Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Thu, 04 Jun 2015
Source: Honolulu Star-Advertiser (HI)
Copyright: 2015 Star Advertiser
Contact:
http://www.staradvertiser.com/info/Star-Advertiser_Letter_to_the_Editor.html
Website: http://www.staradvertiser.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/5154
Author: Kathryn Mykleseth

THE HOUSE THAT HEMP BUILT

Former NBA Coach Don Nelson Touts the Benefits of Building With the Plant

KIHEI, MAUI - Building one of the first homes in Hawaii made of hemp
has left Hall of Fame NBA coach Don Nelson open to some friendly
ribbing from his Maui neighbors. “Most of them think they can smoke
it,” Nelson said. While industrial hemp used in the construction of
homes comes from the same cannabis sativa plant species as marijuana,
it contains only a small amount of tetrahydrocannabinol - the
psychoactive chemical that creates the marijuana high.

“You’d have to smoke a telephone pole worth to get a little buzz on,”
said Don’s wife, Joy Nelson.

The walls of the Nelsons’ 700-square-foot guest house are being
filled with a material - made out of the chips and fibers of hemp
stalk mixed with water and lime - called “hempcrete.”

Once the smaller house is finished later this month , the next
project for the Nelsons is to construct the main house on their Sugar
Beach oceanfront property - a 6,000 square-foot home - with hempcrete.

Don Nelson, 75, said he wanted to use hempcrete because of its low
environmental impact, noting the sustainability of the hemp plant,
which can be grown in Hawaii.

“I always felt that hemp was the building material of the future.
It’s a wonderful plant. Some day there will be a lot of hemp homes,”
Nelson said.

The building material is nontoxic and has other advantages for
construction, including being resistant to insects, mildew and fire.

“We’re not killing any trees, which makes us feel good,” said Nelson,
the winningest coach in NBA history. Nelson ended his NBA career in
2010 with the Golden State Warriors, the team heading into the NBA
Finals Thursday against the Cleveland Cavaliers.

George Rixey, architect and builder of the Nelson homes, said the
cost for the 700-square-foot hemp house was approximately 15 percent
more than a home made of traditional materials, primarily because the
material had to be shipped from Canada and Europe.

Rixey said if hemp could be grown in Hawaii, it would cut the cost.

“It would have a completely 100 percent sustainable building product
here in the islands,” Rixey said. “Someday if someone wanted to tear
this house down, they could throw it in a dump and it would decompose
and would be fine. They could also take it, throw it back into a
bucket and remix it and put it back up again.”

The chips of the hempcrete were visible on the walls when Rixey and
the Nelsons walked around the small house before the final touches.
The home was built with conventional wood studs and the hempcrete was
used as a filler for the walls. Stucco will be applied to the outside
of the home and plaster on the inside of the home before it is complete.

The hempcrete adds insulation to the home, keeping it cool inside on
warm days and warm on cooler days.

“Looking for sustainability is really difficult in the building
industry,” Rixey said. “Along comes this hempcrete which is (in)
every category you can imagine for sustainability in building.”

State Rep. Cynthia Thielen (R, Kailua-Kaneohe) has been pushing for
the use of industrial hemp in Hawaii for the past 19 years.

“My vision is on each island we grow the hemp and one use would be
hempcrete. You have a ready material right there to build the walls
of your home,” said Thielen.

Hawaii currently has one site on Oahu reserved for growing and
testing hemp at the University of Hawaii’s Waimanalo Research Station.

Lawmakers introduced a measure, House Bill 508, last session that
would allow the growing of industrial hemp under certain specified
conditions. The bill proposed a grant program to help with
registration of industrial hemp growers and seed testing. It would
have provided a way to license farmers to grow hemp. Lawmakers
deferred the bill in conference committee.

Thielen, 81, blamed the defeat of the bill on a handful of lawmakers
who still confuse hemp with marijuana.

“Because there are a few people in the Legislature that are afraid of
a crop that won’t get anyone high,” Thielen said, “we’re restricted
to one single research plot.”

Denise Key, director of Industrial Hemp Hawaii and chairwoman of the
hemp subcommittee of Hawai’i Farmers Union United, said that more
test sites are necessary to successfully research and build a hemp
industry in Hawaii.

“We need to find the right seed for Hawaii,” Key said. “The farmers
want to grow it. There was support all around.”

Joy Nelson said Key introduced her to using hemp as a construction
material. After hearing about all of the benefits, Nelson said she
decided to use hempcrete for the guest home on the family property.

Joy Nelson’s daughter, Lee McBride, said she was excited to be moving
into the guest house, especially after learning how hempcrete
insulates, making it easier to keep spaces cool.

“I have allergies, it is supposed to help with allergies and it is
supposed to be more cost-efficient with heating and cooling,” McBride said.
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xxx
Newshawk: Herb Couch
Pubdate: Wed, 03 Jun 2015
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/55FOlSik
Copyright: 2015 Postmedia Network Inc.
Contact: sunletters@vancouversun.com
Website: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477

Author: The Canadian Press Page: A4

CKNW WARNED ABOUT POT SHOP PROMOTION

Health Canada has asked a Vancouver radio station not to promote
marijuana, saying a CKNW radio host made “promotional
representations” about a marijuana dispensary.

In a letter, the department reminds the popular station that
advertising marijuana is illegal and that it could be punished with
fines by law.

“Health Canada is asking that CKNW AM not engage in the advertising
of marijuana or encourage Canadians to participate in illegal
activities,” says the letter dated June 1.

The letter says a host known as DJ Drex directed people to visit a
Vancouver marijuana dispensary during a segment on May 12.

The warning comes about a month after the federal health minister
rebuked the City of Vancouver for its new plans to regulate medicinal
pot shops, which have grown from six to more than 80 in the past two years.

Minister Rona Ambrose followed up her own letter to the mayor by
telling reporters the situation is a public health issue. She
wouldn’t say what the government would do if Vancouver proceeds with
the regulations.

The CKNW host at the centre of the letter from Health Canada is
Justin Wilcomes.

No one at the station immediately replied to requests for comment.

Health Canada notes in its letter the dispensary itself is illegal
and that advertising marijuana for any purposes runs contrary to the
federal Food and Drugs Act and Narcotics Control regulations.

It adds that by advertising the dispensary, CKNW is “encouraging its
listeners to engage in conduct that could expose them to criminal liability.”

Both the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission
and the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council are copied on the letter.

Another Vancouver media outlet, The Georgia Straight, has been
running print advertisements for medical marijuana dispensaries in
its weekly publication.

The current issue features several ads, including one with a photo of
marijuana spilling from a plastic medicine bottle and the banner “Medical May!”

The weekly could not be reached immediately for comment.

CP with files from Tamsyn Burgman
__________________________________________________________________________
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xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Thu, 04 Jun 2015
Source: Arizona Republic (Phoenix, AZ)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/Sqs9LTGx
Copyright: 2015 Associated Press
Contact: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/sendaletter.html
Website: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/24
Author: Bob Christie, Associated Press

STATE HIGH COURT LIMITS WARRANTLESS SEARCHES

The Arizona Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that police can’t search a
home without a warrant to address a possible safety issue unless
there’s a true emergency that could affect the public.

The high court refused to overturn a lower court opinion that
rejected an effort by prosecutors to expand the exemptions police can
use to avoid having to obtain a search warrant from a judge.

The decision stems from a 2011 case in which police were called to a
home in the Navajo County community of Taylor by neighbors who said a
man was acting strangely. The home’s resident, Bradley Harold Wilson,
told paramedics who accompanied police to his house that he had a jar
of mercury in the house that could poison others.

Wilson was taken to a hospital, but officials later went inside
without a warrant looking for the mercury. The officer spotted
marijuana plants and Wilson was charged with growing marijuana.

Wilson’s lawyers tried to have the evidence thrown out at trial
because police didn’t have a warrant, but a Navajo County Superior
Court judge convicted Wilson after a bench trial and put him on
probation for two years.

The Arizona Court of Appeals threw out the conviction, saying the
evidence of growing should have been excluded.
__________________________________________________________________________
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xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Thu, 04 Jun 2015
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2015 The Washington Post Company
Contact: letters@washpost.com
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Stan Namovicz
Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v15/n295/a05.html

THIS PROHIBITION WON’T WORK EITHER

In her May 31 Sunday Opinion commentary, “Caught in the drug trade,”
Danielle Allen proposed decriminalizing marijuana and other illegal
drugs as a matter of justice because drug prohibition laws are
administered inequitably. This reminds me of T.S. Eliot’s line, “The
last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the
wrong reason.”

Even if drug prohibition were administered equitably, it would still
be a costly folly, as we should have learned many years ago with
alcohol prohibition. Alcohol and tobacco are as addictive and harmful
as any of the prohibited drugs. An enlightened policy would legalize,
regulate, tax and educate. Prohibition serves only to establish a
criminal enterprise that breeds violence and tends to corrupt law enforcement.

We spend some $50 billion a year to maintain this futile policy. If
we would do the right thing, we would eliminate a great deal of
corruption and violence while tapping a significant source of revenue.

Stan Namovicz, Takoma Park
__________________________________________________________________________
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xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Thu, 04 Jun 2015
Source: Baltimore Sun (MD)
Copyright: 2015 The Baltimore Sun Company
Contact: talkback@baltimoresun.com
Website: http://www.baltimoresun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/37
Author: Kevin Rector

MAN IN PRISON FOR 5.9 GRAMS OF POT WINS APPEAL

Decision Invalidating Plea May Save Him From Serving a 20-Year Prison Term

A 31-year-old man who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in
Baltimore after he pleaded guilty to possessing 5.9 grams of
marijuana won an appeal Wednesday invalidating the plea - raising the
possibility that he will be released.

Ronald Hammond took the plea in the 2012 case after Baltimore
District Judge Askew Gatewood told prosecutors that “5.9 grams won’t
roll you a decent joint” and suggested Hammond accept the plea and pay a fine.

Soon after pleading, Hammond was called back to court and informed
that his plea violated the terms of his probation for a prior
conviction for distribution of crack cocaine.

Circuit Judge Lynn Stewart-Mays had given Hammond a suspended
sentence of 20 years in that case, and warned that he would face the
whole term if he violated the probation. She made good on that warning in 2013.

Hammond now has an expected release date of 2028. But his victory
before Chief Judge Alfred J. Nance on Wednesday could get him out a
lot sooner, his attorney said.

Nance vacated Hammond’s pot plea based on the argument that Hammond
had not been properly informed of his right to counsel when Gatewood
suggested he take the deal, attorney Gabriela Hopkins said.

“I do think that Judge Nance was sensitive to the overall fairness
issue, as well,” she said.

With that decision, Hopkins said, the state has two options.

In one scenario, prosecutors could try to charge Hammond anew. But
that might be difficult, because possession of 5.9 grams of pot is no
longer a criminal offense in Maryland, but a violation that can be
settled with a civil citation.

“It’s possible that the state could still bring the case,” she said.
“The counterargument then is, they’re prosecuting him today on
something that is no longer a crime.”

In the second scenario, Hopkins said, prosecutors could simply drop the case.

If that happens, Hopkins said, she will immediately file a motion
before StewartMays to revisit the probation violation. With no
conviction, Hopkins said, there was no violation.

Assistant State’s Attorney Michael Brown did not suggest which path
he would take in court Wednesday, Hopkins said. Reached by phone, he
referred questions to the state’s attorney’s office. That office did
not respond to a request for comment.

Hopkins said Hammond is eager to get home and start supporting his
two young children again, as he was doing when he violated his probation.

Early on Wednesday, Hopkins said, Hammond looked at her nervously.

“One of the things he said to me right before the hearing was, ‘If we
lose, it’s not over, right?’ “ Hopkins said.

“I told him, ‘We’re going to keep fighting this no matter what. We’re
not going to give up on you.’ “
__________________________________________________________________________
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xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Thu, 04 Jun 2015
Source: Boston Globe (MA)
Copyright: 2015 Globe Newspaper Company
Contact: http://services.bostonglobe.com/news/opeds/letter.aspx?id=6340
Website: http://bostonglobe.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/52
Author: Yvonne Abraham

MAYOR WALSH ON THE WRONG SIDE OF MARIJUANA DEBATE

As if Mayor Marty Walsh wasn’t already busy enough boosting the
Olympics. Now he says he’d be willing to spend more precious time and
political capital leading a fight against legalizing marijuana, too.

Let’s leave aside, for now, concerns over how thinly that would
spread a mayor who already has plenty demanding his focus. Purely
from a policy perspective, it’s the wrong fight to take on.

There are, by some estimates, at least half a million marijuana users
in Massachusetts. Keeping pot illegal hasn’t done anything to stanch
demand. It’s easy to get, and it’s everywhere; ask any high school or
college student.

Users support an industry worth millions upon millions each year in
this state, said Matt Simon, New England political director of the
DC-based Marijuana Policy Project. In the illicit market, sales are
neither taxed nor regulated. Dealers, some connected to violent
worlds, don’t card customers. We can’t stop people from smoking pot,
but we can diminish and maybe crush the role of gangs and cartels by
bringing the trade out of the shadows.

The laws we have now are not only ineffective, they’re oh so unevenly
applied, with black users targeted way more heavily than white ones -
even though the two groups use at the same rate. An ACLU study found
that in 2010 - the year after possession of an ounce or less was
decriminalized here - black people were four times more likely than
white people to be arrested for marijuana possession in
Massachusetts. In Barnstable County, the imbalance was more shocking,
with black users 11 times more likely than white users to be arrested.

Inequities like that should stop the mayor of a city that is 25
percent black in his tracks.

To be fair, Walsh didn’t go looking for this. He was asked whether
he’d lead opposition to a 2016 ballot question to legalize pot, and
said he’d “step up if nobody else did.” And his position is
heartfelt. He’s a recovering alcoholic, and his opposition to legal
pot is based on a fervent belief that it is a gateway drug.

“I have known plenty of situations, plenty of families and
individuals out there that will say they began drug use while smoking
marijuana, which led to other drugs,” Walsh said yesterday.
Legalization “will open up a whole potential new world of addicts.”

Here’s the problem with the mayor’s position: The
marijuana-as-gateway thing is based on shaky science. There is a
correlation between using marijuana and using harder drugs (a person
interested in getting high might be more likely to try other
mood-altering substances), and that is worth our attention. But
that’s not the same as saying marijuana causes somebody to use harder drugs.

“Just because marijuana smokers might be more likely to later use,
say, cocaine, does not imply that using marijuana causes one to use
cocaine,” says FactCheck.org, which took New Jersey Governor Chris
Christie to task for making the gateway argument in April. Some
research - inconclusive so far - has found paths whereby marijuana
primes the brain for other drug abuse, but similar results were found
for tobacco and alcohol.

So if marijuana is a gateway drug, then tobacco and alcohol are, too.
It makes little sense for a society in which tobacco is legal, and
alcohol cheered, to make marijuana - no more intrinsically harmful
than they are - illegal.

Walsh is resolutely unmoved by those arguments. “I’m not a
scientist,” he said, and he doesn’t want to argue about studies. He
said he knows what he knows, and that any addiction counselor will back him up.

Look, even without the dubious gateway claims, marijuana can be
dangerous. I worry especially about its effects on adolescents. But
we have a better chance of addressing its dangers if we bring pot out
into the open. The money we waste enforcing marijuana laws could go
into the kind of education efforts that have so effectively cut tobacco use.

This is a losing battle for Walsh, and not just because he hasn’t got
time for it. Legalization is not just inevitable. It’s right.
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xxxNewshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Thu, 04 Jun 2015
Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/7JHnSETk
Copyright: 2015 Associated Press
Contact: letters@utsandiego.com
Website: http://www.utsandiego.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/386
Note: Seldom prints LTEs from outside it’s circulation area.

U.S. HOUSE BACKS STATE MEDICAL MARIJUANA LAWS

WASHINGTON (AP) - The GOP-controlled House voted Wednesday to prevent
the federal government from blocking state laws that permit the use
of medical marijuana.

But lawmakers narrowly declined to direct the Justice Department not
to interfere with states such as Colorado and Washington that permit
the recreational use of marijuana.

The 242-186 vote on medical pot was a larger margin than a tally last
year, when the House first approved it as part of a bill funding the
Justice Department. Wednesday’s vote was to renew the pro-pot
language as part of a bill providing funding for the coming fiscal year.

Most Republicans opposed the idea and the Senate is in GOP hands this
year, so the outcome could still be reversed.

But Senate advocates of medical marijuana won a test vote in the
GOP-controlled Appropriations Committee last month.
__________________________________________________________________________
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xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Thu, 04 Jun 2015
Source: Ukiah Daily Journal, The (CA)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/7aiyju9W
Copyright: 2015 The Ukiah Daily Journal
Contact: http://www.ukiahdailyjournal.com/feedback
Website: http://www.ukiahdailyjournal.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/581
Author: Carole Brodsky

TRIBE, SHERIFF DISAGREE ON MARIJUANA PROJECT

“There are ninety nine things we agree on, and just one thing we
disagree about.”

So states Mike Canales, President of the Business Board of the
Pinoleville Pomo Nation, referring to a meeting he had today with
Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman regarding the number of marijuana
plants the tribe can legally place on their sovereign lands.

Heads have been turning and phones have been ringing all weekend, as
casual passers-by, cannabis farmers and concerned citizens attempted
to discern what they were seeing on a two-acre parcel visible from US
101, just north of Ukiah.

Those in the know identified the pallets of soil, the circular fabric
“pots” and the irrigation lines as a burgeoning cannabis growing
operation. But what was to be a 200-plant project situated on tribal
lands has now been curtailed to two contiguous “grows” situated on
adjacent parcels-one consisting of 25 plants and one strategically
containing 26 plants.

Why 26 plants? “Because the Sheriff told me this afternoon that if we
grow one plant over the 25-plant-per-parcel limit, he would eradicate
that plant,” says Canales. And that, he continues, would initiate a
chain of events that Canales states would violate rights of tribal
sovereignty, something that Canales is ready to test in federal court.

Tribal members, under the tutelage of local, professional cannabis
farmers have been working around the clock preparing the site for the
delivery of the already-growing marijuana plants, which, following
the completion of their life cycle, will be turned into bio-medicinal
capsules and sublingual medicines (generally tinctures), designed to
treat specific medical conditions known to be responsive to cannabis therapies.

But in order to make medicine from marijuana, the tribe requires
enough plants to create it. Canales feels the Sheriff is misguided in
his concerns over the tribal cannabis operation. “We had a good
meeting today. A cordial meeting-one of many over the past year or
so. But the Sheriff feels he still has jurisdiction over this area.
Our three attorneys do not agree,” Canales continues.

The Sheriff is exercising his authority to limit the number of plants
on the reservation based upon the county’s 9.31 marijuana growing
ordinance, which states that a maximum of 25 plants can be grown per
parcel. Canales states that as a sovereign nation, the tribe is not
subject to the conditions of the ordinance, and they are ready to
take the difference of opinion to court.

“When we plant that 26th plant, we have been told by the Sheriff that
he will eradicate. At that point, we will file an injunction. I
encouraged the Sheriff to come on the land. There won’t be any
impediments to access. We feel that politically, the Sheriff doesn’t
understand the 1988 decree, which gives our tribe jurisdiction of our
lands. We believe we’re right, and they believe they’re right. We’re
ready to go to Federal Court in San Francisco to talk about
jurisdiction,” says Canales.

Canales feels the impasse would be better resolved
government-to-government. “We would like to go forward by working
with the county’s ad-hoc cannabis committee and the Board of
Supervisors from here on. We’re talking about conversations and
agreements from one sovereign state to another sovereign state.”

The garden site, clearly visible from Highway 101, is fed with well
water located on tribal lands, powered by a solar pump. By planting
the 26th plant at the site, the tribe is, in essence, calling the
Sheriff’s bluff. “This tosses the ball to county government. Are they
going to be happy with the legal bill they are going to receive when,
and not if, we win our case?” Canales smiles. A detailed, 47-page
Tribal Medical Marijuana Ordinance has been provided to the Sheriff
and County Counsel. Examples of other ordinances crafted between
county governments and tribes have also been provided to the Sheriff.
“From the memo we received from the District Attorney, which is
public record, we were under the impression that 200 plants, if they
were covered and protected from view, would be permissible and that
the District Attorney would not be interested in pursuing gardens
that met the other important compliance guidelines, which we do. The
Sheriff stated today that if you can see the plants from the street,
according to the 9.31 regulations, you can’t grow there. We are
putting fencing and protective visual barriers around the plants so
they can’t be seen. Everyone will still know what we’re doing, but we
are happy to comply with this request. But we planned our garden
accordingly for 200 plants. Now, our hand has been forced.”

The tribe has jurisdiction of their entire 99-acre Rancheria and an
additional 30 acres held in trust. Now, with the growing season
rapidly under way, the tribe is scrambling to find appropriate
locations for the remaining 150 marijuana plants, which will now be
planted on portions of their trust lands. “We will be planting on
some of that land. It will be fenced and protected. I’ve told County
Counsel that although we have the right to plant on parcels on Lovers
Lane, we’re not doing that. We’ve told the neighbors that we’re not
doing that,” he continues.

“Some tribes are growing over ten times what we intend to grow. Yet
they have forged agreements and ordinances between themselves and
their local governments. This is a great deal of hassle and money for
the county to spend to mitigate one plant-we’re not growing 2,000
plants, or a 40-acre parcel packed with cannabis plants,” Canales continues.

Two organizations, the United Cannabis Corporation and the Foxbarry
Companies are providing the expertise and the structure for what
Canales believes is the first project of its kind in the nation- a
tribal-run, medical-only cannabis operation.

“The United Cannabis Corporation is a publicly traded medical
marijuana company that produces no recreational products whatsoever.
They develop numerous cannabis therapies for patients that have
various ailments. This project is all about the medicinal properties
of cannabis.”

For the tribe, the project is about improving the quality of life for
members. “It’s about providing economic opportunities for this tribe
so we can do the things that any government wants to do-provide
affordable housing, quality education and job security for its
people,” says Canales. He stresses, emphatically, that no
recreational marijuana will be produced, sold or distributed. “All of
these products are going to be turned into medicine. No bud is going
onto the Mendocino black market-here or anywhere else,” he continues.
“No tribal member is allowed to grow cannabis at their place of
residence. Our ordinance stipulates that the project is structured as
a not-for-profit collective. We can hire consultants, purchase
materials and the like, but no tribal member will receive direct
profits from the project,” he continues. Canales says that in the
past week, the project has spent over $300,000 locally on soil,
staffing, irrigation equipment and all the other necessities to
establish a garden of this size.

If the suit goes forward and the tribe wins, Canales expects that not
all the fallout will be positive. “Unlike our tribe, some will react
to the fear mongering by growing as many plants as they want, without
consulting or working with their local governments or their
neighbors. There are other tribes that are growing cannabis, and
they’re all going to join this lawsuit. I believe that this action
puts everyone who is growing cannabis at risk today. I’d be really
concerned if I were growing 25 plants right now and had a couple
extras on hand in case some of the plants end up being males.”

“There are very disreputable people growing thousands and thousands
of plants all over this county, and they’re picking on Pinoleville? A
poor tribe with 200 plants? If I were the county, I’d be spending my
meager resources looking for people polluting watersheds and growing
2,000 plants. Our tribe is going forward to exercise our sovereign
rights on our trust lands. We do not intend to be singled out,”
Canales concludes.
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xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Thu, 04 Jun 2015
Source: Press Democrat, The (Santa Rosa, CA)
Copyright: 2015 The Press Democrat
Contact: letters@pressdemocrat.com
Website: http://www.pressdemocrat.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/348
Author: Glenda Anderson

CONSTRUCTION APPEARS TO START ON POT FARM NORTH OF UKIAH

Construction apparently is underway for a medical marijuana farm on
tribal land just north of Ukiah.

Rows of huge bag-like containers typically used to cultivate pot
plants above ground, pallets of potting soil, large water storage
tanks and solar panels have cropped up on the northeast corner of the
Pinoleville Pomo Nation’s rancheria, adjacent to Highway 101.

The area - bordered by the highway, a vineyard and rancheria housing
? has been leveled by earth-moving machines and partially surrounded by a chain link fence. But there’s no sign yet of the greenhouse that was originally proposed.

Representatives of the 250-member Pinoleville tribe and its Kansas-based partners this week declined to comment on the work now underway but said they plan to release information about their pot-production plans within a week.
“At this time, I don’t have any comment,” said Barry Brautman, president of FoxBarry Farms, the financial backer for what originally was to be a 2.5-acre medical cannabis cultivation operation on the 99-acre rancheria. FoxBarry also invests in and manages tribal casinos.
As originally planned, FoxBarry would build a $10 million greenhouse operation where it would produce thousands of plants year round with the help of Colorado-based United Cannabis, Brautman said in a January interview.
It was expected to become the first large-scale, tribal-sanctioned cannabis-growing operation in the country. But not for long. FoxBarry also plans at least two others elsewhere in California, Brautman said in January. He would not reveal where.
The work currently underway appears to be smaller than initially planned and there are no signs yet of the planned 110,000-square-foot greenhouse.
It also comes months later than originally scheduled, possibly due to doubts raised about whether it’s legal.
Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman has said the legality of such a large-scale proposal was questionable, even though the tribe is considered a sovereign nation.
In response to interview requests about the project on Wednesday, Allman issued a written statement, revealing that he’d met with a tribal representative earlier in the day.
“Due to conflicting interpretations of state and local marijuana laws/ordinances relating to Tribal lands, no agreement was reached as to the legal operation of the marijuana cultivation,” the release states.
“It is the intent of the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office to fairly and equally enforce the law throughout Mendocino County. If a violation of state or local law is observed in Mendocino County, the appropriate law enforcement action will be taken,” he wrote, adding that he has the authority to enforce criminal laws on Indian lands.
Brautman has said he believes the tribes do have the authority to run operations like his on land held in trust by the federal government.  It will be a nonprofit and its marijuana will be distributed only to legitimate dispensaries, he said. Allman said the tribe also plans to build a dispensary on the rancheria.
In a memorandum produced at the request of tribes seeking clarification on the marijuana issue, the U.S. Department of Justice has essentially said it’s up to tribes, as sovereign nations, to decide whether marijuana is legal or not on their lands.
But the memorandum also states there’s nothing preventing U.S.  authorities from enforcing federal law in “Indian Country.”
In recent years, federal agencies have cracked down on large-scale pot production operations in the Bay Area and elsewhere. The agency has not taken a public stand on the Pinoleville tribe’s plans.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Thu, 04 Jun 2015
Source: Westword (Denver, CO)
Column: Ask A Stoner
Copyright: 2015 Village Voice Media
Contact: http://www.westword.com/feedback/EmailAnEmployee?department=letters
Website: http://www.westword.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1616
Author: Herbert Fuego

ARE CHILDPROOF BAGS ALWAYS NEEDED AT DISPENSARIES?
Dear Stoner: Some of the dispensaries I go to make me use a locked bag so it’s “childproof” when I leave, but others just let me walk out with a paper bag full of pot. What gives?
Kenny
Dear Kenny: Ever notice a pattern in the packaging your buds come in when you don’t need the childproof bag? The pharmaceutical pop-top and push-down bottles many dispensaries use for packaging herb and infused products are already considered childproof, so there’s no $4 bag necessary, but some dispensaries sell products in resealable plastic bags and jars. A curious toddler (or an octopus) can open resealable bags and jars with relative ease, so to comply with state laws, you must leave the dispensary with your purchase locked and keep it that way around children - as a responsible pothead should.  Unfortunately, it’s hard to know which shops carry what until you’re pulling out your money, so next time you’re about to restock, call ahead and ask what your dispensary uses. And if you’ve already spent $20 on bags that are now lying useless around the house, like I have, move a few to the trunk of your car so you’ll always be prepared.
And on a related note, make sure you have cash at the ready for any dispensary visit.
Most shops are still cash-only, and paying extra ATM fees or driving
around around in search of your bank’s nearest branch are two more
avoidable money-wasters
Dear Stoner: I read your article about edibles a few days ago and am trying to reach Julie’s Natural Edibles, but I can’t find her on your website. I can’t find her phone number or place of residence, either.  How can I get in touch?
Mike
Dear Mike: Most marijuana cultivators and product manufacturers prefer to keep their business addresses and other contact information hidden as best they can. Yes, pot is legal here, but thousands of dollars’ worth of products that are incredibly alluring to thieves and the black market are kept in such grow and manufacturing facilities, and because the Colorado marijuana industry is still predominantly cash-only, there’s even more at stake for their owners.  As a result, some cannabis businesses like Julie’s request that we don’t list their addresses - and we respect their wishes.
However, as is the case with most legitimate endeavors these days, you can find more information on the company’s website ( juliesnaturaledibles.Com) and Facebook page.
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sun, 07 Jun 2015
Source: Sacramento Bee (CA)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/3xNiPyN3
Copyright: 2015 The Sacramento Bee
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/0n4cG7L1
Website: http://www.sacbee.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/376
Author: Hudson Sangree

HASH-OIL BURNS ARE EXPLODING DANGER
On her cellphone, Tracey Clark keeps snapshots of her two sons dressed as groomsmen at a family friend’s wedding last fall. The younger boy, 13, smiles under a mop of curly brown hair. His older brother, 15, is clean cut and handsome.
Flipping ahead in her phone’s photo gallery, Clark shares pictures of her boys taken two months later, when they’re almost unrecognizable.  In November, the teens landed in intensive care at Shriners Hospitals for Children in Sacramento, enveloped in gauze, breathing tubes in their throats, their faces raw and red from the massive third-degree burns suffered in a fire, which prosecutors say was caused by an illegal hash-oil lab at their uncle’s duplex in Butte County.
The two, who investigators believe innocently walked into their uncle’s workspace just before it exploded in flames, suffered burns over 40 to 60 percent of their bodies.
“I was scared they were going to die,” said Clark, a phlebotomist with the American Red Cross who lives in Pittsburg. “I thought, ‘This isn’t real. This isn’t happening.’”
Similar scenes have played out throughout California in recent years as intense fires from the illegal manufacture of butane hash oil - cheap and easy to make but extremely volatile - have exploded.
At two of Northern California’s major burn treatment centers - UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento and Shriners Hospitals for Children, Northern California - injuries from butane hash-oil explosions account for 8 to 10 percent of severe burn cases, a larger percentage than from car wrecks and house fires combined, said Dr.  David Greenhalgh, chief burn surgeon at both hospitals.
“It’s kind of an epidemic for us,” Greenhalgh said. There have been times when half of the 12 beds in UC Davis’ burn unit were filled with patients injured in hash-oil explosions, he said.
Between 2007 and 2014, 101 patients with suspected or confirmed burns from butane fires were admitted to the two hospitals, most of them in the past three years, according to Greenhalgh. Most were adults, but six of the admitted patients were under 18, some as young as 2 or 3 years old.
The case of the two teens, who were released from Shriners earlier this year after months in intensive care and multiple surgeries and skin grafts, was especially troubling because of their ages and the extent of their injuries, Greenhalgh said.
The Sacramento Bee is not naming them at the family’s request and because they are the juvenile victims of an alleged crime.
Statewide, illegal manufacturing of hash oil has become a public health menace on a par with illegal methamphetamine labs in prior decades, according to some law enforcement officials.
While federal and state statistics on butane hash-oil explosions are not readily available, there are numerous reports of arrests and fires at the local level.
In Butte County, for instance, prosecutors said 31 illegal hash-oil operations were uncovered in 2014. “We’re already on track to exceed that this year,” District Attorney Michael Ramsey said. The numbers are similar to the annual count of meth labs the county was breaking up in the 1980s and ‘90s, he said.
“What we see now is a reprise of that (but) with more unsophisticated manufacturers,” Ramsey said. “They look on the Internet, order up the supplies - and blow themselves up.”
Ramsey’s office is prosecuting the teens’ uncle, 30-year-old Brandon Qassem, on seven felony charges, including possession of marijuana for sale, child endangerment and recklessly causing a fire that resulted in great bodily injury. Badly burned in the fire, Qassem is not incarcerated pending his trial because Butte County jailers are unable to cope with his medical needs, Ramsey said.
His wife, Angela Qassem, who is charged with two felonies, including child endangerment, told investigators that she and her husband were unemployed and making butane hash oil to sell to medical marijuana dispensaries, the district attorney said.
Easy to make, hard to control
Butane hash oil, a highly concentrated form of cannabis, is illegal to manufacture but is legal to sell under California’s medical marijuana law, meaning dispensaries must get their supply from illicit operations, according to law enforcement officials. The substance is sold in different forms to smoke and also used to make cookies and candies.
Hash oil’s concentration of THC, the active substance in marijuana, can reach 85 percent compared with a marijuana bud’s typical concentration of about 25 percent, said Vic Massenkoff, an investigator with the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District and one of the state’s leading experts on butane hash-oil fires.
Hash oil, made from discarded marijuana trimmings, sells for $800 to $1,300 per pound wholesale and can have a retail street value of $22,000 per pound, he said.
The lucrative market is helping to drive hash-oil production, while the wide availability of online videos and inexpensive supplies is compounding the number of tragic fires, said law enforcement and medical professionals.
Massenkoff delivers training sessions to law enforcement groups and firefighters on the dangers of butane hash oil, also called BHO or honey oil.
The key ingredient is compressed butane, which comes in canisters about the size of a 16-ounce beer can that drugmakers can easily purchase in bulk.
On Amazon, for example, a simple query for “BHO” pulls up the essential supplies a hash-oil maker would need, including a $40 case of 12 cans of “5x Power Butane Super Refined Fuel Gas,” which Massenkoff said is a favorite brand of hash-oil makers. There was also a large glass extraction tube for $37, a book called “How to Make BHO” and nonstick silicone mats for making dabs, the small potent drops of hash oil popular with smokers.
Typically, a hash oil maker crams a tall tube with marijuana and shoots the liquid butane through it. The butane acts as a solvent to extract and concentrate the THC-containing compounds, which drip into a glass container, usually Pyrex. It’s then set on a bath of warm water or a hot plate to help vaporize the butane, leaving behind the pure hash oil.
The biggest danger comes from the vaporized butane  invisible, odorless and heavier than air  that sinks to the floor and collects in enclosed spaces.
“These folks are standing in a cloud of clear, odorless butane,” with the substance absorbing into their clothing, Massenkoff said.
While many online videos carry warnings to avoid fires by only making hash oil outdoors, most manufacturing is done indoors because it’s illegal.
Almost any ignition source, from a spark of static electricity to a water heater’s pilot light, can turn the butane into an explosive inferno.
Curbs on butane buying?
Lawmakers are looking at ways to regulate the sale of butane. A bill introduced in February by Assemblywoman Catharine Baker, R-Dublin, would prohibit any individual from buying more than 400 milliliters of butane in a month and impose reporting requirements on retailers.
Similar limits on the cold medicine pseudoephedrine, a key ingredient of methamphetamine, are credited with curbing meth production in California in recent years. The law now requires purchasers to show their driver’s license to buy a single box.
Similar restrictions are needed for butane, said Massenkoff, who has written to Amazon asking the company to stop selling butane canisters in bulk.
Doctors and emergency crews have become better at identifying the causes of hash-oil burns, Greenhalgh said. Patients are predominantly young men who tend to be burned in groups of two and three while making the oil, he said.
Those whose clothes catch on fire can suffer third-degree burns over much of their bodies, including their faces. With massive burns the body swells, shutting off the airway, and an untreated patient would typically die in a few hours, the doctor said.
The body needs huge amounts of calories to heal from major burns, but such badly injured patients have a hard time getting enough nutrition through their feeding tubes and the body begins to break down muscle and weaken further, he said.
“These are big burns,” Greenhalgh said.
Hospital stays of months are common in the worst cases, including long stints in intensive care. There’s a constant risk of infection, multiple skin grafts, months or years of painful recovery, and scarring and disfigurement. Medical bills can run into the millions of dollars, though many patients are uninsured, the doctor said.
Clark, the Contra Costa teens’ mother and a widow, is sharing her family’s story to warn people of the human cost from illicit manufacturing of butane hash oil.
The horrific burns have changed daily life for Clark and her sons.
The boys are schooled at home while they recover. Once a day, Clark changes her younger son’s dressings on his raw back. He’s had 10 skin-graft operations and still must undergo reconstructive surgery on his face. She also must massage her older son each day to loosen the tight areas where his skin is healing from five operations.
It could be a year or more before her sons will be able to resume a normal life. Although some might consider their faces burned beyond recognition, their mother said, “I can tell it’s them.”
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sun, 07 Jun 2015
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/ql6YvIDK
Copyright: 2015 Hearst Communications Inc.
Contact: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1
Website: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388
Author: Joe Garofoli

POT FARMS NEW POLITICAL FIELD TRIP
Humboldt County Growers Come Out of the Shadows for Lawmakers on
Fact-Finding Trip Over Legalization
HUMBOLDT COUNTY - Standing next to Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom on a hill overlooking southern Humboldt County, a second generation cannabis farmer pointed to the valley below. “There’s one,” he said, gesturing at a clearing in the trees. “And there. And over there. They’re all over.”
Newsom and Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, nodded as they gazed at marijuana grow operations below, taking it all in. They were in the middle of what had been billed a “Cannabis Fact Finding Tour” - a new rite of passage for California politicians grappling with questions of legalization.
It was a journey to the state’s Emerald Triangle, three northern counties that produce 60 percent of the weed consumed in the United States, and where calling the local herb “marijuana” is offensive to some for its perceived negative connotation. Here, the scientific term “cannabis” is preferred, and fear of law enforcement still runs high. Though they were the guests of honor, Newsom, Huffman and Assemblyman Jim Wood, D-Healdsburg, were escorted to this 450-plant farm without learning its address or the grower’s full name.
Yet, the fact that top officials even made the trek is a sign of how California’s 50,000-plus cannabis farmers are already becoming a political force. Growers are shaping potential 2016 ballot measures to legalize recreational use of marijuana and influencing legislation in Sacramento that would regulate the state’s 19-year-old medicinal market in unprecedented ways.
“We are at a historic moment here, and people know change is coming,” said farmer Luke Bruner, founder of California Cannabis Voice Humboldt and the business manager of Wonderland Nursery in Humboldt.  “The best cannabis on planet Earth comes from Humboldt County. But all these people are trying to write laws about us without us. We’re not going to be kept out of it.”
Growers largely stayed out of California’s last legalization fight in 2010, when voters in Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity were among the 47 counties that opposed Proposition 19. Only 11 largely urban counties supported it.
Back then, growers were suspicious of legalization, in part because they weren’t consulted in crafting the ballot measure. Now, with mainstream attitudes toward cannabis softening and recreational use legal in four states, growers see legalization as inevitable - and remaining underground a risk.
California growers want to come out of the shadows politically because they’re worried that major corporations - be it Big Tobacco or Big Pharma - will buy land in the Central Valley should legalization occur. They fear massive farms would crank out, as one farmer put it, “the Two-Buck Chuck” of cannabis - an inferior but cheaper product that could cut deeply into their business.
Newsom grasps this concern. Corporate interests would rewrite the state’s rules “and they will try to write you out,” Newsom told a crowd of 200 at a public forum in Garberville during his late May trip. “We cannot let that happen.”
The audience gave him a standing ovation.
Hezekiah Allen, a third-generation cannabis farmer, was inspired to get involved politically the night he watched the Prop. 19 results roll in five years ago.
“I remember sitting on the farm, it was the middle of harvest season, 20 trimmers working, and we were thinking, ‘Wow, what would happen if this passed?’ “ said Allen, now the executive director of the Emerald Growers Association.
Many shared Allen’s concerns, but few would speak out publicly after living off the grid for so many years. California’s medical marijuana law allows people to grow and sell cannabis to dispensaries for patients with a medical diagnosis. But federal law still considers marijuana an illegal drug on the same level as heroin, one that has “no currently accepted medical use.”
They fear transporting their product to market because the pot laws vary between neighboring jurisdictions. They are wary of approaching the local farm bureau for help. Banks don’t want to deal with them, and few even try to open accounts, fearing the feds could confiscate funds. “So everybody’s got a tree hollow or a hole or something,” Bruner said.
They are reluctant to tell people what they do. As one farmer said, “there’s a lot of people who are ‘carpenters’ up here.”
Shortly after he helped to reboot the Growers Association about six months ago, Allen surveyed thousands of farmers. One survey question asked: “Can I use your name as a farmer?” Only about 150 volunteered a name.
“In our community, it has always been that the lower the profile you keep, the more successful you’d be,” Allen said.
But that has been changing over the past several months. A few weeks ago, 150 farmers, many wearing “I am a farmer” shirts, demonstrated in Sacramento.
Allen said farmers are focusing on four legislative priorities in
Sacramento. They want:
Cannabis to be regulated through the California Department of Food and Agriculture, so it can be openly and legitimately studied by scientists, academics and researchers.
A business licensing program to ensure smaller growers can continue to compete in a legal market.
Increased environmental regulation that would benefit farmers who are not illegally tapping into water supplies.
An appellation system similar to the wine industry.
“You legally can’t market wine called Napa unless it was produced in Napa,” Allen said. “We’d like to see the same for cannabis from Humboldt.”
Allen said the good news for farmers is that most of the legislation moving through Sacramento includes these policy priorities to varying degrees.
Attitudes are changing so much that Board of Equalization member George Runner, a Republican who opposes recreational legalization, took a similar fact-finding tour in Humboldt a few weeks ago with liberal San Francisco board member Fiona Ma.
“We’ve got to figure out how to successfully regulate it for the purposes of taxation,” Runner said.
The most recent estimate is that dispensary sales range from $700 million to $1.3 billion, resulting in $59 million to $109 million in sales tax revenues annually. So little is known about the industry, the board last month launched a study of its scope with the goal of increasing tax compliance. Bruner welcomed it. “People want to do the right thing, they want to pay their taxes,” Bruner said. “They don’t know how.”
Though legalizing marijuana would be a boon for tax collectors, nobody really knows how big the industry already is.
Newsom’s eyes widened as he walked through a nursery filled with starter plants. Cannabis cultivators told him the number of plants nurtured there annually wouldn’t equal 1 percent of the 40 million plants growing in the Emerald Triangle - which is roughly the size of West Virginia.
Newsom surprised
“Every time I think I’ve wrapped my head around this issue, I realize how much there is still to learn,” said the former San Francisco mayor, who was invited on the trip because he heads a state commission exploring issues raised by legalization.
At the Garberville public forum, Newsom, who supports legalization, was greeted as a hero just for showing up.
“I’m having a Barack Obama moment,” a silver-haired man in the audience told Newsom.
“I never expected an African American president. And I never expected the lieutenant governor of the state to be up here talking about these issues.”
Want to protect rights
Many there were growers who want to see their current way of life protected, as Beth Allen put it. She’s been growing for 41 years, mostly in Humboldt, and the money she earned helped her build a restaurant and put her kids through school.
“I’m worried that things will change a lot if this isn’t written the right way,” Allen said. “So much of the community here depends on this. We’ve got to do it right.”
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
xxx
Newshawk: Kirk
Pubdate: Sun, 07 Jun 2015
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2015 The Washington Post Company
Contact: letters@washpost.com
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Brigid Schulte

POT-SMOKING PARENTS: WHAT ABOUT THE KIDS?
Many Uncertain About Navigating the ‘New Normal’
Like the parent of any toddler and kindergartner, Jared wants to keep certain things out of reach.
Liquor is stored out of sight in a cupboard. The household cleaners are safely kept behind childproof locks. And the marijuana is stashed high on a shelf in a fireproof lockbox.
Evenings fall into a familiar routine. Family dinner. Baths. Then, after their daughters are snuggled in for the night, Jared slips out onto the back deck of their District apartment and a now-legal bowl of marijuana.
“It relaxes me. And it helps me get perspective to see the big picture. I find that enjoyable,” said Jared, a rare parent in the District who was willing to talk openly about his marijuana use. He asked that his full name not be used because he is concerned about the impact on his children.
Jared said he and other potsmoking parents he knows have one ironclad rule: They don’t smoke in front of their kids. Yet what will happen once the kids figure out Dad’s on the balcony getting high?
More than half the country supports legalizing marijuana, according to polls. But it’s this question - What about the kids? - that provokes unease, even outrage, and keeps many pot-smokes using parents uncertain about how to navigate the “new normal” of legalized marijuana.
The stakes are high for both parents and kids. Even where the drug is legal, parental potsmoking can be considered as a factor in child-neglect cases, just like alcohol. As a result, some parents have been accused of endangering their children and had them taken away by child protective service agencies.
There are fears that if parents reveal their use, teens will be more likely to give it a try, a phenomenon supported by research. And although the science is fairly new, some studies have found heavy marijuana use in adolescence can permanently disrupt key networks in the developing brain associated with memory and processing information.
“For parents, this is a confusing time. If they’re users, how are they going to talk to their kids?” said Matthew Kuehlhorn, founder of Community Thrive, a new organization in Colorado that helps facilitate such talks in an effort to prevent youth substance use.  “This is a social culture change we haven’t seen the likes of since alcohol prohibition ended.”
Kathy Henderson, who leads a Parents Against Pot effort in her Trinidad neighborhood in Northeast Washington, said she has noticed that legalization has led to a higher incidence of children “walking around the street openly smoking marijuana and thinking it’s okay.”
“It’s very, very disheartening,” she said. “Our children have so many challenges to begin with, this has really set us back. It’s crazy.”
Playing it straight
Jared said he doesn’t want his daughters to use marijuana as minors, but he plans to be straight with them when they’re older.
“When they get to the age of 21, and can make a legal choice, they
need to know, honestly, ‘What’s alcohol like? What’s it going to do
to me? What are the risks? And what’s cannabis like?’ “
In Jared’s mind, cannabis - advocates’ preferred term- is the substance of lesser harm. It’s less addictive, studies have found, causes fewer health problems and, unlike alcohol, no one has ever died using it.
And he likes the idea that regulating the marijuana trade should make marijuana harder for teens to acquire.
In time, he hopes smoking a joint will be as unremarkable for parents as cracking open a beer at the end of the day. But that’s not today.
Even Jared, who made the decision to “out” himself as a pot smoker because he works for the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project, is nervous. He hastens to say that he never smokes so much he couldn’t quickly respond to an emergency with the kids.
“There’s still so much stigma,” he said. “If I worked anyplace else, I wouldn’t be talking openly.”
Finding connections
Advocates for legalizing marijuana say there are more potsmoking parents than most people think. The Pew Research Center reported that 47 percent of Americans - about 150 million people- have tried marijuana.
A group of mothers in Beverly Hills, Calif., made headlines as the “Marijuana Moms” not long ago when they came clean about using marijuana to deal with chronic pain. And the Global Drug Policy Observatory found that women between the ages of 30 and 50 were among the biggest supporters of legalization in Washington state and Colorado.
“Marijuana, of all the mindaltering substances, is probably the only one that helps you cope with being a parent,” said Adam Eidinger, a cannabis activist in the District, who said he smokes marijuana regularly for medical reasons. “It gives you patience.”
Like Jared, Eidinger keeps his stash in a safe locked away from his 11-year-old daughter, and he smokes on his condominum’s roof deck.  But he’s been pushing the District to amend the new law, which permits the drug to be used inside one’s home, in order to allow pot smoking at special roof decks, beer gardens or bars. “I don’t know how that’s any better for children - having friends come over to my house and smoking weed around my kid,” he said.
Yvonne Maguire, a stay-at-home mother of young children, was terrified that her District neighbors would find out she smoked marijuana to deal with insomnia and migraines. But since she moved to Colorado, where the recreational use of marijuana has been legal since January 2014, she and her husband have joined groups that activists have put together for parents who smoke pot.
“It’s really nice,” she said. “It’s a way for parents to feel more comfortable.”
Brittany Driver, mother of a 3-year-old and regular medical marijuana user, dispenses advice in her Pot and Parenting column for the Denver Post.
She’s also helping to promote an app, called High There, that will help pot-smoking mothers find each other.
“Even in Colorado, there’s still such a stigma for parents, it’s still hard to talk about openly,” Driver said.
Legal questions
Because of that stigma, even when it’s legal, some pot-smoking parents worry that their use will be met with the disapproval of others, who might ostracize their children.
But what keeps many parents underground, they say, is their terror of someone calling Child Protective Services. A potsmoking couple who ran a medical marijuana dispensary in Washington state, where medical and recreational marijuana use is legal, had their 5-year-old taken away and placed in CPS protective custody in November when he tested positive for THC, the psycho-active chemical in marijuana.
Andin April, CPS took away the 11-year-old son of Shona Banda, who uses marijuana to manage Crohn’s disease and is an outspoken advocate for medical marijuana in Kansas, where legalization bills failed this year. After her son spoke out about medical marijuana in school, police investigated and found marijuana, drug paraphernalia and a lab for extracting cannabis oil in the kitchen, within easy reach of children. Banda faces the possibility of child endangerment and other charges.
Mindy Good, spokeswoman for Child and Family Services in the District, said officials have been having serious conversations about what marijuana’s new legal status in the District will mean.
“Whether a substance is legal or illegal is of less concern to us than whether or not it’s affecting someone’s ability to parent,” she said. “For instance, alcohol is totally legal. But if it’s impairing the ability to protect and care for your child, that’s when we step in.”
Sara Arnold co-founded the Family Law & Cannabis Alliance, a Massachusetts-based group that monitors and advocates for pot-smoking parents’ legal rights, in part because she herself, a medical marijuana user, has been investigated by CPS three times.
“We have actually had instances of medical marijuana patients in states where medical marijuana is legal facing termination of their parental rights,” Arnold said. “If a parent had a bottle of wine, no one would be coming to check that out.”
Changing demographics
Though studies show that the majority of marijuana users tend to be lower-income and those with less than a high school education, Max Simon, with Green Flower Media, sees that changing. Green Flower is sponsoring a “Coming Out Green” campaign of reports and videos of personal stories to rehabilitate pot’s outlaw image.
“One of the fastest growing markets we’re seeing is the babyboom generation,” who smoked pot in college then quit when they got jobs and now want to use it again, he said. And most of them are parents.  The group is releasing a new report, “Be Askable,” with advice for setting family rules and a “just wait” message to help teens delay any substance use until their brains are developed.
Candace Junkin, co-founder of the International Women’s Cannabis Coalition, is a mother of four and grandmother of three who lives in St. Mary’s County, Md., where medical marijuana has been legal since 2014. ( Virginia recently passed a bill legalizing medical marijuana for epilepsy, glaucoma and cancer.) She suffers from trigeminal neuralgia, a condition that causes excruciating shooting pains in her face. Her doctors initially prescribed painkillers, but they made her so disoriented her children called her “Mombie.” In 2002, she found marijuana eased the pain and began smoking or vaporizing up to six times a day.
At first, she was so ashamed that she hid her use from her children.  “But over the years, the kids started to see that when Mommy would be hurting, she would go in her bedroom, and she would come out and she would be better,” Junkin said.
She decided to share the research she’d done on the health benefits of cannabis with them. None of her children, the youngest of whom is 17, smoke pot.
“One kid is about to go to college. Another is about to graduate. One owns her own business,” she said. “For a pothead mom, I think I’ve done okay.”
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Mon, 08 Jun 2015
Source: Ukiah Daily Journal, The (CA)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/sTqRbHV4
Column: Assignment: Ukiah
Copyright: 2015 The Ukiah Daily Journal
Contact: http://www.ukiahdailyjournal.com/feedback
Website: http://www.ukiahdailyjournal.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/581
Author: Tommy Wayne Kramer

‘WASTIN’ AWAY AGAIN IN MARIJUANAVILLE’
People think growing pot in Mendocino County is a big bowl of gluten-free cherries but I’m here to say it’s tougher than you think.
Yeah, sure: stick a start in the dirt, throw on some water that you pump out of the Eel River and the rest is easy, except for when you have to go visit some guy you’ve never seen before in a motel in Vallejo to exchange the weed for the cash and a little cocaine on the side, while your old lady waits out in the truck with a .357, and she doesn’t need any more coke, believe me.
Anyway, it’s not just that. Growing marijuana is getting more difficult every season. Take it from a veteran. Like every other local business owner knows, it’s getting hard to find good help. Used to be you could hire a school busload of trimmers for $20 an hour, and all you had to do was feed ‘em burritos and a few lines, and crank up the rasta music 18 hours a day. But those days ain’t these.  Now they want organic quinoa or else the full raw meat Paleo diet, plus $30 an hour (they don’t even pay taxes!) and electro hip-pop noise played loud. Kids these days. Next they’ll want yoga classes, foosball tables, free childcare and paid vacations. Here’s something else: It takes about six grand to put a decent camouflage paint job on a 2015 Ram Hemi engine Dodge truck. It’s a cost I gotta factor in, and it’s something people who aren’t in the grow industry never even have to think about.
There’s more, believe me. So I started thinking maybe I’d diversify my career a little and prepare for a time I didn’t want to be lugging bags of dirt up hills and fencing off gardens.
I’ve always had knack with a guitar and the ladies tell me I have a great voice. Here’s something I worked up that hopefully bridges both my worlds:
Wastin’ Away Again
in Marijuanaville
Nibblin’ granola
Doin’ coke but not cola
For a week and now I’m in a rage
I poach farmer’s water
Got my eye on his daughter
She’s close to half my own age
Wastin’ away again in Marijuanaville
Searchin’ for my lost 215 card
Some people claim my lawyer’s to blame
But why’s the DA make it so hard?
Picked up on a warrant
Charges came in a torrent
Now they want me back down in LA
But I think I’ll make bail
And I think I’ll set sail
West from the Golden Gate Bay
Wastin’ away again in Marijuanaville
Searchin’ for my lost 215 card
Some people claim it’s my parents to blame
But why’s Probation make it so hard?
I still wonder why we
Got a place in Hawaii
They got extradition laws there
Better to buy me
New passport and ID
San Quentin gives me a scare
Wastin’ away again in Marijuanaville
Searchin’ for my lost 215 card
Some people claim it’s me who’s to blame
They might believe it, but I find it hard
Got me some zip tags
And some turkey bags
Gave money to Eyster’s campaign
Hope it’s enough juice
For him to turn me loose
Have mercy on poor Tommy Wayne!
Jimmy Buffet and his lawyers will please note I demand no compensation for the obvious improvements I bring to his tired old song about getting drunk in Jamaica or Miami or wherever.
Tom Hine has lived in Ukiah so long he has nearly forgotten what life
is like on the outside. He sometimes writes under the name Tommy Wayne Kramer
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sun, 07 Jun 2015
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2015 The Washington Post Company
Contact: letters@washpost.com
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Eli Saslow
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?199 (Mandatory Minimum Sentencing)

AGAINST HIS BETTER JUDGMENT
In One American Meth Corridor, a Federal Judge Comes Face to Face
With the Reality of Congressionally Mandated Sentencing
They filtered into the courtroom and waited for the arrival of the judge, anxious to hear what he would decide. The defendant’s family knelt in the gallery to pray for a lenient sentence. A lawyer paced the entryway and rehearsed his final argument. The defendant reached into the pocket of his orange jumpsuit and pulled out a crumpled note he had written to the judge the night before: “Please, you have all the power,” it read. “Just try and be merciful.”
U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett entered and everyone stood. He sat and then they sat. “Another hard one,” he said, and the room fell silent. He was one of 670 federal district judges in the United States, appointed for life by a president and confirmed by the Senate, and he had taken an oath to “administer justice” in each case he heard. Now he read the sentencing documents at his bench and punched numbers into an oversize calculator. When he finally looked up, he raised his hands together in the air as if his wrists were handcuffed, and then he repeated the conclusion that had come to define so much about his career.
“My hands are tied on your sentence,” he said. “I’m sorry. This isn’t up to me.”
How many times had he issued judgments that were not his own? How often had he apologized to defendants who had come to apologize to him? For more than two decades as a federal judge, Bennett had often viewed his job as less about presiding than abiding by dozens of mandatory minimum established by Congress in the late 1980s for federal offenses. Those mandatory penalties, many of which require at least a decade in prison for drug offenses, took discretion away from judges and fueled an unprecedented rise in prison populations, from 24,000 federal inmates in 1980 to more than 208,000 last year. Half of those inmates are nonviolent drug offenders. Federal prisons are overcrowded by 37 percent. The Justice Department recently called mass imprisonment a “budgetary nightmare” and a “growing and historic crisis.”
Politicians as disparate as President Obama and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are pushing new legislation in Congress to weaken mandatory minimums, but neither has persuaded Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee that is responsible for holding initial votes on sentencing laws. Even as Obama has begun granting clemency to a small number of drug offenders, calling their sentences “outdated,” Grassley continues to credit strict sentencing with helping reduce violent crime by half in the past 25 years, and he has denounced the new proposals in a succession of speeches to Congress. “Mandatory minimum sentences play a vital role,” he told Congress again last month.
But back in Grassley’s home state, in Iowa’s busiest federal court, the judge who has handed down so many of those sentences has concluded something else about the legacy of his work. “Unjust and ineffective,” he wrote in one sentencing opinion. “Gutwrenching,” he wrote in another. “Prisons filled, families divided, communities devastated,” he wrote in a third.
And now it was another Tuesday in Sioux City - five hearings listed on his docket, five more nonviolent offenders whose cases involved mandatory minimums of anywhere from five to 20 years without the possibility of release. Here in the methamphetamine corridor of middle America, Bennett averaged seven times as many cases each year as a federal judge in New York City or Washington. He had sentenced two convicted murderers to death and several drug cartel bosses to life in prison, but many of his defendants were addicts who had become middling dealers, people who sometimes sounded to him less like perpetrators than victims in the case reports now piled high on his bench. “History of family addiction.” “Mild mental retardation.” “PTSD after suffering multiple rapes.” “Victim of sexual abuse.”
“Temporarily homeless.” “Heavy user since age 14.”
Bennett tried to forget the details of each case as soon as he issued a sentence. “You either drain the bathtub, or the guilt and sadness just overwhelms you,” he said once, in his chambers, but what he couldn’t forget was the total, more than 1,100 nonviolent offenders and counting to whom he had given mandatory minimum sentences he often considered unjust. That meant more than $200 million in taxpayer money he thought had been misspent. It meant a generation of rural Iowa drug addicts he had institutionalized. So he had begun traveling to dozens of prisons across the country to visit people he had sentenced, answering their legal questions and accompanying them to drug treatment classes, because if he couldn’t always fulfill his intention of justice from the bench, then at least he could offer empathy. He could look at defendants during their sentencing hearings and give them the dignity of saying exactly what he thought.
“Congress has tied my hands,” he told one defendant now.
“We are just going to be warehousing you,” he told another.
“I have to uphold the law whether I agree with it or not,” he said a few minutes later.
The courtroom emptied and then filled, emptied and then filled, until Bennett’s back stiffened and his robe twisted around his blue jeans.  He was 65 years old, with uncombed hair, a relaxed posture and a Midwestern unpretentiousness. “Let’s keep moving,” he said, and then in came his fourth case of the day, another methamphetamine addict facing his first federal drug charge, a defendant Bennett had been thinking about all week.
His name was Mark Weller. He was 28 years old. He had pleaded guilty to two counts of distributing methamphetamine in his home town of Denison, Iowa, which meant his mandatory minimum sentence as established by Congress was 10 years in prison. His maximum sentence was life without parole. For four months, he had been awaiting his hearing while locked in a cell at the Fort Dodge Correctional Facility, where there was nothing to do but watch Fox News on TV, think over his life and write letters to people who usually didn’t write back.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked myself, ‘How did I get into the situation I’m in today?’ “ he had written.
Marijuana starting at age 12. Whiskey at 14. Cocaine at 16, and methamphetamine a few months later. “Always hooked on something” was how some family members described him in the pre-sentencing report, but for a while he had managed to hold his life together. He graduated from high school, married, had a daughter and worked for six years at a pork slaughterhouse, becoming a union steward and earning $18 an hour. He bought a doublewide trailer and a Harley, and he tattooed the names of his wife and daughter onto his shoulder. But then his wife met a man on the Internet and moved with their daughter to Missouri, and Weller started drinking some mornings before work.  Soon he had lost his job, lost custody of his daughter and, in his own accounting, lost his “morals along with all self control.” He started spending as much as $200 each day on meth, selling off his Harley, his trailer and then selling meth, too. He traded meth to pay for his sister’s rent, for a used car, for gas money and then for an unregistered rifle, which was still in his car when he was pulled over with 223 grams of methamphetamine last year.
He was arrested and charged with a federal offense because he had been trafficking methamphetamine across state lines. Then he met for the first time with his public defender, considered one of the state’s best, Brad Hansen.
“How much is my bond?” Weller remembered asking that day.
“There is no bond in federal court,” Hansen told him.
“Then how many days until I get out?” Weller asked.
“We’re not just talking about days,” Hansen said, and so he began to explain the severity of a criminal charge in the federal system, in which all offenders are required to serve at least 85 percent of whatever sentence they receive. Weller didn’t yet know that a series of witnesses, hoping to escape their own mandatory minimum drug sentences, had informed the government that Weller had dealt 2.5 kilograms of methamphetamine over the course of eight months. He didn’t yet know that 2.5 kilograms was just barely enough for a mandatory minimum of 10 years, even for a first offense. He didn’t know that, after he pleaded guilty, the judge would receive a pre-sentencing report in which his case would be reduced to a series of calculations in the controversial math of federal sentencing.
“Victim impact: There is no identifiable victim.” “Criminal history:
Minimal.” “Cost of imprisonment: $2,440.97 per month.”
“Guideline sentence: 151 to 188 months.”
What Weller knew - the only thing he knew - was the version of sentencing he had seen so many times on prime-time TV. He would have a legal right to speak in court. The court would have an obligation to listen. He asked his family to send testimonials about his character to the courthouse, believing his sentence would depend not only on Congress or on a calculator but also on another person, a judge.
The night before Weller’s hearing, Bennett returned to a home overlooking Sioux City and carried the pre-sentencing report to a recliner in his living room. He already had been through it twice, but he wanted to read it again. He put on glasses, poured a glass of wine and began with the letters.
“He was doing fine with his life, it seems, until his wife met another man on-line,” Weller’s father had written.
“After she left, the life was sucked out of him,” his sister had written.
“Broken is the only word,” his brother had written. “Meth sunk its dirty little fingers into him.”
“I hope this can explain how a child was set up for a fall in his life,” his mother had written, in the last letter and the longest one of all. “Growing up, all he pretty much had was an alcoholic mother who was manic depressive and schizophrenic. When I wasn’t cutting myself, I was getting drunk and beating the hell out of him in the middle of the night. When I wasn’t doing all that I was trying to kill myself and ending up in a mental hospital. Can you imagine being a four year old and getting beat up one day and having to go visit that same person in a mental hospital the next? No heat in the house, no lights, nothing. That was his starting point.”
Bennett set down the report, stood from his chair and paced across a room decorated with photos of his own daughter, in the house that had been her starting point. There were scrapbooks made to commemorate each year of her life. There were videotapes of her high school tennis matches and photos of her recent graduation from a private college near Chicago.
He had decided to become a judge just a few months after her birth, in the early 1990s. His wife had been expecting twins, a boy and a girl, and had gone into labor several months prematurely. Their daughter had survived, but their son had died when he was eight hours old, and the capriciousness of that tragedy had left him searching for order, for a life of deliberation and fairness. He had quit private practice and devoted himself to the judges’ oath of providing justice, first as a magistrate judge and then as a Bill Clinton appointee to the federal bench, going into his chambers to work six days each week.
Since then he had sent more than 4,000 people to federal prison, and he thought most of them had deserved at least some time in jail.  There were meth addicts who promised to seek treatment but then showed up again in court as robbers or dealers. There were rapists and child pornographers that expressed little or no remorse. He had installed chains and bolts on the courtroom floor to restrain the most violent defendants. One of those had threatened to murder his family, which meant his daughter had spent her first three months of high school being shadowed by a U.S. marshal. “It is a view of humanity that can become disillusioning,” he said, and sometimes he thought that it required work to retain a sense of compassion.
Once, on the way to a family vacation, he had dropped his wife and daughter off at a shopping mall and detoured by himself to visit the prison in Marion, Ill., then the highest-security penitentiary in the country. He scheduled a tour with the warden, and at the end of the tour Bennett asked for a favor. Was there an empty cell where he could spend a few minutes alone? The warden led him to solitary confinement, where prisoners spent 23 hours each day in their cells, and he Bennett inside a unit about the size of a walk-in closet.  Bennett sat on the concrete bed, ran his hands against the walls and listened to the hum of the fluorescent light. He imagined the minutes stretching into days and the days extending into years, and by the time the warden returned with the key Bennett’s mouth was dry and his hands were clammy, and he couldn’t wait to be back at the mall.
“Hell on earth,” he said, explaining what just five minutes as a visitor in a federal penitentiary could feel like, and he tried to recall those minutes each time he delivered a sentence. He often gave violent offenders more prison time than the government recommended.  He had a reputation for harsh sentencing on white-collar crime. But much of his docket consisted of methamphetamine cases, 87 percent of which required a mandatory minimum as established in the late 1980s by lawmakers who had hoped to send a message about being tough on crime.
By some measures, their strategy had worked: Homicides had fallen by 54 percent since the late 1980s, and property crimes had dropped by a third. Prosecutors and police officers had used the threat of mandatory sentences to entice low-level criminals into cooperating with the government, exchanging information about accomplices in order to earn a plea deal. But most mandatory sentences applied to drug charges, and according to police data, drug use had remained steady since the 1980s even as the number of drug offenders in federal prison increased by 2,200 percent.
“A draconian, ineffective policy” was how then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. had described it.
“A system that’s overrun” was what Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee had said.
“Isn’t there anything you can do?” asked Bennett’s wife, joining him now in the living room. They rarely talked about his cases. But he had told her a little about Weller’s, and now she wanted to know what would happen.
“Childhood trauma is a mitigating factor, right?” she said.
“Shouldn’t that impact his sentence?”
“Yes,” he said. “Neglect and abuse are mitigating. Definitely.” “And addiction?” “Yes.” “Remorse?” “Yes.” “No history of violence?” “Yes.  Of course,” he said, standing up. “It’s all mitigating. His whole life is basically mitigating, but there still isn’t much I can do.”
The first people into the courtroom were Weller’s mother, his sister and then his father, who had driven 600 miles from Kansas to sit in the front row, where he was having trouble catching his breath. He gasped for air and rocked in his seat until two court marshals turned to stare. “Look away,” he told them. “Have a little respect on the worst day of our lives. Look the hell away.”
In came Weller. In came the judge. “This is United States of America versus Mark Paul Weller,” the court clerk said.
And then there was only so much left for the court to discuss.  Hansen, the defense attorney, could only ask for the mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years, rather than the guideline sentence of 13 years or the maximum of life. The state prosecutor could only agree that 10 years was probably sufficient, because Weller had a “number of mitigating factors,” he said. Bennett could only delay the inevitable as the court played out a script written by Congress 30 years earlier.
“This is one of those cases where I wish the court could do more,” said Hansen, the defense attorney.
“He’s certainly not a drug kingpin,” the government prosecutor consented.
“He could use a wake-up call,” Hansen said. “But, come on, I mean . . .”
“He doesn’t need a 10-year wake-up call,” Bennett said.
“Ten years is not a wake-up call,” Hansen said. “It’s more like a sledgehammer to the face.”
“We talk about incremental punishment,” Bennett said. “This is not incremental.”
They stared at each other for a few more minutes until it was time for Weller to address the court. He leaned into a microphone and read a speech he had written in his holding cell the night before, a speech he now realized would do him no good. He apologized to his family. He apologized to the addicts who had bought his drugs. “There is no excuse for what I did,” he said. “I was a hardworking family man dedicated to my family. I turned to drugs, and that was the beginning of the end for me. I hope I get the chance to better my life in the future and put this behind me.”
“Thank you, Mr. Weller. Very thoughtful,” Bennett said, making a point to look him in the eye. “Very, very thoughtful,” he said again, and then he issued the sentence. “You are hereby committed to the custody of the bureau of prisons to be imprisoned for 120 months.” He lowered his gavel and walked out, and then the court marshal took Weller to his holding cell for a five-minute visitation with his family. He looked at them through a glass wall and tried to take measure of 10 years. His grandmother would probably be dead. His daughter would be in high school. He would be nearing 40, with half of his life behind him. “It’s weird to know that even the judge basically said it wasn’t fair,” he said.
Down the hall in his chambers, Bennett was also considering the weight of 10 years: one more nonviolent offender packed into an overcrowded prison; another $300,000 in government money spent. “I would have given him a year in rehab if I could,” he told his assistant. “How does 10 years make anything better? What good are we doing?”
But already his assistant was handing him another case file, the fifth of the day, and the courtroom was beginning to fill again. “I need five minutes,” he said. He went into his office, removed his robe and closed his eyes. He thought about the offer he had received a few weeks earlier from an old partner, who wanted him to return to private practice in Des Moines. No more sentencing hearings. No more bathtub of guilt to drain. “I’m going to think seriously about doing that,” Bennett had said, and he was still trying to make up his mind.  Now he cleared Weller’s sentencing report from his desk and added it to a stack in the corner. He washed his face and changed back into his robe.
“Ready to go?” his assistant asked.
“Ready,” he said.
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
xxx