– A Washington State-Vancouver student is filing an initiative to lower the drinking age to 19.

– Barbara Coombs Lee describes several scenarios where advance directives could potentially be ignored at Catholic hospitals.

– Not too many people showed up to Mike McGinn’s town hall for selecting a new police chief. And there’s two more left.

– The U.S. Department of Transportation has responded to the study showing that state cell phone bans don’t work to reduce accidents with the same logical fallacy that perpetuates the drug war as well:

Unfortunately, a study released by the Highway Loss Data Institute casts doubt on the reality of this epidemic. Not explaining likely reasons for the surprising data encourages people to wrongly conclude that talking on cell phones while driving is not dangerous!

If you question the ban, you’re encouraging the behavior. That’s bullshit, and it’s the same bullshit you hear from drug warriors every time a study shows that drug prohibitions don’t reduce drug consumption. Cell phone bans don’t work because they only discourage the behavior among people who aren’t going to cause accidents in the first place (which is also similar to the dynamics of the drug war).

– Blackwater: not exactly the best face we’ve ever shown to the world.

– I haven’t seen Avatar yet, but this is a pretty interesting indication of the global reach of our pop culture.

Colorado DEA agent and legendary crazyperson Jeff Sweetin is at it again, ignoring the Obama Administration’s promises not to interfere with state medical marijuana laws. Sweetin is already well-known for his drug war extremism, once saying “our job is to protect democracy, not to practice it”. Hopefully, we can “hope and change” this asshole to the unemployment line where he belongs.

UPDATE: Jeralyn Merritt has more about this case.

As I was putting together Monday’s post on the corruption within the Department of Corrections, there were a few news items related to medical marijuana that I haven’t had a chance to discuss. First and foremost, there was a court ruling that affirmed what most patients in Washington already knew. Our medical marijuana law doesn’t protect authorized medical marijuana patients from arrest, it only allows them to present a medical defense at trial. During the attempts to update the law in 2008, this was a primary objective for patients, yet any language that explicitly protected patients from arrest was stripped from the bill before it passed. Many people laid this failure at the feet of Governor Gregoire, but it’s not clear exactly what happened or who wanted the language removed.

For those in Seattle, this isn’t much of a problem. King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg doesn’t prosecute anyone who has a medical marijuana authorization. This has been true even for more envelope-pushing patients like Mark Spohn, who openly grows for multiple patients (another aspect of the law that is unclear). The Seattle Police generally have no interest in bothering patients – in fact, it’s worth noting the disparity in professionalism that was exposed in Monday’s post. Both Parkins and Cole, despite the actions of the corrections officers, praised the professionalism of SPD on the day that Parkins was arrested. Both Satterberg and Seattle Police recognize that they have better things to do than to send sick people through our court system when all they need to do is show a judge their authorization and they’re found not guilty.

But that hasn’t been true throughout the state. The Cannabis Defense Coalition court calendar continues to track cases of authorized medical marijuana patients going through our state’s courts. After the law was revised in 2008, Governor Gregoire said that if authorized patients were still getting arrested that she’d work with the police chiefs. So far we haven’t seen any indication that she’s willing to back that statement up with action.

A second bit of news is that the State Senate passed a bill to allow medical professionals other than licensed physicians to give medical marijuana authorizations. If passed into law, it isn’t likely to change the overall number of patients in the state, but will likely make it less of a hassle for them to get authorized. The fairly restrictive list of ailments allowed by the law keeps our medical marijuana regulations from looking more like California’s, where you can get a medical marijuana authorization for anything from insomnia to depression. Even as someone who has used marijuana in the past – and has noted how it helped me sleep better and made me a happier person – I never considered myself to be using it for medical reasons. Yet much of our current pharmaceutical industry is driven by “curing” these two afflictions. That’s why discussions over what makes marijuana a medicine and what separates recreational use from medical use are often muddled. The line isn’t entirely clear.

It’s worth noting that the complainant in the recent court case referenced above was found to have an authorization that wasn’t even legal. It was for anxiety and depression, which are not covered by the law. And in going through the released documents from the DOC, it’s very easy to be skeptical about whether or not some of those who were requesting to use medical marijuana would have been found similarly outside of the law. In fact, one of the doctors who authorized several patients, Dr. Antoine Johnson, was arrested in Madagascar this past October after fleeing the country to escape fraud charges.

Parkins, on the other hand, is a legitimate patient with a legitimate need (under 69.51A.010(4)(b)), but whenever there are doctors who are giving marijuana authorizations to anyone who walks into their office, it does cast doubt on everyone. And this was the mindset that many within the DOC were working with. Throughout the internal discussions, there was a common belief that all medical marijuana authorizations were a sham, primarily because they saw many of them coming from a single doctor. But after they defined their process and began denying everyone, a pattern started to become more clear. Most of the medical marijuana requests were coming from only 2-3 doctors, but most of the requests that were clearly within the scope of the state law weren’t. They were coming from a variety of different doctors, and they were the only authorizations coming from each of those doctors. Despite what the DOC convinced themselves, a lot of very real doctors recognize the very real benefits of marijuana for certain serious medical conditions.

If the DOC were smarter about how they handled this process, they could have denied a number of requests for people to use medical marijuana on probation and not caused such a backlash – simply by enforcing the law as it’s written. Several people requested medical marijuana use for things like anxiety, which isn’t even covered. But the Attorney General’s office and the DOC went way beyond that, trying to re-define the law in a way that made it impossible for anyone on probation to qualify. The legality of what they did hasn’t been decided by a court in this state yet, but it’s pretty clear the policy caused far more problems than what would’ve happened had they just followed the voter-approved law.

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Sarah Palin Uses a Hand-O-Prompter
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

[via here]

The Cannabis Defense Coalition has now received the second and third bundles of documents from the Department of Corrections in response to their public disclosure request. Following the first set of documents the CDC received, I posted about how Attorney General Rob McKenna’s office was advising the DOC to take an extremely hard line against the use of medical marijuana for individuals on probation. With the newer sets of documents, even more has been revealed, including a flagrant case of police misconduct by several corrections officers, and an attempt by even the head of the DOC, Eldon Vail, to cover it up.

All three sets of documents released by the DOC have been indexed here and posted here. Within this post, I’ll be referencing the released documents the same way the index does – for example [2:256-258] would be the second document dump, pages 256 to 258.

The case in question involves a woman named Kathy Parkins (who also goes by Kathy Merry-Parkins), a medical marijuana patient from Washington who suffers from fibromyalgia. Parkins was considering moving further down the west coast in 2007. After spending some time in southern California, she decided to make a trip into Arizona to visit a friend and have her car looked at before driving back up to Washington for Thanksgiving. Along the way, on November 14, 2007, she was stopped at a Border Patrol checkpoint just after entering Arizona (the Border Patrol is allowed to set up checkpoints like this within 100 miles of an international border).

Arizona is not a medical marijuana state, so Parkins was arrested and charged with three marijuana-related counts after a drug-sniffing dog located the less than 1/4 ounce that she had in her possession. So instead of making it back home for Thanksgiving, Parkins spent over three weeks in an Arizona jail. She was finally released back to Washington in January 2008, but had to return several times for court appearances. Parkins was eventually sentenced to probation by the judge in Arizona.

In order for Parkins to spend her probationary period back home in Washington, however, an Interstate Compact was required, an agreement between states to have someone on probation move from one state’s supervision to another. Neither Parkins nor the corrections officers in Arizona, however, understood the extent that the Washington DOC was attempting to fight their own battle against Washington’s medical marijuana law and medical marijuana users.

Upon her release back to Washington, Parkins moved in with a woman named Carla Cole, another authorized medical marijuana patient who says she heard about Parkins’ situation and volunteered to let her stay in her house. On May 21, 2008, hours after Parkins got an updated medical marijuana authorization from Dr. Bethany Rolfe at Sea-Mar Community Center, Community Corrections Officer (CCO) Jeremy Praven and another unidentified CCO conducted a home inspection at Cole’s West Seattle residence and found Cole’s small legal garden of 9 marijuana plants. Praven contacted Seattle Police and then attempted to get guidance from a supervisor, identified as Todd Johnson in an email written a week later by Field Administrator Donta Harper [1:125].

When Seattle Police arrived, according to Cole, they determined that Cole’s small grow operation was completely legal, apologized to Cole for bothering her, and took no actions other than filing a report. After that, a third Corrections Officer from the DOC, Michael Schemnitzer, arrived at Cole’s residence. Referring to both the initial contact from Praven and his partner and the later arrival of Schemnitzer, this is how Cole described what happened in an email complaint sent to the DOC on May 22, 2008, the day after the arrest [1:134]:

While the CCO’s were in my home, one very young man said to me, a retiree in my 60’s, and poor Kathy who is visibily pained and stressed, “I don’t care about her and I don’t care about her problems and I don’t care about you and I don’t care about your problems.”

…

Then your guys came back with a new guy who chose to speak to Kathy SO RUDELY and with such contempt I just had to add “Please” to his command for her to descend the stairs. This was in my home, and I naturally feel a right to ask people to behave in a civil way there.

Then, he said that because I said “please” he was going to take her in, which he did. I told him his cruelty does not become him and I’m telling you the cruelty of your staff does not become you. To make me feel like I sent my friend to prison because I asked her to be treated with kindness in my home – someone who has committed no real crime at all – is just so mean I’m speechless.

After being arrested by Schemnitzer, Parkins spent the next week in King County Jail without charges or a hearing. Her health deteriorated (as it had while locked up in Arizona as well) as she tried unsuccessfully to get information about her case. Throughout that week, Cole sent several frantic emails to elected officials in Olympia and folks within the DOC, trying to find out what was happening. Two separate Deputy Secretary Correspondence Logs were opened for the case [1:124][1:133]. On the evening of May 27, a full six days after the initial arrest, Cole sent her correspondence to several people in the media [1:130]. The next day, folks in the DOC began looking into the situation, and at 7pm on May 28, Parkins was finally released from custody. In making the decision to release her, Field Administrator Donta Harper conceded in an internal email that the CCOs had no authority to detain her in the first place [1:652]:

A review of the case and of DOC 380.605 Interstate Compact policy indicates that assigned CCO did not have jurisdiction to detain as the Interstate Placement had not been approved and the case had yet been gained whereabouts we agreed to assume supervision responsibilities. The CCO was in the investigation process of which he could have denied based on current behavior. The CCO had also further involved local law enforcement regarding the suspected illegal behavior of which she has not been yet charged.

Harper also followed up the next day by sending a letter to Governor Gregoire’s office admitting fault in the arrest [1:374-375].

It’s important to note that the reason that Praven and Schemnitzer didn’t have the authority to detain her wasn’t because they overreacted to the presence of a legal medical marijuana grow, but because it was up to Arizona officials to make the decision to detain her. At this point, Parkins was still largely unaware of the Washington DOC’s policy towards medical marijuana, which she assumed would be legal for her to use while under probation here. Upon leaving Arizona, she was told that during her probation, the restriction was that she was not allowed to use illegal drugs. As Parkins understood it, medical marijuana is not an illegal drug in Washington if authorized by a doctor. But less than a week before Parkins was arrested, however, the DOC released an Administrative Bulletin [1:156-157] that outlined a new process for people on probation who have authorizations to use medical marijuana. I’ll cover this in more detail later in the post, but the process was set up as little more than a formal way of preventing just about anyone from using medical marijuana while under probation.

Despite being let out of jail, Parkins was still understandably worried that she’d be sent back to Arizona for violating her probation. After several attempts to follow up with officials in both Arizona and Washington, Parkins discovered that a nationwide arrest warrant had been posted for her from Arizona, based upon a denial of the Interstate Compact agreement filled out by Praven. On June 20, 2009, an official in Arizona read Kathy the Interstate Compact paperwork that Praven had filled out after her arrest and sent to Arizona [2:20-22]. It contained a number of things that were completely made up out of thin air. On the same day, Kimberly Pearson of the Washington DOC notified Arizona probation officials to cancel the warrant and that they were rescinding the Interstate Compact denial. Parkins could now stay in Washington and apply to use medical marijuana while here on probation.

Despite numerous attempts, Parkins was never able to obtain a copy of that Interstate Compact denial filled out by Praven (she claims to have been told that it was lost). In fact, she didn’t see it until a few weeks ago, when it was released as part of the second document dump from the DOC. The report contains the following claims [2:20-22]:

Ms. Parkins has no family ties in Washington. She stated that she wanted to live in Washington because of the Marijuana laws.

This is complete fiction. Parkins was born and raised in Washington, has two grown kids in the state, a grandchild who had just been born in Wenatchee while she was in an Arizona courtroom, and 9 aunts and uncles all living in Washington state. On top of that, Parkins insists that she never said anything about wanting to living in Washington because of the marijuana laws.

Ms. Parkins was living with individuals from the Marijuana’s Growers Association of Washington.

Neither Cole nor Parkins has any idea where Praven came up with this. No such organization exists.

She stated that she had a physicians prescription for medical marijuana. Per information received from Interstate, there is a Physicians Statement from Medicann. Per this statement, marijuana is appropriate for her serious medical condition. This document has no validity in the state of Washington.

This part is more misleading than untrue. Parkins’ file from Arizona (which is not in the document dump) contained medical marijuana authorizations from both Washington and California. It’s true that she also had a Medicann card from California, and that it’s not valid in the state of Washington, but Praven appears to have ignored the authorization from Washington in order to write this. Parkins also claims that she offered to show the officers the updated Washington authorization that she’d received earlier that day, but they weren’t interested.

With all of this information now public, there’s no ambiguity to what occurred on May 21, 2008. CCOs Jeremy Praven and Michael Schemnitzer improperly arrested Parkins and then Praven filed a report with several things completely made up or intentionally misleading in an attempt to have her sent back to Arizona – a state where she has no family and has never lived in – to serve out her probation.

Even after the arrest and the discovery that her CCO lied about her case to officials in Arizona, Parkins still believed that once her doctor filed the necessary paperwork to certify her as a medical marijuana patient, everything would be taken care of. On July 23, 2008, two months after her arrest, that hopefulness bumped up against the reality of the DOC, as they denied her request to use the medicine that she’d been using for years – legally – before her arrest.

Without going too far into the details of the process that the DOC put into place earlier that year for handling medical marijuana requests, the official intent was to separate out valid medical marijuana users from addicts and others who were getting authorizations from shady doctors. In reality, the physician they put in charge of approving or denying the requests, Dr. Steve Hammond, considered any doctor who recommended medical marijuana a phony doctor. In fact, his animosity towards medical marijuana was so extreme, it extended to Marinol, the completely legal THC substitute medication that works just as well as the plant itself for a percentage of medical marijuana users. He even asserted in an email exchange from March 2009 [2:458-459] that the DOC had the right to overrule a doctor who prescribed Marinol to a terminal cancer patient unless they could confirm that the patient was going through chemotherapy at the time. Unlike the loophole that the Attorney General’s office found regarding medical marijuana, what Hammond suggested the DOC do in that email thread (prevent a probationer from taking a prescribed medication) is completely illegal. Fortunately, he was overruled internally and the DOC doesn’t appear to have crossed that line (although that’s something I hope to explore in a later post).

The entire situation had become surreal. A person who broke a law in Arizona – for something that’s completely legal here – was now being harassed for engaging in that legal activity, despite the fact that even the officials in Arizona seemed indifferent to her medical marijuana use while she was back in Washington. Whatever justification the DOC may have had to overrule certain people’s rights to use a medicine recommended to them by their doctor, it’s hard to fathom how they could justify denying it for a longtime medical marijuana user who only ended up on probation because she was arrested for it in a non-medical marijuana state. At this point, it’s clear that the DOC was denying medical marijuana use based upon an open hostility towards the voter-approved law rather than for any genuine attempt to weed out the people just cynically trying to get high while on probation.

Following the denial of Parkins’ request to use medical marijuana, Praven once again sent the partially fictional Interstate Compact denial to Arizona. Her Corrections Officer from Arizona, Susan Huntzinger, confirmed to me that they only had one denial document, so it appears that Praven just re-sent his previous report – with none of the false claims corrected. At this point, the protocol for dealing with her case started to become even more confusing. The appeal process for those who’d been denied wasn’t fully established, so it wasn’t clear whether she would need approval from Arizona for her appeal, or if she could just submit it herself. By the end of the summer, Parkins was concerned enough for her ability to stay in Washington that she moved out of Cole’s house and in with her son and his girlfriend.

Cole, however, remained furious over the way Parkins was treated and demanded that the CCO’s involved in her arrest be reprimanded for their behavior during and after the arrest. After several failed attempts, she decided to send a letter directly to the head of the DOC, Eldon Vail, who was appointed by Governor Gregoire to lead the agency at the beginning of 2008. On December 3, 2008, she wrote [2:450-451]:

This past May a recent tenant and friendly acquaintance who, like me, is authorized in Washington to use marijuana medicinally, was visited here by your Community Corrections Officers. The friend, [Kathy Parkins] is on an interstate compact probation from Arizona, which she thought was also a medical marijuana state, but isn’t.

She was roughly and unfairly removed from my home to the county jail downtown where she spent a truly miserable week with no contact from you whatsoever. The paperwork was filled with inaccuracies, and further moves by her CCO, Jeremy Praven in West Seattle, seem also to be filled with fabrications and are utterly unworthy of any decent government.

Nearly three months later, on February 20, 2009, Vail finally replied to Cole. At the time, the DOC was still refusing to release the falsified report to Parkins, and Vail attempted to cover up what his officer had done:

A review of jail records and discussion with staff indicates that Ms. Merry-Perkins [sic] was booked into King County Jail without any appearance of physical injury. Through a review of her field file, discussion with the assigned CCO and the unit supervisor, there is no evidence to support your statements that the CCOs inaccurately filled out paperwork or fabricated her supervision paperwork from Arizona.

Vail studied this case so thoroughly that he misspelled Parkins’ last name throughout the letter.

Ten months later, in December 2009, the second document dump from the DOC finally revealed the document that they’d been trying to hide the entire time – and it proves that Vail lied to cover up for the actions of CCO Jeremy Praven. Cole has since sent another letter to Vail asking for an explanation, but has yet to receive a reply. I attempted to interview folks still within the DOC to find out if Praven or Schemnitzer were ever reprimanded internally, but after initially saying that they would set up an interview for me, they failed to follow-up.

Parkins is currently finishing up her probation and searching for a lawyer to look into her case. After filing an appeal of her initial rejection, she was eventually cleared to use medical marijuana in January 2009. She’s one of only two people who have been allowed to do so, but it’s not clear what separated her case from the others, as there are dozens – including at least one person with AIDS, another who was paralyzed in a car accident – who were denied the use of medical marijuana, even with physician authorizations. This is a topic I hope to cover in a later post.

Last week’s contest was won by Greg in an impressive 55 minutes. It was Granbury, Texas.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

– Initiative 1068 has been filed. It removes the criminal penalties for adult marijuana use. If enough signatures are gathered, Washington voters will join California voters this November in deciding whether to make it legal for adults to possess and use marijuana. Pete Guither has an interesting write-up on what the federal government might do in response. For now, the Obama Administration’s current strategy appears to be to bury their heads in the sand and pretend none of this is happening.

UPDATE: There will be a volunteer kickoff meeting in Seattle on February 17 (and in Spokane on February 10) to get people started with the signature gathering process.

– The State Senate passed ESSB 5516, which prevents people from being charged with drug crimes if they are reporting a medical emergency. On a less optimistic note, they passed a stricter law against driving while using handheld cell phones, even though a study this week showed that those laws don’t do anything to reduce accidents. [via Balko]

– The sight of ACORN pimp James O’Keefe – a young man whose ties to white nationalists are starting to be exposed – sitting across from Sean Hannity explaining that his arrest last week was just a “misunderstanding” says pretty much everything you need to know about the state of conservatism, race, and justice among the American right. As I watched that happen, my first thought was “when do the ACORN folks get their chance to sit across from Hannity and plead their case?” Compared to what O’Keefe just got caught doing (even just the parts he’s admitted to), what those ACORN workers did was petty. One can imagine what Hannity would say if four ACORN workers were busted trying to mess with the phones in Senator Mitch McConnell’s office. But that inequity never adds up to anyone in the Fox News alternate universe. Their world is one in which whites live by one set of rules involving the ideas of redemption, trust, and innocence until proven guilty, and everyone else is a potential terrorist.

Last week’s contest was won by Dave Gibney. It was Calexico, California.

This week’s is a challenge. If no one gets this by Monday morning, I’ll post up a clue. Good luck!

As a follow-up to Goldy’s post below, there’s already a group organizing an initiative for Washington. It’s called Sensible Washington and they expect to release the final wording of their initiative and begin signature gathering by March 1. Their initiative is not expected to specify the state liquor stores as the distributors, but will only legalize possession for adults. The state would then be on the hook for setting up regulations for where and how it can be sold.

One of the concerns of legalization advocates (both Goldy and I share this concern) is that there won’t be enough money to collect the necessary signatures. As the top post at Sensible Washington points out, PayPal has a history of freezing the accounts of drug law reform groups, and banks won’t work with them. I’d be curious to know how much of this results from archaic rules and misconceptions about drug law reform, and how much comes from potential crackdowns from the federal government. As for Paypal, one clue might be that one of its founders considers the era of alcohol prohibition as the last great era of American politics (I guess that makes him a libertarian).

So for now, they’re taking mail-in donations before a volunteer army of signature gatherers hit the ground across the state to put this initiative on the ballot. There’s certainly enthusiasm for drug law reform right now, but no one is really sure whether it will be enough to qualify. I guess we’re about to find out.

UPDATE (Goldy):
As an followup to Lee’s followup, Sensible Washington’s account of their difficulties in securing credit card processing is worth a read. On the one hand, if millionaire investment banker Michael Dunmire wants an initiative on the ballot, he just writes Tim Eyman a check; on the other hand, if a group of grassroots activists wants to raise money online from small contributors, the banks won’t give them a merchant account, out of fear of I don’t know what.

So much for “direct democracy.”

That said, I emailed the folks at Sensible Washington earlier today to suggest that they set up an account with ActBlue, the same progressive online fundraising site through which we collectively raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Darcy Burner. ActBlue is now set up to handle state legislative and initiative campaigns in Washington state, in addition to federal races, a feature that R-71 made good use of last year.

Scott Morgan provides the appropriate amount of snark for Liberty High School’s counterproductive method of dealing with students who possess marijuana.

UPDATE: At least those Liberty High students weren’t minorities in New York City.

– While the marijuana bills in the State House were voted down last week, the decriminalization bill is still alive in the Senate.

– The Cannabis Defense Coalition got the third set of documents from the Public Disclosure Requests from the Department of Corrections. I’ve updated the index of those documents here.

– Dan Bertolet writes about why it would be a mistake to implement the “Vision Line”, the proposed routing of light-rail through Bellevue that bypasses the Bellevue Transit Center. As someone who works in that area, I strongly second Bertolet’s concerns. It just doesn’t make sense at all not to utilize the existing Transit Center as a light-rail station. Plus, Wallace claims it “brings all of Downtown Bellevue within a 10-minute walk from the station” at 114th and 6th. It would take a pretty brisk pace to make it to Bellevue Square from there in 10 minutes, not to mention that it’s a fairly steep uphill climb between 112th and 110th. I just don’t see people making that walk – especially during the Christmas season when the weather is crappy and the need for transit alternatives is greatest.

– Tom Schaller writes one of the most dead-on posts I’ve read so far this year regarding Obama and how his instincts hurt him on health care. Here’s a snippet:

One of the joys of reading The Audacity of Hope is also one of its repeated annoyances: Obama’s reasoned and reasonable mind almost always works through a problem or controversy by admitting the merits of arguments made by advocates on both sides of some issue, then confesses his preference for a more liberal solution, but admits he is open to alternative solutions that might take into account a broad range of views and values. The book was undoubtedly written with his own political future in mind, and he surely aimed to demonstrate both his intellectual faculties and his open-mindedness.

But the presidency is not an intellectual exercise. It is a not a law school class debate. And in this hyper-partisan age it damn sure isn’t a colloquium in which opponents try to find common ground with opponents uninterested in reaching accommodation, no matter how much good faith bargaining is done. Consider the filibustering tendencies of the past three years, with the Republicans in the Senate minority, compared to the six years prior with the Democrats in the minority and George W. Bush in office.

Based on data provided by the U.S. Senate, cloture activities have doubled since the GOP became the minority. The average annual filed cloture motions from 2001 through 2006 was 34, but jumped to 69 in the three years since; average votes on cloture grew from 27 to 50; and per annum invoked clotures ballooned from 13 to 33. Neither party plays well with the other, but the GOP is more likely to throw a tantrum in the sandbox.

Did Obama think his political philosophies or 2008 campaign rhetoric would be an antidote to this sort of obstructionism? Did he think that the hand he reached across the aisle would be shook rather than bitten? Did he think wishing for a post-partisan America would make it so?

This week, both of the progressive marijuana bills introduced in the State House this session were voted down by the Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Committee. This wasn’t a terribly surprising outcome, as the Committee continues to be led by former police officer Chris Hurst (D-Enumclaw), who killed the decriminalization bill last year as well. Despite the outcome, having an actual legalization bill introduced was another big step forward towards ending the disastrous prohibition of marijuana.

Making that even more clear are the results of a SurveyUSA poll, which finds that 56% of Washington adults think that legalizing marijuana is a good idea (vs. only 36% who think it’s a bad idea). On top of that, the only demographic that remains strongly opposed is the 65 and over crowd. Even among those aged 50-64, SurveyUSA found that 63% think legalizing marijuana is a good idea. And even in Eastern Washington, they found that 52% think it’s a good idea.

Those numbers alone won’t make the laws change though. It still requires either the legislature and the Governor to care about overwhelming public support for reforming the laws (not going to happen any time soon), or it will take a voter initiative. On the latter front, Sensible Washington is gearing up for the 2010 ballot with an initiative to remove the criminal penalties for marijuana. According to Sensible Washington, they aim to have the initiative language hammered out by March 1, and will be collecting signatures through July. They need over 240,000 to qualify for the November ballot.

What ends up being the most frustrating aspect of this effort, though, is that there simply isn’t a sensible reason for Democrats in this state (or in other more progressive states) to get on board. In fact, Ben Morris makes this connection with respect to the defeat of Martha Coakley in Massachusetts. Coakley was a vocal opponent of the decriminalization initiative that Massachusetts voters approved by almost a 2 to 1 margin. Yet everyone was scratching their head as to why progressives and young voters didn’t show up to vote for her.

Whether Democrats like it or not, drug law reform is part of the “change” that people want right now. And while drug policy isn’t as high profile an issue as health care or job creation, the frames that exist to drive voters perceptions of candidates are often greatly influenced by things like a vocal opposition to a commonsense drug policy measure – especially for young people, for whom the issue is often far simpler to grasp. It’s really hard to convince young people that Martha Coakley is the person you need to vote for to bring about “change” after she spent 2008 supporting absurd reefer madness crusades in an attempt to defeat the ballot measure. The fact that Democrats even here in Washington can’t look at these polls and put 2 and 2 together doesn’t make me very optimistic about their chances this November.

UPDATE: Seattle Weekly has a Q&A with Douglas Hiatt of Sensible Washington.

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky, who got the correct answer of Fort Washington, MD.

This week’s contest was suggested by a reader (who is not allowed to win). :)

This might be harder than it looks, good luck!

[via TP]

This site is preventing me from writing anything more substantial today.

UPDATE: SAFER, a popular Colorado-based marijuana law reform group that has run a number of initiatives, is launching a boycott of Starbucks over their support for an anti-marijuana law enforcement group that promotes and glorifies violence.