THE MARIJUANA CLOSET

Pot Has Lots of Medicinal and Financial Benefits, But TV Stations
Still Dare Not Say Its Name

Earlier this month, the organization I work for, the Marijuana Policy
Project, inadvertently stirred up a hornet's nest with what we
thought was a pretty straightforward TV commercial. That our modest
little ad proved too hot to handle for such Los Angeles-area stations
as KNBC, KABC, KTLA, KTTV and KCOP (plus a couple stations in San
Francisco) says more about socially acceptable attitudes regarding
marijuana than about the ad (or the drug) itself.

After a series of images depicting spending cuts expected as a result
of California's budget crisis, Nadene Herndon of Fair Oaks (near
Sacramento) looks at the camera and says: "Sacramento says huge cuts
to schools, health care and police are inevitable due to California's
budget crisis. Even our state parks could be closed. But the governor
and legislature are ignoring millions of Californians who want to pay taxes.

"We're marijuana consumers. Instead of being treated like criminals
for using a safe substance, we want to pay our fair share. Taxes from
California's marijuana industry could pay the salaries of 20,000
teachers. Isn't it time?"

The spot concludes with a slide reading, "Tax and Regulate Marijuana.
ControlMarijuana.org."

That's it. Nothing in the spot urged people to light up, and there
were no images of marijuana or marijuana use at all. Yet over half a
dozen major-market TV stations, including the NBC and ABC affiliates
in LA and San Francisco, flatly refused to air it. The general
manager of KABC insisted to me in an oddly heated phone conversation
that the commercial advocates marijuana use, and he wasn't going to
advocate illegal activity on his station.

The ad -- which you can watch at
http://www.mpp.org/states/california/we-want-to-pay-our-fair-share.html
- -- did nothing of the sort. But what it did do was apparently just as
disturbing. It showed in concrete terms that the millions of
Americans who use marijuana (nearly 15 million in a typical month,
according to government surveys that likely underestimate its true
prevalence) are ordinary folks -- responsible, hard-working and
entirely normal.

This is a group of people that may well include your barber, your
accountant, your lawyer, the checker at your favorite grocery store,
your kid's teacher and a respectable proportion of your friends,
neighbors and relatives. But most of them don't talk about it -- just
like gays and lesbians didn't talk about their orientation back in
the 1960s, when gay sex was illegal in every state.

The official mythology, of course, is that marijuana consumers are
"drug abusers" who lead sad, dysfunctional lives. They've walked
through the dreaded "gateway" to a life of addiction and despair.

Those myths are stated overtly in official propaganda and reinforced
far more subtly in the stock footage you see on television news
whenever there's a marijuana story. Because all those lawyers,
accountants, etc., would be committing professional suicide if they
let themselves be photographed smoking marijuana, the stock images
they use always show straggly-looking stoners who look like they just
wandered out of a Grateful Dead concert. That such stereotypes
represent a tiny and atypical minority of marijuana users is
society's dirty little secret -- 2009's equivalent of Oscar Wilde's
"love that dare not speak its name."

That a legal, regulated, taxed marijuana industry could generate a
billion dollars or more in revenue for our cash-strapped state is
just one small reason to end the folly of marijuana prohibition. A
far more important reason is that prohibition doesn't make a damn bit
of sense. It gives us the worst of all possible worlds -- a drug
that's widely used and universally available, but produced and sold
with none of the common-sense controls we have for beer, wine and liquor.

But arguably the most important reason is people like Nadene --
ordinary, hard-working Americans who have made the perfectly rational
choice to unwind at the end of the day with a substance that is, by
any objective standard, far safer than alcohol: Marijuana is less
addictive, massively less toxic, and -- unlike booze -- it doesn't
make people aggressive and violent. And whether anyone likes it or
not, those folks are starting to come out of the closet.

Recognizing that reality requires letting go of some familiar myths.

And some TV stations, we now know, aren't ready to do that.