The Kent Vent

Pot Smokers See the Rainbow

2013-11-29T19:05:00.001-05:00

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

2013-03-01T06:47:00.001-05:00

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'

2013-02-02T19:54:00.002-05:00

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

2012-09-11T15:21:00.000-04:00

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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

2012-08-28T20:39:00.001-04:00

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

2012-08-26T12:08:00.000-04:00

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

2012-02-24T00:42:00.002-05:00

‪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.

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.

The Kent Vent

Pot Smokers See the Rainbow

A Vision for the New NORML

NORML Blog

A Vision for a New NORML

All We Are Saying is 'Give Pot a Chance'

NORML By Your Side

Pot Injustice Pervades Public

City Tries to Snuff Out Pot Ad

A Legal Take on Ryan Braun

A Felon for Life

Reefer Madness

Obama Betrays Promise as Feds Crackdown on California Dispensaries

A miscarriage of justice on marijuana

You Are Right to Remain Silent: Just Shut Up

Tim's Anniversary

Marijuana Legalization Stocks

Comedian’s Video Supports Pro Pot Legalization Drive

Guest Blog: Free Marc Emery

Time to Get Mad as Hell

Face Book Opens it Wallet

Renowned Marijuana Activist Passes Away- LA Times Report

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

Thanks for Life

Adam Lambert’s Erotic Performance Deserves Praise

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

Breckinridge Lights Up the Slopes

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