WEED TAKES ROOT

Marijuana's Steady Creep Toward Legalization Nationwide.

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 in Los Angeles. 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 fix 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, 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 Los Angeles.

Encouraged by instructors, and by the prospect 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 pipes up--a student
remarking 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.

Details get technical, as in any science class, but the larger lesson
is clear to see. Here, as in many other places across America, the
future of cannabis is being sown--and it is a future high on promise.

Oaksterdam takes its name from Oakland, where the university began,
and pot-friendly Amsterdam. Here, new growers and dispensary operators
are being trained like whole legions of Johnny Appleseeds, soon to
spread pot's blessings from one coast 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 gold mine 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.

In Olympia, State Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles (D-Seattle) introduced a
bill last session that would downgrade marijuana possession from a
misdemeanor to a ticketable infraction. Another Seattle Democrat, Rep.
Mary Lou Dickerson, will be introducing a bill in the House that goes
even further, calling for marijuana to be flat-out legalized, then
sold, and taxed, in state liquor stores. Seattle voters already
instructed the SPD to make marijuana possession cases a low priority,
and newly elected city attorney Pete Holmes has said he won't bother
enforcing the misdemeanor law that's currently on the books, or tack
on pot-possession charges to extend the sentences of people charged
with other crimes.

"We're almost at a zeitgeist," says one of the high-profile lobbyists
who is making it happen: 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 preppy
from Massachusetts who likes to wear a marijuana-leaf lapel pin. He
says this year NORML has seen an unprecedented escalation of Web-page
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.

Now the buzz is self-sustaining, indicating America's willingness, as
a whole, to engage the subject.

"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; 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 that article's 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."

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. 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 antidrug 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 game board state by state, believing that the surest way
to overcome conservative inertia that keeps pot outlawed is to spread
legalization keyed to states' rights to craft their own statutes.

Medical marijuana has been on the move since 1996 and is now legal in
a dozen states, including Washington, with at least a dozen more to
debate it soon. Proponents predict it will continue to hopscotch from
state to state, much as legalized gambling expanded along the
Mississippi River and throughout a lot of the country in the 1980s and
'90s.

"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.
The vote was largely symbolic, given that possession remains a
misdemeanor under Colorado law.

McAllister acknowledges that the 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, puts 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 people who
suffer from cancer, AIDS, glaucoma, and other afflictions has
partially erased its entrenched stigmas, including a reputation for
dulling the intellect. One Web site, CannabisCenters.com, boasts of
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 pot's also a source of carcinogens. According to the 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." (On the other hand, someone
smoking five joints a day probably has bigger problems than the risk
of cancer.)

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 tracking their national progress, activists can already block
out 10 states--among them, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, and
New York--where a 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 is the violence and obscene profits of 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 later 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 Mirken's words, "You don't need Al Capone to ship alcohol when you
have Anheuser-Busch."

At a time when governments all around the country are facing deficits,
licensing and taxing marijuana suddenly makes sense to many.

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

In Washington, Rep. Dickerson says her plan to sell pot in liquor
stores and tax it at 15 percent per gram could eventually bring in
more than $300 million a year.

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 a year, both by generating new tax income and eliminating the
costs of arresting, prosecuting, and imprisoning offenders. 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 that
law-enforcement agencies catalog arrests and report marijuana data.

Jon Gettman, a former NORML president who operates a public data bank
at drugscience.org, claims that legalizing marijuana would enrich the
public by $42 billion a year. 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 a 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., New Mexico,
and California. Its annual budget of $8 million comes in part from
George Soros' Open Policy Institute, about 25,000 small donors, and a
number of very wealthy entrepreneurs, 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
Men's Wearhouse.

The Drug Policy Alliance's Nadelmann, 52, 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 map strategies.

Close contact with local groups enables him to marshal resources where
they are needed and bring hot spots to nationwide media attention.
Nadelmann can rattle off lists of issues and locales--the drive that
brought medical pot to Maine in 2009, 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 state 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." On one
recent trip, Nadelmann flew from Santa Barbara to Houston, then to San
Diego, back to New York, then to Los Angeles--all to preach pot, all
in the span of a few weeks.

As advocates step up the pressure, public opinion is shifting. The
Gallup Poll showed 23 percent support for legalization in 1983. In
2009, the figure was 44 percent.

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.

"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." In his view, the changing attitudes largely stem from
the efforts of the Drug Policy Alliance--formed by a merger of two
smaller groups in 2000--and similar organizations, such as NORML and
the Marijuana Policy Project.

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 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." Furthermore, they
now fill elected seats and boardrooms. Is it any wonder the tide seems
unstoppable?

"We're looking at a perfect storm here," says California Assemblyman
Tom Ammiano (D San Francisco), who symbolizes that new type of leader.
A former stand-up comic, Ammiano spent part of the 1960s among the
hippies of Haight-Ashbury. 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 that 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.

"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 California ballot next November. This measure would rewrite
criminal drug laws to make an exception for small amounts of
marijuana. The mastermind and chief bankroller of Tax Cannabis 2010 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 revenue flow helps Lee finance further marijuana reform
efforts. 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 over
600,000 and is 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 both Ammiano and Lee consulted him 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, referring to the 1996 medical-pot act. "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." Proposition
36, California's 2000 initiative to favor drug treatment over jail
time, was another example. "Once that passed, we started seeing
queries from probably half the states over the following few years,"
Nadelmann says.

Marijuana activists readily acknowledge that 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.

Law enforcement was never amenable to legalizing pot, but the
situation in L.A.--a black eye to reformers everywhere--can only
galvanize the resistance.

John Lovell, a lobbyist for the 4,000-member California Peace
Officers' Association, fairly 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 soberer and
safer if alcohol or pharmaceuticals were banned--an argument that U.S.
history, particularly the Prohibition era, does not bear out.

Says Lovell, "I think everyone in law enforcement will take on this
fight. 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."

Out in the streets, the counterinsurgency 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.

A similar spike has occurred in New York, even though it was one of
the first states to decriminalize small stashes of marijuana, 34 years
ago. In fact, if there is a world capital for cannabis busts, it is
New York City, where 40,000 people were arrested on pot charges during
the past year.

Queens College sociologist Harry G. Levine is an expert on drug-abuse
patterns, and co-author, with Craig Reinarman, of 1997's Crack in
America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice. "What we have in New York is
what you could call an epidemic of marijuana arrests," Levine says.
"The number-one criminal offense in New York City is marijuana possession."

How is that possible, when pot has long been decriminalized
there?

Levine explored the question by interviewing veteran and retired
police officers, legal-aid attorneys, and jailed smokers, producing a
scathing 100-page review of the NYPD. It became apparent, he says,
that police--who have a vested interest in making as many arrests as
possible--profit from pot, and often "trick" their suspects into
violating a specific law against openly displaying the weed in public.

"Technically, [police officers] are not allowed to go into people's
pockets," Levine says. "But they can lie to people. Lying to suspects
is considered good policing. They say...'We're going to have to search
you. If we find anything, it's going to be a mess for you...so take it
out and show it to us now.'" As intimidated young people--most of them
ethnic minorities--empty their pockets of a joint or a nickel bag,
they're charged with a misdemeanor.

Such busts are huge business for the police, Levine points out. Not
only do they sweep potential bad guys into the system, generating vast
databases of fingerprints and photographs, but the arrests also beef
up crime statistics. Departments in big cities and small towns alike
use the numbers to secure fortunes in federal funding.

Levine says his research has pointed to the same pattern in other
American cities. "Atlanta and Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh,
Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago..." He rattles off a long list. "The
Southwest is really bad. Houston...San Antonio."

El Paso is another city 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, whose 10th-floor
office overlooks the Rio Grande and the impoverished Mexican
metropolis beyond. "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," Reyes said, as
O'Rourke remembers. "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 the matter differently if the
resolution had dealt only 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 Web site. 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.

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 Los Angeles City Hall and his ownership of a busy outlet in West
Hollywood, warns a roomful 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 OK,"
Duncan says. "That's actually a very patriotic and American way of
life."

Next to speak is Robert A. Raich, a leading marijuana-issues attorney
most remarkable for his halolike crown of white hair. Raich gets down
to the nitty-gritty of applying for business licenses. Medical
marijuana is still illegal in the eyes of the federal government, even
if the Obama administration is backing away from enforcement. So be
creative when you have to fill out forms describing what you plan to
sell, Raich says.

"Let me give you some truthful euphemisms," offers Raich, who seems to
delight in presenting them: medicinal herbs, Chinese herbs, cut
flowers, dried flowers... "You don't want to lie to the government,"
he says cheerfully. "You just don't want to give them too much
information."