BONG-HIT BENEFIT

You've heard the arguments against America's tragic prohibition of
marijuana: how pot was only made illegal to protect the profits of
corporate robber barons, how dangerous criminals are set free because the
nation's prisons are crowded with people arrested on reefer charges, how
desperately ill citizens find respite in a bit of weed. There's the theory
of relativity, which notes that marijuana isn't as deleterious as tobacco
and alcohol.

One example of why marijuana was made illegal in 1937 comes in the form of
famous (or infamous) publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, who owned
vast timberlands harvested to supply newsprint. When a machine that
harvested industrial-grade cannabis (a much cheaper and ecologically
friendlier source of paper) was invented, Hearst's newspapers began running
headlines screaming that pot breeds homicidal maniacs.

Here's another point, from a surprising source: Many of those fighting the
war on drugs would be out of a job if drugs were decriminalized. That comes
from people who fought the war on drugs, namely Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition (www.leap.cc). According to a December article in The
Providence Journal, U.S. taxpayers coughed up $69 billion last year to pay
cops, feds, prosecutors, jailers. According to LEAP the cost of the 30-year
war on drugs has emptied Americans' pockets of more than a half trillion
tax dollars.

Those figures don't account for the reverse, how pot smugglers and growers
make immeasurable fortunes that, with legalization and regulation, could be
going to federal and state governments.

These are the reasons that organizations such as the National Organization
for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML, www.norml.org) exist. In the next
two months the U.S. Supreme Court should render a ruling in a case that
NORML, which lobbies on both the federal and state level, considers the
most important anti-prohibition event of 2005: whether the federal
government has a right to continue arresting people in the numerous states
that have decriminalized marijuana.

NORML, formed in 1972, is a nonprofit organization, like LEAP and the
Marijuana Policy Project, which also works to pass new laws legalizing
marijuana. Some two dozen bands, along with spoken-word artists, dancers,
artists, and speakers will put on a show to raise money for NORML at
Tobacco Road (626 S. Miami Ave.) this weekend.

Irvin Rosenfeld, a longtime stockbroker and South Florida resident, will
speak at the event. From age ten, Rosenfeld's body was riddled with painful
bone tumors. A "very law-abiding citizen," Rosenfeld has been fighting
prohibition for years. He once told a Miami crowd that he "wouldn't be
here" without pot, even though he had an open prescription for any drugs he
wanted, including cocaine and morphine. He was the second U.S. citizen to
be permitted to smoke weed by the federal government. That was in 1983 and
Rosenfeld isn't a homicidal maniac, yet.

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DETAILS

The seventh annual Medical Marijuana Benefit begins at 4:00 p.m. on
Saturday, January 22.

Tickets cost ten dollars.

Call 305-374-1198 or visit www.tobacco-road.com

Where: Tobacco Road, 626 S Miami Ave