TODAY, MEDICAL MARIJUANA. TOMORROW, LEGALIZE IT!

Think the medical-marijuana movement in California and beyond is the
vanguard of a broader effort to completely legalize the devil weed?
You're right!

These are not your run-of-the-mill potheads jammed into the long,
narrow classroom at Oaksterdam University, a tiny campus with no sign
to betray its location on busy San Vicente Boulevard, south of the
Beverly Center. A serious vibe fills the loftlike space, where rows of
desks are arranged like church pews under exposed ducts. No one clowns
around or even smiles much. Instead, eyes are fixed intently on a
screen at the front of the darkened room.

Projected there is a photograph of a healthy marijuana plant under an
array of lights. Tonight's subject is Cannabis 101: Growing the weed
in indoor gardens. It's delicate alchemy, as most of these students,
who range in age from their early 20s to nearly 60, already know.
During the 13-week semester, many tend and keep notes on their own
clandestine nurseries in bedrooms and garages scattered around
Southern California.

Encouraged by instructors and by the prospects of staking out
ground-floor positions in the emerging world of "cannabusinesses,"
they cultivate popular varieties of bud while experimenting with
soils, temperatures and light sources.

From the rear of the room, a baritone voice remarks on the
crystalline texture of the leaves when the plants are raised under
light-emitting diodes. "With the LEDs, it just looks way frostier than
anything under the high-pressure sodium," he says.

Oaksterdam takes its name from a bastardization of Oakland, where the
university began, and pot-friendly Amsterdam. New growers and
dispensary operators are being trained like whole legions of Johnny
Appleseeds, soon to spread pot's blessings from one coastline to the
other. Not that anywhere is truly virgin ground, but consider: The
pro-marijuana movement has never had an army so large, politically
sophisticated and well-funded, even if supporters downplay the
millions that roll in. Nor has it enjoyed such a frenzied period of
media exposure, a startling amount of it positive. Never has there
been such a concerted thrust to legalize the drug nationwide--for
medical purposes, for the plain old joy of getting stoned and for a
goldmine in profits to be reaped by those who control the multipronged
industry. Together with a rapidly shifting public attitude toward pot
and a White House willing to accept state medical-marijuana laws,
legalization seems as inevitable today as it was unthinkable a
generation ago.

"We're almost at a zeitgeist," says Allen St. Pierre, executive
director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws
(NORML) in Washington, D.C.

Zeitgeist has become one of the buzzwords of the campaign--meaning, in
context, a sort of coming together of favorable forces. St. Pierre,
who can call on advisory-board input from the likes of Willie Nelson
and Woody Harrelson, is a glib, 44-year-old former altar boy and
preppie from Massachusetts who likes to wear a marijuana-leaf lapel
pin. The high-profile lobbyist says NORML has seen an unprecedented
escalation this year of webpage hits, podcast downloads, new
memberships and media calls.

"We monitor [newspaper] columns, and editors have swung in favor of
reform," he says. "I will go give a lecture in Des Moines, Iowa. The
questions people are asking come right out of watching Weeds on
Showtime. It's quite remarkable."

Badgering newspapers and television programs to pay attention to the
subject used to be one of the critical challenges for people like St.
Pierre. Getting a meaningful dialogue started was half the battle.

"The first time, nearly eight years ago, I attempted to pitch a
marijuana-related story to CNN; they literally laughed at me,"
remembers Bruce Mirken, a San Francisco-based spokesman for the
Marijuana Policy Project. "The person who answered the phone burst out
laughing. Now, they're calling us. We've been on various broadcasts
and cable network shows 21 times this year--at least a couple on CNN.
We've also been on the Today show, ABC World News--really all over."

CNBC has run and rerun its recent documentary Marijuana, Inc.: Inside
America's Pot Industry, exposing the booming pot trade and the sordid
side of California's largest cash crop--the shootings, thefts and arson
fires; the homes in Humboldt and Mendocino counties gutted to make
room for illegal indoor nurseries; and the secluded parcels of
national forest planted with pot by Mexican cartels intent on
cornering metropolitan markets.

In September, Fortune magazine ran the headline "How Marijuana Became
Legal," as if the outcome of the fight were a fait accompli. "We're
referring to a cultural phenomenon that has been evolving for 15
years," observed author Roger Parloff, who suggested that the
critical, sea-changing climax might turn out to be a "policy reversal
that was quietly instituted [this year] by President Barack Obama."

Ah, Obama. Many attribute a good share of the present impetus to
Obama, the third president in a row to acknowledge smoking weed. Bill
Clinton famously claimed he never inhaled. George W. Bush 'fessed up
only after a private admission was secretly recorded and leaked to ABC
News. But Obama won the everlasting affection of the pro-pot crowd
when he addressed the matter of inhaling and asked, "Isn't that the
point?"

He also elicited joyous whoops when he jettisoned existing Bush-era
policy last fall and instructed Attorney General Eric Holder and the
vast federal anti-drug apparatus to stand down in the protracted war
with states over medical marijuana. No longer would the private holder
of a medical-marijuana card have to fear being busted by federal
agents after picking up a supply of Kush from the corner dispensary.
Nor would the dispensary owner have to worry about the feds.

For the marijuana lobby and its broader aims, the win was gigantic. It
removed--for the current presidential term, at least--the daunting
specter of federal interference and turned virtually the entire
continental U.S. into one big, wide-open game board. Pot advocates
divide that board state by state. Medical marijuana has been on the
move since 1996 and is now legal in 14 states, including California,
with at least a dozen more to debate it soon. Proponents predict it
will continue to hopscotch from state to state much the way legalized
gambling expanded along the Mississippi River and throughout much of
the country in the 1980s and 1990s.

"We believe medical marijuana will be in more than half the states in
two years . . . and maybe 47 states in the next 10 years," says
attorney Sean T. McAllister, who led a successful crusade this past
fall to get pot legalized in the small ski-resort town of
Breckenridge, Colorado. In a vote that was largely symbolic, given
that possession remains a misdemeanor under Colorado law, 72 percent
of Breckenridge voters favored changing local laws to remove any
sanctions for private possession and use of less than an ounce of pot.

McAllister acknowledges that medicinal use of weed is a wedge to help
pro-pot activists gain leverage in advancing recreational use of the
drug. "Medical marijuana is really leading the way, letting us see
what a taxed and regulated market for marijuana would look like,"
McAllister says.

As Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance in
New York, put it, "The face of marijuana isn't some 17-year-old,
pimply-faced kid; it's an older person needing help."

The widening perception that cannabis is a godsend for sufferers of
cancer, AIDS, glaucoma and other afflictions has partially erased its
own entrenched stigmas. To be sure, the purported benefits of
marijuana--so vital to its broadening acceptance--are not without
controversy. One website, CannabisCenters.com, boasts more than 240
maladies that respond to marijuana, from writers' cramp to cystic
fibrosis. For prostate cancer, Huntington's Disease, ulcerative
colitis, lupus and grand mal seizures, pot promises at least a whiff
of relief.

But it's also a source of carcinogens. According to the federal
National Institutes of Health, "Marijuana smoke contains some of the
same--and sometimes even more--of the cancer-causing chemicals found in
tobacco smoke. Studies show that someone who smokes five joints per
day may be taking in as many cancer-causing chemicals as someone who
smokes a full pack of cigarettes every day."

The multimillion-dollar pot lobby has used the drug's analgesic
properties to press a more challenging agenda: to remove the barriers
to recreational use, either through outright legalization or, at
minimum, decriminalization, which, in most cases, means that being
caught with less than an ounce is only a legal infraction comparable
to a parking ticket.

On maps where activists track their progress nationally, they can
already block out 10 states--among them California, Colorado,
Massachusetts and New York -- where the first offense involving simple
possession no longer carries jail time.

The image makeover is but one of the important factors now propelling
the movement. Another: the violence and obscene profits of the drug
cartels. Those problems have given rise to the Al Capone argument: If
you make it legal, criminal dealers can't command exorbitant sums
from customers desperate for a high--cash that would later be spent on
bribes, machine guns and smuggling. Licensed, fully vetted growers
operating just down the street would render the bloody drug kingpin
as irrelevant as the Chicago bootlegger.

In the words of Mirken, "You don't need Al Capone to ship alcohol when
you have Anheuser Busch."

A good idea can become a great one if it involves making money--and
doubly so if it generates new forms of tax revenue. At a time of
housing foreclosures and bank failures, when California's state
government faces a whopping $21 billion projected budget deficit,
licensing and taxing marijuana suddenly make sense even to some who
might have abhorred the idea.

Lawful growers and retailers could cough up, say, $50 per ounce in
taxes or fees and still charge less to consumers than the
$150-per-ounce prices common on the black market. Governments would
rake it in--and also save a fantastic amount by not arresting, not
prosecuting and not imprisoning pot offenders.

Harvard economist Jeffrey A. Miron, author of the 2004 book Drug War
Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition, makes the case that
legalizing all banned drugs would benefit taxpayers nationwide by $77
billion per year by both generating new tax income and eliminating
the costs of enforcement. Since marijuana represents about a third of
the illicit-drug economy, legalizing pot would make a difference of
roughly $25 billion, he says.

Miron's estimate is generally in line with figures compiled by
pot-advocacy organizations, although getting firm numbers is
notoriously difficult given the vastly different ways in which
law-enforcement agencies catalog arrests and report marijuana data.

Jon Gettman, a former NORML president who operates a public databank
at drugscience.org, claims legalizing marijuana would enrich the
public by $42 billion per year. In breaking down that sum, Gettman
puts the current cost of legal enforcement at nearly $11 billion. He
also claims that federal, state and local governments lose out on $31
billion annually in taxes and charges that could be gleaned from the
massive industry, based on an overall estimate of a marijuana trade
that totals $113 billion per year.

Mirken concedes that squishy numbers invite attacks from critics. But,
he adds, "No doubt it's a big hunk of money."

Watching that money flow to criminals and cartel bosses has added
impetus to the push for change.

Pro-marijuana forces, well-financed and increasingly centralized in
New York and Washington, D.C., are often directly involved in helping
to craft reform legislation because of their deep knowledge about a
subject murky to many in power. The New York-based Drug Policy
Alliance, for example, employs 45 people and operates satellite
offices in Washington, D.C., and in the states of New Mexico and
California. Its annual budget of $8 million comes in part from George
Soros' Open Policy Institute and also from about 25,000 small donors
and a number of very wealthy businessmen, most notably tech guru John
Gilmore of Cygnus Solutions, Peter B. Lewis of Progressive Insurance,
John Glen Sperling of the University of Phoenix and George Zimmer of
the Men's Wearhouse.

Nadelmann, the 52-year-old top executive, says he spends about half of
his time on the road, engaging in debates, giving speeches, and
conferring with pot advocates to draft voter initiatives and to map
out strategies. Close contact with local groups enables him to marshal
resources where they are needed and also to bring hot spots to
nationwide media attention. Nadelmann can rattle off lists of issues
and locales--the drive that brought medical pot this year to Maine; the
statewide decriminalization approved in Massachusetts; the ballot
tussles ahead in Arizona, Nevada and Oregon. He claims significant
credit for Proposition 215, California's landmark 1996 ballot measure
that authorized medical cannabis.

"The 215 campaign was being run by local activists," Nadelmann says.
"I got involved, put together major funders and campaign managers, and
turned it into a professional campaign and won that thing."

As advocates step up the pressure, public opinions are shifting. The
Gallup Poll showed 23 percent support for legalization in 1983. This
year, the finding was 44 percent, with more than half of the voters in
California in favor.

The number of highly placed government officials and jurists who have
joined the public call for marijuana reform would have been hard to
imagine even a decade ago. One example is retired Orange County
Superior Court Judge James P. Gray, author of the 2001 book Why Our
Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It. Gray argues that
drug prohibitions are a "golden goose" for terrorist organizations, a
view that has gained traction with the public. A onetime Republican
U.S. Senate candidate--and a conservative one to boot--he says of our
nation's drug policy: "We couldn't do worse if we tried."

"I've been doing this [arguing for marijuana legalization] for 17
years," Gray tells the Weekly. "Most of that time I felt like I was
running into the wind. Now, there's wind at my back. People who once
thought I was a nut are finally realizing that the way we treat drugs
in our society is not working. I can get a standing ovation at the
ACLU or from the Young Republicans. That says something."

"We truly are seeing the most rapid gains in public support for making
marijuana legal that I've ever seen," Nadelmann says. "It really feels
like a new age."

While activists know there may be a limited time to seize the chance
offered by today's market conditions and Obama's laissez-faire
policies, they are also buoyed by fundamental changes going on in
America. The biggest of these is irreversible--the supplanting of
hard-line ideologues with Baby Boomers weaned on Woodstock and flower
power.

"A whole generation didn't know the difference between heroin and
marijuana," Nadelmann says. "That generation is mostly dying off. [In
its place] are tens of millions of parents and middle-aged people who
smoked marijuana and didn't become drug addicts."

On the contrary, they now fill elected seats and boardrooms.
California Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) epitomizes that
new type of leader. A former standup comic, Ammiano spent part of the
1960s among the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, grooving to the Grateful
Dead. Now 68, he is one of the most watched figures in the national
marijuana struggle for one compelling reason: Assembly Bill 390,
legislation he introduced in early 2009 that would make California the
first state in the nation to legalize and tax recreational pot.

Considered bold even among marijuana activists, Ammiano's measure
would remove cannabis from the state's banned-substances list, allow
private cultivation, levy fees and sales taxes, and prohibit sales to
minors and driving under the influence. A state analysis projects
annual revenues of $1.4 billion, a number critics claim is inflated.
That figure does not include the enormous amount of state and federal
income and business taxes that would be paid by growers, retailers and
their employees as part of a fully realized economic model.

According to the same state budget analysis, the value of today's
annual marijuana harvest in California is $13.8 billion, making weed
one of the state's biggest export crops. The value of the nation's
entire pot harvest is $35.8 billion, according to the analysis. Since
legalized medical cannabis is only a tiny fraction of the market and
the dispensaries typically operate as nonprofits, virtually no income
tax is collected.

"Our economic situation is egregious," says Ammiano, who plans to
begin conducting hearings this month. "I think people have begun to
take it seriously."

If Ammiano's bill fails--and many think it's too much, too soon--pot
advocates have a Plan B, a narrower statewide initiative expected to
reach the ballot next November. That measure would rewrite the
criminal drug laws to make an exception for small amounts of
marijuana. Its mastermind and chief bankroller is Richard Lee, the
47-year-old founder of Oaksterdam.

Lee, who opened his first campus in Oakland two years ago, says 6,000
people have taken his courses, which are organized into $250 weekend
seminars and $650 one-semester courses. At any given time, he says,
500 students are enrolled in classes at the three campuses in Los
Angeles, Sebastopol (an hour north of San Francisco) and Oakland,
where Lee just unveiled a three-story teaching facility. The
formidable flow of revenue helps Lee to finance further marijuana
reform. So far, he says, he has invested $1 million of his own money
in the initiative. Faced with a February deadline for submitting
433,000 signatures, he claims he has already gathered well more than
600,000 and is still collecting more, just to be certain that enough
are valid. "The response has been overwhelming," Lee says.

If Californians light up, the beacon will be visible from sea to
shining sea. Nadelmann says he consulted with both Ammiano and Lee on
the language of their proposals and points out that California has
always been a bellwether of cultural change, especially when it comes
to pot. "Look what happened with [the passage of] Proposition 215,"
Nadelmann says. "We were able to go to other states and get it on the
ballot. It's not as if the dominoes start falling, but people see that
something's possible."

After-effects continue to ripple. Support for both medicinal and
recreational pot use has grown demonstrably stronger throughout the
West--especially in Oregon and Washington. An estimated 200,000
revelers attended Seattle's annual "Hempfest" this past year.

"What's happening is really amazing," says Gray. "Everybody, despite
their political views, their religious views, their level of education
and their age--everybody is beginning to be on the same page because
our policy isn't working."

Gray can point to a remarkable June event as evidence. In the heart of
OC, his pro-legalization stump speech slammed law enforcement for
blocking reform because of its own addiction to generous government
funding. From a crowd dominated by 60-, 70-, even 80-year-old women
sipping tea and eating cake, Gray's presentation received loud applause.

Whether the "devil weed" will ever play in Peoria is open to debate,
but in October, the Illinois Senate narrowly approved a
medical-marijuana bill, meaning it could become law in the next few
months, and pockets of support for pot have become evident elsewhere
in the heartland.

California's actions in 2010 may greatly influence the speed of those
campaigns.

Reefer activists readily acknowledge the quickening pace of change
raises risks of a backlash. Intense concern already centers on the
poorly regulated mess in Los Angeles, where a confused and largely
paralyzed City Council has allowed the proliferation of more than 540
medical-marijuana dispensaries without regard to zoning or other
restrictions imposed elsewhere in California.

John Lovell, a lobbyist for the 4,000-member California Peace
Officers' Association, bristles when confronted with the argument that
pot should be made legal because it's no worse than booze. "What good
comes of it?" he asks. "Right now, we have enormous social and
public-safety problems caused by alcohol abuse . . . [and] by
pharmaceuticals. What is the good of adding another mind-altering
substance? Look at all the highway fatalities. Why do we want to
create another lawful substance that will add exponentially to that?"

That line of thinking suggests that society today would be more sober
and safe if alcohol or pharmaceuticals were banned--an argument U.S.
history, particularly the era of Prohibition, does not bear out. "I
think everyone in law enforcement will take on this fight," Lovell
says. "I think people concerned about the social consequences of drug
abuse will take on this fight. I think there will be a broad range of
opposition."

On the streets, the crackdown is readily apparent. Marijuana arrests
are up in California, despite rising public tolerance. Activists
theorize it is not just because more people are smoking the drug. El
Paso, Texas, is another place where the ideological battle has flared
dramatically. With cartels committing 1,600 murders in a year's span
just across the border in Juarez, Mexico, El Paso City Councilman Beto
O'Rourke pushed a resolution last January calling for a discussion on
legalizing drugs to undercut the illegal market. "Mind you, it was not
to legalize anything, necessarily," says O'Rourke. "Basically, it was
a way of saying the current policy had failed; we need to put
everything on the table and have a dialogue."

The City Council approved the resolution without dissent, but it was
vetoed by Mayor John F. Cook. An irked O'Rourke tried to override the
veto, only to be strong-armed by U.S. Representative Silvestre Reyes
(D-Texas), who phoned all eight council members to make sure the
matter was quashed. "You need to cut this out," O'Rourke recalls Reyes
saying. "It's going to be tough to get [federal] money for the
community if you pass this."

Reyes, a tough law-enforcement man who spent 27 years in the U.S.
Border Patrol, might have handled it differently if the resolution had
only dealt with marijuana, rather than all drugs, says his press
deputy, Vincent Perez. As it was, the resolution was defeated--and drug
deaths in Juarez have continued to climb. "We're almost at 2,300
murders for [2009]," O'Rourke says.

NORML had a field day lambasting Reyes on its website. The "intense
blowback" over the failed resolution actually achieved what O'Rourke
termed a Pyrrhic victory for the hard-liners and a step forward for
those willing to consider change. "All of a sudden, we had calls from
all over the country," O'Rourke says.

The psychological war is one the marijuana movement can win--and why
weed advocates will likely win, barring the unforeseen. It is not
quite a done deal, however, because the question of pot use, for many,
becomes a moral argument, and moral values are slow to change. "People
long for rules," says sociologist B.J. Gallagher, an author and
lecturer in Los Angeles. "Without them, the world would be chaotic and
unpredictable. We'd be having sex with each other's spouses, we'd be
stealing things. . . . If we legalize pot, what next? Cocaine? Heroin?

"That's what people are afraid of. It's not the pot, per se. It's the
bigger issue--where do we draw the line? So they say, 'Let's not change
the line.'"

But history shows that the line does change--eventually. "When a
majority are saying, 'This does not make sense,' the line will shift,"
Gallagher says. "We've seen it with [alcohol] prohibition, slavery,
women's rights. We're now seeing it with gay rights. Our moral values
change over time, despite the objection of people who are terrified."

A new class is in session at Oaksterdam, a how-to about opening and
running medical-marijuana dispensaries. Dark-haired, bespectacled
lecturer Don Duncan, a prominent pot man due to his lobbying efforts
at LA City Hall and his ownership of a busy outlet in West Hollywood,
warns a room of rapt students to be mindful of the rules. After
federal agents raided his business in 2007, Duncan says, the state
Board of Equalization slapped a lien on his house for nonpayment of
taxes.

"Don't mess with those guys," Duncan says. Pay your taxes. Pay your
rent on time. Don't drive a Bentley and take 'round-the-world
vacations if you're running a nonprofit collective.

"But if you earn a healthy salary because you work hard, that's okay,"
Duncan says. "That's actually a very patriotic and American way of
life."