Author Steve Elliott ~alapoet~

Croatia’s Prime Minister Says Marijuana Decrim ‘Not Acceptable’

By Steve Elliott ~alapoet~ on May 24, 2011 Global, Legislation

Croatia’s first woman Prime Minister, Jadranka Kosor, had a chance to lead her country into the future. But she blew it.

The prime minister of Croatia has said her party, the conservative Christian Democratic Union, would not support the decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana.

Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor, the first female prime minister of her country, said she is against a working group’s proposal to change Croatia’s criminal law to make possession of small quantities of cannabis legal, reports the Croatian Times.

“A decriminalization of the possession of quantities of any sort of drugs has never been acceptable to our party,” Kosor said.

The prime minister added that the Christian Democratic Union (HDZ) would “stick to their position” among coalition partners in the Croatian government.

No distinction is made in Croatian law between marijuana and other illegal substances. According to the current law, growing or sale of cannabis (or any other drug) is considered a felony punishable by a mandatory three-year minimum prison sentence.

The possession of any amount in Croatia is a felony with either a fine or a one-year prison sentence, depending on the circumstances of the case, although people arrested with smaller amounts of cannabis are typically just fined after the court’s ruling.

Canadian Marijuana Bears Wake Up With The Munchies

By Steve Elliott ~alapoet~ on May 24, 2011 Global, Growing, News

Photo: CBC News

RCMP officers were amused last year when the friendly bears came out to greet them as they raided a marijuana grow operation. Now they’ve woken up after a long winter’s nap — and they have a major case of the munchies.

The infamous marijuana bears of British Columbia have woken after their winter hibernation, and they have the munchies — but they seem to be weaning themselves off dog food, according to the man who was once feeding them $100 of kibbles a day.

Allen Piche of Christina Lake, B.C., pleaded guilty in March to feeding the roughly two dozen wild black bears on his remote property after the B.C. Conservation Service last summer charged him and ordered him to stop, reports CBC News. Piche was charged after police found the mellow bears when they raided a marijuana grow operation on his property last August.

Initially there was speculation the bears might be guarding the cannabis crop, but Piche denied that.

Drive To Legalize Marijuana Dispensaries Fails In Washington

By Steve Elliott ~alapoet~ on May 24, 2011 Dispensaries, Legislation

Photo: Steve Elliott

The Washington Legislature’s main proponent of legalizing and licensing medical marijuana dispensaries announced on Tuesday that the attempt has failed. Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles said even her most recent, scaled-back bill won’t go forward.

Kohl-Welles called it “the greatest disappointment of my legislative career,” reports Jordan Scrader at the Tacoma News Tribune.

Her first try regulating the pot shops — which have already sprung up statewide, especially in the Seattle and Spokane areas — was gutted by Governor Christine Gregoire, who hen-heartedly claimed she was concerned about state employees being federally prosecuted, even though that has never happened, even once, in any state which licenses dispensaries.

Supreme Court Upholds Order To Reduce Prison Overcrowding

By Steve Elliott ~alapoet~ on May 23, 2011 News

Photo: Drug War Chronicle

Overcrowding at Mule Creek State Prison, Ione, California

Advocates Urge Ending Prison As A Response To Drug Use

The United States Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the unconstitutional conditions of California’s prisons were caused primarily by overcrowding, and ordered California to reduce its prison population from more than 200 percent of design capacity to 137.5 percent of capacity within two years.

“The U.S. Supreme Court was right to uphold the order to reduce California’s prison population,” said Theshia Naidoo, staff attorney for the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA). “Tough-on-crime policies have crowded prisons so severely with people convicted of nonviolent offenses, including drug possession, that they are not only unsafe and overly costly, but also a net negative for public safety.”

Marijuana Advocates Sue Government Over Rescheduling Delay

By Steve Elliott ~alapoet~ on May 23, 2011 Legislation, Medical, News

Photo: MyMedicineTheBook.com

The federal government refuses to reclassify marijuana as medicine — despite the fact that it has sent Irv Rosenfeld and a handful of other patients hundreds of joints a month for close to 30 years.

A coalition of medical marijuana advocacy groups and patients filed suit Monday in D.C. Circuit Court to compel the Obama Administration to answer a nine-year-old petition to reclassify medical marijuana.

The Coalition for Rescheduling Cannabis (CRC) has never received an answer to its 2002 petition, despite a formal recommendation in 2006 from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Drug Enforcement Administration, which is unfortunately the final arbiter in the rescheduling process.

As recently as July 2010, the DEA issued a 54-page “Position on Marijuana,” but failed to even mention the pending CRC petition.

Plaintiffs in the case include the CRC, Americans for Safe Access (ASA), Patients Out of Time, as well as individually named patients, one of whom is listed on the CRC petition but died in 2005.

Court Order Reopens Shuttered Marijuana Dispensaries

By Steve Elliott ~alapoet~ on May 23, 2011 Dispensaries, News

Photo: OC Weekly

Dispensary owner and former City Council candidate Sue Lester: Judge’s decision to let shops open was the “right thing to do”

A group of shuttered medical marijuana dispensaries previously deemed public nuisances were allowed to reopen in Costa Mesa, California this weekend thanks to a court order, one of the business owners confirmed on Saturday.

Sue Lester, former City Council candidate and owner of Herban Elements at 440 Fair Drive, said an Orange County Superior Court Judge’s order Friday allowing her business to reopen was the “right thing to do” while waiting for a court hearing next month, reports Joseph Serna at the Costa Mesa Daily Pilot.

City officials in April declared several marijuana and massage parlor businesses at Fair Drive public nuisances in April. Police claimed some of the massage parlors were fronts for prostitution.

Lester’s dispensary was among those ordered to shut down earlier this month under a temporary injunction until they had a chance on Friday to appeal the decision. The judge lifted the injunction and scheduled the business owners and Costa Mesa’s attorneys to come back to court June 3 to argue their cases.

Costa Mesa has for about a year now targeted certain marijuana dispensaries throughout the city. Some were ordered to close because they allegedly violated California’s medical marijuana dispensary rules, and others were left alone because they appeared to follow state standards, according to city officials.

Superfast Computers Triggering Botched Marijuana Grow Raids

By Steve Elliott ~alapoet~ on May 23, 2011 Culture, Growing, News

Photo: Bitcoin Miner

Turns out, looking only at electric usage from a residence, the consumption for bitcoin mining won’t look much different from a marijuana grow-op. Cue clueless cops.

You don’t have to be growing marijuana to get raided for it. At least one Bitcoin miner has been raided by police because unusually high power usage led them to suspect he was growing marijuana, according to unconfirmed reports on Monday.

The tip comes from an IRC chat captured by blogger Mike Esspe, though there are no corroborating details, reports Jerry Brito of Techland.

Bitcoin is the anonymous virtual currency that uses distributed computing power to validate online coins. “It’s like gold mining, except that instead of digging, a miner uses cryptographic math,” reports Techland.

Green Rush: Marijuana Superstore Opens In Arizona June 1

By Steve Elliott ~alapoet~ on May 23, 2011 Growing, Products

Photo: ABC 15

weGrow’s third store — and first franchise outside of California — is scheduled to open June 1 in Phoenix, Arizona.

New signage on an old Phoenix warehouse is one of the first visible indicators of the billion-dollar medical marijuana industry’s arrival in the Valley of the Sun.

Marijuana cultivation equipment franchise weGrow, the so-called “Walmart of Weed,” plans to open a 21,000-square-foot superstore in Phoenix on June 1. “WeGrow is the only hydroponics franchise in the nation that openly markets and focuses on the medical marijuana industry,” said media contact Melissa Rzeppa.

“The Green Rush” grand opening event starts with an industry panel and then ends with a public festival. Attendees will be able to visit the onsite medical doctor for evaluations. The latest marijuana-related products and technology will be featured, along with live entertainment.

Charges Dismissed Against Marijuana Dispensary Operator

By Steve Elliott ~alapoet~ on May 23, 2011 Dispensaries, News

Photo: greenkind

All felony charges against Inglewood, California medical marijuana dispensary operator Paul Scott were dismissed in a Los Angeles court on Thursday, just days before Scott was scheduled to face trial, which was supposed to begin on Monday.

Scott, operator of Inglewood Wellness Collective for more than 10 years, was arrested in June of 2010 by the Los Angeles Police Department, according to Brett Stone of the Medical Marijuana News Yahoo newsgroup. Acting on an anonymous tip, detectives used helicopter surveillance of Scott’s home and saw marijuana plants growing in the back yard and also in a storage shed next to the house.

Scott was seen leaving the shed and an LAPD detective used that information and the smell of marijuana emanating from Scott’s back yard to conclude that a cannabis grow operation was located there.

Military Police Attack Marijuana Protesters In Brazil

By Steve Elliott ~alapoet~ on May 21, 2011 Global, News

Photo: AE

Police fire percussion stun bombs and rubber bullets at the Marcha da Maconha protesters, São Paulo, Brazil, May 21, 2011

Prohibited from holding a “March for Marijuana,” cannabis advocates in Brazil’s largest city had agreed with police to protest instead in defense of freedom of expression. But minutes after allowing the march, the Military Police brutally attacked the unarmed demonstrators with stun bombs, tear gas and rubber bullets.

About 1,000 people showed up for the rally Saturday in São Paulo’s financial heart. Television images showed riot troops charging toward the protesters when they tried to march down the busy Paulista Avenue.

Protesters, journalists covering the event, drivers who happened to be traveling in the opposite direction of the march and people who were simply walking down the street at the time became victims of police violence, reports Ricardo Galhardo at Último Segundo.

Henrique Carneiro, a professor of history at the University of São Paulo who was taking part in the march, was injured after being hit in the head with a percussion stun bomb and had to be taken to the hospital.

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