Seattle Hempfest 2004

[Seattle Zack]

As a disclaimer, I'm not affilliated with the Hempfest organizers (although I do give several hundred buck a year to NORML) but anyone who enjoys a good bong hit is certainly welcome to show up at Myrtle Edwards......

***
POT PROHIBITION REACHES RETIREMENT AGE
It has been 67 years since America's un-American pot laws were established, and it's high time to put these policies out to pasture. That's what Hempfest is all about. Here is what we have in store for 2004...

The thirteenth year of Seattle Hempfest is almost in full bloom, and once again the Emerald City is poised to host a dazzling kaleidoscope of pot politics, music, speakers, culture and crafts. Hot off of last year's local victory with I-75, making simple possession of marijuana the lowest enforcement priority, the Pacific Northwest cannabis movement is ramping up its efforts by calling for pot enthusiasts everywhere to come out of the closet and show their pot pride at Hempfest.

Against a backdrop of sizzling sounds, scrumptious eats and an endless array of arts and crafts, the 2004 Seattle Hempfest features some of the most important people in American marijuana politics. Big things are happening in the movements to bring safe, legal access to medical patients, domestic industrial hemp production to ailing American farmers, and the freedom to live without fear of arrest and imprisonment for good and decent citizens who choose cannabis as a vehicle for medicine, relaxation or insight.

2004 proves to be a pivotal year in American politics as the nation chooses whether to stay with the disastrous policies of the Bush administration, or bring in someone with a greater ability to understand our message... that we are Americans seeking freedom, not a criminal underclass threatening society. So you can expect to see a voter registration and education campaign at this year's event as we take a break from our past history of non- partisanship. Also, several states have initiatives on the ballot this year addressing issues about cannabis, and Hempfest is just the place to find out what you can do to help.

SMOKIN' TUNES & PHATTIE SPEAKER LINE-UP
When it comes to Music, this may be the most powerful year we've ever had. Hempfest proudly presents acts like Sir Mix-A-Lot, The KottonMouthKings, and Los Marijuanos right at the Seattle waterfront in one of the city's most beautiful places. Come see over 50 musical acts from the Northwest and beyond, as they throw their full support behind our movement.

Only Seattle Hempfest offers such an expansive lineup of national cannabis activism movers and shakers, including:

Executive Director of the Drug Policy Alliance Ethan Nadelmann
Renowned author and activist Ed Rosenthal
Director of the San Francisco office of the Drug Policy Alliance Marsha Rosenbaum
Keith Stroup, founder of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws

***
August 21 & 22 - 10AM to 8PM
Myrtle Edwards Park, Pier 70
Free!

Anyway, I'll be there (along with about 250,000 like-minded individuals), so smoke a fattie (phattie?) for us if you can't be there in person.

Hempfest

 

[Seattle Zack]

from ol' crustypants himself .....

Penalties for marijuana use hard to defend
by William F. Buckley Jr.
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle News Service

Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great.

The laws concerning marijuana aren't exactly indefensible, because practically nothing is, and the thunderers who tell us to stay the course can always find one man or woman who, having taken marijuana, moved on to severe mental disorder. But that argument, to quote myself, is on the order of saying that every rapist began by masturbating.

General rules based on individual victims are unwise. And although there is a perfectly respectable case against using marijuana, the penalties imposed on those who reject that case, or who give way to weakness of resolution, are very difficult to defend. If all our laws were paradigmatic, imagine what we would do to anyone caught lighting a cigarette, or drinking a beer. Or -- exulting in life in the paradigm -- committing adultery. Send them all to Guantanamo?

Legal practices should be informed by realities. These are enlightening in the matter of marijuana. There are approximately 700,000 marijuana-related arrests made very year. Most of these -- 87 percent -- involve nothing more than mere possession of small amounts of marijuana. This exercise in scrupulosity costs us $10 billion to $15 billion per year in direct expenditures alone.

Most transgressors caught using marijuana aren't packed away to jail, but some are, and in Alabama, if you are convicted three times of marijuana possession, they'll lock you up for 15 years to life.

Professor Ethan Nadelmann, of the Drug Policy Alliance, writing in National Review, estimates at 100,000 the number of Americans currently behind bars for one or another marijuana offense.

What we face is the politician's fear of endorsing any change in existing marijuana laws. You can imagine what a call for reform in those laws would do to an upward mobile political figure.

Gary Johnson, as governor of New Mexico, came out in favor of legalization -- and went on to private life. George Shultz, former secretary of state, long ago called for legalization, but he was not running for office, and at his age, and with his distinctions, he is immune to slurred charges of indifference to the fate of children and humankind. But Kurt Schmoke, as mayor of Baltimore, did it, and survived a re-election challenge.

But the stodgy inertia most politicians feel is up against a creeping reality. It is that marijuana for medical relief is a movement that is attracting voters who are pretty assertive on the subject. Every state ballot initiative to legalize medical marijuana has been approved, often by wide margins.

Of course, we have here collisions of federal and state authority. Federal authority technically supervenes state laws, but federal authority in the matter is being challenged on grounds of medical self-government. It simply isn't so that there are substitutes equally efficacious.

Richard Brookhiser, the widely respected author and editor, has written on the subject for the New York Observer. He had a bout of cancer and found relief from chemotherapy only in marijuana -- which he consumed, and discarded after the affliction was gone.

The court has told federal enforcers that they are not to impose their way between doctors and their patients, and one bill sitting about in Congress would even deny the use of federal funds for prosecuting medical marijuana use.

Critics of reform do make a pretty plausible case when they say that whatever is said about using marijuana only for medical relief masks what the advocates are really after, which is legal marijuana for whoever wants it. That would be different from the situation today.

Today we have illegal marijuana for whoever wants it. An estimated 100 million Americans have smoked marijuana at least once, the great majority abandoning its use after a few highs. But to stop using it does not close off its availability.

A Boston commentator observed years ago that it is easier for an 18-year-old to get marijuana in Cambridge than to get beer. Vendors who sell beer to minors can forfeit their valuable licenses. It requires less effort for the college student to find marijuana than for a sailor to find a brothel.

Still, there is the danger of arrest (as 700,000 people a year will tell you), of possible imprisonment, of blemish on one's record. The obverse of this is increased cynicism about the law.

We're not going to find someone running for president who advocates reform of those laws. What is required is a genuine republican groundswell. It is happening, but ever so gradually. Two of every five Americans, according to a 2003 Zogby poll cited by Dr. Nadelmann, believe "the government should treat marijuana more or less the same way it treats alcohol: It should regulate it, control it, tax it, and make it illegal only for children."

Such reforms would hugely increase the use of the drug? Why? It is de facto legal in the Netherlands, and the percentage of users there is the same as here. The Dutch do odd things, but here they teach us a lesson.

 

[pop_54]

Yea, let's all get stoned

 

[SummerMorning]

*puff puff*

A green by any other name...

 

[shereads]

Marijuana amplifies whatever I'm feeling. Back in the day, it made Pink Floyd sound 75% Pinker and Floydier. Jokes were 75% funnier.

Tried it again a few years ago, as a grown-up, and spent the afternoon worrying 75% more about the job, the car, and the dry-rot under the eaves of the house.

I have no regrets, though. Sharing that hyper-happy state with a few good friends delivered some of my best times and most innocent memories. It was best when we were someplace where no stress could find us. Lying on the beach listening to Marvin Gaye. Making a UFO that night, out of a kite and a chemical light stick, to astonish the drunks at the beach house next door.

It worked, too.



It would have worked a little longer, if we could have held back the laughter. Impossible.

 

[Liar]

I confess. I misread the title as Seattle Humpfest.

Would be the only high I need.

 

[SummerMorning]

Humping and hemping, alas, the best of friends are not...