Potentially a model for the country as well.
Here’s your daily round up of pot news, excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek.
Politico explains how California’s REC initiative, if passed, will disrupt the existing supply chain and provide a windfall to distributors. No other state has a similar model.
A majority of California Latinos oppose legalization, though it’s somewhat more popular among younger voters.
In California it can be even cheaper.
Here’s your daily round up of pot news, excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek.
A month’s supply of MED costs $1,000 in New York, three times as much as in Colorado.
Some teens like to vape pens filled with fruit flavoring. Modern Farmer visits a grow trying to get certified as pesticide free.
Responding to criticism of his escalating war on drugs, Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte threatened to leave the United Nations. CNN went inside a very crowded jail in the country. The N.Y. Times tells the story of a father and son killed in custody. The L.A. Times goes out with “ Nightcrawlers,” the journalists covering the bloodshed.
A few months back we told you about Jacob Lavoro, who was facing life in jail after cops falsely charged him with distributing more than 400 grams of hash by using the entire weight of a batch of hash brownies instead of just the four grams he allegedly used.
Thankfully, someone in Williamson County, Texas has a heart. Or a least a brain that can listen to logic, as the charges that could have brought him a mandatory 10 years or a maximum of life in prison have been dropped. He is still facing two lower-degree felonies and up to 20 years in jail, however.
| KeoniCabral/FlickrCommons |
In February of this year, local pro-cannabis activists in Kern County in Southern California concocted a defense of pot dispensaries that you have to be toking on some top shelf herbs to come up with.
Their argument was that by forcing the closure or re-location of the vast majority of local medical marijuana storefronts, they would be violating the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) by making the region’s cannabis consumers drive their pollution-spewing cars even further to get their medication.
Half-baked or not, the defense stood up in court and the de facto ban on medical marijuana in Kern County was delayed. As we reported at the time, the court’s decision set a potential landmark precedent for other counties or cities on the verge on instituting their own crackdowns on the chron. The example we used was San Diego, and sure enough, America’s Finest City has become the new proving ground.
| www.weedmaps.com |
Leading up to the statewide California election this past Tuesday, it is probably safe to say that a majority of voters in San Diego did not realize that they were casting ballots either for, or against, safe access to medical marijuana in the city.
There were no particular referendums for reefer, no specific ballot measures for medical marijuana, but the disappointing results in the city’s District Attorney race, and a rightward-shift in the too-powerful City Council, are reportedly the result of low voter turnout.
It was a tough day at the polls for pro-cannabis activists in America’s Finest City. Another in a disheartening string of crushing blows against any legitimacy for medical marijuana in San Diego.
| Compton Mayor Aja Brown. |
Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, the city of Compton, CA gained an infamous reputation across mainstream America as a drug-addled wasteland, ruled by gangs and racked by unthinkable violence.
Fueled at the time by accounts from gangster rap titles and Hollywood portrayals of the hardened region of South Central Los Angeles, today Compton is much less violent, but just as vulnerable, running a $40-million deficit as it struggles to try to avoid all out bankruptcy. It’s not hard to see that a change of direction is needed.
Patrick Kennedy, the former Democratic Congressman from Rhode Island, is not a fan of marijuana legalization, and he wants everyone to know about it. The son of the late Teddy Kennedy, the wildly popular long time Senator from Massachusetts, Patrick is riding the coattails of his family name on a whirlwind media tour to promote his new prohibitionist group, SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana).
After visits to nationally syndicated cable television shows like Bill Maher and Piers Morgan, Kennedy’s latest soapbox comes in the form of an op-ed piece that was graciously printed by the notoriously conservative and anti-cannabis San Diego Union-Tribune.
In the piece, Kennedy says, “When I woke up after the 2012 election, two states had voted to legalize marijuana. That day I also ‘woke up’ to how naive I had been. ”
| A coffee shop menu. |
After the Netherlands banned public cannabis shops in border towns, southern Netherlands coffee shop owners say their business – both local and foreign – went in the gutter. Despite their anti-cannabis stance, the courts agreed and say the owners are entitled to compensation.
But the move also clarified the laws, upholding the bans and other measures used to prevent tourists from buying drugs in the country.
| Steve Elliott ~alapoet~ |
| Made In Humboldt California |