Anything NORML about Arizona Marijuana Laws?

Picture of Mikel Weisser speaking at an event

Arizona can no longer ask Mikel Weisser that question, representing a tremendous loss for the state. Weisser died of a heart attack May 13 at age 61. Statewide Director, Arizona NORML, Weisser introduced his topic, Cannabis Legalization & Decriminalization in the State of Arizona, with humor and facts last December 8 at the Tucson Plant …

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Diamond Does the Desert (reprise)

Caricature of Don Diamond as a King of Diamonds

[Ed. note: First published in our pages in 2012, we are reprinting this piece in the interests of giving a more rounded assessment of Don Diamond’s legacy than that offered by the Tucson Weekly and Inside Tucson Business, who ran identical articles about him, titled respectively “Requiem for a Heavyweight” and “Mourners laud Don Diamond’s …

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Ed Morgan: Attorney for the Victims of the System

Picture of Ed Morgan

Soon after I first arrived in Tucson in September 1960 as an idealistic undergraduate Government student at the University of Arizona, I learned that there was only one lawyer in town who would take on the cases of the victims of the system in southern Arizona, against all odds of success, W. Edward Morgan. In …

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Katherine Smith: Remembering a Resister

Detail of photograph of Katherine Smith in front of her hogan

I made my first visit to Big Mountain in the early ‘80s. I came alone as a journalist, my personal struggle, to a world I could not have invented. Big Mountain is an area north of the Northern Arizona Hopi village, Hotevilla. Dirt roads maybe still are the only roads. I was directed to Katherine …

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Clyde Robert Appleton, a Life of Music and Struggle for Peace and Justice

Clyde Robert Appleton, an icon in Tucson’s progressive and folk singing communities, died of a stroke on October 1, 2015, a few weeks short of his 87th birthday, following a long period of declining health. A Community Sing in his honor, in the tradition of the Tucson Folksingers, a group he founded in 1955 and …

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