Pubdate: Tue, 11 Mar 2014
Source: Detroit News (MI)
Copyright: 2014 The Detroit News
Contact:  http://www.detroitnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/126
Author: Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune
Page: 13A

TV POT ADS FIRE UP NEW DEBATE

The legal sale of marijuana is nothing new in America, but now pot
sellers are using the airwaves to reach the masses.

Marijuana ads on television? The possibility used to be a pipe dream
for some folks. Suddenly, it's a reality.

The first marijuana ad to appear in a national TV campaign, viewable
on various websites, doesn't talk about weed right away. It talks
about something truly fishy.

"Yo, you want sushi?" says an actor playing a seedy looking street
dealer in a coat lined with little strips of raw fish. "Ain't nobody
sellin' but me."

A female voice-over interrupts. "You wouldn't buy your sushi from this
guy," she says, "so why would you buy your marijuana from him?"

Clever. It may be hard to explain marijuana quality control to the
uninitiated, but everybody balks at suspicious fish.

The ad, which started running last week 3 late at night on Comcast
stations in states where marijuana is legal for medicinal use,
promotes MarijuanaDoctors.com, which aims to connect patients with
doctors who will recommend the drug.

While some viewers may be surprised or amused, others are alarmed to
see the demon weed openly promoted on TV, even when it is ostensibly
for medicinal purposes.

Welcome to the new world of post-legalization pot politics.
Legalization opponents hope that viewers will be shocked enough by the
reality marijuana advertising to join their push-back campaign.

People don't mind legalization "in theory," Kevin Sabet, a director of
the anti-legalization group Project SAM (Smart Approaches to
Marijuana), said on a local Washington, D.C., public radio panel show.
"But in practice, when they see the pot shop in their backyard, when
they see the advertising now going on even on TV ... then they say,
'wait a minute, this is not what I signed up for.'"

Maybe so, but a reversal of pro-legalization trends is a tall order.
For the first time, according to a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News
poll, a majority of Americans - 55 percent - say they favor laws
allowing adults to buy small quantities of marijuana from
state-licensed businesses.

More than half of the states are considering decriminalizing or
legalizing the drug, according to the New York Times.

Washington state and Colorado set the stage just over a year ago by
legalizing marijuana for recreational purposes. Twenty states and
Washington, D.C., have legalized medical marijuana, according to the
U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, since California led the
way in 1996.

The District of Columbia passed a bill last week to make making pot
smoking a civil, rather than criminal, offense, cutting the penalty
for possession of small amounts of marijuana to a $25 fine. It remains
to be seen whether Congress will try to override that decision.

In short, the great marijuana debate has begun to shift nationally
from whether it should be legalized to it should be regulated. The
answer is coming slowly and sometimes angrily in a variety of states
and localities. And that's OK. The laboratory of the states is an
appropriate place to work out complex issues like this one.

In the long run, it is increasingly clear that America's war on pot
isn't working.