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We told you last week about a Michigan prison cop who died prior to being sentenced for his role in a medical marijuana brownie sting. It turns out that 49-year-old Tim Bernhardt committed suicide, rather than face the felony charges of maintaining a drug house – charges he saw for simply being a medical marijuana patient and making some brownies. Bernhardt was facing up to two years in jail and $25,000 in fines.
According to Michigan law, concentrated forms of marijuana are illegal even for medical cannabis users – that includes infused butter, arguably the most common way to make pot edibles. The court has upheld that ruling as recently as July of 2013 – despite overwhelming evidence that it’s an absurd qualification. The judge based the ruling on the language of the state medical marijuana law, which defines marijuana as the “the dried leaves and flowers of the marihuana plant, and any mixture or preparation thereof.”

Law Office of Joel M. Mann

Numbers Put The Lie To Claims Washington’s I-502 Won’t Harm Patients

Driving under the influence of marijuana. It’s the new scare tactic used by prohibitionists and drug warriors as an argument against the legalization of cannabis. Unfortunately, it’s also used by some people who are supposed to be on our side as a political wedge issue to gain support for Initiative 502, a Washington legalization measure that includes blood THC limits as per se proof that you’re guilty of DUI.

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, despite its opposition as an organization to per se marijuana DUI testing, has endorsed I-502, warts and all. This seeming contradiction — wherein NORML supports per se testing in Washington, after having opposed it in medical marijuana states like Colorado and California — occurs because, NORML says, it’s important to pass an initiative, any initiative, to “send the Feds a message.”
Well, if the message you’re sending them is “open season on medical marijuana patients,” then congratulations; mission accomplished! Otherwise, not so much.

Stoners Against Prop 19
Dragonfly De La Luz: The smugly self-satisfied new face of cannabis prohibition in California.

​It didn’t take long after the defeat of Proposition 19, which would have taxed and regulated marijuana in California, for the cannabis community to realize that legalization’s ignominious defeat was fueled by the duplicity — some would say outright treachery — of certain greedy, reactionary elements within the community itself. Boycotts against anti-Prop 19 businesses are now being organized.

So-called “Stoners Against Prop 19” — traitors to the movement such as Dennis Peron, Dragonfly De La Luz and J. Craig Canada — whether through stunning ignorance or outright malice, spread disinformation about exactly what the measure would have done.
They busily sowed division, distrust, and fear among a community that should have been united in striving to loosen the death grip of 70+ years of cannabis prohibition.
Offered the opportunity to embrace the future, these reactionary elements formed a fifth column within the medical cannabis community.
For who knows what reasons — maybe the miserly interest of preserving big pot profits? — they shamelessly allied themselves with the law enforcement and prison lobbies, with the Religious Right, and with the same intolerant fundamentalists behind the No On 19 campaign — the very same people, in the case of one statewide organization, that headed up the Proposition 8 anti-gay marriage initiative two years ago.