Search Results: hopenet (6)

Jeff Malet Photography
Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California): “We should be protecting and implementing the will of voters, not undermining our democracy by prosecuting small business owners who pay taxes and comply with the laws of their states in providing medicine to patients in need”

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Seven Initial Co-Sponsors Introduce HR 6335 to Stop Unfair Land Grabs by DOJ
Late on Thursday, Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA) and seven initial co-sponsors introduced HR 6335, the States’ Medical Marijuana Property Rights Protection Act, in an attempt to stop the seizure of property from landlords of state law-compliant medical marijuana businesses. The introduction of HR 6335 comes less than a month after U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag served an asset forfeiture lawsuit against the landlord of Harborside, a medical marijuana dispensary in Rep. Lee’s district of Oakland.

Chris Roberts/S.F. Examiner
Catherine and Steve Smith founded HopeNet 14 years ago and have diligently gone by state and city laws

The ranks are thinning. Two more of San Francisco’s most well-known medical marijuana dispensaries closed their doors permanently on Tuesday, both due to the federal government’s crackdown in states which have legalized the medicinal use of cannabis.

HopeNet and the Vapor Room both announced they would shut down due to threatening letters sent to their landlords by the federal government, reports Joe Rosato Jr., of NBCBayArea.com.
“The Justice Department sent out landlord one of those nasty letters,” HopeNet cofounder Catherine Smith said. “So this is our D-Day; we have to leave.”
HopeNet was founded 14 years ago by Smith and her husband on Ninth Street in San Francisco’s South of Market. The business has long been regarded as an excellent example of a working, legitimate medical marijuana dispensary which carefully abides by state and city laws. Smith worked alongside city officials, serving on the Medical Marijuana Task Force and helping craft S.F.’s groundbreaking city ordinance on medicinal cannabis.

Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio

Jack’s Timeline of the History of Cannabis


By Jack Rikess
Toke of the Town

Northern California Correspondent


Your Higher Power provides Cannabis to the Earth.
2737 BCE:  Shen Nung’s Pen Ts’ao, in China, refers to Cannabis as a “superior” herb in the world’s first medical text, or pharmacopoeia.
For the next several thousand years, Cannabis and Hemp are utilized in almost every major civilization in the Old World including everything from paper to sails.
1632 AD, America gets a new cash crop when the Pilgrims bring Cannabis to the New World in their carry-on luggage.
1776 AD: Declaration of Independence drafted on hemp paper.

All photos by Jack Rikess for Toke of the Town


By Jack Rikess
Toke of the Town

Northern California Correspondent

The demonstration that was planned for Tuesday morning to protest the most recent letters sent by U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag took on an added dimension of anger and unabashed outpouring of emotion with the Feds’ untimely raid on East Bay’s Oaksterdam and Richard Lee yesterday morning.  Hundreds of patients, caregivers and activists streamed to the steps of City Hall, carrrying signs and chanting slogans to relieve the anger most were feeling from the assault on Richard Lee. 
The elegant David Goldman, from Americans for Safe Access, commanded the podium and took Haag to task for making the assumption that most patients are basically faking it and dispensaries are nothing more than illegitimate drug dealers. David and others spoke of the Attorney General’s additional comment that she is only “going after dispensaries, not patients,” which garnered many boos from the crowd.  
Supervisor David Chu, observing the crowd, said, “We’re Black, we’re Asian, we’re White, we’re Latino, and today…San Francisco is Green!” Applause echoed between City Hall and the surrounding buildings, drawing in more supporters.

​​By Jack Rikess
Toke of the Town
Northern California Correspondent
On October 27, 2011, the ever-vigilant group Americans for Safe Access, the nation’s largest organization of patients, medical professionals, scientists, lawyers and concerned citizens with the mission statement of promoting safe and legal access to cannabis for therapeutic and research, filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging t
he Obama Administration’s recent crackdown on medical marijuana.
On the macro-level, this is what Americans for Safe Access (ASA) does. It protects the medical marijuana community, besides for being a true a medical cannabis grassroots organization. I would also describe it as a patient-driven think tank that has been influencing and shaping medical marijuana policies while at the same time educating a skeptical public of the medicinal properties of the plant. 

Photo: StoptheDrugWar.org
HopeNet smells like a marijuana dispensary. And its bathroom once stopped working for one day in 2008. Yeah, that’s the kind of “complaints” that S.F.’s dispensaries get.

​So much for all those police-generated myths about medical marijuana dispensaries spoiling the neighborhood.

Despite Nervous Nellies, most dispensaries are quiet, respectable, and hell, as close to boring as you can come when your shelves are full of weed.
That truth has been highlighted again as an SF Weekly investigation revealed a grand total of only 11 complaints on file from a five-year period, according to documents received from the paper’s public records request, reports Chris Roberts.
The Weekly asked the Department of Public Health, which oversees San Francisco’s dispensary program, for a summary of recent problems with the city’s pot collectives. And of the 11 complaints on record, most of them are distinctly of the trifling variety.