Search Results: michigan (281)

The activists put up a long fight.

Here’s your daily round-up of pot-news, excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek.

Michigan almost certainly won’t vote on REC this year. The state’s Senate advanced regulation for MED dispensaries.

Both MED initiatives that will appear on the Arkansas ballot “ are simply recreational marijuana masquerading as medicine,” according to Jerry Cox, executive director of the conservative Christian group Family Council. If both initiatives pass, the one with more votes prevails.

We told you last week about a Michigan prison cop who died prior to being sentenced for his role in a medical marijuana brownie sting. It turns out that 49-year-old Tim Bernhardt committed suicide, rather than face the felony charges of maintaining a drug house – charges he saw for simply being a medical marijuana patient and making some brownies. Bernhardt was facing up to two years in jail and $25,000 in fines.
According to Michigan law, concentrated forms of marijuana are illegal even for medical cannabis users – that includes infused butter, arguably the most common way to make pot edibles. The court has upheld that ruling as recently as July of 2013 – despite overwhelming evidence that it’s an absurd qualification. The judge based the ruling on the language of the state medical marijuana law, which defines marijuana as the “the dried leaves and flowers of the marihuana plant, and any mixture or preparation thereof.”

An attorney’s opinionated rant against marijuana in a Michigan courtroom last week cost her a case, even though most seemed to agree she had won.
In her closing arguments in a case against a Michigan medical cannabis patient accused of growing more than he was allowed, Alger County prosecutor Karen Bahrman went off on a tear on the state’s medical marijuana laws, the Alger Hemp Coalition, a local cannabis advocacy group, and patients in general. She said their vision was to live in a “country where everybody can walk around stoned.”

Former Kent County jail Sgt. and medical marijuana patient Timothy Bernhardt, who is being charged along with three other corrections officers for possessing medical marijuana brownies, has died. According to the family’s attorney, Bernhardt died Sunday morning. The cause of death has not been disclosed.
Bernhardt was set to be sentenced for “maintaining a drug house” after being busted with pot brownies. As we told you last week, marijuana concentrates are illegal in Michigan, which courts there have taken to include marijuana-infused butter.

This week’s asshole prohibitionist award goes to Kent County (Michigan) Prosecutor William Forsyth, who single-handedly has challenged the will of voters in Grand Rapids after they decided in 2012 to decriminalize up to 2.5 ounces of pot.
He’s failed so far, but now the case is in the hands of the state Court of Appeals.
Forsyth first challenged the law in 2013, saying voters have no right to pass a measure that makes city laws conflict with state laws. But his challenge was shut down when a county circuit court judge said voters did have the authority.

We told you earlier this week about marijuana decriminalization measures in Berkley, Huntington Woods, Pleasant Ridge and several other towns in Michigan and suburbs of Detroit. In total, there were 11 measures scattered around the state.
Well, voters did the right thing in six of those communities last night and passed bills lowering or eliminating marijuana penalties for small amounts of cannabis.

Joe Ross/Flickr.


Congrats, Travers Narcotics team: you raided a marijuana dispensary that wasn’t trying to hide what they were doing and have prevented patients from accessing state-legal cannabis they use as medicine.
Cops raided the Magic Buds Medical Cannabis store in Wexford County, Michigan Tuesday, taking cash, business and patient records along with the stock of medical cannabis. The raid came after a judge ordered the shop to close last month for operating against state laws that prohibit dispensaries.

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