Myrna Loy and Marijuana

Loy (with back to camera) talks to a pothead with Columbo looking on. 

The 1972 season premiere of the popular TV show Columbo has an interesting exchange about marijuana, featuring movie queen Myrna Loy.

Loy plays a society lady who heads the local symphony board, interviewing a horn player who's been implicated in a murder. Asked about his shady associations, he says of his friends, "Well some of them have been busted for grass...I smoke grass sometimes, just like you drink gin. Didn't you ever have a drink of gin during prohibition when gin was illegal?" Her only response was, "Let's not get smart about how old I am."

Loy's earlier, exotic look in the pre-code days.

Born Myrna Adele Williams in Helena, Montana in 1905, Loy was 28 when alcohol prohibition ended in 1933. She began her career as a dancer during the pre-production code silent film days when she played exotic femme fatales. According to Wikipedia, she was an extra in 1925's Pretty Ladies, in which she and fellow newcomer Joan Crawford entered hanging from a chandelier. In 1929, she played Princess Yasmani, who heads a band of muslim rebels in The Black Watch, and a dancer named Azuri in The Desert Song, which was scrubbed of its sexual innuendoes and homosexual themes before it was re-released later.

Loy is most known for playing the urbane Nora Charles in The Thin Man movies of the '40s, opposite William Powell as a hard-drinking, smooth-talking detective. In the 1932 film Jewel Robbery, Powell plays a thief who sends his marks into giggly submission by offering them his "herbal" cigarettes. "Now inhale deeply," he says to one victim. To another he says, "Two puffs and you'll be hearing soft music... the world will begin to revolve pleasantly."

Loy wasn't necessarily a pothead, but as demonstrated by her willingness to discuss grass (wearing bright green) in the Columbo episode, she was a human rights advocate. She was a personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, and stood up against the HUAC Hollywood witch hunt. In later life, she assumed an influential role as Co-Chairman of the Advisory Council of the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing. In 1948 she became a member of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, the first Hollywood celebrity to do so.

Columbo, which had a 13-season run, was conceived and written by Richard Levinson and William Link. In 1970, Levinson and Link penned the teleplay for the TV movie "My Sweet Charlie," starring Patty Duke as a bigoted, unwed pregnant teenager who encounters Charlie Roberts, a militant African American attorney falsely accused of murder, during a demonstration in rural Texas. The film was made on location in Port Bolivar, Texas.

According to Duke's autobiography, her friendship with Al Freeman Jr., who played Roberts, led to rumors of an affair. Marijuana was planted in Duke's Galveston hotel room by locals, though it was quickly determined not to belong to Duke. Texas governor John Connally intervened with local authorities to stop harassment of the production company and Duke (Source: Wikipedia). Freeman also appeared in Finian's Rainbow which Petula Clark said was fueled by "flower power." 

“Code of the West,” a documentary on the Montana medical marijuana debate that took center stage in the 2011 legislative session, premiered at the Myrna Loy Center in Helena, which sponsors live performances and alternative films for under-served audiences.

Women, and others, less safe under Federal policy

Diane Sands, a democratic lawmaker from Montana who has championed the rights of medical marijuana patients in her state, has become the object of an inquiry by the DEA.

According to an article in The Missoulan, "A possible witness in a federal drug investigation was asked whether Sands might be part of a conspiracy to sell medical marijuana. The questions came from Drug Enforcement Administration agents from Billings who were investigating medical marijuana businesses, and Sands learned about the inquiry from the witness' attorney."

Sands compared the tactic to McCarthism and the article states, "At least one other legislator declined comment regarding DEA questions about the legislator's duties out of concern over 'additional harassment.'"

The news is particularly troubling because the drug war hinges on the testimony of often-unreliable witnesses who can't be trusted to tell the truth. DEA chief Michelle Leonhart, a Bush holdover activists were disappointed to see reappointed by Obama, is no stranger these strange tactics. Leonhart made her name through her association with a big-time informant who was discredited, but continued to be praised by Leonhart. Two young women have recently been murdered after serving as drug-war informants.

Apparently it's business as usual. I was just reading a NORML press release from 1995 when the DEA threatened Colorado legislators with reprisals should they vote for legalized hemp in the state.

California NORML has had a recent report of undercover FBI agents pretending to be opening a medical marijuana dispensary, and visiting an Orange County attorney's office, hoping the attorney would incriminate himself. And an Arcata, CA woman was arrested at her home for marijuana cultivation after a "narcotics courier sting on passenger trains" found cash on her boyfriend in Reno. Last year, when Berkeley was considering a medical marijuana dispensary permit, someone who objected turned out to be posing as a Berkeley resident and is a suspected undercover agent.

Last March 15, one day after the Montana Senate Judiciary Committee voted to kill a bill that would have repealed the state's voter-approved medical marijuana law, the federal government served more than 25 search warrants on medical marijuana businesses across the state.

Obama appointee Benjamin Wagner, the US attorney from the Eastern District in California, has lead the charge against medical marijuana collectives in that state. Wagner used to work white collar crimes and hate crimes, but has apparently been reassigned to easier and less harmful prey. Why? The easy cash they pull in in their "smash and grab" operations? Courting campaign contributions from cops?

Since a recent RAND study and other reports have found that crime actually increases after collectives are closed, it's arguable that the current federal policy is making US states less safe. (RAND pulled their study under pressure from the LA city attorney's office.) Meanwhile, President Obama has declined to address a question about marijuana legalization from a former police officer, despite the fact that the question won twice as many votes as any other in a YouTube poll.

And they call it Democracy.