Cannabis Chronicles

As we round out today’s coverage of the medical cannabis community, we’d like to point our readers to an interesting blog that we just found. The articulate author, Alex Coolman, is a recent graduate of UC Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, so we’d guess in bird’s nest terms, that makes him a “legal eagle”. While Mr Coolman appears to be just getting started with his career as an attorney, Alex already has an impressive array of experience. Here’s how Alex describes the work he did as a law student.

“I worked with the Drug Policy Alliance Office of Legal Affairs and as a law clerk with the hard-charging criminal defense attorneys of San Francisco’s Pier 5 Law Offices. I clerked for the First District Appellate Project, which handles appeals for indigent clients who have been convicted at trial, and externed at the First District Court of Appeal. I also served as an editorial consultant on the 2006 report Understanding California Corrections, published by the California Policy Research Center.”

We’re impressed, that’s a pretty darn good bit of experience for a young fellow like Mr. Coolman. A very nice background indeed, and a very good foundation for future success, if you ask us. Here’s a recent entry from his Drug Law Blog for our readers here at the Cannabis Chronicles.

That Train Already Left The Station

The Daily Bulletin has an anti-medical marijuana column today by Brenda Chabot of the Inland Valley Drug Free Community Coalition that seems like a pretty normal newspaper op-ed piece until you realize that it’s arguing a point that California’s voters rejected more than 10 years ago.

Chabot spends hundreds of words repeating misinformation about medical marijuana’s medical efficacy, arguing that “Marinol is a medicine - smoked marijuana is not,” flogging the “gateway drug” theory, and generally championing the party line of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. She forgets to use the goofy ONDCP tagline — “Marijuana: harmless?” — but otherwise sounds like she’s writing a speech for John Walters to deliver to some provincial Rotary Club.

The thing she seems to forget is that the train she’s riding already left the station a long time ago in California, along with 11 other states.

California voters don’t buy the federal argument, which they recognize as a mixture of bad science and blatant propaganda. That’s why California voters passed Prop. 215 in 1996, why California’s legislature enacted laws like SB420 to help implement the law, why a number of California cities have passed rules like Oakland’s Measure Z to make marijuana arrests the lowest possible priority for law enforcement. Medical marijuana is already a reality in California.

The battle that Chabot is fighting has been over for a long time.

Chabot and her fellow drug warriors lost.

(Sometimes they just don’t seem to realize it.)

A big tip of our wings to Mr Coolman, that’s a nice little rebuttal.

Here’s a part of Alex’s compassionate and well reasoned description of what his blog is about.

This is not a “pro-drug” blog. I have lost friends and family to addiction, and my heart sincerely goes out to people who are struggling with that type of situation. My concern, though, is with a side of the war on drugs that many middle class people never see: the devastation that this war has brought to communities of color and to the poor, both by turning poor neighborhoods into areas where constitutional rights basically don’t apply any more and by creating powerful economic incentives for people to participate in the illicit drug trade. Like many other people from all political stripes who have been writing about this subject for years, I worry about the way the war on drugs is eroding the civil liberties of all Americans and is causing this country to rely more heavily on prisons as a tool of social control than any other nation in the world. I also worry that the war on drugs doesn’t keep people away from drugs. This blog is a way of discussing possible alternatives to these problems.

We know where Alex is coming from, we’ve seen the ugly side of drug abuse ourselves, having lost friends to addiction, just as we’ve lost friends to an oppressive penal system. Certainly, we are no great fans of street drugs like cocaine and heroin, dangerous chemicals with relatively high toxicity that also quickly bring about dependence and addiction. So, we’re glad that the medical marijuana movement has a bright young legal mind like Alex Coolman on “our” side, and we’re excited to be adding his Drug Law Blog to our link library here at the Cannabis Chronicles. It’s good to read another thoughtful voice that’s added to the debate.

All the best from our nest to Alex!