UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

Last week we reported on a very costly phone campaign arranged by Americans
for Safe Access through an outfit called Left Bank Solutions. Some 600,000
voters in California and Oregon -constituents of four Congressmen who'd
voted against de-funding federal raids on medical marijuana providers-got
pre-recorded messages from either Marney Craig (a member of the Ed
Rosenthal jury who'd felt "hoodwinked" by the Court) or Angel McClary Raich
(who attributes her survival to cannabis). Marney's message said, "Your
Congressman had a chance to end this federal deception but he voted to let
it continue..." Angel's said, "Your Congressman is threatening my life..."

Steph Sherer, the Executive Director of ASA, had held a press conference
Nov. 20 to announce the phone campaign (which the organizers dubbed
"Operation Spank"). She said it had cost "under $100,000" and that the
money had come from "members of ASA."

Not everybody thinks the phone-call campaign is a wise expense of "under
$100,000." Some people don't like unsolicited phone pitches, period.

C-Notes is open-minded, believe it or not. In order to better understand
the phone-call tactic and weigh its efficacy, we forwarded a few questions
to Sherer:

*Does a phone number shared by two registered voters get two calls from
Left Bank or one?

*What percentage of the 600,000 voters will actually hear the message (as
opposed to others in the household)? How does Left Bank calculate this?

*What percentage of the calls get listened to all the way through? Does
Left Bank measure the hang-up rate in order to calculate efficacy? It must
vary from client to client. How did the calls from Angel and Marney do in
that regard?

*What are the costs involved? Who provided the list of constituents' phone
numbers -Left Bank or ASA?

*Whose idea was "Operation Spank?" How does ASA decide to back a project
like this? Is there a vote by the membership?"

After not receiving answers for five days, your correspondent was informed
Dec. 2 by Hilary McQuie, ASA's "Campaign Coordinator" (they all have
two-word titles) that he had only himself to blame for being cut out of the
information loop. Apparently the ASA leaders still resent some principled
criticisms I'd made in the past. Or maybe they just didn't want to answer
the last question -about how the phone-call project got approved by the
membership. Steph and Hilary pay a lot of lip-service to democratic process
but in the nitty-gritty they make all ASA's decisions. Ignoring my
inquiries about the phone campaign shows their anti-democratic instincts.
It's a form of blacklisting; when newsmakers won't answer questions from
certain journalists, it undermines the journalists' ability to make a living.

Steph and Hilary came on the scene about two years ago. They'd met in the
anti-globalization movement, veterans of Seattle '99. Neither smoked
marijuana or had any affinity for it but they sensed that the medical-use
movement had untapped potential and they, being ambitious and unhampered by
amotivational syndrome, could channel it. Steph redefined herself as a
patient. (A federal marshal had twisted her neck during a demo; she is
suing him.)

Steph's offer to give "trainings" was welcomed by club proprietors in
Berkeley (one of whom is now her boyfriend). Her and Hilary's expertise
consisted of facilitating meetings, making giant puppets, and pre-arranging
arrests to get media coverage. They called the pre-arranged busts "civil
disobedience" or "CD." I guess they never forgave me for telling them they
should call them "media stunts."

This Fall, on behalf of the California Cannabis Research Medical Group, I
applied for a grant to the Marijuana Policy Project, a Washington, D.C.
lobby that gets $3 million a year from Peter Lewis, the owner of
Progressive Insurance. I defined our objectives thus:

"To produce four quarterly issues of O'Shaughnessy's, a journal/tabloid
that will enable doctors who have been monitoring their patients' cannabis
use to share data and observations.

"To distribute O'Shaughnessy's to CCRMG members' patients and patrons of
California cannabis clubs.

"To distribute O'Shaughnessy's free to other physicians and healthcare
providers.

"To involve CCRMG physicians in campus 'teach-ins' and Continuing Medical
Education programs to counter generations of systematic miseducation on the
therapeutic uses of cannabis."

Although I have never scored in the non-profit world, and don't get my
hopes up in general, in this case I couldn't help it because
O'Shaughnessy's seemed to meet all the criteria stated in the MPP grant
application.

On Nov. 3 I received the following email "I regret to inform you that the
grants program administered by the Marijuana Policy Project did not approve
your grant application. I will send you a formal letter via regular mail in
about 2-3 weeks, which will include a specific explanation of our decision.
Chad Thevenot, Grants Manager."

I e-mailed back: " Where can I find a list of the projects you chose to
support? I'd like to get an idea of what you consider worthy."

Thevenot replied: "We don't have a published list of projects for which we
have awarded grants. However, I'm always happy to review a formal letter of
inquiry from any grant applicant, to discuss whether MPP thinks it is
promising. For more information regarding our letter of inquiry process,
please visit http://www.mpp.org/grants on the Web."

Three weeks passed and I sent another note to MPP: "I'm still waiting for
the 'formal letter' explaining why you turned us down. I would also like to
know the reason(s) why you keep secret the projects you chose to support.
It might make sense in a few cases, where they're trying not to draw the
heat, but in general it doesn't; a democratic movement requires a certain
level of transparency."

We're still waiting for an answer.

In the late 1960s Esquire magazine ran a fascinating chart full of
overlapping circles that revealed the power relations and connections
within the New York literary establishment (whose hidden leaders didn't
like being exposed, naturally, and put down the chart as "tacky"). If one
were to depict the power structure of the medical marijuana "movement,"
Steph Sherer of Americans for Safe Access and Rob Kampia of the Marijuana
Policy Project would surely be overlapping in what Esquire called "the red
hot center."

The movement itself is in the cash-in stage. Careers in politics are being
made.