Search Results: providence (33)

Singapore executed Chijioke Stephen Obioha by hanging. A Nigerian national and football player, Obioha was found with 2.5 kg (5.5 pounds) of marijuana in 2007. According to Singapore law, anyone with more than 500 g is presumed to be trafficking.

Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, known as “The Punisher” for his advocacy of vigilante murders,threatened his human rights activist critics.

A Florida county sheriff’s office may have trained drug sniffing dogs with material other than drugs, according to ProPublica. Another ProPublica report led Portland, Ore. to change its policy for the drug tests used in many arrests.

The U.S. Supreme Court won’t take up the case of a Native American church in Hawaii that wants to be exempt for marijuana laws.

A college student who had $11,000 confiscated at the Cincinnati airport after his checked bag smelled of pot, challenged the forfeiture and got his money back.

Seantrel Henderson, a Buffalo Bills offensive lineman, may sue the NFL over his second cannabis suspension of the season. Henderson’s Crohn’s disease forced him to have two and a half feet of his colon removed.

The Bay Area has the country’s highest concentration of cannabis users in the country.

My friend Reilly Capps wrote a story for The Rooster about “ Stoners anonymous.

A survey found that cannabis is attracting an increasingly upscale clientele.

Anita Thompson, widow of Hunter S. Thompson, wants to market the gonzo journalist’s personal cannabis strains. Skepticism abounds.

The founder of Healing Church, a Catholicism-inflected pot “ministry” in Rhode Island, is involved in abizarre legal situation. If I’m reading this correctly, Anne Armstrong had a vision of cannabis leaves on a six-foot replica of the Virgin of Guadeloupe – an image said to have appeared on a Mexican peasant’s poncho in 1531. Armstrong later obtained and then lost custody of the replica. She also faces a possession charge.

The Stranger put together a cannabis gift guide. It includes weed filled advent calendars and Christmas ornaments. The piece also cites scripture to prove Jesus was a stoner.

Country music legend Loretta Lynn smoked pot for the first time at 84, for her glaucoma. She didn’t like it, but defended Willie Nelson and the right to do it.

A woman in Greensboro, N.C., was “shocked,” in a bad way, when someone mistakenly mailed her four pounds of weed.

Update 4/18/14: Sorry Rhode Island, no pot legalization – no matter how limited – for you this year. After meeting yesterday, the state House Judiciary Committee decided to table seven marijuana-related bills until next year.
Lawmakers were apparently not swayed by public testimony earlier this week in favor of legislation that would have legalized sales of up to an ounce of cannabis at a time to adults 21 and up as well as the personal cultivation of one plant at a time.

It seems that marijuana decriminalization has been a windfall for Rhode Island state coffers.
Laws making cannabis possession on-par with a traffic tickets were approved and put into law back in April, which some might see as a directive to police to make marijuana possession a low priority. It seems nobody told the police that though, and since April cops have written about 850 marijuana tickets totaling about $110,000 in fines.

slatercenter.com

For the second time this month: Congrats, Rhode Island. Your medical marijuana patients now have somewhere to purchase medical marijuana if you they grow their own.
The Thomas C. Slater Compassion Center opened Friday, just in time for the 4/20 weekends that celebrates – among other aspects of cannabis culture – medical marijuana. According to store employees, there was a constant flow of patients.

William Breathes.
A greener Rhode Island.

Congrats, Rhode Island residents over 18! Walking around with an ounce or less in your pocket will no longer be a criminal offense in your state starting today. Instead, possession of 28 grams or less is a civil violation (like a traffic ticket) that will get you a $150 fine.
No, this is not an April Fools joke.

NorCal Blogs

LEAP Cites Public Safety Concerns Created by Illegal Marketplace
A former narcotics cop on Tuesday morning delivered a letter signed by 73 current and former police officers, judges, prosecutors and federal agents to Attorney General Eric Holder urging him not to interfere with the wishes of the voters of Colorado and Washington State to legalize and regulate marijuana.
“We seem to be at a turning point in how our society deals with marijuana,” said Neill Franklin, executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), the group that authored the letter. “The war on marijuana has funded the expansion of drug cartels, it has destroyed community-police relations and it has fostered teenage use by creating an unregulated market where anyone has easy access.

Tyler Drumm/The New Maine Times

At least four state legislatures will consider replacing marijuana prohibition with regulation
 
On Election Day, voters in the states of Colorado and Washington approved ballot initiatives to remove criminal penalties for adult marijuana use and regulate the substance in a manner similar to alcohol. State legislators from Rhode Island and Maine on Thursday will join the Marijuana Policy Project on a teleconference press call to announce that they are introducing similar bills to tax and regulate marijuana in their state legislatures.

Steven Senne/AP
Rhode Island Speaker of the House Gordon D. Fox: “I think it’s been too long and there have been too many people waiting”

​Rhode Island’s Legislature legalized medical marijuana back in 2006. Three years later, in 2009, the Legislature overrode a gubernatorial veto to allow medicinal cannabis dispensaries in the state with an overwhelming 68-0 vote in the House and 35-3 in the Senate.

That certainly seems clear enough, and it’s been a couple of years now. Haven’t they had time to get that program up and running for seriously ill patients? But, well, you know how silly the federal government can be, when it comes to that oh-so-dangerous boogie bear “marijuana.” It’s still against federal law, doncha know? So please don’t get any wacky ideas about the people trying to run things.

Graphic: RIPAC

​The head of Rhode Island’s largest medical marijuana advocacy group said she is still optimistic that cannabis dispensaries will be open in the state in the not-too-distant future.

JoAnne Lepannen, executive director of the Rhode Island Patient Advocacy Coalition (RIPAC), said on Tuesday that she has carefully reviewed “Seeking to Authorize Marijuana for Medical Use,” the two-page memo issued last week by the Justice Department, reports W. Zachary Malinowski at The Providence Journal.
Lepannen said she sees a silver lining in the document because there is no specific threat by federal authorities to prosecute state employees who are associated with the licensing or oversight of marijuana dispensaries.
“I think there is a ray of hope here,” Lepannen said. “We have to read into this letter what [the federal government]didn’t say. That speaks volumes.”
The memo does warn that those who “facilitate” large-scale medical marijuana production (presumably, that wording was used to intimidate landlords, as well as actual cultivators) are violating the federal Controlled Substances Act.

Photo: Reuters
Attorney General Eric Holder: “We are in the process of working [on]these issues”

​U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said on Thursday that the Justice Department will work with governors and other state officials to reach a “satisfactory resolution” to the establishment of medical marijuana dispensaries in states with medicinal cannabis programs.

“We are in the process of working [on]these issues with the U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island and other U.S. Attorneys across the country,” Holder said, reports W. Zachary Malinowski at The Providence Journal. “My hope is that sometime in the not too distant future … it will be addressed.”
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