$9 MILLION TO TRIAL MEDICAL MARIJUANA
CHILDREN with severe epilepsy and terminally ill adults may be treated with medical marijuana under a NSW clinical trial.
The NSW Government will fund the $9 million trial of at least three marijuana-derived medicines. The trial will examine the benefits to patients with a number of serious diseases.
The epilepsy trial will be run at the Westmead and Sydney Children’s Hospitals and is expected to start enrolling patients in 2016.
NSW Premier Mike Baird said patients and parents of ill children were “increasingly desperate” for cannabis-based medication to be used to manage some illnesses.
“This is a bold plan and one that will utilise the expertise of NSW-based clinicians and researchers, and draw on research developments from across the globe,” he said.

“Once we have the clinical evidence that medical cannabis can reduce suffering then the government will consider a range of supply measures, including importation.
“But if that does not prove successful then the government will
assume responsibility for supply itself.”

The Australian Medical Association praised the trials stating previous trials had been based on “flawed research protocols and methodology”.
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Mon, 05 Jan 2015
Source: Herald Sun (Australia)
Copyright: 2015 Herald and Weekly Times
Contact: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/letter
Website: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/187
Author: Grant MacArthur and Andrea Hamblin

DOCTORS IN CLEAR ON MARIJUANA
Medical Drug Use Surfaces Ahead of Legal Push FIVE doctors who prescribed their patients medical marijuana can
continue to practise medicine, after health authorities ruled they were not putting the community in danger by recommending the controversial medication.
It comes as the Victorian Government has promised marijuana will soon be legal for use by people who are terminally ill or who suffer life threatening illnesses.
But the Herald Sun can reveal that state child protection workers continue to threaten Melbourne parents who have been treating their sick children with the drug.
The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency has not taken any action against practitioners officially reported to it over claims they were using medical marijuana, despite treatment with the drug being illegal in Australia.
Details of investigations into the doctors are being kept secret, however the Herald Sun understands they include a recent complaint made by a major Victorian hospital into the actions of one of its doctors.
All of the other cases have occurred in the past four years.
Hospital records showed that doctors had written cannabis oil on the drug chart of a Mernda child who suffers from epilepsy and other life-threatening conditions.
Cooper’s parents, Cassie Batten and Rhett Wallace, said doctors had been “gagged”, which meant they could not talk about the positive effects of medical marijuana or back up the family’s claims their son’s health had improved.
“There is no need for them to be punished. A doctor’s oath is to help patients and if this can help a patient then why not?” Ms Batten said.
“They should be able to advocate for patients without fearing for their job.”
Police recently dropped a child abuse investigation into the couple.
But on Christmas Eve, the Department of Human Services told another set of Melbourne parents they would be under investigation for giving their epileptic teenager cannabis oil.
The parents were told Victoria Police would be notified but the family has so far had no contact from police.

Premier Daniel Andrews announced in late December that the Labor Government had asked the Victorian Law Reform Commission to investigate how it could safely change the drug law.
The commission has until August to produce its report.
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sun, 04 Jan 2015
Source: Seattle Times (WA)
Copyright: 2015 The Seattle Times Company
Contact: opinion@seattletimes.com
Website: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/409
Author: Evan Bush
WORLD’S STRONGEST WEED? POTENCY TESTING CHALLENGED
Learning Curve
The State’s Mandatory Testing of Marijuana Samples Is Working Well to Detect Impurities Such As Bacteria but Seems Inconsistent in Determining THC Levels.
When Uncle Ike’s Pot Shop opened in Seattle, owner Ian Eisenberg said he couldn’t compete with medical dispensaries’ lower prices, but he did have one advantage.
“Ours is tested and you know what you’re getting,” Eisenberg said.
He’s right on the first point. State rules require a small sample tested from every lot of marijuana up to five pounds.

But do consumers know what they’re getting? That’s murkier. As the state market develops, so does its testing program.
The program is having success screening substances like yeast, mold and bacteria. About 10 percent of marijuana buds fail tests and can’t be sold in recreational pot stores, according to Liquor Control Board data.Potency testing, meanwhile, shows Washington’s recreational pot is all over the map. It averages about 16 percent THC, but ranges widely. About 2.5 percent of marijuana tests above 28 percent THC.  Some samples climb into the 30s and 40s.
For perspective, High Times reports the “heaviest-hitting strains” at conventions it hosted in 2013 maxed out at 28 percent. In Colorado, scientists at CannLabs said they require a retest for results higher than 27 percent THC.
Does that mean Washington is growing some of the world’s strongest weed?
It could. But some laboratory directors, pot growers and the state Liquor Control Board have reservations about the early data and seek changes to the testing system.
In fact, laboratory leaders said they are forming working groups to lobby the LCB for more oversight of lab methods.
“Part of it is to invite more regulation,” said Brad Douglass, the scientific director at the Werc Shop, one of the 12 labs approved by the state.
Randy Simmons, the state’s marijuana project director, said the system is off to a good start but needs tweaking.

“The majority of what’s out there on the packages is correct,” he said.  He expects changes early this year.
“The lab side is emerging,” Simmons said. “As it matures, I think all those things that have been missed ... or things we find out we
should be looking for, will all be changed.”
Secret shopping
The Werc Shop lab in Bellevue is a simple, white-walled office with a collection of expensive machines that look like fancy printers.
Marijuana samples sealed in sterile plastic bags are separated for several tests, including the state-required microbial and potency tests. Together, the tests cost $150.
For microbial testing, samples are fed into an automatic incubator, which takes up to 56 hours to grow and automatically test for salmonella, mold and other harmful substances.
For a potency test, pot is ground, weighed and placed into a tube with solvent that allows chemical compounds to separate as the tube spins in a centrifuge. Later, plant material is filtered out and the remaining liquid gets injected into a machine that analyzes the cannabinoid compounds.

THC, notably, gets you high. CBD is credited with many of pot’s medicinal benefits.
The Werc Shop’s process relies on automated equipment for testing.
It’s built to minimize human error.
Much of that precision, though, is unraveled before samples even arrive, because what growers send might not reflect the overall crop.
“If you’re not careful with sampling, you can have results that vary greatly,” said lab manager Cameron Miller.
But LCB rules don’t direct growers on how to choose samples.  A grower harvesting a crop of 25 plants can select for testing the best-looking bud encased in THC-loaded crystals, rather than a brown one that looks like a hairball.
That’s something the LCB’s Simmons hopes to change.  Retailers often use potency results as a way to advertise the quality of their marijuana. Higher test results can mean higher wholesale prices for growers.
Some producers think others might be falsely boosting test results by adding THC-laden substances to their samples.
“I have suspicions some people are ... rolling it in kief and getting high scores,” said Joby Sewell, whose company, AuricAG, grows marijuana in Sodo. (Kief is the powder made from glands that have been sifted or rubbed from the buds and leaves of the marijuana plant.)
Simmons said the LCB also is concerned growers could dip their buds in hash oil before tests.
The agency is beginning a secret-shopping program to find out.
Simmons said incognito marijuana-enforcement agents will buy products from stores and have them tested. If the results don’t hew closely to the label, the LCB will investigate.
“Will we see people play games? Yes. It happens in any industry out there. Will we catch them? Yes, we will,” said Simmons.
Simmons said marijuana officers are investigating several producers.
So far, no violations have been recorded.
Labs also are under scrutiny.
“There are some labs that have financial incentive to game the system for clients,” said the Werc Shop’s Miller.
A fundamental conflict resides at the heart of the testing industry. Producers pay labs for their tests. If producers don’t like the results, they could take their business elsewhere.

“In the medical world ... people that do tests sometimes do pay for higher test results,” said Simmons. “I want to make sure that’s not happening on the recreational side.”
Compliance checks
The Werc Shop’s Douglass said secret shopping seems premature because labs don’t have to use the same methods to test, though they are expected to conform to herb-industry standards adopted by the LCB.
Douglass wants the LCB to send the same sample to several labs, to check for consistency, and help identify labs with equipment or process problems.
Dr. Michelle Sexton, the chief science officer at state-approved PhytaLabs in Kirkland, who helped edit the testing standards adopted by the LCB, said five different lab tests right now likely would yield “five different answers until we go to the next level and get validated methodology.”
That doesn’t mean labs are doing a bad job or fudging results. The expensive equipment The Werc Shop uses is not required. For a microbial test, Douglass said, labs looking for a “shoestring budget” alternative to his automated incubator might use a petri dish to grow bacteria and then manually count colonies with a microscope.
“Whenever humans are involved, there are going to be errors,” said Douglass.  In addition to secret shopping, Simmons said, the LCB is flagging outlying test results and will perform compliance checks on labs.
“You can do a different process,” said Simmons. “If it comes out differently from ours, you can’t use it.”  Independent tests question the numbers reported to the LCB.  Jessica Tonani, the CEO of Verda Bio, a Seattle cannabis biotech  company, bought pot from recreational stores and had The Werc Shop blind-test them. Seven of eight purchases tested between 3 percent and 7.5 percent different from what their labels showed, according to Tonani’s data.
Small differences can be expected because plant material varies. How much does the LCB allow? Simmons said the agency hasn’t decided yet, but said 1 percent sounded about right.“I think there are very valid scientists doing testing out there,” said Tonani. “But if your lab is high or low, there’s no data to show your lab is testing correctly.”
“Stronger all the time”
Although it’s an imperfect system, don’t discount the idea that Washington could be growing increasingly powerful weed.  “It’s getting stronger all the time,” said the LCB’s Simmons. “People are growing hybrids to increase the THC content.”
Dr. Jonathan Page, an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia and founder of a Canadian cannabis biotech company, said it’s possible that “better growing conditions, as would be expected in a legal place, and good genetics are coupling together to push it beyond what we thought is the limit.”
Page pointed to a study of pot seized by police in Australia. More than 200 samples were tested. They averaged about 15 percent THC, similar to Washington. About 7 percent of the Australian pot tested above 28 percent. One sample hit 39.8 percent.Is high-THC pot better? Not to Page, who sees it as “the Everclear alcohol of the marijuana world.”
Page said early research shows that more than 100 minor cannabinoids (not THC or CBD) play a role in pot’s effects.
“What I’d like to see is that there’s less of a focus on THC as sole molecule, and people saying, ‘I have the most potent bud,’ and more focus on cannabinoid profile” and the overall user experience, said Page.  That might mean more focus on terpenes, which are compounds that create flavor and smell in pot.  Said Douglass: “As consumers become more educated, they’ll be able to sense terpenes in cannabis like a oenophile does with wine.”
xxx
Newshawk: Herb Couch
Pubdate: Fri, 19 Dec 2014
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Copyright: 2014 The Globe and Mail Company
Contact: letters@globeandmail.com
Website: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168
Author: Grant Robertson
Page: B1
THE POT STOCK BUBBLE
Marijuana Inc. Part one of a two-part series on the rise of medical marijuana as big business in Canada.  Inside the rush to profit from medical marijuana
Dennis Arsenault couldn’t believe what he was seeing. When his company, OrganiGram Inc., made its debut on the TSX Venture Exchange this summer, the shares suddenly shot up.
The high valuation didn’t make sense - not even to Mr. Arsenault, and he was the company’s chief executive officer.
Just a few weeks earlier, OrganiGram, an upstart producer of medical marijuana based in Moncton had been valued privately at just over $40-million. But on the open market, speculators feverishly drove up the total value of its shares to nearly $120-million in late August.
It wasn’t that Mr. Arsenault didn’t believe in the future of his business. OrganiGram is one of only 15 companies to land a highly coveted federal licence in Canada’s new medical marijuana sector, touted as a potential multibillion-dollar industry in the years to come.
But the company hadn’t made a dime yet. OrganiGram was probably a year away from pulling in meaningful revenue - and it was already worth nine digits in the stock market.“I was just shaking my head,” Mr. Arsenault said of that first week of trading.
What happened was exuberant, if irrational, and OrganiGram wasn’t the only company feeling the surge.  Investor appetite for Canadian marijuana stocks also turned rival Tweed Inc. of Smiths Falls, Ont., into a $100-million company before it had even logged its first shipment to patients.
Sooner or later, everyone was jumping on the marijuana
trend.

Mining exploration companies, frustrated by lacklustre interest in their stocks, were turning themselves into marijuana businesses overnight Companies such as Supreme Resources and Affinor Resources were suddenly rebranding themselves as Supreme Pharmaceuticals and Affinor Growers - specialists in a new field - to entice investors. And they, too, saw their stock prices lift.  It’s a market craze that has made early investors rich, and left a large number of retail shareholders in some cases clutching near-worthless paper, as stocks suddenly plummet.

The industry has attracted more than its share of colourful players, from stock touts and salesmen to the multinational tobacco conglomerates, which are keeping a close eye on the developing marijuana business.

But had it not been for a failed Health Canada policy more than a decade ago, the pot stock bubble that dominated the Canadian markets for much of 2014 would have never happened.
Ottawa’s efforts to build a new industry from scratch has resulted in an experiment that is moving marijuana sales from the back alley to the capital markets. It is a historic moment, and it is fraught with problems: It is the birth of Marijuana Inc.
‘Open to abuse’
The first time Health Canada attempted to set up a medical marijuana program, the government lost control of it.
In 2000, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that patients who use the drug to treat conditions ranging from glaucoma and epilepsy to the pain associated with cancer treatment had a legal right to possess marijuana. Furthermore, the government had a legal duty “to provide reasonable access” to the drug for that purpose.
In other words, Ottawa could not expect patients to venture on to the streets to obtain something that was considered, in this case, to be medicine.
Despite objections from the Canadian Medical Association - which argues that the medicinal benefits had not been proved in clinical tests - Health Canada had little choice. So, by 2001, the government reluctantly designed a program through which patients with a prescription could obtain the controlled substance either by growing it themselves or buying it from someone else with a prescription or from a government contractor. It seemed like the simplest solution to Ottawa’s problem.
But according to hundreds of pages of Health Canada documents obtained under the Access to Information Act, the program quickly began to spiral out of control.
What began with 100 patients at the program’s inception grew to 4,000 in its first three years. By late last year, no fewer than 21,986 people had prescriptions to grow medical marijuana.
This demand sent costs soaring. Documents show that about $6-million was needed to operate the program in 2005, a figure that had climbed to $17.5-million by last year.
With that growth came more severe concerns. In 2012, Health Canada commissioned consulting firm Delsys Research Group to scrutinize the program. The resulting 180-page report, which was obtained by The Globe and Mail, showed the federal department was failing miserably to manage its own policy.
Between 2003 and 2010, police discovered 190 cases of crime relating to marijuana licences. Some offences were violent - about 8 per cent involved attacks or home invasions - but that wasn’t the biggest concern. Police also believed that some licences were producing “well in excess of their authorized daily amount” and much of that was finding its way to the street.
Not only did Health Canada not have enough inspectors to enforce the rules, it needed either permission or a warrant to make sure a home grow-op was complying with regulations.
According to government documents, the department attempted to carry out 75 such inspections without a warrant in 2010. In only 27 cases did anyone answer the door and, of those, roughly half refused to let the inspectors in. Based on statistical modeling of existing police data, Delsys estimated as much as 35 per cent of Health Canada’s
licences may involve “some degree of misuse and diversion of marijuana intended for medical use into the illicit market.”
Even legitimate growers were raising questions. One man sent an e-mail to Health Canada in 2012, which The Globe and Mail obtained through access to information, saying he had never been inspected in six years to see if he was complying with the law.
In another e-mail, a physician warned Health Canada that he had seen a patient authorized to produce 40 grams of marijuana per day who was, in the doctor’s opinion, producing at least 20 times what his average daily prescription should be. “This is obviously not all being used by one patient,” he wrote.
Another physician told Health Canada of seeing patients who’d been given prescriptions to grow “excessive amounts.” He added: “Somebody has clearly dropped the ball on this one.”
One doctor complained of a colleague he knew in a nearby community, “who for $50, would sign anyone’s form.”
Soon officials at Health Canada were forced to admit things had gone awry. In a draft of a 2013 letter signed by Louis Proulx, assistant director of the Bureau of Medical Cannabis, the department stated bluntly that its program “was widely open to abuse.” The reference was deleted before the final draft of the letter was sent (to an unknown recipient), but it was clear Health Canada needed to scrap the program. That decision would set the stage for a historical shift – the creation of a large-scale medical marijuana industry run by private companies. Rather than retool its efforts, Ottawa wanted out of the business.

A new industry
Health Canada concluded it would be better to license a fewlarge-scale producers, rather than dole out thousands of individual permits.
This new industry, the Delsys report said, could be quite lucrative.  “It is anticipated that the regulated market will grow to be reasonably large, competitive and profitable,” the report explained, adding that Canada has 450,000 projected users of medical marijuana.
“Provided they obtain support of a healthcare practitioner, these persons could potentially make a strong market base.”

That estimate got people in the business world thinking. “The federal government said, ‘We think there will be about half a million people who have a prescription over the next few years in Canada,’ “ said Bruce Linton, founder of Tweed Inc., one of the first producers to land a federal licence. “Everybody in the market said, ‘If the government thinks that’s the number, it’s going to be a lot bigger, and a lot faster.’ “
With the lure of big profits hanging over these licence applications,
Health Canada introduced a two-stage approval process. First, candidates had to design a secure operation, which would be subject to federal approval. Then they had to build that operation, risking the capital up front, without knowing if a licence would be granted.
Even with those unusual hurdles, the response was overwhelming. Health Canada, originally concerned that not enough companies would seek a licence, received more than 1,000 applications between last fall and this summer. At one point, 25 were coming in every week.
Applicants knew what a licence was - a permit to make money. “There’s no denying, there is tremendous wealth that is going to be created from this,” Mr. Arseneault said, comparing the situation to alcohol in the U.S. “You can go back to Prohibition - it’s the same concept.
There is a race mentality.”
Andrea Hill, a securities lawyer at Toronto-based Wildeboer Dellelce, says the licences are like winning lottery tickets. “When these [companies] go public, they’ve consistently been going public at market capitalizations of $70-million plus.”
OrganiGram’s $120-million debut was an example of this, as was Tweed’s market capitalization of more than $100-million. With every licence it issues, Health Canada is essentially minting millionaires.“It’s a constitutionally protected drug-dealing industry,” Ms. Hill said. “There’s not very many of those.”
But most companies pursuing these licences are playing a longer, more speculative game, betting that the market will be even bigger in the future, should the drug be legalized.
That idea is not far-fetched. Ethan Nadelmann, head of the Drug Policy Alliance, a powerful lobby group that has been instrumental in having marijuana made legal in Colorado and Washington state, sees Canada as inevitable, having embraced the medical market.
And with legalization comes a huge opportunity for profit.

“We all stand today at the intersection of something relatively unique in American history,” he said. “If you look at other movements for freedom and justice - movements around gay rights, or women’s rights, or civil rights =C2=85 the sudden transformation of those fields did not have these remarkable economic consequences.”
The emergence of a legal marijuana industry in North America is worth “tens of billions of dollars,” Mr. Nadelmann said, reiterating that “if somebody asks me what’s going to be the next country to legalize marijuana, my bet is Canada.”
Statements like that have brought a wave of speculative investment north of the border.
The impending invasion The push for a legal marijuana market is hardly new. Industry
documents show that the tobacco industry has sought a way into the business for decades.
And if Canada were to make the drug broadly legal, many in the marijuana sector believe it’s only a matter of time before the tobacco companies claim a significant chunk of the market for themselves.
Documents newly uncovered in the University of California’s archives show that Big Tobacco first became interested in the early 1970s, as a U.S. presidential commission was about to recommend marijuana be decriminalized, and similar talk was circulating in Canada.In a handwritten internal memo, George Weissman, then president of Philip Morris Inc., said the maker of Marlboro cigarettes needed to seize the moment, given the potential upside.
“While I am opposed to its use, I recognize that it may be legalized in the near future and put on some sort of restricted sale, if only to eliminate the criminal element,” he wrote.
“Thus, with these great auspices, we should be in a position to examine a possible product [and] at the same time, co-operate with the government.”
Another unsigned internal memo offered up a rationale for the tobacco giant’s planned expansion into pot: “We are in the business of relaxing people who are tense and providing a pickup for people who are bored or depressed. The human needs that our product fills will not go away. Thus, the only real threat to our business is that society will find other means of satisfying these needs.”
One particular concern appears to have rattled Philip Morris - the fact that young people were gravitating toward marijuana, which meant a lost generation of customers. “Many regard marijuana as an alternate, and perhaps superior, method of satisfying the needs that cigarette smoking satisfies,” the memo read. “In this situation, business theory strongly suggests that we learn as much as possible about this threat to our present product.”
When the commission’s recommendation to legalize pot was quashed by Richard Nixon’s administration, the company’s foray into marijuana also halted. Philip Morris never spoke publicly about its strategy.  Discussions in Canada also lost momentum.
However, a similar internal memo from executives at rival R.J.Reynolds Tobacco Co., maker of Camel cigarettes, shows that the industry revisited the subject in 1992 amid rumours that “certain European countries” were on the verge of legalizing the drug, raising “the possibility of its future, more frequent use.”
Today, with Canada and more than 20 U.S. jurisdictions now permitting marijuana for medical use, along with legalization in some states, the tobacco companies say they have no plans to explore the business, but that hasn’t left the rest of the sector at ease.
Inside the industry, the possibility of Big Tobacco entering the fray is referred to as the “impending invasion.” The consensus is that when the market reaches the point where significant profits are being made, the cigarette makers will muscle their way in. That notion - accurate
or not - has helped to feed the appetite for marijuana stocks, raising the spectre that some companies could be takeover targets, triggering lucrative shareholder payouts if that day ever comes.
Pot stock billionaire
The same fever over marijuana stocks that emerged in Canada also ran rampant south of the border. With numerous U.S. states moving to legalize marijuana - Alaska and Oregon approved ballot initiatives this year - the resulting stock-market frenzy sent company valuations into the billions.
The king of North American pot stocks - and undoubtedly the company destined to be the lasting symbol of the marijuana stock bubble - is Las Vegas-based CannaVest Corp.>From early 2013 to the spring of this year, when the hype over marijuana stocks was at its most dizzying heights, CannaVest shares shot up more than 1,200 per cent to $160. At that price, the company was worth more than $3-billion, despite having almost no profits and only an indirect connection to marijuana: CannaVest claimed to be a producer of hemp-based compounds.
Nevertheless, its largest shareholder, Las Vegas lawyer Bart Mackay, became the first pot-stock billionaire, at least on paper.
Canada got its own symbol of the pot stock craze in Toronto-based Satori Resources Inc. With shares in the junior mining sector slumping more than 40 per cent early this year, Satori announced out of the blue that it was exploring new opportunities in agriculture - namely medical marijuana.
It was far from alone. Satori was one of several dozen miners to have gone this route, joining Supreme Pharmaceuticals and Affinor Growers.  The way Satori founder and chairwoman Jennifer Boyle sees it, public companies need a story to take to investors. If you find something that works, use it. She is unapologetic.“In a downward market, which the mining industry is, if there is something that you can raise money on, it’s our obligation to consider it,” Ms. Boyle said. “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”
It reminds her of the heady days of the tech boom in the late 1990s when mining companies slapped dot-com on their name just to capture some of the money flooding into that market.“Mining was headed for the tank back then and these dot-com companies were doing very well, so a lot of the mining promoters converted themselves into high-tech companies,” she said. “Then when that all blew up, they went back to being mining companies. It was mining dot-com back then. Now it’s mining dot-pot.”
This has sapped credibility from the sector, analysts say. “A lot of times, you’ll find people that are telling these great stories,” said Allan Brochstein, one analyst who follows the sector. “There’s a lot of people that are in the marijuana industry - [but] they’re not in the marijuana industry. They’re in the stock-promotion industry.”
“You have to understand what type of industry you’re investing in,” said Mr. Arsenault of New Brunswick’s OrganiGram. “There is a lot of hype in the industry. And that’s unfortunate.”
For many of these stocks, the model is often the same. The insiders at the company hold vast numbers of shares, often in the millions, which they have been issued at a nominal price - often a fraction of a cent.  They list the company as a penny stock, or adopt marijuana as a newfound business, and proceed to spin tales of bold plans to make money by pursuing a licence. If the stock moves by a few cents, the insiders can make hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars, over a period of months.
All that’s required is a supply of willing investors, which the market always seems to provide. “So many scams purport to allow Main Street investors to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing,” said Gerri Walsh, senior vice-president of investor education for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), based in Washington.
Along with other regulators, FINRA took an unusual step warning investors this year about pot stocks, urging people to do more research in the frothy market.
“We were concerned that there might be some element of fraud or at least pumping and dumping of these types of securities,” Ms. Walsh said.
But with so many companies flooding the market, and at such a rapid pace, there has been very little follow-up by those same regulators, including FINRA. Health Canada admits it knows little of what Canadian companies are doing in the markets, noting that it is not a financial regulator.
The right to get rich
If any one person captures the ethos of the marijuana stock bubble, it’s probably Todd Davis.
In June, the former stockbroker was a keynote speaker at an industry event in Denver attended by marijuana executives from across Canada and the United States. The Globe and Mail viewed a recording of his speech.Mr. Davis cut his teeth as a broker in the 1990s selling penny stocks in fledgling biotech companies. He was no expert on the industry, but it didn’t matter, he explained. For every company with a story to tell, there was an investor willing to believe in future riches. It was easy money.
“I didn’t know anything about biotechnology,” Mr. Davis told the room.  “But I’m telling a story about something that’s going to happen in the future - and people were buying it. I would call 10 people and five people would buy [stock] from me. And I was going ‘This is awesome’ =2E We were making a killing.”
These days, Mr. Davis runs a marijuana start-up and likens the industry to his days of selling biotech stocks.

“What I wanted to talk about tonight is why we are all here,” he told the executives. “The primary function - besides our belief in cannabis and what it can do for a patient or a person, and how it can benefit life - is we’re here to make money.” “It’s a unique opportunity that’s been presented to us.”

But it is much more than just an opportunity to make money, he explained. The industry is so ripe for the picking that everyone in the room is entitled to get rich.
“You have the right to make a million dollars,” he told the executives in no uncertain terms. It was an opportunity none of them should waste.
But the good times in the stock market couldn’t last forever.

In Canada, marijuana stocks lost their lustre a few months ago as investors started to realize that companies like Tweed and OrganiGram would need several quarters, if not longer, to build their businesses and start generating real earnings - just as Mr. Arsenault had suggested. OrganiGram’s stock now trades at less than 80 cents, well off the $2.27 that shares garnered at their height.
South of the border, though, some marijuana companies grew impatient when their shares began to slide. And so they found a new saviour.
With the deadly Ebola epidemic dominating global headlines in October amid fears the virus might spread in North America, a new phenomenon swept the capital markets. A company that claimed to be working on a cure, a technology or a product that could somehow assist in the fight against this deadly disease was suddenly a hot commodity.
One in particular was quick to capitalize.
On Oct. 13, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson appeared on Fox Business News ostensibly to discuss the U.S. government’s response to Ebola.
But Mr. Johnson wasted little time in divulging that he had, in fact, recently been named chief executive officer of Cannabis Sativa Inc., a company working on the use of medical marijuana to cure the disease.
“We actually believe we have efficacy with regard to treating Ebola,” he said.  Was the company  actually suggesting marijuana could work?

“If you’re dying from Ebola, and it’s a hail Mary,” Mr. Johnson said, “you’re going to take the hail Mary.” It was the boldest and most far-fetched effort yet to promote a marijuana stock - and proved to be quite good for business. The stock climbed 33 per cent in the ensuing two weeks, and the market value of Cannabis Sativa Inc. soared by $40-million.With stocks now falling across the sector, such antics are a cry for attention in a softening market.
The fact that share prices have cooled, though, is somewhat comforting to Mr. Arsenault. The faster Canada can get away from the bubble market, the better.
“Finally, the hype has started to come out, and people realize that it’s a business like any other business,” he said.
“That’s welcome. Anybody that sits there and says they’ve got this all figured out, they’re just blowing smoke at you.”
xxx
Newshawk: Herb Couch
Pubdate: Sun, 04 Jan 2015
Source: Morning Star, The (CN BC)
Copyright: 2015 The Morning Star
Contact: newsroom@vernonmorningstar.com
Website: http://www.vernonmorningstar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1352
Author: Brenda DeBoice
Page: A9
Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v14/n919/a07.html?1210

MP COLUMN
Regarding the Dec. 10 column by MP Colin Mayes, Drug use a concern.
According to Mr. Mayes, few people are talking about substance use and
he is surprised to learn that a number of families in his riding have
to deal with raising their grandchildren because their parents are
addicted to drugs.
He shares that a nurse told him that 70 per cent of emergency room cases are related to substance use, and he reports that marijuana has been proven to cause schizophrenia.
Mr. Mayes, where have you been through your four terms of office?
Everyone has been talking about substance use. How could you not know that?
The many social agencies in your own riding are overwhelmed by it, and
constantly communicating with all levels of government to help. It is
talked about in the media, it is seen in the back alleys (and
everywhere else), it is dealt with daily by police, paramedics, social
workers and other professionals. But, luckily, you actually listened
to that nurse in emergency so you do know how it affects our hospitals.
And, you had better sit down for this shocker. Many grandparents in your very own riding, Mr. Mayes, are addicted themselves so cannot help their addicted children to look after their grandchildren. Social agencies struggle to help these families, so that their children will at least have some chance at a healthy life, and not be the next damaged generation.
As far as your statement that marijuana use causes schizophrenia, that has not been proven. Yes, many drugs can cause psychosis, but there is a genetic component to schizophrenia as well. There are ongoing studies around this, but there is no conclusive evidence yet to support this theory.
Of course, there is lots of information on the Internet to pull from, if you want to make it political though.
But, as an elected official entrusted with important policy creation and decision-making, is that where you should be getting your information?
How about focusing on facts, so more time is not wasted. Does Canada not have many high-level government and professional agencies that can give you the correct information on all these topics? Maybe look them up before you leave office.
In the meantime, here is a bit of reliable information to help you out.

Since the drug experimentation of the 1960s and 1970s, and since the traumatic incarceration of a whole generation of First Nations into residential schools until the 1990s, we have had serious substance addiction issues in this country. Because trauma, abuse, and a lack of healthy coping skills being passed generationally, are exacerbated by poverty, result in mental health issues, addiction, and hopelessness.
There are First Nations communities in this country, where anyone, grandparents to pre-teens, may be suffering with addiction and where abuse and violence are rampant.
There are currently not nearly enough resources available to social agencies to support these communities, or those individuals in your own community, to address this overwhelming issue.
Yes, the Conservative government has funded drug enforcement. But much of that is a waste as the demand for drugs has not gone away.
Why are so many people needing to be high, and how can we change that?  Remember, trauma, abuse, poverty? Think about it. You still have a bit of time left, right?
Brenda DeBoice
Vernon
xxx
Newshawk: Herb Couch
Pubdate: Fri, 26 Dec 2014
Source: Jakarta Post (Indonesia)
Copyright: The Jakarta Post
Contact: editorial@thejakartapost.com
Website: http://www.thejakartapost.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/645
Author: Ina Parlina
Page: 4
MUSLIM ORGANIZATIONS SUPPORT DEATH PENALTY
The country’s two largest Muslim organizations, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah, have given their support to President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s call for the swift execution of death-row inmates despite criticism from human rights campaigners.
Jokowi paid a visit to the headquarters of the two organizations in Jakarta on Wednesday in his efforts to rally support for his tough stance on drug convicts.
Citing the Koran and the State Constitution, NU chairman Said Aqil Siradj said drug trafficking was a serious crime punishable by death.
Muhammadiyah deputy chairman Malik Fadjar meanwhile said the country’s second biggest Muslim organization “fully supports” the execution of drug convicts, given the damage that they bring to young generations through drug addiction problems.
The National Police narcotics unit chief Brig. Gen. Anjan Pramuka Putra recently revealed that the number of drug-related cases nationwide had increased dramatically from 17,539 last year to 18,788 this year, saying that many foreign drug rings targeted Indonesia as their market base because the demand for drugs increased every year.
The police have also named 25,151 suspects in drug-related cases throughout 2014, an increase from 23,000 suspects last year. According to the police, 126 of those suspects were foreign nationals from several countries, including Taiwan, China and Nigeria.  Jokowi maintained that the call for the execution of drug convicts, including some foreigners, would not trouble Indonesia’s diplomatic ties with other countries.
“Those are different issues. You must understand that between 40 to 50 Indonesians die due to drug abuse every day,” Jokowi said.
Later on Wednesday, Jokowi held a Cabinet meeting to further discuss the drug abuse cases with relevant ministers, including Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Tedjo Edhy Purdijatno,
National Police chief Gen. Sutarman, National Narcotics Agency (BNN) head Anang Iskandar and Attorney General M. Prasetyo.
Earlier this month, Tedjo said that Jokowi has authorized the executions of five drug convicts sometime in December, with 20 other death-row inmates being prepared to face the firing squad next year.
Although the country’s criminal justice system recognizes a death-by-firing-squad execution for convicts who already received their legally binding sentence, the Wednesday Cabinet meeting discussed the legal complication that arose from a Constitutional Court ruling announced earlier this year that allows a convict to file multiple case reviews for their convictions.
“We will coordinate first with the Supreme Court so that if there are indeed case reviews, the legal process could be expedited,” Prasetyo told reporters after Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting.
Tedjo meanwhile said that four drug convicts - instead of five as mentioned in his previous statement - were probably going to be executed in January next year, not this month.
xxx
Newshawk: DrugSenseBot http://drugpolicycentral.com/bot/
Pubdate: Sat, 03 Jan 2015
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Copyright: 2015 Associated Newspapers Ltd
Contact: letters@dailymail.co.uk
Website: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/108
Author: Jack Crone

IRAN FACING DRUG ABUSE CRISIS WITH RECORD NUMBERS OF YOUNG AND
WELL-EDUCATED WOMEN BECOMING ADDICTED TO CRYSTAL METH
Iran is facing a female drug-abuse crisis as the number of young, well-off and well-educated women using substances continues to rise.
At least six million of Iran’s 77.7 million population have drug related problems, according to official reports.
And addiction, especially to Shisheh - a high-purity form of crystalline methamphetamine - is increasingly spreading across all social classes.
The substance has become the second most popular drug after opium among young people seeking an escape from social and economic hardship, the Financial Times reports.
Opium smoking in Iran dates back to at least the 17th century, and the the country has one of the highest rates of opiate addiction in the world.
This has been blamed on the country being a popular trafficking route for dealers transporting drugs from Afghanistan to Europe.
Iran’s problem was first exposed in 2011, according to Zahra Bonianian, an adviser to the state-run Drug Control Headquarters for women and family affairs
Speaking to the Financial Times, she said: ‘It was when we realised that the number of married female addicts was going up, the age of addiction going down while the educational level [of addicts] was high.’
She believes the government needs to place higher focus on protecting women from becoming addicts.  The rise in drug abuse has been attributed to the social development that Iran has experienced as a result of the internet, social media and globalisation.
A new generation of young adults reject a strict Islamic way of life which many of their parents conformed to - instead emulating modern behavioural norms of the West.
In recent years, marriage and birth rates in Iran have fallen while the number of divorces is on the rise.
At the same time, the Islamic government has improved female access to higher education, and women now account for more than 60 per cent of graduates.
But many find themselves caught between a growing sense of freedom and increasing educational opportunities - and the conservative values of older generations.
Amir-Hossein Yazdani, a professor of psychology, said: ‘Girls and boys under 25 years old largely enjoy equal freedom in terms of social and educational activities, but girls have a more gloomy perspective, [seeing] more responsibilities ahead.’
He said highly educated girls ‘do not enjoy equal job opportunities, or they feel under pressure to behave like a traditional woman - this is fanning fresh tendencies to addiction’.
A woman called Mahsa is typical of this trend. After graduating from a respected high school she was forced to marry at 18.
She has since become divorced and took solace in taking drugs. Despite studying psychology at university she ended up in a Tehran addiction treatment centre last year with a drug habit costing her UKP24 a day.The Iranian government is said to be extremely concerned by the growing levels of drug addiction.
The latest official figures suggest the number of female addicts has nearly doubled since in the last eight years.
Women now make up 9.3 per cent of Iranians affected. More than 50 per cent of addicted women used drugs for the first time between the ages of 15 and 19.
Some experts argue this is because women have been seen as a lower priority than men because they make up fewer than ten per cent of Iran’s addicts.
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Wed, 24 Dec 2014
Source: Daily Star, The (Lebanon)
Copyright: 2014 The Daily Star
Contact: opinion@dailystar.com.lb
Website: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/547
Author: Kareem Shaheen

CANNABIS FARMERS SUPPORT CALLS TO LEGALIZE LUCRATIVE CROP
BAALBEK,Lebanon: The warehouse was swirling with cannabis dust, workers with covered faces sorting the harvest that was piled in mounds.
They had their hands full at the mini-factory outside Baalbek sorting through one of the largest fall harvests in recent years, one that many farmers in the Bekaa Valley see as a lifeline amid a stagnant economy.
“We decided here that we do not want people to go hungry,” Ali Nasri, a prominent cannabis farmer in the Bekaa Valley, told The Daily Star.  “Instead of stealing, plant hashish and confront the state.”
“If the state provides a substitute or lowers the cost of food staples nobody will plant it,” he added.

“It’s planted openly,” Nasri said. “People do not plant it in secret: the state sees it and the people see it.”
With the war in Syria stifling the economy and bringing in a flood of refugees in the Bekaa Valley, as well as the closure of smuggling roads and persistent state neglect, many of the farmers in the towns and villages near Baalbek have turned to planting cannabis, a lucrative crop.
But growing production and tighter border controls have also caused a glut of cannabis in Lebanon, driving down prices. Calls to legalize the drug are also gaining traction.
Earlier this month, MP Walid Jumblatt renewed his calls for the legalization of the cultivation and sale of marijuana and the end of the state’s prosecution of its sellers.
Jumblatt had also said in May that legalizing the drug would help struggling farmers in the Bekaa Valley.
Once a thriving multibillion-dollar business, cannabis cultivation was targeted by the Lebanese government in the early 1990s due to international pressure, but crop substitution schemes have failed at limiting it.
Nasri praised Jumblatt’s call for legalizing cannabis, saying the Druze leader felt the “pain of the Bekaa” and the “hunger” of its people.
“Hashish would bring in a lot of money to the government and is less damaging to health, and will create economic stimulus,” he said.
“Poor people will benefit.”
Individuals involved with the hashish trade here say it is necessary for the prosperity of local farmers and communities, creating jobs during the labor-intensive harvest, empowering local merchants and farmers at the expense of politicians, and creating capital for the Shiite community.
It also costs a lot less, one former smuggler said. He estimated that irrigating a dunam, roughly 1,000 square meters, of hashish crops costs about $300, and yields about four kuntars of hashish, or roughly 180 kg, earning them a tidy profit.
Meanwhile, “those who plant potatoes have lost money,” he said.  Those involved with the trade here said it was necessary because the Bekaa Valley region has long been abandoned by the state and its ostensible political patrons, like Hezbollah, from an economic and social point of view.
Much of the development money in the party’s coffers went to developing the war-struck south instead.

The lack of development, inadequate schooling and poor health care have led local farmers to increasingly adopt hashish as a money-making crop. They also insist that growing and selling it is not morally problematic because it is less harmful than other drugs  they refuse to plant opium, for instance.
But the glut of new production, combined with border restrictions, has caused prices to take a nosedive.
A single “ho’a” of hashish, a unit of measurement that corresponds to roughly 1.2 kg, used to cost up to $1,200 in 2012. Now it costs between $300-400, Nasri said.
Farmers are also squeezed because much of the hashish produced in the Bekaa Valley was never primarily targeted to customers in Lebanon.  The vast majority was exported to Syria, and then on to Jordan, the Gulf states and Europe, as well as by boat to Egypt.
Lebanese consumers generally prefer pills like ecstasy, Nasri said.  But many of the old smuggling routes have been closed off to traffic amid the ongoing war in Syria. One old, popular smuggling route in the mountainous outskirts of the town of Brital is now manned by Hezbollah and Lebanese Army checkpoints.
As a result, some believe the smuggling of the hashish across the border is done by carrying quantities of it along with legitimate cargo in trucks.
Still, despite suffering some delays, Nasri said many traders still somehow manage to smuggle significant quantities through Syrian territory.
Though it is widely deployed along the border with Syria, the ex-smuggler said Hezbollah is aware of the hashish trade and is not involved in it, but said the party does not have the power to crack down on the farmers in the fiercely independent and clannish region.
“It’s not in Hezbollah’s hands,” he said. “If it was they would fight it because it is irreligious, but people are planting it because they do not have social assistance.”
xxx
Newshawk: Herb Couch
Pubdate: Mon, 29 Dec 2014
Source: Daily Trust (Nigeria)
Copyright: 2014 Daily Trust.
Contact: dailytrust@yahoo.co.uk
Website: http://www.dailytrust.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2923
Author: Ojoma Akor
Page: 9

‘CANNABIS PRODUCTION SPREADING TO NORTH’
National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) has said drug trafficking is becoming more sophisticated on daily basis with the cultivation of Indian hemp gradually spreading to the northern part of the country.
Head, Public Affairs of the agency Ofoyeju Mitchell stated this while speaking at a media roundtable in Abuja organised by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Ofoyeju said cannabis which is cultivated more in the South is gradually spreading to other parts of the country just as the agency has discovered the abuse of unconventional drugs particularly in the northern part of the country. He also said the growing concern over how organised crime undermine stability and prosperity in Africa and the way it is facilitated by a wide range of people places a demand on the reporter to be accurate, analytical and fearless noting there is need to carry out research on how drug cartels and organised criminal groups work.
Coordinator of the “Response to drugs and related organised crimes in Nigeria” project, Harsheth Virk, said the European Union is supporting the Nigerian government with about 34.5 million Euros in fighting drug production, trafficking and use, and in curbing related organised crime in the country.
xxx
Newshawk: Herb Couch
Pubdate: Fri, 26 Dec 2014
Source: Manila Times (Philippines)
Copyright: 2014, The Manila Times
Contact: opinion@manilatimes.net
Website: http://www.manilatimes.net/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/921
Author: Rene Saguisag
Page: A5

WHO’S AFRAID OF MARY JANE, ETCETERA? ‘BYE, CLARO
IN my lifelong urging that we think out of the box, I have long argued
that marijuana must be decriminalized. On August 30, 1983, I wrote
“Who’s Afraid of Mary Jane? The Truth About Marijuana” in Mr. & Ms.. I got pummelled and pilloried from pillar to post with mothers calling me to tell me what they thought of me and my ancestors.
My friend, Sen. Tito Sotto, says bring back the death penalty,
routinely used in China but drug trafficking continues. Big time.

I would argue for probing legalizing drugs.
Why is marijuana legal in part of North America and elsewhere, like
Paraguay and the Netherlands? Are they dumb or know something we
don’t? Their sanity and humanity have not been questioned. My own
sanity I lost a long time ago. But not 3,000 years ago—I don’t go
back that far—and to date marijuana has not conclusively been
proven as toxic. In 2734 Emperor San-Neng wrote in a pharmacological work that marijuana tranquilizes. (N. Zinberg, Sentence First—
Verdict Afterwards, Book Review, 71 Harv. L. Rev. 1032, 1073 (1971).
Hence, the decriminalization.
The user may be sick but not a criminal. Shortcoming is altogether
different from wrongdoing. The user belongs in a rehab clinic, not a
jail where he goes in a human being and goes out a brute.
If Dubya Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had been convicted for using marijuana would they have become presidents? No wisecracks that Mary Jane occasioned or caused 1) going to Iraq, with its Guantanamo atrocities 2) romancing White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and 3)
Obamacare and resuming diplomatic relations with Communist Cuba.
Cannabis Clubs proliferate in Spain, where they say “grandes males
grandes remedios.” The greatest enemy of a major reform is a minor
one. Justice Brown wrote: “It is the desire to earn money which lies
at the bottom of the greatest effort of genius. The man who writes
books, paints, picture, mould statues, builds houses, pleads causes,
preaches sermons, or heals the sick, does it for the money there is in
it; and if, in so doing, he acquires a reputation as an author,
painter, sculptor, architect, jurist or physician, it is only an
incident to his success as a money-getter. The motive which prompted
Angelo to plan the dome of St. Peter, or paint the frescoes of the
Sistine Chapel, was essentially the same as that which induces a
common laborer to lay brick or dig sewers.” So it is with drug
traffickers. Criminalizing means there is money to be made—big-time.

So why not remove the profit motive or desire to earn money—in
humongous sums—behind our drug problem?
Behind the move to legalize all drugs to remove the profit motive are distinguished names, George Schultz, William Buckley, Milton Friedman and other Nobel Prize winners (BTW, I like that one does not apply to be honored in Nobel; others, you have to write “please honor me naman.”). In 2011 a global commission report on drug policy signed by Schultz, Mario Vargas Llosa, Paul Volcker and former Presidents Henrique Cardo and Ernesto Cedillo said: “The global war on drugs has failed” and recommended “experimentation by governments with models of legal regulation of drugs to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens.” E.g., Time, April 2, 2012, p. 20, col. 2.
Again, drug users are sick, not criminals, and therefore belong in rehab centers, not prisons.
We ought to examine the Schultz-Buckley-Friedman alternative. Buckley was a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic. Decriminalize drugs. We may start with marijuana that is legally available for medication or recreation.
Prohibition did not work but only spurred bootlegging and Al Capone.
Nicotine is decidedly toxic but we have just driven smokers to
sidewalks and second-hand smoke is equally toxic now. But we don’t
criminalize it cuz of the powerful cigarette lobby and the sin tax it
stands for (Colorado gets a lot of marijuana tax money).
We cannot have society say, “aha, you are committing suicide on the installment plan. We’ll do it, and accelerate, it for you. We’ll have you branded a criminal, not just sick. We’ll ruin you.”
We have here a crime arguably without a victim. No need to criminalize what is at core a medical issue. The billions wasted on a war that cannot be won are better spent on a peaceful approach.The scandal today in Bilibid is traceable to outlawing drugs. The desire to earn money. The profit motive.
In 2001, Portugal totally decriminalized drugs, with positive effects.  It is only a small country of course and it may take a country like the US to lead the effort. It can start with Mary Jane, now legal in many parts there. Cannabis Clubs galore in Spain, as earlier mentioned. Uruguay allows all drugs. Switzerland has relaxed its laws on marijuana.
The new drive in Muntinlupa led one inmate to contact me to help
prevent a transfer of some inmates to the NBI. But I could not go to
the penitentiary because of the traffic. Imagine crawling last Tuesday
on the SkyWay from Magallanes to the NAIA exit. And then again from
Arcadio Santos to the toll booth area where they have ambulant
collectors, another Only in D Pilipins entry. It seems to me the area
should be doubled or even trebled. More booths, easier flow. No rocket science. Common sense. As is done in NLEX and other non-backwater countries.
My pal, Claro Mamaril, unheralded as one prosecutor against Rene Corona, passed away last Tuesday in Bacoor. I had planned to visit him in a Bacoor hospital more than once earlier but had to turn back.
Traffic, repairs going on, lack of traffic discipline. Bacoor seemed
like in another planet. In Las Pinas, I could see kin, 70, also in a
hospital, but the other day the wife, my sis, merrily texted he had
made utot, broken wind; farting could be such sweet sorrow.
The other day, Wednesday, I got a text that Panyero Raul Daza would go
to a Bacoor funeral home (Samson, in Molina 3), where I was the night
before. During his years of exile, Raul and Claro worked together in
California. Claro was a quiet Unknown Soldier in the anti-dictatorship
struggle but the patriot would not go unwept, unhonored and unsung, in our heart of hearts. He migrated in 1971 but relocated here for good in 2009.
May we all have the best and the finest the season of grace and
goodwill and the coming year can bring anyone—in the country with
the longest holiday season in the world.
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MAP posted-by: Matt
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sun, 04 Jan 2015
Source: Independent on Sunday (UK)
Copyright: Independent Newspapers Ltd.
Contact: sundayletters@independent.co.uk
Website: http://www.independent.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/208
Author: Tim Walker

GOING TO POT: COLORADO LEADS THE WAY
While Federal Law Says Possession and Sale Is Still Illegal, You Can
Now Buy Recreational Marijuana in Four US States
Last year, on New Year’s Day, I spent two hours queuing in the bone-
chilling cold of a Denver January to be one of the first few people
in the world legally to buy recreational cannabis over the counter.
The drug has traditionally been tolerated in the Netherlands, but
never truly legal. Portugal decriminalised it more than a decade ago.
California legalised medical marijuana in 1996, and has since been
followed by 22 other US states and Washington, DC.
But when Colorado’s recreational marijuana dispensaries opened their doors on the first day of 2014, it was the first time the drug had been legal to buy for anyone over the age of 21, anywhere in the US, since the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937. After the dispensary staff checked the age on my driving licence and handed me a complimentary commemorative T- shirt, I picked out a bar of cannabis- infused chocolate and a premium, pre-rolled joint called a “caviar stick”.
I kept the receipt for posterity and pulled it from my files this week. My purchases came to an almost round $ 30.54 (UKP 20), of which $ 5.53 were taxes destined for the state’s coffers, to be used for schools and public building projects. One customer complained about the prices: $ 400 per ounce of cannabis, plus that hefty tax. The man muttered that he could buy the same quantity for $ 250 on the street, taxfree. But in the end he took his free T- shirt and paid for his goods like the rest of us.
Everyone I spoke to in Denver then seemed happy about legal pot. A year on, they’re still happy  whether they’ve been smoking it or not.
Colorado collected more than $ 60m in taxes, licences and fees for
marijuana in the first 10 months of 2014, a figure that doesn’t
include the harder-to-gauge savings made from not enforcing the
defunct drug laws. Opponents of legalisation have disputed FBI data
that appeared to show a significant drop in crime in the state, but
reports suggest legal weed has at least had an impact on the criminal trade in Mexico, by undercutting the price of cartel cannabis.
Colorado’s pioneering experiment has proved successful enough to
inspire other states, and in November Alaska and Oregon both
legalised marijuana for recreational use, while Washington DC opted
to legalise the growth and possession of small amounts of the drug.
With the movement gaining momentum, as many as 10 further states may be asked to vote on the issue in 2016.
Legalisation has gone less smoothly in Washington state, which, like
Colorado, voted to create a legitimate recreational weed market in
2012. Unlike Colorado, however, it lacked an existing, regulated
medical marijuana system to provide a framework for the recreational
marijuana trade. Washington opened its first dispensaries in July,
but prospective pot-business proprietors have faced an interminable
licensing process, a supply shortage and major competition from the
black market, yielding only around $ 15m in taxes in the second half of 2014.
There have been bumps in the road for Colorado, too. Its marijuana tax revenues may sound impressive, but they’re modest in the grand scheme of a state budget. The pot tourism boom promised by advocates of legalisation has so far failed to materialise. And the state is now looking at extra legislation to govern the production and sale of popular but potent pot-infused food.
So-called “edibles” may be a more practical alternative to smoking
the drug  the law prohibits smoking pot outdoors, and few hotels
allow it on their premises  but many consumers have complained of
uncomfortable experiences after mistakenly ingesting too much
marijuana too quickly. Others fear that children will confuse
colourfully packaged cannabis products for regular sweet snacks. A
decision on new rules for edibles will be made by Colorado
legislators this year.
And yet, strip away all the peripheral details of legalisation
social, financial, digestive  and you are left with the simple fact
that Colorado residents and visitors can now use marijuana in all its
forms without fear of legal consequences. In a society that also
permits people to smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol and drive cars,
that only seems right. Last January, in an interview with

The New Yorker, Barack Obama suggested as much, when he said he
believed pot was less dangerous than alcohol “in terms of its impact
on the individual consumer”. The President, who smoked marijuana as a
young man, said he saw weed, “as a bad habit and a vice, not very
different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up
through a big chunk of my adult life”.
Marijuana possession and sale remains illegal under US law; and while
the Obama administration has allowed legalisation to spread through
several states unhindered, the chances of federal legalisation are
still far off. A push for national reform would mean doing battle
with several government agencies built especially to wage the War on Drugs, not to mention the mighty US prison-industrial complex, almost half of whose inmates are incarcerated for drug offences.
So it is up to the states, not all of which are pleased about the new
legal trade. Last month, Nebraska and Oklahoma brought a l awsuit
against neighbouring Colorado, claiming they were being inundated
with cannabis from across state lines. There is, of course, a much
cheaper option than taking legal action - and that would be to
legalise the drug themselves.
Rupert Cornwell is away
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, 31 Dec 2014
Source: Alaska Dispatch News (AK)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/SJs3IoZh
Copyright: 2014 Alaska Dispatch Publishing
Contact: letters@adn.com
Website: http://www.adn.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/18
Note: Anchorage Daily News until July ‘14
Author: Suzanna Caldwell

AFTER WARNING OF POSSIBLE DELAY, WALKER SAYS POT REGULATIONS ON SCHEDULE
Gov. Bill Walker announced Tuesday he now has confidence Alaska
marijuana regulations will be implemented on schedule, after saying
earlier this month he was exploring the possibility of extending the
timeline for developing regulations.
In a written statement, Walker said he had met with leaders from the Department of Commerce, Community and Economic Development, Department of Revenue and the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board to discuss the issue.  Ballot Measure 2 specifically gives the state nine months to craft marijuana regulations after the measure goes into effect on Feb. 24.
“We have strong, cooperative leadership heading up implementation of this very important act,” Walker said in the release. “They assured me that we can meet the statutory and regulatory timelines outlined in the initiative that voters passed in November. I’m confident that we will be diligent in our efforts to make sure we have adequate regulations for this new industry in place and on time.”
The Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, which is currently handling the regulations unless a Marijuana Control Board is created, has already indicated that they believe they will be able to implement the regulations in the nine-month period.
The release also said the Department of Public Safety, Department of Health and Social Services, and the Department of Environmental Conservation are all working closely with DCCED to “ensure seamless enforcement” of Alaska marijuana law.Alaska marijuana advocates had expressed concern following Walker’s announcement of a possible delay. On Tuesday, The Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol in Alaska said in an email they appreciate Walker’s leadership on the issue and that he is “engaging proactively in the process.”
“We look forward to working with Gov. Walker and state leaders to build a strong regulatory framework that will reverse the failures of marijuana prohibition while also creating new jobs and much-needed revenue for our state,” said Tim Hinterberger, one of the co-sponsors of Ballot Measure 2.
The ABC Board also announced it had updated its list of frequently asked questions about marijuana Tuesday, adding information on the timeline for legalization. The board said it expects to begin accepting applications for marijuana business licenses by Feb. 24, 2016. The first licenses should be awarded by late May 2016.
The board also included a section on financing in its updated FAQ, noting that investors should be aware of securities and banking law before engaging in a marijuana-related business.
As an example, said Kevin Anselm, director of the Alaska Division of Banking and Securities under DCCED, it’s illegal to try to secure investors through advertising, even on Craigslist or Facebook.
Securing financing has been one of the trickiest parts of establishing marijuana businesses in other states, since federal law still expressly prohibits the substance, often making banks leery of lending to marijuana entrepreneurs. Anselm said the division hasn’t had any marijuana businesses reach out to them directly, but they’re expecting an influx of businesses as a result of legalization.
“There are ways to raise money from friends, family and neighbors
without getting in trouble,” Anselm said. “... Alaska is open for
business. It just has to be done appropriately.”
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Thu, 25 Dec 2014
Source: Alaska Dispatch News (AK)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/j2ubqzj2
Copyright: 2014 Alaska Dispatch Publishing
Contact: letters@adn.com
Website: http://www.adn.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/18
Note: Anchorage Daily News until July ‘14
Author: Laurel Andrews

ALASKA BAR ASSOCIATION WEIGHS IN ON ETHICS OF ATTORNEYS AND POT
Is it ethical for an Alaska attorney to smoke marijuana? The Alaska
Bar Association’s Ethics Committee has weighed in with an informal
opinion on that question and two other key ethical issues surrounding attorneys and soon-to-be legalized recreational marijuana in Alaska.
The ethics committee examined the issues in an analysis posted to the
Alaska Bar Association’s website, “particularly in light of the
conflict between state and federal law,” the analysis states. Though
recreational marijuana will become legal Feb. 24 in Alaska, it
remains illegal under federal law.
The analysis stresses it is not a formal opinion, nor a ruling from the Bar Board of Governors, which will meet in late January and discuss ethical issues related to marijuana, bar counsel Steve Van Goor said. The board may propose amendments to the Alaska Rules of Professional Conduct—which include rules outlining attorneys’ ethical conduct—given the changes to state law. Any changes to the rules must be adopted by the Alaska Supreme Court, according to Van Goor.
The analysis does let attorneys “know what direction the wind is going to blow,” Van Goor said, as they navigate the new frontier of legalized recreational marijuana.
Is it ethical for attorneys to use marijuana?
The first issue raised is whether it is ethical for an attorney to use marijuana. In this regard, nothing has changed, the analysis states.
“It has always been an individual decision for a lawyer to use
marijuana privately,” Van Goor said.

The analysis points to the Alaska Supreme Court’s 1975 Ravin v. State decision, which extends Alaskans’ right to privacy to include possessing small amounts of marijuana in the home. The analysis also notes the conflict with federal law, under which marijuana use is prohibited.
Van Goor said there was a “lack of a clear black and white answer,”
as to the conflicts between federal and state law. However, since the
Ravin decision, the choice has been a “personal one” that “hasn’t
really been an issue,” Van Goor said.
The analysis notes “no Alaska lawyer has ever been disciplined for (discreet) and private use of marijuana.”
However, overusage of marijuana that affects an attorney’s practice
could be a basis for action against the attorney, Van Goor said.
Engaging in activity such as dealing drugs would be both a felony and “likely ... unethical as well,” the analysis states.
Attorneys subject to drug testing through their employers may still
be prohibited from using marijuana.
Can attorneys ethically advise clients on how to operate a business while complying with state law?
In a nutshell, the analysis found that yes, an attorney can ethically advise clients on how to operate a marijuana business, so long as the attorney also advises federal law still prohibits the sale of marijuana.Colorado and Washington attorneys have grappled with the same ethical dilemma of advising a client on conduct that is illegal federally, Van Goor said. Those states have said “look, if it’s a legal business . then lawyers should be able to advise clients,” Van Goor said.
Can an attorney ethically get involved in a marijuana business?
The last question the analysis addresses is whether an attorney can
ethically get involved with a marijuana business. Can an attorney
draft documents, or invest financially in a marijuana venture?
“It’s a sensitive area,” Van Goor said, the trickiest question of the three, and one the Board of Governors will need to consider.
In terms of drafting business documents and providing business law services, the analysis states that an attorney “probably could” ethically provide a marijuana business the same services as any other legal business.  But to actually participate in a marijuana business is more complex, ethically speaking, the analysis states. It’s too early to tell how the Board of Governors may decide on that, Van Goor said.
The final say? Until rules are adopted, an attorney should “exercise caution and not become directly involved in operating a business that remains illegal under federal law.”
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Pubdate: Fri, 02 Jan 2015
Source: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner (AK)
Copyright: 2015 Fairbanks Publishing Company, Inc.
Contact: letters@newsminer.com
Website: http://newsminer.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/764
Author: Amanda Bohman

ALASKANS ATTENDING COLORADO POT SYMPOSIUM ON PUBLIC HEALTH AND SAFETY
FAIRBANKS - A marijuana symposium in Colorado in two weeks is drawing a large delegation from Alaska.
At least a dozen people are attending from various levels of government and law enforcement. The conference is called “Marijuana Impact on Public Health and Safety in Colorado.”
The three-day conference in Lone Tree, Colorado, starts Jan. 14. Lone Tree is a suburb of Denver.
“We are just trying to learn as much as we can from what Colorado has already experienced,” said Brad Johnson, deputy chief of the Fairbanks Police Department.
Voters approved a ballot measure in November that will make it legal
to grow, possess and sell marijuana in Alaska.
State and local governments are beginning to figure out how the new marijuana industry is going to work.
Johnson is attending the conference as a delegate from the Alaska Association of Chiefs of Police. Joining him will be Lt. Eric Jewkes, of the Fairbanks Police Department.
The Fairbanks North Star Borough planning director is attending the conference, as is the North Pole police chief.
Legalized marijuana is a radical change in the law for the community of North Pole, which took a hard line on possession and use of the drug.
“We have always had a mandatory arrest for it,” North Pole Police
Chief Steve Dutra said. “We took a strict approach to it so there
would be some community condemnation.
“We have relaxed that standard,” Dutra said. “We still forward
charges, but we are no longer arresting people.”

Dutra has a lot of questions about how the new law is going to work, he said.
“I think the biggest issues we are going to face are distribution
issues,” the police chief said.

The list of invited speakers at the conference in the Centennial State includes people from a range of Colorado’s government agencies starting with the governor. The state directors of marijuana enforcement and marijuana coordination also are listed as speakers.
Colorado law enforcement will be represented. A speaker from the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment is also listed.
Attending from the state of Alaska will be representatives from the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, the Department of Revenue and the Attorney General’s office, said Grace Jang, a spokeswoman for Gov. Bill Walker.
Jang said the Municipality of Anchorage is sending people to the
conference, including some attorneys, a tax director and deputy
chiefs from the police department.
The conference includes sessions on home grows, edibles and a panel that will discuss driving under the influence of marijuana.
Also to be discussed will be impacts on local communities and state
and federal relations. In addition, the economic impact of legalized
marijuana will be discussed.
The Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police is holding the
conference in conjunction with Jensen Public Affairs, a lobbying
firm. The conference costs $325 to attend.
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Pubdate: Wed, 31 Dec 2014
Source: Alaska Dispatch News (AK)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/PPW3mYWj
Copyright: 2014 Alaska Dispatch Publishing
Contact: letters@adn.com
Website: http://www.adn.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/18
Note: Anchorage Daily News until July ‘14
Author: Suzanna Caldwell

ALASKA’S FORMER U.S. SEN. MIKE GRAVEL TO LEAD MARIJUANA BUSINESS
Marijuana may be the reason former U.S. senator and onetime Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel next returns to Alaska.
Cannabis Sativa Inc. says Gravel will head KUSH, a company that will work to develop and market “innovative new cannabis products” for recreational and medical marijuana markets in the U.S.
The company uses a business model of developing marijuana products,
then connecting with local cannabis producers at the state level to
produce and sell the product. According to a press release, the
company is currently looking to develop a marijuana lozenge called
the “Kubby,” named after Steve Kubby, chairman of the board for
Cannabis Sativa Inc.
Gravel said in a phone interview Tuesday he has been an “aggressive board member” for Cannabis Sativa Inc., eventually leading to his current position as head of KUSH.
Gravel, 84, served as one of Alaska’s two U.S. senators from 1969 to 1981. In 2008, he sought the Democratic presidential nomination. He’s been a critic of U.S. drug policy since the Nixon era.
Gravel said KUSH is looking to enter the Alaska market. He said he
was “very much” pleased that Alaskans voted in November to pass
Ballot Measure 2, which legalized recreational marijuana in the state.
The former senator, who now lives in Burlingame, California, said the company would work with local marijuana activists and longtime Alaska friends to watch how the marijuana laws are crafted. He said the company hopes to hire a local attorney to help guide them through the complicated legalities surrounding marijuana.“We don’t want to make any mistakes with the law in this regard,” Gravel said. “It’s new, and it’s fraught with controversy.”
He expects the process of getting product to Alaska will be similar to the process in Washington and Colorado, where they contract with a local producer who is licensed to sell the product. Still, with more than a year before people can even register to obtain a business license in Alaska under the language of the initiative, it will be a long while before KUSH operates in the state.
“We don’t have to wait until the details of the law are in place,” he said. “But we won’t be able do anything until the law is final in Alaska.”
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: Kirk
Pubdate: Thu, 01 Jan 2015
Source: Tucson Weekly (AZ)
Copyright: 2015 Tucson Weekly
Contact: mailbag@tucsonweekly.com
Website: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/462
Author: Dr. MJ

CANNABIS AND CANCER
Dr. MMJ offers an opinion on treatment claims and government research
Therapeutic treatments are emerging and gaining acceptance across the globe, but with no FDA approval or large scale double blind studies done in the USA to fall back on where does one go for reliable information about these treatments? There is respected science about these issues coming from Israel, England and other parts of the world but very little from here at home.
This is because the United States government contends that cannabis is a substance with no accepted medical use. This assertion is made even though since 1974 the government has been in possession of scientific evidence that Cannabis can shrink cancerous tumors.
Below is an excerpt from a patent issued by the same U.S. Government
to GW Pharma, an England-based pharmaceutical giant, for
phytocannabinoids in the treatment of cancer. Phytocannabinoids are
plant based cannabinoids as opposed to synthetic cannabinoids like
marinol or the endogenous cannabinoids found naturally in all mammals.
Phytocannabinoids in the treatment of cancer
US 20130059018 A1
ABSTRACT
This invention relates to the use of phytocannabinoids, either in an
isolated form or in the form of a botanical drug substance (BDS) in
the treatment of cancer. Preferably the cancer to be treated is cancer
of the prostate, cancer of the breast or cancer of the colon.
BACKGROUND
Cancer is a class of diseases which occurs because cells become
immortalized; they fail to heed customary signals to turn off growth
which is a normal function of remodelling in the body that requires
cells to die on cue. Programmed cell death can become defective and
when this happens malignant transformation can take place. The
immortalized cells grow beyond their normal limits and invade adjacent tissues. The malignant cells may also metastasize and spread to other locations in the body via the bloodstream or lymphatic system. Cancer cells often form a mass known as a tumor.
Cannabinoids have been shown to play a fundamental role in the control
of cell survival/cell death. It has been reported that cannabinoids
may induce proliferation, growth arrest, or apoptosis in a number of
cells, including neurons, lymphocytes, and various transformed neural
and non-neural cells, and that cannabinoids induce apoptosis of glioma cells in culture and regression of malignant gliomas in vivo.
There is a long history of anecdotal evidence that points to cannabis
having efficacy treating cancer. Programmed cell death this is the
key, the author of this patent mentions it three times in less than a
page and the application continues for hundreds of pages more and it
is mentioned hundreds of times. So this pre-programmed cell death that cancer cells lack, can Phytocannabinoids fix it? How does it shrink tumors and cure cancer?
Cannabis Oil, often referred to as Rick Simpsons oil, is a highly
potent concentration of the active parts of the cannabis plant, it is
extremely intoxicating and taken at very high doses, like a gram of
oil a day. Cannabis oil has been reported to reprogram cancer cells to
die as described above. Those that have had success treating their
cancer in this manner report shrinking tumors, and clear scans and
sometimes continue on cannabis at much lower doses for
maintenance.
The difficult parts about this process are developing a high enough tolerance to THC in the patient for them to reach and maintain a high enough dose to attain a therapeutic benefit and early detection.
Another challenge in using cannabis to treat cancer is the widespread use of chemotherapy and radiation in cancer patients. These treatments are extremely toxic and have had limited success in curing cancer.They shrink tumors but also kill undamaged cells causing nausea and loss of appetite. Cannabis focuses its energy on only the damaged cells and leaves the healthy ones alone.
Cannabis can be useful to a patient undergoing chemo or radiation treatment but the benefits are mostly supportive. Cannabis stimulates appetite and therefore can minimize loss of appetite and the resulting weight loss many cancer patients endure. Cannabis is a great pain reliever and can also relieve the discomfort caused by these treatments.
This leaves a cancer patient in a position of great uncertainty at a
time when their life has already been disrupted greatly. In the end it
is a difficult decision as to how to treat one’s cancer. These people
deserve the best care and scientific information available and the
freedom of choice to choose the best path for themselves.
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MAP posted-by: Matt
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Pubdate: Fri, 26 Dec 2014
Source: Tucson Weekly (AZ)
Copyright: 2014 Tucson Weekly
Contact: mailbag@tucsonweekly.com
Website: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/462

520 CANNABIS MEDICAL MARIJUANA
MAPS receives $2 million grant from Colorado for Study of Medical
Marijuana for PTSD
Last week, fired UA researcher Sue Sisley learned that the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment awarded the psychiatrist $2 million to her sponsor, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), for their marijuana study for symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in 76 U.S. veterans.
According to MAPS, Colorado’s Medical Marijuana Scientific Advisory Council recommended that MAPS receive the grant in late November. The state’s decision followed the Council’s recommendation, giving MAPS the largest of eight grants awarded by CDPHE. All of the other grantees are major research universities.
“As the very first public funding that MAPS has ever received in our
28-and-half-year history, the award clearly shows that attitudes are
improving about research into the therapeutic benefits of Schedule I
drugs,” said Rick Doblin, MAPS founder and executive director. “It’s
a big step forward for cannabis science and medicine.”
The study will evaluate the safety and effectiveness of smoked marijuana to treat symptoms of PTSD in 76 U.S. veterans, and will be the first randomized controlled trial of whole plant (botanical) marijuana as a treatment for PTSD.
“With this grant, we are one step closer to determining if and how cannabis can mitigate the symptoms of PTSD,” said Sisley, one of the study’s two principal investigators.
“Colorado has brought us one step closer to truly helping our vets.
I’m grateful to MAPS and everyone who is making this journey with us.”
Despite the award and prior Food and Drug Administration and Public
Health Service (PHS) approval, the study still faces obstacles, most
importantly the lack of information from the National Institute on
Drug Abuse (NIDA) about when they will be able to provide the
marijuana for the study. The U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services’ PHS review committee granted MAPS permission to purchase
the marijuana from NIDA in March 2014, but NIDA has not yet been able
to provide the marijuana required for the study. NIDA is currently
the only legal source of marijuana for federally sanctioned research
in the U.S.
“To end federal obstruction of medical marijuana drug development research, the NIDA monopoly needs to end, as does the PHS protocol review process for access to NIDA marijuana,” said Doblin.
MAPS will also need new Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for
Sisley’s portion of the study after she was fired in June for
political reasons by the UA. The study will also require clearance
from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration once the marijuana has a delivery date, which MAPS does not expect to be a significant hurdle.
Half of the subjects will be treated by Sue Sisley, and the other
half by principal investigator Ryan Vandrey at Johns Hopkins
University in Maryland. Marcel Bonn-Miller of the University of
Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, will oversee the two
separate sites as coordinating investigator. Co-investigator Paula
Riggs, of the University of Colorado School of Medicine, will oversee
scientific integrity of the study. Blood analysis will be conducted
at the University of Colorado, Boulder. MAPS will work with the FDA,
manage and monitor data, maintain drug accountability, and ensure
that the study follows Good Clinical Practice guidelines.
By Weekly Staff and Contributors
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Newshawk: Kirk
Pubdate: Fri, 02 Jan 2015
Source: East Valley Tribune (AZ)
Copyright: 2015 East Valley Tribune.
Contact: http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/opinion/submit_a_letter/
Website: http://www.eastvalleytribune.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2708
Author: Mike Ross

WHY DO PEOPLE SEEM TO HATE THE POLICE?
Well one very good reason is the “War on Drugs” . According to U.S.
Bureau of Prison statistics, 51 percent of the people in federal
prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes. Again, per U.S. BOP statistics, 80 percent of of those in federal prisons are for simple possession of an illegal drug.
At the state level it’s even worse. According to Reason Magazine, 66
percent, or two thirds of Americans, are in state prisons for
victimless drug war crimes.
Because of the “War on Drugs”  America has become the world’s largest police state, with more people in prison than any other nation on the planet.
Mike Ross
Tempe
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Wed, 24 Dec 2014
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2014 Los Angeles Times
Contact: letters@latimes.com
Website: http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Soumya Karlamangla

APP CAN’T DELIVER POT
Judge Says Nestdrop, Which Takes Orders From Customers, Is Violating L.A. Law.
A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge said Tuesday that Nestdrop, a smartphone application that lets customers order medical marijuana, must stop delivering pot.
Los Angeles City Atty. Mike Feuer filed a court complaint earlier
this month saying that Nestdrop, which offers alcohol and medical
marijuana delivery, violates a law that restricts pot shops in Los
Angeles from taking their product to customers.
Judge Robert O’Brien granted a preliminary injunction against the company Tuesday to stop the pot deliveries.
Nestdrop co-founder Michael Pycher said the company would appeal the judge’s decision, and will continue alcohol deliveries.
“We don’t believe that they truly understand what Nestdrop is; we’re
simply a communication technology,” Pycher said after the ruling.
Nestdrop launched in Los Angeles earlier this year, marketing itself as the country’s first app-based, on-demand medical marijuana delivery service. Customers can use the app on their smartphone to request weed that is delivered to their doorstep.
Feuer says Nestdrop’s service violates Proposition D, a measure
passed by voters last year to regulate pot shops with the aim of
reducing their numbers. Under that law, delivery is “simply not
permitted,” Feuer says.

Pycher, however, says the company is not subject to Proposition D regulations because it doesn’t handle or distribute the marijuana itself.
The app connects patients to collectives, whose workers deliver the
marijuana, he said.
Feuer said that amounts to aiding and abetting illegal activity, which the judge agreed with Tuesday when he granted his injunction.
Aaron Lachant, an attorney whose firm helped the city write
Proposition D, said he wasn’t surprised by Tuesday’s ruling.

“Proposition D explicitly prohibits delivery service,” he said.
Though the app itself may not necessarily be illegal, he said,
“Nestdrop was basically facilitating violations of Proposition D.”

A simple Internet search reveals hundreds of marijuana delivery
services across Southern California.
Lachant said the city attorney may have decided to target Nestdrop because it would be much harder to go after each individual delivery service.
When asked Tuesday about other marijuana delivery services in the city, Feuer would say only that his office had other investigations underway.
As for Nestdrop, Pycher said the firm would continue with their plans
to expand to other cities. He said that the app now has tens of
thousands of users and that the legal action had actually drawn
attention to the company.

The company is testing the app in San Francisco and is planning to
expand into San Jose and Oakland soon.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Wed, 31 Dec 2014
Source: SF Weekly (CA)
Column: ChemTales
Copyright: 2014 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

DRUG REFORM PROGRESSED IN 2014, EVERYWHERE EXCEPT HERE
In a year full of catastrophes and PR disasters, the country made strides in one area: solving its enduring drug problem in a less twisted way.
If not a full 12 steps towards healing, real progress was made almost everywhere: on sentencing reform, on how we understand “crackheads,” and realizing just how intellectually bankrupt marijuana prohibition truly is.
Even seniors in Florida and lobbyist-owned members of Congress made historic strides on cannabis freedom: A majority of both voted in favor of easing America’s war on weed, a move unthinkable just a few years ago.
Though in a perfect demonstration of how drug reform works, those
“big steps forward” are mostly symbolic, with almost no immediate
payout. Florida couldn’t get the two-thirds majority it needed to
legalize medical marijuana. And while Congress defunded Justice
Department efforts to interfere with state-legal cannabis, marijuana
is still a Schedule I drug. And in every state, there are still
plenty of people doing prison time over a plant.
Meanwhile, California stayed the course. The state’s barely regulated billion-dollar industry chugged along in 2014; efforts to tame the beast with sensible regulations or curb medical marijuana abuse with outright legalization crashed and burned.
But at least there’s legal weed in Portland.
So while we did some learning and changing in 2014, California is
still partially living in drug war paranoia-land.
CRACKHEADS AREN’T REAL, BUT FEAR OF THEM IS
In March, rock star researcher Dr. Carl Hart, a Columbia University
neuroscientist, published a piece in The New York Times that
attempted debunk one of society’s uglier labels: crackhead. Crack is
no more addictive than “regular” powder cocaine, and Hart’s
experiments with supposedly hopeless fiends - who, when offered a hit
of crack or a small amount of cash, most often took the cash -
suggests that drug use starts when the user lacks other opportunities
(specifically, economic opportunity). Treating crack users more
humanely is catching on, with the easing of Nancy Reagan-era laws
that punish crack crimes more severely. But that hasn’t been the case
in San Francisco where Mayor Ed Lee’s office squashed a plan to hand
out free crack pipes - a potentially life-saving harm reduction model
nearly identical to the well-established needle exchange program -
before it was even fully discussed.
MARIJAUANA ARRESTS DOWN, FELONY BUSTS STEADY IN SF
Remember 1998, when Seinfeld was on TV, when there was no such thing
as a tech bus, and when America arrested fewer than 700,000 people
for marijuana crimes? Marijuana arrests dipped below that threshold
for the first time since the Clinton years; in 2014, some 693,000
people were busted for pot. Great. Not so great: Almost half of the
arrests were for simple possession, according to the FBI. In
California, where simple possession has been punishable with a
citation since 2010, total arrests remained steady from 2013. Felony
arrests, meanwhile remained the same in both the state and in San
Francisco, where African-Americans comprise more than half of the
busts, despite making up less than 6 percent of the city’s population.
GOOD NEWS FOR DOPE FIENDS, BUT NOT FOR DOPE PEDDLERS
San Francisco’s former police chief is now one of America’s most
liberal prosecutors. District Attorney George Gascon gave a TED talk
in which he declared the drug war a failure, and backed up the talk
by supporting sentencing reform measure Prop. 47, which voters
approved in November. Moving forward, most drug possession crimes
will be now be misdemeanors, not felonies, and anyone serving a
prison term for simple possession could be eligible for release.
That’s good news, except for anyone caught in one of the San
Francisco police department’s legendary buy-busts, where an
undercover cop asks a street addict for $20 worth of rock or pot.
That’s still a sales bust - and still a felony.

FEDS ARE MELLOWING OUT
Mission District pot club Shambhala Healing Center made cannabis
history earlier this month, when the dispensary beat the federal
Justice Department’s effort to shut it down. That’s the first Bay
Area club to take on the feds in court and win. And with that, the
crackdown that closed one-third of San Francisco’s licensed and
permitted medical marijuana dispensaries appears to finally be over.
BUT SAN FRANCISCO ISN’T MELLOWING OUT
That progress arrived just in time for San Francisco to decide it
doesn’t want any more pot clubs. The city’s Planning Commission
recently rejected a second location for popular dispensary SPARC
despite the project meeting all city guidelines. The problem,
according to a pack of Excelsior neighbors and a police captain, is
that the neighborhood has three already. This “clustering” phenomenon
is a result of the city’s decade-old marijuana zoning laws, which
leaves 90 percent of the city off-limits to pot. Dispensaries lucky
enough to be the first on the block get a near-monopoly on the marijuana trade.
POLS TAKE HITS ON POT
In March, Gov. Jerry Brown answered a question about marijuana
legalization with another question: “How many people can get stoned
and still have a great state?” Perhaps Attorney General Kamala
Harris, who in November suggested that legalization is “inevitable,”
could allay Brown’s fear of “potheads.” Meanwhile, Lt. Gov. Gavin
Newsom is still the state’s most vocal political friend of the
cannabis plant. Another reminder that the lite gov has much less power.
COPS FOR POT (REGULATIONS)
And finally, the question of regulation. The state’s powerful police
lobby surprised us all early in the year when it said it would be
amenable to a regulated cannabis industry. That’s a sea change from just a year ago, when cops wanted no cannabis industry. But in the end, the result was the same: no agreement in the Legislature and no strong statewide regulation.
California still has vague rules saying who can do what with the
cannabis plant, as well as a patchwork of conflicting regulations
among counties and cities; in Weed, voters in November approved bans on marijuana cultivation and dispensaries.
So what if Oregon and Alaska legalized marijuana, there’s still no
legal weed in Weed.
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Wed, 31 Dec 2014
Source: East Bay Express (CA)
Copyright: 2014 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

LEGALIZATION NATION INDEX 2014
Why Our Cannabis Laws Make No Sense.
It’s time again for our annual cannabis index. (The source of each
fact is in parenthesis.)
Percentage of US residents who use cannabis monthly: 7.4 (National Survey on Drug Use and Health)
Percentage of Americans who support access to medical marijuana: 78 (ThirdWay.org)
Percentage who oppose access to medical marijuana: 18 (ThirdWay.org)
Percent who support cannabis legalization for adults: 50 (ThirdWay.org)
Percentage who oppose legalization: 47 (ThirdWay.org)
Number of states that have legalized cannabis for use by adults: 4
Percentage of Washington, DC voters who cast ballots for cannabis
legalization in the November Election: 70.1 (Ballotpedia.org)
Percentage of Oregon voters who cast ballots for legalization: 56.1 (Ballotpedia.org)
Percentage of Alaska voters who cast ballots for legalization: 53.2 (Ballotpedia.org)
Percentage of Americans who say they that want the federal government to stay out of state medical cannabis issues and adult-use legalization: 67 (ThirdWay.org)
Number of states suing federal government to block Colorado legalization: 2
Number of states with medical marijuana laws: 23 (Americans for Safe Access)
Percentage of Florida voters who cast ballots in favor of medical
marijuana legalization: 57.6 (Ballotpedia.org)
Percentage of Florida vote that was needed to pass medical marijuana legalization: 60 (Ballotpedia.org) Amount spent by casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to defeat Florida medical marijuana measure: $5 million (Washington Post)
Estimated Colorado state tax revenues from all legal cannabis sales in 2014: $84 million (Cato Institute)
Percentage decrease in Colorado roadway deaths last year: 25 (Washington Post)
Percentage decrease in violent crimes in Denver through November 30, 2014 compared to same period in 2013: 7.9 (City of Denver)
Percentage decrease in Colorado teens who reported smoking pot in
2014: 2 (MTFSurvey)
Number of stings conducted on Colorado pot shops for underage sales:
20 (Colorado Marijuana Enforcement Division)
Number of Colorado pot shops busted for selling to minors: 0
(Colorado Marijuana Enforcement Division)

Number of THC-laced candies reported given to Colorado
trick-or-treaters: 0 (The Cannabist)

Percentage of American 12th graders who report that pot is “fairly
easy” or “very easy” to get: 80 (US Monitoring the Future Survey)
Number of years that more than 80 percent of American 12th graders have reported easy access to pot: 40 (USMTFS)
Number of US marijuana arrests in 2013: 609,423 (FBI)
Rank of marijuana arrests among all drug arrests: 1 (FBI, UCR)
Rank of drug arrests among all crimes: 1 (FBI)
Amount of money spent on domestic marijuana arrests: $3.6 billion (ACLU)
Average percentage of homicides that US police agencies fail to solve each year: 37 (FBI)
Percentage of reported rapes not solved by US police in 2013: 60 (FBI)
Number of times blacks are more likely to be arrested by US police
for pot than whites, despite less use per capita: 3.73 (ACLU)
US penal population in 2014: 2.2 million (American Psychological Association) Global rank of US incarceration per capita: 2 (International Centre for Prison Studies)
Number of Americans who died from unintentional prescription drug overdoses in 2012: 33,175 (CDC)
Number of humans who have died from marijuana overdoses in recorded history: 0
Percentage of California medical cannabis patients who reported substituting cannabis for prescription drugs: 66 (Harm Reduction Journal, 2009)
Percentage reduction in neuropathic pain achieved by vaporizing whole plant cannabis: 45 (The Journal of Pain and Palliative Care Pharmacotherapy)
Percentage decrease in prescription drug overdoses attributed to medical marijuana laws in states that have them: 25 (JAMA Internal Medicine)
Estimated amount of cannabis consumed by Americans per year:
2,500-5,000 metric tons. (RAND)
Rank of Mexico as a US cannabis supplier: 1 (RAND)
Estimated Mexican cartel financial losses from US legalization: $1.8
billion (The Mexico Institute for Competitiveness)
Percentage of reported decline in marijuana prices in Sinaloa, Mexico last year: 50 (Washington Post) Number of California misdemeanor marijuana arrests in 2013: 6,587 (The Criminal Justice Statistics Center)
Percentage decline of Californians arrested since personal decriminalization passed in 2010: 71 (The Criminal Justice Statistics Center)
Serving size of THC in Colorado: 10 milligrams.
Colorado servings of THC in a California Korova Black Bar: 100
Number of 2015 bills introduced to regulate California medical marijuana: 2
Number of comprehensive medical marijuana regulations passed by the
California legislature: 0
California police revenue from the seizure and sale of property related to marijuana cases from 2002 to 2012: $181.4 million (Sacramento Bee)
National rank of California police for forfeiture revenue from
marijuana: 1 (Sacramento Bee)

Estimated number of California adults who have used medical cannabis for a “serious” condition: 1.4 million (Drug and Alcohol Review, 2014)
Percentage of those adults who said medical cannabis was “effective”:
92 (Drug and Alcohol Review, 2014)
Fine in Fresno County for growing a single medical marijuana plant: $1,000
Estimated number of visitors to The Emerald Cup 2014: more than
10,000 (The Emerald Cup)
Number of entrants in the flowers category of the California Emerald Cup outdoor organic cannabis competition: more than 600 (The Emerald Cup)
Maximum amount a person can earn a year and qualify for low-income marijuana assistance in Berkeley: $32,000 (City of Berkeley)
Rank of the word “vape” on Oxford Dictionary’s list of hottest words of 2014: 1
Number of pages in Oxford University Press’ new Handbook of Cannabis: 768
Number of boxes of Girl Scout Cookies that San Francisco Girl Scout
Danielle Lei sold in two hours in front of a medical cannabis
dispensary: 117 (Lei)
Minimum number of states likely to have legalization on the ballot in 2016: 3 (Marijuana Policy Project)
Number of states predicted to legalize by 2019: 17 (MPP)
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sun, 28 Dec 2014
Source: Desert Sun, The (Palm Springs, CA)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/09Y9Oq15
Copyright: 2014 The Desert Sun
Contact: letters@thedesertsun.com
Website: http://www.desertsun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1112
Note: Does not accept LTEs from outside circulation area.

TRIBES SHOULD CAREFULLY WEIGH POT MOVES
The recent U.S. Justice Department move giving Native American tribes the green light to legalize marijuana on their reservations gives us pause.
While we respect the sovereign right of tribal governments to run
their affairs as they see fit, the situation in the Coachella Valley
is somewhat unique. The close proximity of tribal territory and
adjacent cities gives decisions made by one entity tremendous impact on the entire region.
This is especially true in Palm Springs, where the Agua Caliente Band
of Cahuilla Indians has authority over 32,000 acres in the western
Coachella Valley, including a checkerboard grid of sections
encompassing about half the city.
For now, it doesn’t appear there will be a rush to legalize.
Jeff Grubbe, chairman of the Agua Caliente, told The Desert Sun’s
Barrett Newkirk in an email the tribe had no comment on the Justice
Department announcement.
Riverside County law enforcement officials say they don’t anticipate any changes in their dealings with any of the 12 tribes in their jurisdiction.
Capt. Ray Wood, commander of the Riverside County Sheriff’s
Department’s Hemet Station and head of the department’s Tribal
Liaison Unit, said marijuana hasn’t been a focus of discussion at
regular check-ins with the tribes.
John Hall, spokesman for the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office, also said it was too soon to speak on what the new federal guidelines could mean.
“This is a complicated issue that will need to be discussed with the tribes in this county as well as the U.S. Attorney’s Office before we can comment further,” Hall wrote in an email.
The issue arose after some tribes sought Justice Department guidance on enforcement of federal drug laws on tribal land following legalization in states like Colorado.
The department responded in October with a policy statement to
federal prosecutors and other law enforcement officials noting that
the diversity among Indian nations requires flexibility when working
with tribal leaders on the issue of marijuana.
The policy statement is a sign the Obama administration respects
tribal authority, and is not really about marijuana legalization,
said Stephen Pevar, an instructor on American Indian law at New York University Law School and author of the book “The Rights of Indians and Tribes.”
“It’s not pro-marijuana or anti-marijuana,” Pevar said. “It’s pro-sovereignty.”
Marijuana remains illegal under federal law, but has been
decriminalized for medical purposes in 23 states, including
California. Recreational marijuana use is legal in two states,
Washington and Colorado. Voters in two more states, Alaska and
Oregon, approved initiatives legalizing recreational use set to take
effect in 2015.
Carl Artman, former U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs assistant secretary and member of the Oneida Tribe in Wisconsin, suggests that many U.S.  tribes likely won’t be too interested in the marijuana trade.“When you look at what tribes have to offer - from gaming to ecotourism to looking out over the Grand Canyon, just bringing people out on the reservation for art or culture - this is not one of the things they would normally want,” Artman told The Associated Press.  “It hearkens back to something that’s archaic and stereotypical as opposed to what the modern day Indian is about.”
The rapid spread of legal pot in various forms concerns others as well.
The attorneys general of Nebraska and Oklahoma sued Colorado in the U.S. Supreme Court last week, arguing state-legalized marijuana from Colorado is improperly spilling across state lines.
The suit invokes the federal government’s right to regulate both
drugs and interstate commerce, and says Colorado’s decision to
legalize marijuana has been “particularly burdensome” to police
agencies on the other side of the state line.
In June, USA Today highlighted the flow of marijuana from Colorado into small towns across Nebraska: felony drug arrests in Chappell, Neb., just 7 miles north of the Colorado border have skyrocketed 400 percent in three years.
These are the types of problems we fear could crop up here if tribal legalization occurs absent thoughtful preparation.
Our local tribes have done a great job managing their lucrative gaming enterprises. These operations fund tribal development and are an integral component of the valley tourism picture. Grubbe has said the Agua Caliente tribe employs 2,500 people - clearly a benefit for the region.
A 2012 study commissioned by the California Nations Indian Gaming Association, a coalition of casino-operating tribes, found that Indian gaming has created more than 52,000 jobs in all in California, and generates nearly $500 million in state and local revenues.
Marijuana could be another lucrative business for tribes operating under the eased federal enforcement guidelines.
We trust Coachella Valley tribes will act wisely if they choose to go the path of legalization, following the example of cities such as Palm Springs, Cathedral City and Desert Hot Springs in formulating deliberate zoning and licensing policies for such operations. Ideally tribal officials will work as good neighbors in close consultation with law enforcement and valley city officials to draw up such safeguards.
An excerpt from a (Colorado Springs, Colorado) Gazette editorial published Dec. 21 on how the Justice Department could help neighbor states with Colorado marijuana:
A weird lawsuit filed in the Supreme Court of the United States
against Colorado only formalizes what we know. Colorado’s marijuana
free-for-all is a burden to our neighbors. We grow and sell some of
the most potent pot in the world and it crosses into other states as
dealers and drug tourists come and go. Colorado voters chose to
subject themselves and their children to this ill-fated experiment,
but neighboring states get to live with an abundance of our spillover.
It makes us the neighborhood drug house, lowering the quality of life for the rest of the block. That’s why Oklahoma and Nebraska want judicial relief.
The effect of one state’s laws on another state’s population is one reason the United States Constitution contains an interstate commerce clause. It’s too often abused, but serves as the only authority the federal government has to enforce federal drug laws. The federal supremacy clause gives federal law more weight than a conflicting state law, but only if the federal law complies with powers granted the federal government by the Constitution. In Gonzales v. Raich (2005), the Supreme Court ruled the United States Congress may criminalize production and use of home-grown marijuana in states that approve its use - even for so-called medicinal purposes - because it affects interstate commerce. Some call it a gargantuan stretch, but nevertheless it is the law.
“The federal government could, tomorrow, come in and shut down every dispensary in Colorado under the Substance Control Act,” John Suthers told The Gazette’s editorial board Friday. “But, as you know, the Justice Department has sent out all these memos saying if a state is in compliance with this, this and that, we’re not going to use our power to force compliance.”
It’s only because the federal government has chosen to look the other way that Oklahoma and Nebraska felt compelled to sue. They want the law enforced, so their children aren’t subjected to dangers Colorado voters ostensibly imposed only upon themselves.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Tue, 23 Dec 2014
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/9l3DMYHT
Copyright: 2014 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: Bob Egelko

NEW LAW MAY AFFECT MARIJUANA LEGAL CASES
Judges Seek Clarity Before Sentencing
In a sharp reversal of federal drug policy, Congress has prohibited
the Justice Department from interfering with laws in California and
other states that allow the medical use of marijuana. And the
turnabout caught the immediate attention of federal judges, who want to know its impact on some recent criminal convictions under the federal law that classifies pot as one of the most dangerous drugs.
A day after President Obama signed the new law last week as part of a government spending bill, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer of San Francisco asked a federal prosecutor whether the change would affect the sentencing of a Mendocino County pot grower, who pleaded guilty to charges requiring at least five years in prison.
Not at all, replied Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Barry, because defendant Matthew Graves “was not growing (his crop) for patients. ..  He was growing it for money.”
But Breyer wouldn’t take Barry’s word for it, and rescheduled the
sentencing for February.
When Graves was charged with illegal cultivation in 2012, the judge
noted, federal law barred any evidence of medical use, but the new
law might make that information relevant now. In fact, Graves’ lawyer
has said some of his client’s plants were for medical patients. A day
earlier, another judge in the same courthouse postponed the
sentencing of a Humboldt County man who claimed his pot crop was all for medical use, in compliance with state law.
Not far away, lawyers for Harborside Health Center in Oakland, the
nation’s largest medical marijuana dispensary, were preparing to
invoke the abrupt change in federal law to fend off U.S. Attorney
Melinda Haag’s two-year effort to shut Harborside down and forfeit
its property.
The legislation should persuade Haag’s office “to lay down its arms so as to end the costly and misguided offensive on the rights of medical cannabis patients,” said Henry Wykowski, a lawyer for the dispensary.
Federal prosecutors aren’t prepared to concede anything. While the Justice Department hasn’t spoken publicly on the meaning of the new law, saying only that it’s under review, the legislation - an amendment to a government spending bill - is loosely worded and subject to varying interpretations.
Spending ban
Sponsored by two California congressmen, Republican Dana Rohrabacher
of Huntington Beach (Orange County) and Democrat Sam Farr of Carmel,
the amendment prohibits the government from spending money to prevent
32 states - California and 21 others that allow the medical use of
marijuana, and 10 more that legalize hemp oils - from “implementing
their own state laws.”
“It’s ironic that they don’t want any money spent (on federal enforcement), because there’s going to be a lot of money spent in courts,” said Marsha Cohen, a UC Hastings law professor in San Francisco who specializes in food and drug laws.
Medical marijuana advocates have promoted such legislation for the past decade to counteract a system in which state laws that allow cultivation, distribution and use of the drug with a doctor’s approval can’t even be mentioned in federal court.
Voters approved the California law in 1996, and since then both
Democratic and Republican presidential administrations have backed
raids on pot growers and suppliers, prosecution and imprisonment of
their leaders, and seizure of their properties, regardless of state
or local licensing. The four U.S. attorneys in California announced a
campaign in October 2011 to shut down marijuana dispensaries, which they likened to drug trafficking operations, and have closed several hundred.
The forfeitures have slowed since the Justice Department announced in
August 2013 that dispensaries complying with state laws should not be
a priority for federal enforcement. But Haag’s office and others in
California contend the outlets they target are violating state law
because of their inherently commercial nature - or, in Harborside’s
case, its sheer size, with 108,000 customers - even if the state lets
them operate.
‘Political statement’
Because federal prosecutors say they’re already abiding by state
laws, the new legislation is mostly “a political statement that has
no significant impact” on current cases, said Oakland attorney
William Taggart, a former Golden Gate University law school dean and advocate of marijuana decriminalization.
But medical marijuana advocates say Congress clearly meant to stop federal crackdowns on state-licensed operations.
Haag’s “lawsuit to forfeit property is contrary to the intent of Congress,” and so are prosecutions of medical marijuana growers and suppliers, said Cedric Chao, a lawyer for the city of Oakland, which approved Harborside’s operation.
Medical marijuana lawyer Joseph Elford said California courts have
rejected the federal government’s argument that pot dispensaries
violate state law.
The debate is about to begin in federal court.
Before he pronounces any sentence in the Mendocino case, Breyer said at Wednesday’s hearing, he needs to know “what does that act mean with respect to marijuana prosecutions?”
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Pubdate: Tue, 16 Dec 2014
Source: Two Rivers Tribune (CA)
Copyright: 2014 Two Rivers Tribune
Contact: opinions.trt@gmail.com
Website: http://www.tworiverstribune.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/5422
Author: Clifford Lyle Marshall

IT’S TIME TO MOVE
I write in response to the Times-Standard article, “DOJ says Indian
tribes can grow and sell marijuana” (Dec. 12, 2014), the North Coast
Journal article, “The Revolution Starts Here” (12/11/14), and in
anticipation of the TRT’s coverage of this issue.
The Department of Justice decision that tribes can grow and sell cannabis as long as they follow the same federal conditions as laid out for states that have legalized cannabis is truly a game changer for Indian tribes and a tremendous economic opportunity for our tribal citizens.
I was disappointed in the knee jerk responses from the Hoopa and Yurok leadership, without giving a second thought to the economic opportunity that the tribes have been presented with. Because of this response, I have submitted to the Election Board a petition that states:
“WE THE UNDERSIGNED members of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, and citizens of the Hoopa Nation, hereby petition the Election Board to conduct a Referendum election to Repeal Title 34, The Marijuana Cultivation Suppression Ordinance in its entirety.
Title 34, the Marijuana Cultivation Suppression Ordinance, provides
for the legal authorization to search and seize property, impose
fines, and exclude tribal members from the reservation, for
cultivation of marijuana.

Federal law does not require tribes to adopt or enforce such an ordinance.
Repealing Title 34 will have no legal effect on future federal
funding, nor will it affect the tribe’s sovereign right to
self-governance. The Department of Justice has declared that Indian
tribes can legally grow marijuana in states that have legalized it
for medicinal and/or recreational use. California has legalized
marijuana cultivation and use for medicinal purposes.

Tribal members should not be subject to the threat of discriminatory
prosecution and additional penalties by its government for the
cultivation of marijuana/cannabis on deeded or tribally assigned or
leased land. Repeal of Title 34 will provide tribal members the right
to make their own choices about medicinal use of marijuana, and the
right to participate in a legal, state/county regulated, agricultural industry.
Tribal timberlands will remain protected from trespass through
enforcement of the Conservation/Trespass Ordinance, Title 15.”

We live in a poor community with a very weak economy.
We’ve survived on federal funding which only provides employment for 20 percent of the tribal population, if that. The rest are forced to survive on welfare and meager services.
There are no new jobs now or in the future for the ‘have nots’ or the
homeless from federal funding or tribal government. So before anyone
condemns this opportunity, understand that the only thing now
standing between true economic independence, and the opportunity for
tribal citizens to earn a very good middle-class income from the
sweat of their brow by farming the legal crop of cannabis, is Title
34, the Marijuana Cultivation Suppression Ordinance. Marijuana has
been the number one industry in Humboldt County for decades, and is the only thing that has kept towns like Willow Creek, Orleans, and other communities in Humboldt County alive.
When Title 34 is repealed, citizen farmers will be able to legally
sell their cash crop to dispensaries through a local cooperative
without breaking the law or threat of arrest.
As to the comments made about protecting the environment, I accept that there has been some environmental degradation which, in my opinion, is overstated. I recall when we Indians were blamed for killing all the salmon back in the 70s, but we were exonerated by science which placed the blame on the dam diversion of water.
Nothing that the marijuana gardens may have used is comparable to the hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water diverted to the Central Valley Project, and it does a disservice to the issue of environmental protection to simply blame a scapegoat.
More than 50 percent of the Trinity is still diverted.
I would point out the our tribal water right has never been
quantified, and we are legally entitled to Trinity River water for
irrigation, a right we could use to argue for more water releases to the river.
These issues make repealing Title 34 imperative to protecting our
timberlands and our river. Permitting our citizens to grow on their
property eliminates the reason people grow in the mountains, which is
to hide. Legitimate farmers won’t have to hide if they can farm their
own land. For this economically depressed community, the decision of
the DOJ is nothing less than providence. If our council chooses to be
“unmoved” then ‘We the People’ must move by petition to create this
economic opportunity.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sun, 04 Jan 2015
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2015 Los Angeles Times
Contact: letters@latimes.com
Website: http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Susan Shapiro
Note: Susan Shapiro is coauthor of the bestseller “Unhooked: How to
Quit Anything” and author of the memoir “Lighting Up.”
THE DARK SIDE OF MARIJUANA
As the Number of States Decriminalizing Pot Rises, Don’t Lose Sight
of the Harm Weed Can Do.
In 2014, our country went cannabis crazy, bringing to 18 the number of states decriminalizing pot. Colorado opened boutiques selling “mountain high suckers” in grape and butterscotch flavors and posted signs that proclaimed the state is “where prohibition ends and the fun begins.” In my New York home, I’m glad that someone can carry up to 50 joints and no longer get thrown in the joint. Yet I worry that user-friendly laws and such recent screen glorifications as “High Maintenance” and “Kid Cannabis” send young people a message that getting stoned is cool and hilarious.
I know the dark side. I’m ambivalent about legalizing marijuana
because I was addicted for 27 years. After starting to smoke weed at
Bob Dylan concerts when Iwas13, I saw how it can make you say and do
things that are provocative and perilous. I bought pot in bad
neighborhoods at 3 a.m., confronted a dealer for selling me a dime
bag of oregano, let shady pushers I barely knew deliver marijuana,
like pizza, to my home. I mailed weed to my vacation spots and smoked a cocaine laced joint a bus driver offered when I was his only passenger.
Back then Willie Nelson songs, Cheech and Chong routines and “Fast
Times at Ridgemont High’s” Jeff Spicoli made getting high seem kooky
and harmless. My reality was closer to Walter White’s
self-destruction from meth on TV’s “Breaking Bad” and the delusional
nightmares in the film “Requiem for a Dream.” Everyone believed you couldn’t get addicted to pot.
Turns out I could get hooked on carrot sticks. Marijuana became an
extreme addiction for me. I’m not alone. Nearly17% of those who get
high as teenagers will become addicted to marijuana, according to the 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that up to half of daily marijuana smokers become addicted- an estimated 2.7 million people in the U.S.
The years I toked, I struggled with love and work, sometimes feeling
suicidal. The brilliant addiction specialist who helped me give up
pot a dozen years ago taught me that addicts self-medicate because
underlying every substance problem he’d ever seen “is a deep
depression that feels unbearable.” One-on-one therapy helped me
untangle what I was getting wasted to escape. Being drug-free saved
my health, marriage and career. Within a year, my income tripled. I
came to believe my doctor’s adage: “When you quit a toxic habit you
leave room for something beautiful to take its place.”
In writing classes I teach in New York and L.A., students from many
backgrounds confessed that they “smoked a bowl” or “got ripped” and
then got in a car accident, fell on subway tracks, had a wallet or
cell phone stolen, were sexually assaulted or had a physical
altercation that landed them in the hospital or jail. My
undergraduates loved the series “Weeds” and “Harold & Kumar” films and joked about being “cross-faded,” simultaneously imbibing on alcohol and marijuana.
Yet I warn them that getting stoned greatly increases the likelihood
of something bad happening, reminding them that pot blurs reality,
reduces inhibitions- and regularly leads to tragedy. Consider two
deaths in 2014 in Colorado that police linked to pot: a 47-year-old
man who ate marijuana-infused candy and fatally shot his wife, and
a19-year-old student who ingested a marijuana cookie and jumped to his death.
The weed of today is far stronger than in the past. President Obama
admitted smoking marijuana as a teen and said it’s no worse than
alcohol but hopes his daughters will avoid “the bad habit.” The new
edible pot products can be10 times stronger than a traditional joint,
says a report in the New England Journal of Medicine. The strength of pot varies, and it’s impossible to predict its effect. How you react to marijuana depends on your size, what you’ve eaten, the medications you take. As I tapered off, one hit from a pipe or bong could leave me reeling, as if I’d had five drinks.
Marijuana use doubles the risk of being in a car accident if you
drive soon after smoking it, and it causes more car accidents than
any other illicit drugs, according to Columbia University
researchers. They found it contributed to12% of traffic deaths in the
U.S. in 2010, triple the rate of a decade earlier.
The medical side effects are also significant. Smoking pot increases the risk of lung cancer 8%, according to British and New Zealand studies. It’s associated with bronchitis, respiratory infections and increases the risk of heart attack and stroke, concluded a New England Journal study. Another 2014 study found frequent use by teenagers and young adults causes cognitive decline and decreases IQ.  Marijuana essentially fries your brain.
Being a stoner was easy. Quitting was hard but gave me more to live
for. Before jumping on the buzzed bandwagon in the new year, throwing
a pot dessert party or voting to lift all restrictions across the
nation, ask yourself and your kids: Is the high worth the lows? We
shouldn’t send pot smokers to prison, but they don’t belong on
pop-culture pedestals either.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sun, 04 Jan 2015
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/tBbpcc2T
Copyright: 2015 San Jose Mercury News
Contact: letters@mercurynews.com
Website: http://www.mercurynews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/390
Author: Martin Totland, Richmond Confidential

POT ICE CREAM IS A FAMILY BIZ
Sausalito Creamer’s Son Striking Out on His Own
RICHMOND - When 6-year-old Isaac Lappert started serving ice cream in his family’s Sausalito business, he was too short for customers to see him behind the counter.
It wasn’t until last year, when his father told the now-24-year-old a
story about a famous rock band, that Lappert got the idea to start
his own business: Cannabis Creamery.
If you’ve been in any of Richmond’s medical marijuana dispensaries recently, you’ve probably seen Lappert’s locally sourced ice cream in the ‘Edibles’ section. It has been around for only a year, but his marijuana specialty ice cream is already available “from Sacramento to San Diego,” Lappert said.
The Lappert family has been making ice cream in Richmond for the past 13 years at a licensed dairy facility a few miles south of the Hilltop area. Lappert declined to reveal precisely where because of the risk of break-ins.
For the past year, Lappert has been making his own special blend at a different facility in the city, also a secret location.
In 1983, his father was approached by a ragged group of hairy
musicians who wanted to know if he could make some “special” ice
cream for their upcoming party. Michael Lappert obliged and made a
cannabis-infused batch of high-fat ice cream for them to take to
their party. As it turned out, the group was The Grateful Dead.
“They must have liked it, because they ended up ordering several more times,” Lappert said.  “This is what we got in the business for. Whatever people want, give it to them,” Michael told Isaac.
Isaac figured he could do what his father did, but legally, and so began Cannabis Creamery.
Lappert, whose shaggy brown hair and scruffy beard are de rigueur for his industry, quickly found that he was a long way from Sausalito. In his first week making cannabis ice cream, a botched drug deal led to a shooting. A man in a car was shot, and the car crashed into the factory doors.
“We got a nice welcome to Richmond,” Lappert said.
Since then, improved.
“Everyone is super-nice there,” Lappert said of Richmond. Once or twice a week, he crosses the Richmond Bridge from San Rafael to stir up batches at his facility here.
The novel business has already won several awards, most recently at the HempCon Kush Kup in San Bernardino last October. Lappert won the award for “Best Dessert Edible” for his mint chocolate chip ice cream, which packs 60 mg of THC, the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.
“I lab-test every batch,” said Lappert, who admits to obsessing over
the quality of his product. Precise, consistent dosage is important,
he said, before voicing his displeasure at what he considers his
competitors’ lax standards. “If you buy a cookie from someone in the
park, you might get stoned, or it might not hit you at all,” Lappert said.
His frustration at the lackadaisical process of other edibles-makers also partly stems from his time in culinary school, where he learned the importance of precision.
Lappert never attended high school or college. Instead, he spent his time working in the family business and traveling, before ending up at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in San Francisco.  It was there he started experimenting with edible marijuana products.
Lappert says the business is picking up, and he plans to expand for 2016.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Fri, 02 Jan 2015
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/lf2zAY6k
Copyright: 2015 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: John Ingold

A SHOT TO SOW POT SOUGHT
Colorado’s Attorney General Asks Federal Officials to Give the
State’s Higher-Ed Schools Permission to Grow Grass.
Colorado has made an unusual plea to federal authorities: Let our colleges grow pot.
In a letter sent last month, the state attorney general’s office asks federal health and education officials for permission for Colorado’s colleges and universities to “obtain marijuana from non-federal government sources” for research purposes.
The letter isn’t more specific on how the state’s higher-education
institutions might score weed. But it was sent pursuant to a law
passed in 2014 requiring state officials to ask that Colorado
colleges and universities be allowed “to cultivate marijuana and its
component parts.”
“Current research is riddled with bias or insufficiencies and often
conflict with one another,” reads the letter, written by deputy
attorney general David Blake. “It is critical that we be allowed to
fill the void of scientific research, and this may only be done with
your assistance and cooperation.” The request is a longshot. While
marijuana is, with qualifications, legal in Colorado, it remains
illegal under federal law, and getting permission to conduct research
on cannabis requires clearing a set of high hurdles - approval from
multiple federal agencies and strict requirements on how marijuana
must be handled and stored. Researchers that work without the federal government’s blessing risk losing crucial federal funding for their institutions, not to mention possible imprisonment.
An international treaty that the United States signed onto requires
the federal government to designate only one place in the country
that can legally grow marijuana for research. Since 1968, that place
has been the University of Mississippi’s National Center for Natural
Products Research, which cultivates cannabis on a 12-acre plot and
sends it to approved researchers.
Coincidentally, the National Institute on Drug Abuse recently put the
government’s pot-farm contract up for rebid. Applicants needed to
have 12 acres of “secured and video-monitored” outdoor space and
1,000 square feet of indoor space to grow marijuana and to be able to make marijuana extractions, test for potency and “prepare, preferably by handrolling, a small batch of marijuana cigarettes,” according to the official solicitation.
The contract’s winner is expected to be announced in the next couple
of months. A spokeswoman for the National Institute on Drug Abuse
would not say how many institutions applied for the contract or where
they were.
Spokesmen for the University of Colorado and Colorado State
University said their schools did not apply.

The Drug Enforcement Administration this year massively increased the
amount of pot the government’s official supplier can grow-from 21
kilograms to 650 kilograms. The increase was the result of a boom in
marijuana research interest, and the University of Mississippi has
pledged to grow new strains of marijuana to give researchers more
options for their studies.
Still, the Colorado attorney general’s letter says the federal government falls short of being able to supply researchers with the kinds of products available in Colorado’s commercial marijuana market. State health officials have just approved up to $8.4million in grants for marijuana studies, some of which will examine Colorado-specific products. But the attorney general’s office says more needs to be done.
“We need the support of our federal partners to overcome the inertia that continues to complicate state efforts in this area,” the letter states.
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Thu, 01 Jan 2015
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/7tsUh9cU
Copyright: 2015 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: David Migoya

APPEAL PAINTS POT CONFLICT
Feds Are Inconsistent About Prosecutions, Defendants Claim.
The federal government cannot passively allow a billion-dollar
marijuana industry to flourish by not prosecuting certain crimes and
then later deny its participants bankruptcy protection, a new court
filing says.
By refusing to allow marijuana derived assets to be protected in
bankruptcy in the same way other assets are, the government is
passively prosecuting the crimes it had earlier said it would not, “a
Catch-22” of the U.S. Department of Justice’s own making, according
to an appeal filed by a Denver couple whose bankruptcy was dismissed because much of their income was derived from a medical marijuana business.
Attorneys for Frank and Sarah Arenas of Denver argue in a 43-page
brief that a bankruptcy judge erred when he dismissed their petition
in August because their assets were derived from activity that is
illegal under federal law.
“The (Arenases) should not be faulted, or more importantly lose the right to a discharge of their debts, for playing by rules created by the same agency that seeks to dismiss their bankruptcy case for breaking those rules,” attorney Daniel Garfield wrote, arguing the court could simply refuse certain assets and allow the case to continue.
“The federal government has deliberately and actively allowed a legal
marijuana industry to flourish in Colorado and not to prosecute
participants in that industry,” Garfield wrote. “The federal
government has made a conscious decision to allow(the Arenases’)
otherwise illegal business to operate.”
If the U.S. Bankruptcy Appellate Panel of the 10th Circuit upholds the lower court ruling, the ramifications could be substantial.
Bankruptcy petitions by individuals or businesses whose income was
derived from marijuana - whether an employee of the shop or a
business that supplies one-would be denied.
The potential impact would reach into at least 23 states where
marijuana sales are legal in some form.

The Arenases’ bankruptcy is the latest in a series of cases in which
federal and state laws governing marijuana have clashed.
The federal government in February said it would not prosecute legal marijuana businesses in states that approved its sale as long as the businesses did not violate certain conditions, such as selling to children or trafficking across state lines. Banks were also required to step up oversight of any accounts they held.
The Arenases filed for personal bankruptcy protection in February, listing among their assets a building at 28th and Larimer streets.
Frank Arenas, 58, grew and sold medical marijuana in one part of the building as FSA and leased the other half to a different medical dispensary, Denver Patients Group.
During the bankrutpcy, DPG offered to purchase the building, but that added to the concern that marijuana income would taint the case.
Sarah Arenas, 52, suffered a stroke in 2011 and has since been
disabled, reliant on disability and pension payments. That income is
not considered tainted in the bankruptcy case, only that which is
tied to the marijuana businesses.
Other factors eventually pushed the Arenases to seek bankruptcy protection. Neither Sarah nor Frank would comment for this story.
Bankruptcy laws under Chapter 7 liquidation require a trustee to be
named and assets sold. That puts the U.S. trustee’s office in a
position of having to sell an illegal product for the benefit of
creditors, or to sell assets derived from money that comes from the
illegal product.
The conflict, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Howard Tallman said, is between a federal law that deems marijuana illegal and a state law that allows for its sale.
“Any (bankruptcy) plan proposed by the debtors would necessarily be
executed by unlawful means,” Tallman wrote in his nine-page opinion
in August. “Administration of this case ... is impossible without
inextricably involving the court and the trustee in the debtors’
ongoing criminal violation of the (Controlled Substances Act).”

Tallman in an earlier case determined bankruptcy laws would not extend to those with pot-derived assets, but the case sidestepped the issue by dumping the tainted assets.
Thomas and Susan Wright, owners of RentRite Super Kegs West, in 2012 sought Chapter 11 reorganization, hoping to pay creditors and resume their enterprise, which included a building on East 48thAvenue.
But a venture-capital group that held the rights to a $1.7 million
note on their commercial mortgage petitioned the court, saying
bankruptcy could not protect an illegal business - the Wrights leased
a portion of the building to three marijuana-related businesses.
“A federal court cannot be asked to enforce the protections of the
Bankruptcy Code in aid of a debtor whose activities constitute a
continuing federal crime,” Tallman wrote in the Wright case
The Wrights relinquished the building to the venture capital group
and their bankruptcy was allowed to continue.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sun, 28 Dec 2014
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/X9N6hBXO
Copyright: 2014 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: John Wenzel

ATTITUDES, IMAGES OF MARIJUANA USERS EVOLVE ALONG WITH MARKETING MESSAGES
Melissa Vitale had never considered a career in marijuana when she moved her family to Colorado from Austin, Texas, a little over a year ago.
An accountant and former fifth-grade teacher, she long thought marijuana should be legalized but had no designs on working in the industry.
“When you’re a mom, it’s not the easiest thing to manage in your
life,” the 41-year-old said of her occasional cannabis use. “I do not
and would not smoke in front of my children.”
It wasn’t until she met Amy Dannemiller, another mom at South Denver’s Slavens Elementary School, that working in marijuana even seemed like an option.
“I would see her at school and went to a couple parties at her house.
And the more we got to talking, the more I started expressing interest.”
Now Vitale does the books for Dannemiller - better known in the
industry as Jane West - and her company Edible Events, which produces
marijuana-centric parties. She also works for the Preferred Organic
Therapy dispensary and is a member of Dannemiller’s cannabis
networking group Women Grow.
“I come from a really conservative background, but my attitude’s definitely evolved a lot since we moved here,” Vitale said.
Changing the way people think about and use marijuana has not simply been a side effect of legalization in Colorado, which went into effect Jan. 1 after the passage of Amendment 64.
It’s an evolution that has played out on the streets and in living
rooms across the state.

“I smoke just as much as I ever have, and I still get it from the
black market because it’s cheaper,” said Elliott Woolsey, 32, a
Denver stand-up comedian and regular at Comedy Works. “For me the difference is that people have become more brazen, smoking on patios at bars and things like that. Nobody’s afraid of the cops anymore.”
People also feel more comfortable admitting their cannabis use to
those in their inner circles.
“I typically vape daily,” said Lauren Gibbs, a social media trainer and founder of Rise Above Social Strategies. “As a result, my migraines are more controlled than they have been in the eight years since my diagnosis of chronic migraine,” a condition for which she has been hospitalized twice and formerly took 17 pills a day to treat.
Gibbs, 34, moved to Colorado a little more than two years ago from Washington, D.C., but only in the past few months has she “come out” to her parents as a marijuana user.
“It’s become a pretty significant part of my business now, and I felt like there was no reason to hide it,” said Gibbs, also a member of Women Grow.
“My parents being OK with it is something I couldn’t have imagined a
year ago. But it’s like gay marriage: having a personal connection to
someone who’s gay changes more peoples’ minds than any amount of legislation or public opinion polls. And it’s the same with marijuana.”
Different factions also fought for the soul of cannabis culture this
year, as marketing firms tried to give marijuana a respectable shine
and, in turn, reach out to potential new consumers by changing the
drug’s stigma.
It didn’t always go as planned.
“Those were terrible quotes. I don’t even know where they came from,”
said Jennifer DeFalco, 25, co-owner of the Denver-based advertising
company Cannabrand. “I don’t think it really reflected what we were
trying to say.”
Nonetheless, DeFalco’s words - which were included in an October New York Times story and which compared some Colorado dispensaries to “underground abortion clinics” - exposed a deep divide in marijuana culture over how the industry should present itself.
Cannabrand lost at least one client, the dispensary group Mindful, after the article was published, as well as alienating marijuana activists.
However, DeFalco said her business, which she co-owns with Olivia
Mannix, has rebounded to include a half-dozen clients. Next year,
Cannabrand will launch the national marketing campaign “Destigmatize to Legalize,” which seeks to change skeptics’ minds about the value of marijuana and show that business professionals and parents can be pot users, too.
“There’s a whole range of casual consumers,” DeFalco said. “There
isn’t one single cannabis culture. And baby boomers, women and moms
are changing their minds because they’re experimenting with it on
their own and realizing it’s not as harmful as the stigma has
portrayed it to be for so long.”
The Colorado Symphony Orchestra also challenged the image of a
stereotypical stoner - lazy, sloppy, usually male - with its
“Classically Cannabis” events in the summer. The three private
fundraisers and one public concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre on Sept.
13 drew sponsors from in and outside the weed world, raising a total
of $150,000 for the cash-strapped nonprofit.
“We lost a few donors over it, but it was less than 1 percent,” said
Jerry Kern, executive director of the CSO, who also noted the
international press the orchestra received. “There was no huge
pushback because everybody understood it was a legitimate business in this state, and we were an organization that needed the support of everyone.”
The CSO’s first event, May 23 at Santa Fe Drive’s Space Gallery,
mostly resembled a quiet chamber music show - minus the fact that
more than a dozen attendees slipped onto the private patio to toke
from joints, glass pipes and vaporizers.
“Look around; this is not stoner town,” Evan Lasky, executive vice president of the CSO, told The Denver Post at the time. “We have to build new audiences because the old people are dying off. We have to fight this perception of elitism.” Older women in elegant evening gowns and jewels mingled with younger patrons who, despite their piercings and tattoos, still dressed the formal part.
This was a marked contrast to the image many detractors had of
marijuana users, who have been variously (and derisively) labeled as
freeloaders, hippies and thugs.
Stereotypical “stoner” events that pander to existing pot culture
were not difficult to find in Colorado this year. The Gypsy Jane
Krunkyard Jubilee, an October music festival at the Denver Mart, sold
itself with “hot cars and hot women,” hip-hop from Snoop Dogg, Warren
G and Tyga, and a considerable slate of quirky sideshow entertainment
all tied together with a blinged-out logo and omnipresent pot-leaf imagery.
Despite being legal statewide, pot’s image problem extends beyond the Front Range. High country towns such as Breckenridge and Granby have voted to minimize or ban pot shops and medical dispensaries altogether.
“Whether you’re pro-marijuana or against marijuana, you have to be
concerned about how tourists react to seeing it,” Breckenridge
retiree Bob Gordman, who voted to move the town’s lone dispensary off main street, told The Associated Press.
A recent state-produced report showed out-of-state visitors make 90
percent of recreational marijuana purchases in mountain towns.
Leaders in the Eastern Plains town of Brush also voted down a
proposal to turn a former prison there into a marijuana grow
operation, which would have added 31 jobs and $500,000 in tax
revenue, according to Nicholas Erker, who bought the facility.
“I am disappointed in some of the council members for not taking the time to educate themselves for the betterment of the community,” Erker told 7News in August.
Some Colorado businesses are less concerned with image and more with the bottom line. A survey released in March from Mountain States Employers Council, which represents nearly 3,000 businesses in 11 Western states, found that employers were taking a tougher stance against workers’ drug use in the wake of Amendment 64.
Eight months later that stance is eroding.
“In non-safety-sensitive occupations, we’ve seen a bit of a shift,”
said Curtis Graves, a staff attorney with the employers group. “In
fact, just last week a national company asked us to review their drug
policy because they’re going to try to suppress the results of
marijuana tests for a year and see what happens.”
Graves declined to name the company but said it was a matter of practicality.  “It’s in an industry where they’ve got to hire a large number of people and they probably tend to be on the young side,” he said.  “They know that if they rule out everybody who tests positive for marijuana, they’ll have a staffing issue. And they’re not the only ones.” Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sun, 28 Dec 2014
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/rDf3abcW
Copyright: 2014 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Aldo Svaldi

CANNABIS FIRMS SPREAD THE GREEN AROUND TOWN
Legalizing recreational marijuana has spawned a surge of activity in
some unexpected places and pumped formerly “dark” money into the
larger economy.
Estimates are that cannabis sales nationally this year will total about $2.6 billion, with Colorado claiming about a third of that or $840 million, according to rough estimates from ArcView Group.
Some of that money is funneling down to accountants, software developers, trademark lawyers, lighting vendors, general contractors and a long list of others supporting the new industry.
“It is very difficult to estimate,” said Patrick Rea, co-founder and managing director of Canopy Boulder, a business accelerator for cannabis companies focused on ancillary products and services.
ArcView helps investors prospect for cannabis-related startups and is a partner in CanopyBoulder. Rea is helping ArcView calculate economic impacts along the industry’s supply chain, an exercise he previously undertook for the natural foods industry.Current estimates suggest another $350million to $650million is spent nationally on goods and services related to bringing cannabis products to market, Rea said. Assuming it is $500 million, and that Colorado again accounts for about a third, vendors here could receive around $161 million this year.  At Thrive Workplace Solutions in posh Cherry Creek North, far from the warehouse districts where cannabis is grown, two entrepreneurs are looking for a big payday providing technology to an industry moving away from paper-and-pencil.
“We don’t ever touch the product, but we help the guys that do,” said Rob Rusher, CEO of GrowBuddy, which is developing an application to log environmental conditions and boost yields and reduce costs.Rusher is giving away the app, which digitizes what are known in the industry as grow journals. The trade-off is gaining access to “big data,” he said.
“Data is power regardless of the industry,” said Rusher, who also is developing an online grower supply marketplace within the app.
GrowBuddy is working closely with Grow Remote, a startup founded by Greg Eisenbeis, a process engineer who is tapping his expertise in automation and control systems to monitor and automate cannabis cultivation.
Automation, in theory, should cut labor costs, improve energy efficiency and boost plant yields. And the technologies GrowBuddy and Grow Remote are developing should transfer to growing any kind of plant in a controlled setting indoors.
“We are coming to the game with experience on what is a really great way to control all of this,” he said.
An often-repeated phrase is that legalization has created the
equivalent of a gold rush, minting wealth not only for those who
strike gold but also for those selling the picks and shovels.
“This is a substantial growth opportunity with a substantial risk.
That combination brings a very specific type of personality,” said
Denver attorney Steven Weigler, founder of Emerge Counsel. “There are a lot of speculators.”
Weigler launched his business this year, intending to work with a
variety of startups. But given his timing, about 40 percent of his
work is linked to cannabis.
Those supporting the industry face a different kind of payoff than those opening a dispensary or raising crops, ArcView CEO Troy Dayton said.
Their reward is more uncertain and takes longer to achieve. But it
could prove much larger as more states legalize.
“Colorado is one of the key places for innovation in this space, and you will see more and more companies coming out of Colorado on the ancillary side,” Dayton predicts.
Some entrepreneurs start out trying to get a dispensary license and
turn to playing a supporting role when they fail. Others have never
touched the stuff but chase what they see as a growth opportunity.
And there are a few, like Nathan Mendel, owner of Your Green
Contractor, who stumble into the field and never look back.

An architect friend asked in 2011 if he wanted to work on a
dispensary. “It sounded like a retail project. I didn’t think about
it either way,” he said.

That job led to one referral and then another. Your Green Contractor
now is sought out nationally, and Mendel is considered an expert in
converting old buildings into growing facilities.
Trying to grasp how big the cannabis support industry is in Colorado is difficult. The industry is so new-not to mention still illegal on the federal level-that the specific codes tracking employment and business formations aren’t in place yet.
But here is one clue: A Denver Post analysis of business
registrations with the Colorado secretary of state that included the
word “cannabis” in the name went from only 17 between 2000 and 2008, to more than 575 since 2009, including about 275 the past two years.
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Tue, 23 Dec 2014
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/qQUCs7EQ
Copyright: 2014 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Ricardo Baca

CASH BACK TO POT SHOPS
More Than $500,000 in Vendor Fee Rebates Is a Sales-Tax Reward.
Colorado’s cannabis shops, on the hook for higher taxes than
traditional retailers, are nonetheless reaping more than half a
million dollars in rebated sales-tax revenue in 2014 thanks to timely
payment to the tax man.
The refunded money from the state’s so-called vendor fee, a 79year-old agreement the state made with its businesses, suggests the state’s marijuana businesses are achieving an important goal, that of becoming more establishment, despite the extra hurdles they face in the marketplace.
The majority of states with a statewide sales tax have an equivalent to Colorado’s vendor fee, which rewards all businesses (not just pot shops) for the prompt payment of taxes by letting them keep a percentage of them each month. Colorado’s vendor fee, which allows businesses to keep 3.3 percent of the 2.9 percent state sales tax, dates to 1935- though it has been reduced or temporarily eliminated at various times since then.
Medical and recreational marijuana stores throughout the state have
already kept more than $447,000 of their sales taxes from Jan. 1 to
Oct. 31, according to Denver Post estimates. If marijuana sales
trends continue throughout November and December - months for which the Colorado Department of Revenue has not yet calculated tax numbers for cannabis sales - the state’s 400-plus shops will end up keeping around $575,000 in sales tax. (State forecasters Monday said general fund revenue could grow almost 9 percent for the fiscal year 2014-15.)
“The sales-tax system is somewhat burdensome for businesses to comply with,” said Democratic state Sen. Pat Steadman. “The vendor fee provides them with some sort of compensation.”
Colorado’s vendor fee was 2.2 percent before July 2014, when it
returned to its normal 3.3 percent rate.
Colorado pot shops aren’t getting rich off their vendor fees, but the charges are a potent incentive to remit sales taxes in a timely manner, according to Mitch Woolhiser, owner of Northern Lights Cannabis Company in Edgewater. Woolhiser recently finished his November taxes and remembers keeping around $200 in the form of his monthly vendor fee.  “It’s an example of a government program that sort of works and isn’t a complete disaster,” Woolhiser said. “If you file on time and collect the fee, it adds up over time.”
Tax deductions
Woolhiser said the fee is a welcome respite, especially given the
lack of tax breaks for marijuana businesses that pay
higher-than-average federal tax rates because of IRS Code 280E, which
denies deductions to those trafficking in illegal drugs. While legal
pot’s reach in the U.S. is legitimately expanding, the IRS has said
its federal scheduling won’t allow for normalized tax deductions.
“The process of paying taxes in the marijuana business is a little more laborious as well because we actually have to physically travel there,” said Woolhiser, who pays his taxes in cannabis-scented cash for lack of a bank account. “Luckily, my shop isn’t too far from the (Department of Revenue), so I can do it without too much of a hassle.  But when I have to file five separate returns, spending two to three hours each month just doing this, it can be a lot.”
Reimbursement
While some mom-and-pop stores, Northern Lights included, handle this kind of accounting in-house, others contract the work out. Either way, the businesses are spending time and money to collect and remit these sales taxes to the state of Colorado, and they deserve the modest reimbursement the vendor fee allows, according to Christopher Howes, a lobbyist and the president of the Colorado Retail Council.
“It’s an important fee that the retailers use to offset their
accounting and management of the state’s sales tax,” said Howes.
“It’s no joy to collect the sales tax for the state of Colorado, but
we do it. It’s a small fee that attempts to make up the more than
millions of dollars that goes toward collecting it.”

When Howes was asked about the state’s legal marijuana businesses’ access to the vendor fee, he said, “As long as the state says they’re a legal business, they should be allowed what other businesses get.”
Northern Lights’ Woolhiser recognizes why the vendor fee might look
like a questionable gift from the state to the businesses, but he
insists that it makes sense and that it helps small businesses.
“I can see where some people might say the state should get all of it and that it’s a privilege to do business in the state,” said Woolhiser. “But we pay plenty of other fees for that privilege.”
He added that it’s a smarter, gentler alternative to what ultimately could lead to time and money spent in collections: “Instead of using a stick, they’re using a carrot.”
Steadman agrees: “It’s a courtesy. But (these businesses) are important partners in our tax-collection system. We make them collect the tax at their point of sale. They’re doing a little bit of work by being the tax man, the collector for the state with every transaction they do.
“It’s more work for them.”
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Wed, 31 Dec 2014
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/T2fBNsjw
Copyright: 2014 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: John Ingold

COLORADO AG SAYS IT’S ILLEGAL. PERIOD.
By virtue of a single comma, the Colorado attorney general’s office
says making marijuana hash oil at home is still illegal under state
law, despite other laws legalizing marijuana use, cultivation and possession.
The opinion of the state’s top lawyer comes in a brief filed in a criminal case against a Mesa County man. The man, Eugene Christensen, is charged with arson, reckless endangerment and manufacture of marijuana concentrate. The last charge is a Class 3 drug felony, punishable by two to four years in prison.
Christensen has argued that the state’s law prohibiting manufacture
of marijuana concentrate is now unconstitutional, after Colorado
voters passed Amendment 64 in late 2012. The amendment legalizes limited possession of marijuana concentrate and also contains a provision allowing for “processing” of marijuana plants.
Hash oil is made by dissolving the active chemicals from dried marijuana plants then evaporating the sometimes-flammable solvent to form a thick, potent glop.
“The clear and unmistakable language of the Colorado Constitution,”
Christensen’s attorney wrote in a motion seeking to throw out the
charge, as quoted in the attorney general’s brief, “is that it is
legal in Colorado to process marijuana and marijuana concentrate and that such actions shall not be criminal offenses.”
But, in its brief, the attorney general’s office argues that
Amendment 64 specifically exempts hash oil from its protections. The argument relies heavily on the amendment’s terminology and punctuation.
For instance, the attorney general’s brief argues the protection for
“processing” marijuana does not cover hash oil extractions done at
home because, in part, the definition of marijuana excludes “oil.”
In defining the term “marijuana,” Amendment 64 includes the caveat that the term”does not include industrial hemp, nor does it include fiber produced from the stalks, oil, or cake made from the seeds of the plant ...”
It’s the comma after “oil” in that sentence on which the attorney general’s office hangs much of its argument. In a five sentence footnote, the attorney general’s office argues that the exclusion of “oil” stands separately from any reference to industrial hemp or marijuana seeds.
“Construing the general term of ‘marijuana concentrate’ to include ‘oil’ would make the provision excluding ‘oil’ meaningless,” the office argues in the main body of its brief.
Christian Sederberg, one of Amendment 64’s authors, says he
understands the concern over residential extractions of hash oil -
which have been linked to a rising number of home explosions in
Colorado- and agreed they should be banned. But he said the attorney general’s argument goes beyond what Amendment 64’s authors ever intended and could be used to ban hash oil possession.
In a statement, Colorado Attorney General John Suthers said voters
wanted Amendment 64 to promote only responsible marijuana use.
“To decriminalize dangerous and unreasonable behavior in which people are getting hurt and houses are blowing up defies the intent of the voters,” Suthers said.
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sun, 28 Dec 2014
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/OXw0Gu7U
Copyright: 2014 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Joey Bunch

COLORADO POT LOBBY GAINS CLOUT ON KEY ISSUES AS LAWMAKERS LISTEN
Colorado’s Department of Public Health and Environment surprised the marijuana industry in October by proposing a ban on candy, brownies and other edibles and drinks infused with cannabis.
Edibles accounted for a surprising 45 percent of marijuana sales and
a majority of the regulatory headaches in the state’s first year of
legal recreational pot. Within hours, the growing rapid-response
marijuana lobby swooped in and beat back the proposed ban.
“For the year 2014, edibles has been the most difficult issue for the industry,” said Michael Elliott, executive director of the powerful Colorado lobbying outfit Marijuana Industry Group. “And largely we’ve solved it.” With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, it’s not surprising that the cannabis lobbying industry is growing almost as fast as the plants.
Nine years ago, it wasn’t that way, although Colorado voters had
passed medical marijuana in 2000. Back then Brian Vicente of Sensible
Colorado and Mason Tvert of Safer Alternative For Enjoyable
Recreation were the most distinct voices on the issue to legalize and
regulate marijuana.
“For the first few years in Colorado, people would refer to me as ‘The Marijuana Guy,’ “ said Tvert, now spokesman for the national Marijuana Policy Project, which advocates for legalization and fair regulation in other states. “And now you go to a meeting and there are dozens of marijuana guys and gals.”
Tvert’s initial campaign was to show marijuana was safer than alcohol and shouldn’t be held to a higher standard of regulation or prosecution. In the Colorado Capitol, lobbyists for pot now match those for the much older, better-financed alcohol industry.
The pot industry directly employed 26 lobbyists who were collectively paid about $331,000 during the past legislative session, according to state reports.
An additional 34 lobbyists were employed by groups that had a stake in the issue, such as local governments, law enforcement, drug treatment facilities and schools.
By comparison, in the last session, a failed bill would have allowed local governments to extend closing times for alcohol sales beyond 2 a.m. There were 57 lobbyists supporting, opposing or monitoring the bill, according to state records.
In 2013, when a bill proposed allowing grocery stores to sell full-strength beer, there were 40 lobbyists working on the issue, which eventually failed.
Spending on alcohol lobbying is difficult to calculate in Colorado, because it overlaps with many other issues a lobbyist might be paid for, according to the secretary of state’s office. But nationally in 2014, the beer, wine and liquor industry spent at least $18.3 million on 231 lobbyists, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The public-interest site doesn’t calculate the pot industry’s overall lobbying efforts but notes that the Marijuana Policy Project spent more than $1 million on lobbying nationwide in 2013, and the pro-pot Drug Policy Alliance spent an additional $520,000.
Creating pot credit union
Addressing edibles is far from the only regulatory tangle for the
growing industry. In November, the state issued a charter to the
first credit union to serve marijuana businesses, the governor’s
office said the state had gone to “the end of the line” in what it
could do to provide banking for a booming new industry.

Lobbyists for the state’s pot industry helped push through a bill to
create a state credit union for their clients during just seven days
at the end of the last legislative session. Big banks won’t do
business with pot growers, sellers and buyers, because marijuana
still violates federal law.
Because the credit union still needs the blessing of federal regulators, backers can only hope to have the political muscle in Washington they enjoy in Colorado.
“I think the good players, the people who are concerned about the state and seeing a big industry run the right way, who have a sincere concern about public safety, we’ve certainly found that at the end of the day people are listening,” said Josh Hanfling, a proposed board member for the credit union and a well-connected lobbyist for marijuana seller Invita Wellness.
Sen. Pat Steadman, D-Denver, said the pro-pot lobby hasn’t gotten everything it wants, but it’s taken advantage of the opportunity to provide valuable information about how the industry works and the affects and costs of proposed rules.
“I think we’re doing it right,” Steadman said. “I think the industry has the right amount of voice, and the legislature is taking a thoughtful approach to what’s in the best interest of the industry and what’s in the best interest of the state.”
Colorado voters passed a constitutional amendment in 2012 to legalize recreational marijuana. In the 2013 legislative session there were 21 bills.
After sales began Jan. 1, lawmakers considered 30 separate pieces of
pot-related legislation, tackling issues from banking to regulating
edibles to limiting civil liability in marijuana agritourism and
using pot revenue to fix flood-damaged schools.
Lawmakers will wrangle with just as many issues in this session,
including whether medical marijuana licenses should be taxed or
regulated differently, how many plants caregivers can grow, fire
safety procedures where pot is grown under lamps indoors and various attempts to snag a share of tax revenue.
Elliott said the amount of legislation reflects the aspects of the industry that either didn’t exist before or weren’t regulated in Colorado.
Elliott’s organization was formed by dispensaries in 2010 to help
guide the rules that govern them.
“Before you had law enforcement controlling the discussions, and their only goal was to the do away with the industry,” he said. “No industry can survive like that.”
The dispensaries stepped up after the federal government said it wouldn’t crack down on them if they could demonstrate they were following all state laws. At the time, hardly any state laws existed, which could have proven problematic for the dispensaries, Elliott said.
As a result, the state excluded felons from gaining pot business licenses and required background checks and financial disclosures, among other measures.
Most bills have gotten bipartisan support. While it’s perceived that Democrats favor the industry and Republicans resist, Elliott said plenty of Republicans want to see the industry operated the right way.
“The principles of the Republican Party are very much in line with
this movement,” Elliott said. “When you hear the Republicans talk,
it’s ‘Get the federal government out of our way, states rights,
individual freedom, small business.’ Those are the purported
principles of the Republican Party, and all that is right in line
with what we’re doing here.”

A Pew Research poll last year indicated 49 percent of Democrats
nationwide support marijuana legalization, compared with 32 percent
of Republicans.
Diverse lobby
The pot lobby might represent a broader diversity of interests and
backgrounds than any another other industry in the Capitol.
Hanfling, for example, is one of Colorado’s best-connected lobbyists.
Hanfling worked at a “high level” on Hickenlooper’s run for mayor and governor. His lobbying firm partner, R.D. Sewald, was Hickenlooper’s director of legislative services and liaison to the City Council.
Hanfling’s other lobbying clients include the city of Glendale, Walmart, Land Rover, CenturyLink and the Colorado Outdoor Advertising Association.
“They come from everywhere,” said Amanda Reiman, manager of marijuana law and policy for the national Drug Policy Alliance.
“Some come from backgrounds working on the environment, medicinal, social justice, ACLU and criminal justice.
“Then you have a set who are interested in being a part of a
burgeoning issue, just like the people who got into the tech boom.”
Reiman holds the influential position of identifying and forming strategy around policies on pot that are argued in political circles across the country. She has a background in social work.
The dissertation for her doctorate from the University of California dealt with how medical marijuana dispensaries provide health services. “I thought if I did the research and proved the question, policy would follow,” she said. “I was naive.”
The experience sparked her into advocacy around data.
“The key role of lobbyists in the marijuana industry is as educators,
(or) translators,” she said. “It’s a new thing in a lot of places,
and there’s definitely a need for translation.
“It’s not always about getting what you want, but it’s about helping people understand what’s at stake and broader implications.”
Gina Carbone, a former Washington, D.C., lobbyist and a founding
member of Smart Colorado, said her group doesn’t take a stand for or
against legalization but works on issues related to the health and
safety of youths in light of legal marijuana. Smart Colorado has
pushed the issue of making edibles more distinct to prevent
accidental ingestion.

Smart Colorado’s proponents often are parents and community leaders who take time off from work to go to the statehouse to face off against experienced, well-paid advocates on the other side, she said.
“They’re powerful, and they can put in a lot of money. We’re seeing
that,” Carbone said of the professional pot lobbyists she faces.
“Does that stand up to parents concerned about pot shops going in in their neighborhood?”
Future fights
Sam Kamin, a law professor and director of the Constitutional Rights
and Remedies Program at the University of Denver, isn’t at all
surprised by the manpower and lobbying around pot.
Big industries with a lot of money to gain or lose always field
lobbyists. With Colorado as one of the first states to wade into
regulating marijuana, those interested in the outcome come from
outside the state’s borders, as well.
Other states that legalize marijuana will look to Colorado for their regulatory boilerplate, Kamin said.
“The stakes are high, and Colorado is the first place in the country figuring out how to do this,” he said. “Being on the forefront nationally has a lot of the focus here.”
In the session that begins Jan. 7, legislators will decide how to use
the revenue that’s flowing in. Lawmakers will have to decide whether
to r efund an estimated $30 million to taxpayers, as would be
required by the state’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or invest it in
programs or construction.

A working group made up of industry officials and those concerned about marijuana edibles adjourned last month without any consensus about potential regulations to make them distinguishable from candy, cookies or drinks that aren’t laced with pot.
That political football is punted back to the legislature now.
Steadman and lobbyists also expect changes to requirements for
medical marijuana licenses, because the original rules have a sunset
Hanfling said the stigma of marijuana has fallen away in Colorado in the past few years.
“People are finding out that the people who are running the shops and working in the grow operations are their neighbors, who, like people in any business, want to see it succeed,” he said. “Some of the nonprofits I work with, a year ago, they would have never wanted to get pot money. That’s changing.
“I hope five years from now we’re talking about pot just like we’d
talk about any other business.”
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: DrugSenseBot http://drugpolicycentral.com/bot/
Pubdate: Sat, 03 Jan 2015
Source: Bradenton Herald (FL)
Copyright: 2015 Bradenton Herald
Contact: http://www.bradenton.com/submit-letter/
Website: http://www.bradenton.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/58
Author: Kristen Wyatt, Associated Pres

COLORADO TO DEBATE ROLE OF MEDICAL POT IN 2015
DENVER - Just as Colorado is settling in for a second year of recreational marijuana sales, state lawmakers have some big decisions to make about its older cousin, the medical marijuana market.
The state’s medical-pot regulations are due for automatic renewal in
2015. That means that all the rules about growing, processing and
selling medical pot are open to change.
Colorado’s 2010 marijuana regulations were the template for the rules that now govern the recreational market. But there are some important distinctions between the two, and Colorado’s Legislature will have to consider whether the medical system needs some changes.The biggest fight will likely be how to squeeze more taxes out of medical pot.
Lawmakers from both parties, along with large for-profit marijuana producers, complain that wide holes in Colorado’s medical marijuana framework have led to a still-thriving unregulated market for pot.
Some caregivers grow large quantities of untaxed pot, with none of the seed-to-sale tracking required of commercial growing operations.
Officials predicted that Colorado’s medical patients would stop paying
annual fees for so-called “red cards” and join the recreational market
once dispensaries opened to all over 21.
That hasn’t happened, and taxes are the likely culprit. Medical pot is subject only to Colorado’s statewide sales tax, 2.9 percent. That’s about one-tenth of the taxes levied on recreational pot.
The tax differential has helped create a patient base that has grown, not shrunk.
Colorado’s medical marijuana registry has grown from 107,000 people in late 2012 to about 116,000 this year. Pot shops have sold a greater volume of medical marijuana than recreational marijuana products.
“There’s enough of a price differential between recreational and medical to offer people an advantage” to pay $15 a year to stay on the medical registry, said Dr. Larry Wolk, Colorado’s chief medical officer.
But lawmakers can’t raise medical pot taxes without going back to
voters. Instead, they may try to winnow the medical patient pool and
drive patients to the recreational market.
One proposal would require more scrutiny of the doctors who recommend marijuana for the most common ailment on the registry - severe pain.
Another likely bill would concern caregivers. The state Department of
Regulated Agencies, which reviews expiring regulations, suggested in
October that lawmakers require caregivers to register where they’re
growing pot.
The agency found that a majority of caregivers now haven’t registered with the Health Department, many of them “because they do not want the government to know of their cultivation.”But Colorado lawmakers have stumbled for years on efforts to crack down on unregulated marijuana caregivers.
The state constitution guarantees people with certain medical conditions to name a caregiver of their choice, with no mention of taxes.
Patient advocates say to expect push-back on attempts to drive medical
patients to the recreational market. “This is nothing more than a
money grab,” said Jason Warf, executive director of the Southern
Colorado Cannabis Council.
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sun, 28 Dec 2014
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/JKbGLyuo
Copyright: 2014 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Ricardo Baca

A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF THE WORLD’S FIRST MARIJUANA EDITOR
That harried, Friday-evening moment when you’re switching gears from
work brain to party mode, gathering what you’ll need for a fun night
out - keys, phone, bottle of wine for the dinner party you’re
attending - has changed quite a bit in post-legalization Colorado.
Some are adding a vape pen or infused tincture to their date-night
clutches. Others will pre-pack a bowl or one-hitter before heading
out - or they’ll chew on a 10-milligram edible on their way to the
party. And those running low on supplies can swing by the pot shop on their way to the dinner and maybe grab a pre-rolled joint as a gift to the evening’s hosts.
Think this sounds exaggerated or made up, some amplified version of what’s actually happening on Friday nights all around Colorado? Think again.
A year in the life of the world’s first marijuana editor - that was
the working headline when I first started this essay a few weeks
back. Every story needs a beginning, and this one started 13 months
ago when The Post appointed me the paper’s marijuana editor.
Has my life been all buds and flowers ever since? In a way, yes; I think and write and talk about marijuana daily as I edit The Post’s culture-of-weed site, The Cannabist. In other ways, no; I’ll snack on an edible to relax after a long day at the office or before a night out at a rock show, but it’s hardly a daily occurrence for me.
All that said, I have learned and witnessed a lot in the past 12 months, as we all have since recreational sales started in January.
And our stories of the past year are the historic record of
Colorado’s first-of-its-kind legalization.

But taking a quick step back: Remember that Friday night, the dinner
party? That was real. My fiancee and I were running late for her
friend Alissa’s birthday party. “We need to bring something - do we
have enough wine to bring a couple of bottles,” I reminded Melana as she came downstairs. She shot me a knowing look as she opened the kitchen cabinet where we keep our stash.
“I think she’ll appreciate this more than wine,” Melana said, holding
a store-bought, still-in-its-wrapper joint between the tips of her
fingers. An hour later when we handed Alissa the weedy gift, she
threw her head back and laughed and hugged us both, holding up the joint to the rest of the party and said: “This is the best! And you’re not even the first people tonight to give me weed for my birthday!”
Surely some of you are questioning the integrity of this story or
assuming it took place in some gritty neighborhood. But I assure you
every word is true, and this party was in the lush backyard of a
beautiful Cherry Hills home.
Alissa Joblon is our friend who was celebrating her very fun birthday that night. “Oh, my god, that was the best,” she told me when I called her in December. “At least 10 people brought me a joint or edibles that night. ... I have one friend whose sister owns a dispensary, and she gave me five joints and a big thing of Cheeba Chews and some other edibles.”
Could that moment have happened in 2013 Colorado, or even 2010?  Absolutely. But for Joblon, it didn’t happen until the year Colorado started recreational pot sales.
“It was the first birthday that that happened, people bringing me weed,” Joblon said. “Now everyone can go get a joint on their way to the party instead of stopping at the liquor store. People were bringing my sister booze, and everybody was bringing me weed.
“And that’s the perfect gift for me.”
For Denver resident Lucas Dean Fiser, this year’s legal sales have opened up a special door between him and his mother, Donna. When he drives north to Fort Collins to visit his family, he’ll often get a sweet note from his mom: “Hey, I’m low on tincture. Can you grab me some?”
“The person I get high with the most is still my mother,” said Fiser,
who used to freelance for The Cannabist. “I had gotten high with my
mom before legalization, maybe twice. But now that it’s legal, this
is our very own ritual.
“On Thanksgiving we ate turkey, and then we drank some tincture and played (card game) Apples to Apples. In the summertime we’d always go out and sit by my dad’s firepit in the backyard. It’s our special time together.”
When Fiser first started writing for The Cannabist, his mom asked him about the tincture he kept referring to in his pieces.
“So I introduced her to it,” he said. “She wanted to know what I was
writing about in the column, ‘ What is that tincture?’ I told her how
it’s good for your nerves and muscles, and she wanted to try it. We
don’t like smoking as much, and edibles often kick too hard. But we
do like tincture - we live by it. The tincture’s so easy to monitor.”
There are hundreds more anecdotes of the surprisingly substantial social changes seen in Colorado in 2014, some from my own dining room.
We’ve always loved to entertain, to have friends old and new over to
our 110-year-old Victorian home for dinner parties and happy hours.
Sometimes we’ll host two or three dinners a week; it’s the height of
quality time, sharing food and drink in an unhurried and
unpretentious environment.
Of the hundreds of dinners we’ve hosted, marijuana started to come
into play in 2014. Sure, maybe a friend would ask if they could hit
their pipe in the backyard. But people actively bringing pot as a
gift or a to-be-shared aperitif? That’s pretty specific to the first
year of legal sales.

A colleague brought over a package of joints rolled with G6, one of
his favorite pot strains. A friend showed up with a bottle of wine
and a 100-milligram infused chocolate bar, which was split up and
sent around the table. Another friend, Zack, brought over a couple
grams of his favorite strain, Bubble Gum, which was shared around our outdoor patio table on a temperate fall evening.
“Ah, that was such an awesome night,” my friend Zack Armstrong said.  He had picked up the Bubble Gum at Denver shop L’Eagle before having dinner at my house in December.
Armstrong, who hails from Colorado Springs, says he got high only
once in 2013, but he’s been a bit more liberal since recreational
sales started this year.
“Legalization, it’s 100 percent of why I’m smoking weed every single day now,” said Armstrong, who is (full disclosure) working on an independent documentary on The Post’s coverage of marijuana called “Rolling Papers.” “I went from smoking whatever pot my girlfriend’s brother-in-law had once in 2013 to smoking pot every single day in 2014. I am Mr. Normalization.”
Armstrong struggled with reconciling his new connection to marijuana.  “I don’t know why it is,” he said. “I break the law all the time, so it wasn’t that.”
Without knowing it, he then compared the pot-shopping experience to the advantages of visiting a record store. “There’s a lighter vibe around the whole thing now,” he said. “And now there’s so much information out there. You can go to a pot store and talk with somebody. You get there, and everyone’s talking about the different strains. ‘Oh, you get paranoid? Why don’t you try this.’ It’s cool!”
Yet another sign of our ever-changing relationship with weed in Colorado? Those quotes above. Joblon, Fiser and Armstrong are all friends of mine, sure, but they’re still talking about their love of marijuana under their given names in a major metropolitan daily newspaper - something they might not have felt comfortable about in years past.
(Trust a marijuana editor on this one: Getting people to talk pot on the record isn’t always a simple process.)
Perhaps one of the most unexpected outcomes of the normalization of cannabis in Colorado is the elitism and undervaluing of our new freedoms.
Is marijuana becoming uncool to teens who hear their parents talk
about their “rad, new vape pen”? Are we all losing historical
perspective on how huge this whole thing is? Have adults become so
accustomed to having immediate, almost-thoughtless access to pot that they’ve forgotten that it’s still illegal in more than 99 percent of the world?
“People are, myself included, a little too advantageous (of cannabis) sometimes,” Kayvan Khalatbari, who co-owns pot shop Denver Relief and runs stand-up collective Sexpot Comedy, said while sitting at Rooster & Moon coffeehouse in Denver. “It’s amazing how much public perception is shifting but also how people act.”
Less than a year after recreational sales started, we already are
taking legal pot for granted. And it’s only natural, especially when
you pass multiple pot shops every day on your commute and vape pens often seem as common as cigarettes.
Sometimes we need our friends and colleagues in other states and
countries to set us straight, something they’re often quick to do.
“Remember, it’s still not legal where I live,” is a familiar
sentiment seen on social media.

And we do remember that - well, most of the time. And “remembering things most of the time,” my friends, is simply part of a marijuana editor’s job.
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Thu, 01 Jan 2015
Source: Westword (Denver, CO)
Column: Ask a Stoner
Copyright: 2015 Village Voice Media
Contact: http://www.westword.com/feedback/EmailAnEmployee?department=letters
Website: http://www.westword.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1616
Author: William Breathes

CAN KAISER DRUG-TEST ITS PATIENTS?
Dear Stoner: Kaiser Permanente is sending out forms to people who are
on pain medication that say the insurance company is going to be
doing random urinalysis tests and not allowing even medicinal users
of cannabis to continue using it. I was wondering about the legalities of this.
Timidly Toking in Thornton
Dear Timid Toker: This was the first we’d heard of drug testing by
Kaiser - though, frankly, it doesn’t surprise us much, coming from a
health-insurance company that looks out for its bottom line more than it does for its patients. But there’s more to it than that.
The agreement you signed is part of an effort to combat the illicit
prescription-drug trade that is going on nationally, killing more
people each year than auto accidents do. In Arapahoe County, the
number of drug overdoses last year was three times the rate of
motor-vehicle deaths, and 83 percent of those overdoses were on
prescription drugs.
But here’s the thing: If the doctor prescribing your opioids is the
one who signed off on your medical card, then you can probably still
puff away the pain while blissfully popping pills. We’ve got a copy
of the Opioid Treatment Agreement for Chronic Pain form from Kaiser, and your story checks out, Timid Toker - but the agreement says you can’t use medical marijuana unless it has been authorized by Kaiser.
A spokeswoman with Kaiser’s Colorado office says she can’t comment on
any specific patients, but she did say that these agreements are
quite common. They aren’t really about catching medical marijuana
users so much as they are looking out for people who may be abusing opioids. In fact, Kaiser doesn’t have a policy for or against medical cannabis, she says; that’s up to you and your doctor.
Now, how to breach that conversation with your friendly Kaiser rep is
a completely different story. (We suggest using the words
“hypothetically” and “in general” and speaking in the third person
about a made-up individual.) Also, don’t expect Kaiser to pony up for
your pot. Colorado’s medical marijuana law states that “no
governmental, private, or any other health insurance provider shall
be required to be liable for any claim for reimbursement for the
medical use of marijuana.”
Side note: We spoke with a health-/life-insurance expert who tells us
that most insurance companies view cannabis use as being on par with
cigarette use, even if you are an edibles person and don’t actually
smoke your weed. Basically, it’s a strike against you as a
healthy-living individual - and it isn’t going to be something they
look upon favorably in any circumstance. You’re not likely to be
denied coverage, but your premium could go up.
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Thu, 25 Dec 2014
Source: Westword (Denver, CO)
Column: Ask a Stoner
Copyright: 2014 Village Voice Media
Contact: http://www.westword.com/feedback/EmailAnEmployee?department=letters
Website: http://www.westword.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1616
Author: William Breathes

LANDLORDS, TENANTS AND HOME GROWS
Dear Stoner: I am a landlord who lives two hours away from our rental
in Pueblo. Last week I discovered that our new tenants are using our
house as a grow house without our consent. I have no problem with
Amendment 64 or using the house in that manner, but that’s not what
we agreed on. Just wondering if you have any information or ideas for us as landlords as to our rights and how we can approach this to benefit everybody.
Baffled Near Boulder
Dear Baffled: As a landlord, you have the final say on what can and
can’t go down on your property. Amendment 64 and Colorado’s medical
cannabis laws allow people to grow pot in a home with their
landlord’s permission - but the laws also give you the right to
prohibit growing on your property. There are plenty of reasons to go
either way. While state law prevents your property from being seized
by the state if your tenants end up growing more than they should and get busted by state cops, that won’t prevent the feds from taking your property if they lead the investigation.
And you also need to look into local laws and ordinances regarding
grow houses. In Pueblo, that can be a contentious issue. There have
been enough complaints in recent months that the Pueblo City Council
spent much of December passing regulations further limiting home
grows. Under those new rules, growing can only take place in a
“detached one-family residence” or in a detached structure if the
property is multi-family (like a duplex). Grow spaces can’t be larger
than 100 square feet and plants can’t get taller than ten feet. Most
important, renters in Pueblo must have written permission from the
property owner before growing any cannabis.
If the lease that the tenants signed doesn’t have language expressly
allowing them to use the house as a grow operation, then you could
haul them into municipal court for violating the contract. As a
cannabis-sympathetic human being, though, you know that that could
bring some unwanted legal trouble down on the growers. Our advice
would be to talk with them and explain the city ordinances. If they
want to keep on growing, you’d be smart to propose a new lease making
it clear that they have your permission as long as the grow stays
within the boundaries set by the city. And if you think a higher rent
would make you more comfortable with their activities, you’re well
within your rights to ask for 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: Sun, 28 Dec 2014
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/9firdD6J
Copyright: 2014 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Steve Raabe

CONVENTIONS VIEW LEGAL DEVELOPMENTS AS USEFUL TOPIC FOR PANEL DISCUSSIONS
Delegates to national conventions in Colorado are well aware of legal retail marijuana, and not just because they might have slipped in a visit to a dispensary.
Some conventions have used Colorado’s cannabis laws to incorporate working panels on the ways legal pot can affect their business sectors.
“The legality of marijuana certainly impacts our industry,” said
Stuart Ruff, director of meetings and events for the Risk and
Insurance Management Society, which brought 9,700 attendees to Denver in April. “There are a lot of misperceptions about the (Colorado) law, and we want our members to be educated.”
After recreational cannabis sales became legal Jan. 1, RIMS decided
to hold a convention session entitled, “How Will the Legalization of
Marijuana Affect Your Employment Policies?”
“From my perspective, I look at it as an opportunity,” said Fred
Droz, a meeting planner who is coordinating the Communications
Leadership Exchange convention in Denver in April. “The group prides itself in addressing topics that deal with strategic thinking, so we will have a panel that will give different perspectives on legal marijuana.”
Convention locations typically are selected far in advance of the events themselves, sometimes as long as 10 years earlier. That means almost all major meetings taking place in Colorado for the next few years were planned well before Amendment 64 was approved by Colorado voters in November 2012.
Visit Denver, the city’s convention and visitors bureau, logged 429,210 convention delegates through the end of December, compared with 385,292 in 2013. Bookings for 2015 and 2016 are on pace to continue the same trend, bureau spokesman Rich Grant said.
For future bookings, fallout from legal marijuana has been a complete non-factor, Visit Denver CEO Richard Scharf said.
“People are more inclined to joke about it anymore than to express
any concerns,” he said. “It’s been pretty immaterial from either a
positive or negative standpoint.”
Scharf said officials of Visit Denver, the city government and organizations such as the Downtown Denver Partnership have worked hard to educate visitors and convention delegates on the terms of Colorado’s cannabis laws, including where it can and cannot be consumed.
Ruff of RIMS said the shock value and comedic aspects have dissipated.
The group’s convention delegates “are all college-educated people,”
he said. “They lived in dorms once.”
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: Sat, 27 Dec 2014
Source: Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, FL)
Copyright: 2014 Sun-Sentinel Company
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/mVLAxQfA
Website: http://www.sun-sentinel.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/159
Author: David Kelly, Special to Tribune Newspapers

DENVER MARIJUANA BLOG RIDING HIGH
Mainstream Pot Guide Not Afraid to Get Down in Weeds
DENVER - Jake Browne sauntered into his neighborhood marijuana shop recently and asked the “budtender” for a look at his wares.
The lanky attendant spread half a dozen Mason jars across the
counter, each holding a fat, fragrant bud of cannabis.

“Mmmm,” Browne purred as he opened a jar of Jack Flash. “Smells like
drain cleaner and urine. Sounds unappetizing, but it’s actually
great.” He sniffed another. “You get a nice Grape Skunk off of that,”
he said. “You can smell the sandalwood and cardamom spice notes.”
Browne’s discerning nose is crucial to his role as marijuana critic for The Cannabist, a daily blog by The Denver Post covering the culture of pot.
“They do all the hard news reporting while I get to review weed,” he said.
The Cannabist, with two full-time staffers and 12 freelancers, serves
as the nation’s first mainstream media guide to the swiftly evolving
world of legal marijuana. There are advice columns, product reviews,
recipes for edible pot and hard news coverage of the industry.
“I probably knew more than the average guy about marijuana when I got this job, but I was far from the biggest stoner in the newsroom,” said Ricardo Baca, marijuana editor at the Post, who oversees The Cannabist. “But over the past year, my knowledge has increased a thousandfold.”
The former music critic is now courted by growers flogging their
product, outside politicians curious about how pot legalization is
working and a media enamored of marijuana, especially if a joke or
pun can be wedged into a story. “
Yet even Baca struggles to keep up with the ever-shifting world of cannabis.
“I think edibles are the story of the year,” he said. “They are
baffling in every way. If you’re a kid they look like peanut butter
cups. If you’re an adult you don’t know how much to eat. We have put out eight tips to follow in order to eat edibles safely.”
The next big issue, he predicted, will be concentrated THC, the active ingredient in marijuana that can be bought in crystals and smoked.
“It’s like the size of a pinhead, and it’s the highest of highs,” he
said. “It’s like freebasing marijuana.”

The blog’s “Ask the Cannabist” column recently had a reader wondering whether he could feed a queasy dog pot to prevent it from vomiting in the car.
“Any idea on dosing a 25 lb. beagle?” the writer asked.
The Cannabist, quoting a veterinarian, called it a “terrible idea.”
Baca keeps a close eye on the often lighthearted, if edgy, coverage.
“We probably have the conversation once a month - whether we are
veering too much toward advocacy,” he said.
Denver Post News Director Kevin Dale said the blog had lived up to its mission.  “We approach cannabis the way we approach wine culture and beer culture,” he said. “Like it or not, it’s a legal substance, and we provide the fullest spectrum of reporting on it consistent with our standards.”
Baca, 37, plans to hire another columnist soon and already has nearly 500 applicants.  “The column will be about sex, intimacy, relationships and pot. How does it make you a better lover? I want someone who has no inner dialogue, someone who just puts it all out there,” he said.
That sounds a bit like Browne, 31, a college dropout and sometime comedian who started blogging about pot while working in a marijuana dispensary. His reviews offer blow-by-blow accounts of getting high.“Where a buzz hits you can tell you a lot about what you’ll be in for,” he writes in a review of 303 Kush. It “sat in the center of my head - right behind my eyes - and camped out. This is the kind of ‘Magic Eye High’ where you find yourself looking at something, but also through it at the same time.”
Green Crack was another story.
“I was all over the place. A kid wearing Moon Boots in a jumpy castle. .. I was closer to chanting ‘Serenity now!’ than relaxing, though.”
Browne said pot strains are wildly different. Durban Poison, for
example, makes him paranoid.
“Are the shades pulled? Is the NSA listening to me? It makes me jittery and introspective in the worst ways,” he said.
Baca and Browne are constantly told they have the “coolest jobs in
the world.” One is chronicling the history of legal marijuana as it
happens, the other bearing witness to every buzz.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom
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Pubdate: Thu, 25 Dec 2014
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/sZJAfUS2
Copyright: 2014 Associated Press
Contact: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1
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Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388

DENVER SHELTERS SAY POT LEGALIZATION HAS LED TO INFLUX OF HOMELESS PEOPLE
DENVER (AP) - Chris Easterling was sick of relying on drug dealers in
Minneapolis when he needed marijuana to help ease the pain of
multiple sclerosis. They were flaky, often leaving the homeless man
without the drug when he needed relief the most.
So he moved to Denver, where legal pot dispensaries are plentiful and accessible.  Easterling is among a growing number of homeless people who have recently come to Colorado seeking its legal marijuana and who now remain in the state and occupy beds in shelters, service providers say.
While no state agency records how many homeless people were drawn by legal weed, officials at homeless centers say the influx they are seeing is straining their ability to meet the needs of the increasing population.
“The older ones are coming for medical (marijuana); the younger ones are coming just because it’s legal,” said Brett Van Sickle, director of Denver’s Salvation Army Crossroads Shelter, which has more than doubled its staff to accommodate the increase.
The shelter did an informal survey of the roughly 500 new out-of-towners who stayed there between July and September and found as many as 30 percent had relocated for pot, he said.
Shelters in some other parts of the state said they haven’t noticed
the problem or haven’t surveyed their residents about it.
Colorado’s homeless population and its marijuana dispensaries are both concentrated in Denver, which could be why shelters say they are experiencing a more noticeable rise.Other factors could be driving the rising homeless rates. Colorado’s economy is thriving, but the number of affordable homes and apartments is shrinking.
Julie Smith of Denver’s Road Home, a city plan that aims to end homelessness, said the city’s rising overall population could be a reason for an increase in the number of homeless people.
The city is eager to see the results of a study by Metropolitan State University of Denver’s criminal justice and criminology department of issues related to legal marijuana, including any correlation between legal marijuana and rates of homelessness.
Many of those staying in shelters come to Denver with big plans and find they can’t make ends meet, said Tom Luehrs, executive director of capital city’s St. Francis Center.
The shelter has seen an increase from 730 people a day in 2013 to 780 people this year, and as many as 300 new faces a month. Not all of them are pot smokers, Luehrs said, but many have said they were drawn to the state because of legal marijuana.
In Colorado, some out-of-town homeless people are seeking jobs in the marijuana industry but learn only after arriving that they lack the two-year residency requirement needed to work in a dispensary. Others have felony records that make them ineligible, Van Sickle said.
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Pubdate: Fri, 02 Jan 2015
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/t3xw7IPX
Copyright: 2015 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122

AN ABSURD CLAIM ON HOME HASH OIL
Does Amendment 64 immunize individuals who make marijuana hash oil in their home from prosecution, as a defendant in Mesa County claims in a criminal case there?
Surely not. As Attorney General John Suthers says in a brief filed in
that case, “the defendant agrees that his actions resulted in an
explosion, injuries, damage, and ‘potentially put others in danger.’
He nevertheless insists that the voters created a constitutional
right protecting butane-fueled explosions in kitchens and garages
throughout the state. However, this court should reject the
defendant’s interpretation because the voters would not have
understood the amendment to authorize such irresponsible and dangerous use.”

That’s true. Moreover, as the AG adds, “in interpreting the
Constitution, a court must consider whether an interpretation leads
to absurd results.”
It’s one thing, however, to argue that the state or local jurisdiction has the right to outlaw the home production of hash oil.
We’ve said as much ever since it became clear that home production
was a peril. Hash oil should be produced only in regulated
manufacturing facilities. But Suthers goes further in his brief and
contends that Amendment 64 actually excludes “oil” from the
definition of marijuana itself. Can this possibly be the case? Surely
the amendment’s sponsors could not have meant this interpretation. As Christian Sederberg, one of Amendment 64’s authors, told The Denver Post’s John Ingold, such a reading of the amendment could justify banning hash oil possession. And if that were contemplated, why would the amendment explicitly include “marihuana concentrate” in the definition of legal marijuana?
But Suthers points to an apparently contradictory line in the
amendment that does indeed appear to exclude “oil” from the
definition of marijuana. Perhaps this amounts to a drafting error. If
so, it wouldn’t be the first time that citizen activists included
confusing language in an initiative, leaving it up to the courts to
sort out the mess.
The outcome most consistent with Amendment 64 would be for the court to reject the claim that making hash oil at home is a constitutional right while acknowledging that such oil is a protected concentrate.
Still, it wouldn’t be shocking if the court sided with the AG on both issues given the amendment’s curiously inconsistent language. Suthers has produced a provocative brief that potentially could rock the popular understanding of what’s protected and what’s not under Amendment 64.
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Pubdate: Sat, 03 Jan 2015
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/PdJGWdkR
Copyright: 2015 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Tom Roeder, The Gazette

FEWER GIS TEST POSITIVE FOR POT NOW THAT IT’S LEGAL
Colorado Springs - Fewer soldiers are testing positive for marijuana in two states where recreational use of the drug is legal, an Army study of the issue obtained by The Gazette has found.
The change in Washington and Colorado, where legal pot is available near large Army bases, is small. But it’s the reverse of what military leaders said would happen in Colorado Springs with marijuana legalization.“With one minor exception, the data is trending downward, though it remains relatively flat and the changes are statistically insignificant,” Lt. Col. Justin Platt, an Army spokesman, wrote in an e-mail from the Pentagon.
In Colorado, the rate of positive drug tests for marijuana dropped to 0.47 percent in the fiscal year that ended Oct. 1. That is down from 0.79 percent in the same period two years earlier, before recreational marijuana sales were legal. The number of positive marijuana tests at Fort Carson dropped to 422 from 725 over that span.
Army brass said the drop is more of a sign of how the Army is handling legalization than soldiers being suddenly less likely to smoke marijuana.
“That’s a sign of good leadership,” said Army Gen. Chuck Jacoby, the top-ranking soldier in the Pikes Peak region who stepped down as commander of U.S. Northern Command on Dec. 15.
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Pubdate: Sun, 28 Dec 2014
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/iXx9lUPe
Copyright: 2014 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Ricardo Baca
FOCUSING ON A NEW KIND OF BLACK MARKET BETWEEN STATES
The black market for marijuana in Colorado isn’t what it used to be.  Nine or 10 years ago, the narrative of illicit cannabis in the state focused on illegally grown product filtering in from Mexico,
California and elsewhere. Now it seems officials and experts are more concerned about Colorado-grown marijuana infiltrating other states, a trend that is seeing a significant upward trajectory, according to data obtained by The Denver Post.
“In a lot of ways, our legal industry has become the black market for other states,” said Tom Gorman, director of the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area.
Although some facets of Colorado pot are simple to quantify - taxes, sales, demand - the black and gray markets are by definition difficult to track, especially in the first year of legal
recreational sales. It doesn’t help that the underground market is a complex, multi-headed beast.
“There are four black markets,” said Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California Los Angeles. “There’s people growing it in Colorado to sell in Colorado. People bringing stuff up from Mexico to sell in Colorado. People with medical cards reselling their marijuana in state and out of state, including sales to minors. And there may be some diversion from the commercial market: People buying it retail in Denver and selling it in Chicago or somewhere else.”
For example: The black market is straight up illegal. The gray market represents gray areas of the law among unlicensed, unregulated caregivers.
So what do the local black and gray markets for marijuana look like almost a year after recreational sales started on Jan. 1?
“We say this with regard to everything on these societal impact-type questions: It’s too early to tell,” said Ashley Kilroy, the city of Denver’s executive director of marijuana policy.
Some industry experts agree with Kilroy on that point.  “It’s absurd that a system that has grown over 80 years would end in a week or a year,”
Ripple effect With the pot coming into Colorado, the situation looks to be
improving. Some Mexican marijuana growers have abandoned the crop entirely because stateside legalization has cut wholesale costs in half. “I wish the Americans would stop with this legalization,”   50-year-old lifelong pot farmer Rodrigo Silla told The Washington
Post in April. Another Mexican farmer, identified only as Nabor, told NPR in November: “If the U.S. continues to legalize pot, they’ll run us into the ground.”
But with the pot leaving Colorado, a sticking point for the U.S. Justice Department is that it must prevent “the diversion of marijuana from states where it is legal ... to other states.” The
situation is getting worse. There is substantial data pointing toward an increase in the amount of legal and illegal pot being seized on its way out of Colorado to other states.
The number of Postal Service-mailed packages containing pot intercepted in Colorado increased by 1,280 percent from 2010, when there were 15 seizures, to 2013, when there were 207, according to HIDTA, a federally-funded drug task force. (The data did not include FedEx, UPS or other carriers.) The agency said the pounds of
marijuana in those packages increased by 762 percent in the same time period, from 57.2 pounds in 2010 to 493 pounds in 2013.
“Some of the pot is out of dispensaries,” said Gorman, who spent 30 years with California’s Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement. “Some is out of retail stores, some is out of home grows, some is from co-ops, some is from patients and caregivers - you take that whole segment, and that to me is what the black market looks like now in Colorado.”
HIDTA’s August report also shows a 397 percent rise in highway interdiction seizures of Colorado marijuana bound for other states from 2008, when there were 58, to 2013, when there were 288. When the organization informally polled 100 law officers on how much of the pot leaving Colorado actually is being seized, they estimated less than 10 percent, Gorman said.
“Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma - it’s Colorado dope going into those states,” Gorman said. “It’s very high-quality, very desirable pot, and you can get twice the amount of money for it in Iowa or Missouri.”
The amount of illegal marijuana seized by the Denver Police Department increased 959 percent from the first quarter of 2013, when it took in 275 pounds of pot, to the first quarter of 2014, which it seized 2,912 pounds of cannabis - a result of the department’s marijuana team, which “focuses on these bigger operations, the illegal marijuana grows,” said Kilroy.

Meanwhile Kilroy also points to a recent report from public policy research organization the Cato Institute that says legalization hasn’t brought on any significant changes to how much taxpayers are spending on state costs nvolving police, courts and jails.
“The overall impact on our criminal justice system ... the current statewide data shows no meaningful change in criminal justice activity costs,” Kilroy said.
Marijuana policy
While some pot activists point at recreational marijuana’s
higher-than-average taxes as a reason for an illegal grower-rooted black market, there are bigger factors to some of the issues plaguing Colorado, according to Jeffrey Miron, a senior lecturer on economics and director of undergraduate studies at Harvard University.
“Compared to the rate of taxation for alcohol and cigarettes in many states and countries, (Colorado’s) marijuana taxes are not excessive,” said Miron, who is also the director of economic studies at the Cato Institute, which published his “Marijuana Policy in Colorado” working paper in October. “The magnitude of taxation for marijuana in Colorado isn’t enough to create a black market. But I think if it were fully legal under federal law we would see the vast majority of the market become legal if not gray.”
One of the next major milestones for black markets in Colorado, Washington and beyond: the 2016 election, when at least five U.S.
states will vote on recreational pot within their borders and the whole country will elect a new president.

“Will he or she continue this hands-off, benign approach to marijuana?” asked Miron of the next U.S. president. “Then I think we’ve hit the tipping point. Without knowing the results of that, we can’t quite know.
“Federal policy can be changed with the stroke of a pen. The new president can say to his or her attorney general: ‘We should enforce the marijuana laws in all of the states.’ That would be perfectly legal under the existing paradigm of federal law trumping state law, even in states like Colorado and others.
“The federal government in 1920 enforced alcohol prohibition in a whole bunch of states that had not criminalized alcohol.”
Miron’s working paper used data predating the 2000 introduction of Colorado’s medical marijuana system to determine that “neither judicial and legal employment nor corrections employment shows any meaningful change after a marijuana policy change.”
The finding discredits activists’ theories that legalization would severely increase or reduce expenditures on criminal justice activities.
The Denver Police Department, however, is spending more money on marijuana enforcement in 2014 than before. But its additionally budgeted $410,005 is being used primarily for new hires (a sergeant, detective and crime lab scientist) and is funded by the 3.5 percent special sales tax on recreational pot - and not taxpayers as a whole, according to Kilroy’s office, which also added that an additional $175,000 has been appropriated for 2015 to hire more park rangers to enforce public consumption laws.
Merits of legal purchase
Tvert points toward one number when he discusses the old school black market of customers buying from illegal growers and dealers: More than $550 million has been spent on legal medical and recreational pot in Colorado from January to October 2014, according to Department of Revenue data.
The fact remains that hundreds of millions of dollars in marijuana
sales are taking place in licensed businesses instead of the underground market,” Tvert said. “It cannot be argued that the underground market is anywhere near where it was previously. In fact, it’s probably a fraction of what it was.”  Tvert attributes the success of Colorado’s legal market to four factors: convenience, variety, safety and cost.

“And for the most part, all of those things will be found in a regulated market,” Tvert said. “You’d be hard-pressed to find adults who would rather call around to people to find out who has illegal marijuana and hope it’s the kind they want and hope that the person is able to meet them and hope that the whole transaction goes according to plan - as opposed to stopping at the store on the way home.  “If you think about how real life works, it’s not a reasonable notion.”
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Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sun, 28 Dec 2014
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/SwK8ZvaW
Copyright: 2014 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Jason Blevins
GROWERS IN THE SHADOWS SEEK U.S. PATENT PROTECTION
Ben Holmes gently lowers the turntable needle onto the album, and Traffic’s “Medicated Goo,” begins to play.
Steve Winwood’s wistful tenor sweeps through the Centennial Seeds laboratory: “My own homegrown recipe’ll see you through.”
“Everyone stole from Stevie Winwood,” Holmes says, his foot tapping as he injects a syringe of dark, syrupy liquid into his gas chromatograph.
No one is stealing from Holmes, a self-taught scientist, engineer, farmer and cannabis seed geek who next month will take a rare step to apply for a patent on a laboriously created cannabis superstrain.
If it is awarded, the U.S. patent on Holmes’ medical-grade Otto II strain will be the first to protect a cannabis plant and a first step in establishing plant-breeder rights for growers who only a few years ago were considered criminals.
“This industry came up in stealth, born in basements and crawl spaces,” Holmes said. “But now, with companies forming and making larger investments, the desire to protect intellectual property is becoming paramount. Bleeding-edge stuff, right here.”
Indeed. Gone are the days when pie-eyed longhairs haphazardly hurled pollen into jungles of pot plants, hoping to meld two strains.
Today’s top breeders are geneticists, taking years to weed through carefully engineered generations of cannabis to elevate the most desired traits.
Some of these new superstrains are high in cannabidiol, or CBD, one of several dozen cannabinoid chemical compounds in cannabis and the plant’s major non-psychoactive ingredient. CBD has been credited with relieving some epileptic seizures, prompting widespread calls for additional research.
Other more utilitarian superstrains are resistant to mites or the crop-killing powder mildew that plagues grow operations across Colorado.
Some superstrains are simply super stony, with sky-high levels of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the psychoactive compound in cannabis.
The gas chromatograph is Holmes’ key tool in shaping Otto II, a high-CBD, low-THC strain he hopes can fuel medical therapies. The 50-year-old gizmo separates molecules and converts them into an electrical impulse. A green line tracking across a screen reveals the level of THC in the substance. That line will be the baseline for a measurement of Otto II.
Holmes produces a well-worn legal tablet laden with acronyms and millivolt values from the gas chromatograph. Those figures reveal his painstaking progress toward breeding the THC out of, and the CBD into, his treasured varietal.
It is, in many ways, the result of a lifelong career dedicated to breeding, growing, cloning, engineering and charting the most useful cannabis plants.
As Winwood sings the oft-covered “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” Holmes shares his plans to protect Otto II, which ranks among the most valuable of his collection of 400 varieties of cannabis and hemp seeds, most of which are stored in an industrial freezer in his Lafayette lab. In addition to the patent, he hopes to be the first cannabis breeder to secure protection under the Plant Variety Protection Act, the seminal plant breeders’ rights legislation from 1970.
“The value of that seed, long-term, could be very, very valuable - an annuity,” said Holmes, a father of two who serves on the state’s Industrial Hemp Advisory Committee and is collaborating on the University of Colorado’s groundbreaking Cannabis Genomic Research Initiative.
“Everyone who does this wants to produce something with durability,” he said. “A seed with good utility that produces well can have longevity for generations.”
Holmes is a sort of modern-day Luther Burbank, the pioneering American botanist and horticulturist who developed more than 800 varieties and strains of plants in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Burbank faced intellectual property challenges in his career, as he
created still-heralded peaches, plums, daisies and the world-dominant Burbank russet potato. Some of the unclassifiable hybrids that seed developer Holmes is growing in his lab.
Holmes follows Burbank’s lead, offering a few types of seeds to a single, large distributor who can flood the market in the first year, before anyone can take it as their own by cloning the young seedlings.
By the time the copycats have cloned Holmes’ strains, he already has made his money. He also licenses the use of his heirloom seeds, but not the extra-special seeds he doesn’t want copied.“Really the focus, minus any patent protection, is on licensing and careful selection of distributors,” Holmes said.
State trademark protection can safeguard the name of an innovation within a state’s borders. But protecting intellectual property through state laws is a bandage.
Patents are exclusively federal. Marijuana is illegal under federal law. And federal law trumps state law.
Federal inaction
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected cannabis-related patents consistently, arguing that the invention is “immoral and scandalous” because marijuana is illegal or that the invention has no useful purpose because its use violates federal drug law.
And there is little indication the federal government is ready to begin awarding patents for marijuana strains, even though the government granted 17,591 plant patents between 1989 and 2013.

But then the federal government appears reticent to do anything regarding marijuana, despite voters in 23 states approving some form of decriminalization or medicinal use and an 11 more this year approving CBD oils for seizure treatment.
“They are still trying to pretend that this industry does not exist,” said Taylor West, deputy director of the National Cannabis Industry Association. “These patent questions and this whole intellectual property issue, this is one of those areas that is so new and still falls in that stagnant area between state and federal law.”
West said the feds recently seem to be accepting the medical value of CBD while continuing to abhor THC-dominant strains. While 11 unlikely states - Alabama, Kentucky, Utah and Mississippi among them - legalized the use of CBD-rich extracts and oils for seizure treatment, West said a focus on just CBD is myopic.
“When you start to look at the medical possibilities of cannabis, you have to look at research that shows an entourage effect, which means essentially that the whole of the compounds is greater than the sum of its parts,” West said.
The other cannabinoids
Nolan Kane agrees.
Kane, an assistant professor in the University of Colorado’s department of ecology who is leading the Cannabis Genomic Research Initiative, rattles off acronyms like CBN, CBA, CBG, THCA, THCB and other cannabinoids for which potential therapeutic values are unknown.
Like any good professor, Kane says more research is needed. And it starts with things like mapping DNA sequences of marijuana and hemp and identifying the genomes that deliver certain characteristics to particular strains.
The $1 trillion farm bill passed this year allowed universities in states that permit hemp cultivation, including Colorado, to research the plant without threatening the flow of federal funding.
The work is creating a genomic blueprint similar to those that have enabled tinkering botanists to create - and protect - thousands of varieties of major crops such as wheat, corn, soy and rice.
With that genetic map, breeders can speed production of cannabis strains that yield favored characteristics, Kane said. The research may highlight many new agents that could play a role in evolving medical treatments or, like hemp, illuminate industrial uses for things like biomass energy or hempcrete.
“The high-CBD materials have a lot of advantages in the legal environment combined with a lot of exciting potential for medical applications,” he said. “But the story is not just CBD. We hope we can come up with varieties that are high in other different compounds.”
Kane is focused on the agricultural side of cannabis, so it will be up to other researchers to discover any potential therapeutic or industrial applications for varieties he maps.
Those researchers likely will come from companies seeking to capitalize on the new strains - such as GW Pharmaceuticals and Denver’s United Cannabis Corp.

United Kingdom-based GW last year secured a U.S. patent for the use of a CBD-THC blend to treat brain tumors.
Publicly traded United Cannabis in October filed for draft patents on ratios of cannabinoids - say a concoction that is 90 percent CBD and 10 percent THC - to treat cancer and nervous- and immune-system
disorders. The patents would give the company 12 months to prove its combinations of cannabinoids deliver a medical benefit.
“We have to go out and do our robust safety trials and our rodent trials and really come out with the science behind the concept we have,” United Cannabis’ chief operating officer, Chad Ruby, said.United Cannabis licenses its trademarks but is pushing for broader patent protection.  “We don’t want to waste a bunch of time and a bunch of money and a bunch of effort only to have someone take all our work,” he said.
“Everyone in this industry is sitting and waiting on the federal level to see what they will allow.”

Despite the waiting, there is a sense of urgency.  If the federal government ever drops its prohibition, or begins
granting patents, industry watchers expect cannabis to be suddenly interesting to such mega-corporations as Monsanto, Philip Morris’ parent Altria Group, Pfizer, Walgreens and Anheuser-Busch InBev. (The Internet throbs with conjecture that Monsanto has long schemed a genetically modified marijuana. It’s important to note, breeders say, that engineering marijuana strains through selective breeding is not  the same as genetically modifying the plant’s DNA.)  Even without the corporate players, the cannabis business is booming.  The National Marijuana Business Conference n Las Vegas last month saw 3,000 attendees, up from 600 last year.
The patent game
And the business problems are growing too, as companies begin to invest heavily in innovative products.
Rohan Marley, son of reggae musician Bob Marley, announced last month he would begin distributing Jamaican cannabis strains and hemp-infused products under what the Marley family describes as the world’s first global cannabis brand, Marley Natural.But Steven Fagen, a Montserrat tobacco exporter, registered four Marley trademarks - the words “Natural Marley Spirit Marijuana” with a lion and cannabis leaf, as well as Natural Marley Spirit Cigarettes in Colorado last month.
His trademark filings illustrate the need for protection. Fagen has no connection with Marley Natural.
Fagen “is blatantly trading upon the Marley name, and steps are being taken to stop their infringement,” said Zach Hutson, with Seattle-based Privateer Holdings, the equity firm that has partnered with the Marley family in the Marley-branded marijuana.
Fagen did not return messages asking for comment.
The firm is filing for trademark protection with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.
(The Colorado secretary of state’s website lists more than 130 companies registering trademarks including the words “cannabis,” “marijuana” and “hemp.”)
Ean Seeb fields a regular stream of calls from attorneys seeking to help his Denver Relief dispensary - the city’s oldest - protect its intellectual property.
His team is deep into a multiyear effort to create a high-CBD strain and strain of potent marijuana that resists powder mildew, but Seeb remains wary of investing in intellectual property protection.
There are too many uncertainties, said Seeb, who serves as chairman of the 800-member National Cannabis Industry Association.
Will someone be able to patent timeless strains like Durban Poison, Bubba Kush or Skunk #1? If they do, how will that patent-owner collect from growers and sellers of that ubiquitous strain? How will the patents be awarded and enforced?
“This whole patent game is going to be very interesting,” Seeb said.
“This started as a hippy industry, but it certainly is getting more
corporate. We are certainly getting away from the free-love mentality. Patents is a pure money play, right?”
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sun, 28 Dec 2014
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/ldDI7i39
Copyright: 2014 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Ricardo Baca
HOW LEGALIZATION FORCED ONE GROWER OUT OF HIS ILLEGAL BUSINESS
Growing illegal marijuana in rented houses across Colorado’s front range and illicitly selling it throughout the state isn’t for everyone, but it was once a way of life for Oscar.And the 36-year-old loved everything about his job, from the $80,000 income to his work schedule that left time for snowboarding to his simple daily regimen amid the awkwardly towering pot plants occupying his various living rooms and basements.
“The heyday on a really good ounce was $350 in 2003 to 2008,” said Oscar, whose real name isn’t Oscar, but he was speaking to The Denver Post under conditions of anonymity. “But then the scale started to tip. (The ounces) went down to $300 - and this was really good weed.
“I felt that price dip, hard.”
That decline came in 2009, Oscar said, when Colorado’s medical marijuana dispensary system started to flourish under state-governed regulations. The market suddenly was flooded with legal cannabis, making Oscar’s pot less valuable.
Marijuana prices in Colorado continued to drop during the next few
years, Oscar said. And then the bottom fell out just a few short months after Gov. John Hickenlooper signed mendment 64 into law in December 2012, legalizing recreational pot.
“In early 2013, it was down to people wanting ounces for $175, so it was half of what it had been,” said Oscar, working his way through a vanilla latte at a coffeehouse in the Art District on Santa Fe. “Only the things you had to buy to grow it weren’t getting cheaper. Dirt wasn’t going down in price. In fact, it was going up in price. Pot was legal, and they only had 50 pounds of dirt to sell, and so their dirt prices almost doubled.”
Oscar illegally grew cannabis in Colorado and sold it in bulk here and elsewhere for 10 years. He never had a massive grow, but his 20 or so plants provided more than enough yield. Business was brisk and friendly and all among close friends, which lessened his risk.Once local prices started to drop, Oscar focused on selling pounds to buyers who could still pay full rate; his friend in Texas would drive up to get the product, and friends on the East Coast would receive Oscar’s overnight packages and send him money in return. Oscar eventually married, and he and his wife lived comfortably, even if it meant paying stinky cash on every trip to Target or the grocery store.
Forced out
While a few black market growers and dealers have bragged anonymously to national media organizations about how Colorado’s legalization of marijuana has been a boon to their underground business - given the
high taxes on legal pot - Oscar’s experience has been quite the opposite. When low prices forced him from the underground career he loved, he went back to school and landed an entry-level job in the finance sector.
“I just couldn’t make the money I needed to make,” Oscar said.
Some of Oscar’s former colleagues also gave up growing, while others transitioned into the legal market - often taking a pay cut. He still has a friend or two who grow underground pot, sometimes from seeds and clones from Oscar’s original 2003 plants (including a New York City Diesel that Oscar still buys), but they’re not making the profit they once did in pre-legalization Colorado.  The timing of Oscar’s forced career change makes sense to Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California
Los Angeles who often writes on legal marijuana. And Kleiman doubts Oscar was alone in moving on from illegal marijuana as more and more U.S. states rewrite their pot laws.
“That’s what I would have expected,” Kleiman said after he was told
about Oscar’s experience. “I don’t see how you can have an illicit
market in the face of the Colorado medical market.”
A grower’s life Oscar remembers the first time he ever got high. He was
sixth-grader, and it was schwag weed out of a refashioned soda-can pipe while riding bikes in a Michigan nature preserve near where he grew up. It was the beginning of 15 to 17 years of “smoking without missing a day,” he said.
He later moved to Colorado after falling in love with the Rocky Mountains during a 26-day Outward Bound program spent in the Chicago Basin between Durango and Silverton, a gift from his parents. It wasn’t long before he made friends with a grower who offered to teach him the trade. And shortly afterward, Oscar had the first of two grows in the high-elevation Placer Valley, which sits between Breckenridge and Fairplay.

Oscar skipped all over the state with his rudimentary setup of grow lights and buckets. After growing in two Placer Valley homes, he moved to Boulder, Louisville, Thornton, Morrison and finally Denver.
“I still have a bottle of cloning gel in the fridge,” Oscar said on a brisk December night, sitting in his north Denver living room with his pretty, whip-smart wife. “It’s Olivia’s (brand), I think. You know, I always used the same nutrients that whole time I grew? There was always the next big thing, but why mess with what worked?”
As Oscar reminisced, his wife told a story that shared some of the conflict marijuana has introduced to their lives, especially given the most recent addition to their home.
“I had a C-section with her,” said Oscar’s wife, nodding down to the bouncing baby girl in her arms. “It was planned, and my parents were out here for (her birth). The nurse was putting in an IV and said, ‘I have to ask you some questions. Have you ever smoked cigarettes?’ I said, ‘Yes, but I quit seven years ago, and I haven’t had any since then.’“Then the nurse asked, ‘Have you ever smoked marijuana?’ And I just looked at her with big eyes. And there’s my mom and dad looking at me, waiting for a big answer. And then the nurse moved on. My parents are fairly liberal for Midwesterners, but, no, they would not be down with any of this. I couldn’t tell them about what (Oscar) used to do, absolutely not.”
So did the arrival of their first child have anything to do with Oscar’s career shift?
“I was a little concerned once we were going to start having a family,” his wife said. “I wouldn’t want her going down and getting into something that might make her sick.”
Added Oscar: “My wife never pushed me or led me into it, but she knew
I was stressed about the prices. And once I said something, she said,
‘I think that’s a good idea.’ “
A new leaf
Oscar’s life in late-2014 couldn’t be more different than it was a year ago. Back then he and his wife regularly would enjoy the dried and cured spoils of his crops as well as the added income they brought in. While his wife always held down professional jobs, Oscar often would spend his days on the slopes.
“I (mainly grew pot) for the freedom,” he said. “I could go snowboarding and go to concerts when I wanted to. I never had any responsibility to be here or do that, and I never did anything I didn’t want to do.”
Oscar uses words like “important” and “special” when discussing that time - in part because of the fun he had on his own and the time it allowed him with members of his family.
“It’s relaxing and gets me into this zone where I feel like I’m floating down the mountain,” he said. “When you’re on the hill, seeing the big blue sky, breathing in that air that makes you feel like the inside of your nose is going to break open and start bleeding, that’s what gets me going.
“But that time was also very personal to me, because I still had my sibling for much of that time,” said Oscar, who struggled after an unexpected loss in the family in the mid-2000s. “And my dog was around the entire time, too. I became myself in that period of time, and those decisions led me to where I am today.”
Now Oscar and his wife have a baby, and he’s working 70 hours a week and pulling an entry-level salary of $45,000 - but they seem content with their new life.
“We had more money then,” his wife said matter-of-factly. She’s not as melancholic or romantic about the old family business as Oscar can be.
The irony of Oscar’s evolved financial state isn’t lost on him: The jump from paying for groceries with drug money to opening his first 401(k) and Roth IRA as he studied for a major financial exam was a quick one.
“I never thought about saving money, but I also never had a kid,” he said. “I was only taking care of myself and my dogs, and so I just needed to get us through the month. ... Now I only have 10 vacation days - which is a foreign concept to the me of five years ago.”
Oscar has friends who transitioned their black market experience into high-profile jobs (and sometimes ownership stakes) in legal cannabis businesses.
“I’m happy for them,” he said. “They get to do all that on a much larger scale. So if that was appealing to them, great. I never wanted to keep getting bigger and bigger. I grew really good pot, and people enjoyed it. It wasn’t transactionary for me.”
And while Oscar has shopped for legal weed only twice - “It was the worst weed I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said - he would consider work in the aboveground pot market if the opportunity presented itself. He has a friend who is contemplating a lucrative, fly-in, $10,000-a-month consulting gig in Florida cultivation centers.
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Wed, 31 Dec 2014
Source: Colorado Springs Independent (CO)
Column: CannaBiz
Copyright: 2014 Colorado Springs Independent
Contact: letters@csindy.com
Website: http://www.csindy.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1536
Author: Bryce Crawford

MARIJUANA USE EXPANDS IN COLORADO, A NEW DOCUMENTARY TO AIR AND MORE
High and rising
Though the numbers are from before 2014, and thus don’t address the effects of recreational marijuana legalization, a new study from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health says Colorado has the second-highest percentage of marijuana users in the country. One out of every eight Coloradans over the age of 12 had used marijuana (outside the MMJ system) in the month prior to their being surveyed, a rate bested only by Rhode Island.
“For the 2011-12 period, 10.4 percent of Coloradans 12 and older reported using marijuana in the month prior to being surveyed. That placed Colorado seventh in the country for monthly marijuana use,” wrote the Denver Post, which first reported the study. “Monthly use in Colorado jumped to 12.7 percent - a 22 percent increase - in the 2012-13 data. The result means the survey estimates about 530,000 people in Colorado use marijuana at least once a month.”
As the Post notes, both federally and Colorado-funded studies have found that teen use has not seen a related increase.
T(HC)V
CNBC will air Marijuana Country: The Cannabis Boom on Monday, Jan. 5, at 7, 8 and 10 p.m. MST. The original documentary looks at a year of legalization in Colorado, talking to: parents who treat their children with Charlotte’s Web; Brandon Coats, whose case before the state Supreme Court will determine whether off-duty marijuana use is protected from employers who disapprove; and “two pot dealers - one of them a U.S. Army veteran - who profit from a black market that funnels the drug across state lines and continues to thrive despite the new law,” according to a release.
“[Correspondent Harry] Smith also reports on the plight of medical refugees, a fellowship of hundreds of families that have moved to Colorado to obtain medicinal marijuana they can’t get in their home states.”
Last week, we mentioned that Boulder activist Kathleen Chippi, who leads the Patient and Caregiver Rights Litigation Project, is suing the state to stop it from spending patient application fees on marijuana research. The Denver District Court suit says, “A medical research program is not an ‘administrative cost’ of maintaining a confidential registry of patients, physicians, and primary caregivers, therefore the proposed statutes and rules creating it should be enjoined and declared unconstitutional.” Read it at tiny.cc/syanrx.
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sun, 28 Dec 2014
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/wkRFqlTk
Copyright: 2014 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: openforum@denverpost.com
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Steve Raabe
UPSTART COLORADO HEMP INDUSTRY LAUNCHES, BUT STILL CONSTRAINED
Ask farmers where they procured hemp seeds to plant last spring, and youmay get an answer like this one from Bill Billings: “I got them from Mother Nature and God. That’s all I can say.”
Don’t-ask, don’t-tell characterizes Colorado’s newest cash crop. Like its genetic cousin marijuana, hemp is legal under state law. But conflicts with federal law leave the future uncertain for the state’s hemp industry.
The plant looks like marijuana but has little or no THC, the psychoactive ingredient that makes pot smokers high.

The federal government’s prohibition on hemp was partially eased in the Farm Bill passed by Congress this year. Still, Colorado growers have no legal means to buy starter seed from out of state, nor to sell their harvested raw seed outside of Colorado.
Some growers are using Colorado’s hemp laws to cultivate ultralow-THC cannabis for use in medical marijuana extracts, only adding to the confusion.
Legal hurdles aside, advocates are passionate about hemp’s commercial potential. The most common uses are food products and cosmetics derived from seeds and seed oil. Fiber from the stalks of hemp plants are used in clothing and industrial applications, including as a strengthening agent in concrete.
2014 marked the first year of state-authorized hemp cultivation in Colorado. About 30 growers filed applications to plant a total of 1,811 acres. But because state law does not yet require detailed reporting, no statistics exist on how much actually was planted and subsequently harvested.
Several farmers are planning to save seed from this year’s harvest to sow the 2015 crop.
On a former alfalfa field near Sterling, Billings, his daughter Danielle and business partner Jim Brammer planted 2 acres of hemp.  Their harvest brought in nearly a ton of seed and flowers.“It came up just amazing,” Billings said. “We irrigated three times, compared to six or seven times for (nearby) corn crops.”
Billings said he’s planning to make his own lines of hemp oils, lotions and mints, and he’s talking with retailers including Walmart and Whole Foods to carry the products.
But the same federal legal constraints that make it hard to buy seed also inhibit the creation of a large-scale Colorado hemp industry with interstate trade. Like marijuana entrepreneurs, hemp growers have limited or no access to banking services, said Lynda Parker, vice president of the Rocky Mountain Hemp Association.
“To have a real industry with manufacturing and processing of hemp products, you can’t do that unless there’s a steady market for hemp,” Parker said. “And that can’t happen until we can access the banking system.”
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sat, 03 Jan 2015
Source: Trentonian, The (NJ)
Copyright: 2015 The Trentonian
Contact: letters@trentonian.com
Website: http://www.trentonian.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1006
Author: Edward Forchion, NJWeedman.com For The Trentonain

WE THE PEOPLE ARE WINNING!
2014 was a weird year for me, and good riddance. I started out 2014 in the horrible Burlington County Jail and ended it as the writer of this weekly column for The Trentonian  yeah, that’s weird!
My new year’s resolution(s): to eat better and to open a religious temple in Trenton that provides marijuana to its congregants.
I hope everyone has a happy new year, but we all know there will be a lot of unhappiness in 2015 as there is every year. Sorry to be a schleprock. My hope is marijuana legalization happens in 2015, but I’m not a dope. It won’t, but we are winning the war on the herb.
The legal marijuana landscape of New Jersey changed four years ago when Gov. Corzine signed the New Jersey Medical Marijuana Compassionate Use Act into law as he left office on Jan. 18, 2010.  Yet on the marijuana drug war front 22,000 New Jerseyans were arrested in 2014. Because Gov. Christie and the state legislators refuse to legalize marijuana, 22,000 more will be arrested and ruined by our state’s marijuana laws in 2015.
But strangely, I think we the potheads of America have won our war on drugs: the public is now on our side. The gov’t just refuses to quit - weird.
Luckily this country was founded on a “checks and balances” principle of the three branches of government, and I believe the courts will force the other two branches to surrender.
Here is my assessment of Legalization in 2015, by branch. Executive - Although the chief executive, President Obama, through the Department of Justice (DEA) could end the war on marijuana by simply rescheduling marijuana from Schedule 1 or de-scheduling it altogether, I doubt he’ll do it this year. I’m secretly still hoping he pulls a “Corzine” and legalizes marijuana nationally on his way out the door in 2016. Choom Choom!
Legislative - I don’t think the U.S. Congress will legalize marijuana in 2015; both major parties are heavily invested in the war on drugs and 900,000 people are arrested each year. Billions are seized, billions are spent supporting the prison industry, and all the
contracts and profits are handled by the lawyers. Neither Party is willing to give up the Cannabis Cash Cow.
Judicial - Here there is much hope: several medical marijuana cases throughout the nation that challenge the classification of marijuana as a schedule 1 drug, among other arguments, are working their way through federal and state courts.
This is where I always believed true drug policy change in regard to marijuana would occur. I always believed there would be a “Roe v.  Wade” or “Brown v. Board of Education” type case involving marijuana a case that would reach the U.S. Supreme Court and change the laws nationally. In past years I’ve hoped the California vs Oakland Cannabis Buyers (2001) case or the California Vs Raich (2005) would do it. They didn’t, but I still believe a court case will change the marijuana laws before either of the other two branches get around to admitting defeat.
I believe I will have a major victory here in the state courts of New Jersey. New Jersey court watchers and media representatives are closely watching my case  State of New Jersey vs Forchion - A-004052.
In it I’ve challenged the very constitutionally of the current New Jersey criminal laws that classify marijuana as having “no accepted medical use” (and is thus illegal), while simultaneously
having “The New Jersey Medical Marijuana Compassionate Use Act” that specifically recognizes marijuana’s medical acceptability. This opposition in two current laws creates a devilish unconstitutional duplicity.
Arresting some citizens, mostly those of color, under our state’s laws while allowing others, mostly whites, to grow, distribute, and consume under our state’s medical marijuana laws is fundamentally
flawed and unconstitutional. Everyone in New Jersey who is prosecuted under our laws has been prosecuted unjustly since Jan. 18, 2010.
On a basic constitutional level, this is an unforgivable violation of our nation’s equal protection rights guaranteed by the 5th and 14th amendments. I believe the New Jersey courts will make new law as they fix this flaw in 2015, or who knows, maybe my case will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
There was major good news in 2014 for medical pot smokers on the national level:
The prolonged federal war on medical marijuana was effectively ended last month when the Congress passed a $1.1 trillion federal spending bill. One of the bill’s amendments prohibits the Department of Justice from spending money to prosecute medical marijuana dispensaries or patients who are abiding by the laws of their state.

Last year the Department of Justice pledged not to interfere with state marijuana laws implementation. The DOJ’s earlier pledges left it plenty of wiggle room to change its mind, as it has before. This new Hinchey-Rohrbacher amendment leaves me skeptical  actions speak louder than words.
In 2009 the federal government made similar statements, i.e., the Ogden Memo. At the time I was the owner of the Liberty Bell Temple, a Rastafarian temple that provided medical and sacramental marijuana on Hollywood Blvd., in Hollywood, California. I was so happy with that memo that in January 2010 I held a big Hollywood mansion party celebrating the Ogden Memo’s directives. This celebration party was covered nationally, even TMZ covered it. All this just to have my own Liberty Bell Temple raided and put out of business by the Department of Justice in 2011
So yes I’m looking for actions not the words.  Deep in the 1,603-page federal spending measure the
“Hinchey-Rohrbacher amendment”, that effectively ends federal medical marijuana prohibition. The bill’s passage last month heralds a major shift in drug policy and it is the first time Congress has approved legislation of national significance that is backed by legalization advocates across the nation. It almost brings to a close two decades
of tension between state governments and the federal government over the medical use of marijuana.
We will see in 2015.
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Mon, 29 Dec 2014
Source: Albuquerque Journal (NM)
Copyright: 2014 Albuquerque Journal
Contact: opinion@abqjournal.com
Website: http://www.abqjournal.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/10
Author: D’val Westphal
Note: D’val Westphal Of the Journal Assistant editorial page editor
D’Val Westphal tackles commuter issues for the Metro area on Mondays.
EXAMINING LEGALITY OF POT USE, DRIVING
WHAT’S ONE TOKE OVER THE LINE HERE? Eric Jackson points out, “We all know it’s illegal to drive while intoxicated, and that it’s illegal to have open containers of alcohol in a vehicle - but what about using marijuana?

“Let’s say a person has a medical marijuana card,” he emails. “Is there an ‘open container’ law for pot? I ask because I observed a man toking on a marijuana pipe while stopped at a stoplight in Rio Rancho. Is it illegal to partake of marijuana while driving, even if one has not reached a level of intoxication that would cause impairment?”
It’s illegal to get high while driving. To drive while high is a tougher question, one the New Mexico Legislature has yet to answer.
Rep. Bill Rehm, R-Albuquerque, a retired Bernalillo County sheriff’s captain, has tried for years to get a “drugged driving” law on the books. So let’s turn to him for the specifics.
Rehm answers the easy question first, explaining, “New Mexico does not have an open container ‘toking’ law. If an officer observes a person toking, they arrest them for possession of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia.”
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIQUOR AND DOPE: Rehm says, “Not everyone who drinks alcohol intends to become intoxicated. They have a drink with dinner. Smoking marijuana has one purpose; to get high.”
A little background: “We should understand U.S. past drug policies,” Rehm says. “In the late 1800s to early 1900s there was unregulated recreational drug businesses for all drugs. Customers entered the business and got high. In the early 1900s the United States strengthened its poison laws and labeled marijuana a poison. By 1937 marijuana was illegal with a tax of $200 per ounce. This tax remains today.”
But the potency has increased. “Today’s marijuana is over 25 times more potent than the marijuana of the ‘60s and ‘70s,” Rehm says. “The more times you smoke marijuana, the less smoke is needed to become high. Unlike alcohol, smoking marijuana lowers your tolerance to marijuana.”
Now put them together and get behind the wheel. “Drinking alcohol mixed with controlled substances causes a very dangerous mixture,” Rehm says. “Since the late 1990s this trend dramatically increased nationwide. In New Mexico, police officers can request a breath or blood test from the (suspected) DWI driver. If the (alcohol level in the) blood test is not 0.08 percent or more, then the blood is tested for drugs. Of these tests, over 90 percent are positive for alcohol and a controlled substance. Many of those tests are for multiple controlled substances. Marijuana is the predominate drug found.”
So are drugged drivers prosecuted like DWIs? The short answer is no.  “New Mexico law does not exempt a medical marijuana driver from our DWI law,” Rehm explains. “When we examine our New Mexico DWI law, we see the Legislature set two different standards for court proof. The alcohol standard is ‘unlawful for a person who is under the influence of intoxicating liquor to drive.’ Drugged driving is a higher standard to be proved - ‘under the influence of any drug to a degree that renders the person incapable of safely driving a vehicle.’ “ In Rehm’s mind “there should not be two different standards.”
“We have tested persons to determine what level of alcohol impairs their driving. For drugs, this has not been done, even for prescription drugs. The lack of scientific data is one defense a defense attorney uses in a DWI court hearing.”
As a member of the new House majority, Rehm says it’s important to look at new studies that show “brain damage as a result of smoking marijuana” as well as consider “who will fund the marijuana cessation programs” similar to those for tobacco smokers?
“New Mexico’s DWI problem does not need to be increased by allowing recreational marijuana,” he says. “Colorado has seen an increase(d) number of DWI arrests (that) involve a driver who had just smoked marijuana. We must continue to watch Colorado and now Washington and Oregon.”
And in the meantime, lawmakers should finally address drugged driving.
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Mon, 05 Jan 2015
Source: New Mexican, The (Santa Fe, NM)
Copyright: 2015 The Santa Fe New Mexican
Contact: http://www.santafenewmexican.com/SendLetter/
Website: http://www.santafenewmexican.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/695
Author: Andy Winnegar
Note: Andy Winnegar has spent his career in rehabilitation and is based in Santa Fe as a training associate for the Southwest ADA Center, a program of TIRR Memorial Hermann Rehabilitation.
MEDICAL POT USERS NOT PROTECTED BY AMERICANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT
With legalized medical marijuana in 23 states and Washington, D.C., you might think that legal use of the plant would not result in the loss of your job or other dire consequences, but you are wrong.
This is because federal law still classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug, which means it has no approved medical uses. Drugs and other substances that are considered controlled substances under the Controlled Substances Act are divided into five schedules.
Schedule I controlled substances are considered to have no currently accepted medical use in the U.S., a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision and a high potential for abuse.
Some examples of other substances listed in Schedule I include:
heroin, LSD, peyote, methaqualone and Ecstasy.
In 2011 , Albuquerque Psychiatric Nurse Bryan Krumm sued the Gov. Susana Martinez administration after overruling the Medical Advisory Board decision to make all major depressive disorders eligible for the medicalcannabis program.
Kruum lost his case on appeal on Dec. 12 when the Tenth Circuit Court upheld the district court ruling that it lacked subject matter jurisdiction to decide the claim that marijuana is improperly classified.Several cases of employment discrimination also have upheld the employer’s right to f ire an employee, even those who are suggested to use legal medical marijuana with doctor’s prescription.
Legal medical marijuana use protects the individual from criminal prosecution, but not from employer drug testing programs, denial of employment or promotional opportunities.
If you were taking a legally prescribed drug, you would most likely be protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act. Yet, this protection isn’t extended to medical marijuana.
The use of marijuana still remains illegal in the federal courts,
therefore, there is no protection under the ADA.

The 9th Circuit held that because Congress made it clear that the ADA def ines “illegal drug use” based strictly upon federal law, not state law, the ADA’s exclusion of illegal drug users from its protections also excludes users of medical marijuana, even where the marijuana usage is permitted by state law.
Under the ADA, an applicant or employee who is currently engaging in the illegal use of drugs is not within the definition of a “qualified individual with a disability” and as a result receives no protection under the ADA when denied employment or employment is terminated because of medical marijuana use.
The ruling of the federal courts further affirms that applicants or employees will most likely not be able to assert successful claims for discrimination based on their disability or requests for accommodations using medical marijuana.
A reasonable accommodation is the modification or adjustment of the job application process, interviewing process or employment for a qualified person with a disability.
To qualify for a reasonable accommodation, the employee or job applicant must request it.
However even if the use of medical marijuana would provide relief from the effects of glaucoma, cancer, depression or other conditions the courts have held that a person’s right to use marijuana for certain medical conditions doesn’t extend to a right to an employer accommodation.
Similarly, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-0 that claims of medical necessity for marijuana use were not supported by the Controlled Substances Act, even though California had approved such use in a 1996 voter initiative.
The ADA prohibits discrimination against employees with disabilities.  A disability is a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits a person’s major life activities, including major bodily functions.
Since the ADA explicitly does not protect employees who use illegal drugs and federal law classifies marijuana as such, these contradictory “Catch-22” situations will continue until changes are made to the Controlled Substances Act.
xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sun, 04 Jan 2015
Source: Standard-Speaker (Hazleton, PA)
Copyright: 2015 The Standard-Speaker
Contact: editorial@standardspeaker.com
Website: http://www.standardspeaker.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1085
Author: Lil Junas
Note: Lil Junas is a former photojournalist, editor and college professor.
MARIJUANA: A PLANT OR MEDICATION FOR THE MASSES?
It’s been thousands of years since people have been using marijuana around the world. And cultivating marijuana goes back to 2700 B.C.  when China and India were used as a treatment for rheumatism, malaria and other things.
Then the Spanish brought marijuana to America in 1545, following the English in 1611 when it became a major commercial crop. They grew marijuana mainly for use as hemp rope but were aware of its hallucinogenic properties. Today, medical cannabis treatments are well known.
Now we have electronic cigarettes, as explained in a recent Standard-Speaker article. Will that make smoking safer? And will the health officials over regulate—like producing too much nicotine or vapor? But mainly, will marijuana still be king?
Since 2012, only Colorado and Washington have legalized marijuana for medical and recreational purposes, and Alaska and Oregon will become legal in 2015. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia now have laws legalizing marijuana in some form. State Representative Mark Cohen has co-sponsored a bill in the Pennsylvania House that would legalize marijuana for medical use.
Although most people say marijuana is harmful, there are legal ways to help others medically.
For example, the Oakland Health Center in California serves more than 94,000 patients, most using cannabis (hemp) medically.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta, medical correspondent at CNN, produced “Weed,” a documentary about medical marijuana in March 2014. It highlights five-year-old Charlotte Figi who suffered severe epilepsy. Although the Drug Enforcement Agency said there is no medicinal value for marijuana, Dr. Gupta believes medical marijuana is reducing seizures in epilepsy.
Soon after I came to Arkansas in the ‘70s, I met an active hiking group. We hiked almost every week. We’d eat lunch near a stream, then view the area before walking on.
That day, I picked some interesting plants to take home and but them in my backpack. No sooner than turning my head, Tom said laughing, “Do you know you took marijuana in your pack?”
That was the first time I saw marijuana ... a beautiful plant.   Through the years as a photojournalist, I learned a lot   about marijuana, going with the sheriffs when busting marijuana situations. And I learned how to find gardens full of marijuana plants.
Then the time came. My friend Lian was suffering with pancreas cancer. And one night I saw a magazine story about a man who was using marijuana to treat a serious sickness. Why can’t Lian get help with marijuana, I thought?
It was easy to get the pot. A woman at our newspaper had two sons in college. The next day, Annie opened her sweater and gave me three marijuana cigarettes. That afternoon I went to Lian’s home.Following the directions in the magazine, Lian took a cigarette and sucked a little marijuana, holding it a few seconds. That was easy since Lian was a smoker for years. After another suck, Lian sat quietly, “I feel SO good. No pain at all!” Both of us were laughing with thanks. Lian saved the rest of the cigarettes for later.
Although marijuana was not legal in Arkansas, Lian’s few minutes of marijuana was worth it.
Almost a year later, fighting pancreas cancer, Lian died.  That story has ended. But there are many other stories like that.
There’s no doubt that drugs, including marijuana, are hurting people. But medical marijuana has helped people like Dr. Gupta’s patients-so they’ll be around for many years.
That’s what Americans said when we repealed prohibition 81 years ago.
Gardening gems
I got an interesting call from Betty Fisher in Drums, saying she saw a large tree with many huge balls. It was near the United Methodist Church. She was curious because she never saw such a tree like that.
After seeing my column about hazelnuts recently, Betty was wondering what this tree was. So I went to Visintainer Nursery in Drums and got the answer. They were not nuts. What we saw was Osage-Orange.Mr. Visintainer showed several photos and information about the Osage-Orange, and he knows about the tree by the church. There’s usually two trees nearby, a male or a female, and only the female will produce the balls, he said.
I brought home three of the balls and asked others what they knew about the Osage-Orange. They never saw anything like that. So I cut open one of the balls. I was shocked. Inside was a white milky, stringy and sticky sap. There were lots of seeds around the slimy husk.
Then I called Betty, telling what I learned from the nursery and the ball. Since then, I checked the tree, wondering what happened with the balls. After two big snows, the balls were smashed.
Later in the spring, we’ll discuss other interesting uses of the Osage-Orange. In the meantime, I’ll be looking for the second Osage-Orange tree in the area.
Make sense
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

xxx
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
Pubdate: Sat, 03 Jan 2015
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Webpage: http://drugsense.org/url/BKp7ljMt
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: Bob Egelko
FEDS SAY MARIJUANA STILL POSES A DANGER
U.S. Attorney Fights New Court Challenge
Two weeks after President Obama signed legislation prohibiting federal interference with state medical marijuana laws, his administration has told a federal judge in Sacramento that pot is still a dangerous drug with no medical value.
The U.S. attorney’s office, representing Obama’s Justice Department, made the argument in a court filing Wednesday opposing a challenge to the long-standing federal law that classifies marijuana as a Schedule One drug along with heroin, LSD and ecstasy - substances that have a high potential for abuse and no safe medical use.While there may be “some dispute among doctors as to whether marijuana is medicine,” there is ample evidence to support the government’s conclusion that “this psychoactive, addictive drug is not accepted as safe for medical use at this time, even with medical supervision,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Broderick wrote.
Lawyers for alleged marijuana growers countered that the government presented no credible evidence that marijuana carries the potential hazards of legal substances, like tobacco and alcohol, and that the administration’s position makes even less sense in light of the law Obama signed Dec. 16.
That law, part of an overall government financing bill for the year, bars the federal government from spending money to prevent California and 21 other states from “implementing their own state laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession or cultivation of medical marijuana.”
Congress can’t rationally “justify a finding that marijuana has no medical benefits while demanding that the distribution of medical marijuana be protected from federal government interference,” said Zenia Gilg, lawyer for one of seven defendants charged with growing marijuana on national forest land in Trinity and Tehama counties.
The written arguments come two months after a hearing ordered by U.S. District Judge Kimberly Mueller over prosecutors’ objections. She said defense lawyers had presented expert declarations showing “new scientific and medical information” raising questions about the continued classification of marijuana in Schedule One, which effectively outlaws its possession nationwide.
At the hearing, the defendants called doctors and researchers who asserted marijuana’s medical benefits and relative safety. The administration presented its own expert, a Harvard professor and former drug official in the George W. Bush administration who said pot is both addictive and dangerous.
In Wednesday’s filing, the Obama administration said a single expert’s testimony is enough to show the legally required “rational basis” for marijuana’s current classification. But Broderick, the
government’s lawyer, also said that “most mainstream physicians agree that marijuana is a dangerous drug,” citing the American Psychiatric Association’s observation that pot use can have “serious side effects.”
Although some ingredients of marijuana have government-approved medicinal use, Broderick wrote, there are no adequate long-term studies attesting to the medical value or safety of marijuana. In fact, he said, “there is no standard, ‘medical’ marijuana,” and neither patients nor their doctors know which substances they’re ingesting.
Gilg argued that there are many such studies, but none the government will accept because it has refused to release federally approved marijuana supplies to independent researchers.
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Newshawk: chip
Pubdate: Mon, 29 Dec 2014
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Copyright: 2014 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Contact: wsj.ltrs@wsj.com
Website: http://www.wsj.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487
Author: David B. Rivkin Jr. And Elizabeth Price Foley
FEDERAL ANTI-DRUG LAW GOES UP IN SMOKE
Irate about harmful spillover from Colorado’s marijuana legalization, two neighboring states sue to overturn it. The attorneys general of Nebraska and Oklahoma have asked the Supreme Court to declare unconstitutional Colorado’s law legalizing marijuana. The lawsuit states that, “The Constitution and the federal anti-drug laws do not permit the development of a patchwork of state and local
pro-drug policies and licensed-distribution schemes throughout the country which conflict with federal laws.”
Many conservatives have criticized Nebraska and Oklahoma for being “fair-weather federalists” because their claims hinge, in part, on Gonzales v. Raich, a 2005 Supreme Court decision, upholding the broad reach of Congress’s power to regulate commerce.Conservativesa’? ire instead should be directed at the Obama administration’s decision to suspend enforcement of the federal law prohibiting marijuana - a decision so warping the rule of law that the complaining states’ reliance on Raich is justified and necessary.
In 1970 Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act, or CSA, listing marijuana as a Schedule I drug, and thus illegal to manufacture, distribute or possess. Nonetheless, in August 2013 the Obama administration employed its now-signature response to disfavored laws, issuing a memo directing U.S. law enforcement to refrain from using “limited investigative and prosecutorial resources” to pursue marijuana-related violations of the CSA in states that chose to regulate marijuana businesses. The new law-by-memo told states they are free to ignore the federal ban.  The Controlled Substances Act is an exercise of Congress’s express power to regulate interstate commerce. The law declares that a “major portion of the traffic in controlled substances flows through interstate and foreign commerce” and that even locally grown and sold drugs have a substantial impact on interstate commerce. Drugs
manufactured, distributed or consumed within a single state cannot be tolerated because they undermine Congress’s desire to stop interstate drug trafficking.
State laws legalizing and regulating marijuana - in Colorado, Alaska, Oregon and Washington - conflict with the CSA and cripple its effectiveness. States cannot be required to enforce federal law. But as the Supreme Court held in Arizona v. United States (2012), when the federal government doesn’t enforce its own laws, states still “may not pursue policies that undermine federal law.” Colorado’s decision to legalize and regulate the sale of marijuana undermines the Controlled Substances Act, giving a major boost to all segments of that business. Indeed, in an interview this month Colorado’s attorney general, John Suthers, acknowledged that his state is “becoming a major exporter of marijuana.”
Neighboring states such as Nebraska and Oklahoma have seen a significant influx of high-potency marijuana purchased in and directed toward Colorado markets, increasing those states’ law-enforcement costs. If the CSA is a valid federal statute, the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause (Article VI, paragraph 2) instructs that conflicting state laws cannot be allowed to stand. This is where Raich comes in.
In Raich, individuals who used marijuana pursuant to California’s “compassionate use” law asserted that the CSA was unconstitutional as it applied to them, because Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce couldn’t reach state-sanctioned intrastate marijuana use. The Raich majority refused to create a CSA “exemption” for medicinal marijuana, reasoning that “a
nationwide exemption for the vast quantity of marijuana ... locally cultivated for personal use ... may have a substantial impact on the interstate market for this extraordinarily popular substance.” It concluded that the CSA was a valid exercise of the congressional power to regulate interstate commerce and that amarijuana possession and cultivation “in accordance with state law cannot serve to place respondent’a activities beyond congressional reach.”
Even the pro-federalism dissent by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor which asserted that state compassionate-use laws could peacefully coexist with the CSA - acknowledged that medical marijuana was qualitatively distinct from recreational marijuana. More specifically, Justice O’Connor believed that the relatively small population of medical marijuana users didn’t have a “substantial effect” on the interstate market for recreational marijuana - the market Congress intended to extinguish in the Controlled  Substances Act.  Whatever one thinks about Raich, it is still binding precedent. Colorado’s law is not about a limited, medical-need exemption for  marijuana use. It is a full-scale defiance of the CSA. There is no
federalism defense to Colorado’s law, unless one believes that Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce doesn’t include the power to regulate the buying and selling of marijuana, a commercial market that involves interstate transportation, lures sellers and consumers from other states, and now generates more than $7 million in tax revenue for Colorado every month.
The Controlled Substances Act can be amended or repealed. Congress has taken a step in this direction by providing in its recent omnibus spending bill that the Justice Department cannot use appropriated funds to prevent states from implementing “laws that authorize the use, distribution or cultivation of medicinal marijuana.”
This development may lead the Supreme Court to take another look at the CSA’s constitutionality, something that could occur in the context of the Oklahoma and Nebraska lawsuit against Colorado.
Alternatively, Attorney General Eric Holdercould use his authority under the Controlled Substances Act to remove marijuana from Schedule
I. But Coloradans - or the citizens of any other state - lack the power in our constitutional regime to enact a law that conflicts with the CSA.
When federal power has been legitimately invoked, states may not go rogue. When they do, sister states that can demonstrate concrete injury are entitled to obtain a court declaration that state laws in conflict with federal law are unconstitutional. Normally such lawsuits wouldn’t be necessary because the federal government would enforce its superior law against rogue states. But these aren’t ordinary constitutional times, and it isn’t “fair-weather federalism” to defend these core constitutional principles.

Mr. Rivkin, a constitutional litigator, served in the Justice Department and White House Counsel’s Office in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Ms. Foley is a professor of constitutional law at Florida International University College of Law.
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Newshawk: chip
Pubdate: Fri, 26 Dec 2014
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Copyright: 2014 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Contact: wsj.ltrs@wsj.com
Website: http://www.wsj.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487
Authors: Robert E. Rubin and Nicholas Turner
Note: Mr. Rubin, a former U.S. Treasury secretary, is co-chairman of
the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Turner is president and
director of the Vera Institute of Justice.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/prison.htm (Incarceration)
THE STEEP COST OF AMERICA’S HIGH INCARCERATION RATE
About one of every 100 U.S. adults is in prison. That’s five to 10 times higher than in Western Europe.
One of us is a former Treasury secretary, the other directs a criminal-justice institute. But we’ve reached the same conclusions.  America’s overreliance on incarceration is exacting excessive costs on individuals and communities, as well as on the national economy.
Sentences are too long, and parole and probation policies too inflexible. There is too little rehabilitation in prison and
inadequate support for life after prison.

Crime itself has a terrible human cost and a serious economic cost. But appropriate punishment for those who are a risk to public safety shouldn’t obscure the vast deficiencies in the criminal-justice system that impose a significant drag on the economy.
The U.S. rate of incarceration, with nearly one of every 100 adults in prison or jail, is five to 10 times higher than the rates in Western Europe and other democracies, according to a groundbreaking, 464-page report released this year by the National Academy of Sciences. America puts people in prison for crimes that other nations don’t, mostly minor drug offenses, and keeps them in prison much longer. Yet these long sentences have had at best a marginal impact on crime reduction.
This is not only a serious humanitarian and social issue, but one with profound economic and fiscal consequences. In an increasingly competitive global economy, equipping Americans for the modern workforce is an economic imperative. Excessive incarceration harms productivity. People in prison are people who aren’t working. And without effective rehabilitation, many are ill-equipped to work after release.
For the more than 600,000 people who leave prison and re-enter society every year, finding employment can be a severe challenge.  Prison time carries a social stigma, which makes finding any job, let alone a good job, all too difficult. The Labor Department doesn’t track the unemployment rate for people with prison records.
But a 2006 study by the Independent Committee on Reentry and Employment found that up to 60% of formerly incarcerated people are unemployed one year after release, with their unemployment rates rising to above 65% during the 2008-09 recession, according to a study in the Journal of Correctional Education. And even when they find employment, people who have been incarcerated earn 40% less than people of similar circumstances who have never been imprisoned, according to a study by the Massachusetts Criminal Justice Reform Coalition. Faced with obstacles to gainful employment, it’s no surprise that 43% of people released from prison end up back behind bars within three years, according to a recent Pew study on recidivism.
The costs of incarceration extend across generations. Nearly three million American children have a parent in prison or jail. Growing up with an incarcerated parent can harm childhood development. Research by Pew shows that children with fathers who have been incarcerated are nearly six times more likely to be expelled or suspended from school. Incarceration therefore helps perpetuate the cycle of family poverty and increases the potential for next generation criminal activity. A 2009 study by two Villanova sociologists found that, from 1980 to 2004, the official poverty rate would have fallen by more than 10% had it not been for our nation’s incarceration policies.
Many of the people who end up in prison are already acutely disadvantaged to begin with. In terms of basic education, more than a third of people in prison do not have a high-school diploma or GED, according to the Justice Department. And Columbia University researchers in 2010 found that two-thirds of people in prison
struggled with drug addiction before incarceration. A study released in 2006 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 45% of federal prisoners, 56% of state prisoners and 64% of local jail inmates suffered from mental-health problems.
Instead of allowing these disadvantages to fester in prison, we need new policies that are designed to foster positive change, giving those who are incarcerated the skills they need to re-enter society
as productive members of the workforce. For example, the government currently bars people in prison from receiving Pell Grants, a counterproductive policy that should be reversed. Substance abuse and mental-health treatment programs, along with educational support, can help people leave prison healthier and better-equipped to make socially productive choices.
Model programs are being piloted at the state level. For example, the Vera Institute of Justice’s Pathways from Prison to Post-Secondary Education project is working with more than 900 students in 14 prisons. The program provides college classes and re-entry support such as financial literacy training, legal services, employment counseling and workshops on family reintegration. A 2013
meta-analysis by RAND has already found that recidivism decreases when a former inmate graduates from college, which also boosts lifetime earning potential.
And clearly, we need significant sentencing and parole reform. There is widespread bipartisan agreement that we are using prison for too many crimes and for too long, with concentrated effects in many communities. One possibility for reform is the Smarter Sentencing Act, introduced by Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin and Republican Sen.
Mike Lee, which boasts 30 co-sponsors and was successfully reported out of the Senate Judiciary Committee this spring. The bill’s House companion also enjoys strong bipartisan support. There are also examples of progress in statehouses around the country. In 2013, 35 states passed bills to change some aspect of how their criminal
justice systems address sentencing and parole; since 2009, more than 30 states have reformed existing drug laws and sentencing practices, according to reports from Vera this year.
The time has come to make sensible reform in these four areas - sentencing, parole, rehabilitation and re-entry - a national priority. Doing so could accomplish a tremendous amount for families, communities and the U.S. economy.
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Newshawk: chip
Pubdate: Fri, 02 Jan 2015
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Copyright: 2015 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Contact: wsj.ltrs@wsj.com
Website: http://www.wsj.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487
Author: Chris Taylor
BACKYARD WEED IS NONE OF THE GOVERNMENT’S BUSINESS
In response to David Rivkin Jr. and Elizabeth Price Foley’s Dec. 29 op-ed “Federal Antidrug Law Goes Up in Smoke” : The authors assert that Colorado’s marijuana law is “a full-scale defiance of the CSA (Controlled Substance Act). When federal power has been legitimately invoked, states may not go rogue.”
How is this any different than the subject of abortion? Roe v. Wade
legalized abortion (until viability) in 1973 but states have been going “rogue”  ever since. Some states now require women to watch an ultrasound of the fetus or limit abortions to those under six weeks.
Really? One barely knows about the pregnancy by then.States are self-regulating marijuana like abortion. But no one is
mounting a campaign to support women in their decision to have an abortion until viability. No one cares if she has to travel hundreds of miles to another state to get it or resorts to an unsafe abortion.
So states do go “rogue.”  Why is it any different with marijuana?
Chris Taylor