MARIJUANA 2000: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF POT PROHIBITION

Number of Americans arrested since 1970 on marijuana-related charges: over
13 million

Estimated U.S. deaths in year 2000 attributed to

TOBACCO: 400,000

ALCOHOL: 110,000

PRESCRIPTION DRUGS: 100,000

SUICIDE: 30,000

MURDER: 15,000

OVER-THE-COUNTER PAINKILLERS: 7,600

MARIJUANA: 0

"One of the problems that the marijuana-reform movement consistently faces
is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever
wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks
down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick
and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in
bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer-madness allegation of the
prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm
to far more people than marijuana ever could."

Richard Cowan, former head of NORML, now editor of www.marijuananews.com

JANUARY 18

Atlanta: Louis E. Covar Jr., 51, a quadriplegic paralyzed from the neck
down in a diving accident on July 4, 1967, who says he uses marijuana to
relieve the pain from muscle spasms in his neck, is sentenced to seven
years in prison after being accused of selling marijuana out of his home.
Judge J. Carlisle Overstreet sent Covar to prison after investigators found
about 1.25 ounces of marijuana in his home. "We feel strongly he was
selling out of his house," Richmond County DA Danny Craig said. Covar
denied the charges, insisting the small amount was for his personal
medicinal use. According to the Department of Corrections, the special care
Covar will need will cost $258.33 a day -- or more than $660,000 if he
serves his full seven years. A typical prisoner costs taxpayers $47.63 per day.

FEBRUARY 9

Arizona: Deborah Lynn Quinn, 39, born with no arms or legs, is sentenced to
one year in an Arizona prison for marijuana possession, thus violating her
probation on a previous drug offense -- the attempted sale of 4 grams of
marijuana to a police informant for $20. Quinn will require
around-the-clock care for feeding, bathing and hygiene. Terry L. Stewart,
Arizona Corrections Director, expressed his frustration: "I simply cannot
understand how a judge can sentence a disabled woman to prison who presents
absolutely no escape risk, no physical danger to the public, and who will
be an extremely difficult and expensive person to care for at $345 per day,
without exploring any alternative sentence measures such as intensive
probation."

FEBRUARY 15

The United States' prison and jail population surpasses 2 million people.
Prisons are one of the fastest-growing expenses of government, costing
about $100,000 to build a single prison cell and about $24,000 per year for
each prisoner. Some 1.3 million U.S. inmates are currently serving time for
"nonviolent offenses." One-quarter of the world's prisoners are now
incarcerated in the "land of the free."

FEBRUARY 23

Honolulu: The Hawai'i Medical Association comes out formally against the
pending state medical-marijuana initiative. Heidi Singh, director of
legislative and government affairs for the Hawai'i Medical Association,
said more studies should be done on medical marijuana, and that "physicians
cannot in good faith recommend a drug therapy without clinical evidence to
back it up."

FEBRUARY 28

Madrid: The chemical in marijuana that produces a "high" shows promise as a
weapon against deadly brain tumors, say Spanish scientists. In the study on
rats a research team from Complutense University and Autonoma University in
Madrid found that one of marijuana's active ingredients, THC, killed tumor
cells in advanced cases of glioma, a quick-killing cancer for which there
is currently no effective treatment. The scientists found that THC pumped
into the tumors cleared the cancer in more than a third of the test rats.
The drug also prolonged the life of another third by up to 40 days but was
ineffective in the rest. The cancer did not come back in any of the
survivors. Researchers are not sure why, but the Spanish team says THC
caused a buildup of a fat molecule called ceramide, which provoked a
die-off of the cancer cells.

MARCH 2

United Kingdom: Marijuana-like compounds ease tremors in mice with a
condition similar to multiple sclerosis, researchers say in a study
published in the British journal Nature that appears to corroborate
patients who say pot helps them deal with the disease. "This lends credence
to the anecdotal reports that some people with MS have said that cannabis
can help control these distressing symptoms," said Lorna Layward, one of
the study's authors. Layward heads the research arm of the Multiple
Sclerosis Society of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

MARCH 13

Mondovi, Wisconsin: Mondovi police conduct a 3:30 a.m. raid at the home of
medical-marijuana activist Jackie Rickert, seize a small amount of
marijuana and search her home until 10 a.m. Rickert is 49, wheelchair-bound
and weighs 90 pounds. Rickert suffers from Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and
reflexive-sympathetic dystrophy, bone and muscle illnesses that keep her in
constant pain and often unable to eat. She smokes marijuana to ease her
pain and restore her appetite. Rickert had just missed being accepted into
the federal government's Investigative New Drug program, which distributes
a tin of 300 pre-rolled marijuana cigarettes to eight legally protected
American citizens each month. Rickert's daughter, Tammy, claims the police
raid has left her mother a wreck. "She's tiny, frail," Tammy Rickert said.
"She's not out to hurt anybody. She's trying to maintain some semblance of
a quality of life. The marijuana, which the government pretty much told her
she could use, helps a little. This whole thing is unbelievable."

MARCH 16

New York City: An unarmed black security guard, Patrick Dorismond, waiting
for a cab with his friend Kevin Kaiser, is shot dead by undercover New York
City police officers conducting a marijuana "buy-and-bust." Two
plainclothes detectives approached Dorismond asking if he would sell them
"some weed." Dorismond rebuffed the men, a scuffle ensued and a third
officer, Anthony Vasquez, rushed in, pulled out his revolver and fired a
single bullet into Dorismond's chest. No drugs or other contraband were
found on Dorismond's body. The shooting was the third time in 13 months
plainclothes New York City police officers have shot and killed an unarmed
black man. Under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, marijuana arrests in the city have
risen from 720 in 1992, to 59,945 in the first 11 months of 2000.

APRIL 1

Toronto: Canada's premier national newspaper, The National Post,
editorializes in favor of legalizing marijuana: "Marijuana legalization has
long been the subject of academic debate. The time has come to turn
conjecture into law. Canada's police, judges and prosecutors have better
things to do with their time than track down those who produce and consume
a substance no more dangerous than alcohol and tobacco. We should begin the
decriminalization of marijuana by immediately reducing the punishments that
can be imposed for its possession to modest fines -- and start thinking
about how to regulate its use."

APRIL 12

Santa Cruz, California: The Santa Cruz City Council unanimously approves an
ordinance making the city the first in the nation to legalize the
production and sale of medical marijuana without a doctor's prescription,
as long as it is sold at cost or given away.

APRIL 25

Honolulu: Despite the formal opposition of the Hawai'i Diocese of the
Catholic Church, the Hawai'i State Senate passes medical-marijuana
legislation, joining California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Alaska, Arizona
and the District of Columbia in shielding medical marijuana patients from
criminal prosecution.

MAY 11

Charleston, West Virginia: The West Virginia Supreme Court, voting 4-1,
denies a "medical necessity" defense to Donna Jean Poling, a
multiple-sclerosis patient in the terminal stages of her illness, who was
arrested for growing marijuana in her home. Poling claimed that marijuana
kept her symptom-free for three years preceding her 1998 arrest, after
which her condition worsened dramatically.

JUNE 9

New York City: Human Rights Watch releases a study finding that Illinois is
the worst state for racial disparity among jailed drug offenders. Illinois'
black men are 57 times more likely than white men to be sent to prison on
drug charges, and blacks comprise 90 percent of all prison admissions in
Illinois for drug charges -- the highest percentage in the country.
Nationwide, federal studies show that white drug users outnumber black drug
users 5 to 1, blacks make up about 62 percent of prisoners incarcerated on
drug charges in the United States, compared with 36 percent of whites.

JUNE 14

Los Angeles: Bestselling author, cancer and AIDS patient and high-profile,
medical-marijuana activist Peter McWilliams is found dead in his home.
McWilliams, barred by a federal court order from using marijuana to
counteract the extreme nausea caused by his AIDS drugs, is found dead on
his bathroom floor, having choked to death on his own vomit. His federal
prosecutors say they were "saddened by his death."

McWilliams bestselling books included How to Heal Depression, Getting Over
the Loss of a Love, Life 101 and Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The
Absurdity of Consensual Crimes In Our Free Country.

JULY 31

Ontario, Canada: Ontario's top court rules unanimously (3-0) that Canada's
law making marijuana possession a crime is unconstitutional, because it
does not take into account the needs of Canadian medical-marijuana
patients. The judges allow the current law to remain in effect for another
12 months to permit Parliament to rewrite it. However, if the Canadian
government fails to set up a medical-marijuana distribution program by July
31, 2001, all marijuana laws in Canada will be struck down. The decision
comes in the case of Terry Parker, an epileptic who had been denied a
federal medical-marijuana exemption. Parker has been hospitalized over 100
times for injuries sustained during seizures.

AUGUST 16

Los Angeles: The American Medical Marijuana Association reports that
medical-marijuana patient, grower and author of How to Grow Medical
Marijuana, Todd McCormick, confined to federal prison while appealing his
drug-possession conviction, was sent to solitary confinement. According to
his mother, Ann McCormick, Todd went to the prison's medical office and
requested the synthetic form of marijuana, Marinol, produced by Unimed
Pharmaceuticals, that he had been taking prior to his incarceration. One
day after Todd requested the legal medicine, the Feds ordered that he be
drug-tested. When the results came back positive for marijuana, Todd was
placed in solitary confinement. "The pain in his neck and back has been
unbearable lately," said McCormick's mother. "Todd has a spinal fusion --
the top five vertebrae were fused when he was 2 years old. A tumor had
completely eaten the second vertebrae and the old fusion is now literally
carving grooves in the base of his skull, prompting severe headaches as
well. His left hip stopped growing when he was 9, a result of radiation
treatments for childhood cancer. He has severe scoliosis, nerve damage in
his upper back, shoulders and neck and severe muscle spasms in his lower
back. He has received no medical treatment since January," said Mrs. McCormick.

AUGUST 20 Seattle: An estimated crowd of 100,000 people gather at Myrtle
Edwards Park for Hempfest 2000, calling for the legalization of marijuana
for personal and medical use, as well as legalization of hemp for
environmentally sustainable industrial uses. The event is the largest of
its kind in the world, with no arrests reported.

SEPTEMBER 8 Santa Fe, New Mexico: Green Party presidential candidate Ralph
Nader joins New Mexico's Republican Governor Gary Johnson in criticizing
the nation's war on drugs, calling for the legalization of marijuana and
reform of what Nader calls "self-defeating and antiquated" drug laws.
"Addiction, no matter what kind of addiction, should not be criminalized,"
Nader says at a news conference with Johnson in Santa Fe. "It's got to be
subjected to health programs and caring programs, because they work."
Rehabilitating drug addicts gives a far better payoff than "criminalizing
and militarizing the situation," he said. "Study after study has shown
that, and yet somehow it doesn't get through to federal policy."

OCTOBER 16

Washington, D.C.: U.S. Drug "Czar" Barry McCaffrey announces his
resignation, effective January 6, 2001.

OCTOBER 16

Washington, D.C.: The FBI releases its 1999 Uniform Crime Report. There
were a record total of 704,812 U.S. marijuana arrests in 1999, or one every
45 seconds. Of those arrests, 620,541 (88 percent) were for simple
marijuana possession while 84,271 (12 percent) were for sales/cultivation.
During the Clinton administration, there were 4,175,357 marijuana arrests,
a record for any U.S. presidency.

NOVEMBER 7

Election Day: Voters across the United States pass sweeping drug-law reform
initiatives. In California, despite opposition from Governor Gray Davis,
Attorney General Bill Lockyer, Senator Dianne Feinstein, statewide police
associations and prison guard unions, citizens vote 61-39 to pass
Proposition 36, diverting nonviolent drug offenders into treatment rather
than prison for first and second offenses. Proponents claim the move will
save the state $150 million annually and will cancel the need for a new
state prison. In Mendocino County, CA, voters approve Measure G by a 58-42
margin, decriminalizing personal use and cultivation of up to 25 marijuana
plants. Nevadans vote 65-35 to pass Question 9 allowing qualifying patients
to possess marijuana for medicinal purposes. In response, a self-appointed
task force of state healthcare officials, the Nevada Medical Marijuana
Initiative Work Group, moves to limit use of the drug to research studies,
adding months if not years to approval time. Said Louis Ling, general
counsel for the Nevada State Board of Pharmacy and part of the work group,
"No matter what system gets passed, it's going to be a good long time
before medical marijuana is available." By a 53-47 margin, Colorado voters
pass Amendment 20, allowing qualifying patients to possess up to 2 ounces
of marijuana and grow up to six plants. Tom Strickland, U.S. attorney for
Colorado, in a statement released on the afternoon of Nov. 7, says that his
office will continue to "aggressively enforce federal drug laws, including
the prohibition of marijuana, regardless of the passage of this ballot
initiative." Utahns, by a margin of 69-31, pass Initiative B, denying
government agencies the right to seize property from individuals before
they are convicted