Search Results: tabloid (12)

Photo: Jeanie Mackinder
Bastard’s stoned out of his gourd! Look at him!

​Michael Bublé, he of the wholesome image and music, may just be a regular guy after all.

The clean-cut singer’s embittered ex-girlfriend is doing a lot of talking to the U.K. media. Tiffany Bromley told the press that Bublé regularly smoked marijuana, then would stuff himself with biscuits and cakes to assuage the raging pot munchies.
Yeah, I know; seems like pretty tame stuff to the rest of us, but remember: This is Michael freakin’ Bublé, dudes.
“Michael smoked up to three joints a day when I was with him,” ex-girlfriend Bromley told News of the World.
“He always had a couple in his wash bag ready to go,” the ex-model turned hairpiece maker told the press. “He insisted it was his way of winding down at the end of the day. But sometimes he started the day with one.”
Oh, horrors. Michael Bublé wakes and bakes!
Thing is, Bublé himself beat his pissed-off ex-girlfriend to the punch, a couple of months ago.
Late last year, the singer confessed his marijuana use and partying ways in an interview published in Britain’s The Sun tabloid.

They may have been the first weed dealers.

The following is excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek. Get your free and confidential subscription at WeedWeek.net.

Evidence suggests that Bronze Age Yamnaya tribespeople established a cannabis trade between Europe and Asia 5,000 years ago. Native to the Caucasus Mountains (roughly), the Yamnaya were horse-riding, cattle-herding nomads who traveled along what later became the Silk Road.

While neighbors Indonesia and the Philippines escalate their wars on drugs, Thailand may reform its famously harsh laws.

Can you find weed growing in the wild? Green Rush Daily investigates.

The Cannabist interviews joint rolling artist Tony Greenhand.

Eugene Monroe, who got cut from the Baltimore Ravens this year after he became the first active NFL player to call for MED use, has retired from the league. He’s one of jocks included on the Men’s Journal list of 18 cannabis activists in sports. The only woman is mixed martial artist Ronda Rousey. Earlier this year The New Yorker discussed “ The athlete’s case for cannabis.”

Tabloid stories about the dangers of drugs appear to fuel greater drug use. Gatherings where everyone stays sober are becoming trendy.

Agneya Singh, director of “ M Cream,” a movie billed as Bollywood’s first stoner flick, says India should decriminalize.

This weekend’s Enchanted Forest Gathering, a rave in northern California, was among the first U.S. festivals to have a MED dispensary on site. Alcohol was not sold.

Clothing company Patagonia, has made a short film ”Harvesting Liberty” to support industrial hemp legalization.

Michael “Dooma” Wendschuh, the central figure in my story “ Ebbu and the rise and fall of a modern weed dealer” has a new cannabis company. According to its LinkedIn page, Toronto-based Province Brands is a “global luxury brand” creating products “which do not feel like marijuana products.”

Some schoolchildren in the U.K. are gardening with cannabis compost.

West Coast Leaf
Crisis? What crisis?

​It was bound to happen once marijuana legalization started looking like a real possibility. The prohibitionists and the drug warriors never go down without a fight; they always find an angle. This time, as at least two states — Colorado and Washington — are looking at legalization measures on November’s ballot, the new bugaboo is driving while high.

Nobody’s sure how to solve the question of when someone is just too stoned to drive, but that doesn’t keep plenty of people from offering “solutions” to the “problem” — which is now graduating from “just” a problem, thanks to sensationalist mainstream press coverage, and becoming an “epidemic” or even a “crisis.”

Clear Cannabis Law Reform
Judge Alan Goldsack has decided he’s on a moral mission to wipe out cannabis cultivation — and he’s ignoring new reduced sentencing guidelines

​A senior British judge, ignoring new reduced drug sentencing guidelines, has jailed six men for growing marijuana.

Judge Alan Goldsack (no, that’s really his name, man) criticized new regulations that became effective last week and ignored the Sentencing Council for England and Wales, reports Chris Brooke at the Daily Mail.
Under the new sentencing guidelines, at least four of the six cannabis growers who were jailed at Sheffield Crown Court should probably have been given only “community penalties” not involving incarceration.
British tabloids have done everything they can to whip up reefer madness-style hysteria over so-called “skunk” cannabis, claiming its homegrown production in South Yorkshire, the area around Sheffield Crown Court, has supposedly become an “epidemic.” Judges there have been routinely jailing even low-level offenders “in an effort to clamp down on the industry,” the Daily Mail reports.

Addiction Inbox

​The sad tradition of inaccurate, sensationalistic cannabis reporting continues in the United Kingdom’s tabloid press. Deeply clueless reporter Tamara Cohen at the Daily Mail plumbed new depths of silliness on Tuesday with the breathless headline: One cannabis joint ‘can bring on schizophrenia’ as well as damaging memory.


Never mind that, even as cannabis usage rates have skyrocketed, the ratio of schizophrenics in the population has remained constant at one or two percent for the past 60 years. Never mind that no human beings were involved in the tests, and never mind that no marijuana was used, either.

Photo: CNBC
Trish Regan, CNBC: “The government stands to make a lot of money in the marijuana business thanks to the tax revenue and licensing fees it generates”

​CNBC correspondent Trish Regan will take viewers back inside the booming marijuana industry on Wednesday night with the one-hour documentary Marijuana USA, looking at the world’s most commonly used illegal substance as it becomes part of the mainstream.

The Emmy-nominated Regan travels the country in this followup to CNBC’s Marijuana Inc., which was the most viewed documentary in CNBC history, and finds that in many places, marijuana has already shed its back-alley stigma.
Toke of the Town was able to catch up with the busy Regan and ask her a few questions.
Toke: What is the biggest misconception most Americans have about the marijuana business?
Regan: A lot of people assume the marijuana industry is filled with stoners and ex-hippies just trying to make a little cash.
This group exists; however, the marijuana business has gone far beyond “a little extra cash.” It’s a $100 billion industry and it’s now being dominated by a host of young, savvy entrepreneurs that are willing to risk it all for their chance to be on the front lines of America’s new green rush.

Photo: Gold Speculator
Did Kentucky Senate hopeful Rand Paul tie a college girl up and try to force her to take bong hits?

​A new article profiling Kentucky Republican Senate hopeful Rand Paul’s college days makes the allegation that Paul and a friend once kidnapped a classmate and tried to force her to smoke marijuana.

The GQ Magazine article by Jason Zengerle relates the anecdote about Tea Party darling Paul and another alleged member of the “NoZe Brotherhood,” a “secret society” described as “a refuge for atypical Baylor students,” reports Stephanie Condon at CBS News.
The unnamed woman, reportedly a college classmate of Paul’s, requested anonymity because of her current job as a clinical psychologist, according to GQ. She told Zengerle about the incident, which allegedly occurred in 1983:
“He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They’d been smoking pot.” After the woman refused to smoke with them, Paul and his friend put her back in their car and drove to the countryside outside of Waco, where they stopped near a creek. “They told me their god was ‘Aqua Buddha’ and that I needed to bow down and worship him,” the woman recalls. “They blindfolded me and made me bow down to ‘Aqua Buddha’ in the creek. I had to say, ‘I worship you Aqua Buddha, I worship you.’

Photo: CanIdoit.org
Don’t ask me why they do it, but Brits traditionally mix their cannabis with tobacco. But they’re just like Americans in another way: Most of their politicians are reactionary cowards.

​​The chairman of the Bar Council for England and Wales, Nicholas Green QC, has said it is “rational” to consider “decriminalizing personal drug use.”

Other politicians, terrified at even the faint appearance of taking a stand or displaying any leadership qualities at all, quickly and predictably attacked Green’s remarks, claiming they “sent out the wrong message on drug use.”
Taking this step would save billions of pounds (drug-related crime costs the British economy £13 billion a year), free up police time, cut crime and improve public health, reports Christopher Hope at the Telegraph
Presumably, actually being rational about drugs is considered quite a radical position.

Photo: 4&20 blackbirds
“Just get me some more reefers… NOW!”

​Every few months, you can count on it: Another “scientific” study that attempts to draw some connection, however tenuous, between getting high and going crazy. But those outlandish claims amount to just putting a white lab coat on the “Reefer Madness” warnings of the 1930s, and it’s easy to see why.
I mean, get real: Considering modern rates of usage, if cannabis really produced psychosis, the streets would be choked with a gibbering throng of burned-out potheads. It doesn’t. They aren’t.
“I’ve said it for years now,” film director John Holowach, responsible for the documentary High: The True Tale of American Marijuana, told Toke of the Town. “If pot and mental illness were linked, the two should rise and fall with one another, but they don’t.”

Graphic: Cannabis Culture
Professor David Nutt: “We’re going to focus on the science”

​An independent group, designed to give “politically neutral” information in the United Kingdom about the risks of drugs, is being launched.

The group is founded by the British government’s former chief drugs adviser, David Nutt, who was sacked last October for criticizing government drug policy and calling cannabis a relatively safe drug.
The Independent Council on Drug Harms, made up of about 20 specialists, will be “very powerful,” according to Nutt, and its goal will be to take over from the government-run Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), reports the BBC.
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