CLOCK’S TICKING: 46 YEARS AND COUNTING IN FAILED DRUG WAR
War on Drugs needs a new strategy after 46 failed years, columnist says On Wednesday, March 4, Derek Cruice became the latest unarmed person to be shot to death in a U.S. drug raid staged to seize marijuana. This Volusia County Sheriff’s raid succeeding in saving 217 grams (about half-a-pound) of that drug from being loosed on our streets and it only cost one human life.
Apparently, law enforcement doesn’t think statistics on incidents such as these are worth keeping, so it is very hard to tell how many folks have been killed in the manner of Cruice. However, the CATO Institute one of the only entities that does keep any such statistics shows that between 1985 and 2010, SWAT team raids in the U.S.  accounted for the deaths of 46 innocent people, 25 nonviolent offenders, and 30 law enforcers.
I participated in countless similar raids during my 26-year career as a state police officer, 14 of which I worked undercover in narcotics on investigations that included billion-dollar international heroin and cocaine trafficking organizations.
Thankfully, no one ended up dead as a result of my activities. But back then, we were not using SWAT teams to execute search warrants.
I eventually came to believe that what I was doing was completely wrong. If our goal was really to reduce drug abuse in this country, increasingly harsh punishment and enforcement tactics seemed a strange way to accomplish that goal. The Drug Enforcement Administration has told us that before we started the war on drugs in 1970, they estimated that around 4 million people above the age of 12 had used an illicit drug (2 percent of that population).
Today the DEA tells us we have 121 million people above the age of 12 who have used an illicit drug (46 percent of today’s population). When we started the drug war in 1970, we measured our largest individual seizures in pounds. Today we measure them in tons.
Nearly 1,000 people, mainly young, went to jail as a direct result of my work as an undercover officer. The majority of them had never committed a crime besides using, possessing, or selling an illicit drug. But their lives were much more negatively impacted by their arrest than by the drugs themselves. When they came out of incarceration years later and had few educational and job opportunities, they turned back to the drug culture a=C2=80” the very thi= ng we claim to be saving them from.
Whether the killing of Derek Cruice is judged as justified or not, yet another human life was taken because our government chooses to criminalize people because they want to put something in their bodies that I don’t want to put in my body. Our federal drug policy is especially hard to defend when you realize that 19 states have already decriminalized small amounts of marijuana for personal use, 23 states have legalized medical marijuana, and four states plus the District of Colombia have legalized, regulated, and taxed marijuana for adult use, even for recreational purposes.
Prohibition of drugs, just like prohibition of alcohol, is a destructive policy that simply exacerbates the problem of drug abuse.
In a hundred years of trying, there is only one social drug on which
we have had any effect in lowering the rate of use. And that happens
to be the most addictive drug, and far-and-away the worst killer we
know of a=C2=80” cigarettes. By 1985, 42 percent of our population smoked=
cigarettes, which killed about 480,000 people a year.
We had to do something, but we didn’t start a war on cigarette smokers; we started a very strong education policy, then we pretty much regulated their use out of existence. We told smokers they could smoke at home or in their cars but they couldn’t smoke in any public buildings. In 30 years, by using those policies, we reduced the rate of smokers from 42 percent to 17 percent. That is a tremendous success story, and to achieve that wonderful success we didn’t have to arrest and imprison one person. We didn’t have to destroy one human life.
There are better ways to spend our money. Treating drug use as a health problem instead of a crime problem and instituting policies of education and regulation will greatly reduce death, disease, crime and drug abuse in America.
Jack A. Cole, a retired state police lieutenant, is also co-founder of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which represents over 150,000 police, judges, prosecutors and supporters in 120 countries.
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Newshawk: Kirk
Pubdate: Mon, 18 May 2015
Source: San Bernardino Sun (CA)
Copyright: 2015 Los Angeles Newspaper Group
Contact: voice@inlandnewspapers.com
Website: http://www.sbsun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1417
Author: David Quintero

TIME TO LEGALIZE POT
Each day, physicians throughout America prescribe powerful opiates and often for lengthy periods without resulting in addiction. Shouldn’t that put to rest the myth that pot is a detrimental, mind-altering drug ripe for abuse?
The parallel between our nation’s prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s, and today’s vehement opposition to pot is inescapable. It took 13 years of failure before our government finally, in 1933, came to its senses and repealed the 18th Amendment. So, like beer and wine, isn’t it time to legalize pot?
Last November, New York City’s Mayor Bill deBlasio reduced the penalty for marijuana possession to the equivalence of a ticket. Imagine the millions of dollars now redirected in New York City to more useful purposes.
David Quintero, Monrovia
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Newshawk: Kirk
Pubdate: Mon, 18 May 2015
Source: San Bernardino Sun (CA)
Copyright: 2015 Los Angeles Newspaper Group
Contact: voice@inlandnewspapers.com
Website: http://www.sbsun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1417
Pubdate: 18 May 15
Author: Eric R. Gavin

REGULATING MARIJUANA INVADES ONE’S LIBERTIES
I’m in favor of recreational marijuana for one reason: freedom. This is America, and wherever possible we should be free. The hardcore on either side of this issue will spin their respective tales of dread and drug cartels or extol cannabis as a miracle drug that can cure all of life’s woes. None of that matters.
I don’t smoke marijuana, but as long as it’s not affecting me or mine, you and yours should be free to do what you want. Tobacco and alcohol are demonstrably more harmful and addictive, and yet you can buy both of these in the grocery store.
My freedom to abstain should not dictate your freedom to smoke or drink. Like alcohol, simply regulate who can purchase it, where and how old and be done with this issue.
Eric R. Gavin, Upland
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Pubdate: Tue, 19 May 2015
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/XVTiMqDz
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

CEILING HEMP
Farmer Plans to Process Stalks for Insulation
Colorado’s nascent hemp industry may get a boost from a grower’s plan to use hemp stalks for insulation. Baca County farmer Ryan Loflin said Monday he has formed a partnership with Hollis, Okla.-based Western Fibers for combining processed hemp stalks with recycled newspapers and cardboard to create wall and ceiling insulation.
Hemp is genetically related to marijuana but contains little or no THC, the psychoactive substance in marijuana. Hemp has dozens of uses in food, cosmetics, clothing and industrial materials.
Commercial cultivation of hemp became legal in Colorado under Amendment 64, better known as the law that authorized retail sales of marijuana. Analysts say hemp’s potential to become a significant crop hinges on establishing instate industrial uses for its seed and fiber.
“This could really help get the industry going,” said Loflin, who in 2013 planted the nation’s first commercial hemp crop in almost 56 years. “Until now, there really hasn’t been an industrial infrastructure for hemp in Colorado.”
Loflin said his company, Rocky Mountain Hemp, will use a farm building near Springfield in southeastern Colorado to shred hemp stalks into small pieces suitable for insulation, then mixed with cardboard and newsprint.
Western Fibers is working on a prototype of the material. Commercial sales could begin by later this year, said Western owner Mike McGuire. Loflin said he will employ three to six workers at the Springfield facility, depending on sales growth.
“Anytime we can bring in a business and create jobs for the county, that’s a very good thing,” said Sheila Crane, executive director of Baca County Economic Development.
Crane said southeastern Colorado is gaining momentum in the hemp industry. Last month, Whole Hemp Co. of Colorado Springs said it will convert a vacant building in La Junta into a hemp growing and processing facility with 30 to 40 workers initially.
According to the Colorado Department of Agriculture, there are 159 registered hemp growers in the state who have filed to plant 2,648 acres this year.
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Pubdate: Tue, 19 May 2015
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/ngzgKHW1
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

LAW FIRM SPONSORS DU PROFESSORSHIP FOR POT LAW
A Denver law firm that focuses on cannabis law has sponsored the University of Denver’s law school with a three-year, $45,000 professorship for marijuana law and policy.
The university’s Sturm College of Law professor Sam Kamin will be the first Vicente Sederberg Professor of Marijuana Law and Policy.  Denver-based law firm Vicente Sederberg LLC has committed $15,000 per year for three years to the professorship, which they say is the first of its kind in the world.
Kamin said he will use the money to participate in policy discussions in Colorado and abroad.
“I’ve been wanting to go down to Uruguay and see what they’re doing with marijuana law reform,” Kamin said.
He also plans on hiring student research assistants with the money.
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Tue, 19 May 2015
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/ngzgKHW1
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

LAW FIRM SPONSORS DU PROFESSORSHIP FOR POT LAW
A Denver law firm that focuses on cannabis law has sponsored the University of Denver’s law school with a three-year, $45,000 professorship for marijuana law and policy.
The university’s Sturm College of Law professor Sam Kamin will be the first Vicente Sederberg Professor of Marijuana Law and Policy.  Denver-based law firm Vicente Sederberg LLC has committed $15,000 per year for three years to the professorship, which they say is the first of its kind in the world.
Kamin said he will use the money to participate in policy discussions in Colorado and abroad.
“I’ve been wanting to go down to Uruguay and see what they’re doing with marijuana law reform,” Kamin said.
He also plans on hiring student research assistants with the money.
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Pubdate: Mon, 18 May 2015
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2015 The Washington Post Company
Contact: letters@washpost.com
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: John Woodrow Cox

LEGAL POT IN THE DISTRICT IS A BOON FOR ILLEGAL DEALERS
Not long ago, a man who had covertly dealt pot in the nation’s capital for three decades approached a young political operative at a birthday party in a downtown Washington steakhouse.
He was about to test a fresh marketing strategy to take advantage of the District’s peculiar new marijuana law, which allows people to possess and privately consume the drug but provides them no way to legally buy it for recreational use. Those contradictions have created a surge in demand and new opportunities for illicit pot purveyors.
“Do you like cannabis?” asked the dealer.
“Yes,” answered the man, who had recently left his job as a Republican Senate staffer.
So, the dealer recalled, he handed his new acquaintance a tiny plastic bag that contained half a gram of “Blue Dream,” a sweet and fruity strain of marijuana. With the bag he also presented a business card and an offer: If you like what you try, call me.
Within days, the man - now a lobbyist-picked up the phone.
The dealer - who, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because what they do remains illegal - said he has used that same in-plain-sight sales pitch at similarly upscale D.C.  settings, collecting three new buyers and a pair of new suppliers.  The new business is all thanks to the quirks of the District’s legalization, which has boosted the appetite for marijuana as more people become comfortable acquiring it through the black market.
“It’s the dealer-protection act of 2015,” he said. “This was a license for me to print money.”
Who is responsible for this unintended consequence depends on whom you ask.
In November, Washington voters overwhelmingly approved an initiative that made it legal to possess and grow marijuana, but the following month, Congress enacted a spending prohibition that barred the city from creating a system through which pot could be lawfully bought, sold and taxed.
That means there are only three ways for people in the District to legally obtain marijuana.
Someone can give it to them, though the donors, of course, must find their own original source. Residents can each grow as many as three plants to maturity at one time, though that process is complicated, expensive and time-consuming. And with a doctor’s approval, people can get medical marijuana cards, though supply remains dismal.
“The black market is the obvious choice,” said a 24-year-old government contractor who deals part time. “It’s awesome.”
Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), who has led Congress’s charge to thwart the legalization, blamed city leaders, insisting that they should have forbidden possession when he and other lawmakers prevented Washington from creating a controlled marketplace.
“There’s no question that demand will go up, and there’s no legal source of supply,” he said. “Clearly, this was not thought out rationally by the city government, which chose to go forward with legalization without regulation.”
John Falcicchio, chief of staff for Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), sharply countered that assertion.
“In D.C., it shouldn’t be called the black market. It should be called the Harris market,” he said. “If there’s any uptick in the black market, it’s thanks to Harris.”
Demand on the rise
Dealers don’t seem to care who’s at fault. But they do appreciate the help.
One 62-year-old District man, who has sold pot off and on since he started smoking nearly half a century ago, said he has collected about 10 new buyers since the law changed.
“There’s been a pretty good uptick,” he said. “It’s snowballing.”
He met most of those customers at bars or meetings for the D.C.  chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).
Through suppliers in Colorado, the man pays about $1,000 per order for a quarter pound of “Sour Diesel,” a powerful strain named for its pungent smell.
If possible, he immediately sells half of his supply for between $600 and $650 so his total stock only briefly exceeds the two ounces - enough to pack a pair of sandwich bags - that D.C. law permits every adult to possess.
On a typical night, he carries up to 10 grams, a lighter and a pipe so potential customers can sample the product. He tries to sell grams for $20 apiece, which means that on each four-ounce order, he can profit as much as $770.
“That quickly adds up,” he said. “I pay for my bar tabs.”
Hani Ahmed, a community activist in Southeast-Washington, said changes in the law have provided dealers in his neighborhood a new layer of protection, because even if they’re selling on street corners, police must witness the drugs being exchanged for money.
The law, he added, has also created confusion. Many people still don’t understand that pot can only be privately consumed.
“Everybody and they mama in Southeast thinks they can smoke outside,” said Ahmed, 29. “I’ve seen youngins smoking and walking past the police.”
In Northwest, the 24-year-old dealer/government contractor has also noticed evolving behaviors.
“People who wouldn’t smoke at all before are trying it now,” he said.
“People who were closet smokers are now way out in the open.”
But overall, he has actually lost customers. No longer afraid of being caught with pot, several of his regulars now go directly to street dealers who sell at lower prices.
“If I was willing to be more brazen about it,” he said, “I’d just be sitting on the corner making an a—load of money.”
One District man in his 40s who has worked in the industry for more than two decades predicted the increased competition. As more people want to try pot, they’ll first ask friends who they know use the drug to buy for them as well. Those friends may soon see an opportunity.
“Regular people,” the man said, “are going to turn into small-time dealers.”
Arguing for legal sales
In 2013, residents of Colorado and Washington state faced the same dilemma: They could possess and consume pot but not legally buy it for recreational use.
Because it’s so difficult to collect reliable data on illegal drug sales, government officials in both Denver and Seattle were reluctant to estimate how black markets there had been affected, but independent research suggested that demand for pot increased even before the two states opened regulated markets in 2014.
Each year, a survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration asks Americans whether they’ve used marijuana in the past month.
From 2011-2012 to 2012-2013, the number of adults nationwide who acknowledged use grew by less than half of 1 percent. Over that same period, the rate of increase among adults in both Colorado and Washington was at least six times as large.
It’s possible, of course, that people were simply more willing to admit use post-legalization, but a 2013 Rand Corp. study of Washington state also predicted that, prior to regulation, consumption of pot there would still expand by about 10 percent.
That boost in demand, supporters of legalization say, helps explain why lawful use in the District must be paired with lawful sales.
“If you’re going to legalize marijuana, you also have to legalize the supply because you want to get rid of the black market or at least limit the black market,” said Keith Stroup, founder of NORML. “Right now, they’ve done the exact opposite.”
Delroy Burton, chairman of the D.C. Fraternal Order of Police, said a regulated market would have “pulled the teeth out of the illegal drug trade” and eventually wiped out the violence associated with it.
Jeffrey Miron, an economics teacher at Harvard University, compared marijuana’s potential evolution to that of alcohol after prohibition ended in 1933.
“People seem to prefer going to a legal supplier rather than making beer in their basement,” said Miron, director of economic studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, which supports the legalization of all drugs.
He and others who have studied the topic don’t suggest that illicit sales would disappear overnight, but after several years - even a decade - they argue that the black market could not compete with a controlled market.
Rep. Andy Harris rejected those arguments.
“I think there’s value in keeping the supply chain illegal at this point,” he said, maintaining that it provides “a check on the system.”
The longtime District dealer who now markets his product at chic D.C.  gatherings has already considered what he would do if the city regulated pot sales.
He and his friends, he said, would open their own dispensary. They’d go legit.
The proximity effect
The impact of legalization has seeped beyond the District’s boundaries.
When Justin was 15, his parents caught him smoking pot in his room.
Marijuana was illegal, they told him. Don’t use it.
Justin, now 24, never stopped smoking but still lives with his parents in their Maryland home. After Colorado legalized the drug, their perspective seemed to shift. They told him to be careful but no longer forbid him from keeping it in the house.
Then, one evening a few months ago, the family returned home from dinner, and his parents followed him into his room. They shut the door so his teenage sister wouldn’t hear their conversation.
The change in the D.C. marijuana law, they explained, had also changed their minds.
“We know you have it,” he recalled them saying. “We know you know where to get it.”
They asked their son to become their middleman.
Justin bought them an ounce of a premium strain for $350. Each evening, after a long commute to and from a desk job in Virginia, his dad goes to his room and takes a hit from a bong he nicknamed “Saxophone.”
“He smokes the tiniest bit,” Justin said. “It’s like two flakes.”
Not long ago, Justin’s dad told someone at work about his new habit.  He returned home with a question for his son: Can you get my co-worker some, too?
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Tue, 19 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: Benjamin Weiser

DEFENSE SAYS DRUG SITE REDUCED USERS’ RISKS
The already novel criminal case against Ross W. Ulbricht, the recently convicted founder of the website Silk Road, has taken yet another unusual turn.
Mr. Ulbricht could face life in prison when he is sentenced on May 29 in Federal District Court in Manhattan for his role in running Silk Road, a once-thriving black market for the sale of heroin, cocaine, LSD and other drugs. And although prosecutors have not yet said what length of sentence they will seek for Mr. Ulbricht, 31, they have told Mr. Ulbricht’s lawyers that they intend to introduce evidence of six overdose deaths attributable to drugs bought from vendors on Silk Road, according to a recent defense filing.
Now, in the latest twist in a case that has been flush with technological intrigue, Mr. Ulbricht’s lawyers are asking the judge to disregard the overdose deaths at his sentencing by raising an argument that has probably never been heard in a traditional drug case.
Mr. Ulbricht’s lawyers contend in a filing on Friday that “in contrast to the government’s portrayal of the Silk Road website as a more dangerous version of a traditional drug marketplace,” the website “was in many respects the most responsible such marketplace in history.”
Silk Road operated on a hidden part of the Internet, made deals with the virtual currency Bitcoin and offered anonymity to buyers and sellers, the defense noted.
As a result, Silk Road was “a peaceable alternative to the often deadly violence so commonly associated with the global drug war, and street drug transactions, in particular,” wrote Meghan Ralston, a former “harm reduction manager” for the Drug Policy Alliance, a group seeking reform of marijuana laws and other drug policies, in a declaration included in the defense’s filing.
She added that transactions on Silk Road did not result in people’s having guns pulled on them at the moment of purchase, or require buyers to even visit dangerous neighborhoods. Silk Road had begun to “revolutionize” drug selling, she wrote.
In the filing, Mr. Ulbricht’s lead lawyer, Joshua L. Dratel, cited Silk Road’s “harm reduction ethos” and said the site also had a physician who specialized in drugs and addiction, called himself Doctor X and provided expert advice and responded to requests for assistance.
“Indeed, the distinction between Silk Road and traditional drug selling is as dramatic as it is unique,” Mr. Dratel wrote.
The defense’s position at trial was that Mr. Ulbricht had created the Silk Road website but gave control to others before he was later lured back in and set up to be arrested. The government has said Mr.  Ulbricht was involved throughout, running Silk Road under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts. More than 100,000 individuals bought drugs and other illicit goods and services on the website, which generated more than $213 million from January 2011 to October 2013, the government has said.
The office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, has not offered details of Silk Road’s link to the overdoses. The office has told Judge Katherine B. Forrest that parents of two overdose victims are expected to address the court at sentencing.
Mr. Dratel, in a brief phone interview, said the defense, which retained Dr. Mark L. Taff, a former chief medical examiner of Rockland County, to review the six cases, believes that the government’s claims with respect to the deaths “is insufficient to attribute to Silk Road, much less Ulbricht.”
Mr. Dratel added that since prosecutors “opened up the whole issue of dangerousness, we think the harm-reduction measures exist on their own as a mitigating factor.”
The defense filing says each person who died of a drug overdose “had a history of chronic substance abuse as well as medical and psychiatric problems prior to death, which could have caused or contributed to their death.”
Mr. Bharara’s office had no comment.
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Pubdate: Tue, 19 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: Donald G. McNeil Jr.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)
MAKINGS OF A NEW HEROIN
All over the world, the heavy heads of opium poppies are nodding
gracefully in the wind - long stalks dressed in orange or white
petals topped by a fright wig of stamens. They fill millions of acres
in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Laos and elsewhere. Their payload - the
milky opium juice carefully scraped off the seed pods - yields
morphine, an excellent painkiller easily refined into heroin.
But very soon, perhaps within a year, the poppy will no longer be the
only way to produce heroin’s raw ingredient. It will be possible for
drug companies, or drug traffickers, to brew it in yeast genetically
modified to turn sugar into morphine.
Almost all the essential steps had been worked out in the last seven
years; a final missing one was published Monday in the journal Nature
Chemical Biology.
“All the elements are in place, but the whole pathway needs to be
integrated before a one-pot glucose-to-morphine stream is ready to
roll,” said Kenneth A. Oye, a professor of engineering and political
science at M.I.T.
This rapid progress in synthetic biology has set off a debate about
how - and whether - to regulate it. Dr. Oye and other experts said
this week in a commentary in the journal Nature that drug-regulatory
authorities were ill prepared to control a process that would benefit
the heroin trade much more than the prescription painkiller industry.
The world should take steps to head that off, they argue, by locking
up the bioengineered yeast strains and restricting access to the DNA
that would let drug cartels reproduce them.
Other biotech experts counter that raising the specter of fermenting
heroin like beer, jokingly known among insiders as “Brewing Bad,” is
alarmist and that Dr. Oye’s proposed solutions are overkill. Although
making small amounts of morphine will soon be feasible, they say, the
yeasts are so fragile and the fermentation process so delicate that
it is not close to producing salable quantities of heroin.
Restricting DNA stifles all research, they argue, and is destined to
fail just as restrictions on precursor chemicals have failed to curb
America’s crystal meth epidemic.
A spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration said his agency
“does not perceive an imminent threat” because no modified yeast
strain is commonly available yet. If that happens, he said, D.E.A.
laboratories would be able to identify heroin made from it.
An F.B.I. agent who has been following the yeast strains since 2009
said he was glad that the debate was beginning before the technology
was ready and before lawmakers moved to restrict it.
“We’ve learned that the top-down approach doesn’t work,” said
Supervisory Special Agent Edward You, who said he coined the “Brewing
Bad” term and had held workshops for biotech students and companies.
“We want the people in the field to be the sentinels, to recognize
when someone is trying to abuse or exploit their work and call the F.B.I.”
No scientific team has yet admitted having one strain capable of the
entire sugar-to-morphine pathway, but several are trying, and the
Stanford lab of Christina D. Smolke is a leader. She said she
expected one to be published by next year.
No one in the field thought there should be no regulation, she said,
but suggestions that home brewers would soon make heroin were
“inflammatory” because fermenting manipulated yeasts “is a really
special skill.” Implications of research like hers should be calmly
discussed by experts, she said, and Dr. Oye’s commentary “was getting
people to react in a very freaked-out way.”
Robert H. Carlson, the author of “Biology Is Technology,” said
restrictions were doomed to fail just as Prohibition failed to stop
the home brewing of alcohol.
“DNA synthesis is already a democratic, low-cost technology,” he
said. “If you restrict access, you create a black market.”
What is considered one of the last important missing steps, a way to
efficiently grow a morphine precursor, (S)-reticuline, in brewer’s
yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, was published in Nature Chemical
Biology on Monday by scientists from the University of California,
Berkeley, and Canada’s Concordia University.
The leader of the Berkeley team, John E. Dueber, said it was not
trying to make morphine but 2,500 other alkaloids for which
reticuline is a precursor, some of which might become antibiotics or
cancer drugs.
Nonetheless, he said, since he realized his research has implications
for the making of morphine, he sent his draft paper to Dr. Oye,
suggesting the debate become more public.
One crucial question is whether the technology is of more use to the
pharmaceutical industry or drug cartels. Dr. Oye argues it is the latter.
Companies are always seeking painkillers that create less addictive
euphorias or do not paralyze breathing muscles, and having a
predictable process they could tweak would be useful, but they
already have a cheap, steady supply of opium from India, Turkey and
Australia, where poppies are grown legally by licensed farmers.
That chain will be hard to disrupt. Since the 1960s, when it was
created to convince Turkey to crack down on heroin, the International
Narcotics Control Board has set quotas. Thousands of small farmers,
their bankers and equipment suppliers depend on the sales, and they
have local political clout just as American corn farmers do.
Also, pharmaceutical companies can already synthesize opiates in
their labs. Fentanyl, a painkiller 100 times as powerful as morphine,
is synthetic, as is loperamide (Imodium), an antidiarrheal opiate.
Heroin sellers, by contrast, must smuggle raw materials out of
lawless Afghanistan, Laos, Myanmar and Mexico. Their supply lines are
disrupted when any local power - from the Taliban to the United
States Army - cracks down. Brewing near their customers would save
them many costs: farmers, guards, guns, planes, bribes and so on.
One frightening prospect Dr. Oye raised was how viciously drug
cartels might react if Americans with bioengineering know-how started
competing with them. Gunmen from Mexican drug gangs have taken
control of many secret marijuana fields in American forests.
His commentary suggested several possible steps to prevent misuse of
the technology. The yeasts could be locked in secure laboratories,
worked on by screened employees. Sharing them with other scientists
without government permission could be outlawed.
Their DNA could be put on a watch list, as sequences for anthrax and
smallpox are, so any attempt to buy them from DNA supply houses would
raise flags. Chemically silent DNA “watermarks” could be inserted so
stolen yeasts could be traced. Or the strains could be made “wimpier
and harder to grow,” Dr. Oye said, perhaps by making them require
nutrients that were kept secret.
Agent You said he did not want to comment on Dr. Oye’s suggestions,
but was glad a threat had been identified by scientists before it was
a reality, adding, “If this occurred across the board, it would make
the F.B.I.’s life a heck of a lot easier.”
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
xxx

Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Wed, 20 May 2015
Source: Middletown Press, The (CT)
Copyright: 2015 The Middletown Press
Contact: letters@middletownpress.com
Website: http://www.middletownpress.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/586
Author: Kathleen Schassler

LACK OF RESEARCH CLOUDS MEDICAL MARIJUANA DEBATE
Yale Professor: Safety, THC Content, Expanding Use at Issue
MIDDLETOWN - Since the federal government historically has obstructed scientific research of marijuana, there’s an absence of highquality evidence, just as many states, including Connecticut, already have rolled out the red carpet to the fast-growing medical marijuana industry.
It’s a Catch 22, according to Dr. Deepak C. D’Souza, a Yale professor-psychiatrist and member of the Medical Marijuana Board of Physicians.
“In the absence of gold-standard evidence, what is the bar for legalization?” D’Souza asked Tuesday at the Middlesex County Substance Abuse Action Council’s spring forum.
D’Souza believes that the state’s medical marijuana program is a “runaway train,” according to the event invitation sent by Betsey S.  Chadwick, director of MCSAAC.
While the consumer protection commissioner claims that the medical marijuana program is in a race against time to bring relief to more patients, one panel member physician (D’Souza) keeps championing the scientific method and voting down a quick expansion of marijuana use, the email said.
As a new round of diseases were considered by the state’s board of physicians, ultimately two conditions, including ulcerative colitis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the latter better known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, have been approved for MMJ.
Those recommendations were approved recently by consumer protection Commissioner Jonathan A. Harris.
D’Souza has often cast the sole dissenting votes in the state’s search to approve new, qualifying medical conditions under the medical marijuana statute.
During the hour-long talk Tuesday, the doctor at times lightly scratched the surface on a few highly technical, scientific details about the plant, existing studies and complication of its study based on its 483 separate constituents, or components, D’Souza said.
“There is no single drug that can treat all approved conditions,” which are very diverse ailments with no “common pathophysiology.”
Though many advocates of medical marijuana claim that stringent regulations will better control society’s use or legalization will reduce discriminatory punitive damages against an enormous number of drug offenders tying up the nation’s judicial and prison systems.
“It’s unstudied. Marijuana has more than 400 constituents. Most available drugs have one or two,” said D’Souza. “The cannabis you get in Middletown may be different than what you get in New Haven.”
Plants now are engineered to produce more or less of certain components that are believed to help people suffering from chronic ailments and diseases. No one can compare the safety of marijuana fromthe 1960s to today, D’Souza said.
“The THC content is rising, from ditch weed to skunk and sensimilla,” said D’Souza, adding that higher numbers of serious adverse events occur today from pot use, and related visits to the emergency room are up, too.
Why use something that has not been tested, D’Souza asked. Since any existing studies are not well-documented, “What are the risks?”
It’s been determined that tolerance, dependence and withdrawal symptoms are all connected to long-term marijuana use, he said.  Though marijuana’s effect may “reduce anxiety and distress,” it may not actually affect the disease process.
“We need to establish clear, transparent, scientific studies to validate why one condition gets approved and another is not approved.”
Voting no to use it for Tourette syndrome and yes to ulcerative colitis shows an inconsistent response, according to D’Souza. Doctors need to be educated, he said.
“I’d argue there’s a lot of money to be made here by growers, the state and doctors that prescribe,” D’Souza said. “I wish it weren’t about money.”
In its first year, Colorado saw a tax revenue bump of $60 million through marijuana legalization, according to a report by Politifact.com.
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: Wed, 20 May 2015
Source: Las Vegas Review-Journal (NV)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/7Iwg2M73
Copyright: 2015 Las Vegas Review-Journal
Contact: http://www.reviewjournal.com/about/print/press/letterstoeditor.html
Website: http://www.lvrj.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/233
Author: Eric Hartley

SEVERAL ARRESTED AT WEED MEETING
Police, Federal Agents Disrupt Pot Education Convention
Las Vegas police and federal agents arrested 10 people and seized drugs over the weekend at Hempcon, a marijuana education convention at the Cashman Center.
People who were there described seeing police dogs around the event, as well as officers on the roof of the building, apparently looking for people smoking marijuana.
The arrests outraged event organizers, and some attendees said they left medical marijuana patients frightened as Nevada’s first legal dispensaries prepare to open.
“It’s disheartening for our whole community,” said Jennifer Solis, of Wellness Education Cannabis Advocates of Nevada, or WECAN, and who was at the event.
From Friday to Sunday, officers shut down five booths, arrested 10 people and cited three others on charges including drug possession, possession with intent to sell and transporting a controlled substance, said officer Laura Meltzer, a Metro spokeswoman. She said officers seized marijuana, hashish, marijuana seeds, edible products containing THC and psilocybin mushrooms.
Meltzer said Metro narcotics detectives and Hempcon organizers had spoken before the event, and organizers told attendees they had to follow the law.
Nevada allows medical use of marijuana by patients with state-issued cards. But it’s illegal to sell the drug without a state dispensary license, and it’s illegal for anyone to use it in public.
Asked about the criticism of the arrests, Meltzer said, “It is incumbent upon the people who are attending this and who are conducting this to be aware of Nevada state law.”
Mark Saint, an activist who was at the convention Friday, said the police stance was hypocritical since officers have looked the other way at similar events while people used marijuana.
The arrests were made by a task force called Southern Nevada Cannabis Operation and Regional Enforcement, which includes Metro, Henderson police and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. DEA spokeswoman Sarah Pullen said a federal agent is on the task force but that Las Vegas police led the operation.
Meltzer said the names of those arrested were not available Tuesday.
Police made no public
Crackdown was backlash from other event, organizer says announcement about the operation and provided information only in response to questions from the Review-Journal.
Jason Sturtsman, a patient advocate and owner of a medical marijuana growing operation, wondered whether that’s because police know how much public attitudes toward marijuana have shifted.
“It just seems like a waste of resources,” said Sturtsman, who was not at the event but heard about the arrests.
People who were there said police seemed to become more aggressive as the weekend went on.
On Friday, officers arrested some people who were selling marijuana, said Kurt Duchac, a WECAN board member. Duchac said those arrests were understandable, since it’s illegal to sell without a license.
But on Saturday, he said, officers started arresting patients who were peacefully using marijuana in their cars. And on Sunday, a SWAT vehicle showed up and officers were on the roof of the building.
“They were targeting patients, people for simply having it on them,” Duchac said. “They were running dogs through there.”
Inside, Duchac said, officers were “trashing” booths and ripping open boxes looking for drugs. People gathered around to watch, with some filming police and yelling at them. “It was ugly,” Duchac said.  Meltzer said she did not know details of how the operation was conducted and that the task force commander was not available for comment Tuesday.
Hempcon, which holds conventions around the country, is meant to be an educational event where vendors can meet customers and patients can find information. Its website says attendees are not allowed to bring drugs or drug paraphernalia.
Organizers didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment. On their Facebook page, they wrote in a post Monday: “We deeply regret the unfortunate police activity during the Las Vegas Hempcon over the weekend of May 15-17. It was a blow to our Vendors, the attendees, the Community as a whole, and to us as well. It is sad that our industry is subject to such indiscriminate and prejudicial behavior by law enforcement, but we as a Community will PERSEVERE and not let our forward momentum be derailed by them.”
Solis, who has organized another marijuana-themed event, said police told her such crackdowns are a backlash from an event last year called Hempfest. After that event, Solis said, police were embarrassed by photos that showed people smoking marijuana while officers simply watched.
“You can thank your buddies at Hempfest for all this backlash,” she recalled one officer saying when she met with police after applying for her event permit.
Sturtsman said police crackdowns could pose challenges, since soon-to-open legal dispensaries are expecting many of their customers to be from out of state. And some of those patients might not realize using a legal drug is outlawed in public places.
“I think it’s going to be a growing problem in Las Vegas when these dispensaries open up ... where can these individuals consume cannabis in a safe place?” he said.
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Wed, 20 May 2015
Source: Seattle Weekly (WA)
Column: Higher Ground
Copyright: 2015 Village Voice Media
Contact:
http://www.seattleweekly.com/feedback/EmailAnEmployee?department=letters
Website: http://www.seattleweekly.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/410
Author: Michael A. Stusser

WHAT WE SHOULD BAN IN SEATTLE PARKS INSTEAD OF SMOKING
Manspreaders? Screaming Kids? There Are Plenty of Options.
Anytime I go to a dive bar or pool hall or rock-‘n’-roll show, in the back of my mind it feels like there’s something missing. It’s not the booze or long-lost jukeboxes, it’s not the condom vending machines, filthy bathrooms, or obnoxious, aging, bandana-wearing Axl Rose doppelgaengers. So what exactly is it? Smoke! I’m missing the damn cigarette smoke that for so long provided a hazy backdrop of second-hand nostalgia.
I’ve never actually smoked-tobacco, anyway. But in certain places it seems par for the course. Nevertheless, society banned the practice of cigar and cigarette smoking-and it’s a done deal. Hell, once the Italians banned smoking in restaurants and bars, it was clear there was no turning back.
Recently, in addition to the indoor smoking ban and a ban on smoking in public spaces, our mayor and the parks department have proposed fully eliminating smoking in each and every Seattle city park. What’s next?! Banning adults using the swing sets, or not letting you piss in the kiddie pool? (Wait.)
Look, we all want our parks to be beautiful. Which is why it’s illegal to litter there (including leaving cigarette butts, fast-food wrappers, or RedBulls strewn on the grass). And no one wants to have smoke blown into their children’s faces while picnicking at Gas Works or playing catch at Lincoln Park. Which is why the Seattle parks department banned smoking, chewing, and any tobacco use within 25 feet of other peeps at all beaches, parks, and playgrounds. (Not one citation has been issued by park rangers for this order since it went into effect in 2010, by the way.)
The Board of Park Commissioners will make a final recommendation to the superintendent on the proposed blanket smoking ban in Seattle parks on May 28. (In case you’re wondering, the proposed rule doesn’t specifically apply to vape pens-or electronic cigarettes-so regardless of how the wind blows, I’m in a win/win scenario here! The increasingly common smell of wafting ganja in parks is far more enjoyable than tobacco smoke anyway.) Smoking is already banned in all public spaces and workplaces (enacted in 2005). While the argument for reducing second-hand smoke (and lung cancer) and increasing healthy environments does hold some water, this total park ban seems a spot overly intrusive, and may actually be a smoke screen over messing with the homeless.
“Is this ban really about public health, or is it about discriminating against homeless people?” posed Sharon Jones, a Real Change vendor, at a recent public hearing on the matter. “Being homeless is hard enough-a smoking ban will give the police a reason to harass the poor . . . Homelessness is not a crime.”
The ACLU agrees. “What we think would happen in practice is this would get disproportionately enforced against people who are vulnerable populations,” noted spokesman Doug Honig, “and potentially they can be banned from parks-which are an important place for them to spend time-or even arrested.”
Almost 1,000 cities, including the Big Apple and San Fran, have total or partial bans on firing up in parks, rather than the 25-foot rule we’ve adopted. (So does Portland, but they’re just trying to stay relevant in any way possible.) The complete bans are obviously more straight-forward and easier to enforce and communicate to the public.  But why stop there?
Wanna ban some stuff in our city parks? How about frisbees? It’s extremely hard to relax when discs are zooming nearby-one wrong ring-toss away from destroying my latte. And how about forbidding all big-ass boom boxes-as well as super-loud people? I’d also like to eliminate wide-legged manspreaders on park benches, public nail-clippers, and studs in really good shape who take their shirts off! (Not to mention slovenly slackers who should not be taking their shirts off under any circumstances.)
Ban Boot Camp fitness classes on public land, Tai Chi types, and yoginis too! And nix non-sharing birthday-cake partiers! I also loathe those skateboard punks, who you know are violating the smoking ban when no one’s looking! Hell, if I was calling the shots, we’d ban screaming KIDS from all city parks-talk about a buzz-kill! And while we’re at it, let’s forbid digital devices: I’m sick of seeing people more engaged with their iPhones than with the incredible views smack-dab in front of them. Maybe a giant waft of stinky smoke is just what the doctor ordered to get them to look up from their screens and into the bright light of day!
Put that in your park and smoke it.
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: Wed, 20 May 2015
Source: Colorado Springs Independent (CO)
Column: CannaBiz
Copyright: 2015 Colorado Springs Independent
Contact: letters@csindy.com
Website: http://www.csindy.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1536
Author: Bryce Crawford

CANNABIS DISCOUNTS LAST, CANNA MEDS EXPANDS AND MORE
It’s cheap medicine, too
If you missed out on last weekend’s grand-opening celebration of Big Medicine Cannabissary (2909 N. El Paso St., bigmedicinecannabissary.com), fear not - the discounts continue.  Center reps say that through the end of the month, customers can expect 20 percent off all edibles; four-gram eighths for $20; $125 ounces for bottom- and middle-tier bud; grams of shatter for $25 or two grams for $40; and one oil cartridge for $20 or two for $30.
“You’re like, ‘Damn dude, I’m coming over now,’” says owner Kirk Miller. “I mean, you drop a hundred dollars here and it’s like Christmastime for people. They’re dancing out in the parking lot and shit, but I gotta have ‘em move on because there’s not that big of a parking lot.”
See? A celebration.
Bigger, someday
Canna Meds Wellness Center (506 N. Chelton Road, cannamedswellnesscenter.com) will not only open a second Colorado Springs location at 317 N. Union Blvd., but will expand into Denver as well.
A few caveats to each, however. First, the Denver location was supposed to offer space both to grow and sell, but an unrelated dispensary ended up opening down the street; because the law limits how many licensees can sell near each other, the site will host a grow operation only. The second is that the Colorado Springs location won’t open for another few weeks, also known as the time the center expects it will take to hear back from the state on its license.
“They have our check, they have taken our money,” says operations manager Mike Conaghan. “We’re hearing it’s taking a while. ... We’ve been waiting a very long time, and it’s starting to be frustrating.  We’ve been paying rent on this building for seven months.”
Keef crumbs
Denver law firm Vicente Sederberg LLC, which was mainly responsible for the wording of Amendment 64, recently announced what it’s calling “the first professorship of its kind in the world.” It’s giving the University of Denver $45,000 to fund the Vicente Sederberg Professor of Marijuana Law and Policy position over three years. Professor Sam Kamin will be the first to occupy the position.
“Our state and our school are poised to take a leadership position in this important new area of law and policy,” says Sturm College of Law dean Martin Katz in a press release. “The rest of the country is watching. We need to do this right. We are extremely proud of the pioneering work done by our graduates at Vicente Sederberg. And we are honored to name a professorship for them.”
Hit the third annual Cannabis Prom at Speak Easy Vape Lounge (2508 E.  Bijou St., speakeasycannabisclub.com) at 8 p.m., Friday, May 22, “for music, food, and a whole lot of dabs!” Tickets are $5 for members, $8 for singles and $12 for couples.
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: Wed, 20 May 2015
Source: East Bay Express (CA)
Copyright: 2015 East Bay Express
Contact: http://posting.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/SubmitLetter/Page
Website: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1131
Author: David Downs

MOVE OVER BRITANNICA
It’s Time for the Cannabis Encyclopedia. a Q&A With Weed Author Jorge Cervantes (aka George Van Patten).
The world’s cannabis cultivators, their friends, and loved ones have a new, essential reference: The Cannabis Encyclopedia, released April 20 online and in stores worldwide.
This large-format, 596-page, full-color gardening book has 2,000 images and retails for $50. It’s written by iconic author and Sonoma resident Jorge Cervantes (aka George Van Patten) - a former cultivation editor for High Times magazine.
Van Patten was born in Ontario, Oregon in 1953, and as a child, he loved growing corn and radishes. He was a paperboy, a school newspaper reporter, and a printing press operator in a small town who got turned on to pot by the film Easy Rider and by Mexican ditch weed. After high school, Van Patten became radicalized in 1976 while attending college in Mexico, where he first grew cannabis. After realizing that authoring pot books was his true calling, he got a degree in general studies from the University of Portland, and under the pen name Jorge Cervantes, started publishing pot botany guides at a time when doing so was analogous to writing The Anarchist’s Cookbook.
I chatted with Van Patten about the release of his masterwork, and the shape of California legalization in 2016.
Many of your friends have gone to jail. Printers used to refuse to print these books and bookstores wouldn’t carry them. Looking back on that journey, how does it feel to hold The Cannabis Encyclopedia in 2015?
My, it’s been a long road, you know? Things have really changed over the years. I was treated as a criminal for years and years, and I never saw myself as one. In this country, it used to be so different, but it’s changing very rapidly.
Looking forward, what cultivation trends will affect producers and consumers as legalization progresses?
Number one: People are going to start growing outdoors or in greenhouses a lot more. There’s just more and more people growing outdoors, and it’s easy to grow outdoors in the backyard for most people, and you could easily grow five pounds or ten pounds in a backyard, no problem.
What is the bottom in terms of cannabis’ price?
I’d say $500 to $600 a pound for premium outdoor.
That’s one-tenth of the top prices for Humboldt indoor ten years ago.
But, see, right now, good outdoor is $800 to $1,000 per pound, maybe even $1,200 - so it’s not a very far drop. It’s a 50-percent drop, but it’s already dropped 50 percent recently in the last couple of years.
Are we at the peak in terms of THC?
I’m not sure. My understanding is it can get to be 24 [percent THC], possibly 25 - but anything over 21 is quite strong.
What needs to happen to mitigate the environmental impacts of cannabis farming?
We do need to do something about water use in rural areas where they’re stripping away hillsides. It needs to be managed better.
Are cannabis farmers being singled out?
Oh yeah. I think it could be more efficient, but a lot of those guys are already real efficient.
Is there a future for pot farming in rugged, remote, parched Northern California hillsides or is that an artifact of prohibition?
Cannabis should be grown on a flat piece of land using hydraulic implements. It can be way more efficient. One guy with a tractor can do a heck of lot of work.
Should cities and counties retain the right to ban all cultivation?
It’s kind of their turf and they can already ban a lot of other stuff
? to take that right away from them would be dipping into their sovereignty. For example, in Sonoma, there’s one headshop. That’s just the way it is.

Should folks be concerned about pesticides currently in pot?
There’s a lot of people [who] are using harmful pesticides. It’s that simple. ... Everybody’s using these things. ... Spraying is the path of least resistance, and that’s quite a problem.
They’ve got [Organic Materials Review Institute] inspectors for organic certification. I would love to see those guys go certify farms. They’re experts at it and they already got the agencies.
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: Wed, 20 May 2015
Source: East Bay Express (CA)
Copyright: 2015 East Bay Express
Contact: http://posting.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/SubmitLetter/Page
Website: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1131
Author: David Downs

MOVE OVER BRITANNICA
It’s Time for the Cannabis Encyclopedia. a Q&A With Weed Author Jorge Cervantes (aka George Van Patten).
The world’s cannabis cultivators, their friends, and loved ones have a new, essential reference: The Cannabis Encyclopedia, released April 20 online and in stores worldwide.
This large-format, 596-page, full-color gardening book has 2,000 images and retails for $50. It’s written by iconic author and Sonoma resident Jorge Cervantes (aka George Van Patten) - a former cultivation editor for High Times magazine.
Van Patten was born in Ontario, Oregon in 1953, and as a child, he loved growing corn and radishes. He was a paperboy, a school newspaper reporter, and a printing press operator in a small town who got turned on to pot by the film Easy Rider and by Mexican ditch weed. After high school, Van Patten became radicalized in 1976 while attending college in Mexico, where he first grew cannabis. After realizing that authoring pot books was his true calling, he got a degree in general studies from the University of Portland, and under the pen name Jorge Cervantes, started publishing pot botany guides at a time when doing so was analogous to writing The Anarchist’s Cookbook.
I chatted with Van Patten about the release of his masterwork, and the shape of California legalization in 2016.
Many of your friends have gone to jail. Printers used to refuse to print these books and bookstores wouldn’t carry them. Looking back on that journey, how does it feel to hold The Cannabis Encyclopedia in 2015?
My, it’s been a long road, you know? Things have really changed over the years. I was treated as a criminal for years and years, and I never saw myself as one. In this country, it used to be so different, but it’s changing very rapidly.
Looking forward, what cultivation trends will affect producers and consumers as legalization progresses?
Number one: People are going to start growing outdoors or in greenhouses a lot more. There’s just more and more people growing outdoors, and it’s easy to grow outdoors in the backyard for most people, and you could easily grow five pounds or ten pounds in a backyard, no problem.
What is the bottom in terms of cannabis’ price?
I’d say $500 to $600 a pound for premium outdoor.
That’s one-tenth of the top prices for Humboldt indoor ten years ago.
But, see, right now, good outdoor is $800 to $1,000 per pound, maybe even $1,200 - so it’s not a very far drop. It’s a 50-percent drop, but it’s already dropped 50 percent recently in the last couple of years.
Are we at the peak in terms of THC?
I’m not sure. My understanding is it can get to be 24 [percent THC], possibly 25 - but anything over 21 is quite strong.
What needs to happen to mitigate the environmental impacts of cannabis farming?
We do need to do something about water use in rural areas where they’re stripping away hillsides. It needs to be managed better.
Are cannabis farmers being singled out?
Oh yeah. I think it could be more efficient, but a lot of those guys are already real efficient.
Is there a future for pot farming in rugged, remote, parched Northern California hillsides or is that an artifact of prohibition?
Cannabis should be grown on a flat piece of land using hydraulic implements. It can be way more efficient. One guy with a tractor can do a heck of lot of work.
Should cities and counties retain the right to ban all cultivation?
It’s kind of their turf and they can already ban a lot of other stuff
? to take that right away from them would be dipping into their sovereignty. For example, in Sonoma, there’s one headshop. That’s just the way it is.

Should folks be concerned about pesticides currently in pot?
There’s a lot of people [who] are using harmful pesticides. It’s that simple. ... Everybody’s using these things. ... Spraying is the path of least resistance, and that’s quite a problem.
They’ve got [Organic Materials Review Institute] inspectors for organic certification. I would love to see those guys go certify farms. They’re experts at it and they already got the agencies.
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: Wed, 20 May 2015
Source: East Oregonian (Pendleton, OR)
Copyright: 2015 The East Oregonian
Contact: gmurdock@eastoregonian.com
Website: http://www.eastoregonian.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3903
Author: Jerry Cronin

MEDICAL MARIJUANA HAS HELPED AMERICAN HEROES
“American Sniper” was ranked the No. 1 movie in United States for the week of Dec. 17 through Dec. 23, 2014, when competition for this top listing is intense.
This is an excerpt from the magazine, Salon:
“In his best-selling memoir, ‘American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History,’ Navy SEAL Chris Kyle writes that he was only two weeks into his first of four tours of duty in Iraq when he was confronted with a difficult choice.  Through the scope of his .300 Winchester Magnum rifle, he saw a woman with a child pull a grenade from under her clothes as several Marines approached. Kyle’s job was to provide ‘overwatch,’ meaning that he was perched in or on top of bombed-out apartment buildings and was responsible for preventing enemy fighters from ambushing U.S. troops.”
When Kyle returned home, he suffered from PTSD and that led to sleepless nights and emotional distress that he tried to block out with alcohol.
Let’s switch to a story about a local resident who was a sniper in Afghanistan. He left his high school sweetheart to serve in the Marines. He was trained in the same manner as Chris Kyle and his job was to also provide “overwatch” to prevent the enemy from ambushing U.S. troops.
He witnessed his friends blown up by IEDs and others violently killed standing next to him. He was exposed to one horrific scene after another during his deployment in Afghanistan. When he returned to North Carolina, he discovered that he was always in physical pain, had insomnia, and nightmares woke him up each night. The only bright spot in his life was when he reunited with his high school sweetheart, who had left their home town and settled in Pendleton finding a job as an English teacher at BMCC.
The painkillers prescribed by the VA started to cause debilitating side effects. He discovered that only medical marijuana provided him with relief from PTSD. Unfortunately, his VA doctor wouldn’t prescribe medical marijuana. The Marine doesn’t want to break the law but he’s faced with the responsibility of raising a young boy. After serving his country for nine years, he relies on the medicinal qualities of marijuana to work, support his family, and cope with the physical and mental ailments caused by his military duty.
The time to make a decision about medical marijuana dispensaries cannot be delayed any longer. Local musician Jared Pennington is just one of hundreds of people in the community who relies on medical marijuana to survive.
Jerry Cronin
Pendleton
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Wed, 20 May 2015
Source: Press Democrat, The (Santa Rosa, CA)
Copyright: 2015 The Press Democrat
Contact: letters@pressdemocrat.com
Website: http://www.pressdemocrat.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/348
Author: Julie Johnson

SONOMA COUNTY FAIRGROUNDS TAKES NEW TACK ON MARIJUANA FESTIVALS
Sonoma County Fairgrounds officials have scaled back the marijuana trade show events to be held at the Santa Rosa event center in 2015, bringing back an event with North Coast origins but passing over the Cannabis Cup run by international event powerhouse High Times magazine.
The homegrown Emerald Cup will return to the fairgrounds event center in December for its third run in Santa Rosa as a fair celebrating organic marijuana grown outdoors. Organizers are expecting bigger crowds but are also restricting it to adults for the first time.
Fairgrounds officials, however, said they will not be welcoming back the High Times’ Cannabis Cup, after last year’s event was a headache for staff from unloading to cleanup. The High Times trade show drew thousands to its first Santa Rosa event on a weekend last June.
“They left our facility really messy - debris, stickering, couches - more so than any other event we’ve had,” Katie Fonsen Young, interim fair manager, said. “It took us about a week to clean up after the event. The normal event that’s just in one building will just take a few hours.”
Young said that the decision had nothing to do with the fact that the event involved marijuana but rather the High Times’ show was a significant drain on staff, who were already taxed with preparing for the Sonoma County Fair. The 17-day fair that typically begins in late July is the fairgrounds’ biggest project of the year.
Dan Skye, High Times editorial director, said earlier this month that his organization had wanted to return to Santa Rosa and had thought last year’s event was a success. On Tuesday, he said festival organizers were aware the event would not come back to Santa Rosa. He said they had moved on and were hoping to announce a new Northern California location as soon as this week. He dismissed the idea that cleanup was a problem.
“We pay for the cleaning service once we leave,” Skye said. “It’s a big event. You have how many thousands show up. They leave a mess, there’s no doubt.”
Emerald Cup founder Tim Blake, who runs event center Area 101 on his rural property in far northern Mendocino County, said he had to make certain changes to the Emerald Cup’s event plan before reaching an agreement for this year’s event. The changes include altering the event from all ages to 18-and-over, bringing more security to prevent smoking outside the designated “medicating” areas and planning to strictly prevent vendors from handing out samples of marijuana-infused edibles.
“The reason we’re bringing back the Emerald Cup is because we have a track record of working with them and they’ve been very open to meeting anything we require,” Young said. “That kind of organization and pre-planning didn’t occur with High Times.”
High Times rolled out its first issue more than four decades ago, and was a pioneer in championing pot culture with full-color centerfolds of pot leaves at a time when even images of marijuana were provocative. The magazine’s pages unearthed an underground economy from pipes to detox teas and has beaten the drums against the so-called War on Drugs.
The magazine held its first Cannabis Cup awards program in Amsterdam in 1988. In the 27 years since, the contest has evolved into speaker-thumping events with bikini-clad women held in cities across the country.
In April, an estimated 10,000 people attended the group’s U.S.  Cannabis Cup in Denver. The group is planning upcoming international trade shows in Amsterdam and Negril, Jamaica, as well as in American cities including Portland, Ore.; Clio, Mich.; Washington, D.C.; and Fresno.
In contrast, the Emerald Cup started in 2004 as a secretive word-of-mouth gathering of pot farmers at Blake’s Area 101 near the Mendocino-Humboldt county line.
The close-knit event grew into an all-night party over the years and in 2012 moved from an arrangement of hay bales and tents at Blake’s property to the Mateel Community Center in Redway. It was nearly canceled in 2011 when major law enforcement actions - including the raid of Mendocino’s poster-child collective Northstone Organics - made people afraid of the attention it would bring to the pot-growing community.
But Blake said that they held the event anyway and started including a speaker program to address topics from medical marijuana laws and the implications of legalization to growing practices.
Organizers brought the Emerald Cup to Sonoma County in 2013.
This year, they will have the entire fairgrounds to spread out, and he expects about 18,000 attendees, up from an estimated 13,000 in 2014. They are doubling the number of food trucks to 20 and shelling out an additional $100,000 to attract top notch musical acts.
Blake said they are anticipating a lot of discussion about the potential that a referendum to legalize marijuana may go before voters in 2016, and they are inviting lawmakers, including Lieutenant Gov. Gavin Newsom, Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, and Assemblyman Jim Wood, D-Healdsburg, to attend the event.
“With 2016 around the corner, we ought to bring everyone to the table,” Blake said.
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Pubdate: Sun, 24 May 2015
Source: New York Times Magazine (NY)
Copyright: 2015 The New York Times Company
Contact: magazine@nytimes.com
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/index.html
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/297
Note: The New York Times Magazine is a section of the Sunday edition
of the New York Times
Author: Malia Wollan

HOW TO ROLL A JOINT
After he sold his cable-television firm for $18 million in 1999, Bruce Nassau was a wealthy man looking for a new industry.
He wanted to invest in a product with broad consumer appeal.
Eventually, he settled on marijuana. “I’m an old guy in this business,” says Nassau, 62, the chief executive of Tru Cannabis, a company with five marijuana dispensaries in the Denver area and plans to expand within Colorado and to four other states.
Last year, the company’s sales reached $10 million.
Nassau started smoking joints as a teenager in Chicago, and he figured he knew the ins and outs of weed consumption. But joints, it turned out, were a bit old—fashioned - the meatloaf of marijuana - and young people had all sorts of newfangled ways to ingest the stuff. Chief among them are “dabbing” (a means of inhaling smoke from resinous hash oil) and “vaping” (heating marijuana and breathing in vapor rather than smoke, often done with so—called vape pens). When more youthful smokers did roll joints, they tended to roll unfamiliarly large ones, often in cigar wrappers, and call them blunts. “I had to learn a whole new vocabulary,” Nassau says.
While he understands the appeal of these methods (“They get you real stoned real quick”), Nassau, like many of his baby—boomer customers, prefers an old—school joint.
Making one is “ritualistic and relaxing,” and you don’t need specialized gear. He also likes handling plant material, rather than resinous concentrate. Tru Cannabis sells individual joints for $6, $8 or $9 in its shops, but Nassau says rolling is an easy skill to acquire.
“Go back to basics,” he says. Crush your marijuana buds into uniform bits with your fingers or in a grinder device, which Nassau says works “like a pepper mill.” Take one sheet of rolling paper and fold it in half with the gum strip facing up. Sprinkle the marijuana evenly into the paper’s crease, avoiding the edges.
Begin rolling back and forth with your thumbs and index fingers until you have a cylindrical shape.
Wet the sugar gum with your tongue, and seal it tight. “Don’t overdo it with the licking,” warns Nassau, as too much saliva dissolves the paper.
At first, your joints will be lumpy and crude. Nassau says to keep practicing until you can roll one effortlessly in about a minute.
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Thu, 21 May 2015
Source: Boulder Weekly (CO)
Copyright: 2015 Boulder Weekly
Contact: letters@boulderweekly.com
Website: http://www.boulderweekly.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/57
Author: Leland Rucker

HEMP AND THE WOOLLY MAMMOTH’S HAIR PIECE
It’s no secret that hemp is one of the most misunderstood plants in history. For centuries, it has been used by all kinds of people for all kinds of things - clothing to car construction, bioplastics to building supplies, food to fuel.
Though it was grown by the Founding Fathers, was a major crop in the U.S. for many years and doesn’t contain enough THC to get people “high,” it was blacklisted along with marijuana in 1937 and later listed as a Schedule One drug under the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, at least in part because the federal government couldn’t tell the difference between the two plants.
As a result of our folly, makers of hemp products here - hemp, hemp oil and hemp seeds are utilized in lotions and salves, carpets and beer, paper and jeans - have to import it. Today, China produces almost 80 percent of all the hemp in the world. About $600 million worth of hemp products were sold in 2013 in the U.S., a number that should continue to grow once domestic production begins anew in states that are allowing it again. Its uses seem almost infinite.
But I think we found the most original use for hemp yet. Billie and I were wandering the Dinosaur Garden outside the Field House of Natural History in Vernal, Utah. The museum is a dinosaur-lover’s dream, and the outside garden is stocked with colorful, life-sized reproductions of various plant- and meat-eating dinos, with one exception: A wooly mammoth, the large, extinct elephant ancestor.
Looming over us with its huge tusks, friendly eyes and thick, dark coat, the only warm-blooded representative in the garden immediately got our full attention. Most impressive was the coat, which was thick and shaggy and black and spread over and around the body and huge curved tusks.
Wooly mammoths’ thick outer hair was called the “guard coat.” And this mammoth’s guard-coat hair piece was made from hemp.
Since it is far from any interstate or major city (Salt Lake City is nearly three hours away, and both I-80 and I-70 at least two hours), Dinosaur National Monument, which straddles the Utah-Colorado border not far east of Vernal, is as remote as it is wondrous and wild, especially the gorgeous natural beauty of the Split Mountain area in Utah and Echo Park in Colorado.
The monument’s other claim to fame gave it its name. Voluminous fossils of the creatures we see in the Dinosaur Garden have been discovered in the immediate area. Among the monument’s amazing features is the Quarry Exhibit Hall, a huge A-frame building that encloses a 150-foot long and 50-foot high uplifted wall that showcases an extensive selection of fossilized bones left as they were found. Upwards of 40 complete allosaurus skeletons have been found in the area.
But no woolly mammoths. The replica, made of plastic, was donated to the museum in the 1970s, says Craig Gerber, maintenance specialist at the museum and the man in charge of the care of the creatures in the garden.
As far as he knows, the hemp was chosen by the original artist, and the tradition has continued since then. The local avian population admires the hemp hair as much as we did, he said, so much so that they pluck chunks of it for their own nests (which makes bird nests yet another use of hemp).
Not that keeping up the tradition is an easy task. The hair has to be replaced every 10-15 years, a procedure that Gerber estimates at several hundred man-hours. Or as he puts it, “It’s a nightmare from hell.”
The hemp comes from California in 50-plus-pound bales. The old coat has be removed, and the new “hair” readied. Thirty-gallon tubs are filled with water and then with hemp.
“You have to grab it, untangle it and lay it out to dry,” he says, before application. And then it has be painted. “You couldn’t afford to pay someone outside to do it. It sucks.”
So if you find yourself far off the interstate late one night on Highway 40 in Vernal, Utah, and you observe a woolly mammoth peering into a museum window, you’re not in the Twilight Zone. Be thankful for the occasional toil and trouble of Craig Gerber and mark up one more reason why hemp should again become America’s crop.
You can hear Leland discuss his most recent column and Colorado
cannabis issues each Thursday morning on KGNU. http://news.kgnu.org/weed
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Pubdate: Thu, 21 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

BAN ON THE RUN
The Lake County town of Clearlake has backed off of its marijuana cultivation ban following public backlash and a lawsuit filed by one of the city’s former mayors.
Clearlake was one of the few municipalities in the state to ban cultivation (several counties ban growing as well) and it had become a contentious topic; Lake County’s struggles with marijuana regulation were reported in the Los Angeles Times last year.
The Press Democrat reports that the Clearlake city council had adopted the ban - despite the fact that it already had a law limiting parcels to between six and 12 plants - to combat illegal grows.  Medical marijuana advocates said it deprived people of medicine and, besides, the city wasn’t enforcing its current limits.
Meanwhile, in Illinois, a company is challenging a rival medical marijuana business that won an exclusive contract to serve a portion of the state.
Shiloh Agronomics LLC, which was formed by a former county board chairman and sheriff, is threatening to sue Shelby County Community Services Inc., saying that the company is ineligible to grow and sell marijuana because it operates as a nonprofit and must follow federal law, according to a Chicago Tribune report.
The son of Shiloh Agronomics’ founder, a Chicago attorney, told the Tribune that the state shouldn’t “create a monopoly for someone who is tax subsidized.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf came out in favor of legalization recently, hosting a discussion in his home with doctors and lawmakers and telling reporters the following day that the state breaks up families with criminalization.
State senators passed a medical marijuana bill 40-7 recently, but the bill is in a house committee headed by a Republican who opposed legalization without federal government approval, according to a WPXI report.
This month’s National Geographic features an image that any Humboldter is pretty used to by now: a collection of delicate marijuana leaves dangling over the magazine’s masthead and big red block letters that read, simply, “WEED.”
It is apparently the magazine’s first foray into the rapidly changing social and scientific world of marijuana, and, while it doesn’t touch on anything particularly groundbreaking, it sums up the current state of affairs nicely and features fantastic pictures from photographer Lynn Johnson.
Among others, the magazine profiles: Raphael Mechoulam who, as a young chemist in 1963, identified THC as marijuana’s psychoactive compound and calls the plant a “medicinal treasure trove waiting to be discovered”; Phillip Hague, a Luther Burbank-worshipping seed collector who runs one of Colorado’s biggest grows and whose quips about the plant can likely be heard in many corners of our county;
Manuel Guzman, a Spanish researcher on the forefront of cannabis’ effects on neurology and cancer; and a Colorado community where hundreds of families have moved to seek cannabis treatment for kids with seizures and other maladies.
It’s a remarkably positive piece - hopeful even - without being unrealistically cheerleadery, and you can read it online now, or pick it up at your favorite magazine rack.
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Pubdate: Thu, 21 May 2015
Source: Westword (Denver, CO)
Column: Ask A Stoner
Copyright: 2015 Village Voice Media
Contact: http://www.westword.com/feedback/EmailAnEmployee?department=letters
Website: http://www.westword.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1616
Author: Herbert Fuego

I NEED SOME GOOD EDIBLES RECIPES
Dear Stoner: Do you have any good infused product recipes that require smaller amounts of pot? I’m looking for a mentor in making pot edibles and dabs.
Mckenzy
Dear Mckenzy: If you don’t want to pay for classes on extraction or cooking with cannabis, there are plenty of recipes to help you whip up something quick and strong on a budget.
For starters, infusing small batches of peanut butter, cooking oil or hot chocolate is an easy process. Mix a couple grams of fine herb into a half-jar of all-natural peanut butter, put it in the oven for about 35 minutes at 280 degrees, and have pot PB&Js for lunch. Simmer a cup of olive oil with a quarter-ounce of chronic for over an hour, and you’ll have a healthy alternative to butter for use in all sorts of half-baked goods. Or empty out a tea bag, fill it with finely ground pot and simmer it in a few cups of whole milk for forty minutes, then stir in some hot-cocoa mix. You won’t notice the difference - until your eyes glaze over.
Resin tech is a new way to make solventless dabs with a small amount of cannabis. It’s done by folding parchment paper over a nug and pressing it firmly in a flat iron for three seconds. Resin will be squeezed from the bud, leaving little globs of oil on the paper for dabbing. You can press each nug two or three times and save the flat remains for edibles. Be sure to research this online if you’re thinking about trying it, though: Flat irons aren’t to be played with. And wear an oven mitt!
Dear Stoner: I was talking to a friend about marijuana strains, and
he used the term “landrace” several times. What the hell is a
landrace? Blazed ‘n’ Confused
Dear Blazed: Landraces are the ancestors of all the fine herb you enjoy today: indigenous, pure strains that stoners in the ‘70s grew up loving before crossbreeding changed the game. Landraces developed their unique traits by adapting to their native areas; many are named after their birthplaces (Afghani, Acapulco Gold, etc.). Because their birthplaces are the source of their characteristics, growing them in other environments (like a Colorado warehouse or basement) won’t produce the same plant, and new, wild-growing landraces are extremely rare. But that hasn’t stopped us from enjoying them: Durban Poison and Maui Waui are two popular landrace sativas found in dispensaries all over, and Afghani has spawned a Genghis Khan-like family tree, providing indica genetics for many popular strains. For some fun history on the subject, check out Strain Hunters, a documentary web series that follows pot lovers as they try to preserve landrace strains around the world.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Thu, 21 May 2015
Source: SF Weekly (CA)
Copyright: 2015 Village Voice Media
Contact: http://www.sfweekly.com/feedback/EmailAnEmployee?department=letters
Website: http://www.sfweekly.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/812
Author: Chris Roberts

CITY ATTORNEY DECLARES WAR ON MCDRUGS IN THE HAIGHT
I’m eating in a McDonald’s for the first time in years. I’m here looking for drugs.
To enter the Haight Ashbury’s most dangerous business, I must run a gauntlet at the door. A quick sidestep is needed to avoid bumping into three unattended young children bounding out into the Saturday evening sunlight, presumably in the throes of a salt-and-fat rush.
Inside, the L-shaped dining room is half-empty. A few people stand by the bathrooms; older solitary men nurse cups of coffee and shuffle through newspapers at tables near the service counter. Scanning the menu, I try to remember what Michael Pollan - or was it Eric Schlosser? - said is acceptable to eat here. I opt for small fries, and $1.95 later I’m seated on a plastic stool at a plastic table, ready to observe a hotbed for drug sales and violence in action.
This McDonald’s, at the corner of Haight and Stanyan streets near the far eastern edge of Golden Gate Park, is “a safe haven for drug dealers and users,” according to City Attorney Dennis Herrera. Police have been called here 641 times since January 2014, more calls for law enforcement than any other business in the neighborhood. And the Illinois-based McDonald’s Corp. is “legally on the hook” for it, Herrera informed the company last week. Unless something is done, Herrera has vowed to sue McDonald’s and the owners of this franchise, who could be fined $25,000 a day and have their restaurant shut down for a year. Similar tactics have been employed against Tenderloin bodegas that served as fronts for drug-dealing.
None of this conflict is apparent at first glance. Like everywhere else in the neighborhood, there are lots of “street kids” - easy shorthand for the Haight’s brand of transient. They skew younger and whiter, they sell drugs to the tourists and high school kids who come here to buy them, and they are usually on their way somewhere else.  During their stint in town, drawn here by the weather, free bluegrass, and decades of tradition, these transients might crash in Buena Vista Park or near Alvord Lake across the street from the McDonald’s.
When nobody offers to sell me weed on my way into the restaurant, as almost always happens when I head into Amoeba Records or the Goodwill up the street, I’m struck: I must look like a cop today.
“Something” does happen less than 10 minutes after I sit down, and I’m impressed with how smoothly it goes. A “street kid” with hollow eyes hangs out too long by the counter. A manager, identifiable by his blue shirt and air of tired authority, shouts at the kid to get out, while simultaneously scooping fries for a paying customer.  “Sorry about that,” the manager says. The kid, meanwhile, has exited without a word.
Aside from the City Attorney’s promised suit, none of this is new.  Rumblings about the “problem” at McDonald’s surface every couple of years, but nothing seems to change. In 2012, police Chief Greg Suhr promised that cops would fix the issue “by the end of the week,” according to The New York Times. The restaurant has tried: After security guards proved too expensive, the old franchise owners eliminated the dollar menu and removed picnic tables from the outdoor patio to discourage lingering riffraff. The new owners, who bought the location in 2013, inherited an old problem.
It’s not clear why the time to end this persistent situation is now.  The restaurant apparently was inviting enough in the fall for a visit from the president of the Philippines, who popped in for a meal during a trip to the city. And the 11 drug busts here since September don’t exactly shock and awe: an acid dealer on 4/20 weekend, a guy with a couple ounces of psilocybin mushrooms, another with about 2 pounds of weed, all carrying small quantities of cash. No guns, no serious violence, no organized crime.
Not that the people who live here are content with the status quo.  When I mention the threat of a lawsuit to my partner, who used to come here as a child for a rare treat of Chicken McNuggets after horseback riding lessons in Golden Gate Park, her reaction is swift.  “Good,” she told me. “They should have shut that place down years ago.”
Still, the lawsuit threat feels like a kneejerk response. City officials talk about a neighborhood plagued by “drug dealers” and “addicts” in need of “help.” It’s not clear if it’s the cannabis or the LSD that has the kids addicted, but some of the “help” that was here got evicted. In December 2013, one of the two nonprofits serving youth in the area, the Homeless Youth Alliance, lost its lease on a space on Cole Street, two blocks from the restaurant. The recent spike in crime - those 641 calls - began the next month.
I head outside, where the manager is taking a cigarette break. He’s not talkative, and doesn’t cop to knowing anything about the lawsuit, but I do find out he’s worked here 17 years. I’m trying to digest that fact when a commotion breaks out from the direction of Alvord Lake.
Dogs growl and bark, followed by a shout. Someone starts running across the street. “Oh!” the manager exclaims. He turns to a tough-looking younger woman standing near us on the patio, finishing off an ice cream. “That’s your husband,” he tells her. She curses and heads towards the action.
“You know her? You know her husband?” I ask, incredulous.
“Of course,” he says. “They’re my customers.”
The Haight Ashbury has been a magnet for transient youth for almost 50 years. “All along Haight Street, from Buena Vista Park to the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park, there are nearly as many street kids as tourists on the sidewalks.” That sentence was published in this newspaper nearly a decade ago. Like every McDonald’s in the world, the one in Haight Ashbury is a reflection of the community it serves. It will take much more than a lawsuit to change that.
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Newshawk: Kirk
Pubdate: Thu, 21 May 2015
Source: Gazette, The (Colorado Springs, CO)
Copyright: 2015 The Gazette
Contact: http://www.gazette.com/sections/opinion/submitletter/
Website: http://www.gazette.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/165
Authors: David W. Murray and John P. Walters
Note: John P. Walters and David W. Murray direct Hudson Institute’s Center for Substance Abuse Policy Research. They served in the Office of National Drug Control Policy during the George W. Bush administration.
MARIJUANA AND SCHOOL FAILURE
The dose makes the poison. - Paracelsus
Millennials are the strongest advocates for legalizing marijuana, but they may be paving their own pathway to a problematic educational future through their political support.
Photo - Students walk to and from classes on the campus quad of the University of Colorado, in Boulder, Colo., Monday April 20, 2015. The University of Colorado was open to the public on this 4/20 marijuana holiday for the first time in three years. The university has blocked public access in recent years in an effort to snuff mass smokeouts to mark the unofficial marijuana celebration.
A substantial increase in marijuana potency over the past 20 years is today producing much greater harm than before. Recent research has not only made associations with psychotic effects on susceptible individuals, but has also stressed associations with diminished IQ and cognitive performance with heavy use and even detected brain abnormalities in association with “casual” exposure.
The concentration of the intoxicant THC found in marijuana has climbed from roughly 3-4 percent in the 1980s to the 20-30 percent common in current commercial products, with newer forms of the drug (such as “shatter”) reaching 70-80 percent THC, according to nationwide drug seizures. This increased potency ratchets up the damage to educational performance.
How widespread is marijuana use in this generation? According to Monitoring the Future, an annual school survey conducted for NIDA, in 2014, more than 44 percent of high school seniors reported “lifetime use” of marijuana, while more than 21 percent reported “Current use.” These figures have held roughly steady for several years.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that the use of marijuana, even mid-potency marijuana, affects educational performance because it “interferes with attention, motivation, memory, and learning,” and that students who are regular users “tend to get lower grades and are more likely to drop out.” NIDA concludes that youth using marijuana “may be functioning at a reduced intellectual level most or all of the time.”
It looks increasingly likely that early marijuana use is a causal variable in declining intellectual capacity. Moreover, whatever correlations we find between exposure to THC and cognitive and behavioral deficiencies in youth will likely accelerate as marijuana is legalized.
There are new data that bear on the matter, as the Educational Testing Service reports on results from the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies. When compared to their international counterparts in 24 advanced industrial nations, American students, specifically the millennial generation (between 16 and 34 years of age at time of assessment) continued to score near the bottom in literacy, math, and even the “ability to follow directions,” despite having more years of schooling than their predecessors.
Education experts respond with reasonable explanations, such as America’s diversity or income inequality, coupled with weakened schools.
But this time the “report card” from ETS is more complex. ETS notes that millennials look like America’s “weakest generation” cognitively. And when ETS compared only the elite (90th percentile), native-born school performers across the international setting, Americans fared still worse. Intense marijuana use is found among U.S. youth in every social stratum. Correlation doesn’t mean causation, but there is a correlation.
The impact may extend beyond schooling. Only 29 percent of youth of age for military service were deemed eligible for enlistment, with fully one-quarter failing the army’s basic math and reading test.  Further, daily use of marijuana by adolescents increased their risk of dropping out of high school by 66 percent, according to a recent Lancet analysis - and that dropout risk is even higher for the most socioeconomically disadvantaged, according to a report by the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project.
And what of Colorado, where commercial marijuana exploded in January 2014? Nationally, daily use of marijuana among those 12 and older has already increased from 4.8 percent in 2002 to 8.1 percent by 2013. In 2011, Colorado’s daily use rates were 35 percent higher than the national average.
But drug-related school disruption is climbing. According to a recent report from the Colorado Department of Education, the percentage of expulsions for drug violations exploded from 26.2 percent to 41.9 percent between 2008 and 2014, all prior to full commercialization.
Experts have even explored environmental factors, such as exposure to chemicals like phthalates, used in plastics and inked to IQ loss. A study involving zebra fish recently received attention in the Washington Post. Yet the Post has been silent regarding the environmental effects of THC.
Our argument is not that marijuana is the most important variable driving decline, though the evidence for a role is compelling. What we do argue is that anyone concerned with American schooling must account for this new threat.
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Pubdate: Fri, 22 May 2015
Source: Arizona Republic (Phoenix, AZ)
Copyright: 2015 The Arizona Republic
Contact: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/sendaletter.html
Website: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/24
Author: Ron Sampson

BILKING VIA CHARITY BRINGS LESSER PENALTY THAN SELLING AN OUNCE
James Reynolds II used the Mesa-based Breast Cancer Society to raise and misappropriate (steal) millions of dollars, in the name of charity. He gets to settle a $65.6 million judgment and have his record wiped clean for a $75,000 cash payment and no time served.
I have also noticed that if you happen to have the wrong color skin and sell an ounce or more of drugs you can expect five to 10 years or more in jail/prison and a felony conviction that follows/haunts you for the rest of your life.
I guess that those druggies just don’t know who to make political contributions to. Ain’t justice grand!
? Ron Sampson

Sun Lakes
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Fri, 22 May 2015
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/jQyY2fv2
Copyright: 2015 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Ray Mark Rinaldi, Denver Post Fine Arts Critic

POT WAFTS INTO WORLD OF FINE ARTS, FINALLY
Artists aren’t so quick to respond to social change. It’s not that they don’t care, of course, it’s just that art doesn’t work that way.
Conceiving and executing art - figuring out what to say and how to say it - take time. Add to that technical things, like printing, framing and paint-drying, and then logistics, like finding a spot on the schedule of a busy gallery.
So, it’s not that surprising that, more than a year after the legalization of marijuana, we are finally seeing multiple reflections on the cannabis revolution in formal exhibitions. David B. Smith Gallery is showing realistic portraits of pot plants by talented painter Paul Jacobsen. The Colorado Photographic Arts Center has a trio of artists in an exhibit that looks at the intersection of marijuana culture and commerce.
Both shows were worth the wait. They’re full of thought and a bit of creative wackiness. Jacobsen’s oils are meticulous, with the careful details of 17th-century Dutch masters. The arts center show puts still-developing variables side-by-side, contrasting shots of Colorado’s increasingly mechanized pot factories with humble farms in California where weed is still grown underground, literally, in mostly illegal operations.
The shows have little in common materially, but both attempt to document a shift in how we think about pot, how it is becoming a part of our everyday lives, shedding its stigma, normalizing.
And in a way, the shows are part of that movement themselves.  Marijuana images on the walls of a fine-arts establishment? Well, that can’t be bad for a plant’s image.
Jacobsen’s exhibition is impressive in every way, eight or so paintings plus an architectural construction, made from salvaged building timbers that moves it toward an installation.
The images started as photographs taken at a cabin in Rico that the New York artist purchased a few years back. They are, for the most part, arranged cuttings, leafy, curvy, budding and lush; pot porn, if you will.
Jacobsen poses the plants formally, centered and under bright light, then paints them with all the seriousness of Cezanne and his oranges.  The canvases glow like portraits of saints, resonating with otherworldly light.
Wisely, the artist brings us back to earth, reminding viewers that these are just photos captured in oil. He even paints the camera flash that was on the original digital print. He leaves in the context of the cabin itself; these images were captured in something resembling an abandoned dynamite shack.
Marijuana may be the subject of political discussions, or big business, but it is ultimately a product of seed and dirt. The giant timber construction in the gallery - resembling the roof frame for an old shed - evokes a frontier sensibility. Pot is having its moment, that reminds us, but the plant is as natural and enduring as any of the crops or minerals that made the West what it is today.
The evolution of cannabis is more of a documentary subject at the photographic arts center, and the view is less flattering. Curator Rupert Jenkins gives one wall over to H. Lee’s “Grassland,” 23 pictures of a marijuana farm in rural California. These are contemporary views of timeless agriculture, low-tech and connected closely to the land - scenes of trimming and sorting done by hand, home-made greenhouses and sun-worn drying sheds. They would be downright bucolic, if the farm weren’t skirting the law by producing the substance in a state where it remains outlawed.
The opposing wall has 15 images by photojournalist Benjamin Rasmussen, who has been shooting the evolving grow factories along the Front Range for various publications, including The New York Times. His world is dominated by sterile industrial facilities, warehouses where the light is artificial and workers wear gloves and masks, where pot is packaged by machines, sold in chic retail shops, paid for in fat wads of cash.
Both photographers have their eye, but curator Jenkins sees the big picture, summed up in the exhibition title “Mixed Bag.” Less than two years legal, marijuana is already losing its age-old essence, going from crop to commodity, from natural to engineered. The pictures are pretty, but it’s not a pretty picture.
Completing his show is a series of animations created by photographer Theo Stroomer, who has been focusing his lens on the various public festivals celebrating the great liberation of marijuana. His shots are alternately joyous and troubling, too, a mix of happy partiers and folks who look to be indulging a drug addiction. The scenes are well-crafted and very complicated.
As responses go, both the photography and Smith shows get at the feelings a lot of people have about marijuana in Colorado. We’re happy it’s legal; we chose that because we’re going to smoke it anyway; it does good things for good people who don’t deserve to go to jail for using it.
But it makes us think, too, about where it came from, and where it’s going, and how this revolution is unfolding, about who will win and who will lose.
[sidebar]
“MIXED BAG”
The Colorado Photographic Arts Center presents recent work on the subject of marijuana by Benjamin Rasmussen, H. Lee and Theo Stroomer.  Through June 27. 1513 Boulder St. Free. 303-837-1341 or cpacphoto.org.
“OUTPOST”
David B. Smith Gallery presents an exhibit featuring new oil paintings by Paul Jacobsen. Through May 30. 1543 Wazee St. Free.  303-893-4234 or davidbsmithgallery.com.
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, 22 May 2015
Source: Baltimore Sun (MD)
Copyright: 2015 The Baltimore Sun Company
Contact: talkback@baltimoresun.com
Website: http://www.baltimoresun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/37
Author: Dan K. Morhaim
Note: Dan K. Morhaim is a physician and a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, representing District 11 in Baltimore County.
DRUG WAR CASUALTIES CONTINUE TO CLIMB
As rightly concerned and upset as we are about the fatal injuries Freddie Gray suffered in police custody, we ought to be just as concerned about the body count that existed prior to his death and has been on the rise ever since (there have been roughly three dozen homicides in Baltimore since Gray died, not counting the many wounded). We have come to accept daily community violence as background noise. What’s going on, and what can be done? Sadly, every city and region has well-established lines of distribution of illegal drugs and narcotics. Addicts need their drugs once or several times a day, and there’s a global network established to satisfy that craving. It starts overseas, where opium and cocaine are processed and then sent to virtually every community and street corner in the U.S. The billions of dollars spent to buy drugs are funneled back to the drug cartels via financial mechanisms that would rival a Wall Street investment bank.
When those distribution lines are disrupted - in our case by the Baltimore riots - drug distribution chaos ensues. Prices rise, tempers flare, deals go sour, and shootings increase.
It also explains why rioters targeted certain stores and products.  They entered drugstores, not to get antacids or toothpaste, but to get narcotics. They also aimed for high-value, small, non-traceable items suitable for easy resale, like tennis shoes, jackets and liquor. A $150 pair of sneakers can be fenced for $50 to $75, a leather jacket retailing at $200 might fetch $100 on the street, and a bottle of alcohol might bring 50 percent of retail.
This is what happened after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. In the wake of supply disruption, addicts attacked hospitals and pharmacies to get narcotics, sedatives and tranquilizers, anything to get high or to ward off the symptoms of withdrawal.
The spike in crime tells us something else: We cannot police ourselves out of this mess. Law enforcement and the criminal justice system have roles to play, but they are insufficient. Even with hundreds of police and thousands of National Guardsmen on the street and with the nation’s focus on Baltimore, the crime wave began. And it’s continuing now with a vengeance.
Estimates are that there are tens of thousands of addicts in the Baltimore metropolitan area. Given that each one might need $10 to $100 every day to maintain his or her habit, it’s easy see just how deep this problem runs.
All this is a result of the war on drugs, now 50 years old. It’s a war that has claimed tens of thousands of casualties both at home and abroad, destroyed the lives of countless innocent bystanders, turned neighborhoods - and in some cases, whole regions - into killing fields, filled prisons to overflowing with nonviolent offenders, poisoned farmlands and forests, undermined police and government agencies, corrupted multinational banks and financial companies, funded overseas enemies and terrorists, and despite the tremendous cost in blood and treasure has not advanced the cause for which the war was declared. Drug use has not measurably declined since President Nixon started that war in 1970.
Not only has the war on drugs failed, it continues to make the situation worse. It’s turned into a war on people, communities, institutions and ultimately ourselves. A new strategy is needed.
We need to treat drug addiction and substance abuse as diseases like we do with alcoholism. We need to take the profit out of the illegal drug markets. We need to confront the underlying circumstances that make drugs so appealing to so many. We need to look at approaches taken in other countries like Portugal and Switzerland, where alternative strategies have reduced drug use and dangerous behaviors, and modify those to our unique circumstances.
And perhaps most importantly, we need to engage physicians and nurses, public health experts, law enforcement, scientists, addiction counselors, addicts, all levels of government, researchers, educators, and anyone and everyone who can contribute in a civil, thoughtful and unemotional discussion with the goal of developing and implementing a drug control strategy that is based on science and not on politics. This could even positively affect police behavior in cities with predominantly black communities by restoring a more positive role for officers.
Drug use will never be completely eradicated, but that doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands and do nothing. We need to get back to what should have been the goal of the war on drugs all along: a society where drug abuse is as rare and as manageable as we can make it. That is a goal worthy of our nation’s energy and resources and one that is within our reach if we choose to focus our serious attention on it. Baltimore’s recovery will never happen unless we address this issue.
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
xxx
Newshawk: Herb Couch
Pubdate: Fri, 22 May 2015
Source: Journal-Pioneer, The (CN PI)
Copyright: 2015 Journal-Pioneer
Contact: newsroom@journalpioneer.com
Website: http://www.journalpioneer.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2789
Author: Dave Stewart
Page: A7

DEALING WITH PAIN
Leading Expert in Charlottetown to Address Canadian Pain Society’s
Annual Scientific Conference
One of North America’s leading experts on pain management is in Charlottetown.
Dr. Mary Lynch will be speaking at the Canadian Pain Society’s annual scientific meeting about alternative therapies - everything from art therapy to cannabinoids.
There are hundreds of natural components found within a cannabis plant. Some of those have been classified as cannabinoids, chemicals unique to the plant. Lynch said one of the more well known and researched is delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, a substance primarily responsible for the psychoactive effects of cannabis.
“The reason I’m interested in cannabinoids is because the body has a built in pain defence network and an inflammation defence network and part of our body’s built in pain defence network is cannabinoid based,” said Lynch, who is a researcher, psychiatrist and physician at the QEII Health Sciences Centre’s pain management unit in Halifax.
Her goal is to develop a number of treatments for conditions such as neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis and other forms of chronic pain. Her studies have found about 14 per cent of patients who present to pain clinics were using cannabis to control their pain.
Lynch says about one in five Islanders suffers from a chronic pain condition that is severe enough to interfere with their quality of life and normal function. “That amounts to about 30,000 P.E.I.  residents. That’s a lot of people.”
Medical marijuana production facilities have started popping up across Canada and there is a group in Charlottetown still working through the slow process of getting approval from Health Canada.
She isn’t saying marijuana should be the first form of treatment for people with chronic pain.
“If people don’t respond to the first thing or the second thing, it might be the third thing that they would try.” But there are challenges. “We are working in such a strict regulatory climate and because of the controversial nature and the socio-political climate the human research has been delayed. Consequently, we don’t have a series of agents that we can use for people with pain and inflammation.”
However, it’s not stopping people from using marijuana to ease pain.
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
xxx
Newshawk: Herb Couch
Pubdate: Fri, 22 May 2015
Source: National Post (Canada)
Webpage: http://mapinc.org/url/bhx90n4l
Copyright: 2015 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/wEtbT4yU
Website: http://www.nationalpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/286
Page: A8

SMOKING DOWN THE SLOPES
Watching cyclists racing down the bike trails and skiers loading onto the gondola at Whistler, B.C, it may not seem as though the scenic resort would see much in the way of a lung-killing habit such as smoking. But take a closer look and you can usually find a skier lighting up on a chairlift or a snowboarder blazing in the glades.
In what largely looks like a PR stunt to correspond with World No Tobacco Day, Whistler Blackcomb, the company that owns the ski resort, announced last Friday it will be banning all forms of smoking on its property as of the end of the month (employees will be given a one-year grace period, provided they use designated smoking areas).  The ban covers all property owned by the company, in or out of doors, including lifts, runs, bike trails, parking lots and patios.
In theory, the new policy goes much further than most municipal or provincial smoking bans - even prohibiting the use of medical marijuana and electronic cigarettes. It remains somewhat theoretical because B.C. law and the town’s municipal bylaws already prohibit smoking in many public places and it is unclear if the resort actually has the legal authority to penalize people for lighting up half a mile from anywhere on the side of a mountain.
The company says the decision was motivated by a desire “to preserve the pristine alpine environment our guests come here for,” to create a healthy environment for customers and staff and to prevent forest fires. If that is indeed the purpose, the ban makes little sense.
Although smoking is certainly a health hazard, and can definitely lead to forest fires, the evidence of risk is less clear in the case of brief exposure to second-hand smoke in a well-ventilated area, such as the top of a mountain. Nor is there evidence that second-hand vapours from e-cigarettes pose any risks at all (they certainly don’t cause fires). In some cases, the new policy will simply be penalizing people who legitimately need to use medical marijuana to treat their pain or other ailments, not to mention the resort’s hardworking staff, some of whom just want to relax with a cigarette during their break.
Of course, as a private company, operating on its own property, Whistler Blackcomb is within its rights to ban what it likes - in the same way as its patrons are free to take their custom elsewhere.  Ultimately, consumers will decide. Those who wish may continue to enjoy a smoke while barrelling down the slopes of Banff or elsewhere, while those whose greatest pleasure consists in denying others theirs can revel in Whistler’s suffocating embrace.
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Matt
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sat, 23 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: Rupert Neate

FROM CANNABIS COOKIES TO WEED JUICE - US LEGAL CHANGES OFFER PROSPECT
OF ‘GREEN RUSH’
Cannabis Entrepreneurs Confident That More US States Will Relax Laws
Four years ago, Cassandra Farrington couldn’t find a venue in the US that would host her plan for a conference on the business of marijuana. Last week, she hired the Hilton Chicago, one of the city’s most famous hotels and one that has accommodated every US president since it opened in 1927.
“When we first started looking for venues, people ran screaming in the other direction when we said ‘hey, we want to have this marijuana business conference’. They were like ‘no way, get out of here.’” Farrington eventually staged the inaugural conference at a masonic lodge in downtown Denver because it was the only place that would have her.
Last week, however, was altogether different, with 2,103 attendees eating lunch from tables with white cloths at the 2015 Marijuana Business Conference & Expo. “Being here [in the Hilton Chicago] is mind boggling,” said Farrington, the co-founder and chief executive of Marijuana Business Media, which organised the three-day conference. “It just shows how far the industry has come. I don’t think you can come to this event and then think this isn’t a real industry.” Legalised in 23 states and the District of Columbia for medical use and Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska and DC for recreational use, is big business.
Independent analysts have valued the legal industry at $3bn (UKP1.9bn), rising to $10bn including ancillary trades and services.  Farrington puts the industry’s workforce at 60,000.
“You have to keep in mind that this not a new market or a new product, there is an existing consumer base who have been purchasing this in the shadows and in shame for decades,” George Jage, president of Marijuana Business Media, said. “It’s really difficult to pin down an estimate of the black market, but calling it $50bn would be a reasonable estimate.”
Farrington reckons it is only a matter of time before the end of marijuana prohibition across the US no matter who wins the 2016 presidential election. “But, everyone in this room would cheer for [US Senator and Republican nomination hopeful] Rand Paul,” she said.  “He has been very vocal and supportive of the libertarian aspect. The founding principle of libertarianism is to allow people their personal freedoms.”
But for now, Farrington says, the industry is concentrating on making cannabis more of a “mainstream and sellable product”. Leading that charge are companies making marijuana-laced chocolate and sodas infused with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)  the active ingredient that produces the “high”.
Farrington said it was difficult to market cannabis to someone who was reluctant to smoke a joint. “But say ‘hey here have a little chocolate, and have a good time tonight’. It’s a much easier sell,” she said.
The science of weed, she says, has advanced so much in recent years, that she could imagine “light beer-type strains” being marketed.  “Even if you’re not looking for recreational purposes, there are the wellness benefits: the cannabinoid-only that gives you the relaxation without the high. All of that is really becoming possible.”
Cannabis chocolates and drinks make up a heavy presence across three exhibition halls in the basement of the Hilton taken over by the conference, which will next be held in Las Vegas.
One of the biggest is the Venice Cookie Company (VCC), the largest manufacturer and distributor of cannabis brands on the West Coast.  Dan Zuckerman, VCC’s representative at the show, is showing off products from cookies and chocolates to tea, vapes, olive oil and coconut butter. Most popular, he says, are its 4.20 chocolate bars made of fair trade cacao and up to 180mg of THC, which sell for $20 a bar. His favourite is Cannabis Quencher fruit juice, below. “It will get you pretty high,” he said. “It’s the equivalent of 6-7 joints, it’s best to share.”
VCC was exploring expansion to Colorado, Illinois, Nevada and Arizona before the end of the year, but the company’s ambitions were being hampered by federal law that prevents cannabis and cannabis products being transported across state lines even if it is legal on both sides of the border. “It means we need to grow it, and produce it and package it all inside each state. It’s quite a logistical challenge,” Zuckerman said.
While VCC and Colorado-based Dixie are the biggest players in cannabis food and drink, most people at the conference reckon big business will move into the sector. “Pharma, tobacco, alcohol, they are all eyeing this industry,” Farrington said. “They may well be walking these halls, but absolutely surreptitiously. This is a schedule 1 drug. They cannot be seen to be associated with it.”
A couple of stalls down from VCC, Jair Velleman is declaring a “green rush” to anyone who’ll listen. He has flown from The Netherlands to sell indoor horticultural lights.
“It’s like the gold rush but, this time, the money is in plants,” he said. “I’m selling lights - the shovels of this trade. And, in the real gold rush, who made the most money? The people who dug gold or those who sold the shovels?
“Our biggest customers were people growing cut flowers, but weed has become really big business in the last few years and is now our biggest market,” he said.
Jason Schofield Ralph-Smith, of Autopot, a British hydroponics company, said he was only following the money. “There is so much money to be made out of cannabis,” he said. “And it will just get bigger and bigger as more US states legalise.”
Ralph-Smith said he imagined about 60% of the watering systems he sold were used for the cultivation of cannabis, but he stressed: “I don’t know what they’re growing. I don’t ask, it could be tomatoes.”
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Mon, 25 May 2015
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/y7f10bcx
Copyright: 2015 Hearst Communications Inc.
Contact: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1
Website: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388
Author: Debra J. Saunders

FROM GATEWAY DRUG TO VA MEDICINE
The Senate Appropriations Committee did something last week the Senate has never done - it passed a marijuana reform measure.
It was the narrowest of proposals, an amendment co-authored by Sens.  Steve Daines, R-Mont., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., to a military spending bill that would prohibit the Department of Veterans Affairs from using federal money to prosecute doctors who recommend medical marijuana to veterans in states where the drug is legal.
Last year, the House passed five measures that supported states’ rights on marijuana.
But the Senate would not budge - until Thursday. Twelve Democrats and four Republicans supported the amendment.
Most amazing of all was a “yes” vote from Sen. Dianne Feinstein.  “We’ve always had Dianne Feinstein down as a ‘no’ vote,” policy maven Michael Collins of the anti-drug-war Drug Policy Alliance told me.  The California Democrat has been a staunch hawk in the war on drugs.  She has described marijuana as a gateway drug. She would have been the only Democrat to vote “no.” But DiFi voted “yes,” although, Collins noted, her “’yes’ was the most muffled yes I’ve ever heard in my life.”
A like-minded House amendment failed less than a month ago in a 213-210 vote, but if the Senate amendment passes, it could survive a joint conference committee.
Tom Angell of Marijuana Majority observed, “Elected officials are finally starting to wake up to the fact that endorsing marijuana reform is good politics instead of the dangerous third-rail they’ve long viewed it as, and that means a lot more victories are on the way soon.”
Collins believes the landscape changed in March, when Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., introduced the Carers (Compassionate Access, Research Expansion, and Respect States) Act. The measure would bar the Department of Justice from using federal dollars to prosecute medical-marijuana dispensaries in states where they are legal and reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I to Schedule II drug to allow for more medical research of cannabis.
Feinstein has yet to reveal how she will vote on this bill.
On Thursday, Collins told me, Feinstein was pushing an alternate, watered-down amendment, which she failed to put up for a vote. Then she went with Daines-Merkley. “I strongly believe more research into the potential medical benefits of marijuana - specifically cannabidiol, the non-psychoactive component - is needed, and I am working to reduce barriers to conducting that research at the federal level,” quoth DiFi in a statement. “In the interim, I believe doctors at VA facilities in states where medical marijuana is legal should be able to discuss the potential benefits and harms of marijuana with their patients, especially those suffering from chronic pain or terminal illnesses.”
It wasn’t that long ago - January - that Feinstein and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, were urging the Obama administration to be tougher on states that legalized recreational marijuana, lest the United States be seen as flouting U.N. conventions. This month, she has been forced to recognize that marijuana may have medical benefits and veterans in states that have legalized medical marijuana should have access to it. The ground has shifted.
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Mon, 25 May 2015
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/y7f10bcx
Copyright: 2015 Hearst Communications Inc.
Contact: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1
Website: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388
Author: Debra J. Saunders

FROM GATEWAY DRUG TO VA MEDICINE
The Senate Appropriations Committee did something last week the Senate has never done - it passed a marijuana reform measure.
It was the narrowest of proposals, an amendment co-authored by Sens.  Steve Daines, R-Mont., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., to a military spending bill that would prohibit the Department of Veterans Affairs from using federal money to prosecute doctors who recommend medical marijuana to veterans in states where the drug is legal.
Last year, the House passed five measures that supported states’ rights on marijuana.
But the Senate would not budge - until Thursday. Twelve Democrats and four Republicans supported the amendment.
Most amazing of all was a “yes” vote from Sen. Dianne Feinstein.  “We’ve always had Dianne Feinstein down as a ‘no’ vote,” policy maven Michael Collins of the anti-drug-war Drug Policy Alliance told me.  The California Democrat has been a staunch hawk in the war on drugs.  She has described marijuana as a gateway drug. She would have been the only Democrat to vote “no.” But DiFi voted “yes,” although, Collins noted, her “’yes’ was the most muffled yes I’ve ever heard in my life.”
A like-minded House amendment failed less than a month ago in a 213-210 vote, but if the Senate amendment passes, it could survive a joint conference committee.
Tom Angell of Marijuana Majority observed, “Elected officials are finally starting to wake up to the fact that endorsing marijuana reform is good politics instead of the dangerous third-rail they’ve long viewed it as, and that means a lot more victories are on the way soon.”
Collins believes the landscape changed in March, when Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., introduced the Carers (Compassionate Access, Research Expansion, and Respect States) Act. The measure would bar the Department of Justice from using federal dollars to prosecute medical-marijuana dispensaries in states where they are legal and reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I to Schedule II drug to allow for more medical research of cannabis.
Feinstein has yet to reveal how she will vote on this bill.
On Thursday, Collins told me, Feinstein was pushing an alternate, watered-down amendment, which she failed to put up for a vote. Then she went with Daines-Merkley. “I strongly believe more research into the potential medical benefits of marijuana - specifically cannabidiol, the non-psychoactive component - is needed, and I am working to reduce barriers to conducting that research at the federal level,” quoth DiFi in a statement. “In the interim, I believe doctors at VA facilities in states where medical marijuana is legal should be able to discuss the potential benefits and harms of marijuana with their patients, especially those suffering from chronic pain or terminal illnesses.”
It wasn’t that long ago - January - that Feinstein and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, were urging the Obama administration to be tougher on states that legalized recreational marijuana, lest the United States be seen as flouting U.N. conventions. This month, she has been forced to recognize that marijuana may have medical benefits and veterans in states that have legalized medical marijuana should have access to it. The ground has shifted.
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sun, 24 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
Authors: Marc Mauer and David Cole
Note: Marc Mauer is executive director of the Sentencing Project.
David Cole is a professor of law and public policy at Georgetown University.

HOW TO LOCK UP FEWER PEOPLE
WHEN Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ted Cruz, Eric H. Holder Jr., Jeb Bush, George Soros, Marco Rubio and Charles G. Koch all agree that we must end mass incarceration, it is clear that times have changed. Not long ago, most politicians believed the only tenable stance on crime was to be tougher than the next guy.
Today, nearly everyone acknowledges that our criminal justice system needs fixing, and politicians across the spectrum call for reducing prison sentences for low-level drug crimes and other nonviolent offenses. But this consensus glosses over the real challenges to ending mass incarceration. Even if we released everyone imprisoned for drugs tomorrow, the United States would still have 1.7 million people behind bars, and an incarceration rate four times that of many Western European nations.
Mass incarceration can be ended. But that won’t happen unless we confront the true scale of the problem.
A hard-nosed skeptic would tell you that fully half the people in state prisons are serving time for violent offenses. And most drug offenders behind bars are not kids caught smoking a joint, but dealers, many with multiple prior convictions. We already have about 3,000 drug courts diverting those who need it to treatment rather than prison. Recidivism remains astonishingly high for those we release from prison, so releasing more poses real risks. And criminal law is primarily enforced by the states, not the federal government, so this is not a problem the next president can solve.
To move beyond symbolic sound bites to real progress, we need to address each of these objections in turn.
It’s true that half the people in state prisons are there for a violent crime, but not all individuals convicted of violent crimes are alike. They range from serial killers to minor players in a robbery and battered spouses who struck back at their abusers. If we are going to end mass incarceration, we need to recognize that the excessively long sentences we impose for most violent crimes are not necessary, cost-effective or just.
We could cut sentences for violent crimes by half in most instances without significantly undermining deterrence or increasing the threat of repeat offending. Studies have found that longer sentences do not have appreciably greater deterrent effects; many serious crimes are committed by people under the influence of alcohol or drugs, who are not necessarily thinking of the consequences of their actions, and certainly are not affected by the difference between a 15-year and a 30-year sentence.
For the same conduct, we impose sentences on average twice as long as those the British impose, four times longer than the Dutch, and five to 10 times longer than the French. One of every nine people in prison in the United States is serving a life sentence. And some states have also radically restricted parole at the back end. As a result, many inmates are held long past the time they might pose any threat to public safety.
Offenders “age out” of crime - so the 25-year-old who commits an armed robbery generally poses much less risk to public safety by the age of 35 or 40. Yet nearly 250,000 inmates today are over 50. Every year we keep older offenders in prison produces diminishing returns for public safety. For years, states have been radically restricting parole; we need to make it more readily available. And by eliminating unnecessary parole conditions for low-risk offenders, we can conserve resources to provide appropriate community-based programming and supervision to higher-risk parolees.
It’s true that most individuals incarcerated for a drug offense were sellers, not just users. But as a result of mandatory sentencing laws, judges often cannot make reasonable distinctions between drug kingpins and street-corner pawns. We ought to empower judges to recognize the difference, and to reduce punishment for run-of-the-mill offenders, who are often pursuing one of the few economic opportunities available to them in destitute communities.  The single most important thing we can do is provide meaningful work opportunities to the most disadvantaged.
There are already drug courts in many American communities, and studies show they can reduce substance abuse without incarceration.  But the criteria for diversion are often unduly narrow, and they screen out substantial numbers of drug users who could benefit from treatment. Equally important, we should not limit our response to those who have been arrested. Part of winding down the “war on drugs” will require making treatment options more widely available, before individuals enter the criminal justice system.
Recidivism is also a serious obstacle to reform. Two-thirds of released prisoners are rearrested within three years, and half are reincarcerated. But many of the returns to prison are for conduct that violates technical parole requirements, but does not harm others. And much of the problem is that the scale and cost of prison construction have left limited resources for rehabilitation, making it difficult for offenders to find the employment that is necessary to staying straight. So we need to lock up fewer people on the front end as well as enhance reintegration and reduce collateral consequences that impede rehabilitation on the back end.
Criminal justice is administered largely at the state level; 90 percent of those incarcerated are in state and local facilities. This means mass incarceration needs to be dismantled one state at a time.  Some states are already making substantial progress. New Jersey, California and New York have all reduced their prison populations by about 25 percent in recent years, with no increase in crime. That should be good news for other states, which would reap substantial savings - in budgetary and human terms - if they followed suit. While the federal government cannot solve this problem alone, it can lead both by example and by providing financial incentives that encourage reform.
Ending mass incarceration will not be easy. Opposition will come from rural community leaders who see prisons as economic development, legislators who still respond emotionally to the “crime of the week” and prosecutors who measure success by convictions and incarcerations, rather than by resolving conflict. But the recent tragic police shootings of young black men have, for the moment, focused our attention on the imperative for reform. And state budgetary crises have led many to question the vast resources we devote to holding too many people under lock and key.
Today, at long last, a consensus for reform is emerging. The facts that no other Western European nation even comes close to our incarceration rates, and that all have lower homicide rates, show that there are better ways to address crime. The marked disparities in whom we choose to lock up pose one of the nation’s most urgent civil rights challenges. But we will not begin to make real progress until we face up to the full dimensions of the task.
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: Herb Couch
Pubdate: Sat, 23 May 2015
Source: Peterborough Examiner, The (CN ON)
Copyright: 2015 Peterborough Examiner
Contact: http://www.thepeterboroughexaminer.com/letters
Website: http://www.thepeterboroughexaminer.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2616
Author: Jim Slotek
Page: C9

LEARNING SOME NEW TRICKS
On the Occasion of Tommy Chong and His Dog Otis’ Birthday, Our Own
Jim Slotek Wishes a Couple of Old Dogs Good Tidings
On Sunday, May 24, a hero of my misspent youth, Tommy Chong of Cheech & Chong, will be 77 years old. Coincidentally, on the same day, my dog Otis will turn 12, about 77 in dog years.
And I have a story that connects them both.
Scenario 1: Otis is a wheaten terrier, emphasis on terrier. In his youth, he was a championship-calibre Frisbee dog. He was also a decent fielder in baseball - which is to say, when my boys and I would play pitch ‘n’ hit in the field, he’d eagerly wait for a hit ball to get by, race to get it and happily bring it back to the pitcher (me). A TTC employee once watched us and said, “You guys suck, but I’d sign the dog.”
Though he’s a pretty chill old guy now, in his life, Otis has fought raccoons and pit bulls (I have the vet bills to show for it) and narrowly missed an expensive and painful contretemps with a porcupine (I grabbed him by the collar and threw him barking into the cottage as soon as I saw the fat, quilled varmint waddling toward us).
He has also been skunked twice - the second occasion being relevant here.
Scenario 2: In 2006, the Toronto International Film Festival played host to the documentary a/k/a Tommy Chong, a chronicle of the U.S.  justice system’s $12-million campaign to put Chong in jail for using the mail to distribute “Chong bongs” to fans (an amount in the same neighbourhood as the bounty on Saddam Hussein). Reportedly the prosecution was being overseen all the way to Washington, where then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was drooling over the idea of refighting the Culture Wars and finally putting Cheech &Chong (or half of them, anyway) behind bars.
Just released from jail, Chong was an attendee at TIFF, giving interviews promoting his story. There was to be a party at a westend club celebrating him, and my wife Bianca landed a job catering it.
Back at the house, she had all the food loaded in our van and the clock was ticking when she heard a commotion from the back yard, where my older son discovered - or rather smelled - the aftermath of Otis’s latest skunk encounter In a rush, Bianca grabbed the dog and tossed him in the house with our sons - who weren’t thrilled with being in an enclosed space with a tail-wagging stinkbomb. She then headed to the party venue, realizing to her horror that she was now skunked too (although happily, the food wasn’t).
This being my busiest week of the year, I’d missed the excitement at home. I had various places to be and things to cover before ending my night at the Tommy Chong party, which started at midnight.
An underground-ish affair, you were met at the door by servers offering brownies. Any confusion as to the nature of the confection was dispelled by the advice, “Help yourself. But we’re telling everybody, more than three and you’re on your own.”
Inside, the guest of honour held court at a VIP table where the centerpiece was a bud the size of a palm frond. The objective seemed to be to whittle it down incrementally by smoking it in Magic Marker-sized joints. I suppose on the pot-head’s bucket list, toking with Tommy Chong would be right up there with smoking Indo with Snoop.
And there was Bianca, flustered and dying to bring me up to speed on our dog’s latest ill-considered encounter with wildlife. She was still concerned with how she smelled, but I had to get right up close to even slightly differentiate the odour of skunk from the odour of skunkweed. As it turns out, we were at the only party in the city where a skunked person could go and nobody would notice.
So to anybody who was at that party, that smell in the air might have been Tommy Chong’s special blend. Or it might have been Otis.
Otis is still wagging his tail and alerting me to the approach of friends’ cars. He’ll still make a game attempt at chasing squirrels.
And Tommy? He and his dance partner Peta Murgatroyd made it to the semi-finals of Dancing With the Stars last year. As he told Rolling Stone recently, “The government always used to say, ‘We don’t know the real effects of marijuana. We’ve never been able to test it.’ Well, I’ve been testing it for over 50 years. I came in fifth on Dancing With the Stars at 76.”
So happy birthday to my two favourite old dogs. May you continue to learn new tricks.
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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