Green Art Rocks  -  Available at:  http://www.Green Art Rocks.com
Art Studio located at  Boutique – 1123 E. Douglas, Wichita, Kansas  (Gorilla on roof of building to the east of  Boutique.)  Les Balm in .05 oz Trial Twist Tube, 2 oz Jar or Tin, & 2.65 oz. Twist Tube.

Global Million Man Marijuana March - May 7, 2016 - Riverside Park - Wichita, Kansas 11:30 AM to 1:30 PM - on bridges between the Keeper of the Plains, & Tennis Courts.  Bring smile, & your own sign.  Let's have some fun!  Debby Moore, AKA Hemp Lady, has promised to annoint all with the "Scent of the Rebel".

Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Tue, 05 May 2015
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/y4ZhtFbS
Copyright: 2015 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Mark K. Matthews

LAWYER ASKED FOR ADVICE ON POT FIGHT
Washington - The U.S. Supreme Court is asking advice from a top government lawyer on what to do about state weed policy and a smoldering fight between Colorado and two nearby states.
Justices on the court made the request Monday as part of their official order list. They want U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. to add his thoughts to a complaint filed by Oklahoma and Nebraska in December against Colorado, which is one of just a few states to allow for the broad sale of marijuana.
How Verrilli responds could influence whether the Supreme Court decides to hear the case, though it’s a matter of debate about how much weight the justices put on the opinion of the solicitor general, who represents the federal government before the high court.
Regardless, the next moves by the Supreme Court could have a major impact on recent state efforts to relax marijuana laws. A response by Verrilli is expected later this year.
The latest fight began five months ago when Nebraska and Oklahoma challenged Colorado’s commercialization of marijuana - citing enforcement problems because of the drug’s increased accessibility in the region.
A key question the states raised was the responsibility of the federal government - a point underscored Monday by the office of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt.
“Attorney General Pruitt anxiously awaits an explanation from the Obama administration as to its continued refusal to enforce federal law, specifically the Controlled Substances Act,” Aaron Cooper, a Pruitt spokesman, said in a statement.
But Colorado says it has the prerogative and that it is also ready to hear from Verrilli.
“As we argued in our brief, the federal government’s decision to defer to Colorado’s regulation of marijuana is at the heart of this case,” Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman said in a statement.
“We are pleased that the Supreme Court has asked the United States to explain its position on this litigation, especially now that (U.S.) Attorney General (Loretta) Lynch has assumed office,” she added.
Colorado is not alone in the legal fight. Two pot-friendly states, Oregon and Washington, joined the fray a few weeks ago and filed a brief in March in support of the state’s position.
One pot advocate saw the development as a mixed bag.
“On the one hand, this is concerning since it could be a sign that the Court is taking the case more seriously than I think is actually merited,” Tom Angell, chairman of the Marijuana Majority, said in a statement.
“On the other hand, this could be a good opportunity for the Obama administration to further and more clearly articulate the president’s position that states should be able to legalize marijuana if that’s what their voters want,” he added.
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Tue, 05 May 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: Eugene Robinson

A BROKEN APPROACH
The first two steps toward uplifting young black men are simple: Stop killing them and stop locking them in prison for nonviolent offenses.
Subsequent steps are harder, but no real progress can be made until the basic right to life and liberty is secured. If anything positive is to come of Freddie Gray’s death and the Baltimore rioting that ensued, let it be a new and cleareyed focus on these fundamental issues of daily life for millions of Americans.
Central to the crisis is “zero-tolerance” or “broken windows” policing, which basically involves cracking down on minor offenses in the hope of reducing major crime as well. Whether this strategy works is the subject of two arguments whose right answers can only be inferred, not proved.
The first involves the contention that police should be more aggressive in patrolling innercity minority communities because that’s where the criminals are. Those who hold this view might point to Gray’s history of drug arrests. They might argue that the police officers were justified in thinking he must have been guilty of something, especially when he ran- and that if he had nothing to hide, he should have simply stayed put.
But this argument overlooks a universal phenomenon: We find things where we look for them.
If police concentrate their patrols in a certain area and assume every young man they see is a potential or probable criminal, they will conduct more searches - and make more arrests. Which means a high percentage of young men in that neighborhood will have police records. Which, in turn, provides a statistical justification for continued hyper-aggressive police tactics.
In New York, where a federal judge ruled then-mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “stop and frisk” policy unconstitutional, an analysis by the New York Civil Liberties Union found that 85 percent of “stops” in 2012 involved African Americans or Hispanics - who make up just half the population. The No. 1 goal of the practice, city officials said, was to get illegal weapons off the streets. But minorities were found to be carrying weapons just 2 percent of the time, while 4 percent of whites who were stopped and frisked had weapons.
This doesn’t mean the New York Police Department should have deployed all its resources to the Upper East Side. What it strongly suggests is that officers, when deciding whether to stop and frisk whites, exercised greater discretion. It suggests police were more likely to single out whites who genuinely had something to hide and to detain African Americans and Hispanics indiscriminately.
The second argument about aggressive policing is about impact: The advent of “broken windows” has coincided with a dramatic decline in violent crime across the nation.
Did one lead to the other? It is easy to show a correlation but impossible to prove causality. It is not as if police departments were ignoring inner-city communities before the practice of rousting suspects on drug corners was known by a fancy buzzword. And violent crime has also fallen sharply in many communities that either abandoned zero-tolerance policing or never adopted it.
Has crime fallen because so many hard-core criminals are in prison?  Believe me, my heart does not bleed for any murderer, armed robber or rapist who is behind bars. But thousands of black men are in prison for possessing or selling marijuana, a drug that is now legal in the nation’s capital. Blacks and whites smoke pot at equal rates, but African Americans are four times more likely to be arrested for doing so.
In the larger war on drugs, the victims have been black and brown.  The American Civil Liberties Union reported last year that African Americans facing drug charges are imprisoned at a rate 10 times that of whites - and that sentences for black men are nearly 20 percent longer than those for white men, on average. Punishment for possessing or selling crack cocaine remains vastly greater than for an identical quantity of the upscale powder variety.
Back to Freddie Gray and Baltimore: At 25 years old, without education, employment or immediate prospects, he was hardly what anyone would call a pillar of the community. But neither was he any sort of menace to society. Perhaps some intervention would have gotten his life on track. Perhaps not. We’ll never know.
When he saw police, he ran. Was that illogical? The officers chased him down, pinned him in a folded position “like origami,” according to a witness, and tossed him into a police wagon. Was that necessary?
The answer to both questions is no. Therein lies the problem.
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Tue, 05 May 2015
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2015 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Andrew Higgins

ODD PUSH IN DRUG-AVERSE NORWAY: LSD IS O.K.
OSLO - In a country so wary of drug abuse that it limits the sale of aspirin, Pal-Orjan Johansen, a Norwegian researcher, is pushing what would seem a doomed cause: the rehabilitation of LSD.
It matters little to him that the psychedelic drug has been banned here and around the world for more than 40 years. Mr. Johansen pitches his effort not as a throwback to the hippie hedonism of the 1960s, but as a battle for human rights and good health.
In fact, he also wants to manufacture MDMA and psilocybin, the active ingredients in two other prohibited substances, Ecstasy and so-called magic mushrooms.
All of that might seem quixotic at best, if only Mr. Johansen and EmmaSofia, the psychedelics advocacy group he founded with his American-born wife and fellow scientist, Teri Krebs, had not already won some unlikely supporters, including a retired Norwegian Supreme Court judge who serves as their legal adviser.
The group, whose name derives from street slang for MDMA and the Greek word for wisdom, stands in the vanguard of a global movement now pushing to revise drug policies set in the 1970s. That it has gained traction in a country so committed to controlling drug use shows how much old orthodoxies have crumbled.
The Norwegian group wants not only to stir discussion about prohibited drugs, but also to manufacture them, in part, it argues, to guarantee that they are safe. It recently began an online campaign to raise money so that it can, in cooperation with a Norwegian pharmaceuticals company, start quality-controlled production of psilocybin and MDMA, drugs that Mr. Johansen says saved and transformed his life.
“I helped myself with psychedelics and want others to have the same opportunity without the risk of arrest,” said Mr. Johansen, a 42-year-old researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. He recalled how, as a young man, he defeated an alcohol problem, a smoking habit, post-traumatic stress disorder and depression by taking psilocybin and MDMA.
The drugs are banned in Norway, as in most countries, but can, under tight supervision, be used for medical purposes and in scientific research.
While it took decades for pro-marijuana campaigners in the United States to shift public attitudes and government policy, Norway’s psychedelic champions insist that they already have science and even the law on their side.
But even politicians who support them, all of them quietly because of the extreme sensitivity of drug policy, caution that it will be a long struggle. EmmaSofia has nonetheless succeeded in making its cause an issue, with Mr. Johansen appearing in debates on NRK, the state broadcaster, and in a lengthy profile in a leading newsmagazine.
Eager to sidestep the tight rules in Norway, Mr. Johansen and his supporters tap into a more freewheeling side of this button-down Nordic nation and point to a long tradition of nature-worshiping shamans, particularly among Norway’s indigenous Sami people.
Also lending a hand are the Vikings, who, at least according to fans of psychedelic drugs, ate hallucinogenic mushrooms to pep them up before battle.
Cato Nystad, a 39-year-old drum maker, EmmaSofia supporter and organizer of traditional ceremonies that involve psychedelic potions, said many Norwegians wanted to get in touch with their wilder, more spiritual sides.
Steinar Madsen, the medical director of the Norwegian Medicines Agency, said he had no objection in principle to what he called EmmaSofia’s “interesting project,” but cautioned that “it is a very long shot.”
He scoffed at the argument that Norway needs to reconnect with its shamanistic past. “I don’t believe this stuff,” he said, adding that “drugs were not part of this tradition in Norway.”
Ina Roll Spinnangr, a Liberal Party politician who supports a more relaxed policy on drugs, said the best way to bring about change was not to attack Norway’s paternalistic government but to turn it on its head.
“You have to use a nanny argument: The government needs to take control and regulate the market instead of leaving it to criminals,” she said. “The argument that you decide yourself what you put in your own body will never work in Norway.”
As a result, she added, “I would never use the word ‘legalize,’ but talk instead about regulating, not liberalizing.”
Ketil Lund, 75, the retired Supreme Court justice who advises EmmaSofia on its legal strategy, said he had never used psychedelic drugs and had no interest in trying them. But, he said, he supported Mr. Johansen’s campaign as part of a “bigger struggle” against antidrug policies in the West that he described as “an absolute failure.”
“The present narcotics policy in the West has so many detrimental effects,” he said. “These have to be balanced against detrimental effects of the drugs themselves.”
He said he was not qualified to adjudicate a raging debate over the possible hazards and benefits of psychedelic drugs like LSD. But he had been impressed by research suggesting that they were less harmful than alcohol. “People have used psychedelics for centuries,” he added.
The taboo in the West on psychedelics, however, is deeply entrenched
? a legacy of government campaigns against drug use and a long backlash against the counterculture of the 1960s, when Timothy Leary, a Harvard professor and zealous promoter of LSD, urged Americans to “turn on, tune in and drop out.”

“LSD terrifies governments; it is their ultimate fear because it changes the way people look at the world,” said David Nutt, a professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London. He was fired in 2009 as the British government’s drug policy adviser after he told a radio interviewer that alcohol was far more harmful than LSD and other psychedelics.
He praised EmmaSofia and other groups for helping to lift the stigma and fear long attached to psychedelics, adding that “there has definitely been a renaissance” of medical research in recent years after decades of science-killing “paranoia and censorship” based on scare stories about psychedelics that fed public panic.
“We are not in the 1960s anymore and have moved on,” said Mr.  Johansen, a clinical psychologist, adding, “This is a question of basic human rights.”
LSD, which was first synthesized in a Swiss pharmaceuticals laboratory in 1938, and MDMA, which was patented in 1914, won wide acceptance in Europe and the United States in the middle of the last century when they showed early promise against alcoholism and other maladies.
But initial euphoria over their medical use was then swamped by deep alarm as recreational use of psychedelics surged, leading to a cascade of horror stories in the news media.
The United States banned LSD in 1970. A year later, the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances classified LSD and MDMA as “Schedule I” drugs, those that pose a serious threat to public health.
The United Nations convention banned their use “except for scientific and very limited medical purposes by duly authorized persons.” It also exempted psychedelics contained in plants “used by certain small, clearly determined groups in magical or religious rites.”
Mr. Johansen said the dangers connected with psychedelic drugs had been exaggerated by stories that did not take into account probability. “Everything carries a risk. If you walk in a forest, a tree may fall on your head, but does this mean you should never go in the woods?”
Dr. Madsen, of the Norwegian Medicines Agency, conceded that there “are a lot of myths” about psychedelic drugs like claims that “if you use LSD, you will jump from the roof.”
All the same, he sees no quick way around a thicket of laws and strict regulations on their use. “Everyone sees we have to be very careful with these drugs,” he said. “I don’t think the time is ripe.”
Henrik Pryser Libell contributed reporting.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Tue, 05 May 2015
Source: Alaska Dispatch News (AK)
Copyright: 2015 Alaska Dispatch Publishing
Contact: letters@adn.com
Website: http://www.adn.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/18
Note: Anchorage Daily News until July ‘14
Author: Lindianne Sarno

HEMP SEED IS GREAT NON-GMO CROP FOR ALASKA FARMERS
A civilization stands or falls on its oils. Every cell in your body has a protective wall of two layers of interlocked oil molecules.  This cell wall determines the health of the cell, by admitting or repelling molecules.
For healthy cells, animals require fats and oils in their diet.  Humans require fats, oil and cholesterol for healthy life and clear thinking. The human brain is 25 percent cholesterol.
Every civilization has a significant source of dietary oil.
Neanderthals ate meat fat and pine nuts. American small farmers during America’s agricultural centuries grew cannabis, flax, sunflowers and nut trees, and ate egg yolks and butterfat. Americans today eat GMO chicken fat, GMO butter, GMO bacon, and, increasingly, GMO canola oil. Alaskans love salmon fat and muktuk. But king salmon, an outstanding fish oil source, is being mismanaged out of existence.
Alaska people need healthy oil. An oilseed crop well-suited to grow in the Alaska Interior is hemp. Alaska farmers and growers should obtain hemp seed in bulk from Canada; legislators should clear the way for young farmers to acquire land for hemp seed under a homesteading program. State and private investors should invest in bulk oil presses and bottles, and start production in 2015 of this crucial food.
How crucial fats are may be seen in how terribly bodies break down without high quality dietary fat. GMO fat turns cell walls to mush.  Look around and you see people aching, hobbling, bent over, injured and befuddled on an unprecedented scale. Grow hemp seed, Alaska.
? Lindianne Sarno

Homer
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Tue, 05 May 2015
Source: Oklahoman, The (OK)
Copyright: 2015 The Oklahoma Publishing Co.
Contact: http://www.newsok.com/voices/guidelines
Website: http://newsok.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/318
Author: Chris Casteel

SUPREME COURT REQUESTS ADVICE IN OK POT LAWSUIT
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court asked Monday for the Obama administration’s views on whether Oklahoma and Nebraska should be able to sue Colorado over its marijuana laws.
The court sometimes asks the solicitor general - the president’s advocate before the U.S. Supreme Court - for input on a case justices potentially will hear.
A spokesman for Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt said the president’s Justice Department - which is now being asked for its views - is actually part of the problem.
“Attorney General Pruitt anxiously awaits an explanation from the Obama administration as to its continued refusal to enforce federal law, specifically the Controlled Substances Act,” Aaron Cooper said Monday.
“The administration’s wholesale disregard for the law led Oklahoma and Nebraska to sue Colorado to stop the stream of illegal marijuana flowing into our states as a result of Colorado’s legalization of the commercial production and sale of marijuana.”
The Supreme Court has not decided whether to allow the lawsuit to move forward. The request for the solicitor general’s views is likely to delay - perhaps until this fall - the court’s decision on advancing the case.
Oklahoma and Nebraska asked for the court’s permission in December to sue Colorado over certain aspects of its marijuana legalization plan.
The states claim laws allowing the manufacture, possession and distribution of pot have led to more illegal drugs crossing state lines.
Colorado fires back
Colorado countered to the Supreme Court in March that Oklahoma and Nebraska “filed this case in an attempt to reach across their borders and selectively invalidate state laws with which they disagree.”
Colorado Attorney General Cynthia H. Coffman, while defending her state in court, issued a statement saying that leadership from Washington on drug policy was “noticeably absent.”
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Tue, 05 May 2015
Source: Chicago Tribune (IL)
Copyright: 2015 Chicago Tribune Company
Contact: ctc-TribLetter@tribune.com
Website: http://www.chicagotribune.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/82
Authors: Meredith Rodriguez and Robert McCoppin

POT FOR MIGRAINE, PTSD?
State Advisory Panel Recommends That Drug Be Available for 11 New Conditions
An Illinois panel Monday recommended allowing medical marijuana to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, anorexia and migraine headaches, but rejected its use for anxiety and diabetes.
The Illinois Medical Cannabis Advisory Board supported the drug’s availability for 11 new medical conditions in all, including chronic post-surgical pain, osteoarthritis and irritable bowel syndrome.
The recommendations, if approved by the Illinois Department of Public Health, would significantly increase the list of conditions for which medical pot can be accessed. As it stands, about three dozen disorders and diseases, including AIDS, cancer and lupus, can be eligible for medical marijuana - though a series of delays have so far rendered medicinal pot unavailable in the marketplace.
Industry advocates said the expansion would be a great relief for suffering patients and could make the difference between success and failure for the program.
“That could greatly change the potential market,” said Chris Walsh, editor of Marijuana Business Daily. “Any move to expand it would be huge for the business community.”
Lawmakers approved the use of medical marijuana starting last year, but the product is not expected to be available until this summer. In part because Illinois has one of the most restrictive lists of qualifying medical conditions in the country, only about 2,000 people have been approved so far to get medical weed.
The advisory board, made up of medical professionals, patients and a caregiver, appeared to want to avoid situations like those in Colorado or California, where broad qualifying conditions like chronic pain open up the potential for medical marijuana to be exploited by healthy people.
Along those lines, the board rejected anxiety as a qualifying condition because members said it was too broad a category. Diabetes was also rejected, as the panel said there was no evidence that marijuana lowed blood sugar.
But the board did recommend that those diagnosed with PTSD be allowed to use pot after hearing from two military veterans and a young woman who said she suffered from the stress disorder after being in abusive relationships as a teen.
“This one is very straightforward in my mind,” said Dr. Eric Christoff, a general internist and HIV specialist at Northwestern Medicine who sits on the advisory board. “The risk of not correctly, in a patient-centered way, addressing PTSD is death or suicide, so the stakes are high.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that 11 to 20 percent of veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 15 percent of Vietnam vets, suffer from PTSD. Twelve other states and Washington, D.C., have authorized the use of medical marijuana for PTSD, according to the Marijuana Policy Project.
Anecdotal evidence suggests low to moderate doses of marijuana are useful for relieving the symptoms of PTSD, according to the advocacy group Veterans for Medical Cannabis Access.
However, the VA has stated online that controlled studies have not been conducted to evaluate the safety or effectiveness of medical pot for PTSD.
Some research does show that marijuana use may reduce PTSD symptoms in the short term.
However, data suggest that continued use of marijuana among individuals with PTSD may lead to marijuana tolerance, addiction and psychiatric problems, the VA reported.
Cannabis is the most commonly abused drug among veterans treated at the VA with PTSD, with more than 40,000 vets having both problems as of fiscal year 2014, the agency stated.
Marijuana remains illegal under federal law with no acknowledged medical use, and the VA prohibits its doctors and other providers from recommending the substance for patients.
PTSD affects not only vets, but millions of Americans who’ve suffered trauma, according to the VA.
Antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs are used to treat PTSD, along with various psychiatric therapies, with varying success.
The board also voted in favor of adding two nerve pain conditions, periphery polyneuropathy and diabetic neuropathy, to the list.
Those conditions are difficult to treat, said board member James Champion, who suffers from multiple sclerosis and has been approved to use medical pot.
“The feeling that your feet are frozen in a block of ice or like they’re on fire is not a pleasant feeling at all,” he said. “I know neuropathy is very painful.”
While some on the panel expressed concern that osteoarthritis was also too broad a category, supporters said there needs to be trust in the medical professionals who would recommend medical marijuana.
“I don’t think we need to be overly concerned about opening the floodgates,” Christoff said.
A new analysis projects that revenue from the first year of marijuana sales in Illinois will come in at $15 million to $30 million but said the program’s future remains uncertain because it’s only a four-year pilot.
The Marijuana Business Factbook 2015, published by Marijuana Business Daily, estimated that Illinois will have 10,000 to 20,000 patients by the end of the first year of the program, anticipating a spike in patients once the product becomes available.
“If they get a lot of new conditions and everything works, this program will be healthy and will likely be renewed,” said Walsh.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Tue, 05 May 2015
Source: Chicago Sun-Times (IL)
Copyright: 2015 Sun-Times Media, LLC
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/5QwXAJWY
Website: http://www.suntimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/81
Author: Kathleen Kane-Willis
Note: Kathleen Kane-Willis is director of the Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy at Roosevelt University.
PILOT PROGRAM NEEDS INDEPENDENT ASSESSMENT
While this proposed policy would save taxpayers over $ 58 million over three years, it may not reduce time waiting in jail.
The Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy at Roosevelt University supports the intent of House Bill 356 because it is vitally important to reduce the number of days that individuals wait for a preliminary hearing. Awaiting results from the Illinois State Police Crime lab creates long delays for defendants and causes overcrowding in Cook County Jail.
But academic literature raises concerns regarding police conducting field testing for suspect narcotics.
Police officers must be trained to correctly use and interpret the result of the field tests. Research indicates that false positives in officer-conducted field tests that don’t use spectrometry tend to be high. Field testing of narcotics would not be verified by an independent authority like the Illinois State Police crime lab as they are now. Considering the complexity of training and the lack of independent verification, field testing might cause testing errors and would leave the entire process up to the police officer, who may or may not be unbiased in the outcome of the field test.
Our study of preliminary hearings for drug cases found that a large number of cases were dismissed.
These dismissed cases shared one characteristic: The amount of drugs was very small, under one gram. A typical “dime bag” of cocaine or heroin weighs around one-tenth of a gram. Drug packaging weighs at least one gram. Police may weigh the drugs with the packaging under the pilot program, which could artificially increase the total weight of the “drugs,” perhaps making judges less likely to dismiss these low-level cases.
That could mean more people in the Cook County Jail would end up in Illinois’ prisons if the number of dismissed cases decreases.
That would neither be good for Illinois’ taxpayers nor for people who suffer from substance use disorder.
The creation of a personal-use misdemeanor for possession of less than one gram of drugs for cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine would align Illinois’ policy with federal policy and with states like California, New York, and Ohio. While this proposed policy would save taxpayers over $ 58 million over three years, it may not reduce time waiting in jail. To ensure a successful pilot program, the pilot should be subject to independent review and assessment to ensure that the intent of the legislation successfully reduces wait times for preliminary hearings while ensuring that the proportion of dismissed cases remains the same between the piloted areas and the rest of the city.
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: Tue, 05 May 2015
Source: Chicago Sun-Times (IL)
Copyright: 2015 Sun-Times Media, LLC
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/5QwXAJWY
Website: http://www.suntimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/81
Author: Kathleen Kane-Willis
Note: Kathleen Kane-Willis is director of the Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy at Roosevelt University.
PILOT PROGRAM NEEDS INDEPENDENT ASSESSMENT
While this proposed policy would save taxpayers over $ 58 million over three years, it may not reduce time waiting in jail.
The Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy at Roosevelt University supports the intent of House Bill 356 because it is vitally important to reduce the number of days that individuals wait for a preliminary hearing. Awaiting results from the Illinois State Police Crime lab creates long delays for defendants and causes overcrowding in Cook County Jail.
But academic literature raises concerns regarding police conducting field testing for suspect narcotics.
Police officers must be trained to correctly use and interpret the result of the field tests. Research indicates that false positives in officer-conducted field tests that don’t use spectrometry tend to be high. Field testing of narcotics would not be verified by an independent authority like the Illinois State Police crime lab as they are now. Considering the complexity of training and the lack of independent verification, field testing might cause testing errors and would leave the entire process up to the police officer, who may or may not be unbiased in the outcome of the field test.
Our study of preliminary hearings for drug cases found that a large number of cases were dismissed.
These dismissed cases shared one characteristic: The amount of drugs was very small, under one gram. A typical “dime bag” of cocaine or heroin weighs around one-tenth of a gram. Drug packaging weighs at least one gram. Police may weigh the drugs with the packaging under the pilot program, which could artificially increase the total weight of the “drugs,” perhaps making judges less likely to dismiss these low-level cases.
That could mean more people in the Cook County Jail would end up in Illinois’ prisons if the number of dismissed cases decreases.
That would neither be good for Illinois’ taxpayers nor for people who suffer from substance use disorder.
The creation of a personal-use misdemeanor for possession of less than one gram of drugs for cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine would align Illinois’ policy with federal policy and with states like California, New York, and Ohio. While this proposed policy would save taxpayers over $ 58 million over three years, it may not reduce time waiting in jail. To ensure a successful pilot program, the pilot should be subject to independent review and assessment to ensure that the intent of the legislation successfully reduces wait times for preliminary hearings while ensuring that the proportion of dismissed cases remains the same between the piloted areas and the rest of the city.
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: Herb Couch
Pubdate: Mon, 04 May 2015
Source: Northern Star (Australia)
Copyright: 2015 APN News & Media Ltd
Contact: http://www.northernstar.com.au/contact/feedback/
Website: http://www.northernstar.com.au/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/5149
Author: Leah White
Page: 3

NIMBIN CELEBRATES CANNABIS
Green fun and games at town’s annual ‘protestival’
ONLY in Nimbin could a protest rally be celebrated with a parade full of hemp-themed floats, bong-throwing contests and a flock of green, prancing Ganja fairies down the main street.
This weekend was the 2015 Nimbin Mardi Grass cannabis law reform rally, a tradition that began as a small, peaceful protest outside the Nimbin police station in May, 1993.
This year, heavy rain and wild winds threatened to wreak havoc on the popular “protestival”.
Several roads were closed on Friday due to moderate flooding but come Saturday, the skies had cleared and the crowds were trickling in.
Adding a physical element to the green festival was the annual Hemp Olympix.
The first event was the Bong throw and yell, where contestants pegged a half-filled bong up a hill while yelling something slightly absurd.
It was Luke Campbell’s second year at the festival, having road-tripped from Sydney for the event, and he won with an impressive 23m throw.
“I watched Fat Pizza about a decade ago, and it ( MardiGrass) was on then and I’ve been wanting to go ever since,” Mr Campbell said.
“It was good fun to come last year for the first time,” he
said.

Other events included the Growers Ironperson, where a contestant had to lug a sack of fertiliser and buckets of water around an obstacle course.
There was also the joint-rolling contest, where awards were handed out for speed, artistic flair, ability to roll a joint blindfolded and the wildcard “adverse conditions roll”, which is dependent on weather and the judge’s creativity on the day.
Decked out in a green dress, wings and glitter, Ganja Fairy Zee Marincowids said getting into the theme was a great way to bring a bit of cheer to rallies.
“When you look like this a lot of people ask you questions and that’s the best time to inform people of all the benefits,” Ms Marincowids said.
She said in mythology, Ganja Fairies were known to sprinkle their fairy dust over crops to produce a good harvest.

Medical use major draw card as MardiGrass proves a
hit

MEDICAL cannabis was “unquestionably” the big issue at this year’s MardiGrass festival.
Festival organiser Michael Balderstone said the issue helped attract large numbers to the event despite the terrible weather.
“Our online ticket sales were up a lot, about a third up,” he said.
“Quite a few people didn’t come ( on Friday) because the roads got blocked. But it was lovely to wake up to the sun on Saturday and all the roads opened and people started turning up.”
Mr Balderstone said the focus of this year’s festival was largely on medical cannabis with an impressive line-up of international speakers.
“I think that’s why we’ve got a lot more people coming,” he said.
“The word has got out there and there’s a new acceptance that this plant really is medicinal and the hippies weren’t just carrying on all those years.
“I also think it’s made a change in attitude to Nimbin. We were the dirty druggie town and suddenly we’ve got a medical edge.”
Speakers at this year’s Hemposium included American doctor David Bearman, an acknowledged leader in cannabinoid medicine.
Canadian speakers Ajia Mae Moon and Rebecca Ambrose spoke about the commercial applications of the hemp plant while American visitor Abe Acton focussed on medical applications.
Australian Senator Richard Di Natale and fellow politician Fiona Patten also spoke.
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Newshawk: Herb Couch
Pubdate: Mon, 04 May 2015
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Webpage: http://mapinc.org/url/55550xKE
Copyright: 2015 Postmedia Network Inc.
Contact: sunletters@vancouversun.com
Website: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477
Author: Matthew Robinson
Page: A1

MARIJUANA CASE WRAPS UP IN FEDERAL COURT
Judge reserves decision in users’ fight to grow their own pot
Medical marijuana users’ fight to continue growing their own plants is now in the hands of a Federal Court judge after lawyers delivered their final arguments in Vancouver late last week.
New rules that force patients to purchase medical marijuana from licensed commercial growers ensure they are supplied with safe, good quality marijuana that is grown by industry producers who are subject to stringent standards and government oversight, federal lawyers told the court.
But lawyers for the plaintiffs argued the new rules are overly restrictive and by making marijuana unaffordable for their clients - all B.C. patients - the regulations infringe their rights to liberty and security under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
In court documents filed last week, the plaintiffs quoted Federal Health Minister Rona Ambrose as having told media in late April: “Marijuana is not medicine.”
For Kirk Tousaw, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, that statement “epitomizes the biases” behind the government’s regulatory scheme.  “They don’t think it’s medicine. They just think that all of these patients are overproducing and selling to the black market, they’re not really using the medicine they say they need, their doctors are being bamboozled into signing prescriptions with high dosages. And it’s all this really cynical viewpoint that does not understand and accept that marijuana’s used medicinally,” Tousaw said in an interview.
In their final written submission, federal lawyers stated that although all experts who spoke during the case agreed marijuana has some medicinal value for certain individuals, it is not a “miracle drug.”
“Some of the Plaintiffs’ unbridled enthusiasm for marijuana appears to far surpass the available scientific evidence of its efficacy,” read the defendant’s memorandum of fact and law.
Under the new regulations, patients cannot possess more than the lesser of either 30 times their daily dose or 150 grams - a limit that fails to take into account patient need, according to the plaintiffs.  And while the cost to produce marijuana under the old system ranged from $0.50 to $2 per gram, the estimated cost under the new rules is about $5 to $12 per gram, they argued.
At just $5 per gram, the cost of 60-year-old plaintiff and Nanaimo resident Neil Allard’s medicine under the new rules would be as much as $7,200 per month, the lawyers told the court. He would also not be able to consume edible marijuana, which helps treat the symptoms of a neuro-immune disorder he suffers from that is similar to multiple sclerosis.
Federal lawyers argued there is no constitutional right to cultivate marijuana or obtain it in a specific way, amount or form.
“There is also no constitutional obligation imposed upon the government to ensure that medicine is made available at a cost that is subjectively acceptable to consumers,” read the defendant’s document.
The government asked the judge to dismiss the plaintiffs’ action and leave “disputes over the wisdom of the particular policies adopted in relation to such access” to the political arena.
There are about 38,000 doctor-approved medical marijuana users and some 17,000 of them buy from licensed producers, said John Conroy, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers. When asked why it was unreasonable to ask all patients to buy marijuana from large scale licensed operations, he said it was not.
“This case is not about getting rid of the (licensed producers). We welcome them on the scene,” he said, adding that private growers “have been doing this safely for a long time ... so what’s the problem?  Again, it’s the government that just wants to stop everybody from doing it.”
Federal lawyers had argued growing marijuana in a residential setting posed public health and safety risks, including mould, contamination, fire, home invasion and violence. Plaintiffs responded that those risks could be “mitigated to reasonable levels - levels that are equal to, or less than, other lawful activities.”
The judge reserved decision on the lengthy case. While both sides wait for a resolution to the standoff, those who had been allowed to possess and grow marijuana under the old system continue to do so under a temporary injunction.
Justice Canada did not respond to a request for comment Friday.
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Newshawk: Herb Couch
Pubdate: Wed, 06 May 2015
Source: Metro (Ottawa, CN ON)
Copyright: 2015 Metro
Contact: ottawaletters@metronews.ca
Website: http://www.metronews.ca/Ottawa
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/4032
Author: Lucy Scholey
Page: A1

POLICE SCARE POT LOUNGE USERS: OWNER
‘We’re not doing anything illegal,’ Wayne Robillard says
The owner of BuzzOn, Ottawa’s new vapour lounge, is accusing police of trying to intimidate his customers.
Wayne Robillard told reporters at city hall on Wednesday that police have stopped in three times since he opened on April 20 and asked customers for ID. Officers confiscated one person’s marijuana, he said.
“They’re trying to find a backdoor way to shut us down,” he said, clad in a white T-shirt with “I am Cannabian” emblazoned across the front.  “We’re not doing anything illegal, so they have to find another way.”
Robillard said “hundreds” of people have stopped in to the lounge at 29 Montreal Rd. and he has a clientele of about a dozen regulars. He’s even considering quitting his day job as the operations manager at a manufacturing firm to run the lounge on a full-time basis.
The lounge is meant to be a place for medical-marijuana users to puff their medication in the company of others, but Robillard said he’s now instructing customers on their rights.
“Is it worth trying to criminalize a few people when there’s so many who are benefiting?” he said, adding, “I’m not going to say that there’s absolutely no recreational use whatsoever. That would be ludicrous of me.”
Robillard explains that he does not sell weed; he sells memberships.  However, he said it would be inappropriate for him to ask customers for their medical card.
The police response is “directly proportionate” to Mayor Jim Watson’s reaction to the vapour lounge, he said. Last week, Watson said he was not impressed with the venue and that he expected police to enforce the laws.
Clayton Goodwin, executive director of Veterans for the Use of Medical Marijuana, called the mayor’s reaction “discrimination” against patients.
“What resides in BuzzOn is a community,” he said. “There are people there that are medicating there that have anxiety. There are people that are medicating that have mental illness. Then you have police storming in that have guns and uniforms.”
A spokesman for Ottawa police said they were continuing to monitor and investigate BuzzOn but would not comment further.
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Wed, 06 May 2015
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2015 Los Angeles Times
Contact: letters@latimes.com
Website: http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Timothy M. Phelps

OFFICIALS SAY DEA PROBLEMS MAY BE SYSTEMIC
Agency Is Criticized for Lax Punishment in Case of Forgotten Man Left in Cell for Days.
WASHINGTON - Obama administration officials and lawmakers are calling for greater accountability and tougher disciplinary procedures at the Drug Enforcement Administration after the agency imposed only light punishments on agents who forgot a San Diego man in a holding cell, leaving him without food or water for five days and nearly killing him.
Daniel Chong, a UC San Diego student, was detained in 2012 for what he was told would be five minutes after he was swept up in a drug bust at a friend’s house, where he had been smoking marijuana.  Instead, agents forgot about him. Chong, who was 23 at the time, drank his own urine to stave off dehydration until he was found, delirious and suffering from severe breathing problems, according to a report last summer by the Justice Department Office of the Inspector General.
After an internal DEA review concluded in March, the six DEA agents involved received only reprimands and short suspensions, spurring the Justice Department to demand reforms to prevent such mistakes from reoccurring.
In an April 28 letter to members of Congress obtained by the Los Angeles Times, the Justice Department said that what happened to Chong was “unacceptable” and that “the DEA’s failure to impose significant discipline on these employees further demonstrates the need for a systemic review of DEA’s disciplinary process.”
The DEA is already under fire for its handling of a scandal in which agents admitted frequenting prostitutes in Colombia. Complaints over DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart’s failure to adequately punish the agents in that case led to her early retirement announcement last month.
The incident over Chong is likely to factor in the search for her replacement. Administration officials said they would search for a new agency head who could beef up its internal disciplinary procedures and create a culture that would hold agents more accountable for their actions.
At the same time, several members of Congress - also concerned over the Chong case - have indicated they will move to give the next administrator more authority over civil service disciplinary rules, which DEA officials blamed for the light punishment in both cases.
Chong, who was never charged with a crime, was kept in total isolation with his hands handcuffed behind his back in a windowless cell with no bathroom. Midway through the ordeal, someone turned off the light in his cell, leaving him in darkness. Chong periodically shouted for help and, at some point, slipped out of one of his handcuffs.
After he was found, Chong was hospitalized for four days. He and his lawyers said at a news conference last summer that he underwent intensive therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. The DEA paid Chong a $4.1-million settlement.
Last month, the DEA’s Board of Professional Conduct issued four reprimands to DEA agents involved in the incident and a five-day suspension without pay to another. The supervisor in charge at the time received a seven-day suspension.
Gene Iredale, a San Diego lawyer who represents Chong, said the punishments were insufficient.
“In a situation where someone goes over four days without food and water and almost dies, some reprimands and a couple of brief suspensions are not proportionate to the danger that was caused by this misconduct,” Iredale said. “I cannot accept that the head of the agency was powerless to ensure there would be appropriate punishment meted out. It may be that the regime of Miss Leonhart created a culture of unaccountability.” Rusty Payne, a DEA spokesman, said the Justice Department inspector general’s investigation into the incident was referred to the agency’s Board of Professional Conduct, which recommended the punishments to a top independent official.  Under current civil service regulations, the DEA administrator is not permitted to intervene in disciplinary matters.
But Payne said the institutional problems that led to Chong being forgotten in his cell had been fixed.
“It was a terrible, tragic mistake and one we have learned from, and we are going to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he said.
Justice Department officials and lawmakers remain dissatisfied with the DEA’s handling of the matter.
“The Department of Justice has serious concerns about the adequacy of the discipline that DEA imposed on its employees,” spokesman Patrick Rodenbush said. Former Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. ordered a review of the DEA’s disciplinary procedures, Rodenbush said, and the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility “will make recommendations on how to improve the investigative and disciplinary processes for all allegations of misconduct at DEA.”
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said Tuesday that the Justice Department letter did not address all his concerns about the incident.
“The Drug Enforcement Administration still has a lot of explaining to do,” Grassley said. “This is a very serious matter and questions should be answered to ensure a tragedy like this doesn’t happen again.”
Leonhart, under pressure from the Obama administration, announced April 21 that she was stepping down amid criticism over the Colombia scandal. She is due to leave office this month.
Seven DEA agents received suspensions ranging from two to 10 days for participating in sex parties with prostitutes while on assignment in Colombia, going back as far as 2001.
At a hearing in April, House members were incredulous at Leonhart’s testimony that she had no power to issue more serious punishments.  The committee issued a bipartisan statement of “no confidence” in Leonhart’s leadership.
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Wed, 06 May 2015
Source: Albuquerque Journal (NM)
Copyright: 2015 Albuquerque Journal
Contact: opinion@abqjournal.com
Website: http://www.abqjournal.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/10
Author: Joline Gutierrez Krueger
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/af.htm (Asset Forfeiture)

DEA TO TRAVELER: THANKS, I’LL TAKE THAT CASH
Maybe he should have taken traveler’s checks. But it’s too late for that now. All the money - $16,000 in cash - that Joseph Rivers said he had saved and relatives had given him to launch his dream in Hollywood is gone, seized during his trip out West not by thieves but by Drug Enforcement Administration agents during a stop at the Amtrak train station in Albuquerque.
An incident some might argue is still theft, just with the
government’s blessing.

Rivers, 22, wasn’t detained and has not been charged with any crime since his money was taken last month.
That doesn’t matter. Under a federal law enforcement tool called civil asset forfeiture, he need never be arrested or convicted of a crime for the government to take away his cash, cars or property - and keep it.
Agencies like the DEA can confiscate money or property if they have a hunch, a suspicion, a notion that maybe, possibly, perhaps the items are connected with narcotics. Or something else illegal.
Or maybe the fact that the person holding a bunch of cash is a young black man is good enough.
“What this is, is having your money stolen by a federal agent acting under the color of law,” said Michael Pancer, a San Diego attorney who represents Rivers, an aspiring music video producer. “It’s a national epidemic. If my office got four to five cases just recently, and I’m just one attorney, you know this is happening thousands of times.”
A Washington Post investigation last year found that local, state and federal agents nationwide have seized $2.5 billion in cash from almost 62,000 people since 2001 - without warrants or indictments.  It’s unknown how many got their money back.
It happened, Rivers said, to him on April 15 as he was traveling on Amtrak from Dearborn, Mich., near his hometown of Romulus, Mich., to Los Angeles to fulfill his dream of making a music video. Rivers, in an email, said he had saved his money for years, and his mother and other relatives scraped together the rest of the $16,000.
Rivers said he carried his savings in cash because he has had problems in the past with taking out large sums of money from out-of-state banks.
A DEA agent boarded the train at the Albuquerque Amtrak station and began asking various passengers, including Rivers, where they were going and why. When Rivers replied that he was headed to LA to make a music video, the agent asked to search his bags. Rivers complied.
Rivers was the only passenger singled out for a search by DEA agents
? and the only black person on his portion of the train, Pancer said.

In one of the bags, the agent found the cash, still in the Michigan bank envelope.
“I even allowed him to call my mother, a military veteran and (hospital) coordinator, to corroborate my story,” Rivers said. “Even with all of this, the officers decided to take my money because he stated that he believed that the money was involved in some type of narcotic activity.”
Rivers was left penniless, his dream deferred.
“These officers took everything that I had worked so hard to save and even money that was given to me by family that believed in me,” Rivers said in his email. “I told (the DEA agents) I had no money and no means to survive in Los Angeles if they took my money. They informed me that it was my responsibility to figure out how I was going to do that.”
Other travelers had witnessed what happened. One of them, a New Mexico man I’ve written about before but who asked that I not mention his name, provided a way for Rivers to get home, contacted attorneys - and me.
“He was literally like my guardian angel that came out of nowhere,” Rivers said.
Sean Waite, the agent in charge for the DEA in Albuquerque, said he could not comment on the Rivers case because it is ongoing. He disputed allegations that Rivers was targeted because of his race.
Waite said that in general DEA agents look for “indicators” such as whether the person bought an expensive one-way ticket with cash, if the person is traveling from or to a city known as a hot spot for drug activity, if the person’s story has inconsistencies or if the large sums of money found could have been transported by more conventional means.
“We don’t have to prove that the person is guilty,” Waite said. “It’s that the money is presumed to be guilty.”
DEA agents may choose to ask the person whether his or her possessions can be searched in what is called a “consensual encounter.” If the subject refuses, the bags - but not the person - can be held until a search warrant is obtained, he said.
Waite said that he could not provide exact figures on how often seizures occur in Albuquerque but that last week the DEA had five “consensual encounters” that resulted in seizures.
Whatever is seized is held during an internal administrative process (read: not public) while a case is made to connect the property to narcotics. Subjects can file a claim to have the items returned - and then they wait, sometimes forever.
While travelers like Rivers still have to worry about DEA agents, state and local law enforcement in New Mexico no longer has these virtually unlimited seizure powers. Five days before Rivers’ encounter in Albuquerque, Gov. Susana Martinez signed into law a bill that bars state and local law enforcement from seizing money or property under civil asset forfeiture. The law takes effect in July.
But the new state law won’t supersede the federal law, meaning federal agencies such as the DEA are still free to take your cash on arguably the flimsiest of legal grounds.
Meanwhile, Rivers is back in Michigan, dreaming, praying.
“He’s handed this over to God,” his attorney said.
Which seems infinitely safer than handing over anything further to government agents.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Wed, 06 May 2015
Source: Albuquerque Journal (NM)
Copyright: 2015 Albuquerque Journal
Contact: opinion@abqjournal.com
Website: http://www.abqjournal.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/10
Author: Olivier Uyttebrouck

FLORIDA FIRM TO DEVELOP MEDICAL POT INVENTORY SYSTEM
‘Seed-To-Sale’ Idea Tracks Plants’ Lives
New Mexico has awarded a contract to a Florida-based software company to develop a medical marijuana “seedto-sale” inventory system designed to track each plant through the production cycle and cut the likelihood of fraudulent sales, a company official said.
The system also calls for medical marijuana patients to receive a photo-ID smartcard that contains an integrated circuit, said Patrick Vo, co-CEO of BioTrackTHC, the firm awarded the contract.
Swiping the card also will verify the card’s authenticity and show the retailer how much marijuana the patient has purchased that month, even if the patient has visited several retailers, he said. New Mexico has about 14,100 patients licensed to buy medical cannabis.
“This is going to be a huge protection to the dispensary to make sure they don’t unintentionally break regs by over-dispensing to a patient,” Vo said.
BioTrackTHC will provide the New Mexico Department of Health, which oversees the medical marijuana program, with a “seed-to-sale traceability system” similar to one the firm designed for Washington State, which legalized recreational marijuana use in 2013.
BioTrackTHC is a division of Bio-Tech Medical Software Inc. of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
The system assigns a unique identifier to each marijuana plant and follows it through its production life cycle, from cultivation and harvest to point-of-sale.
“We have now married the inventory to the patient tracking,” Vo said of the system under development for New Mexico.
“It is an anti-diversion tool,” he said. “It prevents black-market product from getting into the system. It prevents product from getting out so that it doesn’t get into the hands of kids. It keeps the federal government comfortable.”
The contract also calls for BioTrackTHC to create a webbased registration system for patients that will allow them to complete an application online and submit it electronically to the state Department of Health.
The Department of Health awarded the contract last month and expects to have the system in place later this year, spokesman Kenny Vigil said.
The firm’s compensation will not exceed $58,000, Vigil said. No fee increases are expected for patients or medical marijuana producers, he said.
Brian Smith, spokesman for the Washington State Liquor Control Board, which oversees the state’s recreational marijuana industry, said BioTrack’s software “is working as planned.”
The system allows Washington to track the precise number of marijuana plants in the production pipeline, which recently totalled 928,000 plants owned by 647 producers, processors and retailers, Smith said.
Ramsey Hamide, owner of Main Street Marijuana, a pot retailer in Vancouver, Wash., said BioTrack has worked out many of the bugs since it rolled out the system in 2013.
“Initially, it was a bumpy start for BioTrack in Washington, but I think they have definitely done a good job of staying ahead of the competition,” said Hamide, who estimated his monthly marijuana sales at $1.5 million.
“We don’t want any blackmarket marijuana coming into the recreational system,” he said. “BioTrack tracks the marijuana from the time it is planted until it is harvested and the end product is sold to the consumer.”
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Wed, 06 May 2015
Source: Seattle Weekly (WA)
Column: Higher Ground
Copyright: 2015 Village Voice Media
Contact:
http://www.seattleweekly.com/feedback/EmailAnEmployee?department=letters
Website: http://www.seattleweekly.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/410
Author: Michael A. Stusser

COME OVER TO THE GREEN SIDE
When deciding what you think about marijuana legalization, it’s important to ask, “What’s in it for me?”
The most recent Pew Research Center poll shows that a majority of Americans nationwide, 53 percent, now support the legalization of cannabis. I’m actually surprised it’s that low, but then again, I’m a marijuana columnist.
But here is the most interesting stat from that poll: Of those surveyed who now support legalization but changed their minds on the issue (40 percent of the 53 percent), the main reason for the shift was self-interest. “The more that people learn about marijuana and look at the benefits of legalization,” noted Tom Angell, Chairman of the Marijuana Policy Project, “the more likely they are to support reform.”
Given this new info-and a desire to bring the 47 percent who remain prohibitionists out of the Dark Ages-I’d like to lay out some new bennies about cannabis.
Less drinking! Fewer hangovers! Weed’s been proven to help people cut back on their drinking. A study in Harm Reduction Journal showed that more and more drinkers are replacing booze, prescription drugs, and other harmful and illegal drugs with pot. Not only is marijuana safer than alcohol, it’s less likely to cause withdrawal problems, not to mention liver failure.
Game of Thrones. Imagine watching it while stoned to the BeJesus!
A catalyst for creativity. Ask Jon Stewart, Maya Angelou, Natalie Portman, Carl Sagan, Dr. Gupta, Rihanna, Bob Marley, Sergey Brin, or President Obama. Ganja has been shown to have positive creative effects-including better test results when individuals are asked to come up with new ideas. On the flip side, short-term memories tend to function worse when high.
Endocannabinoids fight brain aging. You can do the New York Times crossword, sudoku, or smoke a fatty. It’s a no-brainer.
One word: Nugtella. It’s a delicious hazelnut cannabis-infused Nutella treat!
Verbal fluency. Cannabis can create a cacophony of creative chasms for cogent cognitive communication (man).
Epileptic seizures are a downer. Almost 90 percent of Americans polled now believe that folks should have access to medical marijuana if a doc says it can help.
Vinyl. The chances of someone dusting off their record player and spinning some of the amazing vinyl records stored away in a crate somewhere increases 947 percent if the individual smokes herb.
We need the “War on Drugs” money. Fill in the blank: I’d rather spend the $41.3 billion per year on _____.
Cannabis is eco-friendly. Not only does the plant grow like a weed, but it’s able to suck up underground toxins (a process called phytoremediation), which makes for healthier and better farmland.
Legalization is a conservative cause. Smaller, unobtrusive government, states’ rights, individual liberties, etc.
Paying for prisoners is annoying. Half of the 1.6 million people currently in prison are serving time for drug offenses, at a cost of $25,000 a year apiece. Do the math. (It’s $40 billion.)
More time in sweatpants!
Sick of sucking up to the Saudis? Cannabis is an alternative fuel source. Both cannabis and the hemp plant crank out what is known as biomass. Biomass can be turned into all kinds of fuel, including biodiesel and ethanol. Not quite a solar Tesla, but close.
Add it to your smoothie. The cannabis plant is chock-full of disease-fighting, anti-inflammatory antioxidants. So even if you don’t want to get stoned, raw cannabis is a great additive to go with your wheatgrass and Super Blue Green Algae. The cannabis seed is rich in protein, fatty acids, and omega-3. And fiber! Don’t forget about fiber!
Cannabis causes job growth. Who doesn’t want more jobs (and tax revenue)? The marijuana market is filled with them: budtenders, trimmers, new cannabis-app designers, security guards, developers of seed-to-sale tracking software and weed websites, and of course cannabis columnists (thank you!).
Less familial strife. In a study of 635 couples over nine years (culminating in 2014), the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors found that couples who smoke weed together have lower rates of domestic violence.
Tax revenue. If we taxed marijuana at the same rate as alcohol and tobacco, it would bring in more than $8.7 billion a year nationwide.  Pot can fix the potholes!
Weed makes ya skinny. Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health studied 4,600 adults and found that “current marijuana users had significantly smaller waist circumference than participants who had never used marijuana, even after adjusting for factors like age, sex, tobacco and alcohol use, and physical activity levels. They also had higher levels of HDL [i.e., good cholesterol].” A study from the American Journal of Epidemiology also found that peeps who smoke pot are less prone to obesity-even though they did indeed chow more calories from the munchies.
People are getting baked . . . whether it’s legal or not. Finally, for those who haven’t been stoned since college, weed is fun. Maybe you forgot. Maybe it made you paranoid, or you were concerned the DEA might break down your dorm room door. Forget all that-it’s time to party like it’s 2099! Come on over . . . to the green side!
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Wed, 06 May 2015
Source: Minneapolis Star-Tribune (MN)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/hkxC470n
Copyright: 2015 Star Tribune
Contact: Opinion@startribune.com
Website: http://www.startribune.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/266
Author: Jennifer Brooks

IN STATE’S MARIJUANA GREENHOUSES, MEDICINE IS IN BLOOM
In an Otsego greenhouse, Minnesota’s first medical cannabis crop is in bloom.
Young marijuana plants, fuzzy and pungent, stretched toward the skylights as Dr. Kyle Kingsley threaded between the plant beds, leading state media on a tour of the Minnesota Medical Solutions facility that will supply half of Minnesota’s legal medical marijuana.
“You’ll see this place is pretty Spartan,” Kingsley said, walking past bare white walls, concrete floors, and banks of monitors scanning the secure facility and its perimeter. There’s a faint skunky smell in the air that hits visitors as soon as they reach the first of the three locked doors that lead into the building. “We put our focus on science and medicine,” Kingsley continued, walking among rows of seedlings and plants. More than 4,000 plants and dozens of cannabis strains fill the greenhouses and spill out into the atriums.
The company, which found out in December it would be one of the state’s two suppliers, is making plans to expand this summer. “Our focus is on suffering patients and getting patients medicine on July 1.”
Minnesota is just months away from medical marijuana legalization.  Between now and July 1, these plants will be culled, dried and distilled into enough pills and liquids to serve an unknown number of patients with a limited number of severe medical conditions.
The doctors, pharmacists, chemists, horticulturalists and security staff here at Minnesota Medical Solutions say they’ll be ready when the company opens its first dispensary July 1 in Minneapolis, with its other three retail locations to follow over the next two months.
LeafLine Labs, which will be producing the other half of the state’s cannabis crop, plans to open its first dispensary in Eagan on July 1 as well.
Dr. Andrew Bachman, an emergency room physician and co-founder of LeafLine Labs, said his company will be ready as well.
“It’s always challenging to be a pioneer. If trailblazing were easy, everyone would do it,” he said. “We’re thrilled by the prospect of the smile on someone’s face when they get the medicine they need.”
LeafLine hasn’t opened its facilities to tours yet, but Bachman, who grew up playing in the greenhouses of his family’s garden stores, said he has had a “visceral response” to the little marijuana plants growing in his company’s facility in Cottage Grove - plants he said society has been taught to view as bad or dangerous.
“The day I first saw our [plants] in our facility, it made me sad and
somewhat angry,” Bachman said. “I looked at a beautiful little plant
. It smells like tomatoes, it grows like a plant, it just happens to
have a lot of mysteries and secrets in it that we deserve - and
patients are ready - to unlock.” State’s different approach
Next to the plant rooms at MinnMed, chemist Conor Smith scans the peaks and valleys on a chromatograph in his laboratory. One peak charts the amount of THC in the cannabis sample - the psychoactive compound that gives marijuana its buzz - and another measures the therapeutic cannabidiol compounds in the sample.
This particular 50-50 blend might go to a cancer patient fighting nausea from chemotherapy.
On a table in the next room, a rainbow of bottles shows off Minnesota Medical Solution’s product lines - pills, vaporizers, vials and droppers for oils, each color coded green, blue, yellow, purple, according to potency.
Minnesota is taking a uniquely clinical approach to medical marijuana. Instead of sending patients home with a baggie of the drug, cannabis will be sold only in refined pill or liquid form. The system - not popular with some patients who might prefer more traditional and cheaper forms of the drug - does allow the company to control the quality and potency of the drug and to track how effective doses are for patients.
“It’s really interesting. Other states aren’t doing this,” said Smith, who earned his doctorate in inorganic chemistry from the University of Minnesota. Kingsley said the company has been deluged with applications from scientists and clinicians interested in getting in on the ground floor of the fledgling industry. “I like doing research and right now we’re turning research into products.  It’s a very interesting process to try to optimize the research from the plants.”
Kingsley began building this facility months before he knew whether the state would select his company as one of its two designated medical cannabis manufacturers. He took the risk, he said, to ensure he’d be ready for the summer start, ready for the patients he saw in his practice who were battling agonizing diseases like pancreatic cancer, and hoping this new drug might offer relief.
Thousands of patients and their families are taking more than a clinical interest in this crop. Kim Kelsey and Kathy Engstrom, who both have sons suffering from serious seizure disorders, joined the tour of the Minnesota Medical Solutions facility.
They don’t know if their boys will benefit from medical cannabis, but they’re eager to try after their long years of fighting to get the bill passed in the Legislature.
“We have hope,” said Kelsey, whose 23-year-old son has suffered from life-threatening seizures since he was 4 years old. “It’s given us the first hope that we’ve had in a really, really, really, really long time.”
There are many stories of children and adults with seizure disorders who have benefited from cannabis oil. Even if the treatment doesn’t help her son, Kelsey said the state’s research into the drug’s effectiveness might help others.
“Yes, we want a miracle. Who doesn’t if you have a sick child?” she
said. “But if it helps a little or it doesn’t, at least we can give
the state the research ... and feedback and maybe it’ll help somebody
else. It’s not all about us. It’s about everybody.” ‘Won’t be like
Black Friday’
There’s no way of knowing how many patients will sign up for the state program. Registration begins in June and the health department’s best guess is around 5,000, although that number could jump if the state expands the program next year to include patients suffering from intractable pain. Assistant Health Commissioner Manny Munson-Regala, who is overseeing the cannabis rollout, isn’t expecting to see long lines outside dispensaries, like other states experienced.
“It won’t be like Black Friday at Best Buy,” he said.
Minnesota had less than a year to put its medical marijuana program together, and plenty of people were skeptical that it would be up and running in time, Munson-Regala said. “I feel like we’ve done the best we could do to ensure that the folks who need medication get it, and abuse is minimized.”
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Wed, 06 May 2015
Source: Providence Journal, The (RI)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/F6eXKpPE
Copyright: 2015 The Providence Journal Company
Contact: letters@providencejournal.com
Website: http://www.providencejournal.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/352
Author: Donita Naylor
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/spirit.htm (Spiritual or Sacramental)

CHURCH THAT USES MARIJUANA TO CONDUCT SERVICE AT ROGER WILLIAMS
NATIONAL MEMORIAL
PROVIDENCE, R.I. - A church that meets in a West Greenwich home and uses cannabis in its services has obtained a permit from the National Park Service to conduct a religious service at the Roger Williams National Memorial, a site chosen for its significance to the idea of religious freedom.
Cannabis activists Anne Armstrong and Alan Gordon, representatives of The Healing Church, applied for a permit for a 45-minute Celebration of Holy Fire at 8 p.m. on May 23 for about 100 people on the small federal property at 282 North Main St.
Gordon, who doesn’t use the word marijuana, which he says was introduced “to stir up ethnic, religious and racial prejudices of the enfranchised white power structure,” said the service will include cannabis in three forms: an anointing oil made according to the formula given in Exodus 30:23, using cannabis where the Torah calls for Kaneh-bosm, which some Christian Bibles have translated as calamus, a kind of reed; a fermented milk-and-honey-and-cannabis drink; and smoked or vaporized cannabis.
Jennifer Smith, site manager for the national property, on Tuesday said the permit allows the group to assemble, but, as her April 22 cover letter that accompanied the permit stated, “does not grant permission to undertake any activity that may violate applicable federal, state or municipal laws or regulations. This includes the Controlled Substances Act, and the laws of the state of Rhode Island governing the possession and use of controlled substances, and 36 C.F.R 2.35, which prohibits the illegal possession or delivery of controlled substances within the National Park System.”
Smith said that as part of the group’s First Amendment exercise, “they can raise awareness of their cause, their church, what they’re trying to do,” they can have signs and literature, and they can “speak out about their positions regarding the issue.”
Armstrong and Gordon, who are among the residents of 99 Hudson Pond Rd., West Greenwich, where the church meets and where Armstrong has her practice, The Healing Center, said their right to use cannabis in a religious service is protected by the First Amendment, which overrides any other laws.
“The Constitution clearly says Congress may make no law impeding the free exercise of religion,” said Gordon, who identifies himself as a member of the New England Cannabist Anti-Discrimination Taskforce.
Both are prepared to risk arrest on May 23, which was chosen because it’s both the Hebrew holiday of Shavuot, or Feast of Weeks, the commemoration of God’s giving of the Torah to the Jewish people on Mount Sinai, and, for Christians, it’s the eve of Pentecost, which celebrates the Holy Spirit descending upon the Apostles at the end of the Easter season. Armstrong and Gordon call themselves Judeo-Christian “cannabists.”
Smith said she has not discussed whether federal law enforcement will be called in, saying she focused first on getting the permit in place.
Obtaining the permit, Gordon said, “is a recognition of our right to use cannabis ... with the implied constitutional loophole in there.”
“The bottom line,” Armstrong said Tuesday, “they’re permitting our service. They know that our service includes cannabis.”
The application describes the proposed activity as: “A Celebration of Holy Fire. At Sundown on Erev Shavuot (Pentecost Eve) The Healing Church will conduct a prayer service which will last approximately 45 minutes and include the sacrament. “
The application, filled out by hand, said the service would include the “use and distribution of KNH BSM,” which is the Hebrew vowel-less way of writing Kaneh-Bos, and then the word written in Hebrew letters, followed by, “(Cannabis sativa) as described in the ancient scriptures.”
People who go regularly to The Healing Church believe that the cannabis plant is a gift from God and not an item for trade, Armstrong said. “If a person can receive that with reverence and thanksgiving, we can share our sacred matter with them.”
Gordon said the cannabis will be shared only with people they know and in small amounts. “Nobody’s going to be falling down,” he said.  “People who are watching wouldn’t be able to observe any difference in our behavior.”
Armstrong, who is a deaconness and evangelist in the church, said she will officiate. She said they will be “concelebrating with our Rastafarian brothers, who have held this plant to be sacred since King Solomon’s time.”
She said people from the First Cannabis Church of Eugene, Ore., and other cannabis-using churches in Alabama and Utah had said they planned to attend.
Armstrong ran for governor last year as a write-in candidate from the R.I. Compassion Party and enjoyed a brief notoriety in September when her YouTube campaign ad, which ended with her smoking pot, came to national attention.
“If someone feels the need to arrest me for practicing my religion in public,” she said, she would feel “like Daniel in the lion’s den.”
Her reference was to an Old Testament story about a Hebrew who refused to give up his religious convictions and was thrown to the lions, who, to the king’s surprise, did not harm him.
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Pubdate: Thu, 07 May 2015
Source: North Coast Journal (Arcata, CA)
Column: The Week in Weed
Copyright: 2015 North Coast Journal
Contact: letters@northcoastjournal.com
Website: http://www.northcoastjournal.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2833
Author: Grant Scott-Goforth

WATERBOARDING WEED
California’s water board is making a bid to become the state’s strictest marijuana regulator.
Following cultivation site visits earlier this year, the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board has proposed a system to register nearly every outdoor grower in Northern California.
The regulatory program, as drafted, would require registration - including names and an annual fee - from growers whose properties utilize drainage features, stream crossings, water diversion or storage, or fertilizers, and whose grows produce irrigation runoff, waste and domestic wastewater. While the order will exempt grows of fewer than 6 mature or 12 immature plants, it’s hard to imagine an outdoor grow that doesn’t feature at least one of the impacts listed as a “controllable water quality factor.”
The move is a response to a region “inundated with marijuana cultivation” and improper development on private rural properties, according to the board, which uses the federal Clean Water Act and state laws to frame its proposed guidelines.
Operators and property owners of cultivation sites would be responsible for registering grows, which would be categorized in three tiers. Tier One grows would be considered “low risk,” with cultivation areas under 2,000 square feet at least 200 feet from surface water, gradual slopes and no water diversion between May 15 and October 31.
Tier Two growers would implement a water resource protection plan, and Tier Three sites would require “cleanup, restoration and/or remediation based on current or past land development/management activities.”
All tiers would require enrollment and payment of an annual fee, and be subject to administrative penalties if growers fall out of compliance. The board anticipates a conciliatory approach in the beginning of implementation, with outreach to growers and industry organizations to encourage voluntary compliance. With an estimated 4,000 large-scale grows in Humboldt County alone, it’s unclear exactly how many farmers will be sending in their registration.
That approach has worked in the early stages of a site-visit pilot program that the state water board launched in January, with Sproul Creek growers eager to hear what they needed to come into compliance, according to state officials. Should the board meet “recalcitrant” growers, the draft report says, enforcement, including administrative penalties and required waste discharge reports, could follow.
The proposal is still in draft form, and the water board is holding an eight-hour public workshop this Thursday, May 7, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Wharfinger Building in Eureka. Comments on the proposal will be accepted through June 8. Visit www.waterboards.ca.gov/northcoast or find this story at www.northcoastjournal.com for links to the entire proposed draft and more information.
Meanwhile, the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors agreed unanimously to sign a six-county letter urging state legislators to ensure local control over the cultivation, production and sale of marijuana should recreational, or adult-use, weed go legal in 2016.
Supervisors Mark Lovelace and Estelle Fennell represented the county at a March summit in Santa Rosa, meeting with lawmakers from Del Norte, Lake, Mendocino, Sonoma and Trinity counties to discuss their “unique insight into the significant problems and opportunities” posed by legalization and regulation.
Saying that marijuana’s economic, environmental and cultural effects vary widely from region to region, the counties called for Sacramento lawmakers to listen to small communities when it comes to developing licensing, taxation, land use and environmental regulations.
Without the statement, Fennell said, “we might wind up with the kind of legislation that might be very deleterious to our environment - to every aspect of our life in Humboldt County. ... We’re making a powerful statement and I think it will be heard.”
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Pubdate: Thu, 07 May 2015
Source: Boulder Weekly (CO)
Copyright: 2015 Boulder Weekly
Contact: letters@boulderweekly.com
Website: http://www.boulderweekly.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/57
Author: Leland Rucker

PUERTO RICO GOVERNOR APPROVES MEDICAL MARIJUANA
Another U.S. territory will allow medical marijuana for patients.  Puerto Rican Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla signed an executive order this week that authorizes marijuana for certain medical uses under the control of the health department.
The move comes in response to a medical marijuana bill introduced in the Puerto Rico legislature in 2013 that has been bogged down ever since. The territory has no ballot initiative process, so the governor decided to act on his own. The health secretary now has three months to produce a report for how the territory will regulate it. It joins 23 U.S. states, the District of Colombia and Guam that allow medical marijuana.
The announcement came just a couple of days after the U.S. House of Representatives defeated an amendment offered by Rep. Earl Blumenauer that would have allowed Veterans Affairs doctors to discuss medical marijuana as a treatment for symptoms of post-traumatic stress in states where it is legal.
This one was kind of a no-brainer. The Equal Access amendment to the 2016 Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Appropriations bill would have given veterans the same access to medical marijuana as any other citizen in states where it is allowed.  And it came within a week of a CNN Weeds special that showed physicians seeking to do research after dealing with vets self-medicating with cannabis because their prescribed drugs, in the words of one doctor, “were turning them into zombies.”
None of that persuaded Rep. John Fleming, a physician as well as a congressman. When asked why he voted against the bill, he said, “So, why in the world would we give a drug that is addictive, that is prohibited as a Schedule One, that is not accepted for any medical disease or disorder, and enhances psychosis and schizophrenia?”
So much for looking at both sides of an issue. But this is the same fellow, by the way, who last year told the Family Research Council that marijuana is a gateway drug.
“We have proven that scientifically,” he said. “To think that today’s meth user was not yesterday’s marijuana user is actually just a flight of fantasy.”
Don’t miss this short clip of Rep. Blumenauer looking his colleagues
in the eye and bluntly telling them to stop promulgating lies like
that, reminding them that veterans are being treated like secondclass
citizens, prescribed legal opiates that often worsen their
conditions, which forces many into the black market for medicine:
http://bit.ly/1bZ6hpG
Lawmakers with no interest in looking beyond their own noses continue to influence the debate. In Alabama, the Medical Marijuana Patient Safe Access Act recently passed out of the state senate’s Judiciary Committee by a unanimous vote. It would have approved 25 qualifying medical conditions and allowed patients to apply for a license to cultivate their own plants or purchase cannabis from state-regulated dispensaries under the Department of Agriculture.
Senator Jabo Waggoner, who oversees the Rules Committee, killed all discussion of the bill and dismissed it with a shrug, saying simply that Alabama doesn’t need it. And, of course, he knows best. Waggoner has been in the state legislature as a representative or senator since 1966 (that’s no typo), which means he probably still believes Richard Nixon was right about marijuana.
Even worse is the recent case in Kansas where a Garden City woman had her son taken away after he spoke up about the benefits of medical marijuana during a grade-school class discussion. Though it is illegal in Kansas, the latest senate bills having been voted down in February, massage therapist Shona Banda has been using medical marijuana for five years to stave off symptoms of Crohn’s Disease.  School officials contacted police, which searched her home and found cannabis and oil.
But instead of arresting her for possession, they took the boy into state custody, where he remains while prosecutors decide whether charges will be filed against Banda. The case is drawing international attention and support for her. After viewing a video Banda took with her phone when she found police on her property, even Glenn Beck said the officers violated Banda’s constitutional rights and is now considering calling for legalization.
There is a bright spot in all this. Fools like Fleming and Waggoner are moving further to the minority side in these debates. Last year a similar bill in the U.S. House went down 225-195. The vote this time was 213-210, including 35 Republicans.
You can hear Leland discuss his most recent column and Colorado
cannabis issues each Thursday morning on KGNU. http://news.kgnu.org/weed
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Pubdate: Thu, 07 May 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: William Breathes

WILLIAM BREATHES PUTS DOWN THE POT PIPE
Dear Stoners: Time flies when you’re having fun. Time flies even faster when you’re half-baked and have the greatest job in the world.  After two-plus amazing years of answering your (often hysterical) questions about cannabis and five-plus unforgettable years as the nation’s first newspaper cannabis critic, I’ve decided to hang up my bandanna, sunglasses and Rockies hat and put down my critic’s pipe.
It’s all gone by in a flash, and I’m ready to slow things down.
There are several reasons I’m bowing out, but in the end it really comes down to time: I just didn’t have the time to devote to marijuana coverage that the beat deserves. On top of that, I found myself wanting more time with my family (and with toddlers, that rarely involves pot), and increasingly interested in things outside of the amazing (and often frustrating) world of cannabis culture and news. What is important (to me, at least) is that I get to spend more time at home with my family.
The time came for me to make a choice, and while it wasn’t an easy one to make, the time is right.
Am I done with cannabis? Not at all. I’ve been in love with Mary Jane for more than twenty years, and she’s still going to be a part of my life. I just won’t be telling you about the ripe, pungent, rubbery tartness of my Sour Diesel in a dispensary review at westword.com or answering your questions about cannabis in this space every week. I will still be nerding out over amazing cannabis, though, growing a few plants and enjoying the freedoms we’ve gained over the past few years to the fullest.
I feel sad and excited to move on. Westword has been a great home for me, and I’ve always felt lucky to write for the paper I’ve admired for as long as I can remember. It’s hard to leave home. But even as I leave, I’m proud about what we’ve built here at Westword, and proud to know that the paper, the bimonthly Chronicle and the website will keep up the amazing coverage we’ve established over the past half-decade.
Mostly, thanks to all of you for reading. It’s why any reporter does what he does, and I’ve been a lucky man to be able to keep this community informed.
It’s been the time of my life.
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Thu, 07 May 2015
Source: Sacramento News & Review (CA)
Copyright: 2015 Chico Community Publishing, Inc.
Contact: sactoletters@newsreview.com
Website: http://newsreview.com/sacto/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/540
Author: Ngaio Bealum

MEDICINAL MONOPOLY
Hey, what the hell is going on with the medical cannabis industry in Oregon and Washington?
? Wes Coast

Business and politics. The Washington State Legislature recently passed Senate Bill 5052, which will force all of the medical cannabis clubs in Washington to close so that the recreational clubs can take control of the market. The law also decreases the amount of cannabis a medical patient can possess, and the amount of cannabis that they can grow. This law is dumb and it is an insult to all of the medical patients that supported recreational legalization in Washington because they were told that I-502 (the initiative to legalize cannabis in Washington) would not affect medical cannabis users.
Down in Oregon, the cannabis patients are in a pitched battle with a legislature which is trying to do the same thing as Washington’s. A concerted and effective effort has succeeded in getting some of the most egregious rules changed, but they have a long way to go.
This is one of the things I dislike about unbridled capitalism. The people in charge of regulating the new recreational cannabis market want to make sure they maximize their profits, because duh. In Washington, a gram of recreational weed will run you about 20 bucks, while a gram of medicinal cannabis is about 10 dollars, even if it’s the same strain grown by the same people. Of course, the people who only see money want to make sure that everyone pays the highest price possible. But why mess with people who really need cannabis for their health? We need to make sure that any new California recreational marijuana law recognizes and supports sick people’s rights to access safe, affordable cannabis. Remember that this whole push toward recreational cannabis legalization was started by allowing safe access to medical cannabis for qualified patients. We must continue to show compassion and put patients first.
I am headed to Vegas in a few days. Is it true that my California letter of cannabis recommendation is good in Nevada?
? Jack Pot

Yes and no. While the new law allows California cannabis patients to possess and purchase medical marijuana from Nevada dispensaries, there are some hoops to jump through. And if my recent encounter with the police department in Carlin, Nev., is any indicator, Nevada has a long way to go. The cop pulled me over for having expired tags on my rental car. (I am currently discussing this issue with the rental car company, but if I am unsatisfied with their response, I will name and shame them.) I got a ticket for $740 (possession of less than an ounce) and they sent me on my way. Ten years ago, I would still be in custody and looking at serious jail time. I will leave you with what one of the cops said to me as I was standing there in handcuffs while they searched my car: “Next year, all this stuff will be legal anyway.” I really hope he’s right.
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Pubdate: Thu, 07 May 2015
Source: Guardian, The (UK)
Copyright: 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited
Contact: guardian.letters@theguardian.com
Website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/175
Author: Sibylla Brodzinsky

US-FUNDED AIR WAR ON DRUGS TO BE GROUNDED BY CHEMICAL FEARS
For more than two decades, crop dusters have buzzed the skies of Colombia showering bright green fields of coca with chemical defoliant as part of a US-funded effort to stem the country’s production of cocaine. Farmers across the country have long complained that indiscriminate spraying also destroys legal crops, and that the chemical used - glyphosate - has caused everything from skin rashes and respiratory problems to diarrhoea and miscarriages.
Authorities in Colombia and the US  which has funded the aerial eradication programme with as much as $2bn (UKP1.3bn) since 2000 - argued that aerial spraying was the most effective and safest method of destroying coca plants - the raw material for cocaine.
But after 20 years and 4m acres sprayed, Colombia is now considering an about-face.
Following the finding from the World Health Organisation’s cancer research arm that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic”, the country’s health minister last week issued a recommendation that the government stop using it in its aerial spraying programme.
A decision on the recommendation is expected to be made at a meeting on 14 May of the National Narcotics Council, which sets Colombia’s drug policy.
“It would be unacceptable, even from an ethical standpoint, to have this evidence on the table and not accept it,” said the health minister, Alejandro Gaviria, a member of the council.
The US, which made the spraying programme an axis of its drug policy in Colombia, has staunchly defended use of the chemical, which is marketed by Monsanto under the name RoundUp.
“Colombia is a sovereign country and it must do what reflects its national interest, but they should take a serious look at the scientific evidence,” said William Brownfield, US assistant secretary of state for counter-narcotics, and a former ambassador to Colombia.  “There is not one single example of a person who has suffered damage from glyphosate in Colombia in the past 20 or 21 years,” he told Caracol Radio.
The looming possibility of an end to defoliant spraying appears to have prompted the White House to bring forward publication of its annual report on coca cultivation in Colombia. The figures released on Monday showed a sharp rise last year after six straight years of steady or dropping production. The land under coca cultivation in 2014 was up 39% to 112,000 hectares, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Potential cocaine production jumped 32% to 245 tonnes.
One State Department official suggested that the 2014 coca numbers would convince Colombian officials that cutting the spraying programme would be a mistake.
Under pressure from the US, Colombia began allowing the large-scale coca spraying programme in 1994. To date it has sprayed more than 4m acres, an area slightly larger than the US state of Connecticut.
It is the only country where coca is grown that allows aerial spraying, in part because its half-century-old internal conflict with leftist rebels prevents access to many remote areas.
But Colombia’s justice minister, Yesid Reyes, has said the Colombian government can not endanger its citizens. “If a programme like the eradication of illegal crops through aerial spraying has the possibility of harming the health of Colombians, the state has the obligation to protect its citizens,” said Reyes, who holds a seat on the narcotics council.
Other council members disagree: the government inspector general, Alejandro Ordonez, warned that ending the spray programme would play into the hands of leftwing Farc rebels who reap huge profits from the drug trade.
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Pubdate: Wed, 06 May 2015
Source: Willamette Week (Portland, OR)
Column: Willie Weed
Copyright: 2015 Willamette Week Newspaper
Contact: mzusman@wweek.com
Website: http://www.wweek.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/499
Author: Tyler Hurst

PDX POT
Earlier this year, for a trip to Arizona to see my beloved Seattle Mariners at spring training, I packed the kind of contraband that has ruined lives, has seen people shot, and is nearly totally legal in four states: cannabis.
In mid-March, midweek and midafternoon, I approached the security line at Portland International Airport. I was armed with a convenient “Flying out of Portland with Medical Cannabis” letter that included words from Port of Portland assistant general counsel Wendy Hain. The port has no official policy on pot-the letter says that, clearly-but Hain has done her best to dissuade the Transportation Security Administration agents from hassling us.
“Marijuana is not seized from a passenger who holds a valid Oregon Medical Marijuana card when boarding an aircraft at the Portland International Airport as long as the passenger is not carrying a quantity that exceeds an amount that he or she is lawfully authorized to possess,” she wrote.
Still, I braced myself to be whisked away to some dark, windowless room to have my bags and body searched.
Over and over again, I reminded myself exactly what I was carrying, which was three Squibs and a packet of Shrapnel from Lunchbox Alchemy. Packed in my see-through toiletry bag with all my liquids and OMMP card, the products were in their original packaging because transferring them to prescription bottles felt like I was exposing myself to the kind of debacle that befell an Oregon woman who was arrested in Japan, where she lives, for mailing herself prescription Adderall in non-original packaging. I figured my best bet was to be open and honest.
But I didn’t feel open and honest. I felt scared. I worried that my wife, also at the airport for a flight, would get in trouble with me.  All I wanted was an enjoyable, pain-free plane ride, followed by a few days of relaxed fun in the sun.
The relatively short line, previously a welcome sight, made me worry that security agents would be bored and have plenty of time to teach me a lesson about carrying cannabis.
I waited and hoped I didn’t sweat too much.
After seven excruciating minutes that had me picking prison nicknames and promising myself that I’d learn to fight on the very first day I did time, I made it to the boarding-pass check.
With a dismissive wave, he shooed me over to the TSA pre-check section, the only lane open on this slow afternoon. I paused, sure I’d been caught, only to be told to keep walking by the next guard. I looked back for my wife, but couldn’t see her.
Carry-on-sized bag in hand and laptop bag on shoulder, I passed this next guard and heard him tell me to keep my shoes on, keep all my items in my bag, to put both bags on the conveyor belt, and to take out my cellphone.
Oh no, this was it. I was fucked. Not only did they know I was carrying cannabis, they probably assumed I had cannabis in my system and didn’t want to even bother with the formality of checking my bag before showing me that windowless interrogation room.
I stepped forward, and what next came out of my mouth shocked even me. “But what about my toiletries? I have some med-“ I said, while fighting the urge to go all Tyler Durden on myself.
The guard cut me off, repeated his previous requests, and I froze.
Was this for real? Did he know? Oh my God, what was about to happen?
I walked through the standard metal detector, took two steps, turned left, and grabbed my two bags and phone. Next, I walked over a bench, unzipped the outer flap, removed my see-through bag, looked through it to make sure everything was still there, and repacked it in the main compartment. After texting my wife, I walked to my gate, and took a small bit of Squib in preparation for a long flight.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
Why can’t every flight be like this?
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Fri, 08 May 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
Authors: Kevin Dayton and Marcel Honore

POT SITES IN PIPELINE
Lawmakers OK a Bill That Provides for 16 Dispensaries, With Some
Predicting a Look at Full Legalization Later On
In its last major act of this year’s session, the Legislature has sent Gov. David Ige a bill that would give thousands of medical marijuana patients access to dispensaries in Hawaii. The Senate voted unanimously and the House voted 36-13 to pass House Bill 321, which allows for 16 medical pot dispensaries across the state, including six on Oahu. The move comes 15 years after state leaders authorized the prescription and use of the drug but failed to create a dispensary system where patients could purchase it, leaving patients to cultivate the pot on their own or acquire it on the black market.
“We should have done this much earlier - it should have been much simpler,” Sen. Sam Slom (R, Kahala-Hawaii Kai) said moments before the Senate vote. “Some of the patients that depended on us for use are no longer with us today.”
House and Senate lawmakers closed out the regular 60-day legislative session Thursday with high praise for one another for their accomplishments, which also included finally moving forward on other knotty problems such as privatizing state-run hospitals in Maui County and extending the excise tax surcharge to support Honolulu’s rail project.
In his closing speech on the House floor, Majority Leader Scott Saiki said the Democratic caucus “took on major challenges that festered here at the Legislature for many years. These challenges affect the structure of our government, the infrastructure of our islands and the well-being of our residents.”
Sen. Rosalyn Baker (D, West Maui-South Maui) praised the marijuana dispensaries bill for reflecting the work of a task force composed of medical pot advocates, law enforcement, lawmakers, state officials and others who met extensively last year and recommended a path forward for a dispensary system.
By establishing dispensaries, state leaders would ensure that “those patients that need medical marijuana to ease their pains, their convulsions, their other maladies that other kinds of pharmaceuticals or remedies don’t provide any relief, and we will now have a way to do that in a safe, controlled and effective way,” Baker said.
BUT THE MARIJUANA dispensaries bill came in for some harsh criticism in the House, where Rep. Bob McDermott (R, Ewa Beach-Iroquois Point) said the move to establish up to 16 dispensary sites under the bill is vastly out of proportion to the “infinitesimally small need out there” for medical marijuana.
“Perhaps a boutique-style solution, much smaller in scale, would be more appropriate, but this ... seems to me to be putting the infrastructure in place for fullblown legalization within five years, and I don’t think we need more booze and I don’t think we need more drugs,” he said.
McDermott said the state should provide access to medical marijuana for people who genuinely need it, but said many advocates for the dispensary bill are actually seeking outright legalization. Once they are successful in establishing dispensaries, those facilities can readily be converted to retail outlets with just a few “tweaks,” he suggested.
Some lawmakers agree. In fact, Senate Majority Leader J. Kalani English (D, East Maui-Upcountry-MolokaiLanai) told his colleagues on the Senate floor that legalization of recreational marijuana use is the “next step for Hawaii,” adding that the Legislature would address the issue in the next session.
Rep. Marcus Oshiro (D, Wahiawa-Whitmore-Poamoho) cited more than a dozen features in the bill that he considers flaws. Oshiro also said he also supports a well-run, carefully regulated system for providing medical marijuana to patients, but said the proposed law does not properly spell out how the operators of the potentially lucrative dispensaries will be selected.
“WE ONLY HAVE one shot at doing the right thing the right way,” he said. When the state allows private operators to open up shop here, “we are bringing a new enterprise to Hawaii’s shores, and it will be equal to or greater in the effect upon Hawaii’s people than the harvesting of sandalwood or whaling in the 1800s.”
Oshiro also cited language in the bill that allows dispensary operators to subcontract portions of their operations, a provision he said could be used to subvert requirements for background checks and other safeguards.
House Health Chairwoman Della Au Belatti disagreed, saying the bill spells out that potential dispensary operators will be evaluated for their financial stability as well as their ability to operate a business, meet security requirements and exercise inventory controls.  They will also be required to pass background checks, she said.
“This truly to me is the people’s bill, Mr. Speaker,” said Belatti (D, MoiliiliMakiki-Tantalus). “It has had many hands work on it.”
The session was punctuated by a rare and startling change of leadership in the Senate in the last week, but House and Senate lawmakers said that leadership turmoil did not halt the flow of legislation.
On Tuesday state Sen. Ron Kouchi abruptly replaced Sen. Donna Mercado Kim as Senate president, a transition that is so fresh that the new Senate leadership only announced portions of its new committee organization Wednesday evening.
IN SOME WAYS the session was proof positive of the political skills of House Speaker Joe Souki, who entered the 2015 session determined to drive the Legislature forward on several difficult and controversial issues.
One was the effort to establish a system of medical marijuana dispensaries, and another was finding a way to allow the state-run hospitals on his home island of Maui to be privatized despite the concerns of wary public worker unions that represent the hospital workers.
Souki (D, Waihee-WaiehuWailuku) also began the session with the clear objective of extending the half-percent excise tax surcharge on Oahu to bail out the Honolulu rail project, which is suffering from a $910 million budget shortfall.
While House and Senate lawmakers bargained with one another over the length of the tax extension and the specific features of the bill, Souki remained focused: The important thing, he said during the session, is to keep the project moving.
Each of those bills - marijuana dispensaries, the Maui privatization bill and the excise tax extension - ran into difficulties that put them in jeopardy during the session, but each of them passed in the end.
Souki cited those accomplishments and more in his closing remarks on the House floor, praising his colleagues for their work, their vision and their courage.
“We did it not to make headlines, but to make Hawaii the kind of place we are all proud to call home,” he said. “We did it for our families and our communities.”
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Pubdate: Fri, 08 May 2015
Source: Las Vegas Review-Journal (NV)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/2kDCwJrU
Copyright: 2015 Las Vegas Review-Journal
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Author: Richard N. Velotta

LOST WAR ON DRUGS
Investors See Opportunity in Decriminalization, Treatment
Richard Branson has brought his war on the war on drugs to Las Vegas.  Branson, the charismatic founder of the Virgin Group, was a panelist at a session debating U.S. drug policy at the Starbridge Capital Alternatives Conference, a high-level investment event that brings in top names in business, government and politics to discuss issues leading to wise investment decisions.
Among the big names at the four-day conference at Bellagio that ends today were former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke; energy entrepreneur T.  Boone Pickens; retired CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus; political operatives James Carville and Karl Rove; actor Michael J. Fox; retired tennis professional Andre Agassi; and billionaire entrepreneuradventurer Branson, who produced a documentary “Breaking the Taboo” on drug addiction.
Branson was joined on the panel by David Marlon, co-founder of Solutions Recovery, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in Las Vegas, and George Papandreou, former prime minister of Greece.
There was little debate from the panel. Participants and many of those who posed questions to panelists were unified in opposition to existing U.S. drug policy, urging an end to the war on drugs by decriminalizing the use of illicit drugs.
Calling the nation’s war on drugs “an unmitigated disaster,” Branson and the documentary film, shot partly at Marlon’s facility, took the position that resources would be better used in treating drug addicts and keeping them with their families than spending more on drug enforcement agencies, courts and prisons.
“I’ve been in business for about 50 years and the war on drugs has been going for at least 50 years,” Branson said. “If one of my businesses had failed as miserably as the war on drugs has failed, I would have closed it down 49 years ago.”
Papandreou said countries could deliver a huge blow against drug cartels by removing the high profit motive by refocusing the strategy of how it addresses drug use.
How can that be accomplished? Branson and Marlon suggested that it would best be done through public education as well educating political leaders to change their mindsets on how to tackle the problem.
“Politicians need to be educated and helped on this issue,” Branson said. “It might have to be pretty direct, say something like, ‘Would you want your children or grandchildren to be sent to prison or do you want them to be helped?’”
Branson, a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, has visited several countries and has praised Portugal for its rejection of the war on drugs for a decriminalization approach.
Marlon said his rehabilitation center treats addictive behavior and it advocates abstinence from drug use in addition to the decriminalization philosophy.
Panelists said the public is starting to embrace new drug policies as evidenced by about half the United States having medical marijuana laws on their books and a few either legalizing recreational use of marijuana or considering it.
The hall, filled to capacity for the panel and the film screening, paused to applaud the Nevada Legislature’s passage of the so-called Good Samaritan Drug Overdose Act earlier this week.
The bill, expected to be signed into law by Gov. Brian Sandoval, provides protection to those who make calls for help in an overdose emergency.
Nevada is the fourth-leading state for drug overdose mortality rates.
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Pubdate: Fri, 08 May 2015
Source: Nation, The (Thailand)
Copyright: 2015 Nation Multimedia Group
Contact: letters@nationgroup.com
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POLITICIANS STILL HIGH ON DAMAGING DRUG LAWS
Regardless of What Our Self-Serving Leaders Say, the So-Called Wars
on Drugs Have Been a Disaster
Laws to deal with drugs offences drew international attention in recent weeks as rights groups, governments and family members called on President Joko Widodo to pardon a group of drug traffickers sentenced to death in Indonesia.
But at the centre of debate was not Indonesia’s drug problem, as Joko claimed. Instead, much of the attention focused on Indonesia’s domestic politics, where capital punishment has become a tool used by politicians to shore up their power.
Leaders in Thailand have tried the same trick. Thaksin Shinawatra, shortly after he came to power in 2001, sought to enhance his popularity by vowing that drug traffickers would be executed every month. But he quickly learned the cost of such brashness, facing a barrage of protest from the international community.
Citizens the world over - including the majority in Thailand and Indonesia - support these tough measures mainly because they believe that stiff penalties are necessary to deter drug traffickers.
In reality, however, study after study has shown that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent.
In Thailand the street value of methamphetamines (known as ya ba) has risen sharply in recent years, driven in part by politicians’ eagerness to make their name via harsh crackdowns on the trade.
But as the price goes up, so does the rate of production. Ya ba - “crazy medicine” - can now be purchased just about anywhere, despite sharing the same legal category as heroin.
A recent seminar in Bangkok saw academics join civic organisations in calling for the current drug laws to be amended. Among the reasons they cited were the overcrowding in Thai prisons.
Associate Professor Sungsidh Piriya-rangsan, dean of Rangsit University’s College of Social Innovation, said at the conference that more than 90 per cent of drug convicts should not be in jail at all. He said they are in prison only because the law stipulates that even those caught with a small amount of drugs must be convicted of trafficking.
Thailand ranks highest in Southeast Asia and fourth in the world when it comes to the number of women jailed for drugs offences, he pointed out. In some cases, innocent women are arrested just because they happen to be accompanying their drug-dealing boyfriends when the police arrived.
“Some women have also agreed to confess to crimes they did not commit, for the sake of a loved one,” Sungsidh said.
According to Thai law, possession of a mere 15 milligrams of methamphetamine represents “intent to sell”. In other words, in the eyes of the law, there is no distinction between a user and a trafficker.
Politicians like to back such harsh drug laws to enhance their standing among voters and within their own parties. But in this case, self-serving political strategy must give way to a more critical and holistic attitude if we want effective measures to combat the damage done by the trade in narcotics.
In many countries, what was illegal yesterday is legal today. In the United States, the legalisation and taxation of marijuana has saved a number of counties and districts from bankruptcy.
At the Bangkok conference, former Office of the Narcotics Control Board deputy secretary-general Pittaya Jinawat pointed out that the herbal intoxicant kratom ( Mitragyna speciosa) is in fact less dangerous to health than alcohol or cigarettes, “but it is legally recognised as an illicit drug”.
Pittaya joined others in calling for an end to the so-called war on drugs, saying the extreme measures are not working. He added that the many of the convicted drug offenders in Thai prisons are actually victims of the trade, while the real kingpins remain untouched by the law.
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Pubdate: Sun, 10 May 2015
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2015 The New York Times Company
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Author: Jack Healy

MARIJUANA MERCHANTS FACE ANOTHER FEDERAL OBSTACLE: HIGH TAXES
DENVER - Money was pouring into Bruce Nassau’s five Colorado marijuana shops when his accountant called with the bad news: The 2014 tax season was approaching, and Mr. Nassau could not rely on the galaxy of deductions that other businesses use to reduce their tax bills. He was going to owe the Internal Revenue Service a small fortune.
“I had to write a check for $275,000,” Mr. Nassau said. “Unbelievable.”
The country’s rapidly growing marijuana industry has a tax problem.  Even as more states embrace legal marijuana, shops say they are being forced to pay crippling federal income taxes because of a decades-old law aimed at preventing drug dealers from claiming their smuggling costs and couriers as business expenses on their tax returns.
Congress passed that law in 1982 after a cocaine and methamphetamine dealer in Minneapolis who had been jailed on drug charges went to tax court to argue that the money he spent on travel, phone calls, packaging and even a small scale should be considered tax write-offs.  The provision, still enforced by the I.R.S., bans all tax credits and deductions from “the illegal trafficking in drugs.”
Marijuana business owners say it prevents them from deducting their rent, employee salaries or utility bills, forcing them to pay taxes on a far larger amount of income than non-marijuana businesses with the same earnings and costs. They also say the taxes, which apply to medical and recreational sellers alike, are stunting their hiring, or even threatening to drive them out of business.
The issue reveals a growing chasm between the 23 states, plus the District of Columbia, that allow medical or recreational marijuana and the federal bureaucracy, which includes national forests in Colorado where possession is a federal crime, federally regulated banks that turn away marijuana businesses and the halls of the I.R.S.
While President Obama and top federal officials have allowed states to pursue legalization, marijuana advocates say the dissonance between increasingly permissive state laws and federal prohibitions is creating a morass of complications and uncertainty.
The tax rule, an obscure provision referred to as 280E, catches many marijuana entrepreneurs by surprise, often in the form of an audit notice from the I.R.S. Some marijuana businesses in Colorado, California and other marijuana-friendly states have challenged the I.R.S. in tax court.
This year, Allgreens, a marijuana shop in Colorado, successfully challenged an I.R.S. policy that imposed about $30,000 in penalties for paying its payroll taxes in cash - common in an industry in which businesses rely on armed guards and cash-stuffed safes because they cannot get bank accounts.
“We’re talking about legal businesses, licensed businesses,” said Rachel Gillette, the executive director of Colorado’s chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and the lawyer who represented Allgreens. “There’s no reason that they should be taxed out of existence by the federal government.”
A normal business, for example, might pay a 30 percent federal rate on its taxable income, which would represent its gross income minus deductible business expenses. A marijuana business, on the other hand, might pay the same federal rate on all of its gross income because it cannot take these deductions. The difference can raise the rate on a marijuana business to 70 percent or more of its profits.
Ms. Gillette said she represented a dispensary owner who had taken in $1.7 million last year before expenses and had received a tax bill of $866,000. They are negotiating with tax officials, she said.
Colorado and a handful of other states have changed their tax laws to let legal marijuana businesses take deductions on their state returns. And this month, Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Earl Blumenauer, both Democrats of Oregon, which legalized recreational marijuana last year, introduced legislation that would allow marijuana businesses that are following their states’ legalization laws to take regular deductions on their federal returns.
“It’s affecting thousands of businesses, and it’s doubling, tripling, quadrupling their taxes,” Mr. Blumenauer said. “It just cripples them.”
The current system, he said, encourages marijuana sellers to file tax returns that do not follow the law and simply hope the I.R.S. does not spot them.
But Kevin Sabet, president of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a leading critic of legalization, said it made no sense to give “tax breaks to companies openly violating federal law by selling marijuana gummies and lollipops.”
Accountants and tax lawyers, who are inundated with calls from marijuana shops these days, say the rules are murky and make little sense. If marijuana retailers dedicate parts of their stores to yoga, drug education or selling non-drug merchandise, can they deduct part of their rent? If employees split their time between cleaning the store and selling marijuana, are their salaries partly deductible?
“There’s no clear direction,” said Scott Levy, an accountant in Arizona who said that marijuana sellers made up about one-fifth of his business. “You find all these weird little strategies that people use to try to parse the definitions.”
Oddly, accountants said, one expense that marijuana retailers can easily take off their taxes is the marijuana itself.
The wording of the tax laws and their interpretation since states began to legalize medical marijuana has allowed businesses to deduct the expenses of wholesale marijuana or growing the plant, from the price of the seeds or baby plants to the water and growing lights needed to produce it. Only when retailers go to sell those buds, brownies or marijuana-infused drinks do the tax restrictions kick in.
Dispensary owners who once feared raids by drug enforcement agents say they take pride in paying taxes like any other business. They say it brings them out of the shadows and distinguishes them from the black market. Marijuana advocates trumpet tax-collection numbers to show that the industry is pouring millions of dollars into state budgets.
“It is the last domino that has to fall for us to be treated like any other business in the country,” said Tim Cullen, a co-owner of five marijuana shops in Colorado. “We’re not a black-market cocaine dealer. We’re totally on board and on the level. We’d like to be treated as such.”
But every year, Mr. Cullen said, he attaches a cover letter to his tax returns explaining what kind of business he runs.
In Seattle, John Davis earned $53,369 in profits last year from his medical marijuana dispensary, the Northwest Patient Resource Center.  Because he complied with all of the tax rules prohibiting deductions, he said, he ended up owing $46,340 in taxes.
“It hurt, and it hurt bad,” he said. “Everyone thinks you’re just rolling in dough. That may be the case if you’re not being compliant.  You’re not making money. You’re holding on, hoping for a better day.”
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Pubdate: Sun, 10 May 2015
Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/rp4mVcTL
Copyright: 2015 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
Contact: letters@utsandiego.com
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Note: Seldom prints LTEs from outside it’s circulation area.
Author: Don Sapatkin, Tribune News Service

PAINKILLER ADDICTION SPAWNS RISING HEPATITIS C THREAT
Public health officials are bracing for a new wave of hepatitis C infections, one unleashed by the epidemic of prescription painkiller addiction.
The blood-borne virus, on the decline nationally until a few years ago, is rising rapidly among adolescents and young adults, especially in white, rural communities. Those are the same areas where an epidemic of prescription opioid deaths first showed up more than a decade ago, followed by a wave of heroin deaths.
Most of the new hepatitis C patients have contracted the virus by injecting drugs, often crushed pain pills. For infectious disease, that’s riskier.
Scattered studies around the country have detected the patterns, which became clearer on with a report released this past week by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Less clear but increasingly expected is a rise in the better-known, more-feared virus that often accompanies hepatitis C: HIV.
In rural southeastern Indiana, 150 cases of HIV have been identified in the past few months, most of them in a town of 4,200 residents.  The vast majority injected drugs. Nearly all were also with hepatitis C, which is more easily transmitted by shared needles than HIV.
In the CDC study of disease patterns, the number of new hepatitis C infections among people age 30 and younger in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia rose 364 percent from 2006 to 2012; three-quarters of the cases involved injected-drug use. Increases were reported everywhere, but “nonurban areas” - basically rural and suburban counties - went up at double the rate of urban locations, where the virus historically has circulated more.
Jon E. Zibbell, a medical anthropologist and lead author of the study, said in an interview that new infections are rising in older Americans as well - up 150 percent overall between 2010 and 2013, according to CDC data.
Hepatitis C can sit silently in the body for decades before causing liver damage so severe in some cases that only a transplant will prevent death.
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Pubdate: Sun, 10 May 2015
Source: Age, The (Australia)
Copyright: 2015 The Age Company Ltd
Contact: letters@theage.com.au
Website: http://www.theage.com.au/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/5
Author: Nick O’Malley

CALLING A TRUCE
In a Rare Moment of Detente, Democrats and Republicans Have Both Admitted That America’s War on Drugs and the Subsequent Tough-On-Crime Policies Have Failed.
How Did We Get Here?
Politicians from across the divided political spectrum now agree tough policies on drugs and mass incarceration have failed, blighting inner-city communities.
On the last Tuesday of April they buried Freddie Gray in a white coffin with gold trim at the Woodlawn Cemetery in Baltimore. Gray was 25 when he died, his neck broken and his voice box crushed, in police custody after he had been arrested for making eye contact with a police officer.
Within hours a state of emergency would be in place across the city and ranks of police and soldiers would be confronting both protesters and rioters, as they had in recent months in cities across the United States.
That same day in New York an extraordinary book of essays was launched, proving, finally, that the tough-on-crime consensus that helped crowd America’s prisons and blight its inner-city neighbourhoods  and spurred the street battles waged in Baltimore in the past few weeks  has unravelled.
The end of an era of mass incarceration in the US is in sight, and the ramifications of this change are already being felt not only across America but around the world.
The book, Solutions: America’s Leaders Speak out on Criminal Justice, was launched at the Brennan Centre for Justice at the prestigious New York University’s law school.
Its foreword is written by former president Bill Clinton and it contains essays by Hillary Clinton, other leading Democrats such as Vice President Joe Biden and Cory Booker, an African-American senator from New Jersey who is considered a future leader. But it also included many of the leading Republican presidential contenders such as Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker and Mike Huckabee. Even firebrands Ted Cruz and Rick Perry contributed.
Though he did not contribute, Republican presidential candidate, Jeb Bush, has also dramatically softened the zero-tolerance stance of his years as governor of Florida.
One of the book’s co-editors, Nicole Fortier, said she was surprised at the reception she was given when she contacted these candidates and asked for a contribution.
Rather than hesitating, the various leaders jumped at the chance to contribute. Their offices wanted feedback and advice. Some asked if they could have more length.
But it was the content of the submissions that stunned her when they began arriving. Each politician from across the viciously divided American political spectrum agreed that mass incarceration must end.
This turnaround in political will is extraordinary. The war on drugs began under President Richard Nixon, but it was Bill Clinton who opened a new front in 1994 after another surge in crime statistics across America.
That year he introduced an omnibus crime bill that expanded the death penalty and encouraged states to lengthen prison terms and adopt mandatory sentences. It scrapped funding for inmate education.
As a result of these laws, and other tough measures adopted by federal and state governments, America now has the biggest-per-capita prison population in the world. The figures are dizzying. It locks up one in 100 American adults and has 25 per cent of the world’s prison population with just 5 per cent of the world’s population. One in 28 children have a parent in prison. Considered together, America’s prison population would be the size of its 37th largest state. Half of all offenders are in prison for nonviolent offences. The Clinton crime bill was, the Atlantic magazine recently noted, backed by every Congressional Democrat but one.
In the new book Clinton concedes, “plainly, our nation has too many people in prison and for too long - we have overshot the mark”.
It is the growing consensus that, by incarcerating vast swaths of the urban poor, America has broken families, shattered whole communities, increasing the chances of further incarceration.
In inner cities where crime is highest and police are most needed, police are seen as occupying forces rather than civil servants. They are feared and loathed by the populations that need them most.
While America’s unemployment rate is rapidly falling, its long-term unemployment remains stubbornly high, in part because employers are reluctant to hire ex-cons. This, in turn, promotes recidivism.
A new campaign to reverse that perverse result has been launched.  Called ban the box it calls on employers to pledge not to ask applicants to tick a box if they have a record. Instead, it asks them to ask the question in an interview when the applicant might have a chance to explain their situation.
What has driven this remarkable change in political will is debatable. The protests on streets in many American cities, now commonly referred to by activists as “uprisings” might have contributed to the urgency of the movement.
It is also clear that, during the long recession, states could no longer afford to keep locking people up, especially when a single inmate cost them as much as a police officer or teacher might each year.
Social scientists are now identifying so-called “million-dollar blocks” - those in poor neighbourhoods with collapsing infrastructure where the government is spending $US1 million ($1.3 million) each year locking up residents of single blocks.
A Columbia University lab identified many such blocks and found when inmates returned home they could expect to last an average of three years before being jailed again.
But the overwhelming factor - the factor that makes this an issue that politicians are willing to address -is that there has been an unprecedented collapse in the crime rate.
Since the era when Clinton went tough on crime and New York City adopted its infamous “broken windows” zero-tolerance policy, American crime rates have fallen by half.
One of the more interesting observers of crime and punishment  and policing in particular  in America is Radley Balko, who noted in a Washington Post column that people vote on criminal justice issues only when they are in fear and Americans no longer fear crime as they once did.
“While most people continue to erroneously tell pollsters that crime is getting worse nationwide, on the more pertinent question - whether Americans fear walking alone in their neighbourhood  the percentage answering yes hasn’t been above 40 per cent since the early 1990s.”
This is because, Balko argues, “in 2013, there were nearly 9000 fewer homicides, about 27,000 fewer rapes, and about 368,000 fewer aggravated assaults than there were in 1991, even though the country’s population increased by 64 million people.”
Asked if a de-escalation in the war on drugs might see crime levels rise, the Brennan Centre’s Nicole Fortier says no. In the book What Caused the Crime Decline? the Brennan Centre found incarceration had a limited and diminishing impact on crime levels, one that had almost become irrelevant by 2000, accounting for just 1 per cent of the decrease.
The true cause is layered and complicated, the book argues, and includes increasing incomes and consumer confidence, decreased alcohol consumption, and the better targeting of police resources through the use of statistical analysis of crime patterns.
Another study by the National Academies’ National Research Council found that “the growth in incarceration rates reduced crime, but the magnitude of the crime reduction remains highly uncertain and the evidence suggests it was unlikely to have been large”.
With the panic over crime receding, some states have already begun ending the drug war, the crucial contributor to mass incarceration.  Many states have decriminalised possession of small amounts of marijuana, while two  Colorado and Washington, as well as the city of Washington, DC - have taken the extraordinary step of legalising the drug for recreational use.
President Barack Obama, who has made criminal justice reform central to his final years in office, has ordered his Justice Department not to intervene by enforcing federal drug laws.
This turnaround in America’s war on drugs is already having an impact on law and order around the world.
Prohibition enforced by strict criminal sanctions was largely an American invention imposed around the world through treaties and diplomatic pressure.
On Thursday the United Nations held a debate at its New York headquarters on the issue at the request of Uruguay, Mexico and Colombia, which argued that, as some American states no longer criminalises all drug possession, they should no longer be compelled to wage the American drug war. They want the treaties rewritten. The meeting was greeted by a letter from a group of 100 drug policy and human rights organisations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, calling on the UNto reform the way it treats drugs and for member countries to respect those governments that have or will legalise or decriminalise narcotics.
“Existing US and global drug control policies that heavily emphasise criminalisation of drug use, possession, production and distribution are inconsistent with international human rights standards and have contributed to serious human rights violations,” they write.
“Criminalisation of the drug trade has dramatically enhanced the profitability of illicit drug markets, fuelling the operations of groups that commit abuses, corrupt authorities, and undermine democracy and the rule of law in many parts of the world.”
The groups believe “human rights principles, which lie at the core of the United Nations charter, should take priority over provisions of the drug conventions”.
Some at the UN already acknowledge the problem. In 2012 the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a report finding that “excessively punitive approaches to drug control have resulted in countless human rights violations, including the right to health”.
The discussions in New York on Thursday were in preparation for the UNGeneral Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on Drugs in 2016. The special session was originally scheduled for 2019 but was brought forward due to pressure from Latin American countries, where governments have become increasingly concerned about how the war on drugs has affected crime and development in the region.
They believe, as many American policymakers now do, that imprisonment is far more harmful to drug users  and to their communities  than the drugs they are being imprisoned for using.
Whatever happens in the UN next year, it now seems certain that whoever wins the 2016 presidential election will continue with efforts to reduce America’s prison population, rein back zero-tolerance policies and de-escalate the war on drugs.
Though the political leaders who contributed to the Brennan Centre book do not have a common approach on how to achieve this, there are areas of broad agreement, Fortier says.
Most agree on the need to steer the mentally ill and non-violent offenders away from prison and that mandatory minimum sentences are destructive and need to be repealed.
Whatever the outcome it will take years to unpick the diabolical confusion of law and regulation that can still force American judges to steal lifetimes from the pettiest offenders.
Back in Baltimore on Thursday the Baltimore Sun told the story of Ronald Hammond, who appeared in a local courtroom in 2011 on a charge of possessing 5.9 grams of marijuana. The district court judge thought the case was preposterous.
“5.9 grams won’t roll you a decent joint,” Judge Askew Gatewood said.
“Why would I want to spend taxpayer’s money putting his little raggedy butt in jail  feeding him, clothing him, cable TV, internet, prayer, medical expense, clothing  on $5 worth of weed?”
The judge urged Hammond to plead guilty so he could free him on parole.
But then it turned out that Hammond was already on parole for selling $40 worth of crack to an undercover officer.
With a parole infraction Hammond copped a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years. He is due for release in 2028, though the current maximum penalty for possession of 10 grams or less is a $100 fine.
He told the Sun that when he heard the sentence, “A chill went from the top of my head to the bottom of my toes.”
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sun, 10 May 2015
Source: Chico Enterprise-Record (CA)
Copyright: 2015 Chico Enterprise-Record
Contact: letters@chicoer.com
Website: http://www.chicoer.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/861
Note: Letters from newspaper’s circulation area receive publishing priority
Author: Garry Cooper
Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v15/n239/a02.html

WE MUST THINK OF NEW WAYS TO DEAL WITH DRUGS
Let me ask readers a question.
Is it your intended goal that our current drug policy should actually discourage drug use or should it be used to build and maintain a very expensive police force and prison system?
After all, drug use by schoolchildren is at an all-time high, as are drug overdose deaths and people in prison for drugs, despite our trillion-dollar anti-drug efforts over the last six decades.
Don’t you think that keeping an open mind on better ways to address drug use is a reasonable thing to do? Maybe separate the drug addicted and house them in a huge rehab facility converted from one of our jails with professional counselors instead of high-school-educated prison guards that know nothing about the subject. Maybe vastly expand after-school activities to occupy the youthful minds. Maybe accept that pot is the new alcohol and address it that way to destroy the black market behind it, which is estimated supplies nearly 60 percent of the gang and cartel profits.
Every police union and group, such as the California Police Chiefs Association, openly states in their bylaws that they will oppose any change to current drug policy whatsoever. Does that sound prudent? It does to them. They know over 50 percent of their budgets are due to the current drug war.
Steve Landeros’ letter said I am a shill for the pot growers. No, I am a shill for our Constitution and against the failed drug war and the constitutional damages it causes.
? Garry Cooper, Durham
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Mon, 11 May 2015
Source: Virgin Islands Daily News, The (VI)
Copyright: 2015 Virgin Islands Daily News
Contact: dailynews@vipowernet.net
Website: http://www.virginislandsdailynews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3486
Author: Joy Blackburn

NELSON TO ACT SWIFTLY ON MARIJUANA LEGISLATION
Beyond Legalizing Medical Use, Senator Wants to Decriminalize Growing
Small Amount for Personal Use
ST. CROIX - Sen. Terrence Nelson says he intends to move forward quickly with medical marijuana legislation - and other legislation dealing with marijuana - after returning in late April from a fact- finding trip to Washington and Colorado.
“I am convinced with conviction that we need to make cannabis available as a medicine, if nothing else,” Nelson said.
He and a group from the territory visited Colorado and Washington looking into those states’ experiences with legalizing marijuana, meeting with state officials and people involved in the marijuana industry.
Marijuana remains against federal law, but 23 states, the District of Columbia and Guam now allow for comprehensive medical marijuana or cannabis programs, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In addition, recently approved efforts in 14 states allow use of “low THC, high cannabidiol” products for medical reasons in limited situations or as a legal defense, according to the organization.
Across the United States, there is a growing trend toward some form of marijuana legalization, particularly on the medical side.
A week ago, Puerto Rico Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla issued an executive order directing Puerto Rico’s health department to authorize the use of some or all controlled substances or derivatives of the cannabis plant for medical use. It is not clear at this point how Puerto Rico’s medical marijuana regulations will look. Puerto Rico’s health secretary is due to submit a report on the matter in three months.
Washington and Colorado, the two states the group from the territory visited, have also implemented legalized recreational marijuana, in addition to having a medical marijuana industry.
In the territory
V. I. voters in November said yes to a referendum that asked whether the Legislature should take up the question of legalizing medical marijuana in the territory.
Nelson said last week that he will offer medical marijuana legislation - but that he also has an interest in separately pursuing full legalization of marijuana.
“I support full legalization, full access, I support that,” Nelson said. “But I also respect the citizen’s voice and where we’re at.”
He does not want to “shell shock” the community, he said.
“The discussion was medicinal marijuana. The referendum vote was on medicinal marijuana, so the bill that I’m going to write is going to be medicinal marijuana,” Nelson said. “I’m respecting the fact that I asked the public a specific question and that is the law I want to give them.”
Medical marijuana
Nelson expects his staff to have a draft bill that would legalize, license and regulate a medical marijuana industry in the territory compiled and in the hands of the Legislature’s legal counsel by the end of the month, he said.
Then, legal counsel has 45 days to get the bill into the proper format, checked for legal sufficiency and back to him, he said. After that, it would be assigned to a committee and go through the committee process.
Nelson said he plans to differentiate in the bill between medical marijuana and “marijuana used medicinally.”
Medical marijuana would require a doctor’s diagnosis and recommendation, but “marijuana used medicinally” would involve self- diagnosis and self-medicating, he said.
Asked whether “marijuana used medicinally” could cross into recreational use, Nelson acknowledged that it could.
“The latter sometimes takes on a recreational use. That is where individuals feel like they do not need to have a doctor diagnosis.  That is where individuals have been traditionally self-medicating, using marijuana in various ways to ease various pains or sleeping conditions,” Nelson said.
The bill, he said, would contain provisions to license and regulate medical marijuana, but for “marijuana used medicinally,” would allow people to grow a small number of marijuana plants for their personal consumption to treat certain conditions that he said they could identify for themselves.
“I want to say there are certain conditions where individuals should be allowed to self-medicate and grow their own supply,” he said.
Nelson said he is scrapping a draft piece of medical marijuana legislation and reworking it based on information gathered on the trip. The draft was not from the Legislature’s legal counsel, he said. He has not made it public.
“I don’t want to work from a draft where I have to look out for things where people sort of wrote themselves into the bill,” Nelson said.
He said he will propose the medical marijuana bill as he sees fit - but realizes he also may have to compromise on some of its provisions.
“I just want to pursue the language. If my colleagues bring up concerns, I may have to compromise on what I’m proposing. Being a legislator, I understand that - and I’m willing,” Nelson said. “What I’m dead certain on, however, is the need to make this available as a medicine. I’m even more convinced that we need to push until our patients have access to this medicine here in the Virgin Islands.”
Decriminalization and industrial hemp legislation
Nelson said he also plans to offer an additional measure that would decriminalize growing a small amount of marijuana for personal use.
On Sept. 25, senators of the 30th Legislature unanimously supported Nelson’s bill to decriminalize marijuana by making possession of one ounce or less a civil offense punishable by a fine, rather than a criminal act.
However, Gov. John deJongh Jr. vetoed the measure the following month, saying it was “well-intentioned and consistent with a trend” in the United States, but inconsistent in its application of the law.
On Dec. 19, the 30th Legislature overrode his veto, making the measure law.
Now, Nelson said he plans to pursue a provision that would decriminalize growing a limited number of marijuana plants for personal use, making it a civil offense rather than a criminal one.
The V.I. Legislature is also slated to take another look at a bill dealing with industrial hemp soon.
Nelson introduced industrial hemp legislation in the 30th Legislature that was heard in committee and then held.
Hemp is a type of cannabis with a very low content of THC, the psycho-active component of marijuana. Hemp can be used for its strong fibers in a variety of applications.
The industrial hemp legislation is being reintroduced in the 31st
Legislature. Nelson said it is scheduled to be discussed in committee in June.
There is a “reviewer’s note” at the end of the industrial hemp bill from the Legislature’s legal counsel, pointing out that because some provisions of the bill are in conflict with the federal Controlled Substances Act, it could not be approved for legal sufficiency.
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugwarfacts.org
Pubdate: Fri, 08 May 2015
Source: Porterville Recorder (CA)
Copyright: 2015 Freedom Communications Inc.
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/AJm5UIc8
Website: http://www.recorderonline.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2887
Author: Robert Sharpe
Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v15/n250/a04.html

MAKE MARIJUANA LEGAL
Regarding your May 5 editorial, one day marijuana will be fully legal and there will be no environmentally destructive wilderness grows.  Suburban basement grows with artificial lights and massive carbon footprints will be a thing of the past.
These are vestiges of marijuana prohibition. When marijuana is fully legal, legitimate farmers will produce it by the ton under natural sunlight and ideal soil conditions at a fraction of the current cost.  This is important. Financial incentives drive harmful cultivation practices. Marijuana prohibition distorts supply and demand dynamics so that big money grows on little trees. Mexican drug cartels do not sneak into national forests to grow cucumbers and tomatoes. They cannot compete with real farmers.
For the sake of the environment, the sooner the marijuana plant is treated as a legal agricultural commodity, the better. California needs to catch up with Colorado.
Robert Sharpe
Policy Analyst Common Sense for Drug Policy
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MAP posted-by: Matt
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Newshawk: Herb Couch
Pubdate: Sat, 09 May 2015
Source: National Post (Canada)
Copyright: 2015 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/wEtbT4yU
Website: http://www.nationalpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/286
Author: Tristin Hopper
Page: A10-A11

BARELY ILLEGAL - WHY VICE STILL THRIVES
A joint might still get you arrested in Iqaluit or rural Saskatchewan,
but in large corners of this country, it is easier to get high now
than it could ever be under legalization
If several thousand people gathered in downtown Vancouver for a mass light-up of cigarettes, it would be assailed by condemnations from the city’s chief medical health officer. If they came to chug moonshine, the gathering would be stopped in its tracks by riot police.
But when a mid-sized town’s worth of people convene to smoke marijuana in the heart of Vancouver, it is essentially a civic institution.
On April 20 - the world’s unofficial marijuana holiday - as many as 30,000 people gathered around the Vancouver Art Gallery for the city’s annual “smoke-out.” By mid-afternoon, a crushing throng of people splayed for a block in every direction, all cloaked by a skunky thin haze.
When this event started in the 1990s, a defiant few roamed the event with baskets of joints for sale. Now, it’s among the largest open-air markets in the city of Vancouver: More than 300 vendors, from slickly branded booths selling pot-infused olive oil all the way to dreadlocked men clutching hand-lettered signs reading “Dubes $5.”
There are no permits, since this is technically a protest. There are no sales taxes, since these are all illegal transactions. And there are no age limits, as evidenced by a crowd comprised largely of glassy-eyed high schoolers.
There are plenty of Vancouver police, of course, but they’re only there to direct traffic and call in paramedics whenever an attendee drops from over-consumption. Most of the time, they can be seen leaning on barricades looking bored.
Just after 5 p.m., an emcee summed up the scene from the 4/20 main stage, “Nobody’s this free anywhere on earth!”
Cannabis and all its “preparations, derivatives and similar synthetic preparations” are effectively banned in Canada, according to the Chretien-era Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. With a doctor’s note, medical pot users can attain the stuff from an Ottawa-sanctioned catalogue of commercial growers. But for everyone else, get caught with a sandwich Baggie of the stuff, and it can technically mean five years in a federal prison.
But in 2015, there are thousands of people who have lived their entire lives without the slightest hint that marijuana is illegal. A joint might still get you arrested in Iqaluit or rural Saskatchewan, but in large corners of this country, it is easier to get high now than it could ever be under legalization.
So easy, in fact, that only hours after 4/20 celebrations had petered, Vancouver city hall announced that it was finally going to start licensing the city’s vastly expanding collection of marijuana dispensaries - over 80 and counting, more than the number of McDonald’s franchises here.
“The city has no jurisdiction to regulate the sale of marijuana, but it does have clear jurisdiction to regulate how and where businesses operate in our city,” it stated in a release. Providing pot to legitimately sick people was how Vancouver’s dispensary trade got its start, but that pretence is now thoroughly out the window.
Many Vancouver dispensaries have on-site naturopaths to give out prescriptions to any and all comers, even if they forget to fake a serious illness. Dispensaries have employees stand on the street to hand out promotional cards to draw in new customers, several now have marijuana vending machines and at one, customers can obtain their cannabis by using a claw-crane arcade machine.
Despite whatever licence Vancouver attaches to dispensaries, this all remains wildly illegal. Yet it persists solely because the Vancouver police have openly declared they have no intention of doing anything about it.
“If it’s being used in a manner that’s unlikely to impact your neighbours or surrounding community, then it’s unlikely police would become involved,” said Sgt. Randy Fincham, spokesman for the Vancouver police.
“The tallest nail gets hit first,” he add-
ed, and in a city with no shortage of drug problems, there are plenty of nails taller than almost anything marijuana related.
As a result, any Vancouverite under the age of 30 has basically never known a world in which he or she could be written up for anything less than a shipping container full of pot.
“If you get charged with possession in Vancouver, you obviously did something that was over the line,” says Nick, a canvasser with Sensible B.C., a pro-legalization lobby group.
A recent example would be Weeds Glass and Gifts, a dispensary that in recent years has rapidly expanded to include 15 locations throughout Coastal B.C. A Weeds location got raided in April, but only after police got word of a 15-year-old allegedly winding up in the hospital after buying some Weeds edibles.
Similarly laissez-faire attitudes have taken hold in virtually every other major Canadian city. The website WeBeHigh.org tracks tolerance for marijuana around the world, and Toronto, Sudbury and Montreal are all in the “virtually legal” category, with the likes of Whitehorse, Regina and St. John’s not far behind.
One anonymous Whitehorse resident on WeBeHigh reported being pulled over by an RCMP cruiser while concurrently speeding, rolling through a stop sign and smoking a joint. Despite the tripartite of crimes, they were simply “told to keep the window down for the drive home.”
Just across the 49th parallel from Vancouver, of course, marijuana is legal. Last year, Washington state became one of the few places on earth to tax and regulate recreational cannabis.
Despite this, it has not spurred the wave of Canadian pot tourists that one might expect. Washington pot is more expensive, less diverse and, ironically, harder to obtain.
Last summer, when virtually every week yielded a new dispensary in Seattle, the city’s first recreational pot store, Cannabis City, had to turn away customers after it ran out of stock in only three days.  Eighty years ago, the roles were reversed.
During the 1930s, it was Seattle where a popular drug - alcohol - was illegal. Vancouver, meanwhile, was thoroughly “wet” after its own experiment with temperance fizzled out in 1921.
Despite this, Seattle was a far, far easier place to get drunk. In fact, say prohibition historians, the city has never again been as easy a place to get a drink than it was during the lawless 1930s.
“Seattle was virtually an open city,” said Daniel Okrent, author of Last Call: the Rise and Fall of Prohibition, writing in an email to the National Post. Vancouver, by contrast, “actually had laws that regulated liquor sale and consumption.”
Leonard Garfield, executive director of Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, says that during Prohibition “you could come to Seattle, step off your train, and a few steps down the road you could probably enjoy a drink.”
There is a dark side to Vancouver’s open-armed acceptance of pot, of course. Vancouver’s 4/20 rally, for one, sent 64 people to hospital with symptoms ranging from nausea to vomiting.
Seven per cent of drivers injured in B.C. car crashes had consumed pot only hours earlier, according to a recent report in the British Columbia Medical Journal. Two years ago, pot was cited in the derailment of a B.C. train.
Of all the recreational drugs, marijuana is the least likely to kill its users from an overdose, but studies are emerging showing that it leaves teenagers with permanently damaged memory - a phenomenon that many young British Columbians have seen firsthand. And just like cigarettes, of course, bong hits and doobies still fill the lungs with tar.
“Marijuana is just not the same benign substance that we knew about in the ‘60s,” a spokesperson for Vancouver Coastal Health told Global News last year.
But at a time when tax-free, storefront pot is now available virtually within walking distance of any corner of the city, it’s clear that Vancouver - with other cities quickly following suit - are in the midst of a marijuana golden age.
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MAP posted-by: Matt
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