Yearly Archives: 2011

Photo: MHP of Spokane
Jerry Laberdee in happier days at his dispensary, Medical Herb Providers, in Spokane.

​​There are two ways to look at the federal government’s war on medical marijuana patients and providers. One is the theoretical, statistical way of looking at things — where it’s all numbers —  and another is looking at the pot war’s impact on actual human beings.

The second way is a lot more difficult.

A medical marijuana patient and dispensary owner in Washington state has been on a hunger strike ever since he was jailed six days ago on federal charges.

Jerry Laberdee, 56, has been in Spokane County Jail since last Tuesday, after he refused to take his court-ordered drug test, reports Curtis Cartier at Seattle Weekly. Laberdee says he won’t eat until he’s released and allowed to use medicinal cannabis, as he is legally authorized to do under Washington law.
His daughter, Jessica Vogel, 28, told the Weekly that she hasn’t been able to talk much with her dad since he was jailed, but she hopes his hunger strike will “wake people up.”

​Dude, in Kentucky you don’t mess with anyone’s moonshine or marijuana. A 82-year-old Kentucky man has been arrested for shooting a guy for snooping around in his pot patch Thursday night.

Raymond Anthony Faehr Sr., 82, of Pulaski County, shot an unidentified man he allegedly found in his cannabis garden. He told law enforcement he didn’t want the guy to steal his plants, reports Tricia Neal at the Somerset Commonwealth Journal.
The intruder, who was blasted with a shotgun, being struck in the arm, abdomen and thigh, was airlifted to the University of Kentucky Medical Center for treatment of his gunshot wounds. His condition is not known.
The Pulaski County Sheriff’s Department did not reveal the identify of the gunshot victim in a statement on the incident, and Sheriff Todd Wood did not return a call seeking further comment.

After years of dreaming about it, last Friday — a week ago today — I spoke for the first time at Seattle Hempfest.

Yeah, it was as much fun as I had imagined. I packed all I possibly could into my allotted five minutes.
“Toke of the Town editor Steve Elliott speaks to the Seattle Hempfest crowd about ‘Big Pharma’, prohibitionists telling a lot of lies and cannabis as a neuroprotectant,” YouTube uploader RestoreHemp said. “He urges people to seek out the scientific truth about marijuana for themselves and join the fight to end prohibition.
“Elliott finishes by showing how cannabis connects us to the past and to each other and also unites us with our human cultural history.”

Photo: KVAL News
Sections of the Oregon forest were cleared to make way for the illegal marijuana plantation.

​Police seized what they claimed were more than 10,300 marijuana plants from an illegal plantation on privately owned forest land in northeastern Oregon on Wednesday. They claimed the crop was worth about $25 million.

Two men, ages 50 and 25, were arrested and jailed after police raided the grow site, reports KVAL.com.
The investigation began last week when a helicopter spotted the plants from the air. Law enforcement searched the rural property in Wallowa County, not far from the Washington and Idaho borders.
They said they found more than 10,300 plants ranging from three to five feet tall. All the plants have been destroyed, authorities claimed.

Photo: Kush Weed
Did Facebook make them do it?

​In the ever-popular game of “blame the messenger,” a new study claims that teens who regularly use Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other online social networks are much more likely to drink, smoke and use marijuana.
Supposedly, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace encourage them to drink alcohol and smoke marijuana. Meanwhile, the reality show “Jersey Shore” can inspire them to try prescription drugs. All this, that is, if you believe a questionable new study about the use and influence of online social networks.
The National Survey of American Attitudes on Substance Abuse XVI has been conducted by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA), reports the Secaucus New Jersey News.

Photo: Melanie Maxwell/Detroit Free Press
Ann Arbor residents Jaymz Edmonds, left, and T.J. Rice protest outside the OM of Medicine marijuana dispensary Thursday in Ann Arbor after a police raid of the nearby A2 Go Green dispensary.

​Raids, Closings Leave Medical Marijuana Patients Hurting

Many medical marijuana dispensaries in Michigan closed their doors on Thursday following a Court of Appeals ruling.

“It would be dangerous to operate with the specter of a criminal case hanging over our head,” said John Lewis, lawyer for Compassionate Apothecary in Mt. Pleasant, the center of the controversy, reports the Detroit Free Press.

Some Ann Arbor area activists sought to regroup at a rally Thursday night, reports Kyle Feldscher at AnnArbor.com.

Photo: The Republican
Lyle E. Craker, UMass-Amherst professor of plant, soil and insect sciences, in the campus greenhouse

​One well-known professor’s attempt to get federal permission to grow marijuana for research into its potential medical benefits has been — once again — rejected by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

The DEA has for years claimed that letting anybody other than the federal government grow marijuana would “lead to greater illegal use” of the herb, reports Robert Rizzuto at The Republican.

Lyle Craker, a University of Massachusetts professor of plant, soil and insect sciences in Amherst, has been trying for 10 years to get a license to perform potentially life-saving research on medicinal cannabis.

Photo: Steve Sisney/The Oklahoman
Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics buffoons, I mean agents, rappel from a helicopter, supposedly to show off “pot-fighting techniques” on Wednesday, August 24, 2011, in Norman, Oklahoma.

​File under “This is just sad.”

Gung-ho but none-too-bright agents from the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs this week showed off to media and politicians the “tactics and techniques” they use to supposedly “eradicate” marijuana crops in their state.
“You mean besides just chop the fuckers down?” you may reasonably be asking. Just shows how damn little you know about this here mary-ju-wanna, there, hippie!
This stuff is serious and dangerous. You can’t just walk up all casual-like and uproot the shit. Oh, no. You’ve gotta sneak up on it, or maybe drop out of the sky.
You need a multi-million dollar helicopter and a military-style team all Rambo’d out in the finest assault gear. You need these heroes rappelling from that helicopter going after those horribly dangerous weeds. Takes a true hero to do this shit, doncha know!
The OK Bureau of Narcotics has been working out of Norman, Oklahoma all week, flying as far north as Guthrie, south to Pauls Valley, east to Shawnee and west to El Reno, according to spokesman Mark Woodward, reports NewsOK.
Agents start searching for the cannabis crops in June and continue sweeps until the first freeze, according to Woodward.
“It’s something we’ve done in the late summer since the late ’80s,” Woodward said.
Consider for a moment the vast stacks of taxpayer dollars these morons have pissed away playing Army.
The Bureau of Narcotics found and “eradicated” about 200,000 plants during their summer sweeps when they started about 20 years ago, Woodward said, but these days it’s more like 20,000 to 30,000 a year. (Likely explanation: When the Bureau started its “eradication” program 20 years ago, they were going after Oklahoma’s vast fields of feral hemp; after they got all the easy pickin’s, the annual plant count went down.)

Graphic: The Pacific Northwest Inlander

​Medical marijuana dispensaries can be shut down as public nuisances, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled in a decision announced Wednesday morning.

The three-judge panel, ruling on an Isabella County case, said the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act “does not include the patient-to-patient ‘sales,’ ” report Joe Swickard and John Wisely of the Detroit Free Press.

Unfortunately, the unfavorable decision can be used as precedent and applied to other cases.
A lower court had ruled that the Compassionate Apothecary was within the law when its operators allowed patients or caregivers to buy marijuana that other members had stored in their lockers rented from the facility. The owners, according to court papers, took at 20 percent cut of the price.
But Michigan’s medical marijuana law doesn’t include sales as “medical use,” according to the appellate judges’ 17-page opinion, and therefore it does not trump existing anti-drug laws.
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