THE GOLDEN YEARS JUST MIGHT GO BETTER WITH POT
So you’re one of the 13 percent of Boulderites who are over 55 years of age. It’s been almost a year and a half since marijuana legalization, and you’ve sat on the sidelines watching the experiment unfold. Maybe you tried it in college. Perhaps you weren’t willing to break the law when it was illegal. You’re curious but not sure how to proceed.
You’re not alone. The fastest-growing segment of the population to use marijuana is the (wink, wink) “older” demographic. Eight percent of people aged 50 to 64 said they had used marijuana in the last year, and those numbers are only expected to grow in the next few years.
There’s never been a better time for seniors, especially in Colorado, to find out about whether or not marijuana might be beneficial. Are there good reasons so many Americans use marijuana, and not just as medication? Or that more and more states and legislators are opting to allow cannabis to be regulated much like alcohol?
The answer to both questions is yes. Marijuana is a drug, and it certainly isn’t for everybody. I have friends on both sides of the fence. Legalization gives you a choice: If you’re interested or curious, look into it. If you’re not, you should stay away.
Basically, what do you have to lose? All those recent headlines about cannabis killing brain cells or lowering IQ are, at least so far, more wishful thinking than scientific fact, especially if, like most people, you’re a casual user. You probably saw the recent rash of stories about a study that suggested that casual marijuana use is linked to brain changes. University of Colorado researchers who reviewed those studies found no correlation between cannabis use and brain changes when alcohol use, gender, age and other variables were factored. (That study didn’t get as many headlines.)
One thing to consider is the concept of “getting high.” Watching television or reading the anti-marijuana literature, you might get the idea that cannabis makes you crazy. I have never understood this.  The feeling, at least for me and everyone I know, is always euphoric, always relaxing. Steve Jobs put it best when he once told Pentagon interviewers: “The best way I would describe the effect of the marijuana and the hashish is that it would make me relaxed and creative.” That certainly doesn’t mean it will do the same for everyone, but then again, it doesn’t take long to find out if whether you like the “high” or not since the effects of smoked marijuana happen almost immediately.
Another thing you often read is that marijuana is stronger than it used to be. While it might be true that potencies are higher, that doesn’t mean it’s more dangerous - it simply means it’s better quality. It’s not the brick pot smuggled into the country from south of the border for decades. Today it’s grown in better conditions and comes to market fresh. I’d venture that Colorado marijuana is among the bestgrown in the world right now. Don’t buy into the hype that it’s more harmful. Growers are developing medical strains that don’t get you high at all. Some of the significant research is being done at CU, including mapping the cannabis genome, which means the quality will only get better.
If you’re wondering whether you’ll look out of place at the local dispensary, forget about it. You’ll run into people of all ages, and you’ll find the budtenders especially helpful as you seek out the the right strain or edible. Don’t be shy about asking questions - that’s why they’re there. Everybody wants you to have the best experience possible.
One of the big surprises for me was learning the differences in the many kinds now available and being developed. After years of just buying “pot,” it’s really wonderful to try different strains designed to wake you up, give you that mellow creative buzz Jobs was talking about or calm you down. Having problems getting to sleep? Talk to your budtender about a good indica strain.
The most important thing, of course, is to stay informed. There is an abundance of good information and research on the Internet. Spend some time with a search engine looking at the research that has been done on marijuana and health as it relates to seniors. You might be surprised.
No one has ever overdosed on marijuana, and no one ever will. Don’t believe me? Educate yourself. Read the literature - pro and con. Be skeptical of everything. Make up your own mind.
You can hear Leland discuss his most recent column and Colorado
cannabis issues each Thursday morning on KGNU. http://news.kgnu.org/weed
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: Thu, 14 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: Michael S. Schmidt

INTERIM CHIEF IS CHOSEN FOR THE D.E.A.
WASHINGTON - Chuck Rosenberg, a senior F.B.I. official and former United States attorney, has been chosen by President Obama to be the interim director of the Drug Enforcement Administration, according to law enforcement officials.
Mr. Rosenberg will replace Michele M. Leonhart, who announced her retirement last month after accusations that D.E.A. agents in Colombia had participated in sex parties with prostitutes paid for by drug cartels. She also clashed repeatedly with the Obama administration over its marijuana policies.
For the past year and a half, Mr. Rosenberg has served as the chief of staff to the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey.
Mr. Rosenberg has been supported by both Republicans and Democrats.  In 2006, the Senate unanimously confirmed him as the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. He also served as the United States attorney in the Southern District of Texas from 2005 to 2006.
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: Thu, 14 May 2015
Source: Trentonian, The (NJ)
Column: Passing the Joint
Copyright: 2015 The Trentonian
Contact: letters@trentonian.com
Website: http://www.trentonian.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1006
Author: Ed Forchion, NJWeedman.com For The Trentonian

MARIJUANA BECAME LEGAL IN JERSEY ON JAN. 18, 2010
At 9 a.m. on May 27th the New Jersey Appeals Court will hold oral arguments in the most important marijuana case in New Jersey history.  I’m being a little arrogant, but rightfully so because it’s the truth. I’m talking about my case: State vs Forchion, 004477-12. The court must think so too, because the arguments aren’t being heard in the regular appellate courtroom, but rather in the NJ State Supreme Courtroom. (PRESS RELEASE: http://tinyurl.com/ForchionPR - It’s open to the public.)
I’ve worked hard (along with my attorney John Vincent Saykanic, Esq.) for this opportunity to challenge the state marijuana laws. My family and I personally suffered for it, but now I envision a historic triumph. Activism doesn’t pay - it costs, and my two decades of marijuana activism have cost me dearly. I absolutely know I’m not alone; “22,000 other persons” are arrested for marijuana each year in New Jersey and ruined by our Government, based on a LIE.
Politicians and lawyers use marijuana laws to enrich themselves. The laws are rooted in racism and based on an outright lie-that marijuana has no medical value. Why is a dread-headed, not-formally-educated citizen presenting this case before the Appeals Court? In my opinion, it’s because many criminal defense lawyers are in no rush to slay the cannabis cash cow - they’re milking the heifer, lining their pockets by defending victims of the drug war. Not even the state’s premier marijuana organization, NORML NJ, would file an “amicus brief” in support of this historic challenge. So pass me the joint and F ‘em.
People constantly tell me there are more important things to fight for than marijuana legalization. Seriously? Nationwide, 900,000 citizens were arrested for marijuana last year alone, including 22,000 New Jerseyans - ¾ of them persons of color. I don’t know of another issue that affects so many people I personally know. Maybe all my friends are stoners, but the law is still a blatant lie - enriching the legal profession by ruining citizens.
Fact: Marijuana is one of the greatest therapeutic substances on the planet. It has always been good for humans. The marijuana laws themselves have always been bad. These bad laws make people poor, prevent many from getting jobs, and deny children their parents; pot convicts are denied public assistance and educational funds and many lose their freedom. That’s why last week I helped organize a “poor people’s parade for pot” in Camden. (http://tinyurl.com/potparade )
I’ve been arrested twice on felony marijuana charges (11/24/97 and 4/1/10).
In July of 1997, Governor Whitman signed into law a new Omnibus Crime Bill that revamped all of the 2C criminal laws. Also, (N.J.S.2C:43-3(1)) legally describes marijuana as a Schedule I drug - “having no medical value.” Most citizens arrested in NJ for marijuana are charged with violating 2C:35-10. On November 24, 1997, I became the first citizen to be arrested under this revamped law. I fought it hard but took a plea deal three days into the trial, which got me a 10-year sentence; I did 18 months in prison and 19 months on parole.  What a waste of my life - the day I got off parole I smoked a joint at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.
Between these two arrests, the legal landscape of marijuana changed.
On Jan. 18, 2010 Governor Jon Corzine signed into law the NJ Compassionate Use Act C.24:6I-2. In this ACT the state of NJ officially recognized marijuana as a “medicine.” The Act reads: “The Legislature finds and declares that: a. Modern medical research has discovered a beneficial use for marijuana in treating or alleviating the pain or other symptoms associated with certain debilitating medical conditions.”
Yet, no exemption for “medical use” was made in the state’s 2C:35 marijuana laws. I believe marijuana was made legal by this legislative oversight here in Jersey.
In a quirk of circumstances, on April 1, 2010 I was once again one of the first people arrested after this new medical marijuana law was passed, but the prosecution elected to prosecute me under the 2C:35 criminal statutes again, even though I’m a bone cancer patient and this ACT was supposed to prevent the prosecution of medical marijuana patients like me. Instead of being afforded protection by the Compassion Use of Medical Marijuana Act (CUMMA), I’ve been fighting this point for over five years now. I was acquitted by a jury of the serious distribution charge, yet I was still unjustly imprisoned for months in Burlington County’s filthy jail for possession so I appealed.
FACT: New Jersey now has two laws mandating two different things - a clear constitutional violation of Due Process.
One law, the most recent, is CUMMA C.24:6I-2, which recognizes marijuana’s medical use.
The other law, our 2C:35 criminal statues, specifically doesn’t recognize marijuana as having medical value, and because of that its still illegal and legally described as a Schedule I drug in New Jersey.
By law (due process), wouldn’t that render the older 2C:35-10 law, as well as the description in 2C:43-3(1) that specifically doesn’t recognize “medical use,” outdated and obsolete - flawed at the very least, and outright unconstitutional at worst? This is one of the major arguments in my appeal - it’s not my fault the legislature didn’t fix this conflict.
Shouldn’t the state’s title 2C:35-10 marijuana laws be voided for vagueness, and nullified as a violation of due process? CUMMA passage in 2010 superseded it! If so, MJ is legal in NJ.
This is clearly unconstitutional.
How does the state get to prosecute citizens like myself under 2C:35 criminal statutes that are false, and in direct contradiction to the more recent CUMMA law? 2C:35 statutorily classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug having “no medical value,” but under CUMMA C.24:6I-2, other politically connected citizens are allowed to grow and distribute it as medicine. Why is marijuana treated as a legal medical substance for the Alternative Treatment Centers, but for me and 22,000 others each year it’s an illegal “non-medicinal substance,” and we are imprisoned for it? Why are some 4,000 people permitted to use this “ancient medicine” under CUMMA, while we were prosecuted under a law (2C:35-10) that states it “has no medical value”?
Pass the joint and think about this: In 1820 the Missouri Compromise, which described African-Americans as 2/3 of a person, became law. The Supreme Court upheld it in the 1858 Dred Scott decision, declaring, “The negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” But the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments in the 1860s rendered the previous laws like the Missouri Compromise obsolete. Likewise I believe CUMMA voided and nullified the 2C:35 laws that I and 100,000 New Jerseyans have been prosecuted under since CUMMA’s enactment in 2010.
Other states such as California dealt with this issue by making “medical exemptions” to their criminal statutes  SB420. New Jersey has a similar provision (N.J.S. 24:21-3(d)) within the Department of Health to do so as well; this statute even allows the director to change the Schedule, but Christie’s “politics of pot” prevented the application of this provision - thus my appeal.
I believe every pothead who was arrested and prosecuted under the current 2C:35 marijuana criminal statutes since Jan. 18, 2010 was prosecuted unconstitutionally.
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: Thu, 14 May 2015
Source: Trentonian, The (NJ)
Column: Passing the Joint
Copyright: 2015 The Trentonian
Contact: letters@trentonian.com
Website: http://www.trentonian.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1006
Author: Ed Forchion, NJWeedman.com For The Trentonian

MARIJUANA BECAME LEGAL IN JERSEY ON JAN. 18, 2010
At 9 a.m. on May 27th the New Jersey Appeals Court will hold oral arguments in the most important marijuana case in New Jersey history.  I’m being a little arrogant, but rightfully so because it’s the truth. I’m talking about my case: State vs Forchion, 004477-12. The court must think so too, because the arguments aren’t being heard in the regular appellate courtroom, but rather in the NJ State Supreme Courtroom. (PRESS RELEASE: http://tinyurl.com/ForchionPR - It’s open to the public.)
I’ve worked hard (along with my attorney John Vincent Saykanic, Esq.) for this opportunity to challenge the state marijuana laws. My family and I personally suffered for it, but now I envision a historic triumph. Activism doesn’t pay - it costs, and my two decades of marijuana activism have cost me dearly. I absolutely know I’m not alone; “22,000 other persons” are arrested for marijuana each year in New Jersey and ruined by our Government, based on a LIE.
Politicians and lawyers use marijuana laws to enrich themselves. The laws are rooted in racism and based on an outright lie-that marijuana has no medical value. Why is a dread-headed, not-formally-educated citizen presenting this case before the Appeals Court? In my opinion, it’s because many criminal defense lawyers are in no rush to slay the cannabis cash cow - they’re milking the heifer, lining their pockets by defending victims of the drug war. Not even the state’s premier marijuana organization, NORML NJ, would file an “amicus brief” in support of this historic challenge. So pass me the joint and F ‘em.
People constantly tell me there are more important things to fight for than marijuana legalization. Seriously? Nationwide, 900,000 citizens were arrested for marijuana last year alone, including 22,000 New Jerseyans - ¾ of them persons of color. I don’t know of another issue that affects so many people I personally know. Maybe all my friends are stoners, but the law is still a blatant lie - enriching the legal profession by ruining citizens.
Fact: Marijuana is one of the greatest therapeutic substances on the planet. It has always been good for humans. The marijuana laws themselves have always been bad. These bad laws make people poor, prevent many from getting jobs, and deny children their parents; pot convicts are denied public assistance and educational funds and many lose their freedom. That’s why last week I helped organize a “poor people’s parade for pot” in Camden. (http://tinyurl.com/potparade )
I’ve been arrested twice on felony marijuana charges (11/24/97 and 4/1/10).
In July of 1997, Governor Whitman signed into law a new Omnibus Crime Bill that revamped all of the 2C criminal laws. Also, (N.J.S.2C:43-3(1)) legally describes marijuana as a Schedule I drug - “having no medical value.” Most citizens arrested in NJ for marijuana are charged with violating 2C:35-10. On November 24, 1997, I became the first citizen to be arrested under this revamped law. I fought it hard but took a plea deal three days into the trial, which got me a 10-year sentence; I did 18 months in prison and 19 months on parole.  What a waste of my life - the day I got off parole I smoked a joint at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.
Between these two arrests, the legal landscape of marijuana changed.
On Jan. 18, 2010 Governor Jon Corzine signed into law the NJ Compassionate Use Act C.24:6I-2. In this ACT the state of NJ officially recognized marijuana as a “medicine.” The Act reads: “The Legislature finds and declares that: a. Modern medical research has discovered a beneficial use for marijuana in treating or alleviating the pain or other symptoms associated with certain debilitating medical conditions.”
Yet, no exemption for “medical use” was made in the state’s 2C:35 marijuana laws. I believe marijuana was made legal by this legislative oversight here in Jersey.
In a quirk of circumstances, on April 1, 2010 I was once again one of the first people arrested after this new medical marijuana law was passed, but the prosecution elected to prosecute me under the 2C:35 criminal statutes again, even though I’m a bone cancer patient and this ACT was supposed to prevent the prosecution of medical marijuana patients like me. Instead of being afforded protection by the Compassion Use of Medical Marijuana Act (CUMMA), I’ve been fighting this point for over five years now. I was acquitted by a jury of the serious distribution charge, yet I was still unjustly imprisoned for months in Burlington County’s filthy jail for possession so I appealed.
FACT: New Jersey now has two laws mandating two different things - a clear constitutional violation of Due Process.
One law, the most recent, is CUMMA C.24:6I-2, which recognizes marijuana’s medical use.
The other law, our 2C:35 criminal statues, specifically doesn’t recognize marijuana as having medical value, and because of that its still illegal and legally described as a Schedule I drug in New Jersey.
By law (due process), wouldn’t that render the older 2C:35-10 law, as well as the description in 2C:43-3(1) that specifically doesn’t recognize “medical use,” outdated and obsolete - flawed at the very least, and outright unconstitutional at worst? This is one of the major arguments in my appeal - it’s not my fault the legislature didn’t fix this conflict.
Shouldn’t the state’s title 2C:35-10 marijuana laws be voided for vagueness, and nullified as a violation of due process? CUMMA passage in 2010 superseded it! If so, MJ is legal in NJ.
This is clearly unconstitutional.
How does the state get to prosecute citizens like myself under 2C:35 criminal statutes that are false, and in direct contradiction to the more recent CUMMA law? 2C:35 statutorily classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug having “no medical value,” but under CUMMA C.24:6I-2, other politically connected citizens are allowed to grow and distribute it as medicine. Why is marijuana treated as a legal medical substance for the Alternative Treatment Centers, but for me and 22,000 others each year it’s an illegal “non-medicinal substance,” and we are imprisoned for it? Why are some 4,000 people permitted to use this “ancient medicine” under CUMMA, while we were prosecuted under a law (2C:35-10) that states it “has no medical value”?
Pass the joint and think about this: In 1820 the Missouri Compromise, which described African-Americans as 2/3 of a person, became law. The Supreme Court upheld it in the 1858 Dred Scott decision, declaring, “The negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” But the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments in the 1860s rendered the previous laws like the Missouri Compromise obsolete. Likewise I believe CUMMA voided and nullified the 2C:35 laws that I and 100,000 New Jerseyans have been prosecuted under since CUMMA’s enactment in 2010.
Other states such as California dealt with this issue by making “medical exemptions” to their criminal statutes  SB420. New Jersey has a similar provision (N.J.S. 24:21-3(d)) within the Department of Health to do so as well; this statute even allows the director to change the Schedule, but Christie’s “politics of pot” prevented the application of this provision - thus my appeal.
I believe every pothead who was arrested and prosecuted under the current 2C:35 marijuana criminal statutes since Jan. 18, 2010 was prosecuted unconstitutionally.
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: Thu, 14 May 2015
Source: North Coast Journal (Arcata, CA)
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

WEEDER’S DIGEST
If you visit Humboldt County newspaper racks (and, since you’re reading this, I assume you do) with any regularity, you’ve almost certainly picked up a copy of the Emerald Magazine - the glossy, colorful lifestyle monthly that popped up in Arcata couple years ago.  If you’ve gotten used to the breezy business features it contains, brace for change.
The Emerald has been boostery from the beginning, highlighting wineries, inns and other Northern California companies in the colorful pages of its issues. But the magazine has always felt a bit like it lacked an identity. With themed editions ranging from “fathers” to “desserts,” the magazine apparently found a niche satisfying a common complaint that anyone in the newspaper business has gotten used to: “Why don’t you ever write about good news?”
Editor and founder Christina DeGiovanni sought to do just that, at least for the well-off NorCal set. The magazine’s goal has been to promote “local opportunities for attending exciting events, embarking on luxurious getaways, experiencing fine dining and keeping up with the latest local trends in upscale living,” according to an “about” page on the website.
Elsewhere, in a Craigslist help wanted ad, DeGiovanni characterized the magazine another way. “The Emerald aims to be the premier boutique women’s magazine for the North Coast. We have a strong leadership connection to women in Humboldt County.”
One thing that DeGiovanni has explicitly not featured: the Emerald Triangle’s most notable product - weed.
DeGiovanni launched the Emerald after legal troubles. She was arrested at her boyfriend’s Arcata home in 2012 on suspicion of possessing marijuana and firearms. Eventually, her charges were dropped, but, as she writes in the introduction to this month’s issue, “Perhaps in reaction to my personal trials relating to my proximity to the industry, when I launched The Emerald, I wanted it to chronicle a Humboldt County that was much more than the marijuana Mecca it’s almost always portrayed as.”
She was adamant about ignoring pot, despite the magazine’s focus on lifestyles for people with disposable income, its marijuana industry ads and its namesake.
Well, that’s all changing now. In a 180-degree turn, DeGiovanni completely rebranded the Emerald, launching the May edition with a new focus:
“The Emerald Magazine is Northern California’s cannabis culture review guide for business, medical and lifestyle trends. ... The Emerald highlights change in the industry by bridging the gap between the cannabis community and the media. The magazine intends to educate and enlighten the public on social, medical and on-going advancements, and works to establish a public tolerance and awareness as we move towards the age of legalization.”
Talking in her small office off the Arcata Plaza recently, DeGiovanni says she is tired of “ignoring the elephant in the room.”
She still looks to Sunset Magazine for inspiration, pointing to a stack of the West Coast magazines on her desk.
“I wanted to maintain that lifestyle feel and cross over into cannabis,” DeGiovanni says. “I want to be the Martha Stewart of marijuana.”
She called magazines like High Times “grungy,” saying she wasn’t going to switch over to a magazine “dripping with hash.” The inaugural cannabis issue’s cover features, instead, a stock photo of a bowl of sticky bud and an enormous joint on a soft linen table cloth next to a bouquet of lavender.
Readers found a light-on-details story about a “bud and breakfast” opening in Humboldt County (maybe), DIY instructions on making marijuana-infused vaginal lube and cocktails, reviews of strains and soils, and other pot-related articles, as well as features on Arcata artist Laurel Skye and Dell’Arte.
DeGiovanni says the impetus to change the magazine came after her mother’s lung cancer surgery at the end of last year. After spending several months helping her recover, “I lost momentum,” DeGiovanni says. “When I came back in January, I just wanted something fresh and something new.”
DeGiovanni discovered weed when she moved to Arcata to attend Humboldt State University. She says it helped reduce pain from an old gymnastics injury but she hasn’t been able to convince her mother that using marijuana might help the symptoms of her cancer treatment.  “She’s too scared.”
In an almost uncomfortably personal letter from the editor introducing the magazine’s change in direction, DeGiovanni rehashes her arrest and the trauma she says she experienced from it, and suggests that the magazine was a form of therapy. She invites readers to share their own stories of arrest for a feature called “My Bust.” So far, she says two people have told her about being raided, but that they didn’t want their stories published. But she says her website’s views have shot up since the rebranding.
“I think this is going to be better for enhancing the magazine, and my career as well.”
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: Thu, 14 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

OILY GOODNESS
I’m a 100 percent disabled veteran and I have a question about oils.  I stopped using marijuana because it was a little hard on my lungs and left me short of breath sometimes. The oils with the vape pens are easier on my lungs and simpler to use. Please explain the difference in oils versus marijuana and whether the oil’s safer for me to use. Thank you.
? Earl

Thank you for your service. You are right-vaporizers are definitely easier on the lungs, and they are superconvenient. Most of the new pens work by combining hash or hash oil with some sort of solvent, like glycol. The thing about some of the oil vapor pens on the market is no one really knows the long-term effects of glycol on the lungs.  These pens are all relatively new and haven’t really been studied.  Look for a pen that burns pure hash oil. It may be a little more inconvenient (you have to load the hash oil yourself, and that stuff is goopy and kinda messy if you aren’t careful), but I think the flavor and effects are superior to most of the other products. I also really like the PAX Vaporizer for cannabis flowers. It works by vaporizing the THC-containing glands of the plant without burning the plant material itself. Have a good one.
I have a friend with some serious medical issues and she is interested in trying medical cannabis. The thing is, she is a teacher and is worried about keeping her job. What can she do?
? Coco Irie

Hmmm. I will say this again: If you go get a letter of cannabis recommendation from your doctor, no one has to know. Your medical history is protected under the HIPAA Act. You will not be on a list and your boss doesn’t have to know. However, California offers no job protection for medical cannabis users, and yes, the rule has already been tested in court. Look up the court case Ross v. RagingWire Telecommunications Inc. if you want more info. So, if your friend is subject to random drug testing, she could be in danger of losing her job. One of the things we should discuss as we head toward full recreational legalization in California is how we are going to protect cannabis users’ jobs. Who knows? Perhaps when weed is legal, employers won’t be so uptight about people smoking a joint after work.
What’s your favorite action and adventure film to watch while stoned?
? Michael Medhead

Um, all of them? I love a good action film. And I really love a good caper flick. I think you would need something exciting, but also funny. Try The Last Action Hero because Arnold. I also like Ocean’s 11 and Ocean’s 13. Ocean’s 12 is not very good, you can skip it. If you like it over the top, try Crank or Shoot ‘Em Up. Weed and movies go together like weed and movies. Invite me over. I will bring joints and popcorn.
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: Fri, 15 May 2015
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/U6Eoi5Z1
Copyright: 2015 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Ricardo Baca

POT CHAIN LAYS OFF 65 WORKERS
A Licensing Fight With the State’s Marijuana Enforcement Division Causes Cuts to 45 Percent of the Workforce.
Complex licensing issues have led one of Colorado’s largest pot shop chains to lay off 65 people, or about 45 percent of the company’s workforce, owner Shawn Phillips said Thursday.
Phillips said about 80 percent of the employees worked full time in his cultivation facilities, which encompass about 100,000 square feet.
“We’ve been working on putting together this staff for the last four or five years,” Phillips said, “and we had some really good people who are passionate about the business and who wanted to continue on.  Hopefully these layoffs are temporary.”
Phillips’ company pays its state unemployment insurance premiums, so the laid-off workers will be eligible to file for unemployment benefits, the state Department of Labor and Employment confirmed.
“They would not be disallowed simply because marijuana has not been legalized nationally,” spokesman Bill Thoennes said.
Phillips’ nine pot shops - including The Haven, The Retreat and The Shelter in Denver, as well as others in Central City, Idaho Springs, Rifle and Wheat Ridge - remain open.
The layoffs are a result of complex licensing issues with the state’s Marijuana Enforcement Division, Phillips said.
In looking to expand his cultivation operation by 40,000 square feet, Phillips applied for a new grow license for the not-yet-operational Nome Street cultivation. Based on Phillips’ previous experience with the MED, he expected to have that license earlier this year.
When a couple of Phillips’ new marijuana licenses were denied by the MED, including one for a proposed recreational shop in Pagosa Springs, the MED put Phillips’ existing 39 licenses - including the license for the new grow facility - into a sort of pending status.
“It created a huge financial burden on the company and the loss of revenue that we can’t put in the ground,” he said.
A representative from MED declined to provide details, saying “this is an active and ongoing investigation.”
Phillips said he’s appealing the denials. Phillips’ wife’s cannabis business consulting company, Strainwise, is helping to place the laid-off employees elsewhere in the industry.
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: Fri, 15 May 2015
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/U6Eoi5Z1
Copyright: 2015 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Ricardo Baca

POT CHAIN LAYS OFF 65 WORKERS
A Licensing Fight With the State’s Marijuana Enforcement Division Causes Cuts to 45 Percent of the Workforce.
Complex licensing issues have led one of Colorado’s largest pot shop chains to lay off 65 people, or about 45 percent of the company’s workforce, owner Shawn Phillips said Thursday.
Phillips said about 80 percent of the employees worked full time in his cultivation facilities, which encompass about 100,000 square feet.
“We’ve been working on putting together this staff for the last four or five years,” Phillips said, “and we had some really good people who are passionate about the business and who wanted to continue on.  Hopefully these layoffs are temporary.”
Phillips’ company pays its state unemployment insurance premiums, so the laid-off workers will be eligible to file for unemployment benefits, the state Department of Labor and Employment confirmed.
“They would not be disallowed simply because marijuana has not been legalized nationally,” spokesman Bill Thoennes said.
Phillips’ nine pot shops - including The Haven, The Retreat and The Shelter in Denver, as well as others in Central City, Idaho Springs, Rifle and Wheat Ridge - remain open.
The layoffs are a result of complex licensing issues with the state’s Marijuana Enforcement Division, Phillips said.
In looking to expand his cultivation operation by 40,000 square feet, Phillips applied for a new grow license for the not-yet-operational Nome Street cultivation. Based on Phillips’ previous experience with the MED, he expected to have that license earlier this year.
When a couple of Phillips’ new marijuana licenses were denied by the MED, including one for a proposed recreational shop in Pagosa Springs, the MED put Phillips’ existing 39 licenses - including the license for the new grow facility - into a sort of pending status.
“It created a huge financial burden on the company and the loss of revenue that we can’t put in the ground,” he said.
A representative from MED declined to provide details, saying “this is an active and ongoing investigation.”
Phillips said he’s appealing the denials. Phillips’ wife’s cannabis business consulting company, Strainwise, is helping to place the laid-off employees elsewhere in the industry.
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Pubdate: Fri, 15 May 2015
Source: Baltimore Sun (MD)
Copyright: 2015 The Baltimore Sun Company
Contact: talkback@baltimoresun.com
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Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/37
Author: Sari Horwitz, The Washington Post

HEALTH COSTS SOAR BEHIND PRISON WALLS
Aging Population of Inmates Serving Long Sentences Takes a Toll on Budgets
COLEMAN PRISON, Fla. - Twenty-one years into his nearly 50-year sentence, the graying man steps inside his stark cell in the largest federal prison complex in America. He wears special medical boots because of a foot condition that makes walking feel as if he’s “stepping on a needle.” He has undergone tests for a suspected heart condition and sometimes experiences vertigo.
“I get dizzy sometimes when I’m walking,” says the 63-year-old inmate, Bruce Harrison. “One time, I just couldn’t get up.”
In 1994, Harrison and other members of the motorcycle group he belonged to were caught up in a drug sting by undercover federal agents, who asked them to move huge volumes of cocaine and marijuana.  After taking the job, making several runs and each collecting $1,000, Harrison and the others were arrested and later convicted. When their sentences were handed down, however, jurors objected.
“I am sincerely disheartened by the fact that these defendants, who participated in the staged off-loads and transports ... are looking at life in prison or decades at best,” said one of several who wrote letters to the judge and prosecutor.
In recent years, federal sentencing guidelines have been revised, resulting in less severe prison terms for lowlevel drug offenders.  But Harrison, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, remains one of tens of thousands of inmates who were convicted in the “war on drugs” of the 1980s and 1990s and whoare still behind bars.
Harsh sentencing policies, including mandatory minimums, continue to have lasting consequences for inmates and the nation’s prison system.  Today, prisoners 50 and older represent the fastest-growing population in crowded federal correctional facilities, their ranks having swelled by 25 percent to nearly 31,000 from 2009 to 2013.
Some prisons have needed to set up geriatric wards, while others have effectively been turned into convalescent homes.
The aging of the prison population is driving health care costs being borne by American taxpayers. The Bureau of Prisons saw health care expenses for inmates increase 55 percent from 2006 to 2013, when it spent more than $1 billion. That figure is nearly equal to the entire budget of the U.S. Marshals Service or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to the Justice Department’s inspector general, who is conducting a review of the impact of the aging inmate population on prison activities, housing and costs.
“Our federal prisons are starting to resemble nursing homes surrounded with razor wire,” said Julie Stewart, president and founder of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. “It makes no sense fiscally, or from the perspective of human compassion, to incarcerate men and women who pose no threat to public safety and have long since paid for their crime.”
The Obama administration is trying to overhaul the criminal justice system by allowing prisoners who meet certain criteria to be released early through clemency and urging prosecutors to reserve the most severe drug charges for serious, high-level offenders.
But until more elderly prisoners are discharged either through compassionate release programs or the clemency initiative started by then-Attorney General Eric Holder last year, the government will be forced to spend more to serve the population.
“Prisons simply are not physically designed to accommodate the infirmities that come with age,” said Jamie Fellner, a senior adviser at Human Rights Watch and an author of a report titled “Old Behind Bars.”
“There are countless ways that the aging inmates, some with dementia, bump up against the prison culture,” she said. “It is difficult to climb to the upper bunk, walk up stairs, wait outside for pills, take showers in facilities without bars and even hear the commands to stand up for count or sit down when you’re told.”
For years, state prisons followed the federal government’s lead in enacting harsh sentencing laws. In 2010, there were some 246,000 prisoners age 50 and older in state and federal prisons combined, with nearly 90 percent of them held in state custody, the American Civil Liberties Union said in a report titled “At America’s Expense:
The Mass Incarceration of the Elderly.”
On both the state and federal level, the spiraling costs are eating into funds that could be used to curtail violent crime, drug cartels, public corruption, financial fraud and human trafficking.
For now, however, prison officials say there is little they can do about the costs.
Edmond Ross, a spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons, said: “We have to provide a certain level of medical care for whoever comes to us.”
The average cost of housing federal inmates nearly doubles for aging
prisoners. While the cost of a prisoner in the general population is
$27,549 a year, the price tag associated with an older inmate who
needs more medical care, including expensive prescription drugs and
treatments, is $58,956, Justice Department officials say
At Federal Medical Center Devens, a prison near Boston, 115 aging inmates with kidney failure receive treatment inside a dialysis unit.
“Renal failure is driving our costs up,” said Ted Eichel, the health services administrator for Devens. “It costs $4 million to run this unit, not counting medications, which is half our budget.” Devens also employs 60 nurses, along with social workers, dietitians, psychologists, dentists and physical therapists. They look like medical workers, except for the cluster of prison keys they’re carrying.
Although the prison houses about 1,000 low-to high-security inmates, they are not handcuffed or shackled, except when being transferred outside the facility. A golf cart has been redesigned into a mini-ambulance.
At prisons such as Devens, younger inmates are sometimes enlisted as “companion aides,” helping older inmates get out of bed, wheeling them down the halls to medical appointments and helping them take care of themselves.
John Thompson, a patient care technician who works with Devens’ dialysis patients, said he knows a number of people who “want no part of” providing medical care to prisoners.
“But I just feel like they’re good people,” Thompson said. “And they’re doing their time.”
Jesse Owens, a dialysis patient serving about 12 years for cocaine charges, said he’s grateful for the care. “They’re keeping us alive,” he said.
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Pubdate: Fri, 15 May 2015
Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/ynfmP4JB
Copyright: 2015 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
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FEDEX CAN’T GET OUT OF DRUG CASE
Judge rejects claim it can’t be liable for shipping contraband
FedEx’s claim it can’t be prosecuted for contraband in its 4 million daily deliveries was rejected by a judge who allowed a case to go ahead over charges it conspired with “rogue” online drugstores to deliver illegal prescription drugs to dealers and addicts.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco on Thursday rejected the company’s bid for dismissal of the case, in which the government may seek almost $1 billion in fines.
Breyer said the acts alleged by prosecutors do not fall under an exemption in federal drug law for transportation companies such as FedEx.
FedEx had argued that the exemption allowed it and other so-called common carriers to legally possess drugs in the normal course of its business. The Memphis, Tenn.-based shipping giant says it cannot reasonably be expected to police the millions of packages it ships each day.
Breyer, however, said FedEx is accused of engaging in a conspiracy to distribute illegal drugs, which isn’t covered by the exemption. If that behavior were covered, what would stop a drug dealer from becoming a common carrier to distribute drugs without fear of prosecution, he asked FedEx’s attorney. “It’s not that it’s an uphill battle,” the judge said of the argument FedEx was making. “It’s an impossible battle.”
Separately, Breyer ordered the FBI and other agencies to turn over communications that FedEx says show it has long cooperated with the government’s crackdown on companies that are shipping drugs without proper prescriptions. As a drug-trafficking and money-laundering case heads toward trial, the parcel-shipping service is trying to show it’s being punished after doing the right thing.
The company said as far back as 2002, 12 years before it was accused of scheming with “rogue” online drugstores to deliver controlled substances to dealers and addicts, it was assisting federal agencies with investigations of pill purveyors. FedEx helped the government win convictions of the very companies the shipper is accused of conspiring with, defense lawyer Cris Arguedas said in court Thursday.
Prosecutors have charged FedEx with multiple drug counts alleging it conspired with two online pharmacies to ship powerful sleep aids, sedatives, painkillers and other drugs to customers it knew lacked valid prescriptions. FedEx has pleaded not guilty.
Breyer noted the case was unusual for the government’s decision to bring criminal charges. Rival UPS paid $40 million in 2013 to resolve similar allegations that arose from a nearly decade-long crackdown on Internet pharmacies that ship prescription drugs to customers lacking medical clearance.
? BLOOMBERG NEWS & AP
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Pubdate: Fri, 15 May 2015
Source: Boston Globe (MA)
Copyright: 2015 Globe Newspaper Company
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Author: Joshua Miller

MEET MR. MARIJUANA, DICK EVANS
NORTHAMPTON - The response to Dick Evans at the State House was not warm.
The lawyer had drafted a bill legalizing, regulating, and taxing marijuana, and it was among the topics of a public hearing.
Evans made his case in a short speech. “Antidrug crusader types,” of whom there were many, also had their say, he recalled. Then, a legislator asked those in the big crowd who opposed legalization to make themselves known.
“The building shook,” Evans said, laughing. “They are still talking about the roar that was heard.”
The hearing was gaveled to a close, and Evans said, “that was it for about 35 years.”
It was 1981.
Evans, 71, with a shock of white hair, has been involved in pressing for the legalization of marijuana in Massachusetts as long as just about anyone. Now, as chairman of a group pushing to legalize recreational marijuana use by popular vote in 2016, he is poised to be a key player in an effort that could successfully conclude his nearly four decades of advocacy.
The group, the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol in Massachusetts, is backed by the national, well-funded Marijuana Policy Project, and he is currently working with others on crafting the specific parameters of a ballot initiative for 2016 - from how marijuana would be regulated to the rate of a tax on the drug.
After robust Massachusetts majorities approved measures that decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana in 2008 and allowed its use for medical purposes in 2012, political analysts predict a legalization measure will probably garner the tens of thousands of signatures necessary to get on the ballot and enough votes to pass into law.
But the journey to the precipice of legalization has been a long one.
Barry Smith, a friend who traveled with him to the 1981 hearing, said the reaction to Evans’s bill was not “the least bit respectful” - though not negative enough for Evans to call it quits.
“Dick is a very, very ebullient fellow, and his spirits weren’t permanently damaged,” Smith said, “but it wasn’t an easy experience.”
Sporting a cannabis-green tie in a recent interview at his small law office, Evans recalled the genesis of his advocacy.
The youngest of three boys, he grew up in Tampa. His father was a federal probation officer, his mother a school teacher. All the brothers became lawyers and, Evans said chuckling, one a drug court judge.
After four years in the military, including some time in the Pioneer Valley, he returned to Florida for law school, where he said he struggled squaring the constitutional law he was reading with the country’s drug statutes.
Evans moved to Massachusetts and was admitted to the state’s bar in 1973.
A few years later, he was hanging out with a colleague on a Saturday, “passing a joint,” talking about how “wrong-headed” the marijuana laws were, he remembered. The colleague encouraged him to get involved, and Evans joined NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
After some years in the movement, he said, he began to think that perhaps the reason no one was seriously talking about legalizing marijuana is that no one had shown how it could be done.
“I said, ‘Someone needs to write a comprehensive statute,’ “ Evans said in the interview, “So I did!”
He leapt up on a chair to grab his original legalization bill from a shelf.
Of course, the 1981 effort did not work out as planned, and Evans said he gave up on Beacon Hill, but not on the issue.
“The notion of prohibiting all use of marijuana by all persons in all circumstances, and punishing violators severely,” he said, “runs counter to the very notion of freedom.”
Eric E. Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a drug law reform group, recalled meeting Evans for the first time at a NORML conference in the early 1980s.
“I was tremendously impressed with him. I remember he gave a very articulate, well-constructed argument for marijuana legalization,” Sterling said, adding that, at that time, there were not that many people advocating for the idea.
Evans’s paper trail of advocacy is long. Among his many appearances in print, a 1980 op-ed in The New York Times (“The principle that government does not belong on people’s backs cannot be tortured to justify the arrest and prosecution of people for what they smoke.”); and quotes in a 1996 issue of Time magazine about what he told his son about drugs (“Don’t believe much of what they tell you in school about drugs. For example, don’t buy into the notion that drug ‘abuse’ is the same as drug ‘use.’ “)
Evans’s life is not all marijuana advocacy. His primary legal practice focuses on land conservation. He’s a Northampton resident, he plays trumpet, and he is involved with a nearby pumpkin festival.
But he said he has felt a sense of duty to press on the legalization issue.
“My job, over the last couple of decades, has been to try and keep the issue alive in Massachusetts - I and other people,” he said.
Others in the push to legalize see Evans as both influential and a good team player.
He is “a mover and shaker in the activist movement,” not shy about speaking his mind, but “doesn’t try and steal the spotlight,” said Bill Downing, a fellow legalization activist who has known Evans for 25 years.
But Evans says his advocacy won’t last forever: Once marijuana is legal, he plans to retire.
So for all his talk, is Evans himself a user?
He said he has avoided speaking about his own use of marijuana publicly because he has not wanted to give probable cause for his arrest or, these days, for a civil infraction.
“I’ll tell you what,” Evans said leaning in toward a reporter, “when you and I can share a joint and neither of us has to worry about our job” - he slapped the table for emphasis - “I’ll talk about it.”
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Pubdate: Mon, 25 May 2015
Source: Time Magazine (US)
Copyright: 2015 Time Inc
Contact: letters@time.com
Website: http://www.time.com/time/magazine
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/451
Authors: Bruce Barcott and Michael Scherer
Note: Barcott is a journalist who has contributed to the New York Times, National Geographic and other publications. Scherer is TIME’s Washington bureau chief.
THE GREAT POT EXPERIMENT
Yasmin Hurd raises rats on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that will blow your mind.
Though they look normal, their lives are anything but, and not just because of the pricey real estate they call home on the 10th floor of a research building near Mount Sinai Hospital. For skeptics of the movement to legalize marijuana, the rodents are canaries in the drug-policy coal mine. For defenders of legalization, they are curiosities. But no one doubts that something is happening in the creatures’ trippy little brains.
In one experiment, Hurd’s rats spent their adolescence getting high, on regular doses of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive compound in marijuana.
In the past, scientists have found that rats exposed to THC in their youth will show changes in their brain in adulthood. But Hurd asked a different question: Could parental marijuana exposure pass on changes to the next generation, even to offspring who had never been exposed to the drug?
So she mated her rats, but only after she had waited a month to make sure the drug was no longer in their system.
She raised the offspring, along with another group of rats that shared the same life experiences except for the THC. She then trained the children to play a game alone in a box. The prize: heroin.
Press one lever to get a shot of saline into the jugular vein. Press the other to get a rush of opiates.
Initially, the rats with THC-exposed parents performed about the same as the rats with sober parents. But when Hurd’s team changed the rules, requiring the rats to work harder for the drug, differences emerged.
The rats with drug-using parents pushed the lever more than twice as much. They wanted the heroin more.
When she analyzed the brains of the rats, she also found differences in the neural circuitry of the ones with drug-using parents.
Even the grandkids have begun to show behavioral differences in how they seek out rewards. “This data tells us we are passing on more things that happen during our lifetimes to our kids and grandkids,” Hurd explains, though it remains unclear how those changes manifest in humans. “I wasn’t expecting these results, and it’s fascinating.”
SIDEBAR Cause & Effect:  Prohibition has denied beings of nutritional and airborne benefits of Cannabis elimination from atmosphere”  - Debby Moore AKA Hemp Lady, CEO Hemp Industries of Kansas
Welcome to the encouraging, troubling and strangely divided frontier of marijuana science.
The most common illicit drug on the planet and one of the fastest-growing industries in America, pot remains surprisingly something of a medical mystery, thanks in part to decades of obstruction and misinformation by the federal government. Potentially groundbreaking studies on the drug’s healing powers are being done to find treatments for conditions like epilepsy, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, sickle-cell disease and multiple sclerosis.
But there are also new discoveries about the drug’s impact on recreational users.
The effects are generally less severe than those of tobacco and alcohol, which together cause more than 560,000 American deaths annually. Unlike booze, marijuana isn’t a neurotoxin, and unlike cigarettes, it has an uncertain connection to lung cancer.
Unlike heroin, pot brings almost no risk of sudden death without a secondary factor like a car crash.
But science has also found clear indications that in addition to short-term effects on cognition, pot can change developing brains, possibly affecting mental abilities and dispositions, especially for certain populations. The same drug that seems relatively harmless in moderation for adults appears to be risky for people under age 21, whose brains are still developing. “It has a whole host of effects on learning and cognition that other drugs don’t have,” says Jodi Gilman, a Harvard Medical School researcher who has been studying the brains of human marijuana users. “It looks like the earlier you start, the bigger the effects.”
Beyond Reefer Madness
That relatively measured tone is a far cry from the shrill warnings of Harry J. Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who in the 1930s set the standard for America’s fraught debate over marijuana with wild exaggerations. “How many murders, suicides, robberies, criminal assaults, holdups, burglaries and deeds of maniacal insanity it causes each year, especially among the young, can only be conjectured,” he wrote as part of a campaign to terrify the country.
As recently as the 1970s, President Richard Nixon talked about the drug as a weapon of the nation’s enemies. “That’s why the communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff,” he was recorded saying in private. “They’re trying to destroy us.”
The official line today is better grounded in data and research.
And the new focus is squarely on brain development. “I am most concerned about possibly harming the potential of our young people,” says Dr. Nora Volkow, the head of the National Institute for Drug Abuse (NIDA), which funds Hurd’s and Gilman’s work. “That could be disastrous for our country.”
But decades of prohibition and official misinformation continue to shape public views. “The government did not spend as much effort in finding out the facts about marijuana,” says Hurd. “That strategy of scaring people rather than provide knowledge has made people skeptical now when they hear anything negative.”
As states now rush to legalize pot and unwind a massive criminalization effort, the federal government is trying to play catch-up on the science, with mixed success.
The only federal marijuana farm, at the University of Mississippi, has recently expanded production with a $69 million grant in March, and Volkow has expressed a new openness to studies of marijuana’s healing potential. In the coming months, Uncle Sam will begin a 10-year, $300 million study with thousands of adolescents to track the harm that marijuana, alcohol and other drugs do to the developing brain.
High-tech imaging will allow researchers for the first time to map the effects of marijuana on the brain as humans age.
But scientists and others point out that a shift to fund the real science of pot still has a long way to go. The legacy of the war on drugs haunts the medical establishment, and federal rules still put onerous restrictions on the labs around the country that seek to work with marijuana, which remains classified among the most dangerous and least valuable drugs. “We can do studies on cocaine and morphine without a problem, because they are Schedule II,” explains Fair Vassoler, a researcher at Tufts University who has replicated Hurd’s rat experiment with synthetic pot. “But marijuana is Schedule I.”
That means that under the law, marijuana has “no medical benefit,” even though 23 states have legalized pot as medicine and NIDA acknowledges that “recent animal studies have shown that marijuana can kill certain cancer cells and reduce the size of others.” And marijuana researchers face barriers even higher than those faced by scientists studying other Schedule I drugs, like heroin and LSD. Pot studies must pass intensive review by the U.S. Public Health Service, a process that has delayed and thwarted much research for more than 15 years.
The result is sometimes a catch-22 for scientists seeking to understand the drug. “The government’s research restrictions are so severe that it’s difficult to find and show the medical benefit,” says neurobiologist R. Douglas Fields, the chief of the nervous-system-development section at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
That all may change soon. On Capitol Hill, a left-right coalition of Senators Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Cory Booker of New Jersey introduced a bill in March to federally legalize medical marijuana in states that have already approved it.  “For far too long,” said Paul, a Republican candidate for President, “the government has enforced unnecessary laws that have restricted the ability of the medical community to determine the medicinal value of marijuana.”
The Cannabinoid System
Harm researchers and neuroscientists aren’t completely deadlocked.
They agree on at least one thing.
Marijuana’s positive and negative effects both spring from the same source: the body’s endocannabinoid system. First discovered in the late 1990s, it’s a complex neural system that researchers are only beginning to fully comprehend.
A little Brain Science 101: Human gray matter contains around 86 billion neurons, a type of cell that essentially talks to other cells in the brain through electrochemical processes.
Neurons talk to each other through chemical messengers known as neurotransmitters including dopamine, serotonin, glutamate and compounds called endocannabinoids which in turn send instructions to your body about what to do.
Researchers now know the body produces endocannabinoids, which activate cannabinoid receptors in the brain.
Interestingly, one plant on earth produces a similar compound that hits those same receptors: marijuana. Just as poppy-derived morphine mimics endorphins, marijuana-derived cannabinoids like THC and cannabidiol (CBD) mimic endocannabinoids, which impact feelings of hunger and pleasure. Cannabinoid receptors are especially widespread in the brain, where they play a key role in regulating the actions of other neurotransmitters.
“The more we investigate the hidden recesses of the brain, the more it seems like practically every neuron either releases endocannabinoids or can sense them using cannabinoid receptors,” explains Gregory Gerdeman, a neuroscientist and endocannabinoid researcher at Florida’s Eckerd College. Neurotransmitters carry out brain communication through synapses. “But too much synaptic excitation is poisonous it damages cells,” says Gerdeman.  “Endocannabinoids are a mechanism for putting on the brakes when that toxic level of excitation is approached.”
Cannabinoids like CBD may be thought of as neuroprotectants that is, brain protectors. In fact, the NIH actually owns a patent (No.  6630507) on cannabinoids as neuroprotectants, based on the work of researcher Aiden Hampson and his mentor, Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist Julius Axelrod. They found that CBD showed particular promise in limiting neurological damage in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease and in those who have suffered a stroke or head trauma.
Endocannabinoids also play a role in the regulation of pain, mood, appetite, memory and even the life and death of individual cells.  Curiously, cannabinoid receptors aren’t densely packed in the medulla (within the brain stem), which controls breathing and the cardiovascular system.
That’s why a heroin overdose can be fatal the drug shuts down the respiratory control center but a marijuana overdose generally can’t.  PTSD researchers are keen to crack the cannabinoid code because the compounds appear to play a role in extinguishing unpleasant memories.  “Part of what happens with PTSD is that the brain’s stress buffers have been blown out by trauma,” says Gerdeman. “Endocannabinoids within the amygdala” the brain region important for emotional learning and memory “act as a key mechanism for what we call memory extinction.”
But what accounts for the potentially healing effects of pot in some can cause harm in others.
That’s because endocannabinoids appear to play a critical role in the development of the adolescent brain.
If the brain were a house, the childhood years would be spent pouring the foundation and framing up the walls.
Adolescence is when the wiring and plumbing get finished.
Neural networks are refined and strengthened through pruning.
The strong synapses, axons and dendrites are preserved, the weak culled.
Researchers now believe the cannabinoid system plays a critical role in this neural fine-tuning. This is where the worries about teenage pot use come to the fore. At the precise moment when the brain relies on a finely calibrated dose of endocannabinoids, the adolescent weed smoker floods the system. “If you actively and repeatedly overload the endogenous cannabinoid system,” says Volkow, “you are going to disrupt that very well-orchestrated system.”
That disruption may lie at the heart of still inconclusive science about marijuana’s impact on human behavior, especially among younger users. Early studies suggest that there may be long-lasting impacts on mental acuity, higher brain function and impulse control for younger users.
There is also a well-documented connection between pot smoking and schizophrenia, a condition that affects about 1% of the U.S.  population. Scientists have been aware of the link since the 1970s.  Among those with a family history of mental illness, marijuana can hasten the emergence of schizophrenia.
Researchers are trying to identify the mechanisms in play. “Many genes are undoubtedly involved in risk for schizophrenia,” says Dr.  Michael Compton, a professor at Hofstra North Shore LIJ School of Medicine and the head of psychiatry at New York City’s Lenox Hill Hospital. “But there are also a host of social or environmental influences at work.” For a subset of the population, the earlier the initiation of marijuana use, the earlier the onset of psychosis.
Here’s why that matters: The later schizophrenia emerges, the greater the likelihood of recovery.
Schizophrenia onset in a 15-year-old is often permanently life-altering. In a 24-year-old, it can be less damaging, because the person has had the chance to accomplish more psychological and social-developmental milestones. But that doesn’t mean all teenage pot users are smoking themselves into mental illness. Darold Treffert, the Wisconsin psychiatrist who first documented the marijuana-schizophrenia link in the 1970s, puts it this way: “Perhaps some persons can safely use marijuana, but schizophrenics cannot.” A test or a clear genetic marker to identify kids who are vulnerable to schizophrenia is likely years away.
The Healing Possibilities
While American research on the potential harms from marijuana is booming, the U.S. continues to lag in funding investigations into the possible benefits.
In the late 1990s, the U.S. and British governments commissioned separate studies of medical marijuana.
The U.K. study was spurred by multiple-sclerosis patients’ using pot to calm spasticity. The U.S. study, done by the Institute of Medicine, was in response to California’s 1996 legalization of medical marijuana.
Both studies reached a similar conclusion: medical pot wasn’t a hippie’s delusion.
The research showed that the stuff held real therapeutic potential for specific conditions, including epilepsy, chronic pain and glaucoma.
The British responded by treating marijuana as a plant with biotech prospects.
U.K. officials licensed GW Pharmaceuticals, a startup lab in
Salisbury, England, to grow weed and develop cannabinoid drugs, some of which U.S. scientists like Hurd use in their research.
The Americans, meanwhile, doubled down on the war on drugs.
Barry McCaffrey, Bill Clinton’s drug czar, was outraged at the Institute of Medicine’s results. “I think what the IOM report said is that smoked marijuana is harmful, particularly for those with chronic conditions,” he said pretty much the opposite of the report’s conclusions. Nonetheless, he and then Attorney General Janet Reno vowed to prosecute medical-marijuana patients and doctors who prescribed the drug. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services adopted even tougher strictures against the study of marijuana as a medicine.
The federal antipot policies resulted in a strange kind of scientific trade deficit.
The U.S. leads the world in studies of marijuana’s harm, but we’re net importers of data dealing with its healing potential. THC discoverer Raphael Mechoulam runs the world’s leading cannabinoid lab at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Spanish biologist Manuel Guzman is doing cutting-edge work on the potential of cannabinoids to retard the growth of glioblastoma, one of the deadliest forms of brain cancer.
Canada’s health agency may soon approve the world’s first clinical trial to test medical marijuana on military and police veterans with PTSD.
There are signs of change at home, though.
This year, the Colorado department of public health awarded $9 million in grants for medical-marijuana research, funded with tax revenue from state-licensed pot stores.
They will be among the first U.S. clinical trials to look into the effectiveness of marijuana for childhood epilepsy, irritable-bowel disease, cancer pain, PTSD and Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Kelly Knupp, a pediatric-epilepsy specialist at Children’s Hospital in Denver, will track children using high-CBD marijuana strains to calm seizures. “Some of these children can have 100 to 200 seizures a day,” Knupp says. “We’re hoping we can measure seizure frequency to see if there’s any improvement” among kids trying the cannabinoid medicine.
This Is a Rat on Drugs
Back at Hurd’s Upper East Side lab, the rats have begun to show the way. In a separate experiment, she gave heroin-addicted rats doses of CBD and found that it decreased their willingness to work hard for more heroin, suggesting that parts of marijuana could help human drug addicts stay clean.
She is now testing that hypothesis by giving CBD tablets, made in England, to recovering human addicts in New York City.
She is also continuing to study the behavior of rats whose only exposure to marijuana’s active ingredients came through the DNA passed on to them from their parents or grandparents. That research suggests that THC may have epigenetic effects, which have been found in other drugs like cocaine and heroin, changing the way genes express themselves in the brains of offspring.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that parents who smoked weed in high school have damaged their kids, because those changes may be overrun by other behaviors. The science is too new to know for sure. “It’s not a given that this is going to happen,” Hurd explains of her rats.  “They tell us the potential.”
That word potential still qualifies much of what is known about pot, but it won’t be that way for long. The science of pot is likely to expand in the coming years, and it could boom if federal restrictions are lifted.
What the government once dismissed as a communist plot that prompted murderous rages has turned out to be a window into the very workings of the human mind. In the years to come, researchers may yet find genetic markers that predispose people to pot-induced psychotic reactions, map out the specific ways in which THC changes the brain and find new medicines for some of the most intractable illnesses.  Until then, the great marijuana experiment will continue in a country where 1 in 10 adults and 35% of high school seniors admit to conducting their own, mostly recreational, research.
Portions of this article were adapted from Barcott’s new book “Weed the People, the Future of Legal Marijuana in America,” from TIME Books, is now available wherever books are sold, including Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Indiebound.
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Pubdate: Fri, 15 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: William Neuman

DEFYING U.S., COLOMBIA ENDS A DRUG TACTIC
BOGOTA, Colombia - The government of Colombia on Thursday night rejected a major tool in the American-backed antidrug campaign - ordering a halt to the aerial spraying of the country’s vast illegal plantings of coca, the crop used to make cocaine, citing concerns that the spray causes cancer.
The decision ends a program that has continued for more than two decades, raising questions about the viability of long-accepted strategies in the war on drugs in the region.
Colombia is one of the closest allies of the United States in Latin America and its most stalwart partner on antidrug policy, but the change of strategy has the potential to add a new element of tension to the relationship.
Just last week, American officials warned that the amount of land used to grow coca in Colombia grew by 39 percent last year as aerial spraying to kill or stunt the crop, already a contentious issue here, declined.
“The folks who run counternarcotics never want to give up any of their tools, and there are pockets of discontent inside the U.S.  government with this decision,” said Adam Isacson, a senior associate of the Washington Office on Latin America, a research group.
“Colombia and the United States have been in lock step on a hard-line approach” in how to fight drug trafficking, he added. “It’s the first time there’s been light between the two countries on what the strategy should be, in recent memory.”
The decision to halt the spraying, which was backed by President Juan Manuel Santos, came after an agency of the World Health Organization declared in March that the herbicide used here, a chemical called glyphosate, probably causes cancer in humans.
The chemical, the active ingredient in the popular weedkiller Roundup, is the most widely used herbicide in the world. Colombian officials have said that a previous Supreme Court ruling in their country called for an end to the spraying if health concerns involving the chemical were found.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency has determined that there is a “lack of convincing evidence” to consider it a cancer risk to humans.
Before Thursday’s decision, the United States had pressed the Colombian government to continue the spraying program. The American ambassador in Bogota, Kevin Whitaker, published an op-ed article in El Tiempo, one of the country’s main newspapers, over the weekend, defending the program.
But he has also stressed that Colombia’s decision would not harm diplomatic relations.
“This is their sovereign decision to make, and we will respect that and we will continue to use the tools that are available to us, as Colombia wishes us to do, to continue to be a partner with them in this fight,” Mr. Whitaker said in an interview a day before the decision was taken.
“We have lots of tools to help Colombia address the problem of transnational crime and narco-trafficking.”
He said that includes providing intelligence on drug traffickers, encouraging farmers to grow other crops, intercepting drug shipments, focusing on shutting down drug labs and supporting efforts to pull up and destroy coca plants by hand.
Thursday’s decision involved only the use of the herbicide in the coca spraying program. The government has not moved to ban use of the herbicide by farmers who grow legal crops and use it to kill weeds.
The spraying program was steeped in controversy even before the declaration was made in March by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
Colombia is the only coca-producing country that uses airplanes to spray and kill the crop. The other major producers, Peru and Bolivia, have shunned spraying.
Critics of spraying in Colombia said that it was harmful to the health of rural residents and that it caused environmental damage.
The spraying also alienated the poor farmers who have often felt that they had little choice but to grow coca to feed their families.
But opponents of the spraying ban have argued that ending spraying could lead to a boom in cocaine production and favor traffickers and rebel groups like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which depends on the drug trade for much of its financing and has advocated an end to spraying.
They have also pointed out that one alternative, eradicating plants by hand, is dangerous because it involves sending troops and workers into areas controlled by traffickers and guerrilla troops. Many eradication workers have been killed and wounded by land mines or in armed confrontations in drug-growing areas.
Spraying with glyphosate began in the 1990s on a small scale and by the early 2000s it was established as a crucial aspect of Plan Colombia, a multibillion dollar push by the United States to aid in fighting rebel groups and drug traffickers in the country.
It reached its peak in 2006, when more than 405,000 acres were sprayed, according to data compiled for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
But aerial spraying has fallen sharply over the last two years, even as coca plantings jumped. Last year, 137,000 acres were sprayed, while the amount of land planted with coca increased to 276,758 acres in Colombia, compared with 198,919 acres the previous year.
Daniel Mejia, the director of the Center for Security and Drug Studies, a research group in Bogota, said that spraying was inefficient and counterproductive.
“I would recommend attacking the links in the chain of drug trafficking, the labs where cocaine is processed, the large shipments of chemicals, which is really where the hard drug trafficking is, where organized crime is,” Mr. Mejia said. “It has been shown that attacking the farmers doesn’t work.”
Rafael Nieto, a former vice-minister of justice, questioned the rationale behind halting spraying, saying that more eradication workers would be put at risk.
“If the spraying is stopped, the income of the drug traffickers, the criminal gangs and the guerrillas will go up substantially and so will the number of dead and wounded,” Mr. Nieto said. “Coca and cocaine production would also go up, and there would be more addicts and more people will die.”
The impact of the decision on the peace talks underway between the government and the FARC are uncertain. Some critics of the decision say that it removes a critical element of pressure on the group that could help push it toward a deal to lay down its arms.
The two sides have reached a preliminary deal on cooperating to fight drug trafficking, which would go into effect if an overall peace deal is reached. It calls for the government to work with rural communities to help them grow legal crops and increase government services in those areas. It says that spraying could be used only as a last resort.
On Monday, the government said that the armed forces had raided 63 illegal mines operated by the FARC to extract gold and other minerals. It said shutting down the mines would take away millions of dollars in monthly income for the group.
Susan Abad contributed reporting.
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Pubdate: Mon, 18 May 2015
Source: Herald, The (Everett, WA)
Copyright: 2015 The Daily Herald Co.
Contact: letters@heraldnet.com
Website: http://www.heraldnet.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/190
Author: David Sirota

FINANCIAL SIDE OF MARIJUANA STARTING TO ROLL
In January, the SEC for the first time allowed a company that deals with marijuana cultivation to sell shares of stock.
The convention floor at Denver Airport’s Crowne Plaza on a recent afternoon could have been the trade show for any well-established industry - gray-haired execs in conservative suits mingling with office park dads in polos and fresh-out-of-college types in brand emblazoned T-shirts. Only this is a new kind of business conference with a special Colorado theme: legal weed.
After Colorado voters legalized marijuana in 2012, more states and cities are considering a similar path for themselves. At the same time, the cannabis market is looking less like a music festival and more like a Silicon Valley confab - upscale, data-driven and focused on investors.
Vendors and potential financiers at last month’s Marijuana Investor Summit here in the Mile High City say the current market for legal cannabis is more than $3 billion in the 23 states that have already legalized the drug for medicinal or recreational use. Expanding that market, they say, will require not just drug reform legislation, but also a consistent infusion of capital at a time when the marijuana economy still exists in a legal gray area - one where the drug is permitted in some states, but still outlawed at the federal level.
“It’s going to take time, but it’s a great opportunity,” said Chris Rentner of Akouba Credit, a Chicago small business lender exploring the possibility of working with marijuana businesses. “For people that think everyone is a stoner lying on the sidewalk passed out, it’s going to take time for them to get comfortable with it. But there’s too much money in it. We just need to figure out the risk associated with it, but if we can find a way where it makes sense legally, then why wouldn’t we try to be in this market?”
If Akouba jumps into the marijuana market, the company would be trying to address one of the biggest obstacles to the industry’s growth: access to financial services. Because marijuana is still prohibited under federal law, cannabis grow houses and dispensaries have trouble finding traditional banking partners, leaving much of their business to be conducted in cash.
That not only presents a risk of robbery, it also can limit the industry’s access to the kinds of lending and accounting services that are typically involved in small business development.
Like Akouba, many of the 78 exhibitors and nearly 1,000 attendees at the conference are not in the business of actually harvesting cannabis. Instead, they aim to provide support services for cultivators and distributors.
“The majority of these companies aren’t actually touching the plant,” said John Downs of the Marijuana Investment Company. “There’s a green line: You are either in the ancillary and tertiary services, or you are digging in and growing.”
That term - “touching the plant” - is a term of art that distinguishes businesses that provide support services from those that actually grow cannabis. It’s not a minor semantic difference.  “Touching the plant” can bring greater regulatory scrutiny and threats of federal action, thereby putting investors’ capital at risk.
That, though, may start to change. In January, the SEC for the first time allowed a company that deals with marijuana cultivation to sell shares of stock. Meanwhile, the legal situation is becoming clearer in Colorado.
Andreas Nilsson of iComply - a firm that helps marijuana business follow the law - says that while there remains political opposition to weed from leaders like Colorado Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper, the state’s officials put together “very well-developed and clear” regulations and “decided to go in and create a system that is not designed to fail.”
Is it a perfect system? Hardly. But has the sky fallen, as drug warriors once predicted? No - and it probably will not in other states that follow Colorado’s lead.
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Pubdate: Fri, 15 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: Spencer Ackerman

RAPE AND ABUSE CLAIMS IN US POLICE ‘BLACK SITE’
For psychological reasons, Angel Perez does not call what happened to him rape. But he vividly recalls being taken to Homan Square, a warehouse used by the Chicago police for incommunicado detentions, where police inserted something into his rectum.
“I felt the coldness and the metallic aspect of it,” Perez, 33, told the Guardian.
It was 21 October 2012. Perez had been driving his 4x4 on his restaurant delivery route the day before when he says police accosted him, wanting him to contact a drug dealer who they believed Perez knew, so they could arrange a sting. Perez was less cooperative than they had hoped.
That day, Perez was handcuffed by his right wrist to a metal bar behind a bench in an interrogation room on the second floor of Homan Square. Behind him were two police officers that a lawsuit Perez recently refiled identifies as Jorge Lopez and Edmund Zablocki. They had been threatening him with a stint at the infamously violent Cook county jail if he didn’t cooperate.
“They’re gonna think you’re a little sexy bitch in jail,” Perez recalled one of them saying. Perez is now the 13th person the Guardian has interviewed since February who has described being taken by police to the warehouse on Chicago’s west side; kept without a record of his whereabouts available to the public; and shackled for hours or even days without access to a lawyer.
Most of them have been black, Hispanic and poor. Some allege physical abuse; all allege that they were in an inherently coercive environment.
Few were charged with a crime, and police took those who were to actual police stations for booking after detention at Homan. Police and local media have dismissed their stories. Perez claims he was bent over in front of the bench. He recalled smelling urine and seeing bloodstains in the room. The police officers pulled his shirt up and slowly moved a metallic object down his bare skin. Then they pulled his pants down.
“He’s talking all this sexual stuff, he’s really getting fucking weird about it, too,” Perez remembered. He began shaking, the beginnings of a panic attack.
“They get down to where they’re gonna insert it, this is where I feel that it’s something around my rear end, and he said some stupid comment and then he jammed it in there and I started jerking and going all crazy  I think I kicked him  and I just go into a full-blown panic attack.”
Whatever the object was, the police suggested it was the barrel of a handgun. After Perez involuntarily jerked from the penetration, Zablocki is alleged to have told him: “I almost blew your brains out.” Perez claims all this occurred to persuade him to purchase $170 worth of heroin from the dealer.
The abuse Perez alleges is reminiscent of an earlier era of police torture in Chicago, when Darrell Cannon had a shotgun barrel jammed into his mouth. Last week, decades after Cannon’s abuse, Chicago established a reparations fund for survivors of police torture. Perez is still seeking justice.
He initially filed a lawsuit against the police detailing his allegations of sexual abuse in 2013, which attracted attention from Courthouse News and Vice. But what he has since learned is that his ordeal took place at Homan Square, the off-the-books detention centre considered by lawyers and activists to be the law enforcement analogue of a CIA black site. Weeks ago, four other people detained at Homan Square from 2006 to 2015 joined his lawsuit.
Videos Perez acquired through his legal proceedings show him inside the warehouse complex and corroborate the dates and times of his detention there.
The effect of the sexual torture was similar to Cannon’s. Cannon falsely confessed to a murder. Perez told Lopez and Zablocki he would buy the heroin.
“After they did that, I would have done anything for them,” said Perez, who was not charged with any crime related to his Homan Square detention.
He called “D”, whom court papers allege is a man named Dwayne, and arranged to purchase heroin with $170 the police gave him.
The Chicago police department has reacted with indignation and nonspecific denials of the Guardian’s Homan Square reporting.
“The allegation that physical violence is a part of interviews with suspects is unequivocally false, it is offensive, and it is not supported by any facts whatsoever,” the police said in a 1 March statement. The police downplayed Homan’s detention operations, saying that like other police facilities in the city, it contained “several standard interview rooms”. Most people interviewed at Homan Square were “low-level arrests from the narcotics unit”.
Yet the videos show police leading Perez, hands confined behind his back, through a door inside Homan Square marked “prisoner entrance”, suggesting a more routine detention function than the police have described. Perez was never formally arrested: he was neither booked nor permitted legal counsel nor charged.
“No inmates are supposed to be there. Certainly they’re not supposed to be held there,” said Perez’s attorney, Scott Kamin.
The other people who signed on to Perez’s lawsuit have also told their stories for the first time. Their further revelations, including confinement in fetid and humiliating conditions, now mark 17 first-hand accounts of detention at Homan Square since the Guardian began reporting on the warehouse in February. The most recent occurred fewer than three weeks before the initial report.
Jose Martinez is alleged to have been cuffed to a bench for nine hours before being booked at an actual police station in September 2011. He claims that he was shackled “without food, water or use of the restroom” in a “locked room that smelled like urine and faeces”.
Two other individuals, Estephanie Martinez and Calvin Coffey, described relieving themselves while shackled in Homan Square interrogation rooms. Martinez, locked up in August 2006, was told by a guard that she did not have the key to Martinez’s handcuffs and could not take her to the toilet. Coffey, taken to Homan Square on 6 February 2015 on suspicion of “narcotic activity”, defecated on the floor after two hours of fruitless requests to use the toilet. A police officer “made Calvin clean it up with his skull cap”, the lawsuit alleges.
Juanita Berry was with Coffey at the time of his detention and was taken with him to Homan Square. Handcuffed to a “ring or a bar on the wall”, the lawsuit alleges, officers told her to get them two handguns “or else they would charge her with aiding in the delivery of controlled substance”.
After Berry acquired a gun from an unspecified acquaintance, satisfied police allegedly drove her to a Dunkin’ Donuts and let her go without charge.
Berry’s account echoes that of a different Chicago man, not a party to the lawsuit, whom the Guardian has separately interviewed and agreed to identify as Young OG so as not to risk his further harassment by police. He said Homan Square police kept him detained for nearly an entire day before he agreed to get them guns.
Young OG, a black man in his 30s, was picked up by masked police, guns drawn, after he stopped at a petrol station with a friend in late 2013 for cigarettes. It was mid-morning and Young OG was confused over whether he was getting robbed or stopped by police. “It was a real-life kidnapping,” he said.
At Homan Square, police kept Young OG confined with a twist tie on his right wrist. Young OG was kept, he said, in an office-like space without furniture, causing him to sit on a dirty floor and lay on his hooded sweatshirt.
He was not fed, not booked, not permitted a lawyer and afforded one brief bathroom break.
Late that evening, police came to Young OG, woke him up, and said they wanted him to provide them with weapons. One officer had what looked like packets of heroin. “It’s gonna be yours before the night’s over if you don’t cooperate with us,” Young OG recalled a masked officer telling him.
“As soon as you help us, the sooner you’ll get out of here,” he recalled an officer saying. A white officer “went straight to guns”, saying that Young OG needed to get them for the police.
Young OG was allowed to call his friend, whom the Guardian has agreed to identify as “Head”. He told Head: “Police got us, bro, they’re trying to pin us on some bullshit.” With the knowledge of the police, Young OG instructed Head to place any gun he could find in a garbage can behind Young OG’s grandmother’s house.
Head did as his friend asked. “By 2.30, they were picking the shit out from the garbage,” Head said. Police let Young OG and his friend go later that morning without charge. Young OG never got his mobile phone, his ID or his wallet back.
The Chicago police department did not respond to a list of questions sent to them for this story. Last month, the Guardian sued the Chicago police department after attempts at acquiring official police records about Homan Square under the Freedom of Information Act proved fruitless.
The police are scheduled to file their first response today. Among the records sought are a tally of how many people have been taken to Homan Square, and any video evidence of interrogations and detentions evidence that Perez’s case has independently turned up.
A spokesman for Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority, Larry Merritt, said it had investigated Perez’s claims and deemed them “unfounded”. He would not elaborate and invited the Guardian to file a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more.
Perez said that while he “would love to see those cops in jail”, the long history of Chicago police abuse did not give him reason for optimism. “At this point, I just want them to stop. I know they’re never going to go to jail. So I’m hoping maybe they’ll get fired if we expose enough of what they do. But really, I even doubt that’ll happen in this city.”
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Pubdate: Sat, 16 May 2015
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/vtXbWZs8
Copyright: 2015 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Steve Raabe

WAREHOUSE DEMAND SPROUTING LIKE A WEED
Surging growth in jobs and legal marijuana drives high leases and low vacancies in Denver’s industrial market.
Job growth and pot growth are fueling record high lease rates and low vacancies in Denver’s industrial real estate market.
“Competition for industrial space in the Denver market is very aggressive,” said Dawn McCombs, senior vice president and industrial specialist at the Denver office of brokerage Avison Young. “The lack of quality options for tenants is driving rental rates higher than I have ever seen.”
Avison Young’s market report released this week shows that first-quarter lease rates averaged $7.47 per square foot, up 10 percent from a year earlier and the highest ever recorded for metro Denver.
Part of the market surge is tied directly to legal marijuana. Pot growers and manufacturers of cannabis-infused edibles have generated insatiable demand for warehouse space.
Commercial real estate tracker Xceligent Inc. last year estimated that marijuana cultivation and manufacturing facilities in Denver occupy at least 4.5 million square feet - the equivalent of 78 football fields.
While the cannabis boom has eaten up nearly all inventories of cheap warehouse space, highergrade “flex” buildings - which combine offices with distribution and manufacturing space - also are in short supply.
Occupancy and lease rates in those buildings have soared in concert with overall economic expansion in metro Denver.
“Population growth, job growth, increased manufacturing and consumer spending are contributing to the demand for space,” McCombs said.  “Buyers and tenants are frustrated that they can’t locate space and are having to make due with their current locations, biding time until more space comes available.”
Demand is strong enough that major warehouse owners and developers such as Prologis and Majestic Realty Co. are building industrial properties speculatively, yet landing tenants before the projects are complete.
With leases in hand for two-thirds of a new, 500,000-square-foot warehouse at Interstate 70 and Tower Road in Aurora, Majestic decided to launch development of an adjacent, $15 million spec building.
“We strongly believe that now is the time to bring the space to the market in anticipation of (market) growth late this year and into 2016,” said Randy Hertel, Majestic’s executive vice president and director of development.
Current construction of 1 million square feet of industrial space in metro Denver “will likely not keep pace with tenant demand in the market,” commercial brokerage DTZ said in a recent report.
DTZ said relief could come from proposed construction next year of another 1 million square feet at the Crossroads Commerce Park on the site of the former Asarco smelter near I-70 and Interstate 25 in Globeville.
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Newshawk: Jim
Pubdate: Wed, 13 May 2015
Source: USA Today (US)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/jVy9meP8
Copyright: 2015 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/625HdBMl
Website: http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/index.htm
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/466
Author: Lawrence Diller
Note: Lawrence Diller, M.D. practices behavioral pediatrics in Walnut Creek, Calif. His latest book is Remembering Ritalin.
WHEN WILL AMERICA JUST SAY NO?
Our love affair with prescription amphetamine is hard to quit
I’ve decided to create a new psychiatric disorder. Why not? Drug companies do it all the time. Shire, which makes Adderall, won approval recently from the Food and Drug Administration to market its amphetamine drug Vyvanse for the treatment of BED. You haven’t heard of it? Neither had many people, until Shire funded studies to get the bingeeating disorder into the DSM-5 - America’s official psychiatric bible of common life dilemmas translated into mental disorders. My disorder is called achievement anxiety disorder (AAD), and it explains the increasing reports of prescription amphetamine misuse, most often in the form of Adderall abuse.
Just what is achievement anxiety disorder? Like all psychiatric conditions, there are no blood tests or brain scans to make the diagnosis. But you can see it all around us - frantic people working ever harder to achieve a certain level of material satisfaction and security.
STRUGGLE FOR SUCCESS Because of our country’s declining position as a global economic empire, along with a widening gap between the 1% and everyone else, Americans must now work harder and make more money just to maintain the same standard of living our country enjoyed 40 years ago. And while the U.S. has produced astounding successes, that history has left many Americans doubting their own abilities, striving to do more and turning to drugs to cope.
A once-personal struggle for self-acceptance and success has turned into contagious angst about a collective failure to live up to our dreams. Today’s Millennial generation is the first group of Americans since World War II who will not live as well as their parents did.  Our young adults who are turning to Adderall are the stark casualties of this broken cultural norm that makes happiness difficult to achieve.
Adderall is not a new drug. Amphetamine (legal and illegal) has been around since 1929 and has repeatedly found its way into society for use in treating depression, asthma, narcolepsy, weight control and now attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD - or ADD (without hyperactivity).
Doctors invoke ADD as the most current reason to prescribe a chemical that, in the short term, makes anyone who takes it more alert, more methodical and more likely to complete tasks that are boring or difficult. There is no evidence in either children or adults that taking Adderall has longterm benefits.
Rampant Adderall use is a clear sign of our nation’s epidemic of ADD or AAD. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, in 2013 U.S. manufacturers of prescription stimulant drugs produced 211 tons of legal speed. This translates to more than two dozen 20 mg Adderall pills for every U.S. man, woman and child. While our country makes up less than 4.5% of the world’s population, it produces 70% of its amphetamines.
SHOPPING ON SILK ROAD
Our ADHD/ADD epidemic is the official reason for our love affair with legal amphetamine. But experts estimate that nearly a third of the stimulants prescribed in the U.S. are diverted for illegal use. Any college student can tell you how easy it is to obtain Adderall during exam time. Knowledgeable Internet surfers go to the “dark side” and find sites such as the Silk Road, where Adderall is openly sold and traded.
However, we can’t just blame drug companies and drug dealers. In any epidemic, one must not only examine the qualities of the virus but also consider the qualities of the host. AAD is part of our national character. Author Horatio Alger and fictional men Jay Gatsby and Gordon Gekko chronicle how fundamental AAD is to the American ethos, though, as far as I know, none of them used Adderall.
Our relentless pursuit of material acquisition is our unofficial state religion. Nothing short of a natural or social catastrophe is likely to change our values. But at some point, our use of Adderall is certain to peak and then crash. It’s a historical inevitability, with at least three waves of doctor prescribed amphetamine abuse in our country’s past. The last was in the 1970s, when dieting women became addicted. Doctors were sued and lost their licenses, and the practice stopped.
This time is different. There are mega Fortune 500 companies making $9 billion a year by selling legal stimulants. Their influence over federal regulatory agencies makes it unlikely Adderall use will decrease any time soon. Unfortunately, many more young adults will become addicted, and some could die before America says no (again) to Adderall.
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Pubdate: Sun, 17 May 2015
Source: Alaska Dispatch News (AK)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/WtS3jctV
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: Devin Kelly

INDUSTRY AND CURIOSITY DRAW CROWDS TO ANCHORAGE CANNABIS TRADE SHOW
From the variety of specialized products to visitors eager to learn industry tips, the Northwest Cannabis Classic in Anchorage on Saturday looked like a typical trade show.
The obvious exceptions were the cannabis plants displayed in glass jars beneath LED lights, helping make what organizers said was the first event of its kind in Alaska since voters approved the legalization of marijuana more than six months ago.
Aimed at sharing information about the fledgling industry, the three-day show at the Dena’ina Center features panels, demonstrations and products that range from lighting technology to smoking instruments to flower enhancers and plant food. It generated a buzz, with about 700 people buying presale tickets and about as many day-of tickets bought on Saturday, said event organizer Cory Wray.
By Saturday afternoon, the third floor of the convention center was populated with dozens of booths and a steady flow of people.  Twenty-somethings mingled with retirees. Some wore cowboy hats and tie-dyed T-shirts; others wore sport coats.
“It’s a trade show, not a party,” said Jason Brandeis, a University of Alaska Anchorage professor who has extensively researched marijuana and spoke on a morning panel at the trade show about the future of cannabis in Alaska.
Visitors weren’t allowed to consume or buy marijuana at the show but some cannabis plants were on display, the result of a last-minute change in city policy allowing marijuana to be displayed inside the convention center. In the absence of state regulations, the Anchorage Assembly adopted a policy Tuesday that addressed issues like insurance, cannabis displays and even odors.
City officials said they planned to watch Saturday’s show as a test run for similar events in the future.
“If this goes well, this could be the model,” city attorney Dennis Wheeler said earlier in the week. “If we need to make changes and adjustments, we’ll do that.”
The excitement surrounding the event was dampened by legal quagmires confronting would-be marijuana cultivation businesses. One of the first booths many visitors encountered walking into the show was AK Hydro Gardens—a company that shut down its medical marijuana cultivation business six days ago in the face of potential enforcement action by the state for operating without a license.
Owner Ryan Smith said his company, a sponsor of the show, had spent the last week revamping itself into a consulting firm. He said AK Hydro Gardens plans to advise people who want to grow their own plants and give away free cuttings of cannabis plants to anybody who signs up for a contract.
Smith also said foot traffic Saturday was “10 times” what he expected. His company had printed out 800 fliers, all of which were gone in two hours, he said.
Among the more eye-catching features of the show were the phone-booth-shaped tents with LED lights shining down on leafy green cannabis plants. Jim Farrell, 55, and MaryJo Langford, 51, listened with interest as Smith discussed the LED lighting techniques associated with the tent. Langford asked how much it cost, and how long it took to grow the plant.
Farrell and Langford said they attended the trade show hoping to learn as much as they could about new technologies. Both said they were interested in getting into the marijuana business in the future.
“I never thought I would see this in my lifetime,” said Langford, an Anchorage resident. “I’m astounded.”
Nearby, glass jars with dried green plants balled up inside were lined up on a table. Mane Bustamante unscrewed each lid, held it up and inhaled.
Bustamante, a 43-year-old journeyman painter, said a strain called Quantum Kush stood out to him as being the most potent. He said he’s had a medical marijuana card for several years and wanted to learn more about the drug at the trade show.
Bustamante also said he’d hoped the show would feature opportunities to try out different strains, but the Anchorage Assembly voted against allowing consumption in the new policy. Vendors weren’t allowed to remove plants from containers, but they could open containers to demonstrate differences in smell or sale techniques.
Jody Reynolds, a co-owner of Happy Skeeter, an Anchorage business that she said plans to sell edibles and other products once commercial regulations are in place, said the show was “great for a beginning,” though she also hoped future events would allow consumption.
“It’s one thing to come in and look at it and smell it; it’s another thing to see how people are reacting to it,” Reynolds said.
At another booth, Randy Larson displayed equipment for extracting butane oil. Larson, who represents Best Value Vacs and also runs a nonprofit called AK Trim 4 Vets, said he’s working with the Girdwood fire chief on a pamphlet about safe extraction techniques after several explosions in the area. He said most people are “unaware, uneducated” about such systems.
Taylor Bickford, director of Alaska operations for the marketing and consulting firm Strategies 360, said the show combined national vendors with highly specialized products and local businesses simply looking for a foothold in an emerging state industry.
He said there’s also a “gold rush” mentality among Alaska companies that don’t directly handle cannabis products but provide related supplies, such as lighting equipment.
“There’s a lot of excitement. I think you’re seeing the emergence of a real Alaska industry,” said Bickford, who worked on the marijuana legalization campaign for Strategies 360.
Beneath the general excitement, however, frustration brewed over the questions about legal framework. Jay Redbone, 58, said he came to learn about state regulations and found himself “a little irritated.”
“Nobody knows what’s going on,” Redbone said.
At his booth on Saturday, Cy Scott, co-founder of the cannabis information site Leafly, said it’s hard to tell what will happen in Alaska with regulations still in flux. But he said he’s noticed a spike in visitors to his site since the drug became legal in Alaska.
Most were just taking the scene in. One young couple—Haley Niederhauser, 25, and Michael Drobnick, 26 -- drove up from the Kenai Peninsula for the trade show.
They said they appreciated the open atmosphere.
“It’s the first thing you can walk into and not feel ... sketch,” Niederhauser said, glancing around. “It feels good.”
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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