September 22, 2010

This Week’s Reefer Madness

Flickr user Salty Cracka

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


This story is cross-posted at The Riff.

Boy, it’s only Wednesday and this week has already gone to pot. Marijuana hasn’t had this much going for it since, well, anybody who smokes a lot of it can remember. Proposition 19, the California ballot measure that would legalize recreational pot smoking, yesterday earned an endorsement from the Service Employees International Union, California’s largest and most powerful labor union. Doing the SEIU one better, the Teamsters announced this week that they’d unionized 40 actual pot farmers who work for Oakland’s Marjyn Investments, which contracts to grow buds for medical marijuana patients. “I didn’t have this planned out when I became a Teamster 34 years ago,” labor organizer Lou Marchetti told the Sacramento Bee. “This is a whole new ballgame.”

No kidding. Marijuana is big business, and not just for Humboldt County or that kid selling bags of Mexican schwag. On Sunday, six pot vendors assembled in Tacoma’s Conquering Lion, a music venue, for what was billed as Washington’s (and maybe America’s) first marijuana farmers market. On Tuesday, High Times reported that a pot dispensary in Oakland, Crema de la Cana, is now selling pot ice cream in flavors that include Straw-Mari Cheesecake and Bannabis Foster. If Proposition 19 passes, maybe we’ll see organic heirloom pot at the Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market, or Cherry-Mari Garcia at Ben and Jerry’s.

That could be why California breweries, pot’s main competitors, are worried about waking up on November 3rd with a hangover. “This Bud’s Not For You: Beer Industry Battling California Pot Initiative,” the Huffington Post tweeted yesterday in response to the news that the California Beer and Beverage Distributors donated $10,000 towards defeating Prop 19. They’re not the only ones worried about Marchetti’s “new ballgame.” Yesterday, FireDogLake reported that a $10,000 donation to fight a proposed medical marijuana initiative in Arizona came from the Arizona Cardinals football team.

Does this remind anybody of high school? On one side you’ve got beer-swilling jocks, on the other, pot-toking stoners. The only difference is that the popularity contest will determine a lot more than who gets laid.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate