Search Results: seattle/ (11)

The league and the plant appear to be on a collision course. 

Here’s your daily round-up of pot-news, excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek

Buffalo Bills offensive lineman Seantrel Henderson will serve a four-game suspension after testing positive for marijuana. Seantrel suffers from Crohn’s Disease and had bowel surgery early this year.

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is not happy that rookie running back Ezekiel Elliott visited a pot shop in Seattle. Elliott didn’t buy anything according to TMZ. The Cowboys start the season tomorrow with three players suspended for substance abuse violations.

Marijuana possession (and soon purchases) are legal in Seattle, but public consumption remains verboten in Seattle much the same way as tipping back a bottle of beer in public. In that vein, Seattle City Council yesterday passed a law making marijuana toking in public a $27 fine – the same for illegal alcohol consumption.
Police, however, say they’ll most likely be issuing warnings “whenever practical” and would like to avoid writing the tickets if they can. We take that to mean that you’ll have to really/em> try to get the citation in most instances.

Medical marijuana dispensaries will have to apply for the same licenses as legal recreational shops in Seattle, which several activists argue is a move to wipe out medical marijuana dispensaries altogether by forcing the state to adopt the same policy.
Basically, by forcing medical shops to be recreational shops the government is setting the up to be shut down if the feds ever come in and shut everything related to Washington’s I-502 down.

TokeoftheTown.com

Seattle Police won’t be ticketing people for public consumption at this weekend’s Hempfest. Instead, they’ll be issuing munchies along with information on the newly-passed marijuana laws in Washington state.
We already predict that there will be two schools of thought on this from the ganja smoking camp: The first, is that it’s a funny, smart and tongue-in-check way of distributing some public information to a target group of people. The second is that it’s an insulting way for police to continue stereotype cannabis users as junk-food eating dumbbells. We here at Toke side more with the former than the latter here, though admittedly we have a thing for Doritos to begin with.

Swagger & Young

Washington state’s I-502 may not be the best piece of “legalization” legislation you’ve ever seen; it certainly has its share of warts, including the unscientific DUI blood limits for active THC, and the continued prohibition on home cultivation. But there are definite up-sides to the passage of 502.

Among those delicious up-sides is the publication — by the Seattle Police Department — of a guide on how to legally use marijuana in the Emerald City.
A cop-penned guide on how to legally use marijuana? That shit just couldn’t have happened until November 6, man. Let’s enjoy the thing, in its entirety.
(The cops got a little clever, entitling their magnum dopus “Marijwhatnow? A Guide To Legal Marijuana Use In Seattle.”)

Nuggetry

Voters Say Yes To Regulation, Taxation Plan

Isn’t it just the way it always goes? Nothing for 75 years, then two states in one day. Washington voters resoundingly approved Initiative 502, which regulates and taxes marijuana production in the state, with 56 percent voting Yes and 44 percent voting No.

The state’s voters on Tuesday evening joined those of Colorado, from which results had become final earlier, in legalizing cannabis.

Graphic: Cannabis Defense Coalition

​The top prosecutors and officials in both King County, Washington and the city of Seattle are asking the Legislature to quickly untangle the mess left by Governor Christine Gregoire’s gutting of a medical marijuana bill. The bill was supposed to have legalized dispensaries and provided arrest protection for patients, but after Gregoire got through with it, patients were worse off than they started.

In a letter to the four top leaders in the Washington Legislature, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, county executive Dow Constantine, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn and Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes said the medical marijuana law in its current state leaves them with “few good options” to control and regulate dispensaries, reports Jonathan Martin at the Seattle Times.

“In the absence of new legislation, we at the local level will have to choose between closing down dispensaries and prosecuting the owners and workers, or allowing them to continue to multiply in an unclear regulatory environment,” they wrote in a letter [PDF] dated Wednesday, May 18.

Graphic: Salem-News/NORML Blog

​It only took two years for the U.S. federal government to get from “we won’t interfere in state medical marijuana laws” to threatening raids and even arrests of state employees if dispensaries are legalized.

The administration is using a new tactic in its war against medical marijuana patients and providers. In at least four states in the past two months, U.S. Attorneys have been given the dirty work of threatening states if progressive medical marijuana legislation is passed.

Things got started in February when the U.S. Attorney for Northern California threatened to prosecute operators of a proposed commercial medical marijuana farm in Oakland, even though the farm was licensed by that city and legal under state law.
U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag “strongly warned” Oakland that big industrial marijuana farms are illegal under federal law, and that the Department of Justice was considering “civil and criminal legal remedies” if the city went ahead with its plans to permit them. The plans were put on hold.

Cannabis Defense Coalition

​​Responding to increasing outrage over a police raid on a legal, two-plant medical cannabis garden, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn on Monday announced an executive review of the city’s cannabis enforcement policies.

“It’s not the policy, or the goal, of the city to investigate, arrest and prosecute individuals who possess small amounts of marijuana,” said McGinn. The mayor organized a review panel consisting of the city attorney, police chief, county prosecutor, and a member of the city council.
Starting on Tuesday, November 2, a specific assistant police chief must approve all marijuana search warrants in the city.
Washington is one of 14 states that allow the medical use of cannabis, and Seattle voters directed police to lay off the pot enforcement with the passage of I-75, a “lowest priority” directive, in 2003.
​With a county prosecutor sympathetic to medical marijuana and a city attorney that refuses to pursue pot cases at all, Seattle is seen as a safe haven for medical marijuana patients in Washington.
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