cannabisnews.com: `Guru's' Tirade on Marijuana Earns Respect `Guru's' Tirade on Marijuana Earns Respect Posted by CN Staff on June 05, 2003 at 08:43:56 PT By Scott Herhold, Mercury News Source: San Jose Mercury News The ``Guru of Ganja,'' marijuana grower Ed Rosenthal, is an unprepossessing guy with a pug nose, a gray suit, a slight belly. He looks like an accountant. But put a microphone before him and he buries any concept of Mahatma Gandhi.Twenty minutes after U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer let him off Wednesday with a $1,000 fine and a day's jail sentence for marijuana growing, a red-faced Rosenthal denounced the judge, calling him corrupt and demanding his resignation. Then he went on to undermine the medicinal marijuana defense that his lawyers and supporters had so carefully constructed for him.``The federal government makes no distinction between medical marijuana and any other kind of marijuana,'' he said before a crowd of supporters in a parking lot across the street from the federal building in San Francisco. ``They're right. All marijuana should be legal!''Just for good measure, he insulted the people working in the courthouse. ``This has become the harm center of San Francisco,'' he shouted. A little respectI say you have to respect a man like this. Not like him, but respect him. Yes, he's intemperate. Yes, he's unfair. Yes, he's full of himself. But he has the quality of being unyielding -- and maybe that's what was needed in this particularly silly case. You wanna prosecute me? Fine. Bring it on.To understand his role, you have to know the stakes: To his lawyers and supporters, this case was about the right of a decent man in Oakland who followed a city ordinance that let him provide marijuana to sick people.To legal scholars, it was a contest between the anti-drug Bush administration, which brought the case, and California Proposition 215, the medicinal marijuana initiative.But those battles were only the surface warfare. What was going on in Judge Breyer's 19th-floor courtroom No. 8 Wednesday morning was a huge salvo aimed at decriminalizing marijuana -- and maybe even making it effectively legal.That salvo goes well beyond medicinal marijuana. I don't doubt there are ill people who genuinely benefit from pot. One of the most remarkable features of Rosenthal's case was that a cadre of the jurors who convicted him on federal charges of cultivating more than 100 plants showed up Wednesday on his behalf, still irritated that they had not been allowed to hear evidence of how Rosenthal helped the sick.But the feds, for all their overzealousness in bringing this case, have this much right: There's a slippery slope between making marijuana available medically and making marijuana available, period.Would a woman with severe back problems benefit from a toke every now and then? Well, maybe. Would she like it even after her back stops hurting? Why not? Courageous callIn what has to be called a courageous decision, Judge Breyer was delivering an unmistakable message to federal prosecutors that he didn't think much of their case.Giving someone a day's sentence in a case of this magnitude is like awarding a class-action plaintiff $1 in a multimillion-dollar civil lawsuit.So that has to raise the questions: Just how vigorously should our nation's marijuana laws be enforced? And should they be changed? The answers are not very and probably yes.The weight of expert opinion is swinging away from the idea that marijuana leads to harder drugs. A study by the non-profit Rand Drug Policy Research Center debunked the notion that pot was a ``gateway'' drug that led to cocaine and other drugs. All in all, alcohol probably costs more lives.In Canada, Parliament is moving toward passing a law to decriminalize pot -- essentially making it the equivalent of a traffic fine. It's not a bad model here. We can avoid the political hassle of legalizing it. But more important, we can avoid prosecutions like Ed Rosenthal's. As an added bonus, maybe we can escape his firebrand rhetoric.Scott Herhold's column appears on Thursdays and Sundays.Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)Author: Scott Herhold, Mercury NewsPublished: Thursday, June 05, 2003 Copyright: 2003 San Jose Mercury NewsContact: letters sjmercury.comWebsite: http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/Related Articles & Web Site:Ed Rosenthal's Trial Pictures & Articleshttp://freedomtoexhale.com/trialpics.htm Medicinal Pot's Leader Receives Lenient Sentence http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread16538.shtmlRosenthal Gets Slap On Wristhttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread16537.shtmlMarijuana Grower Sentenced To One Day http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread16535.shtml Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help Comment #3 posted by kaptinemo on June 05, 2003 at 12:47:59 PT: Another panty-waist pressboy So, the author of this drivel doesn't like Mr. Rosenthal for pointing out that he shouldn't have even been brought before the court? That the author gets upset that Mr. Rosenthal feels that justice has been corrupted in this country when someone like him is treated as he has been? He expects Mr. Rosenthal to, like some 14th century Russian peasant, kiss the foot of the judge who tried to shanghai him with a long term prison stay?The author can himself kiss something else (dropping trousers).Like so many others, this so-called reporter is missing the point: Fed actions have resulted, directly and indirectly, in increasing the suffering and hastening the deaths of all those dependent upon cannabis for some degree of relief from their painful and/or terminal maladies. This is no debating society here; people are suffering and dying, and all this dweeb is concerned about is decorum? That Mr. Rosenthal didn't show proper respect to those intent upon destroying him and all those others seeking to provide humanitarian relief for their fellow human beings?Had Mr. Herhold been around in 1776, he would probably been demanding that we bend knee to Mad King Georgie. Out of respect due proper authority, don't you know? [ Post Comment ] Comment #2 posted by afterburner on June 05, 2003 at 10:34:39 PT: Before 1908... no one talked about "slippery slopes." Medicine was medicine until a politically motivated doctor, William Hamilton Wright, 1 of 3 delegates to Shanghai Opium Commission in 1908, decided to make the patients criminals. The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 added cannabis to the list of demonized medicines.Decrim as shown by the reasoning of this writer, Scott Herhold, is really a prohibitionist smoke screen to take the wind out of the sails of legalization. Timid steps. Baby steps. Will not satisfy the outrage of 95 years of wrong-headed thinking resulting in massive harm to individuals, their families, their property, their jobs, their travel to foreign countries, their education, their voting rights, and to the rule of law including especially the trashing of the US Constitution. "I have not yet begun to fight!" -John Paul Jones. ego transcendence follows ego destruction, the battle is getting hotter as we approach critical mass and solve the problem properly. [ Post Comment ] Comment #1 posted by Truth on June 05, 2003 at 09:18:54 PT probably? "All in all, alcohol probably costs more lives"Probably? Pot has killed NO ONE, alcohol is the second deadliest drug there is at 100,000 deaths a year, your math needs help. [ Post Comment ] Post Comment