Search Results: federal government (898)


A report released Thursday by the federal government challenges the assertion that loosening state marijuana laws will lead to more teens getting high.
In its latest biennial survey of high school students, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that teen use of marijuana remained flat between 2011 and 2013. During those years, several states either decriminalized small amounts of the plant or launched medical marijuana programs.


The United States government has added a new tool to their anti-marijuana toolbox, announcing yesterday that they are barring state-legal cannabis growers from using federally controlled irrigation water to grow their ganja. The announcement actually doesn’t change much – it’s been illegal to use federal water to grow marijuana for decades now. But the policy announcement also likely signifies a new era of enforcement from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which controls water in 17 western states including Washington and Colorado.

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Earlier this year, on February 7th, President Barack Obama signed a new farm bill, backed by a rare display of bipartisan politicking. Originally introduced by cannabis-friendly Congressmen Jared Polis (D – CO), Earl Blumenauer (D – OR), and Thomas Massie (R – KY), the bill contained a very special amendment. For the first time in decades, the federal government had made an allowance for the cultivation of hemp. The hemp caveat only applies to states that have passed their own form of hemp legalization, and Massie’s Kentucky is one of those states.
Also from the Commonwealth of Kentucky is Republican Senator Rand Paul, who has made clear his support for hemp cultivation in the state. The senior Senator from Kentucky and possible-Sleestack Mitch McConnell was reported to be instrumental in making sure that the bill that the president signed retained the hemp growing amendment.
Kentucky was poised to re-establish its roots in a hemp trade that flourished in the state until it was banned by the federal government in 1937. Today, however, the state finds itself embroiled in a lawsuit against the federal government, and their first hemp harvest hangs in the balance.

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Martin Nickerson Jr. is suing the government.
As a citizen of the state of Washington, he is suing Governor Jay Inslee, as well as Attorney General Bob Ferguson and state tax chief Carol Nelson for what he claims is a wrongful demand to collect taxes from him related to a medical marijuana dispensary he operated years ago.
Nickerson, who is currently facing federal marijuana possession and distribution charges, questions whether it should be legal for the state of Washington to assess taxes on a federally illegal drug, even citing Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act. Yeah, he went there.

Larry Harvey and Rhonda Firestack-Harvey.


If the last few months of pot tolerance from the Obama administration has left you thinking that all is well in the world of state-legalized medical marijuana, you’d be wrong. A federal judge yesterday refuse to allow a Washington state family to use the state’s medical marijuana laws in their defense against federal charges of cultivation, possession and distribution of marijuana as well as a gun charge for having a firearm “in furtherance of drug trafficking.”


Yesterday, Minneapolis state Sen. Scott Dibble’s medical marijuana bill passed its final committee hurdle in the Senate, paving the way for a floor vote in that chamber.
Dibble’s bill, which allows patients to vaporize marijuana but not smoke it, is still more liberal than the medical marijuana bill making its way through the House. In fact, Heather Azzi, political director of Minnesotans for Compassionate Care, tells us the House version is fundamentally unworkable because it would implicate both state employees and doctors in federal offenses.


Federal officials have now brought charges against ten additional people in Michigan for allegedly using the state medical marijuana program as a front for illegal sales and cultivation, bringing the total number of people “busted” in the sting to 37.
According to the feds, the group called themselves the Medical Marijuana Team and was growing in multiple small towns in the western part of the state as caregivers for medical marijuana patients.

The White House is open to changing marijuana from a Schedule 1 controlled substance, Attorney General Eric Holder announced Friday, but any change would have to come from the U.S. House. The move wouldn’t necessarily legalize cannabis, but it would make it easier for medical studies of the plant to be conducted as well as give state-legal pot businesses the ability to take federal tax deductions they currently are not allowed to take.

Since the beginning of Arizona’s medical marijuana program, people have petitioned the state health department to add post-traumatic stress disorder as a qualifying condition for medical pot. However, PTSD and other conditions aren’t added to the list, due to a lack of scientific research on the risks and benefits of using marijuana to treat those conditions. But that might change.

Yesterday, the Obama Administration, by way of Attorney General Eric Holder, reaffirmed its support for a current proposal that, if passed, would nudge our nation’s legal system a step in a more civil direction. Mr. Holder spoke Thursday before the U.S. Sentencing Commission, whose duty it is to vote annually on what sort of instructions need to be updated for federal judges to reference when handing down sentences on all of the various cases they see.
This April, the Sentencing Commission is considering a vote to overhaul the current recommended sentences for all federal nonviolent drug-related offenses.

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