NBC, CBS, ABC, & FOX HAPPY TO PROFIT FROM MARIJUANA, AS LONG AS
NOBODY TALKS ABOUT LEGALIZING IT

Everywhere You Look, Corporate Media Are Covering Pot Stories, Except
for the Issue of Its Illegality and the Lives Ruined by Prohibition.

Marijuana legalization is the hottest topic in the media these days.
MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, FOX, NatGeo, and CBS News have presented special
features on marijuana business, medical marijuana, and the marijuana
legalization movement. Google Trends is showing double the interest
in searches and news hits for the term "marijuana legalization".
Showtime's hit series Weeds, about a suburban mom turned pot dealer,
is entering its fifth season. Everywhere you look, corporate media
are happy to profit from America's most popular herb.

Unless you want to address marijuana's illegality and the lives that
are shattered by the effects of marijuana prohibition. In that case,
the corporate media cannot have anything to do with you, even if you
want to pay to broadcast the message of ending adult marijuana prohibition.

Case in point: CBS. At the end of June, CBS's new internet radio
venture, ChatAboutIt.com, contacted NORML. One of our advisory board,
Ann Druyan, advertised her podcast in Talkers Magazine, an industry
journal for talk radio. ChatAboutIt was interested in hosting
Druyan's show, but Druyan wasn't interested in the offer.

This is where I come in. I am a talk radio professional, having
hosted my show (The Russ Belville Show) on XM Satellite Radio and AM
620 KPOJ in Portland, for almost two years. I have guest-hosted for
the extremely popular Bill Press Show in Washington DC. For the past
year and a half, I have hosted NORML's Daily Audio Stash, the
organization's daily news and interviews podcast. I contacted
ChatAboutIt to discuss creating a new live talk radio show dedicated
to this incredibly popular phenomenon around medical marijuana and
marijuana legalization called NORML SHOW LIVE.

Throughout the negotiations, the salesman from ChatAboutIt was
fantastic. He joined me and NORML's executive staff by conference
call. We emphasized that we are NORML, the National Organization for
the Reform of Marijuana Laws. We told them that we would have
advertisers involved with promoting marijuana - legally, as they are
co-ops and dispensaries in California and Colorado - marijuana-themed
magazines, doctors, clinics, authors, musicians, and so on. We told
them we would be talking about marijuana legalization, our web page
would have marijuana leaves on it, callers would be talking about
marijuana, and, oh, by the way, did we mention that the show was
about marijuana?

It's all good, we were assured by the salesman. He said he'd run it
all by his VP and this was fine. He said we'd own all our content and
we could run all our ads. We verbally agreed this was a go and all we
needed to do was to raise the $6,000 necessary to pay for the first
two months of broadcast. We explained that we'd need to produce some
press releases to raise the money. To be sure we weren't saying or
promoting anything in any way that CBS would not approve, we
submitted our release to CBS, which did make some changes. They
approved of our revised release and we posted it on the NORML Blog
and front page on Wednesday.

Thursday morning I receive a call from the salesman at ChatAboutIt.
"People higher up" had seen the release "on the blogs" and they "will
not green light your show".

Now, CBS has all the right in the world to decide what to put on
their airwaves or cyberstreams; I'm not crying "censorship". If they
want to pass up affiliation with the most recognized brand in
marijuana and a professional live call-in show dealing with the
hottest topic in the media, that's their call.

What I am crying, though, is "hypocrisy".

See, CBS owns Showtime. That very same Showtime that's aired for the
past five years the tale of Nancy Botwin, suburban pot-dealing mom on
Weeds. A show that films many scenes in the legal marijuana clinics
and dispensaries in California that would be our advertisers. A show
that just this year signed contracts with NORML to allow display of
our trademark in the scenes where it is shown in Weeds.

And it cannot be that CBS is OK with airing a dramatic interpretation
of marijuana culture, but afraid of airing a serious news program
about marijuana culture. CBS News has an entire web special feature
entitled "Marijuana Nation" (not-so-coincidentally the tag line of
NORML SHOW LIVE) devoted to all their news coverage about marijuana
dating back to Mike Wallace in 1968.

CBS will show Weeds to make money off of people who like marijuana,
but won't allow its banner advertisements for Weeds to be seen on any
website trying to keep those marijuana lovers from arrest and a
criminal record. CBS will pepper their news coverage and websites
with cannaporn* and cannabusiness, but won't allow a non-profit
organization attempting to legalize those industries to have a voice
on their networks.

Case #2: In addition to hosting NORML's podcast and social blog, I am
NORML's Outreach Coordinator. In this position I recruit activists
from all across the country (even the US Virgin Islands) to organize
NORML chapters. These independent affiliates host events, gather
petition signatures, and provide education to the community to
counteract the anti-marijuana propaganda from the government (such as
our "drug czar" recently proclaiming - in California, no less - that
"Marijuana is dangerous and has no medicinal benefit.")

I was contacted by the tour manager for the "Blazed and Confused"
Tour. The artists performing in the most pro-marijuana concert of the
summer are Mickey Avalon, Bob Marley's son Stephen Marley, San Diego
rockers Slightly Stoopid, and Snoop Dogg, probably the most
recognizable person alive associated with marijuana aside from Willie
Nelson. They, particularly Slightly Stoopid, wanted NORML chapters to
host marijuana information tables for the concerts and offered us the
opportunity for free.

I combed through my chapter listings and got them NORML booths for
over half the shows. At the show in Portland I got to interview Miles
from Slightly Stoopid and wander around backstage. The props for the
Stoopid show were two massive five foot skulls with pot leaves on the
forehead. Snoop's show featured a huge backdrop reading "Tales from
the Crip" and marijuana leaves were all around. Everyone performing
at or attending this concert was very pro-marijuana legalization.

Yet this morning I'm contacted by the tour people who tell me they
need to cancel the booth we have scheduled for the show last Saturday
in Orlando. It seems the venue is the Hard Rock, and "because they
are a Universal owned company they are much more conservative than
your typical venue."

This Universal, of course, is NBC Universal, the parent company to
the MSNBC and CNBC networks that reported their highest ratings ever
for their marijuana-themed news reports on the burgeoning cannabis
business in California. The same NBC Universal that is happy to sell
you Cheech & Chong's Next Movie, Dazed & Confused, and Half Baked on
DVD. The same NBC Universal that has no problem allowing Snoop Dogg
to get the crowd at the Hard Rock in Orlando to chant "Legalize It",
but somehow can't let a couple of college kids in NORML T-shirts hand
out educational fliers about why we should legalize it.

Case #3: Another marijuana legalization organization, Marijuana
Policy Project (MPP), produced an excellent TV ad calling for passage
of a bill to tax and regulate cannabis for adults. The governor had
recently called for an open debate about legalization and MPP created
this thirty second ad to begin that debate:

Certainly a sober and non-sensational way to debate the issue. Yet
when MPP offered the ad to California stations, Los Angeles' KABC
(ABC) and KTTV (FOX), San Francisco's KGO (ABC), and San Jose's KNTV
(NBC) refused to accept the ad. KNTV said their standards department
wouldn't approve the ad. KGO issued an official "no comment." KABC
and KTTV didn't even bother give the courtesy of a "no comment" -
they would not respond to MPP's inquiries.

I've detailed NBC's and CBS's profiting from cannabis culture. You'd
think ABC, being a part of the Walt Disney Corporation, would
generally shy away from profiting from cannabis culture. But a little
digging shows they own Miramax films, which this year released
Adventureland, a comedy about teenagers smoking and dealing weed
while working at an amusement park and in 2001 offered Jay & Silent
Bob Strike Back, the adventures of two inveterate stoners who wrote a
stoner comic book. FOX for eight years aired That 70's Show, a
ratings hit whose signature sight gag was teenagers sitting in a
smoke-filled basement passing around a joint or bong (never seen,
however), with the camera focusing on each character as they "passed
the dutchie on the left hand side".

So it is OK for the corporate parents of CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX to
profit from movies and TV shows that satirize marijuana culture, but
they have a "standards and practices" problem with their broadcast
affiliates showing 30 seconds of a 38-year-old woman suggesting we
should tax and regulate marijuana.

Keep in mind in these cases, we are talking about one part of the big
media company raking in huge profits with shows about the marijuana
community, while another part of the big media company refuses the
free educational fliers, paid advertisements, and pay-to-play
broadcasts BY AND FOR the marijuana community. Marijuana is the
modern day minstrel show - we're allowed on the air as long as we
keep on our "greenface", shuck and jive (or would it be "smoke and
pass"?), and never forget our proper place.

By the way, the NORML SHOW LIVE mentioned in Case #1 will still be
going on the air, as promised, on Labor Day Weekend. Unlike CBS, we
keep our promises to our customers. The money raised will go into
promotions and producing our show through the facilities of
BlogTalkRadio.com, which was happy to accept our business, and quite
frankly, offers us a better production technology at one-sixth the
price. Tune in every Saturday Night at 9pm Eastern for two hours of
intelligent discussion about marijuana legalization.

* Cannaporn is the news specials that like to show lots and lots of
pictures of big green sticky buds and the people smoking them,
usually the same stock footage they've run for years with the most
stereotypical "stoner" types they can find, lots of pictures of bongs
and tie dyes, some b-roll from a music festival, or body-armored
police helicoptering in to chop down marijuana plants, while intoning
the reefer madness du jour about increased potency, psychosis, or
clandestine cartel grows and violence that wouldn't exist in a legal
market. In other words, not what you will find on NORML SHOW LIVE.