Search Results: conservatives (48)

Grijalva.House.Gov

Arizona’s marijuana-legalization ballot initiative, Proposition 205, has been endorsed by the Arizona Democratic Party and several other notable groups and politicians.

Voters will decide the fate of the proposition on November 8. If it’s approved, adults 21 and older could legally possess up to an ounce of marijuana, grow six live plants at home (unless a landlord says no), and buy cannabis products at a limited system of retail cannabis shops like those in the states of Colorado, Oregon, and Washington.

Graphic: Cannabis Culture

​Canada’s federal government is expected to announce new rules for medical marijuana that would allow only a few licensed growers to be permitted to cultivate cannabis.

The move would eliminate individual and private growers from the current system, under which eligible people apply to Health Canada, which then issues the license, reports Amy Minsky at Postmedia News.
People in the medical marijuana dispensing community who have heard about the impending change said it is unwelcome, and will do more harm than good.

Graphic: The Non Conformer

​Tenants caught growing as few as six marijuana plants in their homes could face automatic jail terms of at least nine months under a federal drug-sentencing bill revived Wednesday in Canada. The bill imposes harsher penalties on home renters than on homeowners for growing identical amounts of pot.

Introduced for the third time after dying twice before, the bill, S-10, removes discretion for judges to sentence as they see fit, proposing instead mandatory minimum jail terms for a variety of drug related crimes, reports Janice Tibbetts at The Vancouver Sun.

The industry is worried.

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

President-elect Donald Trump nominated anti-pot hardliner Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama (R) for Attorney General. At a Senate hearing in April 2016, Sessions said that ‘we need grown-ups in charge in Washington to say marijuana is not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized, it ought not to be minimized, that it’s in fact a very real danger.’

“I think one of [Obama’s] great failures, it’s obvious to me, is his lax treatment in comments on marijuana,” Sessions said at the hearing. “It reverses 20 years almost of hostility to drugs that began really when Nancy Reagan started ‘Just Say No.’ ”

Lawmakers, he said, have to “send that message with clarity that good people don’t smoke marijuana.”
USNews calls Sessions an “ Existential threat” to state-legal cannabis. Industry leaders are very nervous.

Reason points out that Sessions has an “aversion to civil rights” and gay rights. The U.S. Senate failed to confirm him for a federal judgeship in 1986, amid allegations of what late Senator Ted Kennedy called “racial insensitivity” and “lack of commitment to equal justice under the law.” The New York Times editorializes that the nomination is an “ insult to justice.”

What does a Trump presidency mean for the industry? The transition team isn’t talking. NBC speculates.So does CBS.

The Sessions nomination needs to be approved by the Senate. Have a view you want to share?  Contact your Senator.

Before the Sessions pick, the Washington Post’s Radley Balko said former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) would also be “ terrifying.”

Before the Sessions pick, anti-legalization activist Kevin Sabet said, “A Trump administration throws everything up in the air… “Is it going to be ‘ states’ rights Trump’ or ‘law-and-order Trump’?”

Marijuana.com’s Tom Angell has launched a petition for Trump to keep his “marijuana pledge” to respect state laws.  Even if he doesn’t go after the industry, The Stranger says President Trump will  make the industry whiter.

It’s official, Denver will be the first U.S. city to license social use businesses.

After the Massachusetts REC vote, Rhode Island could legalize REC through the legislature. Alaska is setting up a  drop box system  to collect taxes in cash.

Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery (R), said looser cannabis regulations in Memphis and Nashville can’t stand.

Due to a glitch, it appears that MED in California will be tax-free until the state’s REC program begins in 2018.

Some conservatives don’t like that MED patients can’t buy guns.

Rand Paul.


Late last month, the U.S. House voted to defund DEA medical marijuana raids in Colorado and other states that have legalized MMJ — an unprecedented development that was greeted with cheers by many cannabis reformers.
But the next step in the legislative process — passage by the U.S. Senate — hit a snag despite support by two extraordinarily odd political bedfellows: Kentucky’s Rand “Son of Ron” Paul, a firebrand touted in many quarters as a 2016 Republican presidential hopeful, and New Jersey’s Cory Booker, a liberal Democrat and unapologetic pal of President Barack Obama.

There is an imbecilic group of conservatives currently humping the political landscape of Montana in hopes of persuading the local yokels into outlawing marijuana across the state.


Earlier last week, the collaborative effort between anti-cannabis group Safe Montana and a shifty-eyed car salesman by the name Steve Zabawa won approval from the Secretary of State to begin collecting signatures for their petition, Initiative 174, aimed at banning the use and possession of all Schedule I substances deemed illegal under the Federal Controlled Substances Act — including medical marijuana.


No one seriously believes anymore in the Reefer Madness depiction of marijuana use, in which this new-fangled devil weed transforms otherwise upstanding teenagers into murderous sociopaths. Even some otherwise staunch social conservatives (e.g. Texas Gov. Rick Perry) are beginning to embrace some degree of decriminalization as a fair and necessary step toward a fair and rational criminal justice system.
Yet there is a lingering strain of thought that full or partial legalization will inevitably bring a corresponding increase in crime. Not so, says UT Dallas criminology professor Robert Morris, the lead author of a just-published study of crime rates in states that have legalized medical marijuana.

Dozens of state-legal marijuana business owners and representatives from all over the country converged on Washington D.C. yesterday to pitch The Small Business Tax Equity Act to members of the U.S. House and Senate.

The bill – a brief, single page addendum to current tax laws – fixes current tax laws in the United States to allow for medical marijuana businesses to take the same deductions as other legal businesses are allowed to take on their federal returns. Currently, they are stuck paying the entire bill, which some say nearly doubles what they should really owe the government.

While the U.S. government teeters precariously on the edge of complete shutdown, hinging on a hyperbole-ridden argument over whether or not its citizens deserve proper basic health care, their neighbors to the north in Canada are on the verge of another revolutionary leap in government-backed healthcare reform.Starting tomorrow, the Canadian government will begin to pump $1.3-billion dollars into its Health Canada program, earmarked specifically to prop up large-scale free market medical marijuana growing operations across the country, in a move that is expected to create not only jobs and revenues, but hundreds of thousands of new medical marijuana patients as well.

When one thinks about Germany, rarely does cannabis freedom immediately come to mind. Volkswagens, maybe, but lax pot laws? Hardly ever.
But since April 28th, 1994, marijuana users in Deutschland have enjoyed the freedom to possess reasonably personal amounts of cannabis without fear of arrest or prosecution. Considered by the German government to be a “soft drug”, marijuana has not necessarily been legalized, so much as it is tolerated by authorities.

1 2 3 5