By Tom Angell

 

Prohibitionists just revealed that a retired professor is bankrolling their efforts to defeat marijuana legalization ballot measures this year to the tune of more than $1.3 million.

SAM Action, the advocacy arm of the nonprofit Smart Approaches to Marijuana, said in campaign finance documents filed Friday in both California and Massachusetts that Julie Schauer, a former art teacher at Northern Virginia Community College, has given the group at least $1,389,000 this year.

A Marijuana.com investigation reveals that Schauer has a history of making alarmist claims about marijuana.

Among the more provocative things she’s posted on the Internet over the years are suggestions that cannabis use causes violence:

Whatever alcohol and tobacco can do, marijuana was the drug of choice of the Tsarnaev brothers, the recent Santa Barbara shooter (note his video, “Smoke Pot Everyday,” James Holmes, Jared Loughner.

To be clear, a major donor to the U.S.’s leading anti-legalization organization believes that the Boston Marathon bombing, the Aurora movie theater shooting and the attack on former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, among other atrocities, can be at least partially blamed on marijuana.

She also believes that the legalization movement is a “cult”:

Unlike the POT LOBBY, the alcohol lobby is not funded by a cult. The pot people are a religious cult, who worship their weed as if it is a “god” They sound 100% convinced that marijuana is the ONE AND ONLY GOD. A few alcoholics may talk that way but nothing like the POT COMMUNITY! If they only realized how ridiculous and funny they sound to attribute so many magic powers to this weed!

Schauer has repeatedly taken to online discussion forums to espouse her belief that alcohol and tobacco are safer than marijuana:

Cigarettes don’t cause psychological damage, marijuana does and it also causes more heart damage and more lung damage than cigarettes. Many people have personally admitted to me that they have become psychotic from marijuana.

And:

Traditional cigarettes have health risks, but marijuana has health risks plus the risk of psychological problems and later anxiety/mood disorders. Although some drinkers who quit to have lingering depression or anxiety, I haven’t observed that in those who quit smoking plain old tobacco. (I am not advocating for tobacco, but believe it’s less risky than marijuana. It also seems that a lot of people only have a glass of wine or beer to compliment their food, rather than to get high.

In an extended Twitter discussion with a Marijuana.com reporter over the weekend, Schauer not only repeated claims that marijuana causes violence, but seemed to deny the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of marijuana arrests in the U.S. every year.