Browsing: Culture
| Joe Winn |
| The 2011 Oregon Medical Cannabis Awards (OMCA) First Place trophy |
By Charlie Bott
Toke of the Town
Oregon Correspondent
The marijuana strain Mad Scientist, grown by first-time entrant Ray Bowser, captured top honors at the 10th Annual Oregon Medical Cannabis Awards on Saturday, December 10, at the World Famous Cannabis Cafe in Portland.
The highest THC content flowers overall measured an impressive 23.9 percent. Better keep this stuff out of New Jersey (where the limit is 10 percent) and the Netherlands (limit 15 percent)!
Overall Winner: Mad Scientist — grown by first-time entrant Ray Bowser
2nd place: Medicine Woman — grown by David Verstoppen
3rd place : Blueberry — grown by last year’s winner, Jessi James
The ceremony also included the presentation of the Freedom Fighter of the Year awards to Lori Duckworth of Southern Oregon NORML, and presentation of the Dr. Ric Bayer Award to Paul Loney, legal counsel for Oregon NORML, for his years of service to the medical cannabis community.
| Ronald Martinez |
| LeBron James can’t be bummed out about the news: No testing for pot in the NBA’s off-season |
Just because you’re seven feet tall doesn’t have to mean you can’t get higher. The National Basketball Association’s new labor agreement will not test players for marijuana during the off-season. Players will only be tested for performance-enhancing drugs.
The walk-out is all behind us now. And it seems the players were able to get an even better deal under the new NBA labor contract, reports Rena Karefa-Johnson of Buzz:60.
“You’d think after all the walk-out, the last thing the players would want in the off-season is something that would make it go even slower,” Karefa-Johnson said.
| memoirsofapothead |
| Hot Box Cafe in Toronto |
By Matt Mernagh
Toronto’s bring-your-own marijuana scene has developed with little political resistance — until recently.
A city council item to conduct a comprehensive review of vapour lounges was sneakily passed during budget debate. Now cannabis-friendly establishments that allow people to come in and consume their own pot on-premise are wondering what’s going to happen next. Toronto Police Service have all the tools necessary to shut these places down right now, but haven’t.
Will city council meddling prompt cops to take a closer examination of their hands off policy?
| The Emerald Cup |
By Jack Rikess
Toke of the Town
Northern California Correspondent
The fabled Emerald Cup is returning to the legendary Mendocino spiritual sanctum, Area 101, this Saturday. As the blurb says, “Proclaimed by Rolling Stone Magazine,’ as the premiere competition in America.'” And they’re not kidding.
The Emerald Cup, “the world’s only outdoor organic cannabis competition,” first lit up on the scene almost a decade ago, with the initial competition bringing in 22 entrees to be judged. Last year, the entries almost reached 150.
But that’s just pot talk. What’s cool about the Emerald Cup? It is so much more than your average medical cannabis bake-off.
The new documentary film Science vs. Stigma does a wonderful thing: It puts a human face on some of the collateral damage from the War On Drugs. The film does this by allowing medical marijuana patients to share their struggles to safely access an unjustly demonized medicinal herb that helps them.
True stories and scientific research reveal the difficult lives of patients who require the ancient medicinal plant, cannabis, which is now legal in some states, but still so demonized that it cannot even be named in an advertisement.
The medicinal components of cannabis have been shown to be effective in treating dozens of conditions, but patients who are ill and disabled are still senseless persecuted and socially stigmatized.
| Rose Law Group |
| Border Patrol Agent Bryan Gonzalez was fired merely for verbally expressing frustration with the war on marijuana and voicing support for LEAP |
Maybe Frank Zappa was right to ask, “Who are the Brain Police?” Remarks from a Border Patrol agent expressing dissatisfaction with the Drug War — made on the job to a fellow agent, a few feet from the Mexican border — later resulted in the agent’s firing after his remarks were passed along to headquarters.
Bryan Gonzalez, a young agent stationed in Deming, New Mexico, was in his Border Patrol vehicle next to the border when he pulled up to a fellow agent to chat about the frustrations of the job, reports Marc Lacey at The New York Times.
If marijuana were legalized, Gonzalez told the other agent, the drug-related violence across the border in Mexico would cease. He then mentioned an organization called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), consisting of former cops, judges and prosecutors who favor ending the War On Drugs.
“Now that The New York Times has featured LEAP and the emerging debate in the law enforcement community about ending the ‘war on drugs,’ hopefully this will lead to more sympathetic cops getting in touch with us and joining the movement,” LEAP’s media relations director, Tom Angell, told Toke of the Town on Monday morning.
“I’m already hearing from a lot of news outlets that don’t normally cover LEAP that the Times story caught their attention,” Angell said.