Global Ganja Report

Resisting the Eradication Regime, Defending Your Right to Cannabis

Colorado controversies over cannabis on airwaves, billboards

Posted on May 11th, 2012 by Global Ganja Report and tagged cannabis, Colorado, legalization, medicinal, Rocky Mountains, United States.

Colorado's Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol is running a TV ad May 11 with a Mother's Day theme. The ad, entitled "Dear Mom," is in support of Amendment 64, which will go to voters in November. It features a young woman writing an e-mail to her mother suggesting it's "high time" they talk about her marijuana use (as the Denver Post put it, pun presumably not intended). "The young woman explains that marijuana use is, in her experience, safer and more healthy than the drinking she [the daughter] did in college."

Days earlier, the Denver Post reported that Colorado's main medical-marijuana lobby is pushing Denver's City Council to ban billboards and other outdoor advertising for cannabis dispensaries in an effort to further legitimize the industry. "We see this as a necessary step to clean up the industry," said Michael Elliott of the Medical Marijuana Industry Group, a trade association representing more than 50 businesses. "The justification for a complete ban of outdoor advertising [for medical marijuana] is to prevent the encouragement of nonqualifying patients to use" the product.

The council is already considering a bill to bar outdoor advertising for dispensaries 1,000 feet from schools, day-care centers, parks and recreation centers. But council members may look at a citywide ban instead—following the industry's own lead.

Image from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection

Global Ganja Report News Blog

Comments

Xenophobes for legalization?

Another one to file under "with friends like these..." In the Colorado Springs Gazette of Sept. 17, former Republican congressman Tom Tancredo threw his support behind his state's legalization initiative:

I am endorsing Amendment 64 not despite my conservative beliefs, but because of them.
Throughout my career in public policy and in public office, I have fought to reform or eliminate wasteful and ineffective government programs. There is no government program or policy I can think of that has failed in such a unique way as marijuana prohibition.

Our nation is spending tens of billions of dollars annually in an attempt to prohibit adults from using a substance objectively less harmful than alcohol.

Yet marijuana is still widely available in our society. We are not preventing its use; we are merely ensuring that all of the profits from the sale of marijuana (outside the medical marijuana system) flow to the criminal underground.

Somehow Tancredo isn't such a small-government zealot when it comes to unleashing a police state on "illegal" immigrants. He supported draconian anti-immigrant measures in Colorado, addressed Minuteman rallies, and called for bombing Islamic holy sites, among numerous other hateful indiscretions.

Does this mean we should refuse his support on Amendment 64? No. But progressives who support 64 have got to be clear that they disagree with Tancredo about everything else...

Comment by Bill Weinberg on Sep 26th, 2012 at 2:57 pm