At the website for Kevin Sabet’s Project SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana), there is an entire page dedicated to the scaremongering about Big Tobacco taking over a legal marijuana industry.
We know if it’s legalized, marijuana will be commercialized, too. A commercial marijuana industry will act just as the tobacco industry acts. Big Tobacco may even take over a marijuana industry once it’s up and running.
…there’s Altria, the parent company of Phillip Morris. It recently bought the Web domain names “AltriaCannabis.com” and “AltriaMarijuana.com.”
According to that “recently bought” link in Domain Name Wire, which claims to be the news source for the internet domain name industry, Altria fought to reclaim those domain names from an unknown registrant in Washington DC back in 2009. Altria filed an arbitration proceeding to get the names from the person who was using them to paint the picture of a commercial marijuana industry that would act just as the tobacco industry acts. Here is a snapshot of the page from January 2010:
Thank you for visiting our site to fight the legalization of Marijuana.
Our goal is to inform you about the new cases like the California Proposition 215 (1996) and California Senate Bill 420 (2003). These cases have made legal marijuana/cannabis for so called “medical use,” decriminalizing this dangerous narcotic and allowing less than upstanding members of society to become state sanctioned drug dealers, who profit from the misery of others.
Other states have since followed suit, and a virtual domino effect has thus transpired. As such, nearly 30% of our states have decriminalized marijuana/cannabis in one way or another. Now a new and greater threat is on the horizon as California Assembly Bill 390 proposed to completely legalize the sale and use of marijuana/ cannabis. We fear that this will likely cause a similar, although far more massive, domino effect, as was the case with decriminalization. Furthermore, even righteous states that oppose the legalization of drugs and continue to fight the good fight stand to be severely impacted by the passing of California’s Assembly Bill 390, as drug dealers will have unlimited access to marijuana/cannabis by simply traveling to California and other states that follow suit and decide legalize marijuana/cannabis.
Greater than the sum of all these fears is the premonition that, when made legal, “big business,” especially those “big businesses” that profit from poisoning our society and the destroying our youth with tobacco and alcohol, will engage in and ultimately control this “multi-billion dollar” industry, furthering the decline and destruction of America at a unfathomable rate. Thus it is the mission of this website to fight the legalization and usage of marijuana/cannabis and all other intoxicating, addicting, and illicit substances.
Both web sites now return only a blank page.
If memory serves correctly, between 2009-2011, Kevin Sabet was living and working in Washington DC as an adviser to Gil Kerlikowske, the Drug Czar. Is it possible that Sabet built the AltriaMarijuana and AltriaCannabis sites? Given the primitive HTML, it wasn’t built by a real web designer. Is it possible that Altria merely fought to keep its brand name from being sullied by association with marijuana legalization? Given the lack of any new sites at those domains, it doesn’t look like Alria wants anything to do with marijuana.
Source: National Cannabis Coalition – make a donation
