An updated set of rules for the fledgling medical marijuana program in Illinois that amend unpopular regulations approved in February are expected Friday, including restoring gun-owner rights at the state level and setting state application fee requirements.
The rule-changes came after the department received hundreds of letters from the public with concerns.
Now that the Florida Supreme Court has approved to have a constitutional amendment to legalize medical marijuana on the ballot this November, the group responsible for getting it there, United for Care, is all about getting the word out.
This week alone, the group has a daylong campaign scheduled to call registered voters and get the word out about Amendment 2.
It’s been three-and-a-half months since the start of recreational cannabis sales in Colorado, but recent stats show that medical marijuana sales still far outpace recreational sales — even with a patient base of fewer than 114,000 people.
Retail sales tax collected in the state in March for retail cannabis sales was about half that collected from medical sales, according to Colorado Department of Revenue data. Medical marijuana sales were somewhere around the $35 million mark, while retail sales totaled about $15 million.
| Ingebrigtsen (left) and Rosen regard efforts to legalize weed as “a direct attack at our way of life in Minnesota.” |
An anti-medical marijuana letter co-written by MNGOP Sens. Julie Rosen and Bill Ingebrigtsen reminds us of some of the crazy stuff you would’ve read about pot nearly a century ago.
The letter, which is addressed to Rosen and Ingebrigtsen’s Senate colleagues, describes marijuana as a “devastatingly addictive drug” that “rips families apart, devastates relationships and destroys communities.” Seriously. There are people that still believe this crap. Our friends at the Minneapolis City Pages did a great job of calling them out on their BS, though.
| New York state flag. |
A U.S. map that shows where pot is legal looks a lot like recent electoral college maps, except instead of blue, the liberal states are rendered in green: the entire West Coast (California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada), progressive mountain and Midwest states (Colorado, New Mexico; Michigan, Illinois), all of New England, plus New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and Hawaii. Twenty states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws legalizing medical marijuana; in two of them, recreational weed is all good, too.
Conspicuously absent from that map: New York. The Village Voice examines why.
A federally-sponsored study on the harms of marijuana found – surprise! – that marijuana is harmful to the brains of youth who smoke it, even casually.
Yes, a Northwestern University School of Medicine study funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Office of National Drug Control Policy found that marijuana use physically alters brain structures. The study didn’t examine whether or not those changes caused any decline in the brains of users, but that didn’t stop them from making that connection.
If you’ve been craving a dose of “Reefer Madness,” there’s still time to RSVP to Thursday’s annual conference of the central Arizona anti-drug organization MATForce. The public portion of the conference runs from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors auditorium, 205 West Jefferson Street. The featured speaker is Kevin Sabet, the anti-cannabis activist that Rolling Stone magazine calls “Legalization Enemy No. 1.”
Sabet’s a drug-policy expert and marijuana prohibitionist who’s served as adviser to the Office of National Drug Control Policy under two presidents. He’s on a crusade to save marijuana users by forcing them either to undergo re-education and “treatment” — or to rot in jail.
Back in 2011, the state of Montana saw a pretty big backlash against medical marijuana patients, caregivers and collectives and state lawmakers approved a ban on the small commercial medical cannabis industry and limited caregivers to three patients. Thankfully those laws were blocked in favor of the medical marijuana industry on appeal, however the state Supreme Court overruled that decision and has forced the judge in the case to reexamine his ruling.
Yesterday an attorney representing patients and collectives argued that the restrictions should remain blocked and that the proposed rules would keep patients from accessing something the state has deemed legal.
A husband allegedly shot is wife in the head in Denver Monday night. And while the crime is horrible, it is primarily making news because police and Denver media are latching on to the rumor that the man may have been high on marijuana at the time.
But what police aren’t making a big deal is their absurdly slow reaction time – 13 minutes – nor do they have any concrete evidence of marijuana consumption or that it contributed to the incident (hint: it didn’t).
Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s plan to randomly drug test every single state employee in Florida — from department heads to minimum wage DMV janitors — has already failed the common-sense test and an appeals court ruling. A trial run of the program found that almost no state employees were failing, while an appeals court ruled that the program violated the constitution.
But Scott hasn’t given up on the idea yet. The U.S. Supreme Court will likely decide this week whether to take up the latest petition filed by Scott’s lawyers.