Inspired by a scene from Return Of The Jedi in which Han Solo is frozen in carbonite in Jabba’s lair, this poster announces a new round of cannabis legalization protest in Washington, DC and the White House on September 24, and calls on the DEA to “release the #Choom” — to deschedule cannabis and free all prisoners being held for marijuana “crimes”.

Needless to say, there’s a lot of discontent boiling in the cannabis activist community about the DEA dragging its feet and stringing everybody along for months before finally blowing us off and refusing to remove cannabis from its “Schedule 1” list, alongside heroin. Much of the criticism is also directed at President Sparkle Pony, who claimed he would let science dictate policy and not politics, but has consistently chosen to support the failed Drug War policies which have their roots in the Nixon Administration. (The joke going around the DCMJ office is that the DEA has Obama “frozen, like Han Solo”; the term “choom” refers to Obama’s weed-smoking posse from school, nicknamed the “Choom Gang”.)

11×17 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 936kb

Continue reading "Return Of The Choom" »

In his high school days in Hawaii, Barack Obama hung out with a circle of friends nicknamed “the Choom Gang” — “choom” being Hawaiian slang for smoking marijuana. Almost all the students in this group went on to be entirely productive and successful citizens — writers, lawyers, businessmen and, of course, President of the United States.

This is by way of reminding everybody out there that cannabis is still listed by the DEA as “Schedule 1”, along with meth and heroin, and that Obama could start the descheduling process for marijuana himself instead of passing the buck to Congress. Obama himself is living proof that cannabis should be descheduled; his legacy could only be improved by ending a program of persecution based entirely on the deceptions and racism of Harry Anslinger and Richard Nixon.

11×15 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 732kb

Continue reading "Hail To The Choom" »

At last report, 22 veterans a day are committing suicide due to depression and other post-traumatic stress. Today, DCMJ and the Weed For Warriors Project threw a Smoke-In and Die-In at Lafayette Square in front of the White House. “Easier access does not equal EQUAL access” said WFW’s Brandon Wyatt, an Iraq War veteran and attorney who uses cannabis to heal his PTSD.

"22 A Day" Cannabis Protest for Vets, White House from Mike Flugennock on Vimeo.

(continue reading…)

Continue reading "22 A Day" »

The DEA schedule of narcotics — in which cannabis is classifed alongside heroin — was a product of the Nixon era, when the modern War On Drugs started cranking up. Tricky Dick himself, on a leaked White House tape, was said to have called marijuana “…the drug of choice of Mexicans, hippies and niggers.”

Here’s former White House Domestic Affairs Advisor, the notorious John Ehrlichman, with a slightly more nuanced framing of this policy in a 1994 interview:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
–John Ehrlichman, Nixon Domestic Affairs Advisor, 1994

The DEA schedule is Nixon’s schedule, part of a policy born out of deception and racism. It’s time to DEschedule cannabis.

We’ll be at the White House on May 20, how about yourself?

11×17 medium-res color .jpg image, 608kb

Letter-size high-res flyer, color .jpg image, 1.3mb

Continue reading "The DEA’s Schedule is Nixon’s Schedule" »