Search Results: bay-area/ (6)

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NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre: “Defending the ‘medical’ cannabis industry is so yesterday”

​NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre has called the medical marijuana industry a “legal farce” and “largely a sham” in an article which hit the web yesterday, creating a backlash among NORML’s many supporters (quite a few of whom likely just became former supporters) in the medicinal cannabis industry.
How many times must we repeat this? Attacking medical marijuana is not a good legalization strategy.
The sadly predictable outcome is that for the next umpteen years, every single time a medical cannabis initiative is raised in any state, the opposition are going to drag out St. Pierre’s ill-considered words as ammunition. “Why are you sitting there trying to tell us this state needs a medical marijuana law when NORML itself has admitted medical marijuana is a fraud and a sham?”
The piece, published by Steve Bloom on CelebStoner (according to NORML’s “Radical” Russ Belville, from private listserv emails sent last October, and without St. Pierre’s permission), is really unfortunate, and is a huge, huge blunder on NORML’s part. The pity of it is, it’s not just NORML that’s going to have to pay for St. Pierre’s mistake — it’s the medical cannabis community which he apparently so disdains.
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Sarah Rice/SFGate
Lynnette Shaw ran Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana — the first in the state to be licensed, back in 1997. Now the Feds have shut it down.

By Jack Rikess
Toke of the Town
Northern California Correspondent
It’s really easy these days to be negative about cannabis. The Feds are waving their guns around like old-time Western town bullies. Playing with the tin-horns and the dandy Easterners alike, making them dance to a tune that we thought was long gone.
They sit outside protecting the saloon, leaning  back in their chairs, keeping the weak and poor in the sight of their weapons, not necessarily to shoot them, just scare ’em a little.
 
In the Golden State, where it must seem that progress burns bright, I mean, how can you complain when you can have your medicine, including edibles and anything else that’s on the menu delivered right to your door? What in the world could those spoiled Californians have to gripe about?
How about the closing of Lynnette Shaw’s Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana dispensary in Fairfax?  As most know by now, Lynnette’s dispensary was the first to be licensed in California back in ’97. The closure of this landmark is incredibly distressing. 

Lance Iverson/San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Board of Supervisors President David Chiu: “With its recently announced ‘crack down’ on these dispensaries, the federal government has proposed a solution in search of a problem”

​San Francisco Board of Supervisors President David Chiu responded this week to the Obama Administration’s crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries in California, calling the action “a solution in search of a problem.”

“Medical marijuana dispensaries are providing safe access to treatment options that many Californians depend on to live a comfortable, pain-free life,” Chiu wrote in a Wednesday email to Shona Gochenaur of the Axis of Love, a San Francisco dispensary.
“With its recently announced ‘crack down’ on these dispensaries, the federal government has proposed a solution in search of a problem, while California law supports allowing these distribution centers to give patients the medicine they need,” Chiu said.
“I am very disappointed in Attorney General Holder’s decision and hope that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco focuses on more important issues than restricting access to a legal medical treatment,” Chiu said.

Graphic: Nick Stokes Design/Willamette Week

​Tenants of two public-housing agencies in Oregon have been told they cannot smoke medical marijuana in their apartments and houses.

The warnings have drawn a line for the first time as the federal government continues to apply pressure against medical marijuana in Oregon, reports Corey Paul at Willamette Week.
The public-housing agencies involved in the warnings are REACH Community Development and Home Forward, formerly known as the Housing Authority of Portland.

Photos: San Mateo County Sheriff
Virginia Pon, 65 (left) and Aleen Lam, 72, were arrested after police found more than 800 plants growing in their San Bruno, California home.

​Two elderly women are in a California jail after neighbors called the police to report a burglary at their San Bruno residence. When police arrived, they saw, through the broken front door, nearly 800 marijuana plants inside the home.

Aleen Lam, 72, and Virginia Chan Pon, 65, were arrested Friday afternoon, reports Erin Sherbert at the S.F. Weekly. Police, searching the unoccupied home, found $3,000 in cash as well as an electrical bypass that allowed the grannies to steal electricity from Pacific Gas & Electric.

Photo: Humcounty.com

​Two members of the Oakland City Council are planning to propose legislation, possibly this month, that would allow and regulate the commercial cultivation of medical marijuana.

Council members Larry Reid and Rebecca Kaplan said they hope the rules will limit the public hazards sometimes associated with large-scale illegal marijuana growing operations, reports Kelly Rayburn of The Oakland Tribune.
Under their plan, Oakland, California would allow a small number of commercial marijuana cultivators, regulate them carefully, collect taxes on the revenue, and, Reid and Kaplan hope, keep neighborhoods safer.