The Birth of a Cannabis Nation

The blogosphere has been abuzz of late with news and analysis about cannabis legalization. Certainly, despite the federal government's best efforts to never ever talk about cannabis legalization let alone debate it, the national debate is now raging. California, by and large, has led the way. The most populous state in the Union has seen citizens place a series of ballot initiatives on the statewide ballot over a good part of the last two decades so that cannabis is a political issue in California every few years. With the most populous state of the Union holding regular votes about state cannabis policy, the debate is happening with or without the federal government.

Indeed, for years the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) has assiduously avoided any and all media situations wherein it would be asked the hard questions about the futility of the War on Drugs, the wisdom of drug prohibition, or the medical benefits of cannabis. Rather, when the ONDCP exposed itself to the press, it was under very tightly controlled circumstances where no one was present to knock its messenger off his/her carefully rehearsed talking points. It appears that the ONDCP knew that it would lose any debate so that it diligently and wisely avoided getting into one.

Moreover, in order to bolster if not outright create its talking points, the ONDCP has been hard at work manufacturing data in support of its political agenda and has shown little interest in open research on cannabis. For example, in the past decade federal funding for court alternatives to incarceration entailing "drug treatment" have been offered to thousands of teens arrested and charged with misdemeanors including the possession of cannabis. By offering these teens a non-incarceration alternative mandating "drug treatment," the numbers of teens entering treatment for cannabis has skyrocketed over the last decade. But rather than acknowledging this obvious cause and effect relationship to explain the huge increase in the number of teens seeking drug treatment for cannabis, the ONDCP has blamed the statistical increase on the increased potency of cannabis. When your data sets have been so obviously manipulated, and you are arguing that something other than your creation of the data is the cause for the uptick in youth seeking drug treatment for cannabis, you really don't want to face cross-examination by a prepared member of the media with an agenda to expose your fraud.

Beyond manufacturing their own data sets, a successful drug war strategy also required the federal government to actively suppress research into the beneficial uses of cannabis as medicine. It already had to deal with pre-existing research suggesting that cannabis was therapeutically beneficial in many ways, and it would be damned if any more such research was conducted. With the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) holding a monopoly in the United States on the distribution of cannabis for scientific research, and it deciding which researchers conducting what research received cannabis, and it being the same DEA that repeatedly rejects the findings of its administrative law judges finding therapeutic uses for cannabis, it was no surprise that the DEA rejected virtually all reasearch applications it ever received that sought to investigate the therapeutic benefits of cannabis while granting applications that sought to study any of its "dangers." Indeed, when it comes to cannabis, the federal government has been hard at work creating an alternative reality.

So for quite a number of years meaningful national debate on cannabis legalization has been taking place without the federal government which deigns to talk AT America and not WITH America about cannabis. This has permitted most U.S. Senators and Representatives to avoid talking about the horrendous failure that is the War on Drugs. For sure, the federal government has had its plate full over the past decade operating a War on Terror (modeled largely after its failed War on Drugs), dealing with a near complete collapse of the banking system, and working on health care reform, just to name a few. But the argument that the War on Drugs is a relatively unimportant federal issue is starting to sound more and more ridiculous to more and more Americans. Soldiers coming home from the war in Afghanistan are spreading the word about how the US military is turning a blind eye to poppy cultivation in Afghanistan as part of its military strategy of engaging the locals and providing Afghanis a better standard of living than under the Taliban. This is occurring while we continue to arrest and incarcerate Americans for possession of nonprescription opiods; a double standard to say the least. It was only about fifteen years ago when the federal government admitted that as a means of illegally funding a revolution against the democratically elected Sandanista government of Nicaragua, the CIA imported cocaine into the US in the 80s and 90s and sold it into the streets of southern California as a means to raise money for guns. Meanwhile, as the federal government starts to jail Americans for supplying medical cannabis consistent with state laws, and more and more Americans start to realize that the government has been lying to them about the harmful effects of the most readily available illicit drug in America, more and more Americans are starting to understand that the problem in this country with cannabis is the laws against it and not the substance itself. Still our federal elected officials are trying their best to ignore the 800-lb gorilla in the room.

However, recent events in Mexico have started to change that. By now the killings in the Mexican Drug War are national news. The US states bordering Mexico have all felt the effects of that Drug War. A recent study by the Rand Corporation found that if California voted for cannabis legalization in November 2010, and assuming for the sake of argument that cannabis grown in California would be smuggled to other states to meet demand there, that Mexican drug trafficking organizations likely would lose 65 to 85 percent of all of their revenues from smuggling cannabis into the United States, accounting for a total loss of approximately 20% of all of their revenues from all sources. Still, in late October the ONDCP campaigned against California's Prop 19 to legalize cannabis despite that it knew that California legalization would deprive these drug trafficking organizations of substantial revenues. Facts such as these are causing more Americans than ever to question the wisdom of the War on Drugs which in turn is starting to turn up the heat on federal elected officials who are finding it harder and harder to ignore what is happening along our southern border. But still they by and large diligently avoid addressing the issue publicly with only a handful of local Congressmen from the border states even acknowledging the situation.

Enter Willie Nelson. In late November the U.S. Border Patrol stopped Willie Nelson's "multistate crime wave of softly singing and strumming a guitar" when they arrested the beloved country music icon in Texas, 100 miles from the border, for possessing six ounces of cannabis on his tour bus. Laying aside the questionable legality of the search by the Border Patrol over 100 miles from the border, after the police seized Willie's cannabis, Willie's six ounces not so magically turned into less than four ounces. Thus, while Willie initially was facing a felony possession charge under Texas law, now he faces only a misdemeanor possession charge. Nonetheless, Willie Nelson got really, really annoyed. Annoyed to the point that he stated publicly that he thought it was time for Americans to take back their freedoms and form a "Teapot Party" to end cannabis criminalization. The timing might be just right.

Indeed, the demographics suggest that it is an idea whose time is almost upon us. According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll taken earlier this year, support nationally for medical cannabis is at 80%. A Gallup poll released in October showed an all-time high of 46% of Americans supporting outright legalization. That is up 2% from two years ago. The same poll showed that opposition to cannabis legalization was at 50%, an all-time low. Exit polls in California demonstrated that the staunchest opponents to legalization were the oldest Americans and that America's youth by and large supported cannabis legalization. This is not surprising. The youth of America know what the government denies: that cannabis is much less harmful than the legal alternatives and that cannabis is easier for kids to obtain than alcohol. Kids these days learn the lesson young that government is stupid.

So as the so-called greatest generation begans to pass on and the youth of today become more engaged in the political process as they age, and given the demographic trends, it seems that cannabis legalization is inevitable and it is only a question of time. But in the meantime our jails are filled with non-violent drug offenders and many Americans know someone who has spent serious time in federal prison for possession of marijuana. With a movement afoot for smaller government, it seems that the downsizing of law enforcement and correctional institutions/industries by calling an end to the War on Drugs seems a logical place to start. You would think that the Tea Party and the Libertarian Party would agree. However California exit polling data showed that 65% of people who identified themselves as Republicans, as most Tea Partiers do, opposed Prop 19. And while some Tea Partiers say that the party supports drug legalization, others admantly deny as much. Its funny how some Tea Partiers sing a different tune about downsizing big government when "small government" runs counter to their strongly held religious views that the ingestion of drugs is a defilement of God's property.

Necessity being the mother of invention, and the Tea Party not providing the answers, so was Willie Nelson's Teapot Party born.