Pubdate: Sun, 16 May 2010
Source: Sacramento Bee (CA)
Copyright: 2010 The Sacramento Bee
Contact: http://www.sacbee.com/2006/09/07/19629/submit-letters-to-the-editor.html
Author: Peter Hecht
Image: http://www.mapinc.org/images/forumgraphic.jpg
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?253 (Cannabis – Medicinal – U.S.)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?261 (Cannabis – United States)

The Conversation:

RESEARCH OFFERS CONTRASTING VIEWS OF MARIJUANA

Rickey Yuhre didn’t need an $8.7 million California medical marijuana study to tell him that pot eased his suffering.

The 53-year-old former diesel truck mechanic and welder has pulmonary fibrosis, a chronic and debilitating disease of the lungs.  He has fused vertebrae in his neck due to severe nerve damage.

Pain meds and relaxants – Oxycontin, Vicodin, Neurontin, Valium – only turned his insides out with nausea.  And so he started using a special “vapor box” to medicate with marijuana without smoking.

“It brought things to a tolerable state,” said Yuhre, of Sacramento.

His experiences seem to support findings of state-funded research that asserts that marijuana provides relief for a range of ailments, including neuropathic pain caused by injuries, infections, diabetes, strokes and other conditions affecting the nervous system.

[snip]

[sidebar]

MEDICAL MARIJUANA: PANACEA OR PROBLEM?

A community health forum, presented by Capital Public Radio and The Bee, will feature a panel of experts to discuss the medical, legal and community impact of medical marijuana.  Insight host Jeffrey Callison will moderate the forum and Bee reporter Peter Hecht will join the panel of experts.  A one-hour live broadcast will begin at 6 p.m.  Wednesday on 90.9 FM in Sacramento, 90.5 FM in Tahoe/Reno, and 88.1 FM in Quincy and 91.3 FM in Stockton/Modesto.  A Web chat will begin at 6 p.m.  at www.secondopinions.org.  For more details, see graphic above.

Continues: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10.n365.a03.html

Pubdate: Sat, 15 May 2010
Source: Lake Wales News (FL)
Copyright: 2010 The Lake Wales News
Contact: http://www.lakewalesnews.com/forms/letters/
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?261 (Cannabis – United States)

TIME FOR FLORIDA TO TALK ABOUT MARIJUANA LAWS

If there were a way for Florida to save tens of millions of dollars annually, would you want to know about it? If more than a dozen other states were already enjoying these cost savings and a more than a dozen more were exploring ways to join them, would you want to know what Florida is doing?

If Florida, in fact, were doing the exact opposite of more than half the states in the country, would you want to know why?

We’re guessing you answered yes to all of the above questions, but we admit they were framed in a way that it would be hard to say no.

If you knew the questions involved marijuana laws, we suspect your answers might change.  That’s understandable.  Marijuana is illegal.

Many believe it is a dangerous “gateway” drug that leads its users to use even more dangerous drugs and to commit crimes to support their drug use.

We’re not convinced past policy toward marijuana use has been effective.  Florida and its counties are spending far too much money enforcing existing laws and incarcerating offenders.

At a time when state and county resources are scarce, Florida should join other states in exploring its marijuana laws.

Decades of marijuana law reform across the country and stacks of studies examining the impact of those reforms provide ample evidence on which a reasoned, rational policy could be crafted.

Almost all the studies show relaxing marijuana laws does not lead to increased use among any age group, a common red herring argument against decriminalization.

Continues: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10.n363.a10.html

Pubdate: Fri, 14 May 2010
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Copyright: 2010 The Denver Post Corp
Contact: [email protected]
Author: Michael Riley, The Denver Post
Referenced: Questions for Attorney General Eric Holder on Medical Marijuana http://mapinc.org/url/2LYyZsgk
Referenced: Rep. Jared Polis’s letter to Attorney General Eric Holder http://mapinc.org/url/GXHrt8XT
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?253 (Cannabis – Medicinal – U.S.)

POLIS PRESSES AG ON POT RAIDS

Holder Says Federal Agents Have Other Priorities and That Only Certain Cases Would Merit Action.

WASHINGTON – Rep.  Jared Polis on Thursday quizzed Attorney General Eric Holder about federal enforcement of marijuana laws in states such as Colorado, which have approved it for medical use and are seeing a growing number of dispensaries.

In his first appearance as a new member of the House Judiciary Committee, the Boulder Democrat, who recently held a “coffee with your congressman” event at a coffee shop adjoining a dispensary in Nederland, quizzed Holder about comments from a federal Drug Enforcement Administration agent suggesting the Justice Department was planning to raid dispensaries in Colorado.

Not so, Holder said, citing higher enforcement priorities and pointing to a directive by the deputy attorney general outlining the specific criteria under which the feds would take an interest in shutting down dispensaries operating legally under state law.

“There are a variety of factors that are contained within the memo .  .  .  that United States attorneys and assistant United States attorneys are supposed to apply, supposed to consider, when trying to make the determination about whether or not federal resources are going to be used to go after somebody who is dealing in marijuana,” he said.

Continues: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10.n361.a02.html

Pubdate: Fri, 14 May 2010
Source: Kennebec Journal (Augusta, ME)
Copyright: 2010 MaineToday Media, Inc.
Contact: http://www.kjonline.com/readerservices/Send_a_Letter_to_the_Editor-KJ.html
Author: Keith Edwards, Staff Writer
Cited: Berkeley Patients Group http://www.berkeleypatientsgroup.com/
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?253 (Cannabis – Medicinal – U.S.)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/dispensaries
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Berkeley+Patients+Group

INQUIRY, AND RULES, HERALD CITY POT CLINIC

Former California Operator Interested

AUGUSTA — With at least one inquiry already made about opening a nonprofit medical marijuana dispensary in Augusta, city councilors are considering rules to restrict where such facilities could locate.

Councilors discussed ordinance changes to address medical marijuana dispensaries Thursday, and are expected to consider the first of two required readings to adopt the changes at their business meeting next week.

In the meantime, a now-local resident who City Manager William Bridgeo said has worked with an established medical marijuana dispensary in California hopes to open a facility in or around Augusta.

“Thank you for implementing regulations that will, hopefully, prevent a lot of problems which could occur if you weren’t ahead of the curve,” Becky Dekeuster, a new resident of Augusta who expressed interest in opening a medical-marijuana facility, said after councilors discussed drafting the rules Thursday.

Dekeuster said Thursday she was not representing a specific group but has previously indicated, before a state task force that wrote Maine’s medical marijuana rules, she has worked with the Berkeley Patients Group, which has run a dispensary in California for 10 years.

In a November 2009 state referendum, voters approved allowing nonprofit dispensaries to open across the state.  Earlier this month, the state Department of Health and Human Services’ Division of Licensing and Regulatory Services announced it is accepting applications from nonprofit corporations to become dispensaries under Maine’s Medical Use of Marijuana Act.

Continues: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10/n360/a06.html

Pubdate: Thu, 13 May 2010
Source: Orange County Register, The (CA)
Copyright: 2010 The Orange County Register
Contact: [email protected]
Author: Erika I. Ritchie
Cited: Mayor Peter Herzog http://www.lakeforestca.gov/officials/mayorncouncil/herzog.asp
Referenced: The Ruling http://www.lakeforestca.gov/civica/filebank/blobdload.asp?BlobID=5237
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/dispensaries
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?115 (Cannabis – California)

RULING LETS CITY SHUT POT CLINICS

LAKE FOREST – A Superior Court judge issued a ruling Wednesday allowing Lake Forest to shut down all medical marijuana dispensaries.

Judge David Chaffee’s ruling is in response to lawsuits filed by Lake Forest seeking a preliminary injunction to stop dispensaries from operating.  The city argued the dispensaries violate zoning laws.

Chaffee agreed, citing two reasons:

.  Cities are legally prohibited from passing land-use ordinances that violate state or federal law.  Marijuana is illegal under federal law, so land-use laws that allow medical marijuana dispensaries would be prohibited.

.  Because the city municipal code does not allow dispensaries, they have to be closed down.

In his ruling, Chaffee wrote: “Defendants are barred from conducting, allowing, permitting, inhabiting, leasing, renting or otherwise granting authority to use properties in the above described manner.”

In September, Lake Forest sued 35 people in the city, including medical marijuana dispensary owners and retail landowners who rented space to them.  Since then, 10 collectives have shut down.  Eleven continue to operate.

Jeffrey Dunn, who is representing Lake Forest, said he believes Chaffee’s ruling could eventually force the closure of all marijuana dispensaries in the state.  For now, because the ruling is a trial court decision, it applies only to Lake Forest, where dispensaries will have to close down immediately unless they get a temporary stay.

Continues: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10.n359.a02.html

Pubdate: Thu, 13 May 2010
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: C01
Copyright: 2010 The Washington Post Company
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/mUgeOPdZ
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post Staff Writer
Photo: Lyster Dewey, with hemp on his desk at the Agriculture Department, wrote painstakingly of cultivating the plant on a government tract where the Pentagon was later built. His diaries were recently discovered at a garage sale. [Photo Courtesy Of Adam Eidinger/Hemp Industries Association] http://www.mapinc.org/images/LysterDewey.jpg
Cited: Hemp Industries Association http://www.thehia.org/
Cited: Hemp History Week http://www.hemphistoryweek.com/
Cited: Vote Hemp http://www.votehemp.com/
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/industrial+hemp

HEMP FANS LOOK TOWARD LYSTER DEWEY’S PAST, AND THE PENTAGON, FOR HIGHER GROUND

Hemp needed a hero.  Needed one bad.

The gangly plant — once a favorite of military ropemakers — couldn’t catch a break.  Even as legalized medical marijuana has become more and more commonplace, the industrial hemp plant — with its minuscule levels of the chemical that gives marijuana its kick — has remained illegal to cultivate in the United States.

Enter the lost hemp diaries.

Found recently at a garage sale outside Buffalo but never publicly released, these journals chronicle the life of Lyster H.  Dewey, a botanist at the U.S.  Department of Agriculture whose long career straddled the 19th and 20th centuries.  Dewey writes painstakingly about growing exotically named varieties of hemp — Keijo, Chinamington and others — on a tract of government land known as Arlington Farms.  In effect, he was tending Uncle Sam’s hemp farm.

What’s gotten hemp advocates excited about the discovery is the location of that farm.  A large chunk of acreage was handed over to the War Department in the 1940s for construction of the world’s largest office building: the Pentagon.  So now, hempsters can claim that an important piece of their legacy lies in the rich Northern Virginia soil alongside a hugely significant symbol of the government that has so enraged and befuddled them over the years.

All thanks to Lyster Dewey.

A small trade group, the Hemp Industries Association, bought Dewey’s diaries.  The group’s leaders hope that displaying them for the first time on Monday — the start of what they’ve decreed the “1st Annual Hemp History Week” — will convince the universe that hemp is not a demon weed and was used for ropes on Navy ships and for World War II parachute webbing.  The ultimate goal is to spur the government to lift the ban on hemp production, a policy that especially riles activists because foreign-produced hemp oils and food products can be legally imported.

Continues: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10/n358/a05.html

Pubdate: Thu, 13 May 2010
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: B01
Copyright: 2010 The Washington Post Company
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/mUgeOPdZ
Author: Robert McCartney
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?253 (Cannabis – Medicinal – U.S.)

D.C.’s MEDICAL MARIJUANA LAW HAS PROBLEMS BUT IS A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION

The risk with the District’s new medical marijuana law isn’t that the city will become another California with hundreds of pot shops and doctors who’ll approve it for people feeling just jittery or blue.  Instead, the worry is that the statute is so restrictive there won’t be enough legal weed to meet demand.

Fearful that Congress might kill the law, the D.C.  Council approved what cannabis advocates say is probably the least-permissive measure in the country.

No growing at home.  Only five to eight “dispensaries” to sell it.  Licensed cultivators are limited to 95 plants.  They have to grow indoors, which means smaller plants.

The limits could mean that people with ailments such as cancer and multiple sclerosis would have to use the black market to get marijuana for relief from nausea, muscle spasms and other symptoms.

Other controversies are likely.  Competition will be fierce among would-be pot entrepreneurs eager for lucrative licenses to operate dispensaries or grow plants.  Unsettling r?sum?s will abound, such as from big operators outside the state and local people who’ve been in the business illegally for years.

“They’re calling wondering, who do I need to grease? Who do I need to show our support to?” said Allen St.  Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws.

None of this is to say the law was a mistake.  Quite the opposite.  Loyal readers know I support legalizing marijuana, including for recreational purposes.  My goals for pot policy can be summarized in four words: good quality, reasonable prices.

Until that’s achieved — St.  Pierre predicts it’ll take a decade for public opinion to shift that far — we must settle for small steps in the right direction.

Continues: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10/n358/a04.html

Pubdate: Wed, 12 May 2010
Source: Ottawa Citizen (CN ON)
Copyright: 2010 The Ottawa Citizen
Contact: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/letters.html
Author: Dan Gardner, The Ottawa Citizen
Image: DEA administrator Karen Tandy’s statement, July 29, 2005 http://www.mapinc.org/images/Tandystatement.jpg
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Marc+Emery
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)

JUST ANOTHER CASUALTY IN THE CRIMINAL WAR ON DRUGS

It’s certainly not the worst crime committed in the name of the war on drugs.

That title probably belongs to the countless innocent people killed in botched raids.  Or the police officers who died in pursuit of the impossible.  Or the lives lost to easily preventable overdoses, adulterations, and blood-borne diseases.  Or the funding handed on a silver platter to thugs, terrorists, and guerrillas, like those killing our soldiers in Afghanistan.  Or the civil liberties eroded, the corruption fostered, the chaos spread.  Or maybe it belongs to the hundreds of billions of dollars governments have squandered in a mad, futile, and destructive crusade.

Next to all that, the extradition of Marc Emery to the United States is no great travesty.

Emery is the Vancouver activist who has spent most of his life campaigning for the legalization of marijuana.  To fund his efforts, he ran a little seed company similar to thousands of other little seed companies, except when Emery’s seeds were put in soil, watered, and given sunlight, they grew into cannabis plants.

Showing rare good sense, Canadian officials decided that prosecuting a man for selling the seeds of a common plant is not a public priority.  In effect, they permitted Emery’s business, and others like it, to operate.  Health Canada officials were even known to direct those licensed to possess medical marijuana to Emery, so patients could grow their own medicine in the kitchen window.

But such modesty and pragmatism smacks of heresy to the holy warriors of prohibition.  Verily, the plant is Evil unto the last seed.

In 2005, Emery was arrested by Canadian police acting at the behest of the U.S.  Drug Enforcement Administration.  Innocent Americans had been lured into purchasing Emery’s wicked wares, the DEA alleged.

Emery fought extradition for five years.  On Monday, justice minister Rob Nicholson ordered him handed over.  Thanks to the insanely punitive sentencing laws in the Land of the Incarcerated, Emery faced as much as 20 years.  He accepted a plea bargain for five.

Emery argued all along that he was a political target, that the DEA was out to get him in order to silence a prominent advocate of marijuana legalization.  One might suspect Emery has delusions of grandeur, except the DEA issued a press release in which the agency’s chief is quoted saying pretty much exactly what Emery alleges: “Today’s DEA arrest of Marc Scott Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture Magazine, and the founder of a marijuana legalization group, is a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S.  and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement.”

Incidentally, the DEA posts all its old press releases on its website, but that release has vanished.  There is, however, a different press release, which makes no mention of the legalization movement.

Continues: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10/n358/a03.html

Pubdate: Wed, 12 May 2010
Source: National Law Journal (US)
Copyright: 2010 NLP IP Company
Author: Amanda Bronstad
Cited: Americans for Safe Access http://www.americansforsafeaccess.org/
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/dispensaries
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?115 (Cannabis – California)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Americans+for+Safe+Access

CALIF. CITIES SUED OVER MEDICAL MARIJUANA ORDINANCES

Medical marijuana dispensaries have filed lawsuits against California
cities, including Los Angeles, challenging ordinances that
effectively threaten the existence of their businesses.

Besides the dispensaries, the plaintiffs include medical marijuana
users and organizations that promote the use of medical marijuana.

Vincent Howard, founding partner of Howard | Nassiri, based in
Anaheim, Calif., who represents at least 10 dispensaries in Los
Angeles, expects more suits to be filed.

“As long as cities want to turn a blind eye and pretend like this
isn’t coming, there’s going to be a lot of lawsuits and a
proliferation of dispensaries,” he said.

Continues: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v10.n357.a01.html