Tag Archives | NORML

4/20 Goes Mainstream In California’s Bay Area

By on April 20, 2012 in News 2

California NORMLStoners everywhere recognize April 20th (4/20) as a day to celebrate their favorite herb, but perhaps nowhere has this “holiday” of sorts entered the mainstream to the extent it has in California’s Bay Area, where the local NBC station reports on celebrations:

The holiest of days in many a marijuana users’ calendar is upon us: The 20th day of April, the hallowed 4/20. There’s much on in the Bay Area today to mark “the stoners’ Christmas,” as the day has been dubbed.

But there’s also much more going on than the annual smoke-outs at 20 minutes past four in the afternoon at Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park, the University of California Santa Cruz campus, and essentially anywhere else marijuana users are known to congregate (read: anywhere). The time — 4:20 p.m. — is important. In the 1970s, a small group of hippie stoners at San Rafael High School would go out every day at that time to smot pot, and their “club” name just stuck.

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5 Things the Corporate Media Don’t Want You to Know About Cannabis

By on October 1, 2009 in News 5

Paul Armentano is a contributor to the Disinformation book You Are Still Being Lied To and the deputy director of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. This is the beginning of a great article he wrote for Alternet:

Writing in the journal Science nearly four decades ago, New York State University sociologist Erich Goode documented the media’s complicity in maintaining cannabis prohibition.

He observed: “[T]ests and experiments purporting to demonstrate the ravages of marijuana consumption receive enormous attention from the media, and their findings become accepted as fact by the public. But when careful refutations of such research are published, or when later findings contradict the original pathological findings, they tend to be ignored or dismissed.”

A glimpse of today’s mainstream media landscape indicates that little has changed — with news outlets continuing to, at best, underreport the publication of scientific studies that undermine the federal government’s longstanding pot propaganda and, at worst, ignore them all together.

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