Medical Marijuana and Online Video: A New Kind of Lobbying?

The early states of Iowa and New Hampshire have long been stomping grounds for organizers hoping to use the national attention focused on these battlegrounds to elevate their issue, and maybe force some of the leading candidates to adopt their cause. But this year, something new is happening, fueled by the rise of online video. It's one thing to get supporters to go to candidate events and ask your question about the need for affordable health care or campaign finance reform. It's another thing when you can get the candidates on tape answering -- or not answering -- a question, and then show that to the world.

One group taking advantage of this is Granite Staters for Medical Marijuana. The New Hampshire-based advocacy group, which is funded by the national Marijuana Policy Project, has compiled an amazing trove of videos on YouTube featuring most of the candidates’ statements on whether they would stop federal raids on users of medical marijuana, including clips of John Edwards (would stop arresting people), Mike Huckabee (says he hasn't seen research that marijuana is more effective but wouldn't arrest users), Ron Paul (wouldn't arrest), and Fred Thompson (doesn't know). More illuminating and potentially more damning are their interactions with actual voters.

The blog Stop the Drug War recently posted on the videos, picking up John McCain and Rudy Giuliani's responses to a question from the Granite Staters’ Linda Macia.

Macia, who suffers from nerve damage, fibromyalgia, reflex sympathetic dystrophy and degenerative arthritis, tells McCain that users of medical marijuana are sometimes arrested by the feds in the middle of the night. At the moment she mentions medical marijuana, McCain turns his back to her, and he tells her (erroneously) that dead and dying people aren’t being arrested for using medical marijuana.

“That’s not the kind of society we live in,” he says. Actually, it is, she says, but rather than grant her point of view he's oddly cold and dismissive.

Another video shows Rudy Giuliani — who has advised the company that produces Oxycontin — telling Macia that other medications (you mean, like Oxycontin?) are more effective than marijuana, despite patients’ assertions that only marijuana can ease their symptoms.

And the Granite Staters' YouTube channel has another damning video, this time of a wheelchair-bound man with muscular dystrophy asking Mitt Romney if he would have him and his doctors arrested for using medical marijuana.

“I’m not in favor of medical marijuana,” Romney tells him, refusing to discuss the issue any further and walking away in that I'm-smiling-but-I'm-not-talking-to-you-anymore manner that so many politicians have mastered.

The point isn't that all three candidates are Republicans, or that they don't support the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes. The point is that voter-generated video is helping us understand, in a very human way, the positions and, perhaps more importantly, the attitudes, of these candidates. It's one thing to disagree on an issue; it's another to treat potential supporters so badly, and to be captured doing so on video.

Taken individually, these videos could easily slip through the cracks. But brought together, they can provide startling insights into a candidate's positions and character; imagine a database of videos for every issue — for health care, immigration, the war in Iraq, the environment, etc — managed by voters, not the candidates. Maybe we've entered a new phase in the use of video in politics: video lobbying.