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In an editorial entitled “A Cheech and Chong ‘medical’ marijuana bill“, the Tacoma News-Tribune’s Patrick O’Callahan goes after the medical marijuana bill introduced by Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles and discussed last Thursday at the Capitol. O’Callahan’s editorial is fairly typical of the snide, dismissive editorializing that remains standard within many of our nation’s newspapers, but in the off-chance that anyone is taking this pile of nonsense seriously, I’d like to break it down and provide an informed perspective:

It must have taken some doing, but advocates of “medical” marijuana have come up with a bill that would actually invite more abuse of the drug than straightforward legalization.

Right away, O’Callahan starts with a mistaken premise. By assuming that even straightforward legalization “invites more abuse” of the drug, he ignores a significant amount of research showing that drug laws themselves have no demonstrable bearing on the amount of drug abuse a society encounters. And as has been pointed out numerous times over the years, the amount of marijuana use in Holland, a nation which has tolerated sales of marijuana in coffeeshops for over 35 years, has less marijuana use than the United States, where we arrest over 750,000 people per year just for possessing it.

Even worse, his editorial never fully explains how he came to this conclusion. He’s just spit-balling criticisms, hoping they’ll stick.

The “medical” belongs in quotation marks here, because the measure in Olympia would junk a key rule designed to prevent common drug seekers from getting marijuana on medical pretenses. And once recreational users or addicts got their pseudo-medical authorizations to use the drug, they’d enjoy more privileges than simple legalization would give them.

O’Callahan never specifies what the “key rule” is, so I can only guess at what he’s referring to. But in looking at the bill, and knowing how the system currently works, I can’t imagine any way in which it gets any easier or harder for someone to get a medical marijuana authorization under this bill. My best guess is that he’s referring to the removal of language that specified that a condition couldn’t be alleviated by other medicines in order for the authorization to hold up in court. But that never made a difference to doctors, only judges and prosecutors. And the language was removed precisely for that reason. A judge – or any other government employee – is not your doctor, and shouldn’t be in a position to second-guess doctors over what medicines you should be taking.

They’d be protected, for example, if ex-spouses objected to leaving children in their care; judges would not be permitted to consider marijuana use as a factor in custody arrangements except in extreme cases involving “long-term impairment” – whatever that means.

What that means is that if you get cancer and your doctor authorizes you to use marijuana to deal with the nausea you experience as you go through chemotherapy, your ex-wife or ex-husband can’t use that to prevent you from seeing your kids. That’s just one example, but there are many others that warrant this provision in the bill. If a parent is irresponsible or incapable of being a parent, that’s one thing. But the reality of medical marijuana is that most of the people who use it lead very normal lives and can function perfectly well as parents. They don’t get “high” from the drug and act loopy all day. In fact, if you want to see a good profile of a parent who uses medical marijuana, watch the CNBC documentary “Marijuana Inc”, where they interview a patient’s two sons who tell the reporter that medical marijuana “gave them their father back” because it allowed him to deal with his pain and lead a normal life. If you think that someone like that should be prevented from seeing his kids, your moral compass isn’t pointing north.

The bill would bring down the hammer of discrimination law on companies with anti-drug policies. Employers who refused to hire or employ marijuana users – the drug stays in the body long after use – could be investigated and sanctioned by the state Human Rights Commission.

As I mentioned after the hearing, this is one area where it’s possible the language of the bill will have to be reworked to be compatible with existing anti-discrimination rules (I’m far from an expert on that). But the intent of the clause is clear. Unless a job entails public safety, you shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate against someone simply because they’re authorized to use medical marijuana. Of course, if that person is not capable of doing their job because of their medical marijuana use, then companies should be free to either fire them or not hire them in the first place. Getting the proper balance here is difficult, but I thought this bill did a good job trying to find it.

That’s just scratching the surface of this amazing piece of legislation. It would also legalize large-scale commercial marijuana grow operations and wholesaling – no specified limits on quantity. Cities and counties would not be permitted to ban grow operations in their jurisdictions; the measure leaves all control over licensing to the state.

Oddly, this is the exact opposite criticism of Proposition 19, California’s initiative to fully legalize marijuana production. Proposition 19 left this up to the individual counties and cities, and the criticism was “Oh my god! This will create a patchwork of different laws across the state!” In this bill, we have one law for the state, and the criticism now is that cities and counties have no control. Huh? Not to mention that O’Callahan leaves out the fact that under this bill, cities and counties can use zoning laws to ensure that a production facility can only be located in an industrial or commercial area.

Growing, processing and selling could be conducted in secrecy. Call this one the Home-Buyer’s-Surprise Provision.

This is really the dumbest thing in the entire editorial. The reason that this bill is being introduced is precisely because the “growing, processing and selling” is “conducted in secrecy”. By licensing and regulating both growers and dispensaries, you take this industry out of the shadows and allow the cities and counties to establish the proper location for these activities to take place. This bill fixes the problem of having large numbers of grow operations hidden in people’s basements. The fact that O’Callahan thinks that this bill would cause that is the clearest indication that he doesn’t have the foggiest idea what the hell he’s talking about.

There’s more: Police officers would have to check state databases for medical marijuana licenses before responding on probable cause to “cannabis-related incidents” (also known, under federal law, as “crimes”).

I’m having trouble not getting too snarky about this, but this attitude is extraordinary and O’Callahan’s lack of understanding of the law is terrifying. For starters, our local police aren’t supposed to be enforcing federal laws, so the fact that marijuana is illegal under federal law is irrelevant to any law enforcement official in this state. Second, asking that a police officer check a database – before bursting into someone’s home with weapons – to see if the person they’re about to invade might be a law-abiding citizen is not unreasonable. In fact, it should be considered a very basic part of a police officer’s job.

Individual officers could be personally fined or sued for failure to do so. There’s no obvious reason this wouldn’t apply to, say, a cop who spots dope and money changing hands in a dark alley. Odd: The law doesn’t paint a legal bull’s-eye on officers for responding to “alcohol-related incidents.”

As far as I can tell, this is completely untrue. If a police officer sees a transaction between two people in a dark alley, the officer should be able to respond exactly the same way whether it’s alcohol or medical marijuana being purchased. Those transactions should not be occurring outside of licensed establishments.

The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, has been touted as a “clarification” of the legal status of the illegal marijuana dispensaries that Washington cities and counties – including Tacoma – have begun to tolerate.

The measure’s actual reach is far, far more sweeping; it amounts to legalization with privileges.

Again, O’Callahan says this but doesn’t provide any actual evidence to back it up. This bill does not change – in any way – the process by which an individual with one of the qualifying conditions goes to a doctor and gets an authorization. Recreational use is still illegal. The result of this bill won’t be an increase in the amount of medical marijuana users, it will be a better system for ensuring that those individuals can have a safe place to obtain it.

To legitimize the dispensaries, the logical first step would be to impose genuine medical-pharmaceutical rigor on the authorizations that allow people to acquire “medicinal” pot in the first place.

And that would be a wonderful thing that just about every medical marijuana patient would welcome, but sadly the Federal Government makes this impossible so long as marijuana is considered a Schedule I drug.

As things stand, a handful of clinics – often fly-by-night operations – do brief, assembly-line-style “exams” of marijuana seekers and churn out authorizations like factories. They rubber-stamp the documents – often for about $200 a pop – for users with nebulous complaints of “intractable pain.” These mills have been transforming who knows how many garden-variety marijuana smokers into “patients.”

The law permits little effective regulation, and no one has ever been sanctioned for over-authorizing marijuana. The lack of controls blurs the line between legitimate providers and money-hungry enablers.

I have no doubt that this happens. And I have no problem with medical boards coming down on doctors who do it. But this phenomenon has minimal effect on anyone. In some ways, it’s better that recreational users become medical users because then the money they spend on marijuana is more likely to go to a local business rather than a criminal organization. That’s why over half the people in Washington state just want it legalized for both medical and recreational use. But until that point, you’ll likely always find some subset of the medical profession who decide that money is more important than their integrity. Just like journalism.

Instead of tightening the process, Kohl-Welles’ bill would actually loosen it. Under the existing law – an initiative approved by the voters – marijuana is largely treated as a last resort to be used only when legal, conventional treatments and FDA-approved medications fail. Her measure would let it be used as a first resort.

As I mentioned above, this language was taken out because it was putting judges in a position to make medical determinations for the folks in their courtrooms. It’s odd that in a world where we’re so easily terrified of “death panels” and “government getting inbetween you and your doctor”, a newspaper is actually editorializing in favor of giving the government the ability to send you to jail for a health decision that you and your doctor agree upon. That’s stunning.

With this in place, any drug abuser who didn’t get his get-out-of-jail-free card would deserve to be arrested for sheer stupidity.

This is even more stunning. Regardless of how one feels about the language of the bill, believing that “drug abusers” belong in jail is a sign of complete moral bankruptcy. Hardly anyone in our society still believes that the proper way to deal with a drug addict is to send them to prison. Even worse, that’s still quite separate from the reality here. The vast majority of both medical and recreational marijuana users aren’t “abusers”. They aren’t destroying their lives with it. But to believe that the few who do abuse the drug will turn their life around if you send them to jail is beyond stupid. Seeing something that dumb in an editorial from one of the state’s largest newspapers is quite remarkable.

Words fail. This bill could have been written by Cheech and Chong 30 tokes past midnight. Any lawmaker inclined to support it should make a point of reading it first.

I’m not sure what else there is to say. The sad reality is that people this clueless and blindly ideological are still employed by the major newspapers of this state, even as they’ve been under intense pressure to trim budgets. Like O’Callahan, I strongly encourage every lawmaker to read this bill, and if they have as much trouble as O’Callahan did in understanding it, I’d encourage them to do something he didn’t do: talk to someone who’s actually knowledgeable about medical marijuana and the history of how the law has worked in this state.

UDPATE: I was just sent this clarification to the “long-term impairment” part of O’Callahan’s editorial over email:

[T]he “long-term impairment” that confuses Mr. O’Callahan is exactly the same “long-term impairment” already described in the statutory provision allowing judges to preclude or limit visitation based on a parent’s struggles with “drug, alcohol, or substance abuse,” RCW 26.09.191(3)(c). Family law judges and attorneys are quite familiar with it.

A group of Bellevue homeowners is alleging that Sound Transit has intentionally increased cost and risk estimates of a proposed light rail alignment, to make it look worse. The agency says it’s just not true, but it’s a sign of how much tension there is in a debate over where trains will travel.

Because as we’ve learned from experience, public agencies always overestimate the cost of large infrastructure projects. The Big Dig came in at a fraction of its original projected cost, and no doubt Seattle taxpayers are due for a big rebate when the deep bore tunnel comes in well under budget. That’s just the way these things work.

(Just more evidence that if you say something loudly and angry enough—and with hand-made signs—our media will eventually report it as news.)

[In a fit of nostalgia (and laziness), I’m marking my remaining days here on HA by posting links to some of my favorite and most influential posts. If you have favorites you’d like to see, please let me know.]

06/03/2005: Dog day afternoon

Yesterday was a bad day for Feisty, my petulant little puppy. We awoke at 6 am to empty her young bladder, but on our way to the backdoor she took a shortcut on the living room rug. Later, annoyed with me for paying more attention to Kirby Wilbur than to her, she made every effort to voice her opinion on the air. The difficult behavior continued. She chased the cat. She dug a hole in the backyard, caking herself with mud. And when not chewing on my hands, ankles and feet, she destructively masticated whatever piece of furniture or household object was most convenient.

Finally, at the end of this long, tiring day, I returned Feisty to the family from whom we had adopted her, locked her in the kennel with her last remaining litter mates, got back in the car, and drove off.

Assuming dogs have the ability to reason (and for rhetorical purposes we’ll leave that assumption unchallenged,) one could hardly blame her for having the impression that, angry and exasperated, I had abandoned her. That would be a logical conclusion… at least, for a dog.

When I asked my co-bloggers for their suggestions as to which posts deserved inclusion into this Best of HA series, Darryl and Carl both nominated the above. It’s hardly my most influential, nor my best written, and in the larger scheme of things, the subject matter is rather inconsequential. But it’s also kind of a classic, both in the way it epitomizes my tendency to forego a proper lede, instead taking my readers on a winding path toward the ultimate thesis, and in the way my trolls are so quick to jump to conclusions… and for the worst.

Anyway, read the whole thing.

[In a fit of nostalgia (and laziness), I’m marking my remaining days here on HA by posting links to some of my favorite and most influential posts. If you have favorites you’d like to see, please let me know.]

09/02/2005: FEMA director Mike Brown, a “total fucking disaster”

Yes, that’s right… the man responsible for directing federal relief operations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, sharpened his emergency management skills as the “Judges and Stewards Commissioner” for the International Arabian Horses Association… a position from which he was forced to resign in the face of mounting litigation and financial disarray.

Perhaps no post anywhere better demonstrates the potentially powerful nexus between local and national blogs than my little expose on “Brownie.” An HA reader and horse enthusiast, distraught over the disastrous relief efforts in New Orleans, mention’s Browns disastrous tenure at the International Arabian Horse Association, and the story quickly moves from HA to Daily Kos to Talking Points Memo, and then throughout the media at large. Within 24 hours Brown became a symbol of Bush administration cronyism, and a few days later he’s forced to step down.

No doubt my most influential post. But don’t just take my word for it…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9JXd8bGGh8[/youtube]

[In a fit of nostalgia (and laziness), I’m marking my remaining days here on HA by posting links to some of my favorite and most influential posts. If you have favorites you’d like to see, please let me know.]

10/20/2005: Raging Bullshitter: the sad twisted tale of the Irons family feud

David Irons Jr.’s mother has mixed emotions about her son. On the upside, she says he’s “very good with his hands.” On the downside, she claims he’s used them to beat her.

In addition to sporting perhaps my favorite lede ever, it was this controversial post that cemented my early reputation as our local blogosphere’s most devastating muckraker. Posted just weeks before the election, and a day after polling showed Republican David Irons closing within the margin of error against incumbent Democratic King County Executive Ron Sims, the ensuing media storm caused Irons’ support to plummet virtually overnight. Sims went on to win a third term by over 16 points. Read the whole thing.

An angry reader sent me the the following email:

From: Lu G
Subject: Shame!!!
Date: January 9, 2011 6:29:11 PM PST
To: Dan Savage, Goldy, Joel Connelly, Joni Balter

Dear third-rate journalists:

Don’t wait for the facts to emerge before expressing speculations and opinions.

As I write, the facts about the shooter are coming out from classmates, teachers, etc., and the nature of the gunman doesn’t agree with your pre-conceived notions.

Oh man, just to be mentioned in the same breath as Joni Balter and Joel Connelly, not to mention Dan Savage… my sudden rise in stature from fourth-rate to third-rate journalist has me feeling all tingly. At last, I finally know what it feels like to write for an actual newspaper.

Anyway, my reply:

You’re right Lu… even more outrageous and tragic than the shooting itself is the gall of commentators to suggest that violent political rhetoric and symbolism could ever lead to violent political action. It’s a good thing our nation has patriots like you and Mr. Loughner to protect our liberties from dangerous wordsmiths like me.

Goldy

Just doing what I can to maintain the integrity of my fellow third-rate journalists everywhere.

A reader alerted me to a news story that took place out on the peninsula right before Christmas:

Yellow crime-scene tape surrounded Dr. James Rotchford’s Olympic Pain and Addiction Services medical clinic in Port Townsend’s Uptown District on Tuesday morning, as city police officers assisted state and federal agents in executing a search warrant on the premises.

According to two other articles online, the raids were a result of an investigation by the State Attorney General’s office over Medicaid fraud. The Attorney General’s office provided no details on the warrants, which are sealed for 90 days.

Rotchford’s clinic specializes in treating pain patients and those with addictions to pain medications. Because of the risks of abuse from prescription painkillers like OxyContin and Percocet, doctors like Rotchford are in a risky profession. Even doctors who’ve been cleared by medical organizations of any wrongdoing have found themselves guilty in a court of law, simply for not realizing that the folks they were prescribing to were supplying the black market. As a result, there are precious few doctors willing to go into this field of medicine. And the recent story of Siobhan Reynolds is a frightening indicator of how dangerous it can be merely to defend an accused doctor.

As of now, no charges have been filed against Rotchford and little else is known about why his clinic was raided. My understanding of Medicaid fraud implies that they believe that Rotchford was writing improper prescriptions that were then charged to Medicaid. Someone with some more knowledge of that charge can perhaps let me know if it could possibly mean something else. In the meantime, though, it doesn’t look like we’ll get to see anything related to the search warrant until March.

The difficulty in this issue comes from the balance we need to strike between the treatment of pain and the threat of addiction. Our federal government’s approach to this delicate topic hasn’t been very balanced. Keeping addictive pharmaceuticals under wraps is their only mandate, so there’s little consideration to chronic pain patients who suffer from the downstream effects of that mission.

This imbalance briefly came under scrutiny in December when Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin placed a hold on the nomination of Michele Leonhart to run the DEA. Kohl thought that the restrictions being imposed by the DEA on nursing home personnel were preventing adequate pain management. He lifted the hold after getting assurances from the Department of Justice that they’d work to rewrite the rules.

Reading through the comments on the Port Townsend-based articled I’ve linked, there are strong and conflicting opinions on Rotchford and his clinic, some positive, some negative. It’s not clear yet what’s going on here, but based on the history of the DEA’s conflict with pain doctors, we shouldn’t be surprised to see Rotchford targeted, nor should we be surprised if it turns out that he’s being targeted unfairly.

Over the past couple weeks I’ve been posting a bit about budget priorities, pointing out that the decisions we make in Olympia in regard to both taxing and spending, reflect our priorities as a state.

For example, if lawmakers choose to cut yet another couple billion dollars from K-12 education while refusing to even consider the repeal of nonproductive, special interest tax exemptions, well, that reflects our priorities. If the state continues to slash funding and raise tuition at our community colleges and four-year universities at the same time businesses claim they can’t find enough qualified workers in the midst of near record-high unemployment, well, that reflects our priorities too.

And of course, the fact that our state and local governments have steadily shrunk themselves over the past couple decades both as a percentage of the total economy and in the number of FTEs compared to population, that sure as hell reflects our priorities, as does the fact that nationwide, Washington now ranks 45th in spending on K-12 education, but 14th in spending on corrections.

But unfortunately, when I write about stuff like this, I’m mostly ignored. Oh, call out the Seattle Times editorial board for licking Rob McKenna’s balls, and that might earn me a link from some self-anointed arbiter of journalistic integrity, but spend a little time and effort exploring the conventional “government must learn to live within its means” narrative, and refuting it with actual, you know, numbers, well that just elicits a collective yawn from our political press corps. I guess, because, I’m just some foul-mouthed local blogger (as opposed to a real journalist like Joni Balter), so you can just ignore my math, even when it’s lifted directly from the OFM. And… I sometimes use the word “fuck.”

Well, okay then… if you won’t pay attention to little ol’ me, perhaps you’ll listen to State Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, a trained economist, who on the Senate Dems blog writes about how we pride ourselves on being one of the top states in the nation in terms of quality of life, but how we’re increasingly at the bottom of the pack in terms of our willingness to pay for it:

In Washington, we want to be among the top quarter of states in public services, but we’re in the lower-half in amount paid in state and local taxes. In fact, we’re lagging far behind the same mid-West states like North Dakota and Minnesota that Lake Wobegon is meant to poke fun at.

We may laugh at the gap between what people from Lake Wobegon think of themselves and reality, but if Washington levied the same amount of state and local taxes per $1000 of personal income that North Dakota levies – North Dakota –  we’d have 29 percent more revenue than we have today. That’s more than $9 billion, which would more than cover our current revenue shortfall, and then some…

In Washington, we have a bigger Lake Wobegon gap than Lake Wobegon does. We’re in the third year of significant recessionary impacts on our state budget. And for the third year in a row, we hear loud talk about making Washington live within its means by cutting state spending to match diminished revenues.

The truth is, state spending compared to personal income has been declining for a decade. And all this talk about “living within our means” masks another important truth: We can’t keep cutting spending without downgrading the public services mentioned above. And if we keep downgrading these same services, we can’t expect to maintain our quality of life, much less improve it.

Both Sen. Brown and I are making the same basic assertion, and we’re making it based not on ideology, but on math. We cannot continue to shrink government, the services it provides and the human and infrastructure investments it makes, while continuing to maintain the quality of life Washingtonians have come to expect.

Republicans and their ball-lickers on the editorial boards would have you believe that we have no choice but to make do with tax revenues that continue to fall even as the economy recovers, but the reality is, thanks in part to the public investment of prior generations, we are a wealthy state that can afford to do more… particularly the wealthiest amongst us. Whether we choose to, well, that reflects our priorities.

Via Raw Story:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange denounced “business McCarthyism” in the United States after the Bank of America halted all transactions to the website Saturday.

The Australian, who was spending his second full day on bail, vowed the whistle-blowing site would carry on releasing controversial leaked US diplomatic cables as he insisted his life was under threat.

Bank of America, the largest US bank, halted all transactions for WikiLeaks, joining other institutions that have refused to process payments for the website since it started to publish the documents last month.

“Bank of America joins in the actions previously announced by MasterCard, PayPal, Visa Europe and others and will not process transactions of any type that we have reason to believe are intended for WikiLeaks,” it said in a statement.

Commenter ‘Undercover Brother’ made a mention of this in a previous thread, and I think it’s an overlooked point in the battle against Wikileaks. Wikileaks had been considered a serious threat to our government’s secrecy for quite some time already. They released the Apache Helicopter video back in April. They released the Afghanistan War logs in July and the Iraq War logs in October. And even though the release of the diplomatic cables only started recently, our government has known that Wikileaks had them for over six months.

But it wasn’t until the first week in December that major pressure was applied to them from private industry, specifically folks in the financial services world. And it happened shortly after Julian Assange said this in an interview printed in Forbes:

These megaleaks, as you call them, we haven’t seen any of those from the private sector.

No, not at the same scale as for the military.

Will we?

Yes. We have one related to a bank coming up, that’s a megaleak. It’s not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but it’s either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it.

…

What do you want to be the result of this release?

[Pauses] I’m not sure.

It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume.

Usually when you get leaks at this level, it’s about one particular case or one particular violation. For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron emails. Why were these so valuable? When Enron collapsed, through court processes, thousands and thousands of emails came out that were internal, and it provided a window into how the whole company was managed. It was all the little decisions that supported the flagrant violations.

When discussing Wikileaks and the intense backlash against them, it’s easy to fall into a conspiratorial mindset. But when dealing with America’s financial sector in a world economy that’s so interconnected, they may indeed have more power to silence people than any single government by itself.

I don’t want to make excuses for Gov. Christine Gregoire; she fought for our state’s top job, so the buck surely stops at her desk. But she certainly doesn’t seem too happy about balancing the budget primarily on the backs of the poor, the sick and the young:

“I hate my budget,” she said, tearing up. “I hate it because in some places, I don’t even think it’s moral.”

Can’t argue with that. But the Republicans…?

Sen. Joe Zarelli of Ridgefield, the Republican’s chief budget expert in the Senate, called the budget a step in the right direction…

What Gov. Gregoire calls immoral, Sen. Zarelli calls a step in the right direction… you couldn’t ask for starker ideological contrast. And you also couldn’t ask for a better opportunity for Republicans to ultimately prove that they are not the heartless, Social Darwinist bastards that I think they are.

I mean, it sure does appear that, unlike Gov. Gregoire, Sen. Zarelli really does want to cut a couple billion dollars from education, and 100,000 people or so from the health care rolls… that he believes it’s a step in the right direction to impose a couple more years of double-digit tuition inflation, and to zero out funding for state parks. In fact it sounds like he would have preferred the governor gone even further.

But if he doesn’t, well, there is something he can do about it. It wouldn’t be easy, but with enough support from Zarelli and his fellow Republicans, the legislature could pass a bipartisan revenue package intended to soften the harshest blows, and the governor would sign it. Unconstitutional as I-1053 may be, its supermajority requirement does put control of revenue proposals in the hands of the Republican minority, so let’s be absolutely clear: regardless of who is its putative author, this immoral all-cuts/no-new-revenue budget is a Republican budget.

This is the kind of budgeting philosophy that they campaign on, and thanks to Republican-backed I-1053, this is the kind of budget that we’ll get. 35 kids in a kindergarten classroom? That’s a Republican kindergarten. Tens of thousands of children with no health insurance? That’s Republican health care. College tuition rising out of reach of the middle class? That’s a Republican university system.

Or if it’s not, Republicans know exactly what to do to prove me wrong.

The Podcast is back after a long (and maybe, not so productive) sabbatical. Goldy and friends open up the ‘cast with a discussion of the Obama tax compromise cave-in, described by one panelist as the“worst messaging disaster…in a long time.” After some major meandering and bitching, Goldy seamlessly segues into levy equalization for Washington State. The panel imagines ways to give Red Washington the government they voted for.

The podcast plows into a deep issue: What does it say about Seattle that 3 or 4 inches of snow invokes “soul searching?” Or is this simply a pathology of a certain Editorial Board (member). Naturally this raises the question, should Goldy run for City Council in 2011? From local politics to an international man of mystery, the panel tackles the ethical, political, legal and corporate revenge ramifications of the Wikileaks leaks for publisher Julian Assange.

Goldy was joined by Peace Tree Farm’s N in Seattle, Effin’ Unsound’s & Horsesass’s Carl Ballard, DailyKos uber-blogger Joan McCarter, and Seattle Drinking Liberally co-host Chris Mitchell.

The show is 48:48, and is available here as an MP3:
[audio:http://www.podcastingliberally.com/podcasts/podcasting_liberally_dec_7_2010.mp3]

[Recorded live at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. Special thanks to Confab creators Gavin and Richard for hosting the Podcasting Liberally site.]

Today was Repeal Day, the anniversary of the official end of America’s brief experiment with alcohol prohibition. On December 5, 1933, the 21st Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, and it once again became legal in the United States to manufacture and sell alcoholic beverages.

I’ve just finished reading Daniel Okrent’s incredibly well-researched book on the subject, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. The history of alcohol prohibition has unmistakeably strong parallels to our current prohibition on marijuana. And that begs the question, will it come crashing down in much the same way?

The end of alcohol prohibition came much quicker than mostly everyone expected at the time. By amending the Constitution to outlaw the production and distribution of alcohol (or, more specifically, “intoxicating liquors”), many people thought – even right up to the end – that it would be nearly impossible to undo. But just as overwhelming popular support for getting rid of the saloon in the 1910s ushered in huge majorities of dry-voting legislatures across the country, the experience of alcohol prohibition – with organized crime, political corruption, and overzealous enforcement – led to similarly overwhelming support for repeal less than two decades later.

In some ways, marijuana prohibition is quite similar to its ancestor. Each prohibition led to significant levels of organized crime and to corruption among government officials and law enforcement. In each case, the attempts to keep adults from engaging in an activity strictly on moral grounds backfired and led to less moderation and riskier behaviors. And even earnest law enforcement efforts were helpless to do anything to prevent black markets from arising, often leading them to more extreme tactics that often put the citizenry at far more risk than the intoxicating substances themselves.

But there are some major differences. One is that much of the organized crime and corruption caused by the current prohibition is based outside of the United States. The rampant official corruption that accompanied the astronomical profits from bootlegging liquor has its strongest parallel today to the drug trafficking organizations of Mexico, who’ve been able to subvert Mexico’s justice system to an amazing extent. I cringe when I hear people claim that Mexico’s corruption problem is a function of Mexico’s culture. That’s bullshit. As Okrent explains, America’s law enforcement mechanisms were just as corrupted during alcohol prohibition as Mexico’s are today. The problem is the policy, not the people.

Another striking difference about the respective eras is how tame the police abuses were that caused widespread outrage during alcohol prohibition. Part of this stems from the fact that the average alcohol consumer was mostly left alone under the legal framework set forth by the Volstead Act. This is very different from today, where hundreds of thousands of mere marijuana users are arrested every year. The fact that even well-liked celebrities are not immune from its enforcement represents a fairly significant difference between then and now. One example given by Okrent was of a Chicago-area woman who was shot to death because her husband was believed to be a bootlegger. As a result, the Chicago Tribune used the incident to rail against prohibition. In today’s prohibition, wrong-door raids and innocent bystanders being killed are not seen as the extraordinary aberrations they were at that time, and are often completely ignored by our media.

But the main difference – and the one that has allowed marijuana prohibition to continue to such an absurd point – is that unlike alcohol prohibition, there’s no “before” for people to draw comparisons to. With alcohol prohibition, people were able to compare the world of alcohol prohibition to what it was like before it was outlawed. People could see the organized crime, violence, and corruption that existed in 1930 and they knew that all of that didn’t exist in 1918. We don’t have that 20/20 hindsight today. When marijuana was outlawed at the federal level in 1937, very few Americans used it or even knew what it was. The tremendous growth in its popularity occurred entirely within the confines of prohibition, so the negative effects of that policy seem far more “normal”.

So today, we face a battle with some historical parallels, but also some fairly significant differences. Al Smith, the losing Presidential candidate of 1928, was against prohibition. He lost handily to the Republican Herbert Hoover, but the fact that he took that position in the first place shows how different the two prohibitions were from a political standpoint. Not a single U.S. Senator of either party has come out in support of ending marijuana prohibition, and only a handful of House members have. For an issue that polls at over 40% support nationwide (and over 50% along the west coast), this is an extraordinary disconnect between the people and our politicians.

So how will it end? If Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson (D-36) is reading the political climate correctly, it will end right here in Washington this year:

State Representative Mary Lou Dickerson (D-36, Queen Anne and Ballard) wants to go all the way—RIGHT NOW.

According to a bill she intends to pre-file this month for the 2011 legislative session, “We would legalize it, regulate it, and tax it,” she says. “I am serious. We have been wasting scores of millions of dollars on arresting and jailing people who have done nothing more than smoke marijuana recreationally. That has ended up harming people and costing taxpayers tremendously. So it’s a very high cost to individuals and to taxpayers—it’s a wrongheaded policy that simply needs to be changed. People need to stick their neck out and say enough already and people are starting to do that. You will see that we will have a very good sponsor [for a companion bill to legalize marijuana] in the senate, someone who is very well respected. I am dead serious about this.”

Dickerson expects the bill will pass—she was unflinching when faced with my skepticism based on the failure of less aggressive pot bills—because polling this year showed 54 percent support to legalize marijuana in Washington, she says. She’s working with the ACLU and she plans another round of polling before the session begins in January. “If we don’t pass it this year, there’s a possibility we will take our case to the people in the initiative process in 2012,” she says.

We’ll find out if Dickerson’s optimism is warranted. There have been a number of signs recently that do point in this direction. California’s initiative was the first statewide initiative on ending marijuana prohibition that failed not because of general opposition to the idea, but to the specifics of the proposal. We’re now at the point where state legislators are understanding that this is a reality, and that either they regulate it, or an initiative will regulate it for them, perhaps not in a way the legislature would consider ideal.

And that leads to what might end up being the most interesting parallel in how both prohibitions end. What likely accelerated the demise of alcohol prohibition the most was the state of the economy. As the boom of the 1920s led to the Depression of the 1930s, that revenue that had been lost by enacting the 18th Amendment loomed much larger. Today, the parallel is obvious, and the precarious economic situation that Washington state finds itself in may bring about a political sea change on a issue that was once thought untouchable.

Republican politicians may be awfully concerned about how allowing gays and lesbians to openly serve might disrupt the military, but the vast majority of the troops on the ground… not so much.

The Pentagon has concluded that allowing gay men and women to serve openly in the United States armed forces presents a low risk to the military’s effectiveness, even at a time of war, and that 70 percent of service members believe that the impact of repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law would be either positive, mixed or of no consequence at all.

[…] The report also found that a majority — 69 percent — believed they had already worked with a gay man or woman, and of those the vast majority — 92 percent — reported that the unit’s ability to work together was very good, good or “neither good nor poor.”

Hear that? 70 percent of service members couldn’t care less about the sexual orientation of their buddies serving next to them. So can we put this bullshit manufactroversy to rest already, repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and just move on?

1 Kings 11:1-3
King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh’s daughter—Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites. They were from nations about which the LORD had told the Israelites, “You must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods.” Nevertheless, Solomon held fast to them in love. He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray.

Discuss.

Just dumb:

OLYMPIA – A judge fined a wheelchair-bound Olympia man $4,000 Wednesday for growing 42 marijuana plants in his home, but he imposed no jail time.

A jury convicted William Kurtz, 58, in October of felony counts of possession of marijuana over 40 grams and manufacture of marijuana. He has no prior felony criminal history and uses the wheelchair because of a medical condition.

Before trial, Kurtz’s attorneys fought to be allowed to present a medicinal-marijuana defense to the jury, but Thurston County Superior Court Judge Carol Murphy did not allow it. Prosecutor Scott Jackson argued that Kurtz did not have a medicinal-marijuana card in March, when Thurston County Narcotics Task Force detectives found the plants, as well as more than 15 ounces of packaged marijuana, in his home in the 11800 block of Champion Drive Southwest.

…

At trial, Hiatt tried to introduce to the jury a letter from Kurtz’s doctor that describes Kurtz’s “hereditary spastic paraplegia” and his medical benefit from using marijuana.

The letter from the Olympia physician, Peter Taylor, was not allowed as evidence. It reads it part that Kurtz “has had progressive loss of function related to this familial neurologic condition which has left him wheelchair-bound and with severe tremors. Unfortunately, there is no treatment to prevent or cure this condition, and we are left to manage his symptoms, including chronic daily pain which is severe.”

Kurtz’s avoidance of jail time was the only silver lining in this mess. One Olympia-based medical marijuana activist I spoke to a few weeks back was fearing for Kurtz’s life if he were to be sent to jail.

Prosecutors really need to exercise better discretion on who we put through the criminal justice system. If Kurtz was caught selling his marijuana, that’s one thing, but he was quite obviously a medical marijuana patient. The proper course of action should have been to confiscate whatever plants were over the state limit and to give him a window of time to get a doctor’s authorization. Let’s reserve the court system for actual criminals.