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The stigma is shrinking and the money is growing.

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

Private equity investment in weed is heating up. Canadian MED company Organigram raised $17.5M. Denver’s Baker Technologies, a software company which helps dispensaries win and retain customers, raised $1.6M. The industry’s average seed round is $1M according to investment firm Poseidon Asset Management.

Commodities investor Jim Rogers, who started Quantum Fund with George Soros, has invested in PharmaCielo, a Canadian company that won the first license to grow MED in Colombia.

CMH Brands, a company which processes Willie Nelson brand Willie’s Reserve, acquired Denver Relief’s grow and manufacturing facilities. The deal comes weeks after Denver Relief sold a store to Terrapin Station.

The Clinic’s new flagship store in Denver cost more than $1M. A JPMorgan analyst thinks Scotts Miracle-Gro’s push into the industry will benefit the stock. Bloomberg BusinessWeek interviewed Dixie CEO Tripp Keber.

Fast Company looks at what it’s like to work for social media app MassRoots.

San Jose, Calif., dispensary Medimarts promised a court fight against a ruling that it owes $767,000 in taxes and late fees.

787 drivers were involved in Colorado’s 546 driving fatalities last year. Of the drivers, 59, or 7.1% tested positive for cannabis but not other drugs. The total number of fatalities was down from 606 in 2005.

Researchers found that a Vermont Department of Health study was overly negative and did not account for the possibility of legalization alleviating the state’s opioid crisis. This year the state legislature failed to pass a REC bill that was widely expected to become law.

In the Des Moines Register, the founder of an addiction center writes that pot is still dangerous. “We see the faces of marijuana addicts first hand. And it’s not funny. We see people who struggle with simple tasks at school and work.  People incapable of perceiving or expressing emotion. People who suffer from higher incidence of mental health diagnoses, such as schizophrenia, paranoia and anxiety.”

Flickr/Alex E. Proimos.


Arizonans no longer risk getting a DUI for driving with an inactive metabolite of marijuana in their blood following a ruling by the state’s high court.
The Arizona Supreme Court announced this morning that it was reaffirming the trial court’s decision to dump the case of Hrach Shilgevorkyan, who was prosecuted for driving while impaired after a blood test revealed the presence of marijuana. New Times covered the case and overall issue in detail in the Phoenix New Times May 2013 article “Riding High.

According to the Michigan Supreme Court, medical marijuana patients who drive after using cannabis are not automatically breaking the law reversing a lower court decision that barred medical patients from driving with any amounts of THC in their system.
The unanimous ruling issued Tuesday, centers around Rodney Koon, who was pulled over for going nearly 30 mph over the limit back in 2010. Koon admitted to drinking a beer and taking his meds earlier in the day and a blood test for active THC proved he had about 10 nanograms per milliliter of blood, but he contends that wasn’t why he was speeding. After being shot down in lower courts, he appealed his way to the Supreme Court.

No On I-502

By Anthony Martinelli
Communications Director
It’s a challenging thing to oppose Initiative 502 — a measure many have been duped into thinking is “marijuana legalization” — and it’s going to be a challenge for many cannabis law reform advocates to check “No” on their ballot. The proponents of this initiative have wrongfully pegged it as a potential blow to our failed War On Drugs, and have justified the dangerous provisions as “necessary.”
Necessary is ensuring that patients who truly need their medication are protected, and that we don’t prosecute the innocent. Initiative 502 does anything but.

The Daily Chronic

By Anthony Martinelli
Communications Director
Our opposition to Initiative 502 was not a decision made in haste. We examined this measure from multiple angles, looking at the political ramifications, the legal implications, and the social benefits and consequences. We came to a clear conclusion: Initiative 502 is not a positive step forward for our state, and we can do better.
The initiative proposes dangerous and arbitrary policies, and sets up a legal distribution system that will fall to federal preemption. Here are the key reasons why, after deep consideration, our organization voted unanimously to oppose this measure (you can read our full analysis here):

The Weed Blog

By Anthony Martinelli
Communications Director
Washington state’s Initiative 502 has caused a heated debate within the cannabis community. Individuals who would have never imagined themselves opposing a “legalization” measure, have found themselves adamantly and publicly opposed to this initiative. 
Both sides of the debate have merit.
On one end, the initiative is filled with unnecessary flaws – it retains cannabis as a Schedule I drug – it leaves activities such as passing a joint as felony charges – it creates new criminal penalties for patients in the form of an unwarranted per se DUID limit – et cetera
That being said, there are arguments in support of this measure that also hold validity – the issue of public perception on the national level, for example – and of course arrest protection for up to an ounce of cannabis seems beneficial.

CarInsurance.org
Highway fatalities have fallen steadily every year since states began passing medical marijuana laws. They are now at their lowest point since 1949.

If marijuana really caused car accidents — you know, the way alcohol does — America’s highways would be awash in blood because of the herb’s growing popularity.

But even as marijuana use — and society’s acceptance of it — grows every year, highway fatalities are diminishing.

Weed Posts

A bill establishing a THC blood limit for drivers, after first having appeared to die on the Colorado Senate floor, was called back and passed by a single vote Tuesday afternoon.

The bill, which would establish a per se cannabis “impairment” limit of 5 nanograms per milliliter of blood (no correlation has been shown between this level and actual impairment) now heads to the Republican-controlled House, where its passage appears likely, reports Michael Roberts at Denver Westword.

Old Hippies Cookbook
“Fifteen minutes before the homeroom bell, I spy a long-haired student being dropped off by his long-haired father in a Prius in front of the school with a public radio playing and a Greenpeace sticker on the bumper.”

​By Jack Rikess

Toke of the Town

Northern California Correspondent


Jazz Musician’ Son Brings Brownie To Fourth Grade Class!

Panic broke out this morning at Redwood Elementary School when a local jazz guitarist’s son smuggled in through the opened doors of the grammar school a “red” sequestered Tupperware-covered container of evenly-cut Betty Crocker’s “More Fudge Than Fun Brownies,” for Pebbles Shapiro-Naguchi’s birthday party. There’ll be no birthday celebration in Room 102 this afternoon because of the quick judgment of a teacher who thinks profiling is more than tracing a child’s silhouette.  
This fast-acting teacher intercepted the suspicious treats once the child was caught off-guard opening his desk. Fearing the inevitable — that the child was part of a drug ring intended to imprison our innocent youth from their eight to nine hours of day of playing ‘World Demands To Die Warfare,’ videogames, the untested, sugar-laced, possible store-bought opiates were removed. 

Patients Against I-502

​Washington state’s marijuana legalization Initiative 502 has plenty of prominent backers and a healthy war chest of money heading towards the November election. So why do many of the state’s most prominent cannabis advocates oppose it?
One of the most troublesome reasons, according to Patients Against I-502, is its faulty DUI provision which would create a per se DUI charge for anyone testing over the low, arbitrary and scientifically unsupported blood THC level of of five nanograms per milliliter (5 ng/ml).
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