MADISON: Next Tuesday, President Barack Obama will be coming to Madison and headlining a political rally on the University of Wisconsin campus downtown.

The event will be on Library Mall, which just a few days later, on Saturday Oct. 2 and Sunday, Oct. 3, will be the location of the 40th Annual Great Midwest Marijuana Harvest Festival.

The festival, entering it’s fifth decade, has been a fall fixture in Madison, even outdrawing the university’s football team back when the team was not the powerhouse of recent years.

Harvest Fest, which began as a free speech/anti-war protest in 1971, went on to become the Midwest’s most enduring cannabis festival. But its long existence also speaks to the seeming intractability of marijuana prohibition. Generations of UW students who attended the festival literally have grown gray waiting for the laws to be changed.

Today, even with another admitted one time enthusiastic pot smoker as US president – Barack Obama - speaking on Library Mall, the site of many Harvest Fests, marijuana prohibition is still wreaking mayhem on our city, state and nation

2010 is a pivotal year for cannabis prohibition. Voters in California may pass Prop 19 and legalize marijuana in the Golden State. A dispensary measure is on the ballot in Oregon and medical marijuana is on Arizona and South Dakota ballots. Here in Wisconsin, Dane County voters and those in the city of River Falls will be voting in first-time, historic medical marijuana advisory referendums. Nov. 2 could be the tipping point so the counterproductive fraud of marijuana prohibition can be buried once and for all. Let Cannabis Freedom ring out this Nov. 2, and Oct. 1-3 at Harvest Fest!

Read all my Madison NORML Examiner articles here.