So, there’s more good news on the marijuana legalization front, and this time, it’s coming to us straight from the Lone Star state.
This week, Texas State Representative Joe Moody introduced a bill that could potentially reduce the current state penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana. Which, frankly, is needed. Marijuana laws in Texas are pretty darn ridiculous in their current state.
Medical marijuana patient numbers continued to climb in Colorado recent months, increasing from 115,710 people at the start of September to 117,239 by Halloween night. And those patients spent quite a bit of money on pot, with medical sales outpacing recreational sales in September and October as well.
Here’s a lesson for you: if you want to get away with marijuana posesion, be a cop.
A Richmond, California police officer busted with about five pounds of pot he picked up at a UPS store won’t face any charges, even though he failed to follow even the most basic protocol.
K-9 Cop Joe Avila picked up the pot at the UPS store on Nov. 25 and radioed in to dispatch that he was going to file an incident report. He never did that, though. Instead, he took the pot home with him instead of to a station to lock up as evidence. It’s not the first time Avila hasn’t written a report, either. In fact, it’s his complete lack of competency and failure to write reports for more than 36 incidents that led to his bust.
| Taser. |
| A police body camera by Taser. |
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti unveiled plans today to outfit the LAPD with 7,000 body cameras, making L.A. the first major city to take that step. But before the cameras hit the streets, the department has to come up with a policy on when and how they will be used. And that could be tricky.
The L.A. Police Protective League, the union that represents LAPD officers, is broadly supportive of body cameras. But they want to make sure that officers can review the videos before writing up their reports.
Not so fast, says the ACLU, which calls the proposed policy “ridiculous”. More at The Informer blog.
| Ryan Orange/LA Weekly. |
| Seth Rogan. |
Sony assumed North Korea would hate the movie. The question was: What would it do? Pyongyang had just tested its atom bomb and threatened “preemptive nuclear attack.” And the Supreme Leader with his finger on the trigger was barely over 30, with less than two years of experience.
But Kim Jong-un didn’t care about Olympus Has Fallen, even though the violently anti-North Korean 2013 film showed his people strangling women, murdering unarmed men, kidnapping the U.S. president and even executing their fellow citizens. His saber rattlers never mentioned it. That wasn’t worth a fight.
A year later, North Korea had a bigger enemy: Seth Rogen.
The days of jackbooted feds raiding legit medical marijuana operations are mostly a thing of the past under the omnibus federal spending bill signed by President Obama this week. An amendment slipped into the bill denies funding for federal anti-pot raids of legit marijuana businesses in states where cannabis has been legalized for medical or recreational purposes. That would include nearly 32 states and the District of Columbia.
The addition to the $1.1 trillion spending bill, hammered out by the House and approved by the Senate last week, was written in part by a Southern California congressman.
Controversial cannabis researcher Sue Sisley is on her way back to Colorado today, after six months that have been a “pretty barbaric rollercoaster,” she says. “One injustice after another, and I suspect it will not slow down for quite a while.” But at the end of November, the Arizona-based researcher finally caught a break: Colorado’s Medical Marijuana Scientific Advisory Council chose eight research-grant proposals for the Board of Health to consider at its December 17 meeting — including Sisley’s proposal to study the effectiveness of using marijuana to treat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.
One of the most popular arguments among marijuana-legalization critics is that greater cannabis accessibility for adults will lead to more use by teens. But a new study from the University of Michigan calls that assumption into question. Michigan researchers found that teen pot use actually declined this year despite legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado and Washington and liberalization of medical marijuana laws in many locations across the country.
Florida For Care, the group that put together a bipartisan Blue Ribbon Committee to dictate regulatory standards had the medical marijuana amendment passed back in November, is hosting a couple of conferences they’ve dubbed “The Future of Medical Marijuana in Florida.”
With Amendment 2 defeated in the polls in November, the group is moving forward to start, as they put it, “strategizing and planning in advance of Florida’s Legislative Session.”
The next legislative session is scheduled for March.
Perhaps it’s not the greatest idea to use a taser on an elderly person during a traffic stop. That’s what a rookie cop in Texas is finding out, anyway. Victoria police officer Nathanial Robinson has been placed on administrative duty for accusations of excessive force stemming from a traffic stop where he tased a 76-year-old man twice as he lay on the ground.