Search Results: task-force (13)

The study is from a U.S. government agency.

Here’s your daily dose of pot news from the newsletter WeedWeek.

U.S. teenagers find it harder to buy weed than they have for 24 years, according to an annual survey by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). The same study found that teen drug use is declining nationally.

Humboldt County’s growing areas voted against REC, but the cities voted for it.

A long awaited task force report in Canada recommended 18 as the legal buying age. For more see hereand here. The country plans to legalize REC next year.

REC businesses in Portland, Oregon, are struggling to obtain licenses. And the head of the state’s lab accrediting agency is stepping down.

Florida lawmakers are thinking about how to regulate MED. For more see here. A proposal in Ohio would allow 40 MED dispensaries in the state.

Tennessee Republicans are considering a MED program.

Radio Free Asia reports that Chinese visitors to North Korea buy pot by the kilogram and sell it for a healthy mark-up in China.

Australian economists say legalizing REC would be good for the Queensland economy.

Stanford Medical School professor and tobacco advertising expert Dr. Robert K. Jackler editorializes that “If nationwide legalization happens, it is essential that the tobacco industry is banned from the marijuana market.”

L.A. Weekly profiles Seventh Point LLC, a cannabis private equity firm focused on Los Angeles. The firm expects L.A., the world’s largest cannabis market, to be the “Silicon Valley” of weed. The city’s cannabis community is uniting to legalize dispensaries.

Keith McCarty, CEO of delivery app Eaze, is stepping down, shortly after the company secured $13M in funding. He’ll be replaced by Jim Patterson, who, like McCarty was a senior executive at Yammer, a workplace social network which sold to Microsoft for more than $1 billion.

Israel’s Teva Pharmaceuticals will start to distribute a medical cannabis inhaler developed by Syqe, an Israeli start-up that raised money from tobacco giant Philip Morris. The inhaler may also be tested with opiates.

An editorial in The Scientist says its unacceptable that the World Health Organization has not developed positions on legalization.

Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children will begin a clinical trial of cannabis extracts containing CBD and THC for children with severe epilepsy.

A new study from Steep Hill Labs found that 83 percent of California weed wouldn’t pass Oregon’s testing standards. An industry report says Oregon’s strict regulations are crushing the state industry. Willamette Week reports that business conditions are pushing some entrepreneurs back to the underground market.

Rehab provider Spectrum Health Systems said a doctor was not to blame for revealing to a patient’s employer that she uses MED.

A survey of cannabis researchers finds out what they want from the government in order to pursue their work.

A Reason investigation finds that conservative authorities in Idaho “conspired to restrict a promising cannabis-derived seizure treatment.”

The National Fire Protection Association is developing fire safety standards for cannabis businesses.

The FDA will allow a late stage clinical trial for ecstasy as a treatment for PTSD.

Minnessota approved PTSD as a MED qualifying condition. New York approved chronic pain.

Canada’s legalization push is getting complicated. The much-anticipated task force report on legalizationhas been delayed. Meanwhile activists wonder why shops are getting raided if the government plans to legalize. For more see here.

Bill Blair a Canadian government official overseeing the issue appeared at a “ cash-for-access” fundraiser with cannabiz leaders that may have violated Liberal Party ethics guidelines. Blair defended recent raidssaying, “The only system for control is the existing legal regime. And we’re a society of laws,” he says.

Denver Mayor Michael Hancock

Denver Mayor Michael Hancock (D)  blames legal weed for the “urban travelers” who have caused violent episodes on Denver’s 16th Street Mall, the city’s main pedestrian thoroughfare. Recently, a 32-year old Indiana man was arrested after video showed him attacking pedestrians with lengths of PVC pipe. It’s not clear whether he was high at the time.

Other recent incidents, also caught on video, have seen arrests after attacks and aggressive panhandling. New research shows that legal states have seen a drop in Medicare prescriptions for anti-depressants and opiods, and a corresponding reduction in Medicare costs.

Prescriptions did not drop for drugs like blood-thinners that can’t plausibly be replaced with MED. (Read that study here.) If California legalizes REC in November, it could influence federal policy on banking and other issues. Regulators in the state said they will start inspecting dispensary scales  to ensure that customers are getting their money’s worth.

Massachusetts’ REC initiative will be on the ballot in November. Gov. Charlie Baker (R), Boston Mayor Marty Walsh (D) and Speaker of the House Robert DeLeo (D) have banded together to oppose it. Arkansas voters will decide on a MED initiative. Fortune sees signs of a backlash in Colorado. Murders in California’s Lake County, a center of growing, reached a 10-year high of eight last year. Donna Weinholtz, wife of Utah gubernatorial candidate Mike Weinholtz (D), is under federal investigation related to her MED use.

The rules for Alaska’s pot café’s are under review. Voters in the state’s Matanuska-Susitna Borough will decide on a commercial ban in the fall. Former Liberal Party deputy prime minister Anne McLellan will lead Canada’s nine-member legalization task force. McLellan is a former law professor at the University of Alberta. Canada’s legal purchasing age may vary across provinces, but the government wants a consistent national law on DUI. Both LSU and Southern University are exercising their option to grow Louisiana’s MED supply.

This article also appeared in the the pot-focused weekly newsletter WeedWeek. Get your free and confidential subscription at WeedWeek.net.

Keep your friends close. Keep your enemies closer. Keep your Friends List private.


You may remember a couple of weeks ago we reported here on a story about DEA agents in New York stealing a suspect’s online identity and creating a fake Facebook profile in her likeness in an attempt to lure her friends into guilt-ridden admissions of their own.
The suspect, Sondra Arquiett, sued the Drug Enforcement Agency and the federal government for $250,000 and was due to begin court proceedings on the matter this week, but the suit is now in mediation as the feds try to buy their way out of the embarrassing situation. The revelation that law enforcement was using the popular social media networking site to conduct undercover investigations was just another on a growing list of incidences that have left those still logging on wondering just how real, and how safe, Facebook actually is.


Though there are about 13,000 medical cannabis patients in Hawaii, there’s no place for anyone to legally purchase the plant. Currently, patients grow their own, though technically there is nowhere to legally purchase seed or even clones – state law doesn’t even address that.
To address that issue, the Hawaii House Health Committee is looking into the possibility of creating legal dispensaries.

As one of the original counties formed when California was granted statehood back in 1850, Mendocino County is known for its picturesque northern Californian coastline, its majestic redwood forests, and of course, its weed production.
Home to a short-lived, county-regulated, cannabis cultivation program for nearly two years, Mendocino now finds itself stuck between the citizens who willingly signed up for the program, and the federal government who is seeking to acquire all of their personal information for reasons unknown.

Jack Daniel.

In 1996, California voters legalized medical marijuana for qualified patients and caregivers. Nearly two decades have passed, and the city of San Diego has yet to enact an ordinance which would regulate medical marijuana dispensaries, and provide the guidelines by which they could legally open.

In nearly four hours of testimonies
given by dozens of San Diego citizens on Monday, the eight sitting City Council members heard arguments given both in favor of, and against, Mayor Bob Filner’s new proposed ordinance to allow for the legal and regulated re-opening of medical marijuana dispensaries in America’s Finest City.

Earlier this week, the Denver Westword posted about an Amendment 64 task-force recommendation to allow marijuana tourism. But while Christian Sederberg, a task-force member with whom we spoke about what some see as a one-year licensing monopoly for current medical marijuana centers, concedes that the proposal would indeed allow out-of-staters to buy weed here, he thinks its potential to fight crime might be even more important.
Read the rest on Colorado’s pot tourism over at our sister paper, The Denver Westword.

Photo: MyFoxMaine
Starting January 1, medical marijuana patients in Maine are required by law to register with the state.

​More than 400 residents of Maine have applied to be medical marijuana patients under a new state law. Starting January 1, Mainers must be registered with the state before legally using cannabis medicinally.

For the past decade in Maine, ever since voters approved medical marijuana in 1999, patients had needed only a doctor’s authorization to use cannabis medicinally.
Applications flooded into the Maine Department of Health and Human Services in the final days and weeks of 2010, with hundreds more expected in the next several weeks, reports John Richardson at The Portland Press Herald. State officials said that expect to register 1,200 or more patients by the time the initial rush is over this spring.
“Everybody’s coming in at the last minute,” said Catherine Cobb, director of licensing and regulatory services for the health department. “We’ve been hammered.”
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