Not-So-Secret Holiday Hints at Change for Marijuana Advocates

Happy 4/20 everyone! Today a reprint from the New York times article

By JESSE McKINLEY

Published: April 19, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — On Monday, somewhere in New York City, 420 people will gather for High Times magazine’s annual beauty pageant, a secretly located and sold-out event that its sponsor says will “turn the Big Apple into the Baked Apple and help us usher in a new era of marijuana freedom in America.”

David Perleberg sold pro-marijuana T-shirts at the forum, including one that shows the university’s buffalo mascot inhaling.

They will not be the only ones partaking: April 20 has long been an unofficial day of celebration for marijuana fans, an occasion for campus smoke-outs, concerts and cannabis festivals. But some advocates of legal marijuana say this year’s “high holiday” carries extra significance as they sense increasing momentum toward acceptance of the drug, either as medicine or entertainment.

“It is the biggest moment yet,” said Ethan Nadelmann, the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance in Washington, who cited several national polls showing growing support for legalization. “There’s a sense that the notion of legalizing marijuana is starting to cross the fringes into mainstream debate.”

For Mr. Nadelmann and others like him, the signs of change are everywhere, from the nation’s statehouses — where more than a dozen legislatures have taken up measures to allow some medical use of marijuana or some easing of penalties for recreational use — to its swimming pools, where an admission of marijuana use by the Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps was largely forgiven with a shrug.

Long stigmatized as political poison, the marijuana movement has found new allies in prominent politicians, including Representatives Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Ron Paul, Republican of Texas, who co-wrote a bill last year to decrease federal penalties for possession and to give medical users new protections.

The bill failed, but with the recession prompting bulging budget deficits, some legislators in California and Massachusetts have gone further, suggesting that the drug could be legalized and taxed, a concept that has intrigued even such ideologically opposed pundits as Glenn Beck of Fox News and Jack Cafferty of CNN.

“Look, I’m a libertarian,” Mr. Beck said on his Feb. 26 program. “You want to legalize marijuana, you want to legalize drugs — that’s fine.”

All of which has longtime proponents of the drug feeling oddly optimistic and even overexposed.

“We’ve been on national cable news more in the first three months than we typically are in an entire year,” said Bruce Mirken, the director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project, a reform group based in Washington. “And any time you’ve got Glenn Beck and Barney Frank agreeing on something, it’s either a sign that change is impending or that the end times are here.”

Beneficiaries of the moment include Norml, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which advocates legalization, and other groups like it. Norml says that its Web traffic and donations (sometimes in $4.20 increments) have surged, and that it will begin a television advertising campaign on Monday, which concludes with a plea, and an homage, to President Obama.

“Legalization,” the advertisement says, “yes we can!”

That seems unlikely anytime soon. In a visit last week to Mexico, where drug violence has claimed thousands of lives and threatened to spill across the border, Mr. Obama said the United States must work to curb demand for drugs.

Still, pro-marijuana groups have applauded recent remarks by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who suggested that federal law enforcement resources would not be used to pursue legitimate medical marijuana users and outlets in California and a dozen other states that allow medical use of the drug. Court battles are also percolating. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard arguments last Tuesday in San Francisco in a 2007 lawsuit challenging the government’s official skepticism about medical uses of the drug.

But Allen F. St. Pierre, the executive director of Norml, said he had cautioned supporters that any legal changes that might occur would probably be incremental.

“The balancing act this year is trying to get our most active, most vocal supporters to be more realistic in their expectations in what the Obama administration is going to do,” Mr. St. Pierre said.

For fans of the drug, perhaps the biggest indicator of changing attitudes is how widespread the observance of April 20 has become, including its use in marketing campaigns for stoner-movie openings (like last year’s “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay”) and as a peg for marijuana-related television programming (like the G4 network’s prime-time double bill Monday of “Super High Me” and “Half Baked”).

Events tied to April 20 have “reached the tipping point in the last few years after being a completely underground phenomenon for a long time,” said Steven Hager, the creative director and former editor of High Times. “And I think that’s symptomatic of the fact that people’s perception of marijuana is reaching a tipping point.”

Mr. Hager said the significance of April 20 dates to a ritual begun in the early 1970s in which a group of Northern California teenagers smoked marijuana every day at 4:20 p.m. Word of the ritual spread and expanded to a yearly event in various places. Soon, marijuana aficionados were using “420” as a code for smoking and using it as a sign-off on fliers for concerts where the drug would be plentiful.

In recent years, the April 20 events have become so widespread that several colleges have urged students to just say no. At the University of Colorado, Boulder, where thousands of students regularly use the day to light up in the quad, administrators sent an e-mail message this month pleading with students not to “participate in unlawful activity that debases the reputation of your university and degree.”

A similar warning was sent to students at the University of California, Santa Cruz — home of the Grateful Dead archives — which banned overnight guests at residence halls leading up to April 20.

None of which, of course, is expected to discourage the dozens of parties — large and small — planned for Monday, including the top-secret crowning of Ms. High Times.

In San Francisco, meanwhile, where a city supervisor, Ross Mirkarimi, suggested last week that the city should consider getting into the medical marijuana business as a provider, big crowds are expected to turn out at places like Hippie Hill, a drum-happy glade in Golden Gate Park.

A cloud of pungent smoke is also expected to be thick at concerts like one planned at the Fillmore rock club, where the outspoken pro-marijuana hip-hop group Cypress Hill is expected to take the stage at 4:20 p.m.

“You can see twice the amount of smoke as you do at a regular show,” said B-Real, a rapper in the group. “And it’s a great fragrance.”

Diggbar - Are you for it? Against it? Or just don't care?

A little over a week ago, digg.com introduced their new Diggbar url shortener service.  It was instantly a hit as the internet began instant adoption.  The ingenious functionality of simply putting digg.com/ before any URL was a huge hit and gauranteed easy adoption.  But within a couple of days their were rumors flying that the diggbar was stealing page rank, valuable SEO was being lost!  And now just about 14 hours before this writing, digg founder, Kevin Rose, sent out a tweet pointing to a diggbar'd article that dispelled (or atleast dampened) the SEO stealing rumors (http://digg.com/d10RtH).

You've got to admit Digg did just about everything you can think of to ensure it wasn't stealing any page rank, but I have a seperate problem with the diggbar being used as a direct URL shortening service - You never have to visit digg.com's page on the article at all!

While it is probably good to get people to actually read the articles before they digg them, it also means they may never visit the articles digg page at all.  Valuable comments and on-site banter will be lost as people digg, random, digg random without ever participating on the site.

Also, while the random button was a great idea, it seems to serve up only articles with 1k diggs or more.  You know, the same articles you see when you visit the home page and root pages of any section.  If it's random, let it serve up some upcoming articles or even brand new ones!

A couple of days after the diggbar's release, I wrote an eggdrop TCL script for IRC bots and released it to the wild.  Unfortunately, while the URL easy digg url creator is for everyone, the xml output page (which takes up even less bandwidth to produce) now requires a developers key.  I don't know if that means I can get one and release it with the script, or if every one of the script users has to figure it all out and get their own.  But I'll be releasing a new version of that soon.

So what's your take?  Are you currently using the diggbar?  Do you like it, hate it, or just don't care?  Comment below.

 

My Letter to CT House Rep: Demetrios

As we work toward marijuana reform around the country and especially here in Connecticut, I thought I'd share a letter I received and then replied to from CT House Rep Giannaros:

Thanks Shane.
The bill was voted successfully out of the Judiciary Committee.

I am not sure when it will be debated. I am leaning in favor of it
depending on the specific language at the end.
However, the Governor seems to be against it.

Best wishes,
Demetrios


Rep. Demetrios Giannaros
demetrios.giannaros@cga.ct.gov
(860) 240-8585


And my response:

Dear Representative Giannaros:

I sincerely appreciate you're taking the time to consider this bill at length. I urge you to stay strong in your stance to pass this bill.

In regards to our dear Governor, I have also written her to express my extreme disappointment with her narrow view on the subject and to remind her she will not have my vote in the upcoming elections if she stands against this bill. Marijuana decriminalization is important as we struggle to maintain Connecticut budgets, we could sincerely use the estimated $11 million dollars annually in our public school systems, to reinvest in our communities, or simply as a economic stimulus package to the people of Connecticut.

If the Governor does decide to veto this bill, I urge you to work with others in the House to over turn this veto as Vermont recently did in relation to gay marriage. How many more years will we pump money into enforcing non-violent, simple marijuana possession charges? Locking up our children, parents and grandparents who's only crime is simple marijuana possession charge, but are now labeled common criminal thugs by society, making it even more difficult to obtain employment. As you know, Mr Giannaros, we need to keep our residents in Connecticut and that means getting them back in the work force, does it make sense to keep simple marijuana users out of work? 

Thank you for your hard work on this very important issue to the people of Connecticut, I implore you to continue this work until we complete the task of decriminalizing simple marijuana possession in our great state.

Sincerely,

Shane Dragon
Connecticut Resident

UberDragon is back! - as a marijuana advocate???

First, to any of you wondering what in the world happened to me.. I'm still here. I lost my drive to blog regularly as life, family and work simply didn't allow much time for it. To be honest, all of those things still stake claim to the majority of my time.

I'm back because I need to be. Recently I was asked by a prospective client if I could help them with their online strategy, specifically the social networking aspect, twitter, facebook, myspace etc. That's when it hit me, while I have been busy working in the web industry to create client websites and applications, the web was passing me by. I hadn't blogged in a couple of years, I certainly had heard about all the social networking that was going on but other than marketing myself I didn't see much use for it. Since my employer pays to make sure my abilities are promoted, I had no need to self promote.

A couple of weeks ago, after the client inquiry, I decided I needed to re-acquaint myself with the web as it is being used today. It was then I realized I was so far behind the times! I went to digg.com where I had registered an account several years ago, but never used it. I decided I would start there and see where it takes me, and what a shock for me to find marijuana was all over the headlines. As digg linked me to news organizations like TIME magazine, NYTimes (who has a marijuana news section!), I realized there was a serious movement going on to tell the world about marijuana and to convince us all it is time to legalize it. After reading EVERYTHING I could find on the subject I have come to the following conclusion; everyone is right and we need DO to legalize it sooner rather than later.

I admit, I have had past affiliations with NORML and CANN over the years helping to organize a couple of marches as well as building websites for the causes, but I head never heard of LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition), nor MPP (Marijuana Policy Project) and I was introduced to many others. And I have always kept that occasional side of my life 100% separate from my work/web life.

I found myself digging article after article about the medicinal benefits of marijuana, the billions of dollars we spend annually to continue enforcing the current policies, locking up children, parents and grandparents and labeling them criminals for the use of marijuana. The mexican cartels that obtain over 60% of their cashflow from marijuana distribution. Oh the list just goes on and on, (I'm still finding worthwhile articles to digg about the legalization of marijuana).

So the question is have I become an online marijuana advocate? Do I really want to suddenly get labeled a "worthless stoner" or "a criminal" because I do believe Americans could save billions of dollars and could generate billions more by legalization and taxation of this globally used commodity? I don't want those labels, nor do I think I deserve them, but I've decided if you want to slap on some labels to my otherwise impressive list of responsibilities and accomplishments, than so be it. As I watch my family members loose their jobs one by one due to the recession, having to consolidate living into one house and personally paying for a large amount of the bills so we can all survive, I know something must be done, the time is now, tomorrow is a day too late.

Please don't think this means this is the only topic on my mind, I am back online and I have a renewed commitment to continue blogging. As always my topics will range from web development & design, web security, and web technology as usual, you may just have to deal with a few opinions on ending marijuana prohibition along the way. It's good to be back!

And to answer Will Wheaton's call: I too smoke pot and I like it! I don't drink, I don't use any other illegal substances and I have managed to hide my marijuana usage from my government, and most of my colleagues all of my life. This while managing to receive company awards with names like "Get it Done", donating my time to my community, raising a family and paying my taxes. Why do you want to call me a criminal?

Microsoft Applies For Patent Telling You If A Website Is On A List Of Phishing Sites

It seems that every few days when new patents are announced there are a few gems from Microsoft. Take, for example, Microsoft's latest patent application on Phishing Detection, Prevention, and Notification. If they truly came up with an innovative way to stop phishing attacks, that would be interesting. Instead, it appears that the patent is for looking at the URLs found in an email or visited by a website, comparing them to a known list of phishing sites -- and then alerting you that the link might be fraudulent. In other words, it's the most obvious anti-phishing system around (and one that's proven to not be all that effective). If someone were to describe to you the problem of phishing, and ask you how to stop it, this would be nearly everyone's first attempt. It's hard to see how something so obvious deserves patent protection -- but the way our system works these days, the whole "non-obvious" requirement has been pretty much tossed out. -- Clarifying that this is simply a patent application, not a granted patent -- but the fact that Microsoft even thinks it's worth applying for such a patent highlights the way the system works these days.