By O’S News Service April 6, 2015 Candy Bergen has just published a memoir called “A Fine Romance.” According to the New York Times, the actress “parses the nation’s infatuation with the CBS sitcom ‘Murphy Brown,’ in which she starred for a decade as a take-no-prisoners, formerly booze-guzzling television reporter.”
We have reserved the book at the public library and will parse it for cannabis references (if Ellen Komp hasn’t done so already).
This brief item is from a chronology we started compiling in the Prop 215 Era.
November 5, 1997 (a year to the day after California voters legalized marijuana for medical use): On prime time TV, Murphy Brown, diagnosed with breast cancer, smokes marijuana to deal with the effects of chemotherapy.
Today, with the media totally marijuana-infused, the Murphy Brown episode seems insignificant. But at the time it was a breakthrough.
The next item in our chronology, we couldn’t help but notice, dealt with the situation in Washington, DC, and is not irrelevant today, given that “Americans for Medical Rights” was a front group set up by the organization now known as the Drug Policy Alliance, and they’re still trying to suppress and control grassroots activists here and there.
Nov. 11 Steve Michael of ACT UP! – Washington, D.C., sponsor of a medical marijuana initiative that has already collected 12,000 signatures, protests AMR’s plan to sponsor a separate measure. “I am angered that the California-based Americans for Medical Rights would actively undermine the efforts of DC AIDS activists working to qualify a medical marijuana initiative in our community… The AMR crowd has hired a K Street PR firm and is currently calling on community groups throughout the District of Columbia to convince people to support their effort… This has been a long and draining campaign. I have been frustrated by the leadership of the drug policy movement time and time again. With a few exceptions they’ve ignored our requests for help, even the simple things, like postage, printing, signs, volunteers. We’ve been left twisting in the wind”
Activist Lin Hagood adds: “It’s like the AMR crowd is afraid that if we prevail they won’t be able to cash in on our effort. We are going public in the hope that those who funded the California Initiative drive like Mr. George Soros learn of our poverty status and will bypass the fat cat AMR gatekeepers and help the DC community activist based effort to secure legal and safe access for medical marijuana to serious ill Washingtonians. I can’t believe Soros has anything to do with the secret campaign by AMR to crush Initiative 57.”
