Friday, April 20, 2012

"4/20: Sweet smoke from Vancouver to Boulder" (with slideshow)

Joel Connelly (SeattlePI.COM) with slideshow:
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– Sen. Eugene McCarthy: The Minnesota senator who challenged President Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War had a way of putting it on the line without raising his voice. McCarthy got away with saying he would fire FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Asked what he would do about marijuana, he told an audience in conservative Indiana: "I’d put a warning on the package." (from the slideshow)

It’s an historic April 20th, on a number of counts. We’re marking the 75th anniversary of the federal prohibition on marijuana, which has not prevented 100 million Americans from smoking cannabis, in venues from the elite Honolulu high school attended by Barack Obama to the I-didn’t-inhale experience in England of Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton. Our politicians seem to agree, in words from Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the Summit of the Americas in Colombia that the criminal pursuit of pot “is not working but it is not clear what we should do.” The University of Colorado-Boulder usually features one of America’s largest smoke-ins. And this year, voters in Colorado will get to decide on proposition 64, which would tax and regulate cannabis. Initiative 502, on Washington’s ballot, would do likewise — and has garnered support from a former FBI man, the Seattle city attorney, nabobs from the bar and medicine, and a former U.S. Attorney. MORE...

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