It's 4/20: Time for a Marijuana News Round-up

Easter falls on 4/20 this year, which means in addition to bunnies and chocolate eggs, Americans are thinking about marijuana.

Here's a brief round-up of marijuana-related news in celebration of the dual holiday.

First, where did the "420" tradition come from?

An Phung offers this explanation on the NBC Los Angeles web site:

While there are no shortages of theories about how the “high" holiday came to be, several published reports give the credit for 4/20's creation to a group of Northern California high school students. The friends say they started using the term as code for pot-smoking in 1971, after planning to meet at 4:20 p.m. one day to smoke and search out a rumored pot crop.

The term spread, eventually reaching, through mutual acquaintances, members of the Greatful Dead [sic] rock band, the friends claim. The lingo was picked up by High Times magazine in 1990, according to BBC News, after an editor saw the term on a Grateful Dead concert flyer.

While others have also come forward to claim they are parents of the pot phrase, the friends, who call themselves the Waldos, say they have letters and other documents to back their story.

What about the weed business?

While he cautions that too much optimism may be premature, Andrew Bender reports in Forbes that Colorado is seeing a boom in the tourist industry since recreational pot was legalized earlier this year:

In the first quarter of the year, Denver International Airport saw record traffic, online searches for Denver hotels were up 25 percent, the real estate market has boomed, and the nation’s first cannabis-themed tour operator has sold out all its tours. That’s a lot to cheer about going into the 420 Rally this weekend, itself newly expanded and set to bring in record numbers of visitors.

Bender offers details such as this:

Cannabis tour operator My 420 Tours has sold out all six of its tours so far this year, at rates of $1,399 to $1,699 for 5 days. CEO and founder J. J. Walker says that the tours let visitors “see the industry from inside and out” with visits to dispensaries and growers, cannabis cooking classes, hashish-preparing lessons and plenty of product samples. Oh, yes, and snacks.

And this:

[Ricardo] Baca and [J.J.] Walker also credit pot with new real estate construction, sales and rentals. “There’s tons and tons of construction starting and apartments being built,” Walker says.

Baca has heard from apartment search services that there’s been a huge influx of people, especially those in their twenties, moving to the state for the marijuana. “They don’t want to have to be looking over their shoulder or for it to be illegal just to have some in their refrigerator.”

Meanwhile, Walker says, commercial rental rates for potential dispensaries or growers’ warehouses have skyrocketed.

“People are moving here for the industry and the opportunity and freedom it represents,” Walker says. Talk about all-American values.

Hunter Stuart offers these four statistics (and nine more equally compelling) at The Huffington Post:

$1.53 billion: The amount the national legal marijuana market is worth, according to a Nov. 2013 report from ArcView Market Research, a San Francisco-based investor group focused on the marijuana industry.

$10.2 billion: The estimated amount the national legal marijuana market will be worth in five years, according to that same ArcView report.

$6.17 million: The amount of tax revenue collected in Colorado on legal marijuana sales in just the first two months of 2014.

$98 million: The total tax revenue that Colorado could reap in the fiscal year that begins in July, according to a recent budget proposal from Gov. John Hickenlooper.

Another economic benefit of pot legalization is that it is usually accompanied by the legalization of industrial hemp production. According to a report in the Post Independent:

“Hemp can fix every problem in the world if we just let it, so let’s get to work finding out the hundreds of thousands of uses for hemp,” said Sen. David Balmer, R-Centennial.

In 2011, the U.S. imported $11.5 million worth of hemp products, largely from China and Canada, compared to $1.4 million in imports in 2000. Most of that was hemp seed and hemp oil, used in granola bars, soaps, lotions and cooking oil.

Colorado authorized hemp cultivation in 2012 when it legalized marijuana for recreational use. Farmers must apply for permits with the state Department of Agriculture, which are being issued for the first time this year, though a few growers didn’t wait and brought in sparse and scraggly experimental crops last year.

Twelve other states have removed barriers to hemp production — California, Kentucky, Indiana, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia, according to the Vote Hemp advocacy group.

As for those who worry that legalizing marijuana (for medical or recreational purposes) will lead to an increase in violent crime, Erin Delmore of MSNBC reports:

[E]ven after Colorado legalized the sale of small amounts of marijuana for recreational use on Jan. 1 of this year, violent and property crime rates in the city are actually falling.

According to data from the Denver Police Department, violent crime (including homicide, sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault) fell by 6.9% in the first quarter of 2014, compared with the same period in 2013. Property crime (including burglary, larceny, auto theft, theft from motor vehicle and arson) dropped by 11.1%.

Delmore cites a study, "The Effect of Medical Marijuana Laws on Crime: Evidence from State Panel Data, 1990-2006," by four criminologists at the University of Texas at Dallas ( Robert G. Morris, Michael TenEyck, J. C. Barnes, and Tomislav V. Kovandzic), which concludes (references omitted):

The central finding gleaned from the present study was that MML [medical marijuana legalization] is not predictive of higher crime rates and may be related to reductions in rates of homicide and assault. Interestingly, robbery and burglary rates were unaffected by medicinal marijuana legislation, which runs counter to the claim that dispensaries and grow houses lead to an increase in victimization due to the opportunity structures linked to the amount of drugs and cash that are present. Although, this is in line with prior research suggesting that medical marijuana dispensaries may actually reduce crime in the immediate vicinity.

In sum, these findings run counter to arguments suggesting the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes poses a danger to public health in terms of exposure to violent crime and property crimes. To be sure, medical marijuana laws were not found to have a crime exacerbating effect on any of the seven crime types. On the contrary, our findings indicated that MML precedes a reduction in homicide and assault. While it is important to remain cautious when interpreting these findings as evidence that MML reduces crime, these results do fall in line with recent evidence and they conform to the longstanding notion that marijuana legalization may lead to a reduction in alcohol use due to individuals substituting marijuana for alcohol. Given the relationship between alcohol and violent crime, it may turn out that substituting marijuana for alcohol leads to minor reductions in violent crimes that can be detected at the state level.

With these advantages -- reductions in crime, economic growth, increased tax revenues -- it should come as no surprise that Americans have become more open to the idea of marijuana legalization in recent years.

Writing in The Weed Blog earlier this month on a survey of Americans about pot laws, Paul Armentano of NORML reported:

Seventy-five percent of Americans believe that the sale and use of cannabis will eventually be legal for adults, according to national polling data released this week by the Pew Research Center. Pew pollsters have been surveying public opinion on the marijuana legalization issue since 1973, when only 12 percent of Americans supported regulating the substance.

Fifty-four percent of respondents say that marijuana ought to be legal now, according to the poll. The total is the highest percentage of support ever reported by Pew and marks an increase of 2 percent since 2013. Forty-two percent of respondents said that they opposed legalizing marijuana for non-therapeutic purposes. Only 16 percent of Americans said that the plant should not be legalized for any reason.

Pew reported its findings like this:

The survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted Feb. 14-23 among 1,821 adults, finds that support for the legalization of marijuana use continues to increase. And fully 75% of the public –including majorities of those who favor and oppose the legal use of marijuana – think that the sale and use of marijuana will eventually be legal nationwide.

By wide margins, the public views marijuana as less harmful than alcohol, both to personal health and to society more generally. Moreover, just as most Americans prefer a less punitive approach to the use of drugs such as heroin and cocaine, an even larger majority (76% of the public) – including 69% of Republicans and 79% of Democrats – think that people convicted of possessing small amounts of marijuana should not have to serve time in jail.

(The same survey also showed Americans' preference for medical treatment rather than criminal penalties for users of harder drugs like heroin and cocaine.)

However you slice it, the news is good for proponents of ending the drug war, at least as far as marijuana is concerned. People are beginning to understand that prohibition doesn't work, it is unable to overcome the economic laws of supply-and-demand, it encourages the growth of illegal enterprises, and it punishes -- sometimes with death -- otherwise innocent Americans.

Pollster Scott Rasmussen Addresses RightOnline Conference: Video

Scott Rasmussen

Three previous posts this week featured videos of presentations at the 2012 RightOnline conference in Las Vegas, which took place on June 15 and 16 at the Venetian Hotel.

The first post was about former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and current Nevada Third District Congressman Joe Heck.

The second one included speeches by two highly-rated talk-radio hosts, Lars Larson and Rusty Humphries.

The third had speeches by authors S.E. Cupp and Jonah Goldberg, as well as a panel discussion with the two of them plus Larson.

This entry in the series features a dinner address by Scott Rasmussen, founder and president of the Rasmussen Reports public opinion polling firm (and also co-founder of ESPN, but that's just a historical tidbit).

A few hours before his speech, I had an opportunity to interview Rasmussen about the polling business.  Here's an excerpt:

Rasmussen has also noted a change in attitudes over the past twenty years since he began doing public opinion surveys, when issues like gay marriage were not even being discussed.

Beginning with a caveat that he did not “want to overstate this in a political sense,” he pointed out that “the biggest change is that, as a younger generation comes along,” there are more apparent “libertarianish attitudes.”

What this means, Rasmussen explained, is that “people believe they have the right to make decisions for their own lives and they’re very comfortable with that. They get pretty offended when somebody tries to tell them they can’t do something.”

That attitude, he said, “would apply to something like same-sex marriage or to a whole range of other cultural and social issues coming up.”

Rasmussen's post-dinner speech covered a wide range of issues. It's best to let it speak for itself:

Scott Rasmussen is the author, most recently, of The People's Money: How Voters Will Balance the Budget and Eliminate the Federal Debt. His other books include In Search of Self-Governance, A Better Deal : Social Security Choice, and (with Douglas Schoen) Mad As Hell: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System.

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Replying to Critics of My RTD Piece on Theodore Roosevelt

Over the weekend, the Richmond Times-Dispatch published an opinion piece I wrote with the headline, "Why does Obama channel racist TR?"  It ran in six columns across the top of the Op/Ed page on Saturday, accompanied by a photo of Teddy Roosevelt.

In the article, I take note of President Barack Obama's recent speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, a small town that had been the location of an earlier speech (in 1910) by former President Theodore Roosevelt, in which he introduced the phrase "a square deal" as the theme of his upcoming campaign to regain the presidency.

Roosevelt split the Republican party in 1912, forming the Bull Moose party as a vehicle for his planned return to office, while the GOP nominated the incumbent, Roosevelt's hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft.  The divide between factions of the Republican party led to the election of Woodrow Wilson.

The key paragraph in my Times-Dispatch piece was this:

The sad fact is, Theodore Roosevelt was an unabashed racist who celebrated genocide. He was a Nobel Peace Prize winner who glorified war and facilitated the Japanese conquest of Korea. He was a eugenicist who thought only fit people (as he, or the government, defined them) should be able to reproduce.

My point in bringing this up was that it is strange that the country's first African-American president would want to wear the mantle of a man who, according to most accounts (and his own words), held non-white races and non-Anglo-Saxon ethnic groups in contempt.


For my article, I drew on the works of scholars like Thomas J. Dyer, author of Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race. (The fact that a book with a title like that exists should be an indication of Roosevelt's problematic views.) Another historian I cited was Nancy Carnevale, who cited Roosevelt's disdainful views of immigrants from southern Europe in her book, A New Language, A New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States, 1890-1945.

Even the Miller Center at the University of Virginia noted that Roosevelt

did little to preserve black suffrage in the South as those states increasingly disenfranchised blacks. He believed that African Americans as a race were inferior to whites

I also quoted directly from Roosevelt's own writings.

Although I have written articles for the Richmond Times-Dispatch in the past (for instance, "Third Party Resurgence Seems Unlikely," published on August 7, and "America Could Use a Good Dose of Calvin Coolidge," published on July 4, 2010), none has received the kind of reaction that this one has.

There were comments left on the Times-Dispatch web site (and propagated through Facebook) and I also received several emails, some critical, some congratulatory, in reply to my piece.

What follows are replies to most of the comments I received, either directly or through the RTD web site.  If you haven't read the original article yet, it may be helpful to do so before tackling the responses.

One of the emails and one of the commenters took me to task for misrepresenting how Texas came to be part of the United States.

The email correspondent wrote:

Not to make a big issue, but Texas was not 'annexed' by the USA. Texas was an independent nation in 1936 and joined the Union later.

Similarly, a published comment stated:

Texas was a republic, a separate country, from 1836 to 1845. The United States annexed Texas in 1845. Do your homework!

I did, of course, do my homework before mentioning "the annexation of Texas and other territories formerly belonging to Mexico" in my article.

In fact, the United States annexed Texas in 1845. The governing law passed by the U.S. Congress to join Texas to the United States, passed March 1, 1845, was entitled "Joint Resolution for Annexing Texas to the United States." The controlling legislation from the Republic of Texas, passed in convention on July 4, 1845, was called the "Ordinance of Annexation." (The texts of both those laws can be found on the web site of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.)

Another email came from a self-described "retired history teacher."  Given the lapses in grammar, spelling, and punctuation in the message, I print the text in full (first paragraph omitted here but shown later in this post):

Obama our nation's first Black president is trying to say that Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican, who was " progressive" and willing to move forward instead of being like the Republicans today who only move backward or not move at all. It is not about race? Its about vision of the future.

Teddy Roosevelt preached against greed of big business and worked hard to break up monopolies.

No where in your article do you mention that. If Obama understands that, why can't you?

In order for him to be re-elected our country will have to get over the race issue. Too much anti-Obama is about race. For this southern white male, and retired history teacher who supports Obama and will vote for his again no matter who the Republican is. If you think about it, it may be that your article; why would this Republican newspaper use it? To tell everyone not to forget that Obama is Black. You did it for them. Thanks alot.

Other writers (e.g., Jim Powell and Gene Healy) have addressed Roosevelt's domestic policies with regard to business and economics; that wasn't the point of my article, and that's why I did not "mention that."  I chose to write about a different topic.

What I find most odd about this emailer's complaint, however, is that he seems to imply that my article decrying racism had a hidden racist message. If so, he finds more irony in what I wrote than what I found in Barack Obama's wish to emulate a racist politician.

And, if there are Americans who are unaware that President Obama is African-American and need my reminder... well, those people shouldn't be voting in the first place. Ignorance has no place in the voting booth.

Another email correspondent writes:

This morning I read your piece on Teddy Roosevelt. It was an interesting read. Near the end you referenced two quotes from letters Roosevelt wrote, one to Charles Davenport and another to an unnamed recipient. It's my opinion that neither of these quotes supports your argument that Roosevelt was a racist as he not once makes mention of race as a factor in his breeding philosophy. You offer no additional support for how these quotes demonstrate TR's rascist views.

To a certain extent, this point is valid. The quotations about Roosevelt as a eugenicist to not, in themselves, prove he was a racist. But what I was trying to do by citing them is to prove he was a eugenicist, and eugenics was largely (but not entirely) based upon racist beliefs. Prominent eugenicists like Margaret Sanger were not shy at all about expressing the racist (mostly anti-black) roots of their aims.

In that regard, a third correspondent, unaware (I believe) of the others, wrote this:

A year or so ago, I read the book "The Imperial Cruise" by James Bradley, which detailed much of what Roosevelt believed and stood for, his speeches and his actions. He was truly a bully and his beliefs concerning Eugenics, interracial marriages and his encouragement to Japan to become the dominant force in the Pacific were horrifying. By the time I finished the book, I have been wondering how we could blast his face off Mt. Rushmore without damaging any of the remaining three.

One of the commenters on the newspaper's web site seems not to have read the article I wrote because he assets:

TR was no racist. In fact, his views on race unusually progressive just like his politics in general. He believed all people should be treaty like human beings. As for his war record, there was none. In fact, he won a Nobel Peace Prize. Your reading of American history is flawed and biased. He was a patriot.

My high school debate coach taught that "he who asserts must prove." I provided evidence for my contentions, but the commenter does no more than gainsay my argument. This is not argument at all, just contradiction. The fact that I mention the dubious circumstances under which Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize apparently slipped this commenter's grasp altogether.

Other correspondents and commenters rationalize Roosevelt's racist attitudes by suggesting that he was a man of his time or that he was no different than other public figures before or since.

Said one, in an email with the subject line "Your RTD Blog on TR" (has the line between blogging and newspaper opinion-writing become that porous?):

All heroes have feet of clay………………… Grow up………………………. Martin Luther King was a huge racist and adulterer…………………. Why don’t you ponder that for a while.

And another:

The same column could be written about Abraham Lincoln by harping on his placing preservation of the Union above freeing the slaves.

And the same has been said many times of Ronald Reagan, and that is far more relevant to today's political discourse.

And this one, which arrived in my email box after I began composing this blog post:

Mr Roosevelt was a product of his times; employing the teachings of evolution and carrying them out in his beliefs! Evolution teaches that life came from a simpler life form to a more larger and stronger life form. That only the strong survive and the weak fail to continue. Obama simply has no clue about the historical facts of the presidents he desires to emulate and should perform more research before he comapres himself to one of the characters of history.

Finally, the "retired history teacher" cited above began his email to me with this:

By our standards today every white male would have been racist in Rossevelt's time. By that same standard today every Black male would be racist towards whites.

I actually reject that thought. While the turn of the 20th century was no picnic when it comes to race relations -- the reprehensible Virginia state constitution of 1902 is evidence of that -- there were, in fact, principled individuals who believed fully that "all men are created equal" and who worked hard to achieve racial harmony in the face of great odds.


This was the time, remember, when groups like the NAACP had their beginnings. It was also the time, to be sure, of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, which inspired a resurgence of the KKK in the North as well as the South, and the time during which Woodrow Wilson ordered the re-segregation of public facilities in Washington, D.C.

Had it not been for those early pioneers in civic activism, law, and the humanities who fought against racism, jingoism, and eugenics, the accomplishments of the later "civil rights era" of the 1950s and '60s would have been that much harder to achieve. Were it true that "every white male" was racist toward blacks and "every Black male" was racist toward whites in 1900 and the years that followed, the civil rights movement could never have reached the launch stage.

Progress requires a core group of people of good faith who are also kind, thoughtful, fair-minded, and intelligent.  That people like Roosevelt and Wilson lacked those qualities is a good reason for us today to reassess their political legacies.

I am looking forward to any letters to the editor that appear in the Richmond Times-Dispatch in reply to my article. Once they are published, I will post links as an update, below.

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Today's RTD: 'Third-Party Resurgence Seems Unlikely'

A couple of weeks ago (July 26, to be precise), Coy Barefoot invited me to be a guest on his WINA-AM radio program, "Charlottesville Right Now."  The topic we agreed to discuss was the prospects for a third-party presidential candidate in 2012. (Podcast here.)

In preparing for the show, I realized that, despite the wishful thinking of pundits who -- as they have prior to so many elections in past years -- predict that a "third-party moment" is upon us, owing to the deep dissatisfaction of American voters with the two major parties, the Democrats and Republicans.

What has sparked this latest round of prognostication was the "dysfunctionality" perceived in the long congressional debate about raising the debt ceiling, an issue that has largely gone unnoticed in the previous dozens of times it's come under legislative consideration.

I realized that the pundits are going to be wrong once again when I examined the facts about Virginia's "off-year" elections in 2011.  (We election officials cringe at the use of "off-year" to describe Virginia's elections, because every year is election year in the Old Dominion, and every election is equally important in the effects it has on the lives and governance of our citizens.)

What I found out is that there are only about a dozen third-party and independent candidates for the 140 seats up for election in the General Assembly -- 100 in the House of Delegates and 40 in the Senate.  I also discovered that the majority of those seats will be fully uncontested -- there is only one major party candidate in 62 of the House elections and in 15 of the Senate elections.

If there were really a strong desire for third-party representation in government, we would see demand for third-party and independent candidates to emerge in this year's Virginia elections.  But we don't see that.

This is all a long way of getting around to pointing out that, once I got my thoughts in order, I put them on paper and submitted them as an op-ed to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, which published the piece in Sunday's commentary section under the headline, "Third-party resurgence seems unlikely".

The article's central argument is this:

Because Virginia holds its state elections in odd-numbered years, out of sync with most of the rest of the states, it is widely seen as a bellwether of the country's political mood.

In 2009, for instance, Republicans swept the top three statewide offices here, anticipating the landslide return in 2010 of a GOP majority to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Four years earlier, Democrat Tim Kaine won the governor's mansion, followed in 2006 by the Democratic Party regaining control of both chambers of Congress.

In 1993, Republican George Allen's come-from-behind victory in the governor's race portended the first GOP takeover of Congress in 40 years.

If the electorate's mood really favors a third-party surge, we would be seeing it in Virginia. There would be a demand for third-party and independent candidates for the General Assembly, and candidates would rise to meet that demand.

Yet according to records available through the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP), there are only seven independent candidates seeking election to the 100-member House of Delegates this year. There are four independent candidates for the 40-member state Senate.

Check out the Times-Dispatch today at your local newsstand or look it up online. Comments and questions are welcome, there or here.

I just hope that nobody thinks the photo accompanying the article in the RTD is a picture of me.

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Survey Says? Bloggers Shape Opinion

The second of two (so far) annual surveys by the Society for New Communications Research has found that professional journalists have a stronger, more positive opinion about social media that both leads those journalists to use social media as a tool to disseminate information and also to rely on social media -- including Facebook and Twitter, for example, but also blogs -- as sources of information.

The survey was conducted by Jen McClure, the founder and president of the Society for New Communications Research (also CMO and director of community development for Redwood Collaborative Media), and Don Middleberg, CEO of Middleberg Communications. The survey included 341 journalists from around the world, with 54 percent from the United States. Among the survey's findings:

* Nearly 70 percent of journalists are using social networking sites, a 28% increase since the [previous] 2008 study

* 48 percent are using Twitter or other microblogging sites and tools, a 25% increase since 2008

* 66 percent are using blogs

* 48 percent are using online video

* 25 percent are using podcasts

* More than 90 percent of journalists agree that new media and communications tools and technologies are enhancing journalism to some extent

The most intriguing finding (to me, at least) was this:

Nearly 80 percent of respondents agreed that new media and communications technologies allow them to report with greater accuracy, and 80 percent of journalists believe that bloggers have become important opinion shapers in the 21st century and many are increasingly incorporating citizen-generated media into their reporting.

Paolina Milana, executive vice president for Marketing/Editorial Operations/Media Relations at Marketwire, a corporate sponsor of the study, said:

Social media is immediate, it is accessible, and it has irrevocably changed the relationship between makers, reporters and consumers of news. The more that all journalistic participants understand each other's needs, how they use various media channels at their disposal, and how they want to work with PR professionals, the better the entire communication process will be.

H/T Joe Ciarallo



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