Pubdate: Sat, 08 Mar 2014
Source: Trentonian, The (NJ)
Copyright: 2014 The Trentonian
Contact:  http://www.trentonian.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1006
Author: Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency
Page: A35

FIRING UP A NEW POT DEBATE

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 voiceover 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 Monday (March 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 pushback 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 on Tuesday to make making pot
smoking a civil, rather than a 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 how it should be regulated. The
answer is coming slowly and sometimes angrily in a variety of states
and localities.

In Denver, for example, the city council voted in November to ban pot
smoking on front porches, patios and balconies, then reversed itself a
week later -- just in time to fire up another heated debate over
limits to how many plants should be allowed per household.

In Washington State, small farmers and vendors are fuming over new
regulations to pull them into a tightly controlled and licensed
commercial system for recreational marijuana, which goes on sale this
summer.

Even liberal California is tapping on the brakes. Legalization
proponents have withdrawn competing propositions for this year's
ballot because of unresolved differences over, yes, how legalized
marijuana should be regulated.

That's wise. Opponents like Sabet, who topped Rolling Stone's list of
"Legalization's Biggest Enemies" last year, are closely watching
states like Colorado and Washington for stumbles and horror stories.

And that's OK. The laboratory of the states is an appropriate place to
work out complex issues like this one. But in the long run, it is
increasingly clear that our past war on pot hasn't been working.
Judging by the polls and political trends, any serious pushback to
more criminalization sounds like another pipe dream -- or, if you
prefer, an anti-pipe dream.
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MAP posted-by: Matt