(Toke of the Town) It’s time for the cannabis community to be more aware of the stands taken by judges and other public servants when it comes to marijuana, and the NORML Women’s Alliance is taking steps to make that happen in Los Angeles County.

The L.A. branch of the NORML Women’s Alliance (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) on Monday launched a new voter education project focused on candidates for Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge in the June 5 primary election.

“We at the NORML Women’s Alliance believe that judges hold one of the most important elected offices in our system of government,” said Cheri Sicard, Los Angeles County community leader for the group. ”Judges, more than any other government officials, have a direct impact on the daily lives of the constituents they serve. Yet voters are often least informed about the candidates they elect to these important positions. We want to change that.”

Please be advised that on Monday, May 7, 2012 at 4:20 p.m., the local chapter of the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) will protest the Drug Enforcement Administration’s detention of UCSD Engineering student Daniel Chong for five days without food and water. The protest will take place outside of the DEA office compound at 4560 Viewridge Avenue in San Diego. If you can’t be in San Diego, show your solidarity by joining the protest live online at live.norml.org.

Read more: http://blog.norml.org/2012/05/04/norml-to-protest-d-e-a-imprisonment-starvation-of-ucsd-student/

Today @ 1:30 PM (eastern) the NORML and High Times-sponsored Silver Tour, hosted by America’s longest serving cannabis prisoner Robert Platshorn, is live from Temple Shaarei Shalom in Boynton Beach, Florida.

Topic of the day: Teaching senior citizens about the safety, utility, effectiveness, cost savings and politics of medical cannabis.

Click below to watch or go to the UStream page:

Featured speakers include Irvin Rosenfeld (one of the five federal medical cannabis patients who receive 300 pre-rolled ‘joints’ monthly from a special and closed-to-the-public medical cannabis research project) and former NORML board member and longtime cannabis medical researcher Mary Lynn Mathre, RN (from Patients Out of Time) and NORML Legal Committee member attorney Michael Minardi.

Defending the “medical” cannabis industry is so yesterday. Why not acknowledge the political and legal farce it is and focus on the real problem at hand: ending cannabis prohibition?

The law and court precedents are fairly clear here. Self-preservation (yes), large-scale cultivation and sales (no). It’s just this simple. The numerous actions by the Feds and state governments over the last few months make this abundantly clear:

And what more re-assertion of primacy will we get from the Feds today?

If this were the 1920s, advocacy of today’s “medical” cannabis industry would sound like a lawyer back then fronting for the legal sellers of “prescription” alcohol during Prohibition. The med-pot industry, of course, opposes actual legalization, such as last year’s Prop 19, which was also opposed by the profiteering communities in the state’s northern “grow” counties.

Prescriptive alcohol was a sham then, and the “medical” cannabis industry (not medical cannabis itself) is largely a sham now. Is this news? NORML, and lawyers like Bill Panzer, have been warning ganjapreneurs and their legal counsel at our seminars and conferences about this political and legal box canyon since at least 2002.

Steven DeAngelo, CEO of Harborside Health Center and recently star of Discovery Channel’s Weed Wars, has come under fire for his comments at the conclusion of Episode 4 where he said, “I don’t believe in legalizing cannabis for recreational purposes; I think cannabis should be used for purposes of wellness.”  Steven took some heat in cyberspace, particularly Steve Bloom’s fiery denunciation in CelebStoner.com (“Say it ain’t so, Steve DeAngelo!”).

DeAngelo has responded in CelebStoner with some backpedaling on the statement, claiming his naïveté in television by not realizing how editors would snip out his “comments denouncing all criminal penalties” and leave “no recreational legalization” hanging there out of context.  That could be the case, though the DeAngelo brothers have made the same “no recreational legalization” statements on live interviews on MSNBC (Dylan Ratigan) and FOX News (Bill O’Reilly)  leading up to the premiere of Weed Wars.  During the unedited 9:31 of the Ratigan segment and the unedited 5:17 of the O’Reilly segment, I didn’t hear any ”comments denouncing all criminal penalties”.  In fact, in the Ratigan segment I heard this exchange:

RATIGAN: So you think the recreational – the legalization of marijuana as a recreational drug is a very different debate than the use of marijuana as a medicine for specific treatment?

DeANGELOs: Absolutely.

RATIGAN: And your goal is to draw the distinction between those who are suffering in the prohibition of recreational use that is preventing them from gaining legitimate access to the medicinal use.

STEVEN DeANGELO: Yes, exactly.

RATIGAN: Do I have it?

ANDREW DeANGELO: We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

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Seventy years ago today, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, a day President Roosevelt said, “would live in infamy”. The next day, Congress declared war* and America, which had been reticent to get involved with foreign wars just a generation after “the Great War”, was at war in the Pacific, and days later, in Europe as well.

My grandfather was a part of that “Greatest Generation” and fought in the Pacific.  He’s passed on years ago, but I always remember him when this day comes around.  As a child, I saw his sergeant’s uniform, clean and pressed, hanging in a plastic bag in his closet.  That was as much as I knew about his involvement in World War II; unlike some men who never see war, he didn’t talk about it much.

My friends often kid me that I can find a marijuana angle in any news story.  Today is no different.  On December 7, 1941, cannabis had been federally prohibited for four years already.  Most states had begun eradicating and prohibiting cannabis even before 1937.  A nation founded by hemp farmers, whose first hemp plantations were sewn in 1611, had criminalized hemp farming for the first time in its history.  It hadn’t much effect; American farmers had long since switched to corn, wheat, soy, and other more profitable crops.  Hemp was cheap enough to get from overseas farmers and plenty of modern new synthetic fibers made from bountiful and cheap petroleum were too much competition for hemp in most cases.

Except warfare.  Ocean warfare require battleships and they require rigging that withstands rot, seawater, and is extremely strong, something only hemp robe and canvas can provide.  It was just a few months after Pearl Harbor that the Japanese had captured the Philippines, and with it, our primary source of illegal-to-produce-in-America hemp, so desperately needed for ships engaged in the Pacific theater.  So in the summer of 1942, America mustered up a little Hemp for Victory!

The tale of the first US Hemp for Victory mill in Polo, Illinois:

The hemp mill program was assigned to the Department of Agriculture. The program for planting and processing the hemp plant was directed by the Commodity Credit Corporation. There were to be forty-two mills in the Midwest, eleven of which were to be in Illinois. The plant in Polo, Illinois, was to be the pilot mill for the entire program. It was the first of its kind.

The Polo Hemp Mill, which began operation on November 20, 1943, consisted of mill buildings, a dryer, storage buildings, and a boiler house. The overall cost was $350,000.

At first, farmers were reluctant to raise hemp because they knew nothing about it. They feared a labor shortage at harvest time and also feared that hemp prices would be lower than those of corn prices. To acquaint the farmers with raising hemp, meetings were held at the Polo High School. The farmers were reassured that the necessary equipment would be provided for every one hundred acres of hemp. The farmers in the area then joined in the attempt to produce the fiber crop, something entirely new to the area’s agriculture.

The first carload of Kentucky hemp seed arrived in Polo in April 1943. Farmers were soon busy planting. The hemp seed was drilled into prepared ground between oats and corn planting. Soil which is suitable for growing corn is usually suitable for raising hemp.

Of course, after World War II, there was no more need for Hemp for Victory.  Oil was still cheap and plentiful and so was overseas hemp.  It’s sad that it takes something of the magnitude of a world war to return us to our hemp heritage.  Let’s hope it doesn’t take climate catastrophe to bring back the next return.

And thanks, Grandpa, for your service.

Seriously, American Cancer Society, you’re publishing this Reefer Madness on your “Complementary and Alternative Medicine” data sheet in medical marijuana?

Many researchers agree that marijuana contains known carcinogens, or chemicals that can cause cancer.

All researchers agree that water contains a known explosive, hydrogen, a volatile element that can ignite with as little as a static electricity spark.  That doesn’t mean water can cause explosions.  Chemistry matters.  Yes, cannabis smoke — all smoke — contains carcinogens.  But cannabis smoke also contains THC, which has been shown to have anti-tumoral effects and inhibits cancer cell growth through apoptosis (cell “suicide”).

Results of epidemiologic studies of marijuana and cancer risk have been inconsistent, and most recent epidemiologic studies have not found a substantial effect on cancer risk. However, some researchers caution that these studies are difficult to conduct, as some people may not be truthful about illegal habits such as smoking marijuana, and that these negative results should not be interpreted as convincing evidence of safety.

Uh… what?  We do studies that can’t distinguish an increased risk of cancer from pot smoking, but folks lie about pot, so we can’t trust the studies?  Well, that would mean the either the people who don’t get cancer are lying about smoking pot, or people who do get cancer are lying about not smoking pot.  The former doesn’t make much sense, so the author must assume there are a whole bunch of pot smokers in cancer wards who are lying about it and blaming it on something else.

Seems quite a stretch to me, especially when Dr. Tashkin studied thousands of pot smokers for 30 years, concluding “We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use.  What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect.”

They caution that smoking marijuana may decrease reproductive function,…

Willie Nelson has seven kids.  Snoop Dogg has three kids.  Tommy Chong has five kids.  Bob Marley has eleven kids.  Just sayin’ those reproductive scares have been studied, too, and they’re bunk.

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