of marijuana. Growing up in urban Chicago, and having come from Hawaii, home of ‘Maui Waui,’ we have a man in the oval office that has an herbal background.

I am therefore not intimidated that, on his third day in office, while he was working on a nationwide economic stimulus package, some renegade prosecutors raided a medical dispensary in California. Those ugly efforts will cease soon enough. I am encouraged by President Obama’s prior public statements that such raids are counterproductive and provide illusory answers to real problems.

Number Two: The Medicine

Just as I was exploring the placement of my mom into an assisted living facility for early stage Alzheimer’s patients, I see a study released by Ohio State University this month. The research is indicating that marijuana has some potential capacity to reduce brain inflammation, which plays a role in Alzheimer’s. Mom, those brownies might taste differently next week.

While evidence showing the benefits of marijuana in multiple sclerosis cases has been advancing significantly, work in Alzheimer’s disease is still in its infancy. Still, another recent study performed at the Scripps Research Institute in California found that THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, inhibits the formation of a brain plaque that is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.

Number Three: The Politics

If you light up a joint while walking down High Street in Medford, Massachusetts, not much is likely to happen to you. As of Jan. 2, Massachusetts became one of 12 states that have decriminalized marijuana possession to some extent. The new civil penalties for possession of less than 1 ounce include a $100 fine and forfeiture of one’s stash for those over 18 years of age. Minors will receive the same fine and be required to attend drug education classes.
In city after city, and state after state, once silent minorities are becoming vocal majorities and voting to enact legislation freeing marijuana from unjust law enforcement. When given the chance, we are winning the war against prohibition. Legislators in Michigan, Connecticut and even Florida are starting to re-introduce bills to lower penalties for pot. The whirlwind is commencing; just ask anyone in a dorm room within a wave of the White House after the inauguration.

Number Four: The Media

Marijuana has gone mainstream. Media outlets are no longer hiding in the shadows afraid to produce honest reports about the culture of marijuana. We are less likely to see commercials of pot smokers having their brains grilled in a frying pan. We are more likely to view legitimate programming which produces truths rather than trash about your stash.

One such report was featured on NBC news last week, a snippet of an hour long production on MSNBC entitled ‘Marijuana, Inc.’ Focusing more on economics then the sociology of pot, the well-supported report inescapably concluded that marijuana commerce is here to stay and unlikely to change. As even the NY Daily News said, “When it comes to marijuana, a whole lot of people voted some time ago to just say yes.” Ask the cast of the award winning HBO show, ‘Weeds,’ which captures a growing American spirit.

Number Five: The Public

Even the Department of Health has said that 95 million Americans have over the age of 21 have tried marijuana at least once. Everyone except Bill Clinton has inhaled. The anti drug warriors have a hard time explaining to the average adult in the 21st century that millions of Americans are wrong when they light up every day.

It is normal to smoke pot. The vast amount of marijuana users today are parents choosing to calm down instead of liquor up, not just kids, looking to get high after class. Of course, they are too, adults treating arthritis, patients using it for multiple sclerosis, or people with HIV fighting a wasting syndrome. Pot smokers cross ethnic, sociological, and economic boundaries.

Number Six: The Celebrities

There is a lot of reason to hate the celebrity culture, paparazzi, and people who get their daily pulp from finding out where Brittany Spears went shopping. As more media types get busted with pot, the less newsworthy it becomes. The public could care less. An arrest for pot is not a career-ending event. As I finish this piece and send it off for distribution, I am watching Snoop Doggy Dogg being interviewed on ESPN for the NFL Countdown to the Super Bowl. It does not seem to have hurt him. And guess what Michael Phelps got caught doing this weekend? Toking off a bong!

Macauly Culkin, Bud Bundy, Willie Nelson, Art Garfunkel, and Al Gore’s son also make the High Subscription List. So do Allen Iverson, Matthew McConaughey, Whitney Houston, Oliver Stone, and even Queen Latifah. All have posted bail for pot. They are not doing too badly for themselves. Go visit http://www.celebstoner.com/ for more information.

Number Seven: The Growers

In speaking out against rescheduling marijuana so as to remove it from its classification as dangerous, the most significant point that the Office of Drug Control Policy makes is that today’s weed ‘is not your grandfather’s pot.’

Exactly! It is not, but they miss the mark when they say today’s pot is ‘stronger.’
Today’s pot is also cleaner, safer, and healthier to consume. From vaporizers to hydroponic labs, the marijuana grown and consumed today is more precisely cultivated, carefully processed, and lovingly manicured then the mold-encased, dried-out weed we grew up on decades ago. That pot was often delivered to Americans from overseas after being buried in the dark, musky cargo hulls of ships for weeks at a time.

Now that Americans grow our own marijuana at home, we do not hear stories on a daily basis about people smoking rat poison or buying oregano. We have returned to the roots of our forefathers, lest we forget that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison all grew hemp. They did not turn out too bad, either. Today’s pot growers are the new revolutionary farmers.

Number Eight: The Police and Jails

Sadly, the criminal justice system in America is teeming with serious crimes and violence against Americans. A Department of Homeland Security must necessarily focus on threats from abroad. From drive-by shootings to corporate white collar crime, the jails in our country are simply not capable of housing all those who should arguably be locked up. So law enforcement has to prioritize. Building jails and keeping people in prisons costs more money than communities can afford. Pot smokers are the residual beneficiaries.

The necessities of twenty first century law enforcement have reduced pot to secondary priorities. More and more cities are encouraging cops to treat simple pot possession as a civil traffic infraction and just write a ticket. As those progressive initiatives take hold, pot prosecutions will diminish and pot users will be treated more fairly.

Number Nine: The Non Profits

The wealth of non profit organizations advocating drug law reform is growing exponentially. We are not just NORML anymore. Benefactors like Peter Lewis and George Soros have underwritten drug reform movements the way Hugh Hefner once helped NORML. The Marijuana Policy Project, Students for a Sane Drug Policy, the Drug Policy Alliance, and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition are just a small sampling of honorable groups fighting to change the public perception in the way drug consumers are viewed and treated. If you enhance their efforts today, there is less of a chance that you will be bonding yourself or your child out of jail tomorrow.

Number Ten: The Internet

There is no better way to end this column then to point towards the awesome power of networking to generate partnerships for the common good. Overnight, hundreds of thousands of reformers can be linked for a specific goal, a targeted protest, or unified voice to speak out for or against a new law or proposed regulation.

The NORML blog and podcast draws hundreds of thousands of Americans daily who would otherwise never be reached but for the arm of the ‘Net. Stopthedrugwar.org Marijuananews.com, and cannabisnews.com are amongst the target specific Internet resources drug law reformers can access instantly. There are too many more to mention.

Finally, the Internet has spawned awesome networking groups such as Facebook and My Space, where activists, organizers, and reformers can synthesize their partnerships and causes. And there is always something new unfolding, like Twitter, which I have not figured out, but I know is catching on.

It's Up to Us

For too many years, pot smokers have been political prisoners, captive to repressive government and a rolling tide. 2009 represents a renewed opportunity to make the waters of justice run our way again.

Topless is Dangerous

2009-01-31T18:14:00.003-05:00

Johnny Carson used to say there is no such thing as a new joke; just old jokes reborn, revived, restored, and retold. As you trespass through the years, you see how many battles that are being fought today have been fought yesterday. In fact, I think you know you are getting old when you not only see the first remake of a movie, but the second.

It has been a while since we read about a Palm Beach ordinance which snagged a lawyer who used to jog shirtless in Palm Beach. Nevertheless, I have a vague recollection of the furor and stir that it caused the uppercrust community of Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard.

It has even been a while since the city of Hollywood in Broward enforced that ordinance banning men from dancing with their private parts in a 'turgid state.' But as I was surfing through the Blogosphere for features for our Broward Law Blog, I came across an interesting ordinance out of Easton, Maryland.

Not only is it illegal for men to go topless in Easton, Maryland, it's illegal for "any person." Babies, too? Boys ? After all, equal enforcement! Here's the law:

Sec. 18-9. Required dress, upper torso, penalty.

(a) It shall be unlawful for any person, whether male or female, to appear upon the streets, sidewalks and highways, or in any public building of the Town of Easton unless he or she is wearing a shirt, blouse or similar article of wearing apparel designed to cover the upper torso of said person.

(b) The penalty for violation of this Section shall be ten (10) days in jail or a fine of not more than One Hundred Dollars($100.00). (Ord. No. 70, 1 and 2, 6/17/74.)10 days in jail! Here's a link to the Town Code.

Good to know that community has no other problems to worry about, huh? I bet they have a baggy pants ordinance, too. Please, laws like this are soooooooooo

stuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuupid, why do we bother? Why do we bother?

New Grow House Laws Snare Innocents in Florida

2009-01-15T17:07:00.002-05:00

New Florida Grow House Laws Snare Innocent Families in Florida

By Norm Kent

January 15, 2009

On July 1st of 2008, Florida enacted a new law which enhanced penalties for marijuana grow houses. Authorities heralded it as the ‘Marijuana Grow House Eradication Act.’ It is just another excuse to lock decent people up for longer times.

There are some provisions of the act which bring back the dark days of the draconian Rockefeller drug laws in New York, legislation which sent small marijuana growers to jail for thirty years. Some might first be getting out today.

Law enforcement argued that they needed the new law because of the increasing number of grow houses operating in the state and violent crime which tend to be associated with these operations. Sure they did.

“Grow houses are not only furthering this dangerous drug trade within our state, they are bringing violent crime into our neighborhoods,” said Attorney General McCollum. “This new law will help protect our families and communities.” No, it won’t.

There was no accompanying empirical or independent study or statistical backup to lend truth to the public statements of Mr. McCollum. Nor was there any journalist anywhere in the state that took him to task or asked for documentation to sustain his claims. They just regurgitated and repeated the pablum they were fed by law enforcement.

The new law makes it a second-degree felony to grow 25 or more plants, no matter how small or large those plants are. Baby seedlings or mature daddies, 25 plants can get you 15 years. It used to take 300 plants to reach that harsh a penalty. Put it in perspective. If you lived in California, and you were given a medical marijuana card, you would be allowed to grow up to six plants of your own. Thus, if the cast of Real World was growing its own medicine in San Francisco they could film some great episodes. If they were doing it in St. Pete, Florida, they could be doing those episodes for the next 25 years from the State Penitentiary.

The Florida law also changed to make it a first-degree felony to grow 25 or more plants in a home with children present. That penalty is now 30 years. Already, I am representing a 50 year old gentleman, who was a schoolteacher in Miami for 20 years; who retired because of a disability. He grew his own pot in an outdoor shed behind the garage, apart from his children, used it for himself, and knew nothing about the law. He is now facing the rest of his life in jail.

“Marijuana is the most commonly used illegal drug in America and we must take a stand against the for-profit growers who were previously exploiting higher thresholds,” said one of the bill’s sponsors. “By lowering the number of plants necessary for criminal charges, we’ve given Florida’s authorities valuable tools in the fight against these criminal operations,” he foolishly added. No, they have not given law enforcement any more tools. They have just given decent people longer sentences for essentially innocent conduct.

Many of the larger grow houses I have seen over the past 30 years as a criminal defense lawyer are truly marijuana cultivation operations designed solely for entrepreneurial reasons and major marketing. Exclusive homes in gated communities worth hundreds of thousands of dollars have been rented, sealed, and converted into home grown hydroponic laboratories.

When they are inadvertently discovered, law enforcement makes an entry only to find no one lives there, and the place was being used to solely grow pot which would be commercially marketed for a profit. If pot is going to be against the law, you can understand that type of operation being targeted. Greedy people violating the law go to jail.

The new law enhances penalties. The difference in changing the law is significant, because what the legislature has done is gone from targeting entrepreneurial operations to including individuals simply trying to cultivate their own medicine. The less you grow, the more you are likely to now face a greater penalty.

Two of the individuals I currently represent are domestic partners who purposely started a grow house in their backyard exclusively because, at the age of 45, they did not “want to go purchasing pot on the streets in their car during the dark of night.” My client said they thought this was the smart and safest way not to commit a crime, but to “tend to their own garden.” And the price they pay for a safer way to acquire pot is a speedier way to go to jail for a longer time.

Another individual I represent who was growing pot is an artist. He and his wife have two children. They are painters. They paint, they smoke, they raise their children. At six a.m. one morning last summer, agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency knocked on their door to say they were investigating grow houses.

Separating wife and husband, they argued they smelled pot and had a right to enter. They warned the couple that “if they did not cooperate,” they would have to take their children to the local family services agency, the typical bureaucratic disaster in this city that it is in your own. They reminded them that under the new law they could lose their children and face 30 years in prison. The couple had no guns, ran no gangs, and committed no violent acts. They grew some weed to fulfill a passion they had engaged for 20 years. These are the types of people these new laws target.

In this operation, the one law enforcement authorities bragged about as Operation D Day, sixteen agencies combined on one single day in Florida to bust 150 grow houses which would have netted purportedly $41 million worth of marijuana plants. I guess we will never know now. Overall, on that day, April 28, over 9,000 plants were seized and 135 arrests were made throughout the state.

A review of the county wide press releases said very little about finding any guns, weapons, AK-47s, or rifles. About ten guns were found in South Florida, and a bullet proof vest. If you were Noel Llorente, you might have needed one.

Mr. Llorente, you see, lives in Opa-Locka with his wife, Isabel. He was leaving for work when unmarked cars pulled up, DEA agents jumped out, yanked him out of his vehicle, threw him down with guns drawn, handcuffed him, and then stormed into his home searching for drugs, smashing in the front door along the way. Panicked, Isabel tried to call 911. Agents grabbed the phone from her. A few minutes later, agents realized they were in the wrong house. Whoops!

“Sorry, they told me, Sorry,” Noel Llorente said. Then the agents went on their way. “So it goes,” said the Little Prince, “so it goes.”

Marijuana is, of course, against the law in Florida. The agencies had a right to make the arrests, conduct the seizures, and raid the grow houses. They were doing their job enforcing the law. We cannot castigate them for doing their duty. We can condemn, censure and criticize the legislators who enhanced the penalties for the acts, instead of adjusting the laws to respond to the practical realities of marijuana use.

Authorities correctly point out there is an emerging trend that identifies an increasing number of indoor cannabis operations statewide. One law enforcement officer said that the number is growing exponentially, at a rate they will never catch up to. Well, does that also not say to those same agents of justice that people see their prosecution as an injustice? If so many are defying the law, should we not be reducing the penalties rather than enhancing them?

I understand that law enforcement correctly stated that many ‘Cuban nationals’ were arrested in this operation, intimating that it is all part of a foreign conspiracy.
I understand too, that each county sheriff talked about how some of these major grow houses have led to more serious crimes.

I understand also that if Floridians were allowed to grow their own plants in their own backyards without the threat of law enforcement breaking in their doors and taking away their children there would be no need for Cuban nationals or terrorism.
Finally, I understand how the terrible law terrifies the decent citizen and creates the very terrorism the government seeks to end. There is a very simple way to end the problems these law enforcement officers want to cease. Legalize the pot they criminalize. Medicalize it as over a dozen states have now done.

Thomas Jefferson once said that “That government which governs least governs best.” And like his friend, George Washington, not to shabby an American himself, Thomas Jefferson was a hemp farmer.

Maybe America today needs more cultivators and more grow houses, not less. Maybe like the patriots who threw tea off a British ship in a Boston harbor, the families who have grow houses in their backyards are today’s revolutionaries. Maybe tomorrow, history will prove them right.

Who knows, if I am right, maybe someday someone will make a TV show about it and call it ‘Weeds’. Then the show will win awards, people will laugh at it, and we will all look up and say how stupid these laws were. After all, families who grow together, grow together.

Norm Kent is a Fort Lauderdale criminal defense and constitutional rights attorney who can be reached at Norm@normkent.com. A member of the Board of Directors of NORML (www.norml.com), Norm also blogs publicly about legal issues at www.kentvent.blogspot.com

Bloggers Have A Right to Anonymity

2009-01-12T20:03:00.002-05:00

Courts Are Beginning to Address Anonymity of Bloggers

January 10, 2009

By Norm Kent

In New York City last week, a Vogue model made headlines not by being on the cover of a new magazine but by being referred to as a ‘skank’ on a rather inconsequential and insignificant blog.

The model, Liskula Cohen, has now filed a lawsuit against Google and its Blogger.com website, seeking the identity of the anonymous blogger.

Although the entire blog was generated on a single day and it contains a total of solely five posts, the blog entries refer to the model derogatorily as a "ho," a “#1 skanky superstar,” and otherwise depict her as sexually promiscuous, dishonest, and unclean.

Because the site is hosted through Google's Blogger service, Cohen is asking the court to order Google to disclose identifying information including the blogger's name, address, telephone number and email.

As a policy matter, Google does not reveal bloggers' identities without a court order. "We take great care to respect privacy concerns and will only provide information about a user in response to a subpoena or other court order," a spokesperson said.

On January 5, the court issued an "order to show cause," which requires Google to appear before the court on January 26 for arguments about whether disclosure of the blogger's identity should be ordered.

New York attorney Steven Wagner represents Cohen, who in the past appeared on the cover of Australian Vogue. He alleges in the complaint that the blog posting is defamatory, libelous, and costing his client possible employment.

Wagner acknowledged that it is no easy legal task to identify bloggers who lob insults anonymously, but re-asserted his position that the publications were defamatory “and you shouldn’t just get away with this.”

If Mr. Wagner were practicing in South Florida and reading the JAABLOG, he could find work very quickly. But he would have a tough legal road ahead of him.

While Florida has no uniform standard to go by, courts around the country apply at least a two-pronged test before requiring the release of the name of a blogger, if it can even be found. First, the Plaintiff has to show that the blogger’s remarks are defamatory. For a statement to be defamatory, it first must be false, and then it has to expose a person to ridicule, contempt, or injure him in his business or trade.

Second, once the plaintiff establishes defamation, the court then balances the strength of his underlying legal claim and the need for disclosure against the strength of the blogger's claim to First Amendment protection. Courts have recognized that the right to speak anonymously is a fundamental part of the First Amendment right to free speech, and accordingly some level of scrutiny is required before stripping an anonymous Internet speaker of that right. It is a tough road to hoe; a high burden to meet.

When considering a subpoena or other discovery request seeking to unmask a speaker, courts have to balance these two competing rights. But courts have struck the balance in different ways, and the result is a number of different legal tests for deciding whether or not to allow a blogger/speaker's identity to be revealed. These tests or standards can be placed into roughly two categories: (1) high-burden tests and (2) low-burden tests.

Every state is of course different, but most are leaning towards protecting the rights of anonymous bloggers. Many states are mandating a high burden for the Plaintiffs, and appropriately protecting bloggers rights. You can read more about this at the Electronic Frontier Foundation website.

Florida has few cases on point thus far. As you can see from the New York suit, it does not require a blog as prolific as JAABLOG to initiate an action. If defamation is alleged, the legal issue to be determined is whether a blog could be judicially directed to turn over to a court the ISP addresses of anonymous authors if subpoenaed. The answer is yes, it could happen, but there are many hurdles to climb. That is the situation facing Google in New York today. They will fight the subpoena, as we would do here.

A factor that might affect what test or standard applies is the character of the speech activity over which you are sued. Some lawsuits clearly implicate important First Amendment concerns -- criticism of public officials or government policies, whistleblower activities, to name a few. That would seem to protect the bulk of the communications on this JAABLOG.

I think you can reasonably predict that a court is more likely to apply a high-burden standard when "core" First Amendment values are involved, and less likely to do so when the issues appear personal or otherwise unrelated to matters of public concern.

I think that the interest in having anonymous works enter the marketplace of ideas unquestionably outweighs any public interest in requiring disclosure as a condition of entry. Accordingly, I believe an author's decision to remain anonymous is an aspect of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment. Nevertheless, when you are significantly causing harm to another, courts will have to weigh your right to anonymity versus the purported victim’s right to redress his grievances.

I have always been persuaded that courage is standing up and identifying yourself, not cowering in a closet. As a person, you grow and mature by the adversities you engage. I would defend a blogger’s right to do so anonymously, but I would never want to be in that position myself.

According to the nonprofit Media Law Resource Center, there have been over 150 documented civil court actions involving bloggers. At least seven cases have resulted in verdicts against bloggers, with cumulative penalties totaling $18.5 million. But I would not lose sleep over this. The Internet is growing exponentially every moment, with thousands of new blogs getting created on the Internet every day.
By the way, the blog itself is not liable for the libel. Federal laws protect it. While newspapers can still be sued for the residual publications of libel, blog sites such as these are shielded under the Communications and Decency Act, specifically Section 230.

Still, if you blog frequently and loosely, make an effort to understand liability. There are limits. It’s kind of like the speedometer on your car. Just because the odometer goes up to 180 mph does not mean you should always drive your car down Broward Boulevard at that speed.

Exercise a little discretion and caution and you will further your rights to post anonymously and induce courts to continue to protect them. What you learn today might protect you from a lawsuit tomorrow. Besides, it might protect me from having to go to court to defend your first amendment right to be a jerk. You have that right, and let’s face it, many of you use it.!

Maxims for the New Year

2009-01-01T00:20:00.003-05:00

Rules and Maxims for the New Year

by Norm Kent

1. Auto industry executives have joined baseball players as the most overpaid professionals in the world. Just as I am sure that there are some fantasy league l general managers who could run teams better than baseball executives, I bet there are a lot of auto dealers who have been selling cars for the past 30 years that could have done a lot better than those big shots in Detroit did.

2. Our government can’t fight a war, clean up after a hurricane, or regulate a single industry. We don’t just need term limits for politicians, we need SAT tests.

3. The kid you played stickball with in a schoolyard when you were six years old may grow up to be a crook at 50. Every era in American history has been poisoned by corrupt thieves who made off with a fortune while you paid the price.

4. Anyone who smokes may not deserve to get cancer but they sure do not deserve money from jurors for getting sick. You don’t need labels to tell you to stop smoking.

5. If Barney wants to marry Bill and live together in Wilton Manors, no straight couple in Tallahassee has a right to vote on an amendment saying they cannot.

6. Speaking of which, one of the rights the justices ruling on the constitution have forgotten to protect in the past two hundred years is the ‘pursuit of happiness.. .’

7. If pot is so bad, how come more Americans died last year from ice cream cones and spinach?

9. The only time in the last eight years our Vice President was on target was when he shot his lawyer friend while hunting.

10. There is no question that George Bush was loyal to Laura, but when you look at what a mess the country is in maybe he should have taken some pointers from Bill Clinton and screwed around a little more.

11. Rush Limbaugh belongs in jail for trafficking in oxycontin, not on the air trafficking in hate.

12. I do not care how many times Brittany Spears goes into rehab, and Hulk Hogan’s family or Anna Nicole Smith’s should not be your role models. Try your mom instead.

13. I don’t care if he was a Vietnam war vet, I do not need to feel sympathy for a 60 year old man who says he is homeless because of post traumatic stress disorder from a war forty years ago. Get over it. Move on.

14. In real life, all crime is not solved in 48 minutes like you see on ‘Law and Order’ and ‘CSI’. Sometimes bad things happen to good people and bad people go free and the good unfairly suffer.

15. When everyone in your world has abandoned or left you, your family will be by your side to ridicule you, laugh at you, and say ‘I told you so.’

16. Alexander the Great conquered half the world by the time he was 21, and he did not have a cel phone.

17. I still have a lover’s quarrel with the world, but I can no longer see that world without reading glasses. I am not sure the golden years are golden. I think they are more like the beginning of the end. Make sure you enjoy the ride while you can.

18. If all the politicians in America are too stupid to figure out a way to provide health care for every American, can we at least devise a method to take care of every kid?

19. If you have to perform under the name of Lady Ga Ga this year, no one will know who you are in 10 years.

20. Laugh more. Eat less. Drink Coca Cola. Drive Safe. Save the Earth. Don’t expect to win the Lottery and avoid the inane, banal hosts who infest the air waves on New Year’s Eve.

21. One final thought for the start of the year. You love your dog. He loves you. I saw this plaque: Try to live your life being the kind of person he thinks you are.

GOP: Leadership Not So Grand

2008-12-29T19:48:00.003-05:00

GOP Leaders Open Mouths and Shoot Feet

By Norm Kent

December 29, 2008

I thought Republicans were intellectually challenged and diversity impaired, but this moron who is running for the head of the RNC takes the cake.

As the story unfolds, astonishingly, Chip Saltsman a candidate to run the Republican National Committee has sent out a Christmas letter seeking support for his candidacy. In an effort to be humorous, he included a recording of a parody of the famous Peter Yarrow song, ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon.’ If you have not heard it, the song is a children’s favorite, a staple of ‘60’s activists, and a loving cute ode to peace and tranquility.

The parody does to this song what a pornographic artist once did to a painting of Disney characters. It is satire, to be sure, and lawfully protected under first amendment doctrines that shield parodies. Legally, it is defensible. But I want to talk about it artistically. Forget that I think it may be in poor taste, it is just outright poor. It is a pathetic parody with lousy lyrics, bad singing, and crappy timing. It is artistically abominable.

In this day and age, it is also a poor political move for a leading Republican to initiate. The current chair of the party admitted as much. Mike Duncan, has issued a statement saying he is "shocked and appalled" that Saltsman could have thought this was appropriate.

"The 2008 election was a wake-up call for Republicans to reach out and bring more people into our party. I am shocked and appalled that anyone would think this is appropriate as it clearly does not move us in the right direction.”

The author of the song, Peter Yarrow was also disappointed by the use, stating that he and his co author, Lenny Lipton found the satirical conversion of ‘Puff’ “vulgar and a mean spirited slur,” and those were the nice things he said.

This is a good time to point out we live in a world of hypersensitivity and overreaction. The response to the ‘Puff’ song has been both. But somewhere, somehow, I just wish someone would say: “Hey, this song is not only not funny, this is just plain bad.” Okay, I will be the first. The song stinks. It is not only not funny; the rendition is just plain bad. Make it go away, if not for political insensitivity, at least for artistic sensibility.

First played on the Rush Limbaugh show, the Barack track is part of a lengthier CD created by conservative satirist Paul Shanklin. I know he has done a few songs about liberals. I wonder if he has done any about Rush’s drug habit. That of course might not be satire. That would be truth. In fact, I am still amazed how I have clients in Florida who have gone to jail for years with the kind of oxycontin habit Rush had. Don’t think Shanklin has got to do that satirical piece yet either.

There is another parody Shanklin might want to work on as well. It would be about the 19 year old white supremacist that recently got himself elected to the Palm Beach County Republican Executive Committee. David Duke may be toast, Strom Thurmond is buried, but you ‘gotta hand it to these progressive Republicans. They march to the tune of a different drummer.

I wonder if Saltzman sent the CD to Marcia Stirman. She's the chairwoman of the Otero County Republican Women in New Mexico who wrote in the Alamogordo Daily News that "I believe Muslims are our enemies," and that "Obama isn't a messiah or a Democrat. He's a Muslim socialist."

Columnist Paul Jenkins said it best in a piece this week: “Let's be thankful for one thing about Bush's presidency: the white male leadership of the Republican Party showed the world once and for all that its cronyism, corruption and discrimination completely outweighed any shred of competence.”

There is no humor in any of this, just the certainty that the party is marginalizing itself even further. I also always thought Log Cabin Republicans had to hate themselves, too, working within a party that was working against them. I thought moderate Republicans were routinely crucified in the GOP. But you would think 2008 sent a message to the Grand Old Party that America is seeking an era of openness, diversity, and wisdom.

You would think they would have heard the messages of John McCain’s noble concession speech, and the graciousness with which George Bush has been greeting and meeting the President Elect. You would think.

Instead, their new leadership is fighting off an onslaught of Aryans, racists, and intellectually impaired. I mean even Newt Gingrich is condemning the party for becoming too extreme.

I love it. When Newt becomes the moderate, what does that tell you about the party?

Happy New Year.

Head Shop Raids are Unconscionable

2008-12-28T22:00:00.006-05:00

Raids on Head Shops Unjust and Unfair

By Norm Kent

December 28, 2008

“Look outside the window, there's a woman being grabbed
They've dragged her to the bushes and now she's being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But Monopoly is so much fun, I'd hate to blow the game
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.”

---song by Phil Ochs

Duval Street is the epicenter of Key West, home to Sloppy Joe’s, Hemingway’s and a host of bars and hotels which have for a century captured the spark and soul of this land of the lost.

The Environmental Circus is gone, Valladares’ News Stand is history, and though La Te Da still stands, Larry Formica and his pink Cadillac have long since passed. Where a beat up wooden dock and a collage of cultures once gathered on historic Mallory Square, cruise ships now pour out thousands of tourists in flowered shirts onto the city’s main streets.

Fantasy Fest still wreaks havoc to the city every fall, but the Pirate image of this out of the way city has been lost for a long time now, to t shirt shops and condos; to name hotels and tourist traps. The heart of the city, Duval Street, has seen some of its landmarks become chain pharmacies, and cheap coffee shops like Shorty’s and Dennis Pharmacy have become convenience stores.

Walking down Duval Street in 2008 you are more likely to find a foreign exchange student from Slovakia peddling a bike for extra cash than you are to stumble upon a runaway teen from New York hustling a street corner for change. The times they are no longer changing. The times they have changed.

The temperature on October 17, 2008 in Key West was its typical and tropical 75 degrees. Ladies were sunning themselves bare-breasted at the Pier House’s private beach. Fishermen were working the pier, vacationers on mopeds criss-crossed the narrow streets, and more than one drunk stumbled down an alleyway. After all, it is still Key West.

But the heat on Duval Street was about to get hotter.

The shops on Duval Street opened their doors as usual, with no threats of a hurricane brewing. Merchants, if anything, were readying themselves for the annual, sin-filled festival of self-ordained decadence, Key West Fantasy Fest. On that date, many of them, head shops, were selling rolling papers, glass pipes, bongs, and other products designed to enhance the “right of happiness,” a constitutional right not too often protected by our courts.

The stores had signs all over them saying the products are for ‘legal and tobacco use only.’ But this distressed the new mayor, concerned that his little town was sending the wrong message: “You know that you don’t really smoke tobacco out of those things.” He sounded like Sarah Palin telling us how you could see Russia ‘from my house here in Alaska.’

The misguided mayor of this island city disapproved of the displays and set to do something about it. So he called the feds. You see, under broad Florida state laws, those pipes are legal. Not so under federal law. Understandably, this confuses the average citizen. Heck, it confuses lawyers too.

Title 21, Chapter 13 of federal law states: "Drug paraphernalia means any equipment, product or material of any kind which is primarily intended or designed for use in manufacturing, compounding, converting, concealing, producing, processing, preparing, injecting, ingesting, inhaling, or otherwise introducing into the human body a controlled substance ..."

Supported by the local district attorney, the Mayor found his answer. On this quiet morning in October, federal authorities from 16 different agencies, aided by local and state operatives, converged on Duval Street and the neighboring streets where head shops dispensed their products lawfully, or so they thought.

Store by store, law enforcement entered with badges and guns, uniforms and crates- that’s right, crates- to cart away and confiscate the inventory of these stores to the waiting Budget U Haul Rent-a-Truck conspicuously parked in the center of the street.

Systematically, the feds sucked up any items they deemed as contraband that they say could be used to violate Title 21. The items taken then were rolling papers, lighters, ash trays, bongs, catalogues, pipes, and anything they say could potentially be used to violate the law. There was no order or determination of probable cause by a jurist, no ruling by a court that the items were illegal, just law enforcement officers with cartons and guns.

Furthering their operation, these officers then seized all the financial records of the stores, including their receipts and credit card purchases. That means if you have visited Key West lately and you purchased one of those glass pipes, the Feds now know where you live too. Your credit card number is now sitting in a federal database as a drug paraphernalia consumer. No, there was no judicial hearing on that either.

As a matter of fact, no one was charged with a crime, but the feds carted off 11,920 items defined as drug paraphernalia under the federal law, with an estimated value of three quarters of one million dollars. Not a bad haul for one sleepy, sunny morning in Key West.

Since the raids, at least two stores have summarily closed their doors, their inventory entirely depleted. Said Abby Frew, the owner of a shop called Energy: “The financial loss was too great. Stay open? I don’t think so. They took all my stuff.”

“I wanted to clean up the city’s image,” said Mayor Morgan McPherson. “I did not like what I saw in the windows of all those stores.” He added that if the business people don’t like it, they “call their congressman.”

He cleaned it up all right. Aided by a complicit federal government following their own set of laws, he kicked the businesses out without due process of law. He disgraced its community, screwed its businessman, and advanced a disgusting partisan personal political agenda. In the old Key West, he would have been recalled and reviled. In the new Key West, he becomes a hero.

An enlightened mayor might have called the chamber of commerce or invited a community discussion to discuss alternatives. The mayor might have used code enforcement and local ordinances to mandate zoning changes. Instead, he called and asked the Feds to do what city cops were not allowed to do.

Moti Elfasi, an Israeli by birth, is one of those businessmen whose inventory was seized. Having lived in Key West for a decade, he loves the atmosphere and the community of the island. But his head is spinning over what happened to him.

Here is what he told local reporters: “I don’t understand America. They gave me a license in Key West. I paid my taxes. I obeyed the law. Florida said it was okay to sell the things. But now people from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and federal agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration come in and take everything away from me without even a notice to remove it first.”

It’s more than that, Moti. You detrimentally relied upon the representations of Key West city representatives that you could lawfully do what you were doing. Day by day, hour by hour, Key West city police patrolled your business, and no one told you that you could not do what you were doing. You have been operating openly and legally for years. You paid your taxes. You had an occupational license. You employed your neighbors. Now you got screwed.

Key West is not the first city to deal with this conflict between state and federal laws, nor will it be the last. California is of course the epicenter of this cosmos of confusion, with the feds neither recognizing medical dispensaries nor Prop 215. Just last week, our government pushed the envelope even further, raiding head shops in San Diego.

Across this country, over the past few years, other shops across this country have been systematically and surreptitiously raided, and their products also seized. Meanwhile, pipes and paraphernalia are now being marketed nationally, expanding rapidly in convenience stores from coast to coast. Find one repressive right wing mayor in the right town with the wrong agenda and you could conceivably become the target. Ask Tommy Chong. It’s still happening on a wider scale.

What happens to the products which are seized?

Agents quietly warn the businessmen to suck up the forfeiture and not challenge it in court. The advisory goes something like this: “Most likely we will just destroy this stuff as contraband, but if you attempt to challenge it, well there is no saying we won’t come back and arrest you.” Facing a not-so-veiled threat of criminal prosecution, the stores live with the bankruptcies, seizures, and loss of their products. The feds say they will “destroy the contraband.” More likely, some of them will use it at their bachelor parties.

These raids may deprive stores of their inventory, but our government abandons fundamental principles. Our citizens lose their rights. Lawyers are denied the opportunity to meaningfully contest the seizures. One more chink is carved into the heart of liberty.

If the past stays true to form, these unconscionable seizures will not make the national news. Politicians are too complacent, the drug law reform movement is too weak, and the massive pot smoking public is too disorganized, probably more concerned about getting high on those products designed for legal purposes only.

As for those merchants, outside of a small circle of their friends, no one cares.

Domestic Violence in the Gay Community

2008-12-27T09:51:00.004-05:00

Domestic Violence in the Gay Community

By Norm Kent

Originally published on Labor Day, 2008 in the Express Gay News of South Florida

In order to promote a campaign of public awareness against domestic violence, Broward County Sheriff Lamberti is appearing this month in a public service announcement on local television to urge battered women to get help.

Last year, in Florida, a state of 18 million people, there were over 115,000 cases of domestic violence reported. Over 160 of those cases involved deaths.

When most people think of domestic violence, the stereotypical response is that of a husband beating his wife. But wives as well as husbands, and family members against other household members, can also commit acts of domestic violence. Unfortunately, so do, and so can, same-sex partners.

Marriage ban or not, the laws on domestic violence are applied to homosexual relationships in Florida. If you strike or batter your partner, you can be arrested, jailed, and prosecuted. Those of us who practice criminal defense see same-sex prosecutions in court daily.

All it takes is one punch, a thrown beer bottle, or one cut. Someone gets hurt, paramedics were called, the police responded, and somebody went to jail. More often than not, the next day, in a more sober moment, you make up with your partner. The State Attorney’s office, however, with or without the victim’s consent can go forward with a criminal prosecution. Now you are facing probation or jail time, and court ordered supervision.

An arrest for domestic violence can also be devastating to your career. It almost can never be expunged and inhibits job opportunities in many social service fields. As hard as it is to do, the best way never to get there is sometimes own up to the fact that you have to secure a civil restraining order against the potential abuser. It can be obtained by anyone who has had harm done to their person or property, or can legitimately attest such harm is likely to occur.

To secure such an order, you must make an application and fill out a self-explanatory affidavit, available at your local courthouse. While a lawyer is not required, it is often prudent to secure independent counsel if you can afford to do so. This removes you from the emotion of the moment and insures that your petition is legally sufficient. This decision should depend on the immediacy of the moment. If you fear for your life, do not wait for an appointment with a lawyer. Do it yourself.

A restraining order makes any contact by the abuser illegal, subjecting the abuser to arrest and other penalties under the law.

At the initial stages, the courts tend to favor the complaining party. They figure that the restraining order is a protection against domestic violence, and that if you were not going to do anything wrong to another, you are not victimized by being told to stay away from that person.

Once secured, a sheriff's deputy will then serve the restraining order on the person against whom it is being imposed. After being served with that order, if that person violates any of the terms of the restraining order, or has any unlawful contact with you, or he or she will be subject to immediate arrest.

Once served, you must go to court with your temporary order to make it permanent. At that time, your former partner also has a right to appear to contest it, and represent his claims. This hearing allows the judge to hear both sides of the story and make a decision about whether the restraining order should remain in effect for an extended period of time. If the jurist elects to do, he can impose a wide breadth of conditions against either party to guarantee enforcement of his order. You can be restrained from e mailing, physical contacts, verbal contacts, and from going to or from specific locations. I have even seen limitations imposed on visits for your pets.

Having a lawyer present at this stage can be critical for both sides. The claimant needs to insure his application met the proper legal requirements. The target of the order wants to prevent his rights and freedoms from being abridged. A skilled lawyer will be able to make a concise and powerful presentation of the relevant facts in your case.

There are different kinds of restraining orders as well. Domestic Violence Restraining Orders are usually imposed against people you live or lived with. However, for an act of Repeat Violence, you may file for a Restraining Order against anyone. There must have been two occurrences or acts of physical or sexual abuse, and one occurrence must have been in the last six months.

Individuals who have or have had a continuing and significant relationship of a romantic or intimate nature may also file a request for a dating violence restraining order. The dating relationship must have existed within the past 6 months.

The biggest problem I see in the enforcement of restraining orders is when partners reconcile, as we are so often likely to do. Once you resume contact with your ex-, you will jeopardize any future attempt you may make to enforce that restraining order, or secure another in the future. Seeking a restraining order is something you should not do lightly. Fill one out falsely and you can be charged with perjury.

Another mistake I often see partners make is when they do reconcile, they fail to go to court to seek an order declaring the court’s orders null and void. An argument ensues, a fight develops, the police arrive, out comes the restraining order, and into jail goes one of the partners.

Finally, don’t assume that just because you own the house and pay the mortgage that if an altercation develops with a live in partner, that person will automatically be removed from the home. If the police are satisfied the homeowner engaged in an act of domestic violence, he could still be the one to go to jail and even temporarily removed by a court from his own home.

Despite the sheriff’s noble ads, domestic violence is not just battered wives anymore. It is gay men and women also beating each other.

The time to stop it was yesterday. The time to do something about it is now.

On a personal and non legal level, if you love your partner, then explore in the calm of day alternatives to prevent the situation from reaching these disastrous stages. See counselors, attend anger management sessions, and invite intermediary steps which can avoid the catastrophic consequences of violence. Have the guts to get help before a court orders you to do so. The life and relationship you save could be your own.

Send the Pastor Packing

2008-12-24T22:05:00.006-05:00

The President’s First Mistake:
Tell Rick Warren to Preach Somewhere Else

By Norm Kent

Christmas Eve, 2008

It is my obligation as the publisher of a national gay newspaper (www.nationalgaynews.com) to weigh in on the President-Elect’s selection of Pastor Rick Warren to deliver an invocation at his inauguration. This is change we can’t believe in.

As a spokesperson for the gay community, I want to make it clear that I find it offensive.

Mr. Obama is not being inclusive and ‘post-partisan.’ He is being divisive. He is ‘swift boating’ us. After Jeremiah Wright, you have to wonder about his selections for Divine Guidance.

As an individual, I don’t give a damn who gives the invocation at the inauguration, because that is not the speech I want to hear. Besides, between the fires in California, earthquakes in China, and that tsunami in the Far East, God’s been doing a lousy job lately. That does not mean I am an atheist. I just believe what Woody Allen said in one of his films: “If there is a God, he is an underachiever.” Or maybe She.

Mr. Obama thinks he can move the needle and bring us all together in a unified effort for a common purpose. He sees an America where I can walk hand in hand with my partner down the aisle, and Reverend Pat Robertson will marry us. I think maybe our President Elect has a little too much of Harvard in him. I agree with Congressman Barney Frank. Some of these people will never be our friends. We are just always going to agree to disagree. If we can do so respectfully, that is great. But I don’t have to invite as the best man to my wedding a pastor who would not marry me to my partner.

Abraham Lincoln once said the best way to defeat an enemy is to make him your friend, and Mr. Obama is a strong believer in Mr. Lincoln. In fact, it was revealed today that he will be sworn in on the Lincoln Bible. Mr. Obama said his invitation to Pastor Warren does not compromise his ‘fierce’ support of gay rights. Good, then let’s not expend to much political capital on his decision to have Warren at his swearing in. Let’s understand that Mr. Obama is the President of all the people, including those we do not agree with. I sympathize with all that. I don’t have to agree with it though, and I won’t.

In fairness to Mr. Obama, and in fairness to Mr. Warren, they have met before and become friends. Mr. Warren in fact ran an AIDS conference two years ago at his church and made a point of inviting Mr. Obama to talk. He accepted, and it sparked an outcry amongst angry evangelical Republicans within his church. But Mr. Warren stood firm, arguing that both sides need to be heard, that it "takes two wings to fly." So both men are building bridges, both men are reaching out, and both are to be applauded. Just don't ask me to join in. Call me unreasonable, but I don't want half a hand.

One of the things I have learned in the civil rights movements is that you will continue to have adversaries. For every step forward we make, there will be those to push us back. For every partner we find, there is a Michael Savage nurturing hate against us. Unlike some activists whose comments I have been reading, I do not think gays have been thrown under the bus or that Mr. Obama has abandoned any promises yet. But I don’t intend to watch from the sidelines and give out free passes.

The pursuit of freedom is a relentless process which requires persistence. Yes, it demands patience, but not passivity. Oh, I remember all the well-intentioned persons who spoke vigorously against the gay marriage issue in 2004, saying we were pushing for too much too soon and too quickly. Where are they now?

Where are those voices of the status quo now that the Supreme Court of California has legalized same sex marriage?

Where are they now that Massachusetts and other states have also affirmed the principle that we can go beyond socially acceptable civil unions to permanently entrenched marriage declarations?

How many of those wimps wanted us not to push Lawrence vs. Texas to the Supreme Court, afraid we might get an adverse decision which would cripple forever the gay rights movement? When it comes to civil rights, there are no acceptable partial promises; no separate water fountains gays and lesbians have to drink from. Sometimes, it takes courts to mandate human rights political partisans will never provide for.

The Human Rights Campaign has given Mr. Obama a new agenda for 2009, saying it wants to ‘move on’ from the divisive issue of Pastor Warren. To his credit, the Pastor has posted on his own website an outreach to the gay community, saying that while he opposes gay marriages, he seeks to bridge our differences. That’s nice pastor, and it brings to mind all those nice Southern politicians who were willing to let Negroes ride the bus in the 1960’s, as long as they sat in the back.

I did not work all these years for a new America that is the same as the old America. I am not interested in appeasing evangelical Christians. I am interested in telling them to stop getting in our way. I am interested in letting them know there will be a price for racism, intolerance, and that just might be losing your place at the table this time.

My message to Mr. Obama is that there is going to be no ‘honeymoon’ either. The gay community in America has multiple voices and you can expect them to be heard. As this one instance with Pastor Warren shows, we won’t be quiet. Our voices want more than lip service. We seek action. The President Elect has an obligation to fulfill his commitment to support gay rights by initiating acts consonant with the same, from moving the equal rights non-discrimination legislation through Congress, to an executive order eliminating arbitrary exclusions of homosexuals from the armed forces of the United States of America.

Look, I know there is a political reality which mandates that a new President has to get his feet wet, be grounded, and move forward with a steadiness of purpose that is based on a sure foundation. That does not mean we have to compromise our desire to see equal rights initiatives delayed or postponed. Just because something is good for the President does not mean it is good for the rights of gays. The pressure must be kept up. I don’t see any Aryans on the inaugural dais.

To those of you who are already apologists for an invocation from a pastor, whose politics has been one of exclusion, shame on you. There are too many other men and women the President could have picked. He chose not to, and Rick Warren should not be on the inaugural platform any more than the President elect should have invited him.

Norm Kent is a criminal defense and constitutional rights Fort Lauderdale lawyer who can be reached at Norm@normkent.com

The President is a Marlboro Man

2008-12-22T17:50:00.006-05:00

Obama Lights Up

By NORM KENT

November, 2008

I will be damned.

The President-Elect has a flaw and Tom Brokaw brought him out of the closet about it last Sunday on ‘Meet the Press.’ The issue has legs. It is smoking !

Noting that the White House was a no-smoking zone, Tom Brokaw asked the President-Elect during a televised interview, a week ago Sunday, "Have you stopped smoking?"

"I have," Obama replied, smiling broadly. "But there are times where I have fallen off the wagon."

"Wait a minute," Brokaw interjected, critically, "that means you haven't stopped."

"I've done a terrific job, under the circumstances, of making myself much healthier and I think that you will not see any violations of these rules in the White House," Obama replied.

No, no, no, Barack. That just won’t fly as an answer.

In fact, how many cigarettes have you smoked since?

Earlier this year, in an interview for its November issue, Obama told Men's Health magazine that he wished he had more time for staying fit, BUT that he still occasionally smoked a cigarette. Obama says he manages to squeeze in 45-minute workouts, six days a week, but wishes his exercise sessions were longer.

Obama said in that interview that he had bummed a cigarette a couple of times during the campaign. "But I figure, seeing as I'm running for president, I need to cut myself a little slack," he said. That would be like saying because it is stressful to try to lose weight you are going to treat yourself to an extra doughnut.

In St. Louis last June, Obama acknowledged he was a smoker, and admitted to “falling off the wagon” then also. Two months later, he confessed the same thing to Chris Matthews in a Hardball interview. Thus, I think we see the President has an ongoing Nicotine issue, and that he has been evasive. With all due respects to the late Paul Newman, and his role in ‘Cool Hand Luke,’ what we have here is a ‘failure to communicate’ honestly.

If in every other interview you do every other month, you admit to ‘falling off the wagon,’ well, you never really got on it. You may think you kicked the habit, but it is more reminiscent of what my friend Joe Walsh of the Eagles told me at a baseball camp a few years ago: “I have only been drunk once. For thirty years, now.” Well, at least he could hit.

Nevertheless, the President Elect did indicate the White House was going to remain “smoke-free.” So if he needs to sneak a smoke, where does he go- for a secret walk along Pennsylvania Avenue? Try to find a locker room near a gym where he could sneak a smoke? I suppose Mr. Obama is learning what many Americans have over the years: that quitting is not easy.

Mr. Obama told Chris Matthews as much: “It is a struggle like everything else. And I think that it is important to just keep in mind… I want to set a good example for all these young people here, and I want to make sure as President of the United States, everybody knows that I’m going to try to stay healthy.”

Over the summer, Obama’s doctor shared with reporters that the President-Elect has a history of “intermittent cigarette smoking, but he quit this practice on several occasions and is currently using Nicorette gum with success.”

Studies say Nicorette users do better at quitting. Maybe so, but I worked at a radio station with a guy that used to put a patch on his arm to stop smoking and I think that is as useful as telling a flea to stay off my dog’s tail by putting a collar around his neck.

Last year, Fox News TV Host John Gibson called Obama’s smoking his “dirty little secret.” I guess that is the best they could come up with to dish out dirt on the prospective president. Still, it was never really a secret Mr. Obama actually hid. Too bad for the Fox Fanatics, but this is an issue that is hardly going to bury Mr. Obama. Still, I expect the media and the press and cancer groups are going to jump all over this issue and never let it go. It is going to become the epicenter of a national debate on smoking.

The smoking issue had already been known to citizens of Illinois, where the President-Elect has served as a United States Senator. Michele Obama even discussed ‘the bad habit’ on 60 Minutes. Our future first lady said that she agreed to help her husband run for president on one condition: that he finally quit smoking, for good. Of the smoking habit, Mrs. Obama was pretty clear: “I hate it.”

In fact, as early as 2004 during his Senate campaign, Obama had told the Chicago Sun-Times his smoking is "an ongoing battle." His wife told reporters then that he smokes "about three Marlboros a day." I know smokers who wish they could only smoke three packs a day.

Today, the President Elect offers this advice to smokers: “If you want to quit, then eliminate certain key connections – that first cigarette in the morning, or after a meal, or with a drink,” Obama said last month.

Anti-smoking advocates are counting on Obama as a role model for others trying to kick the habit, showing them that while it's hard, all things are indeed possible in America. Said Matthew Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, “Obama has shown a firm commitment to beat this addiction even though no one could have tried under more stressful circumstances," Myers says. "It takes courage to admit failure, but even more courage to pledge to succeed.” But wait, there is another issue.

What if Obama does stay faithful to an occasional Marlboro? Does Obama smoking periodically make it cool, an abuse excuse for nicotine lovers? Or does he become the poster boy for the 2008 version of ‘Just Say No?’ Do the Mothers Against Midnite Smokers start national chapters? I don’t know. I do know we all have smoking stories.

I am a male Michele. I hate nicotine. I have been trying to get my partner to stop smoking cigarettes for about seven years. Every time we start to go into a deep kiss, I think I am inhaling stale cigarettes from a garbage can. It inhibits passion.

Every year in November the American Cancer Society conducts a ‘Great American Smokeout,’ urging smokers to commit to quit. Last month my partner John promised to show. Conveniently, he found a way not to go. They even offer follow up classes. It looks to me like Barack could pair up with my partner. They each have a recurring issue when it comes to smoking. Promises, promises.

This is not an issue I win with as a first amendment lawyer, arguing for free choice, individual responsibility, and the right to mark your life by each and every choice you make everyday. It is an argument I make because the toxic effects of smoking resonate to innocent bystanders, environmental concerns, and medical costs which influence all of us.

Since the Brokaw interview, more and more people are sure to write about smoking, and I suspect it is going to generate a new national debate. Even the Associated Press touched down on this issue in a feature article this weekend, which is sure to be picked up by hundreds of papers.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. Cigarette smoking causes an estimated 438,000 deaths each year, including thousands from secondhand smoke exposure. I don’t want to be one of them, and I don’t want my partner or my President to be one either.

I remember what my surgeon told me the day before he operated on me, after I had been diagnosed with stomach cancer at the age of 50: “If I knew I was going to get cancer this young, I may have drank and smoked a lot more,” I said. “You are looking at this the wrong way,” he replied, “You may live through this because you did not.” And here I am, ten years later.

The National Institute of Health has noted that there is a statistical prevalence of smoking excessively in African American populations as well. If Barack Obama sends a message that the habit is unhealthy, and it reaches elementary schools and cities, then there is a chance that could influence behavior for decades.

For whatever the cause, gays and lesbians also smoke at a staggeringly higher rate than most American men and women. Younger gays are even worse. They light up younger and continue longer and kill themselves sooner.

At the very least, I fully expect to see Michele Obama in a television ad, asking kids to stop smoking cigarettes. Not sure yet if Nancy Reagan will be up to the task to join with her.

As a member of the Board of Directors of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, I do realize this whole issue of smoking does not bode well for our issue. If the President is cornered into a flip-top box where he can’t smoke cigarettes, he is going to have a hard time saying good things about pot. I just do not foresee Barack speaking out against Marlboro one day and asking for decrim for Purple Haze the next.

Well, I will at least make him this deal. If he agrees to stop the raids on dispensaries in California, I will cut him a break and let him indulge his three Marlboros a day. But if he has his nicotine lapses without going to jail, can I ask that the 750,000 plus Americans who get arrested for simple possession of pot each year be cut the same break? We can promise to get back on the wagon, too!

Anyway, I do hope the message of a more nicotine free America will start with our new President. In fact, I hope it will reach my bedroom.

Norm Kent is a Fort Lauderdale attorney who can be reached at Norm@normkent.com

I Am Tired of Injustice

2008-12-22T01:07:00.004-05:00

I Am Tired of Injustice

Norm Kent's Speech to the Seattle Hempfest, Myrtle Park on Elliot Bay

August, 2006

I stand before you, nearly 100,000 people, on a magnificent summer afternoon before a majestic bay in a progressive state. You are decent and dedicated warriors working for a better future. Most of you are younger than me, and I am here to say I hope the time has come for me not to be here anymore.

I have never been more serious about the need to take criminal penalties away from pot smokers.

I am no longer the 22 year old pot smoker from Hofstra University who smoked weed in the dorm by placing wet towels in the door cracks, opening the windows, and burning incense in the room.

No, I am no longer that person.

I am a seasoned criminal defense attorney, with 30 years of practice in criminal courtrooms, and 18 months of chemotherapy as a cancer survivor.

I am the former director of an AIDS clinic, who has seen too many young people die young, when their final days could have been made more pleasant by a peaceful herb.

I am in the Fall of my lifetime, and I do not need either a drink or a joint to find laughter and love, meaning or purpose. But I am mature enough to know I should not have the privilege to deny anyone else that right.

Because after 30 years I know that pot smoking does not make you a murderer or madman, a rapist or robber, a burglar, a thief, or swindler. Look, I am not asking for you to make pot smoking your vocation. But it should not cause you to go on probation.

Because after 30 years, here is something else I know. There are too many murderers and rapists and robbers and burglars and swindlers walking free in our communities, and too many pot smokers sitting locked up in prisons.

It is not just that America arrests over a half million citizens a year for pot possession. It is that we take resources that can be used against rapists and sex offenders, killers and car jackers, and use them against people who simply smoke pot. And that is criminal. Because we are not the criminals.

Day after day, you hear about a car getting stolen, a home getting broken into, an office getting burglarized, a convenience store getting held up, and a friend getting mugged. These are crimes of violence that shake the peaceful foundations of our community. They are acts of domestic terrorism. And it seems like no one is ever caught. Go tell the Seattle police someone broke into your car and they will tell you there is nothing we can do, cars are broken into every thirty seconds.

But go tell them three students are smoking joints by a seawall in Myrtle Park and half the SWAT squad will respond by sea and air within minutes. And that is criminal. Because we are not the criminals.

Candidly, I am tired.

I am tired of telling high school students how a couple of joints today can cost them a scholarship tomorrow.

I am tired of telling college students how getting caught with pot in their dorms can get them booted from their university.

I am tired of telling young workers doing their jobs well how a positive pot test can cost them their employment.

I am tired of telling a workman who with his bare hands, helped build the local fire station, how getting caught with pot in his car is grounds not only for his arrest, but the seizure of that vehicle.

I am tired of trying to explain how a single mother working two jobs to support three children can lose her kids to a social service agency because she stood on her terrace at nite and smoked a bowl after a day's work.

I am tired of telling poor and indigent moms in government projects that their government won't do much about crime in their community or mold and rot in their home, but they will throw them out of those projects for smoking a joint.

I am tired of trying to explain to mothers with breast cancer or grandmothers with glaucoma how marijuana may ease the agonizing throes of chemotherapy but could risk their freedom.

Oh yes, I am tired. Tired of explaining how you can still get stopped, searched, seized, booked, arrested, jailed and incarcerated for getting high. Because if kids have a problem getting high, we should find a treatment facility that retrieves and rehabilitates them, not a prison that strips and houses them.

I am tired of telling probationers how getting high on a dime bag can get them ten years in the state pen.

I am tired of seeing legislators figure out new ways to make glass pipes or artistically created bongs more illegal and grounds for federal RICO violations.

And I am tired of coming to NORML rallies and Seattle hempfests to say 'We are Not Criminals.'

Because it should not be criminal to smoke pot. Because we should not be criminals.
It should be criminal to put someone in jail for smoking pot.

We are locking up the wrong people. It is not the smokers that belong in the joint. It is the politicians whose laws put people there that do.

Do not blame the cops who enforce the law they are given.
Do not blame the judges who mete out the sentences they are dutibound to follow.

Turn your anger and attention to the political parties and the communities of apathetic voters that permit the injustice to permeate our school boards, university senates, city councils, and state legislators.

Turn your anger inward and perhaps even ask yourself the question: "What have I done to end this injustice?"

Have I protested at a school board? spoken out to my parents? educated a friend? written a letter? attended a protest? complained to an employer? You must. You must.

Truly, if our cause is just than stand up against the injustice. The wisdom of our fathers leaves us with an adage, "If not now, when? If not me, who?"

In your home, in your office, and in your community, come out of the closet, light up, look up, and say, "Hey, there is nothing wrong with that."

I am not telling you to become an around the clock weed smoking vegetable. I am asking you to become an around the clock weed warrior. I want you to be an activist, not just a stoner. Because I don't want you to go to jail or have to make bail.

I want to stand up one day, give a speech, and not be criticized for condemning the state, but be congratulated for defending it. For that to happen we must change the laws. But how does that happen?

How do you move the tides of the vast oceans of public opinion?

We go to work. Make your voice heard. Make your presence felt. Make your cause known.
I want you to put defense lawyers like me out of business.

I want to stop being tired of injustice, and stand by you without looking out over our shoulders for cops and informants. I want them to know you are good people who are trying to expand your freedom, not defy their laws.

I want the world to know we have a common bond, a sacred union, a communal goal, and it is not to beat down society, it is to better it. It is not to humiliate law enforcement, it is to illuminate it. It is not to break or bend the law so it snaps, it is to rebuild it so it lasts.

Side by side with your friends, you can see you are not alone; that you have partners and peers in the promise of tomorrow.
Make a difference.
30 years ago I stood in a hotel in the Capitol and listened to Ramsey Clark, then the Attorney General of the United States, tell me how he thought pot would be legal in twenty years.

The national director of NORML, Keith Stroup, echoed that promise. So I come here today finally, to apologize to you, because I have failed.

NORML has failed, My generation has failed. You are still going to jail, and pot is still not legal. So I apologize.

With all the music, all the festivals, all the marches, and all the mandates for change, from the proposition 215s to the medical needs, we have failed. Dispensaries are getting raided, medical users are getting arrested, bong sellers are getting indicted, and users are still getting booked and busted.

The torch must pass to a new generation. So 30 years from now you will not find someone standing here as I am today, saying we could have done better. We should have done better.

We must do better.

Make a difference so 30 years from today your children will not have to be here protesting injustice.

Make a difference so 30 years from today they will be celebrating freedom to be.

Confessions on Turning 50 With Chemo

2008-12-21T23:07:00.002-05:00

Confessions on Turning 50
By Norm Kent
October, 1999
Published in The Express Gay News and read on the Howard Stern Show!

I confess.

For years, I have been lying about my age. Just like some of you. I even used to joke to people that my younger brother was my older brother. Anything to maintain my youth.

But today I write a column I did not know I would be able to ever publish this year. So here's the truth. I am turning 50 years old on October 18. While I do not recommend the Norm Kent Tumor Diet to anyone, I am healthier and more fit than I have been in a fifteen years.

I am a student of the 60's, turning 50, leaving my 40's, feeling like 30, wishing I was 20. But I confess: According to my mom, sometimes I still act like I was 10. Well, you gotta keep a lotta little boy in ya' to love life.

A quarter century marks my time in Florida, from my first move here to Key West, with a stop in Coral Springs, on the way to my townhouse in Victoria Park. It's been a great ride. I have experienced the blessings of life and health, of family and friends. I have cherished memories of loving moments, and endured sad ones, from the passing of my father, to the loss of two of my labrador retrievers, now begging for bones in doggie heaven.

I have taught at FAU, and lived to see my students from 1978 become Circuit Court Judges and Police Chiefs by 1998. I have practiced law for two decades, and I have still managed to maintain a heart and advance the public good, often representing those who could not effectively speak for themselves. But I confess. I have made money because of other people's troubles.

I have won significant legal victories that have afforded me honor and distinction, and fumbled some cases that a grade schooler could have won. I have held court in the Floridian Restaurant and the Supreme Court in Tallahassee. But I confess. I have had my ass kicked in court more than once.

For eight years, I had my own talk radio show in the country's 11th largest market, and even had a fan club in my name. Still, I have read the papers when critics called me 'obnoxious as hell' and 'the biggest horse's ass in the world.' Ouch ! But I confess: Sometimes I have been both, and more.

I have played on a straight State Championship softball team in 1984, and competed in the Gay World Series in 1994. I love playing softball, competitively and hard. But I confess: Sometimes I have just not given a damn, not played to my peak, and not tried hard enough. I hate complacency, but sometimes I have been complacent.

I have travelled from Mykonos to Mount Olympia, and I have witnessed glorious sunsets in Key West and magnificent sunrise’s right here in South Florida. But I confess: Not everything has been so majestic. I have also fallen asleep drunk on the floor and done far too many hedonistic party drugs. Of course they were fun. That's why I did them. But I confess: I still love pot, both medicinally and recreationally.

I have had close friends and dear lovers. I have lived through relationships which I have cherished and some that I have shattered. I confess: some relationships unearthed because of my own arrogance, pride, and hubris. And maybe because I use too many big words, and have too big an ego.

I have survived eight knee operations, a ruptured Achilles tendon, and a year long bout with lymphoma, cancer, and chemotherapy. I chose the cherry flavored kind. They called it ‘courses’ of chemo, like I was dining out instead of dying. Still, here I am, lucky to be alive, to see another rising sun, to be awake to turn 50 years old.

I am still enchanted with my youth, and 21 is definitely the age I would always choose to be. But I am happy as a bunny in heat to be where I am now. In life, if you spend too much time crying about the darkness, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars. I don't know that the golden years will be so golden, but I loved yesterday, I am still here today, and I am looking forward to tomorrow.

After surviving cancer, I now realize that the best medicine continues to be love, laughter, and chocolate. I understand that possessions and position earn you neither respect nor dignity. Only your deeds can create honor, only your character can earn you esteem. In life, you learn that to bring sunshine to yourself you first have to bring it to others.

I don't try to please everyone because I realize that then you cannot please anyone. I am true to myself and honest with my peers because it is simply so much easier to fall back on the truth you can remember, rather than fiction that you have to create. It is healthier also to be who you are, and not try to be something you are not. It is easier to live open than in the closet, because spirits grow in the sun and not on the dark side. I think I learned that from Yoda or Luke Skywalker.

I learned a lot of things from Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger, and Lassie. It's okay to stand up for the underdog, fight for the disenfranchised, and demand dignity for animals and all living things. We can speak out for the environment, the earth, and the protection and preservation of life. Sure the Bible begats a few too many people in an incredulous manner, but it also says more than just a few wise things in Ecclesiasticus, the Prophets, the Proverbs, and the Ten Commandments. And everyone should read Robert Frost.

For some of us, I guess it means watching your kids grow up. And that is of course a very special experience. For me, it has been watching too many of my friends die too young, from foreign wars to domestic diseases. But it has still been a marvelous journey, as is any climb to a mountaintop. The beauty is the journey itself,

Turning 50? Why, it means remembering Woodstock and Haight Ashbury; Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg; Harvey Milk and the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK. It means I was there when man landed on the moon and when they still delivered milk in glass bottles to your doorstep before dawn. It means remembering the cherished days of high schools and summer camps in the 1960's and living for the reunions in the 1990's. I had one last week at Mickey Mantle's in Manhattan. I could say I am still alive but my heroes are dying. The truth is being 50 means knowing your real heroes are the friends and family you know and love, not idols you do not.

50 means having watched Americans die unnecessarily in Vietnam and being taken hostage in Iran. It means finally, after all these years, once and for all understanding anyone America does not like automatically becomes a foreign dictator who must necessarily be invaded and bombed, whether it is Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Libya, Somalia, or Yugoslavia. Our country finds no shortage of people to kill. But we are never the aggressor. The history books tell me so.

It means knowing when AIDS was called GRID, and when Richard Nixon said he had a secret plan to end that war in Vietnam. It means recalling Watergate, George McGovern, Nehru suits, and love beads. It even means remembering when Marlon Brando was a thin, good looking actor, and when America was shocked by a three second nude scene in the play 'Hair'. It means watching MASH before there were reruns of it. And knowing when Opie was a kid.

It means I got to watch the Three Stooges and more times than I care to remember, became one of them. Forget computers, I remember when software wasn't a word, and time sharing meant togetherness. I remember Tiny Tim dancing through the tulips. 50 ? It means you have been at times rich and poor, broke and well off. Well off is better. It means you have spent more than you had to and kept more than you needed. It means you have partied too hard and at times not enough.

It means newsreels before the double feature Saturday matinees, Buffalo Bob, Howdy Doody, and even Amos 'n Andy, not to mention Fred Sanford or Archie Bunker. It means Dad drove cars with tail fins and I played with toy soldiers made of lead. It means stickball in the street, roller skate keys, potsy, and polaroid cameras with blue flashbulbs.

No- you can't go back, but I can always go on, cherishing what was and looking forward to what yet may be. So can we all on any day, at any age, at any time. Well, like I said, ‘ya gotta have a lotta little boy in ‘ya to love and live life.......

1999 Guest Column for High Times Magazine

2008-12-21T09:21:00.002-05:00

Pot, Protest and Passion:
A Challenge to do Better

BY NORM KENT

The following guest editorial column appeared in High Times Magazine, its 25th anniversary edition on June 1, 1999.

Today I call upon the readers of High Times to do more than just get high.

Forgive me. I am one of those freeze-dried, 1960's activists whose body has aged, but whose blood still breathes civil disobedience, righteous dissent, and spiritual protest. After a half century on this planet, I have come to treasure the students of the Age of Aquarius, not only for the deeds we accomplished as young Americans, but because of who we were and what we believed. You, today's young readers of High Times, are not us. You do not measure up to us. Not even close.

Three decades ago, thousands of young people, students on college campuses across this country banded together to form a spiritual army that no police force could wrest asunder. It is not just that we fought for the decriminalization of marijuana with smoke-ins on college campuses, and not just that our protests helped end a war. Our collective spirit immobilized the repressive power structure. Our aggressive assertion of equal rights for our own stalled the proliferation of power solely for the mighty.

As we approach the New Millennium, a frightful era of repression infects our being. Our hearts should be revolutionary. Our souls should be boiling. Today's students, however, are not motivated, socially conscious, or visionary. You are the quiet puppets of social ringleaders who abuse your rights daily.

On campus after campus, zero tolerance policies for even minimal amounts of marijuana are causing students to face disciplinary sanctions that include expulsion for first, personal, private use. In secondary schools, your rights are even further diminished. School officials are allowed random searches of your properties and person without even a shred of probable cause. But if they find a loose joint, your academic career may forever be scathed. Instead of defiance and insurrection, only silent acquiescence invades the corridors of learning. You are not being taught. You are being led

In legislature after legislature, students who are found guilty of marijuana law violations are discovering that they are now ineligible for student aid, scholarships, and loans. Light up today and be a janitor tomorrow. Get caught with pot in your car and your driver's license is suspended for two years in Florida. Get caught driving drunk and you only get a six month suspension that can be immediately waived with a work permit. The high ball and the martini crowd still rules.

In city after city, private employers and government agencies are proudly adopting attitudes and policies for a 'drug free work place.' That means take all the abusive prescription drugs you want, from percodan to prozac, and you are okay. Smoke a joint and you are history. You are measured not by the quality of your work but by the quantity of THC in your urine. Office Depots across America have banners that read: "We drug test all our employees ! "

Maybe we ought to make them drug test all their customers before they take our money: "Sorry, Mr. Kent, we would love to sell you this new three thousand dollar desk, but you just tested positive for pot...." Don't hold your breath. Exhale. A hypocritical president could not. You should.

Speaking of the President who has pricked our consciousness, on no greater policy than marijuana law reform has the Oxford-educated Mr. Clinton been a social hypocrite. For eight years now, he has maintained a ban on even medicinal use of marijuana for critically ill patients, even those who were once fortunate enough to legally acquire pot through a federally sponsored compassionate use program. He is also signing federal prohibition bills that prove he is screwing students and interns in more than just the Oval Office.

Using driver's license revocations as weapons against teenagers, law enforcement officials are now making informants out of scared teenagers. Parents are getting turned in by their own kids. If after executing a warrant the authorities find pot in a home, parents are finding themselves charged with reckless endangerment. Their children are being removed from the home and turned over to colossally misguided and mismanaged social service agencies. Welcome to the New Millenium, maybe without your mother, father, or children.

Sure, most parents do not want their kids to smoke dope. But they don't want their kids to go to jail for doing so either. They want the law out of their living rooms. They don't want their kids going to jail for lighting a joint. And they certainly don't want to lose a custody battle because they light up. The policy of denying parents' custody of their children because they toke is the Millenium's new version of Reefer Madness. And you thought Harry Anslinger was dead.

Get pulled over for a traffic ticket, and you find canine units sniffing your car. If the dog alerts, not only can your car be seized, but any cash you have on you as well. Forfeiture was last socially popular in the Dark Ages in feudal times, when the King seized a serf's land and threw him out of the castle. Today, our government not only has the right to arrest you, but your money and property too. Then you have to prove it was lawfully yours. To do that you now have to spend money you no longer have to hire a lawyer you may not be able to afford. Innocent until proven guilty? It makes good copy for a textbook, but it is not real life any longer.

The bottom line is that more people are smoking and growing their own pot than ever before. Call it American ingenuity, but we were not going to grow it in open fields only to let our government spray paraquat on it. So the pot movement has gone indoors, and everyone tends to their little closet garden. So the powers that be now do garbage pulls, infrared searches, thermal imaging, and electronic surveillance to detect whether or not the devil weed is blossoming in your home. They subpoena High Times advertisers for their credit card records. They tap your phones, search your utility records, and inspect your trash. And what are we doing about it? Watching John Glenn land in a Space Shuttle ?

The truth is we have become all too apathetic. Comfortable that pot is socially acceptable, we have forgotten all too often that it is still legally unacceptable. Quietly, we look the other way as a half million Americans still get arrested every year. Silently, we roll our joints on the way home from work, but we don't do smoke-ins, protests, or politics. We have become the new silent majority, tolerating a social injustice that we see being played out across America daily. In ballot boxes, we have let government know enough is enough, and medical marijuana initiatives have passed in eight states in eight tries. But government won't listen. We are like the vegetarian citizens of H.G. Well's 'Time Machine', looking the other way as our colleagues drown.

The movement needs you. We need you in corporate boardrooms, university senates, legislative bodies, and city commissions. We need you to say that the laws against pot are wrong and you will not stand for them. We need you to put your body and soul on the line to make a difference. Thirty years ago, thousands of us did. We made the world a better place to be. But the cause and movement is a continuing battle.

Tolerate the silence of today and you create the repression that foils you. Students across America need to unite again; need to mobilize into a social force that will make us care more about all of us. We need to stand up, light up and be counted. Everywhere I go, I am greeted by people, young and old, who say how cool the gold pot leaf necklace I wear around my neck is. But it is not enough to wear hemp clothes or a pot leaf. We have got to carry the message of what that symbolizes.

To the students of America, I say this: 'Don't come up to me anymore, as I tour college campuses, lecturing about social injustice, and ask me what it was like to live in the sixties. Make your own sixties happen. There are battles to be won, causes worth fighting for, and shattered lives yearning to be saved. Remember, the drug war is a war against people. You could be the next casualty. Defend yourself as a free person today, so you will not be calling your mother to bond you out of jail tomorrow.

Get angry. Get high. Make a difference......

The President and Pot

2008-12-20T17:55:00.002-05:00

What Will the New President Do About Marijuana?

By Norm Kent

Christmas Week, 2008

“I inhaled frequently, that was the point.”
-Barack Obama, November 2006

He picked for Vice President one of the major architects of the Drug War.

He picked for Chief of Staff one of the chief opponents of medical marijuana.

He is talking about picking for the Drug Czar spot a conservative candidate who has been a congressional leader fighting drug reform.

He has promised to put an end to raids on medical dispensaries in California, but he has not said he will broadly support the Hinchey-Rohrbacher Amendment which would let states decide the issue.

He has moved from once supporting marijuana decriminalization to publishing comments that he cannot overuse ‘political capital’ on the issue.

He has now appointed for Attorney General a candidate who has a long history of opposing drug policy reforms and who has in court supported mandatory minimum sentencing and civil forfeiture.

Allen St. Pierre, the Executive Director of NORML, summed it up best about Mr. Obama’s appointments thus far: “So Far, Not So Good:” His thought-provoking article appears on the NORML.com website at its blog.

From summarizing why the selection of Joe Biden as Vice President caused him ‘digestive tumult’ to tracing Rahm Emanuel’s anti-drug policies for the past decade, the article captures a snapshot of what was routine politics as usual for the players soon to be in power.

When it comes to our 44th President, some of his positions on marijuana were once encouraging. But as Mr. Obama has moved towards the national limelight, there is a new found frustration for reformers. It seems the President to be is moving from the left to the middle. And as Loudon Wainwright once wrote in a popular song, the only things you see in the middle of the road are dead skunks and yellow lines. Still, I am not alarmed yet. It is way too early, and there is still room and reason for optimism.

Commencing your administration in the face of a national economic crisis at home while American soldiers are at war abroad can focus your priorities on other issues outside the need for weed. We have seen what happened to Bill Clinton when he tried, too early in his administration, to advance the cause of gay rights by banning discrimination against homosexuals in the military. He started a firestorm which burnt up valuable first months of his presidency.

We do know this though, and it is a challenging start. Rather decisively, on the official administration website, at www.change.gov, the following statement appears: President-elect Obama is not in favor of the legalization of marijuana.

What can we then expect of Mr. Obama once he becomes President?

I think there are many encouraging things.

First, in his past he has acknowledged the broad failures of the drug war, declaring in 2004 that it was an “utter failure” which needs to be rethought.

Second, as an African-American in an urban community, few people will be as sensitive as Mr. Obama to the exhaustive legal toll this drug war exacts on minority communities. The arrests come quicker, the prosecutions are more frequent, and the sentences are longer. Drug arrests have been tools to deny poor people driver’s licenses, scholarships and federal welfare benefits, causing innocuous conduct to endure catastrophic consequences for otherwise decent people.

Third, the President is ‘with it’. His telling comments to a group of students when asked whether he ‘inhaled’ marijuana were “Of course, I thought that was the whole purpose.”

Those remarks are a reflection of the candor and commitment of Mr. Obama to address the issue in a new light. He did not play a game of Clintonian holier-than-thou cover-up. With the same self-deprecating qualities that he shared with the nation when he called himself a ‘mutt,’ Mr. Obama implied in tone and substance that marijuana may not be as bad as we have been hearing from the government for too many decades.

Last week, the website Change.gov asked the public to provide them with a list of the top public policy questions facing America. Visitors to the site were then asked to vote on which questions should take priority for the incoming administration.

After receiving nearly 100,000 total votes on more than 10,000 separate public policy issues, the most widely voted on question for Obama is:
“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.?”

Maybe Rahm Emanuel has turned a corner as well. Rahm is politically smart if nothing else, so I hope that he’ll follow his boss’ lead in the area of criminal justice reforms. Also, to his credit, after voting years against Hinchey-Rohrbacher Amendment in 2007, as member of Congress from Illinois, Rahm voted in favor of holding back federal funding from law enforcement (read DEA) to raid or harass medical marijuana cultivators and dispensaries.

I know I have been unsuccessful in getting my own liberal Congresswoman from South Florida, Debbie Wasserman-Schulz, to even support this effort. Maybe Mr. Emanuel will influence her and dozens of others. It will take leadership from the oval office. That can only happen when the people in office are looked upon as enlightened reformers rather than being weak on crime.

Politically, I know such polls as the one the administration inaugurated here are instrumental in turning mindsets. If we can show politicians that it is ‘safe’ to support drug reform, even popular, we can suddenly find them on our side. To their credit, outstanding philanthropists like Peter Lewis and George Soros have been national leaders in helping bring public opinion out of the closet. These are men whose voices may be heard by the new administration. And I am here for them too if they need me. My number is listed. So too is Barney Frank, the influential Massachusetts congressman who has long supported decriminalization legislation.

The truth is that people who support decriminalization have always been a silent majority afraid to speak out. But give them a secret ballot box, and in state after state, you see massive support for medical marijuana and a more enlightened approach to marijuana reform. Perhaps the President, in his own unique disarming way, can lead a new path. He has surrounded himself with educated leaders who also have been willing to speak candidly in favor of decriminalization including new Cabinet nominee Bill Richardson.

We do not need a new Drug Czar, either. This is America. Czars are for Russia. What we need is the appointment of an educator, a scientist, a doctor, a constitutional rights lawyer to pave the way to a new era of drug enlightenment.

At the last NORML Board of Directors meeting, one issue we raised was one many of us within the drug reform movement can support. It has been three decades since the Shafer Commission released its national study on marijuana, which Nixon immediately trashed. Perhaps a new Blue Ribbon Commission, with decades more research behind it, and years of medical marijuana evidence, can look into new recommendations for the 21st century.

On one hand, such a Presidential panel would buy time for the new administration to get settled in with more pressing priorities. But it would also give drug reformers a national platform to address so many issues that have been, forgive me, cultivated- since the Shafer Commission, from forfeiture laws to raids on dispensaries, from the THC content of marijuana to medicinal initiatives. It is time to look again at marijuana with a scholarly and clinical eye instead of with SWAT teams and law enforcement raids.

Correspondingly, it is also time for the national drug reform organizations to speak with a singular voice and work together for a common purpose. There needs to be a unity of purpose, and leaders from the Marijuana Policy Project, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, the Drug Policy Alliance, Students for a Sensible Drug Policy, and a host of other respected reform organizations, too many to mention here, should hold their own meeting to develop a common theme with a collective initiative. We need to work together to send a message that is enlightened and progressive, convincing legislators and the executive branch that we are responsible and right.

The drug reform movement needs to act in a way that President-elect Obama has asked all of us to move towards: not to be tied to the politics of the past and the way things have always been done, but to engage hope by broadening our constituency and reaching out to others. Within the drug reform movement, fratricide must come to an end. We must bury the hatchet on our own rivalries, and move forward with a common purpose. We defeat ourselves by ourselves when we do not.

Our cause is just, and our goals have always been righteous. We may have only ourselves to blame if we cannot achieve now what we have fought so long for. I would say our time is now, but I thought that in 1976 when the Attorney General of the United States, then Ramsey Clark, said we should see an end to unjust marijuana laws before the end of the decade. I think we are overdue. Together, let us do better than we have already done.

We have a President who is willing to listen, a Congress that is willing to learn, and a public that is salivating for a better solution.

Norm Kent is a nationally known criminal defense lawyer from Fort Lauderdale who serves on the Board of Directors for NORML www.norml.com He can be reached at Norm@normkent.com, and his law office website is www.normkent.com

An Open Letter to Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota

2008-12-20T11:04:00.004-05:00

June, 2007

NORM KENT'S LETTER TO SEN. NORM COLEMAN

Dear Mr. Coleman,

My friend Norman.

Years ago, in a lifetime far away, you did not oppose the legalization of marijuana.

Years ago, in our dorm rooms at Hofstra University, you, me, Billy, your future brother-in-law, Ivan, Jonathan, Peter, Janet, Nancy and a wealth of other students smoked dope.

Sure, we had to tape the doors shut, burn incense and open the windows, but we got high, and yet we grew up okay, without the help of the Office of National Drug Control Policy's advice.

We grew up to become lawyers. Our other friends, as you go down the list, are doctors, professors, parents, political consultants and professionals. No one ever got cancer from smoking pot or diabetes from using a joint. And the days of our youth we look back fondly upon as years where we stood up, were counted and made a difference, from Earth Day in 1970 to helping bring down a president and end a war in Southeast Asia a few years later.

We smoked pot when we took over Weller Hall to protest administrative abuses of students' rights. You smoked pot as you stood on the roof of the University Senate protesting faculty exclusivity. As the President of the Student Senate in 1969, you condemned the raid by Nassau County police on our dormitories, busting scores of students for pot possession.

You never said then that pot was dangerous. What was scary then, and is as frightening now, is when national leaders become voices of hypocrisy, harbingers of the status quo, and protect their own position instead of the public good. Welcome to the crowd of those who have become a likeness of which they despised. Welcome to the mindless myriad of legislators who gather in cocktail lounges to manhandle their martinis while passing laws against drunk driving.

We have seen more people die last year from spinach then pot. We have endured generations of drug addicts overdosing on a multitude of drugs, from heroin to crystal methamphetamine. In your public life, as an attorney general, mayor and United States senator, you have been in the forefront of speaking out against abuses which are harmful. You have been a noble and honorable public servant. How about not being such a dope on dope?

How about admitting that if the Rockefeller drug laws were applied to Norman Bruce Coleman on Long Island in 1968, or to me, or to our friends, and fellow students, you, I and others we knew and loved might just be getting out of jail now? How about recognizing that for too long too many have been wrongly arrested, unjustly prosecuted and illegally incarcerated for unconscionable periods of time?

How about recognizing that you have peers who have smoked pot for 25 years or more and they are successful record producers, businessmen and parents?

How about standing up and saying you have heard and witnessed countless stories of persons who have used pot medicinally, as I have, to endure the effects of chemotherapy?

You who have travelled to Africa and seen the face of AIDS so up close and personal would deny medicinal marijuana relief to those souls wasting away from malnutrition, nausea and no access to fundamental medicines?

How about not adopting the sad and sorry archaic path of the Office of Drug Control, which this week suggested pot smokers are more likely to become gang members than others?

How about standing up and saying: "I, Norm Coleman, smoked pot in 1969." That "I am not a gang member, a drug addict or a criminal."

How about saying: "I was able to responsibly integrate my prior pot use into my life, and still succeed on my own merits."

How about standing up not only for who you are, but who you were?

How about it, Norm?

I will always love, admire and cherish what you have achieved and accomplished and the goals you have met. I will always fondly look at the remarkable success of your present.

How about you looking back at your past and saying: "What I did was not so wrong and not so bad and not so hurtful that generations of Americans should still, decades later, be going to jail for smoking pot - nearly one million arrests for possession last year."

Can't Norm Coleman come out of the closet in 2007 and say "These arrests are wrong - that there is a better way, and we need to find it."

You might find more integrity and honor in that then adopting the sad and sorry policy of our Office of National Drug Control Policy. You might find the person you were.

Norm Kent
Your Friend Always

Tommy Chong: The Comedian as Warrior

2008-12-20T10:48:00.003-05:00

Not Just A Comedian Anymore: The ‘Unanticipated Warrior’ Tommy Chong

October, 2008

By Norm Kent
I double dare you to tell me that when you hear the names ‘Cheech and Chong’ you don’t smile, chuckle and recall a funny, hazy moment in your life.

Between 1972 and 1985, the comedy team released nine albums, starred in eight films, and won a Grammy award. They became the Dynamic Duo of Dope, and some of their films, like ‘Nice Dreams’ and ‘Up in Smoke’ became celebrated classics.

Tommy and Cheech would often be pressed to talk about their ‘message.’ They would reply simply: “All we can do is be funny and try to make people laugh.” In a lifetime far away, that was their modest and fulfilling goal. That, however, was before a fully armed Department of Justice swat team raided Tommy Chong’s comfortable suburban California home in February of 2003.

Armed with a search warrant, you would think these machine gun toting FBI agents were expecting to find 9-11 terrorists. You would think Tommy was holding hostages. Not close. The feds found Tommy, his wife, his elderly dog and some pot. They found a comedian whose entrepreneurial bent enabled him to become the CEO of business enterprise which sold beautiful and designer glass pipes over the Internet.

Unfortunately, ‘Nice Dreams Enterprises’ was about to become Tommy Chong’s nightmare.

In a different world, maybe Tommy would have been given an award for glass artistry. But in the mind of President George Bush, Tommy Chong was aiding and abetting a culture of ‘terrorists’ who glamorized pot. Said the Chief Assistant United States Attorney from the Western District of Pennsylvania, who would personally handle Tommy Chong’s prosecution, and see him to prison: “The people who sell the accessories are just as bad as those growing the plant.”

On that date, Tommy Chong went from telling jokes and producing glass pipes to starring in a real life documentary which exposes just how transcendentally meaningless the drug war against our citizens is. Like the young man who stood alone before a cannon twenty years ago in Tiananmen Square, Tommy Chong has become the unanticipated warrior whose life experience has exposed the abject foolishness of our government’s drug war.

Tommy Chong has gone from living off the culture of pot to going to prison because of it. He has become the person he joked about. But he never asked to be a hero. He just sought to be funny, to do for pot what Red Skelton used to do for booze. Somewhere along the way someone forgot to tell the feds that Marcus Welby was never really a doctor and Tommy Chong was never really a stoner. Well, maybe a little. But it was not his whole life.

Tommy Chong was a comedic writer, a guitarist, a filmmaker, a humorist, a businessman, and an entertainer. He trivialized law enforcement. He made stoners laughable and humorous. He mimicked those panicked moments when we would stash the stash, or swallow a roach. He made us laugh about being high even when we were not high. He made funny movies and comic albums. Along the way, he became a counter culture hero, and for everyone who ever bogarted a joint, there is a Cheech and Chong moment stored in your memory bank.

Says Tommy today: “I turn 70 this year. And I still smoke pot about as regular as I want to.”

One of Tom’s more unique honors was being given a “Lifetime Achievement Award” at the Cannabis Cup ceremonies in Amsterdam. His tour still involves comedy of course, but in his own words, Tommy gives talks “on how Pot can save the Planet. My life is full of love and adventure thanks to the magical herb.”

Following a path many of us tracked, Tommy grew up, has grown older, got married, got divorced, got married, raised a family, and started a successful business. ‘Nice Dream Enterprises’ sold bongs over the ‘Net. Today, any convenience stores on street corners from San Francisco in California to Saint Petersburg in Florida carry pipes and papers and smoking agents. They are not getting busted and they are not going to jail.

But in 2003, while our nation was still removing bodies from the World Trade Center, 55 defendants got popped for bong-selling on the ‘Net. It was a nationwide operation heralded in a press conference by the Attorney General of the United States. Tommy Chong was the Potboy Centerfold, targeted as the number one offender, with a government hell-bent on sending a message which would make Tommy the example to be burnt at the stake.

After 9-11, selling glass pipes on the Internet became a low priority for the federal government. The law was pretty much ignored. Out of all those eventually charged and found guilty, one man of course, would have to wind up with a sentence longer than any other. That man would be a man in his sixties with no criminal record, a father, a parent, and entrepreneur. That man would be one Tommy Chong, who would go to Taft Prison in California for nine months between 2005 and 2006.

“I tried to look at it as going on location for nine months,” Tommy says in a newly released documentary, A/K/A Tommy Chong. It’s playing now on Showtime, and it is a compelling, commanding feature, produced by Blue Chief Entertainment. Even the title has a double entendre: the federal indictment including the charges which would send Tommy to prison, reads United States of America vs. Thomas B. Kin Chong A/K/A Tommy Chong.

The Josh Gilbert film illustratively reveals the way the government improperly solicited and perhaps unlawfully entrapped ‘Nice Dream Enterprises.’ The revealing evidentiary tapes show that the company originally sought NOT to ship glass pipes into the Western Pennsylvania jurisdiction where a phony paraphernalia store run by feds was pleading for product. But the propositions from the undercovers kept on coming, and the corporation headed by Tommy Chong made a bad call. Then came the feds.

As the film shows, Tommy had little to do with the day to day operations of the company. He was, his son Paris says, too busy “dreaming about creating a million dollar bong with gold and diamonds.” But the indictment named Tommy, and in exchange for the government not adding as co-defendants his wife and son, who were instrumental in the operation of the company, Tommy bit the bullet and took the fall.

To secure a lenient plea deal and possible sentence reduction means your attorney has to plead you guilty swiftly. This sentencing guideline enables you to get credit for ‘early acceptance of responsibility.’ It means you have to waive your right to contest the indictment, file defensive motions, and allege such issues as unlawful entrapment. As his attorneys in the film point out, and as Tommy himself found out, your options are severely limited.

The Prince of Dope Films became the pot prisoner he used to joke about. In the film, drug reformers Ethan Nadelman and Eric Schlosser acknowledge as much: “He convinced the government he was the guy he played in the movies.” And Andy Griffith was really a Sheriff.

In 2008, as he tours North America with Cheech Marin for the first time in 25 years, Tommy recognizes of our government: “They made me a martyr.” How true. Within months of his release, Tommy was on the Tonite Show with Jay Leno. “Too bad he wasn’t a conservative radio talk show host,” Leno would remark in his monologue: “he would be in rehab instead of jail.”

On Bill Maher’s weekly television show, Maher noted with irony that Tommy’s federal sentencing date was on September 11: “Osama may still be running free in caves, but our country will be much safer with a 65 year old Tommy Chong in a prison.”

Now free of prison, but forever an adjudicated felon, Tommy says: “I made a living for thirty years talking about a culture. Today, I stand up for it.” He is truly not just a comedian anymore.

Joshua Gilbert produced, wrote, and directed the film. He had the ingenuity and foresight to create a film which followed Tommy from his indictment to his release from prison. We see Tommy entertaining on stage before his incarceration, and then doing a sobering interview while doing his time. In a lighter moment, he jokes with his new found friends, all inmates at a federal prison. Few actors have better worked the ‘method’ system. Tommy’s was real.

In a later scene, we see Tommy leaving the gates of this deserted and lonely steel prison, walking out of the federal penitentiary on his release date, his wife waiting to meet him. Driving home along an isolated road, Tommy sees a goat entangled in a wire cage. He frees him. “It feels good to be free,” Tommy says. He then arrives home, bends down, and kisses the concrete steps leading up to his house.

The film’s insight reveals that the end of a sentence for a prisoner can also be the beginning of a new one. As a felon, you have to register and report to police stations, half way houses, and you can be subject to post-custodial supervision and random drug testing. The failure to meet these conditions can cause your return to prison. After spending nine months in jail, Tommy had to go to one of those half way houses and endure nine more months of probation. We forget what that can do to the human spirit.

“Once you have been jailed, you are never really free again,” Tommy says. “You no longer feel invincible. You have been humbled. You know what the meaning of ‘doing time’ means.”

In life, sometimes you are called upon to stand naked in front of the cannon, as that young man in Tiananmen Square did years ago. Sometimes, you are called upon to just be funny.

The new tour of Cheech and Chong is taking them to cities in America and Canada. As she has since 1996, Tommy’s wife Shelby opens the show. An entertainer in her own right, she is the prelude for the duo that has now been booked for over 50 dates in 50 cities between now and March of 2009.

One of those dates, on March 07, 2009, is not many miles from the very county in Pennsylvania where Tommy’s bongs arrived in a shipment, in 2002, which would lead to his arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. If he has not already, I suspect on that stage and in that forum, Tommy may find true vindication.

Tommy is not alone turning 70 this year. So are many members of his audience. But the crowds laugh and cry, stare and abide by the Dukes of Dope, now in the autumn of their lives. Maybe they go home to lattes instead of lines, grandkids instead of ganja, but Cheech and Chong are one with the crowd, no more so then the closing moments of the performance, when all join in a joyful, playful, sing-along rendition of ‘Up in Smoke.’

“And we close our show,” says Cheech in a Rolling Stone interview, “with ‘Kumbaya.’ It’s for world peace. It’s for the kids. It’s for the future.”

“I am inspired,” Tommy says now, “not just to tell jokes, but to send a message. My arrest, my sentence is a badge of honor..”

A published writer on issues related to Marijuana and law reform, Norm Kent (norm@normkent.com) is a Fort Lauderdale criminal defense attorney who serves on the Board of Directors of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. His website can be accessed at www.normkent.com.

The Legacy of Harvey Milk

2008-12-20T10:39:00.002-05:00

Harvey Milk’s Legacy: Connecting the Dots from Past to Present

By Norm Kent

December, 2008

“My name is Harvey Milk, and I am here to recruit you.”

Anyone who was alive then has to see this movie now.

As 2008 comes to a close, the month of November has turned out to be a defining moment in the evolution of gay American history.

Call it a collage of circumstance, but the past has met the present, and today it defines our future.

It was November of 1978 when the first openly gay office holder in California, Harvey Milk, was slain by a disgruntled colleague on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. A chronicle of his life and death came last week to the big screen, a mainstream studio film starring a renowned actor, Sean Penn. Rapidly winning critical acclaim, the historically accurate film is riveting and compelling.

Years ago, a renowned lesbian writer named Patricia Nell Warren authored a ground breaking gay novel, The Front Runner, featuring a youthful track star and the gay coach who loved him. It never made it to the movies. No major star wanted to play the role of a gay man. No major studio would bankroll a film based on a gay love affair. We lived in a different world three decades ago.

South Floridians who have lived here long enough will also remember the progressive human rights ordinance enacted by the Dade County Commission in 1977, protecting the rights of gays and lesbians. We will also recall the successful initiative to repeal it, led by Anita Bryant, the Orange Juice Queen. Rare footage of what happened in Miami, Florida is captured in the film on Harvey Milk. Those are pictures you won’t find in this week’s magazines capturing last week’s White Party.

The history of South Florida’s struggle thirty years ago is also the focus of a new book by Fred Fejes, a well known local educator. The Blade covered its release, showcased for the Stonewall Library, housed in a wing of a public library on East Sunrise Blvd. in Fort Lauderdale. Thirty years ago, gays who treaded openly along East Sunrise Blvd. in Fort Lauderdale would more likely wind up being housed in the city jail.

This week, a leading candidate for a Presidential appointment to head national AIDS policy is an HIV-positive gay man. Vizcaya again hosted the White Party, South Florida’s annual testimony to an ongoing struggle against AIDS. It was a battle Harvey Milk never had to fight. He was shot and killed less than a year after he took office, years before we would hear the words ‘Gay Related Immune Syndrome.’ Still, he would be proud of the way that the gay community has raised hundreds of millions of dollars on its own to fight this pandemic.

Last week, while supporters of the Miami Dade Gay and Lesbian Film Festival were gathering at a benefit for the Harvey Milk film, Circuit Court Judge Cindy Lederman was striking down as unconstitutional a Florida statute banning gays and lesbians from adoption. The law was created thirty years ago in response to Anita Bryant’s unrighteous campaign.

Yet here we were again, only last month, in California, Florida, and elsewhere organizing voters not to approve a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to unions of only men and women. We were defeated, but this is simply a setback within a larger cause. We have not lost ground. We are picking at sacred institutions, and temples do not fall lightly.

One of the things you learn about Harvey Milk in the film is how he galvanized his legions after every defeat. On November 15, 2008, a week after losing the marriage amendments in three states, gays and lesbians spontaneously protested in fifty. We did so without the help of fancy gay bureaucrats at the HRC in DC holding banquets. With new leaders, younger voices, and the promise of tomorrow at our doorstep, I have confidence in the future.

Last week, I went to the funeral of another gay American hero. He led no marches. He spoke at no rallies. He simply did his job, and died in the line of duty. His name was Alex Del Rio and he was a 31 year old gay cop serving the city of Hollywood. To the thousands of friends and fellow law enforcement professionals attending his rites, it did not matter that he was gay.

Harvey Milk opened the doors yesterday that invite gay men throughout our community today to run and serve openly on city commissions, in the judiciary, or even in law enforcement.

“If Athens shall appear great to you” wrote Aeschylus, “consider that the city purchased its honor simply by good men doing their duty.” If we continue to stand our ground and there abide, in our time or the future, eventually the whole world will come ‘round to us.

I met Harvey Milk only once, in the summer of 1975, on Castro Street. I told him I had just finished law school at Hofstra University, on Long Island, in New York State, and that I was thinking about relocating to San Francisco or Southern Florida. I shared that like him, I was from Woodmere, New York, a point he would raise in so many of his spirited speeches.

“Well, then come move out here with me,” he said, “and we will change the world.”

Harvey paid the ultimate price, but made a unique difference. We all owe him a debt we can only pay forward by fighting that same fight.

Gay Marriage Matters

2008-12-20T10:37:00.001-05:00

Why the Marriage Amendment Mattered

By Norm Kent

November, 2008

In 1997, the Florida legislature enacted Florida Statute 741.212, which banned marriages between persons of the same sex. Section 3 of that law even reads that for the purposes of interpreting the statute, ‘marriage’ would mean only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife.

With that law in effect, a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage was clearly redundant and unnecessary. So why did they do it? Because your enemies do not just want you down and out. They want to stomp on your throat.

On its face, the Protection of Marriage Amendment simply prohibits same-sex marriages. The breadth of this amendment could be much worrisome though. You see, the people who brought you this amendment falsely advertised that it would only ratify existing law. Their past suggests that is not all they had in mind. Here is the story behind the story.

The strongest backers of the amendment included anti gay groups like the ‘Liberty Counsel.’ The liberties they support are their own, not yours. These are the groups and organizations that supported state statutes making consensual gay sex criminal.

They are the people who oppose passage of domestic partnership ordinances, and fought against health and employee benefits for same sex partners and their children. They are the same vampires who are still fighting in Florida against allowing qualified gay people from adopting. Okay, maybe I am being unfair to vampires.

What does this mean, then? It means ‘they’ are not done; they are just beginning. They will use this amendment as a legal sword to go into court and challenge the progress we have made. ‘They’ are coming to a neighborhood near you and bringing a bank of lawyers.

The ‘Liberty Counsel’ and its friends will now sue Broward County and argue that the new amendment has rendered the county’s domestic partnership benefits ordinance illegal. They will challenge the city of Wilton Manors for extending employment benefits for gay couples. They will argue that their tax dollars cannot be used to provide same sex benefits in Miami Beach.

In those states and places where these issues have already been voted on and approved, like Michigan and Ohio, this is what ‘they’ have done. They are never satisfied with just getting an amendment passed. They then want to use that law as a vehicle to ‘stomp on your throat.’

For example, in Ann Arbor, conservative groups have already sued the school board demanding that it repeal a same-sex benefits provision for its teachers. A state senator in Ohio has already introduced legislation demanding that state universities cease at once from providing its gay employees same sex benefits.

The goal of your enemies who backed this amendment was to be able to go to court and argue that governments which continue to provide benefits packages for same sex partners are treating those unions as the equivalent of marriages. Therefore, they initiate legal actions demanding the programs cease because they now violate the new constitutional amendment.

The passing of this amendment in Florida means that civil rights lawyers as well as city and county attorneys are going to have to defend the human rights ordinances which have already been passed. There is a twist there for us though. The very cities we had to cajole for decades to pass human rights ordinances will now have to hire lawyers to defend the constitutionality of them. This time, they will be on our side.

Gays and lesbians have won many civil rights over the past decade. Those laws will now be tested by the passage of this repressive constitutional amendment. Fortunately, the gay and lesbian community is protected by a legal network of competent lawyers, from the ACLU to Lambda Legal. Ultimately, we will prevail, despite the marriage ‘protection’ amendment. But we are going to have to fight again. That should come as no surprise to anyone. Liberty is an ongoing struggle.

As we go forward, the minimal differences between competing organizations fighting for the same civil rights will be inconsequential. There is no blame game anymore. Whether you worked for Fairness for Families or the Red and Blue team, it just doesn’t matter. We are all in this together.

Abraham Lincoln emancipated slaves in the nineteenth century. One hundred years later, in the twentieth century, Lyndon Baines Johnson had to sign a Civil Rights Act to insure the freedoms of Negro Americans would not be violated by sheriffs with water hoses keeping them from the voting booth. In the twenty-first century, America elected an African-American to its highest office. Our time will come too. It will just take more time to get there.

Just as we wonder how there ever was an America which treated African Americans as three fifths of a citizen, or denied women the right to vote, years from now future generations will be astonished that gays and lesbians endured so many legal abuses. We can stand fast though, because we are on the right side of history, and the Neanderthals who oppose us are doomed to failure.

A nationally known writer, criminal defense and constitutional rights attorney with offices based in Fort Lauderdale, Norm Kent founded the Express Gay News in 1999.
He can be reached at norm@normkent.com

Pushing 60 With Pot

2008-12-20T10:18:00.001-05:00

After All These Years:

Pushing 60 with Pot

By NORM KENT

January, 2008
I am close to being a senior citizen. Though I will always think of myself as a student at Hofstra who was the 19 year old President of the Sophomore class, I am turning 59 this year. Damn, 60 is around the corner!

You know what that means? When I open a newspaper in the town I have lived in for the last thirty years, I know the people in the obituaries. I am older than some of them. When the city councilmen go to jail for the bribes they always seem to take in every city everywhere, I realize they are kids I grew up with. That means I smoked dope with them, got laid with them, partied with them, and got drunk with them.

If you are from the 1960's, let's be honest. Pot was the least of the things we did. There were mushrooms and Quaaludes, acid trips with LSD, body painting, psychedelic and psychotropic drugs up the yin yang tree. So a little weed was just a nominal high. By the time we were 20, we were reading about classmates who overdosed on Heroin.

Some of us really got into marijuana, though. It was a chance to individually transport ourselves to a higher consciousness, to strip away stress and let our bodies reach sensory highs.. It was a chance to feel and touch on a cosmic level, to tune in and turn on.

It worked then for us and it still works now for a younger generation, despite the institutional trash generated from the United States Office of Drug Control Policy. "This is not your father's pot," they warn. They are right. As users and caregivers everywhere know, it is better, cleaner, more refined, and probably a lot safer than ever.

If Americans are growing their own pure hydroponic pot in their homes, they do not have to worry about deceitful dealers throwing oregano, rat poison, and dirty weeds into the mix. They do not have to fear that their plants came over moldy and mildewy, after a boat trip from Colombia, where it was sprayed and stored and secreted in ways that reduced the product to rubbish.

Anyway, while we kids were dancing in the mud at Woodstock, our parents were living in the suburban valley of the dolls, downing valium by the bucket. They were pouring martinis, and finding pills by the pound to cure their own ills. Doctors called them tranquilizers and they dosed our parents in the millions.

Forty years later, whether its booze or coke, reckless citizens still generate self-inflicted destructiveness, and it has nothing at all to do with pot. In a free society, you have no conduct to condemn or congratulate but your own. The world is yours to create or ruin.

I never really used drugs until I busted up my knee playing baseball. Then the doctors shot my knee up with lidocaine, benzocaine, and any liquid that would relieve the pain. I can't list all the arthritis and pain pills I have been given. From Celebrex to Vioxx to Bextra, the manufacturers are all now getting sued for poisoning Americans while distributing substances they knew were toxic.

I found out a lot more about pills when I contracted cancer. My life became a 24 hour cycle of constant protocols of treatment. You are dosed with oxycodone, oxycontin, percocet, darvocet, percodan, cortisone, prednisone, hydrocodone, and all or any combination or concoction of medicines doctors can prescribe to keep those good blood cells alive while beating down the bad ones. You take them because they tell you to.

Recently, we all have been anointed with human growth any purportedly natural or herbal pill with a fancy name you cannot pronounce, but all I ever wanted was a joint.

As a gay man, I have been friends with lots of men who have come down with HIV and AIDS. Many have died, but many more are living. Until the new protocols were available, they were taking as many as 30 pills a day. I can't list them all, but the processes to match the medicine with the man would leave good people very sick and often emaciated beyond your belief. Meanwhile, joints were illegal.

So here I am now, having lived a pretty full life in a pretty pill-filled America. Over the years, we have seen lots of food scares. Just in the past few years, some E coli thing in the lettuce killed thousands, and a Mad Cow took down hundreds. Last year, we even lost Popeye from a bad can of Spinach. But I don't ever remember reading about anyone dying from a bong hit, unless a jealous lover smashed the glass over some toker's skull. I did cut my hand once when I dropped a ceramic bong and it shattered in my fingers.

When I was a kid, I remember there was a scare about cranberries, and then Bon Vivant Vichyssoises Soup, and then something crazy called Legionnaires' disease. Occasionally, our city officials tell us not to drink the water because it is contaminated and we have to boil it. You know what occurred to me the other day, though? I have never had to boil pot. The only time pot ever became dangerous in America was when our government tried to spray paraquat on it.

I am proud of my efforts back then, as a young lawyer, in 1982, to stop the government dead in its tracks, asking for an injunction to end the toxic spraying. It was the first time I ever made the New York Times, and I was 32 then. Now it is 25 years later and instead of spraying pot in Florida, my government is raiding dispensaries in California. What lunacy.

Years later, I had a client smoking pot to reduce the intraocular pressure in her eyes from glaucoma. Pot saved her eyesight. Same thing with some HIV patients in Key West, who consumed cannabis to retaliate against the wasting syndrome the disease caused. Pot and the patients won. Smoke and you get better, or at least less sick.

You know, we are all day to day, and minute to minute. I may live another hour or another two decades, but in one truth I think I can trust. Pushing the age of 60, I do not need someone else to tell me what I can put in my body. I do not need laws telling me what I can eat, drink or smoke. If I don't know by now that smoking cigarettes can give me cancer or becoming an alcoholic will destroy my liver, then 'my bad.'

The bottom line is that if they can pass a law saying a condo can be for residents only 55 an older, maybe we can push for a law saying no drug laws can be applied against those 55 and older either. Maybe we can say we have put in our dues, earned our rights, and in the latter stages of our lives, we have an unfettered freedom and right to be free; to determine our own destinies.

Let's see if I can't conclude with a little story from the Mass Cann NORML conference last September in the Boston Commons. The founder and director of NORML, Keith Stroup, and the Associate Publisher of High Times Magazine, Rick Cusick, were both busted for smoking a joint at a pot rights rally in the park. They both have to go to court. Maybe more of us should.
Now you tell me what this court is going to say to two professionals who have spent their lives devoted to the advocacy and abolition of marijuana laws?

You tell me what the courts should say to two sixty plus year old men who made a conscious and deliberate choice to consume some weed on a weekend. Like they have nothing else to worry about in Boston but to bust 50 people every year in the Commons when they have a toke?

Have you seen the crime stats in Boston lately, for robbery, rape, ransacking, and plunder- and that is just in City Hall in their parking lot?

For thirty years, since those early days as a student activist, I have been fighting for change. But I guess I have not done all that well, not if our government is raiding dispensaries, arresting growers, taking scholarships away from students, seizing property from landlords and, astonishingly, arresting 800,000 citizens a year on simple pot possession charges. I guess I am not doing well if the government is still revoking your drivers' licenses, forfeiting your cars, and locking you up for loose joints.

I think we all need to do a little bit better. You can help us help you by joining NORML today. We are still fighting the good fight. We need some freedom fighters to join us.

Yeah, NORML is still around. Yeah, I know some of you have not heard about us since your college days. Yeah, we are the old men on the block. But we are infused with new blood, still very dedicated to an honorable cause, and still in need of your help.

We were here for you yesterday, and unless we change the laws we will be around for your kids tomorrow. But you can help change that by joining us at www.norml.com today.

Norm Kent lives in Fort Lauderdale.

He can be reached at::norm@normkent.com