Pot Smokers See the Rainbow

Pot Smokers Finally See the Rainbow

By Norm Kent

When 64 % of the voters in Miami Beach in a straw ballot said they would support medical marijuana last week, it was no surprise.

Pot smokers may not wear rainbow flags, but they have finally come out of the closet.

For forty years, since early in the 1970’s, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) has been fighting to change repressive and regressive laws against the responsible use of cannabis by consenting adults.

The truth is that the ‘war on drugs’ was never a war on drugs. It was a war on good and decent people, whose only crime was smoking a joint at the end of the day.

Most Americans have always known that the horror stories about pot consumption were delusional hallucinations thrown upon us by cowardly politicians who were afraid to be seen as ‘soft on dope.’ Today, though, cannabis consumers realize they can trust their own experiences more than the government’s forked tongues.

In 20 states where citizens have been asked if they want pot to be decriminalized, they have resoundingly said ‘yes.’ Current Gallop polls in fact have showed that a majority of nearly 60% of Americans wants pot legalized.

It isn’t because we are all stoners, though many of us are. It is because we as Americans are fed up and disgusted with the lies and laws our legislators have passed and prosecuted. Over four decades, we have empowered our government to enact draconian measures that have compromised our civil liberties and sacrificed common sense. We are fighting back, against spying, surveillance and stupidity.

While we were too complacent or silent, our leaders have ratified statutes allowing for our sons and daughters to be jailed, our cars to be seized, and our scholarships to be forfeited. In certain places, moms and dads can still lose custody of their kids because they are caught smoking pot. It is an outrage and injustice Americans can no longer endure or countenance.

Today, from Miami Beach to Maine, from Seattle to South Florida, we are saying ‘Free the Leaf.’  It’s not just to get high. There are valid medical and curative reasons to support normalizing marijuana.

Thousands of Americans who were living with HIV learned years ago that medical cannabis inhibited a ‘wasting away’ syndrome and enhanced their appetite. Others, like Elvy Mussika, a grandmother from Hollywood, Florida, found out smoking marijuana can alleviate her blinding glaucoma. She now actually gets pot monthly from the DEA, cultivated at a government-controlled grow house in Mississippi.

Scientists in Israel have discovered cannabis can control muscular spasticity and arthritic conditions amongst the elderly. One housewife in Manatee County, Cathy Jordan, has grown and used cannabis for a quarter of a century to combat Lou Gehrig’s disease. Acknowledging her use is a ‘life-saving condition,’ an enlightened prosecutor has declined to prosecute her.

Those of us who smoked joints watching Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix in the 1960’s are now in our 60’s. We have seen pharmaceutical companies overdose us with a sea of prescription pills that have led to unanticipated consequences and multi-million dollar class action lawsuits. None of us has ever died from weed, but we have all been victims of the war against it.

As we approach an age of decriminalization and even legalization, let me just say ‘welcome.’  If you support reform now, and you have not before, thanks for joining a good cause.

In Florida, an effort has been launched to place medical marijuana on next year’s ballot as a constitutional amendment. If the signature requirements are met, you will get to vote on it. Like every other state where people vote on cannabis, it will pass overwhelmingly, with bipartisan support in both red and blue counties. Pot has only one party.

Support those communities that want to legalize and medicalize cannabis, and you will be on the right side of history, part of a community wrongfully denied a voice and now, finally, after all these years, rightfully being recognized.

A Vision for the New NORML

NORML is the pioneer, the grand patron and founder of the marijuana policy reform movement in America. We are still here and by your side, and we are needed now, more than ever. 

Some have said that as our nation moves towards medicalization, decriminalization, or legalization, our tasks will be diminished, our duties lessened, our essence threatened.

The truth is that it is just the opposite. 

Now, with cannabis reforms about to blossom in city after city, from small communities to large counties, our nation needs a respected consumer advocacy group more than ever. 

Our nation needs a lobby such as the new NORML, firmly planted, and nationally respected, which will protect the rights of cannabis consumers, as no one else has in the past or can in the future.

Our nation needs a new NORML, which ensures that the distribution of cannabis to anyone is universally safe, readily accessible and fairly affordable to everyone.

Our nation needs a new NORML that ensures that the laws which legislatures pass favor freedom and fairness, not moneymakers or mercenaries.

Our nation needs a new NORML that ensures patients have access to safe medicine, consumers acquire healthy products, and distribution mechanisms protect gender, age, and race, available not just to corporate conglomerates but individual entrepreneurs.

The new NORML today contains a NORML Women’s Alliance representing the power of feminism and professionalism, bringing passion and gender diversity to the cause of personal freedom and individual choice.

The new NORML brings vast youth advocacy to the table, with hundreds of chapters in 50 states, young men and women fighting with their heart and soul to ensure scholarships are not revoked, driving privileges are not taken away, and jobs are not lost because they make legal decisions to use cannabis responsibly.

The new NORML will bring activists and academicians, economists and entrepreneurs, to political forums, explaining how justly taxing cannabis legally today can stop the bleeding of state, city and village budgets tomorrow.

The new NORML will still need and provide the national canvas with a network of criminal defense attorneys to represent clients who are wrongly arrested and unjustly prosecuted, from patients with medical conditions to adult drivers illegally stopped.

The new NORML needs to remind Americans that decriminalization in 18 states means we still have a ways to go in 32 others, where nearly a million Americans a year still go to jail for consuming cannabis. 

Thus, the new NORML needs to remind everyone that apathy and inertia has no room for intrusion; that our advocacy must still be engaged, that our voices still be heard.

The new NORML thus needs to blend innovative social media tools to drive activists with initiatives from coast to coast and in community after community. With hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook, and millions of cannabis consumers living and supporting our cause all across America, our word must be spread on the web and throughout the country. 

We must remind Americans everywhere that it is unjust and unfair for adults consuming cannabis privately and personally to get arrested anywhere, anytime, or in any place.

The new NORML needs to be advocates not just for patients who want access to safe medicine and fair distribution systems, but adults who demand the right to responsible use along with just access for righteous, recreational use, needing no apologies for exercising their individual sovereignty openly and freely.

The new NORML also needs to be advocates who rectify the injustices of past decades, for individuals whose futures were destroyed by a drug war that failed to do anything but ruin good lives with bad laws.

The new NORML needs to marshal public policy so that the laws are changed everywhere not in the next few decades, but in the next few years. To achieve national reform, we need to harness the energy and network of drug policy reform organizations throughout this country. We need to speak with a common voice and universal message.

The message to be shared and the story to be told is not just that prohibition was wrong all along, or that the drug war has been a financial and moral failure. That is a past we have learned all too well.

The message for the new NORML is to state that Americans citizens have always come to support equal civil liberties for all, from women to African Americans, to our friends in the gay and lesbian community. After decades of pain, that morning has come for cannabis consumers. The new NORML will celebrate the future, not condemn the past.

For 40 years, NORML has been on the side of those who embraced individual choice and the responsible use of cannabis, as an extension of personal freedom. 

Now, more than ever, the new NORML will remain by your side in order to ensure that as cannabis is distributed and disseminated to consumers from state to state, or coast to coast, it becomes readily accessible, equitably affordable and universally safe.

Thank you,

Norm Kent

Chair, NORML Board of Directors 

NORML Blog

• A Vision for a New NORML

  by Erik Altieri, NORML Communications Director February 28, 2013 A Message from the Chair of NORML’s Board of Directors, Norm Kent:
  
  NORML is the pioneer, the grand patron and founder of the marijuana policy reform movement in America. We are still here and by your side, and we are needed now, more than ever.
  Some have said that as our nation moves towards medicalization, decriminalization, or legalization, our tasks will be diminished, our duties lessened, our essence threatened.
  The truth is that it is just the opposite.
  Now, with cannabis reforms about to blossom in city after city, from small communities to large counties, our nation needs a respected consumer advocacy group more than ever.
  Our nation needs a lobby such as the new NORML, firmly planted, and nationally respected, which will protect the rights of cannabis consumers, as no one else has in the past or can in the future.
  Our nation needs a new NORML, which ensures that the distribution of cannabis to anyone is universally safe, readily accessible and fairly affordable to everyone.
  Our nation needs a new NORML that ensures that the laws which legislatures pass favor freedom and fairness, not moneymakers or mercenaries.
  Our nation needs a new NORML that ensures patients have access to safe medicine, consumers acquire healthy products, and distribution mechanisms protect gender, age, and race, available not just to corporate conglomerates but individual entrepreneurs.
  The new NORML today contains a NORML Women’s Alliance representing the power of feminism and professionalism, bringing passion and gender diversity to the cause of personal freedom and individual choice.
  The new NORML brings vast youth advocacy to the table, with hundreds of chapters in 50 states, young men and women fighting with their heart and soul to ensure scholarships are not revoked, driving privileges are not taken away, and jobs are not lost because they make legal decisions to use cannabis responsibly.
  The new NORML will bring activists and academicians, economists and entrepreneurs, to political forums, explaining how justly taxing cannabis legally today can stop the bleeding of state, city and village budgets tomorrow.
  The new NORML will still need and provide the national canvas with a network of criminal defense attorneys to represent clients who are wrongly arrested and unjustly prosecuted, from patients with medical conditions to adult drivers illegally stopped.
  The new NORML needs to remind Americans that decriminalization in 18 states means we still have a ways to go in 32 others, where nearly a million Americans a year still go to jail for consuming cannabis.
  Thus, the new NORML needs to remind everyone that apathy and inertia has no room for intrusion; that our advocacy must still be engaged, that our voices still be heard.
  The new NORML thus needs to blend innovative social media tools to drive activists with initiatives from coast to coast and in community after community. With hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook, and millions of cannabis consumers living and supporting our cause all across America, our word must be spread on the web and throughout the country. We must remind Americans everywhere that it is unjust and unfair for adults consuming cannabis privately and personally to get arrested anywhere, anytime, or in any place.
  The new NORML needs to be advocates not just for patients who want access to safe medicine and fair distribution systems, but adults who demand the right to responsible use along with just access for righteous, recreational use, needing no apologies for exercising their individual sovereignty openly and freely.
  The new NORML also needs to be advocates who rectify the injustices of past decades, for individuals whose futures were destroyed by a drug war that failed to do anything but ruin good lives with bad laws.
  The new NORML needs to marshal public policy so that the laws are changed everywhere not in the next few decades, but in the next few years. To achieve national reform, we need to harness the energy and network of drug policy reform organizations throughout this country. We need to speak with a common voice and universal message.
  The message to be shared and the story to be told is not just that prohibition was wrong all along, or that the drug war has been a financial and moral failure. That is a past we have learned all too well.
  The message for the new NORML is to state that Americans citizens have always come to support equal civil liberties for all, from women to African Americans, to our friends in the gay and lesbian community. After decades of pain, that morning has come for cannabis consumers. The new NORML will celebrate the future, not condemn the past.
  For 40 years, NORML has been on the side of those who embraced individual choice and the responsible use of cannabis, as an extension of personal freedom.
  Now, more than ever, the new NORML will remain by your side in order to ensure that as cannabis is distributed and disseminated to consumers from state to state, or coast to coast, it becomes readily accessible, equitably affordable and universally safe.
  Thank you,
  Norm Kent
  Chair, NORML Board of Directors

- See more at: http://blog.norml.org/#sthash.fYauLtL1.dpuf

All We Are Saying is 'Give Pot a Chance'

By Norm Kent

More and more prudent politicians, thoughtful columnists, and fiscally responsible legislators are re-thinking outdated marijuana laws. It is long overdue, and thoroughly welcome.

The mainstream view is to now decriminalize marijuana entirely, or allow for its distribution to adults legally. In fact, more than 70 percent of Americans support, at the very least, legalizing medical marijuana. Last year, citizens both in Colorado and the state of Washington voted for legalization. It is amazing what can happen when you close the curtain in that voting booth. We are developing a national recognition the ‘drug war’ has been a failure.

For decades, politicians running on ‘law and order’ campaigns were afraid to speak out about unjust drug laws, for fear of being perceived as ‘soft on crime.’ Consequently, they supported sending people to the joint for smoking joints. Florida is one of the more archaic states. Just a little more than a half an ounce of marijuana is still a felony, which can cost you not just your freedom, but expose you to losing a job, college scholarships and having your car forfeited. That is ludicrous.

In Florida this year, though, medical marijuana initiatives will be presented to the state legislature for consideration. Last week, in the Sun Sentinel, even conservative columnist Kingsley Guy suggested our nation’s drug laws be reconsidered. Leonard Pitts did so last year in the Herald. Encouraging and responsible voices for decriminalization are emerging everywhere. Across the nation, legislators or citizens in over 18 states have now voted for decriminalization or medical use. The wave has arrived. Let's all ride it.

Statistics for national marijuana arrests are kept by the FBI. In its last report, for 2011, 757,969 arrests for marijuana were reported nationwide- and over 663,000 of them were for simple possession. But in progressive states, where dispensaries are allowed and decriminalization has been advanced, arrests are down and society is not compromised. The trains still run on time and the world has not crumbled. In fact, new cottage industries are springing up for 'medibles,' herbal uses, and natural homeopathic uses for cannabis.

Three decades of harsh drug laws have done little more than institutionalize racism into our justice system. Statistically, minorities have always been incarcerated at a drastically higher rate than their Caucasian counterparts. But if you think Americans love guns, we love jails more. In fact, we put people in jail at 5 to 10 times the rate of most countries in the world, including all the democracies in Western Europe. But locking people up for smoking a joint is asinine, and must come to an end.

Last week, an appellate court stupidly refused to reschedule marijuana, maintaining its classification as a harmful drug with no respected medical uses. The decision employed strained logic and lacked common sense. It ignored documented studies establishing the medicinal uses of cannabis historically and presently. It will be used as a tool for continued repression and arrest. Hopefully, a higher appellate court will vaporize that ruling.  It was forty years ago that a Presidential commission had the foresight to recommend decriminalizing marijuana. Instead, our nation launched an unconscionable drug war against innocent citizens. That war is not against drugs. That war is against people, and it has inexcusably compromised our civil liberties.

None of this makes any sense in terms of public safety, health or fiscal policy. Federal crackdowns have not curtailed the ever-growing and omnipresent trade in marijuana. However, legalizing marijuana, or even allowing for medical dispensaries, will enhance urban and rural tax bases, and provide medical marijuana to those who need it. The federal government should defer to those states now doing so, allowing them a chance to see if this new approach won’t work successfully. If it can save lives, cut prison costs, generate tax revenues, and expand our essential freedoms, we ought to ‘give pot a chance.’

It is time for courageous community leaders and politicians to speak out against unjust marijuana laws, especially since most of them have smoked pot themselves. And look- they have grown up to become respected realtors, entrepreneurs and even educators. Let’s get real about pot. If you are a member of a local city commission, you should be directing your police agency to make pot arrests their lowest priority.

If Republicans really want to espouse core values such as individual liberty and states’ rights, along with economic opportunity, they should join in the emerging common sense approach to decriminalizing marijuana. If Democrats want to stand up for equality for all classes of citizens, and ending social injustice, they should also be proposing laws for responsible adult use of marijuana.

The decriminalization and legalization of marijuana is and has always been a cultural and political struggle. The laws against public legal consumption were never in the public interest. They have been tools to silence dissidents, minorities, and young people living outside the mainstream.  The federal government has always been the bully. Well, it is time we started passing anti-bullying laws.

The gay community should be especially concerned as well. Informal polling in the LGBT community shows not only 80 percent support decriminalization, but routine use and social acceptance, from age 22 to 82. Less than a month ago in an emerging gay-centric community in South Florida, Wilton Manors, a 75-year-old retired Harvard professor was taken to jail for smoking a joint in his living room. The laws would be a joke if they did not fashion such an injustice from coast to coast.

If pot smokers had come out of the closet with the courage and numbers that gay and lesbians have, we would be further along the path to legalization. But maybe the LGBT community can do for cannabis activists what they have done for themselves- stand up and be counted. Gay men and women should actively support and join the growing nationwide movement for marijuana legalization.

You ought to be able to put into your body what you want, whether it’s a partner’s private part or a joint you rolled. As the Supreme Court justices wrote in the landmark case defining gay rights in Texas just a few years ago,  there is a sphere of civil liberties beyond government control. That is the fundamental premise of our constitution, and it is one we should always fight for. It is not about the pot. It is about your right to choose. As gay men and women, we should always choose free choice as our governor. As American citizens, we should embrace those who do so as well.

NORML By Your Side

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NORML By Your Side

By Norm Kent

"Of all the tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive...”-----C.S. Lewis

Next month in Los Angeles, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws will meet at its annual convention.

We are at a critical time for reform in America. We are at the precipice of change, despite unfortunate, untimely, and uncalled for setbacks by the Obama Administration.

Medical dispensaries in California have been under attack by federal prosecutors and state law enforcement officers. Local cities are backing away from their licensing of medical marijuana programs, authorized by state law.

NORML has always backed reform efforts, but last year a storm of controversy ensued when our own national director referred to the California plan as a ‘sham.’ In truth, advocates for the reform of marijuana laws never intended for pot to be conditionally ‘medicalized.’ We wanted it unconditionally legalized. Nothing has changed since the organization was founded 40 years ago.

Long before there were pharmacies for the federal government to raid, Thomas Szasz, a noted civil libertarian, writing in Liberty Magazine, warned us about the dangers of creating a therapeutic state. Here are his exact words:

“Drug prohibitionists were alarmed last November, when voters in Arizona and California endorsed the referendums permitting the use of marijuana for "medical purposes." Opponents of drug prohibition ought to be even more alarmed: The advocates of medical marijuana have embraced a tactic that retards the repeal of drug prohibition and reinforces the moral legitimacy of prevailing drug policies.”

No one at NORML has ever said that marijuana is not medicine. No one is saying that the war on drugs has not been an intrinsically evil exercise. We have even had voices argue that all use is medical.

The issue advocates debate today is the best and most appropriate path to legalization. Ironically, many thought the first step would be to support statewide medical marijuana programs. Instead, that highway has led to a federal law enforcement bulldozer. Innocent people are getting arrested and prosecuted.

NORML’s position has been to advocate for the free and unfettered use of marijuana by responsible citizens.

Why should we require any free citizen, patients included, to have to explain to a doctor why they are responsibly consuming a natural herb they should otherwise be free to use as they wish anyway?

Why should we embrace a system, where we know in advance, some people are going to use a ruse to get their medicine? It has contributed to the very consequences we are dealing with today.

When you position yourself as being an advocate of medical marijuana programs supervised by the state to help sick patients, you are correspondingly saying that the substance being administered should be regulated and controlled by that entity. You are not saying it should be freely disseminated to the general population at their leisure.  

NORML has a broad duty to serve the general public, not just a limited obligation to protect the medical marijuana clientele. Regrettably, the federal government is now demonstrating with arrests where that path has taken us, ignoring even decisions made by the states for their own citizens. 

Americans need to author their own drug policy, and not abdicate that right to physicians, the pharmaceutical lobby, or the government. Thomas Szasz was prophetic when he warned we were blinding ourselves by asking the government to adopt a “more rational policy.”

Any policy orchestrated by the government is simply another instrument of control inhibiting what should be the inalienable right of free citizens to decide which substances to use or avoid within their own bodies. If we bought into this idea of medicalization with governmental regulation, it was only because we hoped it would be a stepping-stone that would facilitate legalization. The broad primrose path sometimes leads to a nasty place.

Articles in the NY Times dating back to 2004 warned about the abuses inherent in California’s pioneering medical marijuana program. Shrewd reformers at the local and national level knew that these defects would eventually lead to a law enforcement backlash, which could potentially undermine the ability of patients to get their medicine. While justly empowering citizens to acquire marijuana as a medicine, we also saw it could lead to more stringent controls. Sadly, we face that today from a hypocritical Obama administration. We can say we are surprised this particular president reversed his course. We cannot say we are surprised that this day has come.

Consequently, rather than enhancing our civil liberties, we may have set into motion a process which diminished them. Allowing for medical marijuana access under a system of government administration is simply not the same as legalization, which provides adults with free and unfettered access to consume cannabis. Medical marijuana, for all its value, still has set forth a path of regulation, better perhaps than what existed before- but still not where we need to be.

Still, for any one of us that supports legalization not to also support medicalization is foolish. The fact is cannabis is a useful medicinal treatment alternative for dozens of ailments suffered by thousands of Americans. Not to allow its distribution through lawful and licensed dispensaries is inexcusable, indefensible, and unconscionable. So NORML very much joins with citizens from Colorado to California and all those communities now opening their doors to medical dissemination. Still, we can even do more than that.

Let’s move to a higher plateau and address the real issue of freeing nearly one million Americans a year from arrest and prosecution for the use of marijuana, medicinally or recreationally.

Medical? Recreational? Spiritual? Your body, your mind, your choice. A civil liberty is a civil liberty regardless of why you exercise that right.

Join with NORML next month at the Omni Hotel in Los Angeles and express your preference that marijuana be freed from slavery. Go to our website at www.norml.org and register as soon as you can.

Pot Injustice Pervades Public

The city of Wilton Manors has decided they will not oppose my law firm’s sign being placed on a Wilton Drive Bus bench.

Society is safe, thank god.

If you missed the controversy last month, Wilton Manors had initially forbidden my bench ad because of the pot leaf in it (see below). If you are “busted,” you are encouraged to call the Criminal Defense Law Center of South Florida, which is the fancy name I have given my law firm.

My law office partner, Russell Cormican, and I, decided to advertise the firm’s new name and logo, and our move to a new office in the Legacy Bank Building. Often, we represent good people charged with criminal acts because of stupid laws, which long ago should have been discarded.  None are more glaring than those arrested for the use of marijuana.

Take Elvy Mussika, a Hollywood woman who grew and smoked her own pot in order to counteract glaucoma, which was causing her to lose her eyesight.  After 23 operations to remove cataracts, she discovered that the THC in marijuana reduced the intraocular pressure in her eye canals, enabling her to see without surgery.

 Faced with a cultivation charge 25 years ago, in 1987, she challenged the State of Florida, saying she had a constitutional right to see, and argued her possession and use of marijuana was lawful, based on medical necessity. A jury agreed, 24 years ago today, and we won the case. Now, Mussika is one of many activists who will attend the Seattle Hempfest this weekend. In fact, far away in the northwest corner of the United States, over 150,000 pot warriors will gather at Myrtle Beach State Park in Elliott Bay to demand the legalization of marijuana.

One of the people that should be there with her is Boynton Beach resident Robert Platshorn, 69, the leader of The Silver Tour, fighting to educate senior citizens about the medicinal uses of marijuana — how it is an alternative to traditional therapies, with less residual consequences. In 1987, he was in jail.

Unfortunately, Platshorn served the longest sentence in America for marijuana — over 30 years — but he is still a victim of America’s drug war. Still under federal parole supervision, it seems that the government is now questioning his right to attend festivals promoting the decriminalization of marijuana.  He is working for drug law reform. The federal government is insisting on drug war compliance.

Like Elvy Mussika, Platshorn will eventually prevail, because Truth cannot be suppressed or silenced by government agents acting foolishly. It blows up in their face and Justice eventually emerges. If you want to help fight for Platshorn’s cause, you can go on Facebook and help fund his remarkable video, “Should Grandma Smoke Pot?” You can write to the Parole Commission and tell them to let him travel. And you can read his book, The Black Tuna Diaries.

Unfortunately, the national media does not adequately cover the marijuana activist movement in America. If it did, you would know that over 18 states in America and the District of Columbia have decriminalized marijuana.

You would also know that in each and every place where a decriminalization bill gets on a ballot, it wins — almost everyone today 35 and older has smoked pot, and everyone 16 and older is willing to try it. And Platshorn is showing how marijuana is medicine for seniors.

In different decades, both Mussika and Platshorn have stood alone fighting battles against injustice and a legal system that has been far too harsh and cruel to marijuana smokers. Though 25 years apart in their dilemmas, they are inextricably woven together by a thread of injustice fostered and furthered even today by the Obama Administration.

In California, medical dispensaries for marijuana users have proliferated by virtue of local ordinances and state laws allowing for the same. Sadly, tragically, and I dare say moronically, the Obama Administration has engaged in an all out war on those dispensaries and lawfully licensed businesses.

Disregarding the people’s will, the U.S. and its Department of Justice have raided the establishments, seized the inventory of medicines that were going to be provided to patients, and even arrested numerous owners who had in good faith opened businesses according to local laws.

As an activist who has spent 40 years fighting for the decriminalization of marijuana laws, I have found the acts of the Obama Administration unconscionable, unjust and unacceptable. It is flat out the reason why I will not support his re-election, despite his noble and forward record on LGBT civil rights. Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, is most likely to get my vote even though he has not gotten the national media attention he deserves.

Nationally, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) is carrying on a battle originally engaged 40 years ago when its founder, Keith Stroup, first called for an end to prohibition by 1980. Locally, a small group of activists is petitioning the city of Miami Beach to decriminalize pot, but it is a strong and vocal chapter you can also find on Facebook, led by a middle aged mom, Karen Goldstein, who saw her own roommate once unjustifiably arrested for using marijuana while fighting a disabling multiple sclerosis.

When it comes to marijuana, there is injustice on every corner. So that sign on Wilton Drive is where it needs to be, and no city is going to tell me I can’t have it there as long as their cops perpetuate the inequity of the drug war.

The only danger facing a pot smoker sitting on that bench is not from the weed but from a speeding drunk driver who hits him while he’s just sitting there.

City Tries to Snuff Out Pot Ad

A massage parlor can’t advertise on park benches in Wilton Manors — and now neither can I.

Here I am, the vice chairman of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), and the city is telling me I can’t place an ad on a bus bench because it’s got a big pot leaf behind the text.

Here I am, a guy who has spent 40 years in the trenches as a criminal defense lawyer representing pot smokers, helping pave the way for 18 states to decriminalize marijuana, and our own little city of Wilton Manors now tells me that my ad is “objectionable.”

Hey, I did not mean to become the center of a news item. But now, a little ad that would have caught a few eyes is taking up a page in my newspaper. I guess I should thank the city, not bury them. But first, let me tell the story and the facts.

The City of Wilton Manors entered into a contract with Martin Outdoor Media a few years ago, allowing them to place 48 bus benches with professionally designed, commercial advertising on them in and about the city. No problem.

The city, however, imposed a restrictive condition on their contract with Martin, stating that “advertising of tobacco, firearms, massage parlors, adult book stores, adult theaters, adult escort services and pornographic or obscene matters are prohibited. The determination of objectionable, obscene advertising shall be the right of the City, and their decisions shall be final.”

My gut reaction at looking at that statute is how dare they presume that licensed massage parlors are presumptively obscene or offensive? But wait, it gets better.

I submitted an ad to replace the SFGN ad at the epicenter of Wilton Manors, on the Drive in front of the Alibi. The ad I submitted is to promote my other career, my law practice, the Criminal Defense Law Center of South Florida.

As you can see, the ad features the word ‘Busted?’ superimposed on top of a pot leaf. As is the nature of the industry, I am a lawyer who represents people who get busted. Note, I am advertising my law firm, not marijuana.

Nevertheless, our city, after meeting with the City Manager, the Leisure Services Director, Patrick Cann, has rejected my ad. They told Martin Media not to place it. They deemed it “objectionable.” They courteously and politely asked (told) me to cooperate with their advertising program, and requested me to “consider revising it.”

Cann, a nice enough guy, even added: “I greatly appreciate your consideration and would like to thank you for your support with the advertisement program.”

As I was writing this, Cann emailed me again to say the city isn’t actually saying I can’t do it, but ‘requesting’ I don’t do it.

Unfortunately, that does not hold water — they already told Martin Media they preferred not running the ad, and without the city’s approval, Martin Media won’t run it. In fact, the city said it was the “depiction of an illegal drug” in the ad, i.e., weed, that’s inconsistent with their objectives.

Well, here is the problem: I don’t agree or support the program as worded, and not just because I am bucking for a free massage from a wealth of licensed and legitimate massage therapists, who are getting screwed here, too.

First of all, I find nothing ‘objectionable’ about pot leaves. In fact, I love pot leaves. I wish I could grow them in my home in South Florida like I do in my apartment in San Francisco, where, as a surviving cancer patient, I have a grow license and medical marijuana card.

Second, the bottom line is that my ad does not violate the city’s contract. I am not posting something that is inherently ‘objectionable.’ What are objectionable for 40 years are the outdated laws that make pot illegal still. Marijuana has been decriminalized in 18 states, dozens of cities, and about 200 million Americans agree with me, but not Wilton Manors.

If more pot smokers came out of the closet the way gay people did, there would be less laws in America restricting pot possession. Hell, I just got back from Chicago, where their city council voted 43-3 to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of pot. As a guy who stands up for his clients, I sure as hell am going to stand up for myself. Like the country song goes, if you don’t stand for something, you will for anything. I won’t fall for this.

And I think this rule is beyond dumb that it’s almost comical.

It’s freaking 2012. There is a cable TV show called ‘Weeds.’ Presidents and pontiffs smoke the damn herb, and I bet there are plenty of residents of Wilton Manors who do as well.

Objectionable?

Please, people are going to laugh about this while smoking a joint. Instead of focusing on building a parking lot in the center of the city, engineering economic development for its small businesses, and making its epicenter more pedestrian friendly, the city is worried about a sign with a pot leaf in it?

You have got to be kidding. I wonder if we drug tested every single one of our city employees, including commissioners and cops, for marijuana this week, how many would come up “objectionable.”

You make the call. Do you find the ad offensive? Should it be on a bus bench or not?

The back-and-forth with Wilton Manors is still on going as of press time. Check back next week and I’ll let you know how it all went down.

A Legal Take on Ryan Braun

‪A Legal Take on Ryan Braun

by Norm Kent

Vice President, National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws

After being exonerated by major league baseball yesterday from his potential suspension, Ryan Braun owes all fantasy baseball players an apology.

In his press release acknowledging the support he had from his family and friends, he forgot to thank all those early-drafting fantasy players who stood by him and selected him in the top 20 picks. After all, as the NL MVP he was one of baseball's best players in 2011.

But now let me speak as a constitutional rights lawyer. Neither a technicality nor a loophole today freed Ryan Braun from a 50 game suspension. What saved Braun today was the fact that we leave in a society which is supposed to preserve due process, insure fairness, and honor agreements protecting the rights of employees. Baseball is no different. Players are very well paid obviously, but as Curt Flood, challenging baseball's free agency system years ago once stated, 'A high paid slave is still a slave.'

Today, baseball players are hardly slaves. Free agency has given them vast negotiating rights, but that does not change the fact that drug testing procedures in America are inherently flawed. Every day, using a substantially compromised field test, cops arrest innocent people for purportedly carrying contraband that turns out not to be so. The list and litany of false positives could and do fill a book, and I cite a few examples in a link at the bottom of the page. Beware of Dr. Bronner's natural, herbal, liquid soaps. They could put you in jail.

Nevertheless, in this era of steroids and performance enhancing drugs, major league baseball players and its management negotiated drug-testing protocols to insure the integrity of the game and trust of its fan base. However, as lawyers for the players sat down to work out the drug testing initiatives, it was imperative that mechanisms and processes be implemented that would insure the integrity of drug testing and fairness for both sides.

Scientists and lawyers had seen for years a panoply of poorly administered procedures which compromised the accuracy of results. These included a variety of situations, from not properly storing drug specimens at specific temperatures, to failing to initiate a timely testing of the sample. The reason meticulous guidelines and standards were imposed for all drug testing was because the failure to do so would render the test inherently unreliable, and could very well lead to false positives wrongly accusing an otherwise innocent individual.

The issue today with Ryan Braun is apparently chain-of-custody, but the reason chain-of-custody is critical is because the failure to preserve it exactly could potentially compromise the integrity of the test. That is why the failure to safeguard chain of custody was negotiated as a material factor in relying upon a drug test in the first place- because there is a history of insanely false positives when chain-of-custody protocols are not exactingly followed, or the specimens are not tracked thoroughly.

As the Ryan Braun case unfolds, it appears those procedures, agreed upon in writing by major league baseball and the players’ association, were not followed. He was ‘acquitted’ of wrongdoing not by a technicality. He was ‘acquitted’ of wrongdoing because of the wrongdoing by major league baseball operatives not abiding by the agreement they entered into.

This is not about a player getting off. This is about a contract being honored; about both parties being faithful to the rules and regulations they mutually negotiated before a player’s career could be interrupted and his reputation irreparably stained.

It is not that drug testing lost today. Fairness won. It is not a technicality that saved Ryan Braun. It is that we as a society have preserved due process, and the same procedures that have been used to affirm a dozen previous rulings on steroids, have now been applied to exonerate one. That is the way it should be when one side does not abide by its agreements. This time, it was the owners that lost, but neither did baseball win.

What won was the right of a censured athlete to argue an appeal and mandate that the landlords of the game respect the rights of its tenants pursuant to the terms of a lease they mutually negotiated beforehand.

For more information on how drug testing procedures in America are flawed, visit this article I published at http://jaablog.jaablaw.com/2011/08/18/field-drug-tests-fa.aspx It is hard to believe a bar of chocolate or some herbal incense can put you in jail, but in our Amerika, it still can.

As for Norm Kent, the fantasy baseball player, I should have known better. I should have had more faith in my own words, and drafted Ryan Braun in the freaking first round. My bad.