Even as Assemblyman Tom Ammiano today reintroduced his bill to legalize, regulate and tax marijuana for all uses, marijuana advocates are taking to television – but not with ads.

“Cannabis Planet,” a 30-minute weekly television program is about to start a 26-week run on the Bay Area’s KOFY-TV (Channel 20/13) at midnight this Friday.

The show – focusing on the merits of the marijuana plant in medicine, industry and agriculture “and the benefits this plant brings to Planet Earth, mankind and the United States” – is already seen in the Los Angeles and San Diego markets, and will roll out in Sacramento in March and in Colorado later this spring.

Weekly topics will include cannabis news and information, profiles of medical marijuana collectives, cannabis cooking, patient testimonials, celebrity interviews, music, entertainment and more. It’s co-hosted by Ngaio Bealum, publisher of West Coast Cannabis Magazine, and Los Angeles medical marijuana activist Sarah Diesel; Oakland’s own Ed Rosenthal, the “guru of ganja” who’s world-renowned for his horticultural expertise in marijuana, will serve as a resident expert offering cultivation tips, while Chef Michael Delao will cook up some cannabis cuisine.

“We are very excited to be bringing this show into the Bay Area, where Prop. 215 was born” Brad Lane, the show’s creator and executive producer, said in a news release. “Our goal at Cannabis Planet is to inform and educate the masses about the merits of the Cannabis Sativa plant, and to fight for safe and legal access for medical cannabis patients.”

That’s a hell of a publicity blitz even as California ramps up the debate over Ammiano’s bill and a like-minded November ballot measure put forth by Oakland marijuana activists and businessmen Richard Lee and Jeffrey Jones. But when I talked to Lane this afternoon, he insisted it’s not a political show.

“Our political agenda is to legalize cannabis” for food, fuel, fiber and medicine “but we’re not a political-based show, if that makes sense – were just trying to educate and inform the masses about the merits of cannabis sativa,” he said, noting the show won’t depict or promote recreational use of marijuana. “Hemp, hemp hooray – we just want to get the message out there.”

The show originally ran in Los Angeles for 13 weeks, then was re-run. Lane said the producers have “re-mastered” the LA episodes with minor touches to make them geographically appropriate for other areas – San Diego and Bay Area backdrops, for example – and are now producing a second run of 13 new shows which will contain more local content.

Lane said the Berkeley Patients Group is the flagship Bay Area sponsor, with other support for the show coming from San Francisco’s Ketama Collective, Richmond’s Seven Stars Holistic Healing, and Berkeley-based KZee Novelty Products, maker of the “Lollipipe” edible candy smoking pipe. “We plan on bringing in more sponsors, we’ve just started dipping our toe in the water in the Bay Area,” he said.

Statewide sponsors include the MediCann medical-marijuana-evaluation clinics, as well as Canadian hydroponics companies Advanced Nutrients and BC Northern Lights.

Ammiano’s Marijuana Control, Regulation, and Education Act (AB 2254) would create a regulatory structure similar to that used for beer, wine and liquor, permitting taxed sales to adults while barring sales to or possession by those under 21. Its former incarnation, AB 390, was approved by the Assembly Public Safety Committee – which Ammiano chairs – last month, but died when the clock ran out on the last Legislative session. Re-introduced, it’ll probably make a quick pass back through Public Safety on its way to the Assembly Health Committee.

(Note: This post was penned by San Jose Mercury News reporter Denis C. Theriault, in the Sacramento bureau.)

Reports of a certain veto message’s death — as in the one with the hidden, four-letter message apparently sent from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to Assemblyman Tom Ammiano — have been exaggerated.

Despite a blog post by the Sacramento Bee last week saying the message had gone “poof,” it’s alive and well for all the world to see over on the governor’s Web site.

The message, you might remember, was issued in response to AB 1176 and seemed to follow the governor’s usual form when rejecting bills. But careful readers, eyeballing the first letter of each line, found something else: a familiar curse word, plus the word “you.”

The discovery kicked off a brief national media storm and saw the governor’s office defending the acrostic as mere coincidence — never mind that Ammiano had only weeks before peppered the governor at an appearance with some choice words of his own.

The Bee, in its post, looked only at the Legislature’s bill-tracking site, leginfo.ca.gov, which formatted the message’s text differently and ended up wiping out the acrostic.

So, after bleak budget forecast after bleak budget forecast, long live one of the lighter pieces of writing to come from the governor’s office last year.

Marijuana legalization is picking up public-policy steam in California, Washington state, and across the nation, reform advocates said on a conference call this morning.

Assembly Public Safety Committee Chairman Tom Ammiano, D-San Franicsco, said a re-vamped version of his AB 390, to decriminalize, regulate and tax marijuana, will be heard by his committee Jan. 12 before heading to the Health Committee “and we do expect very, very positive results.”

“We’re very excited about this issue, it has gained a lot of traction, the political will seems to be there and it does have a populist dimension as evidenced by our initiative process,” Ammiano said, citing proponents’ announcement earlier this week that they’d easily gathered more than enough petition signatures to put a legalization measure on next November’s ballot.

The initiative’s expected qualification “certainly gets the attention of the Legislature,” Ammiano said. “They’re thinking, ‘Well, if this initiative is going to pass… we’d better start paying attention, we’d better work with it.’ ”

And initiative or not, more lawmakers than ever before see it as a serious public policy issue of conserving scant law enforcement resources, reducing the prison population, using strict regulation to keep the drug out of children’s hands, and creating billions in new revenue for the cash-strapped state’s coffers, Ammiano said: “The Legislature itself is becoming more and more ‘user-friendly.’”

More on Washington State’s similar bill and the national scene, after the jump…
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Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, seemed to accept Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s encoded upbraiding – hidden in an Oct. 12 veto message, responding to Ammiano’s Oct. 7 invitation to “kiss my gay ass” – with bemused resignation this morning.

He called it “a very creative way of exercising veto power,” and said he’ll reintroduce his bill – dealing with financing mechanisms for the Port of San Francisco – next year despite being “very disapponted” by this veto.

“I guess the governor is feeling his oats,” Ammiano said, discounting any possibility that the message was coincidental. “I feel there was a point to the way it was designed, yes.”

Ammiano took questions about the matter during a news conference before an informational hearing about marijuana legalization, on which he introduced a bill earlier this year. Asked whether he believed Schwarzenegger would sign such a bill, he quipped, “It would be an interesting veto message, wouldn’t it? Rich in potential.”

Oakland-based activists filed a proposed ballot measure with the state Attorney General’s office today which would legalize and tax marijuana for recreational use.

Proponents Jeff Jones, executive director of the Patient ID Center (formerly known as the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative), and Richard Lee, founder and president of Oaksterdam University, submitted their “Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010” for the Attorney General to prepare the title and summary that will appear on the initiative petitions; that process takes about 60 days. After that, it’ll be forwarded to the Secretary of State’s office so they can start gathering petition signatures to put it on the ballot in November 2010.

It’s the latest omen of impending changes in California’s marijuana policy. Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, introduced a bill earlier this year that also would legalize, regulate and tax marijuana for recreational use, initially estimating his bill would raise more $1 billion per year for the state’s beleaguered General Fund; the state Board of Equalization pegged it at about $1.4 billion per year.

And Oakland voters, facing a hefty municipal deficit of their own, last week approved a 15-fold tax increase on the city’s medical marijuana dispensaries, a move that garnered national media attention and could spark similar efforts in other California cities.

(Incidentally, I’ll be moderating a panel discussion – in which Richard Lee will be among the participants – on “Marijuana Economics: The Pros and Cons of California’s Cash Crop” at 6:30 p.m. this Thursday, July 30 at the Commonwealth Club of California, on the second floor of 595 Market St. in San Francisco; tickets cost $12 for club members, $20 for non-members or $7 for students with valid ID, and are available online.)

“The momentum to end decades of failed marijuana prohibition just keeps building,” Stephen Gutwillig, California director for the Drug Policy Alliance, said in a news release today. Although his organization would prefer that such a measure wait until 2012 when support likely will be even greater, “we’d of course like to see it win. There’s simply no denying the intense groundswell for change.”

Lots more on differences between the proposed measure and Ammiano’s bill, and on the political implications of a 2010 vote on this measure, after the jump…
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