Cannabis News NORML - It's Time for a Change!
  Ed Rosenthal, Tipping Points and Doomed Laws
Posted by CN Staff on February 21, 2004 at 22:35:22 PT
By Bryan Brickner, Ph.D. & Dianna Brickner, Ph.D. 
Source: Newtopia Magazine  

medical So, you want to be an activist, do you?

That's how we should start this little discussion. We could tell you activism and change are about getting people to vote, the proper editorial in the local paper, the legislator that wants to hear your proposal, or finding sources of funding. We could tell you lots of things. You see, just four years ago we weren't activists. We weren't doing much of any politicking - we were even in the 'don't vote' crowd.

But that changed because we changed. At some point we realized that, for us, it was all about language. That is a simple place to start, but that's activism. It isn't just about money, ideology, and interest groups. You have to have the words to go along with those things to create your message - your passion - what you stand for. Passion and commitment help you bring your message to action, which ultimately changes behavior and beliefs - or not. But one thing is clear, it's impossible for individuals to support an idea they are not aware of, nor are individuals likely to embrace abstract words.

Also, it has to be said, we aren't interested, as activist, in victimology or even justice. As activist, we don't want to make more victims; that's been done already. We're into empowering individuals to change how government is viewed. Individuals have to step it up and government needs to let them do so. People are afraid to take a stand because marijuana is still illegal, they can't risk coming out of the closet. They have careers, jobs, property, and children. On the other hand, there are many closet activists in our audience: individuals who really want the laws to change, but haven't been able to assist. Step up, new friends; the time is now to end marijuana prohibition. Give of your energy, time, and money: to quote Ed Rosenthal, and it's best to say this aloud, "These laws are doomed."

This essay is about passion and fear. We use the politics surrounding medical marijuana to show how passion and fear work together in activism. For activism to be alive, the activist has to have a presence - a face.

Ed Rosenthal, Activist

In 2002, at the NORML National Conference in San Francisco, we met Ed Rosenthal, marijuana cultivation guru and activist for over 30 years. You see, Ed is a gardener: he's an activist who ran into another active group, only the other active group was the law enforcers of the federal prohibition of cannabis.

If you're interested in politics, it helps to think of the government as a special interest group. The government represents interests, both public and private. As is true of all information, if you receive information from an interested party, you should always take note of the party's interests. This will lead to questions such as "why is our government interested in someone like Ed Rosenthal?"

Ed has studied medical marijuana for more than thirty years. He has written and edited over a dozen books on marijuana cultivation and our social policies regarding marijuana prohibition. In his Ask Ed column, featured in the magazines High Times and Cannabis Culture, he shares his knowledge of how to cultivate cannabis. And as a deputy for the City of Oakland's medical marijuana program, Ed grew marijuana for chronically ill patients, a legal California activity, but an illegal federal one.

Ed Rosenthal wrote about his arrest in a book he co-authored with Steve Kubby called Why Marijuana Should Be Legal. He opens the chapter on his arrest with the following observation on activism - that is, don't take it personally. Here's what he wrote:

"That day that I was arrested, February 12, 2002, I entered a new phase of activism. I do not look upon my indictment as one for criminal activity. I was seized because the U.S. government is committed to senseless wars. Sometimes the U.S. is at war with foreign countries, sometimes with its own citizens. I am one of the more than 730,000 people arrested for marijuana in 2002. So, in that respect, I don't take it personally."

Not taking it personally is not an easy thing to do, not when you are being arrested for following state law but breaking federal law, all in an effort to help patients get their medicine. Medicinal marijuana isn't easily found: the drug war has succeeded in that regard. Prohibition affects the availability of medicinal marijuana by driving sources underground, which puts patients at risk. They either have to go without medicine or break the law. Prohibition also drives prices up, making an inexpensive commodity more valuable, per ounce, than gold. Sans prohibition, the cost of medicine for patients would be very low. It makes sense to regulate this market. Can't patients have access to their medicine?

Ask Ed, he has an opinion.

While speaking at Quimby's bookstore in Chicago, Ed was asked what a future cannabis market would look like. He used the idea of the tomato market in the United States to address the question. Almost everyone eats tomatoes, he said, but some people buy them and some people grow their own. In fact, the market for home grown exceeds the market for produced tomatoes. In a similar manner, the market for cannabis will exist even if some people choose to grow their own. The market will supply the individuals who choose to buy it already grown, dried and rolled. The cannabis market will always contain instances where growers buy and buyers grow. It will act like any other market, and could be regulated much like alcohol. All can thrive in this new market economy.

In January 2003, Ed was tried and convicted of cultivating marijuana for medical use. U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer, brother of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, sentenced Ed to one day (time served) against the objections of the federal prosecutors who wanted Ed sentenced to five years in prison for his crimes. The outcome of his appeal will set precedent for state medical marijuana growers and caregivers vs. the Federal Controlled Substances Act.

Tipping Points

On August 2, 1977, President Jimmy Carter said "Penalties against drug use should not be more dangerous to an individual than the use of the drug itself. No where is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marijuana in private for personal use."

Since then more than 13 million arrests have been made for cannabis. You could arrests every person in Illinois and still have to go and pick up a million or so from Iowa or Indiana to find 13 million people to arrest. With numbers like that, policy makers are beginning to take another look at the war on drugs and how cannabis fits into that policy, and it is increasingly apparent that current practices are not working.

In fact, the war on drugs is not really about drugs, but about policies. Incarcerating someone who uses drugs, and not providing them treatment, is an unsound policy, and yet that is the case throughout the U.S. prison system. But why incarcerate anyone for drug use? is the real question. All use is personal, no matter how it is defined. But to spend nearly 250 million dollars every year to incarcerate drug offenders, which is what the Illinois Department of Corrections spends, is just bad social policy. It isn't deemed inadequate from a moral judgment regarding one's use of drugs, but from what President Carter was talking about: the idea that social policies shouldn't do more harm than the drug itself. If we wanted to go for drama, we could compare the arrest of 13 million citizens in 25 years for marijuana violations as some sort of civil rights violation. That's not our point: instead, it's easier to think of this simply as bad policy, one that has reached a point of change, a so-called tipping point.

This issue is coming to the Midwest of the United States, and, like the West coast, change is first being addressed through medical marijuana. In 2004, at least three midwestern states will have active campaigns, with legislation introduced in Illinois and Wisconsin, and a ballot initiative in Michigan, in support of medical marijuana and safe access for patients. Legal protection for patients is only part of the issue: safe, reliable access is the other. As patients gain legal protection, it becomes necessary to develop a safe source of medicine. So it isn't as if cannabis reform ends with legal protection for patients. A broad approach to cannabis reform, to include medical marijuana, decriminalization, and treatment for those who request it, is sounder public policy than prohibition.

The Tipping Point is a recent book by Malcolm Gladwell about change and phenomenon that shape our reality. Since all types of activism deal with change, either through reform or conservation, it isn't uncommon to find tipping points. They are change and they are things that lead to more change. Ed's conviction and subsequent sentence brought news coverage of medical marijuana. The coverage of his trial brought notoriety, which brings more coverage. It leads to the formation of new groups, such as Green-Aid.org, a California group helping medical marijuana cases around the nation, to include Brenda Kratovil from Illinois, to change state laws. In other words, as activist, change doesn't come as you expect it, it just comes.

In a January 2004 letter, The Drug Policy Alliance, a drug reform group based in New York, wrote:

"With states facing crippling budget deficits, billions of taxpayer dollars continue to be wasted on the failed drug war. The single biggest reason for the end of alcohol prohibition in America was the Depression. When times are tough government programs that are costly, unpopular, and ineffective are the first to go. Today, there is no program more costly, less popular and less effective than the drug war. Most of the 50 states now face some of the worst budget deficits in modern American history. We now have the opportunity to put an end to the failed drug war while helping the country regain financial stability."

What service or program is your state cutting as it struggles with revenue shortfalls?

According to a 1999 study conducted by the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), "At an average cost per prisoner per year of more than $20,000, the total cost to taxpayers of marijuana-related incarceration reaches more than $1.2 billion per year." That is only the cost of incarceration. Add to this the cost of investigating, arresting and prosecuting the over 700,000 arrests each year.

In reforming the drug war, law enforcement is the key. By this, we refer to police protecting the streets, attorneys prosecuting the law, judges who impose sentences, and correction officers who carry out the sentence. It's as if a particular drug policy, say arresting cannabis users, becomes part of a social and legal code with few questioning why we negatively moralize cannabis use in the first place.

There's a part of the cannabis movement that says all use is medical. The quote comes from Dennis Peron, author of California's Prop 215, the Compassionate Use Act of 1996, and it doesn't attempt to differentiate "how" cannabis helps someone, just that it does. As any regular cannabis user might tell you, the properties of the herb are numerous and extensive. It does seem though, that in making all use medicinal we may end up making all "intake" medicinal. Instead of all use is medicinal, perhaps all use is dietary.

And isn't that the point. As change brings about new information, which is how we often perceive change, as something to be processed, we begin to see that all understanding is subject to change.

Slavoj Zizek has written about tipping points. For him, simply stated, tipping points are when language fails to move people to action. In Tarrying With The Negative1, he uses a piece from Ryszard Kapuscinski to demonstrate a point about the third figure between law enforcement and citizenry, and that third figure is fear. In the story, it is related how an Iranian policeman confronted a man in the streets of a revolutionary Tehran. The street was where the law enforcer met the citizen. The Iranian police officer tells the citizen to disperse. The citizen does not leave. The officer does not do anything. He doesn't escalate the situation, but instead, he walks away. Moments of change are moments of change. They can never be completely distilled of fear and apprehension, as fear is a powerful stabilizer. Fear keeps things from changing because change seems to initiate fear. But the 'seems to' is important, as it's not clear why fear is so universal in our society - why we let it have such a hold over us. But fear is stark and grave and powerful. In this manner, it makes passion immobile. Passion has to meet fear to overcome immobility.

Doomed Laws

It's difficult to go more than a couple of days without seeing some reference to marijuana prohibition in the media. Most of what we see, hear and read are instances that describe individuals losing their freedom due to searches, or portrayals of exaggerated behavior, depicting the marijuana smoker as a violent, irresponsible individual who lacks morals or scruples. Most of us can tell when what we see, hear and read is not true, but the media and the government, which are two separate entities (we hope), do not. They perpetuate the typical marijuana myths and we pay the cost.

The facts are that in 1999 an Institute of Medicine report stated that 9% of cannabis users report dependence versus 15% for alcohol and 32% for nicotine. This fact alone makes cannabis unworthy of the 13 million arrests that we have lived through since 1977. Thirteen million individuals caught up in someone else's morality. Simply stated, marijuana is what it is: it causes less dependence than alcohol and nicotine, and without the health risks associated with the other two. It is not perfect, but that isn't what this is about, the perfect drug or the perfect policy. In essence, all laws are doomed which, at the end of some day, are no longer enforceable. Into this vacuum comes another law, only to be replaced again and so on. Today isn't any different.

As activists, we are always inviting individuals to another challenge: take for instance a policy of total prohibition. Such a policy does not allow medical marijuana, no matter what the condition. A total marijuana prohibitionist is unable to take into account the health of another person: like one patient we know has said to us, "If the police were my doctors, I'd be dead by now."

Patients like that exist, but we don't like to think about things for which we have solid opinions. But take another look (that is often the activist's creed) and try to take another's perspective toward marijuana prohibition. Marijuana users are normal people. They are productive citizens, pay taxes, have jobs, mortgages and children. How does what they do in the privacy of their homes - whether we call it personal or medicinal use - harm you? And what kind of political philosophy supports this intrusion into privacy?

Since his conviction, Ed has been traveling the US speaking about his experiences and sharing his opinions about marijuana prohibition and drug law reform. It was this work that brought him to Illinois, a state that hasn't reformed (or implemented) its medical marijuana statute.

So, why is the federal government interested in someone like Ed? Because they can be. Plain and simple, if we continue to support, through action or inaction, government intrusion on our basic rights, then we'll get what the federal government wants us to have, and that isn't always a good idea.

Passion and fear work together in activism. Language is the bridge toward change. Words like compassion, medicine, responsible use, privacy, and human rights thwart our fear.

So, you want to be an activist, do you?


Zizek opens his book with a quote from G.W. F. Hegel's "Preface" to the Phenomenology of Spirit.

"Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being."

To learn more about the Federal trial of Ed Rosenthal in Oakland, CA, please visit: http://www.CannabisNews.com/

To see a gallery of photographs from, the trial, please visit: http://www.freedomtoexhale.com/trialpics.htm

Bryan W. Brickner, Ph.D. is a Senior Editor for Newtopia. He teaches reading and math in Chicago, is on the Board of Directors for IDEAL Reform and Illinois NORML, and is the author of The Promise Keepers: Politics and Promises, Lexington Books, 1999. His interests include political theory, activism, and writing.

Dianna Brickner, Ph.D. is a Performance Consultant with seventeen years of experience in e-learning strategies, performance improvement and instructional design and development consulting, project management, technical documentation, and client communication. She is skilled in the instructional design process to include performance and cause analysis, curriculum design and mapping, intervention selection and design, technology based instruction and Reusable Learning Object (RLO) strategy development. Dianna is sole proprietor for DLB consulting based in Chicago since June 1999, with clients such as University of Illinois, Alterian, Smart Force, and NETg. She has held positions as a Senior Instructional Designer with Vellis Knowledge, Inc., Senior Performance Consultant with NIIT (USA), and Director of Instructional Design/Implementation and Instructional Designer with NETg. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Education from Purdue University with concentrations in Instructional Research/Development and Educational Computing, and a Master of Science in Education with a major in Instructional Research/Development, also from Purdue University.

Note: Ed Rosenthal was deputized by the City of Oakland, CA to grow marijuana for the city's medical clinics and co-operatives. The Federal Government arrested him and put him on trial as a drug dealer. Apparently, medical marijuana is a political tipping point.

DL: http://www.newtopiamagazine.net/content/issue15/features/tippingpoint.shtml

Source: Newtopia Magazine (IL)
Author: Bryan Brickner, Ph.D. and Dianna Brickner, Ph.D.
Published: Vol. III, Issue 15 February - March 2004
Copyright: 2004 Newtopia Magazine
Contact: bryan@illinoisnorml.org
Website: http://www.newtopiamagazine.net/

IDEAL Reform
http://www.idealreform.org/

Illinois NORML
http://www.illinoisnorml.org/

CannabisNews Medical Marijuana Archives
http://cannabisnews.com/news/list/medical.shtml


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Comment #3 posted by Virgil on February 22, 2004 at 15:38:55 PT
The Tipping Point
It's difficult to go more than a couple of days without seeing some reference to marijuana prohibition in the media.

You must be kidding. The Washington Post and NYT and LA Times can go weeks at a time without covering something outside of arrest. Here at Cnews it is the norm to get no more than a single article from a print media in the US on any given day. When the subject comes up you can darn well figure it is not going to use the word prohibition like this article does. Silence is the master plan and the media are in on it as they always have been since Hearst gave us "marijuana" to rid us of cannabis.

There is a tipping point that comes with being in the majority. It seems that all the polling organizations would want to be the one to announce that the majority now sees that CP must end. The Powers That Be do not want to be seen defending a minority position that was abandoned by people listening to what the reformers were saying about CP and Miracleplant.

The medical cannabis prohibition shows us a corruption of our government that is in disregard to science and the majority that have come to see a true reality. This is the splinter under the skin that makes the situation a cause of action. The wrong that we all see there has shown us that the public good plays no part in policy and that the government of the people has been overthrown to bring us a group of criminals that are there to protect the interest of the concentrations of wealth. The attack will be unrelenting until legalization comes and the announcement of the tipping point in popular opinion must be guarded.

In Oakland's iniative to regulate and tax Miracleplant we see people supporting the idea three to one. This makes it harder for a politician to claim any legitimate holding to inflicting a prohibition on the people. That is why the tipping point is important. It gives cover to those that recognize what is all but obvious. It is one thing for the air to be warm, but it is another for the soil to become warm. The seeds that were planted now turn to growth and a plant only knows to grow and bloom.

The jig is up. The snicker factor is no longer amusing and the silence cannot hold back the failure to serve the public good and the harms that come with inflicting all of society with the harms of prohibition when most people find cannabis use beneficial.

There is too much intolerance over CP. It will only grow until the death of prohibition.

[ Post Comment ]

 
Comment #2 posted by FoM on February 22, 2004 at 10:48:37 PT
Patrick
You're very welcome. I'm glad you like the article!

[ Post Comment ]
 
Comment #1 posted by Patrick on February 22, 2004 at 09:56:06 PT
This essay is about passion and fear
And very well written with powerful language.

Applause

"Passion has to meet fear to overcome immobility."

Awesome!

Thanks FoM for cannabisnews and all that you do.

Articles like this one getting imprinted into the mindset of "mainstream america" might just tip the scales in our favor and doom cannabis prohibition for all time? Hope is a blessed thing!

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