Voters in Santa Fe and Bernalillo County yesterday approved measures that call for the decriminalization an ounce of weed or less at the state level yesterday. The move didn’t actually change any laws, though. It’s more of a proclamation from voters to elected officials.
Oh, and it doesn’t actually hold the lawmakers to any promises either. Thankfully, there’s enough momentum that New Mexicans can expect several decriminalization and legalization measures to come their way in 2015.
Weedmaps.com has long been a pioneer in the online cannabis market. Since 2008, their interactive marijuana dispensary map has led untold thousands of cannabis enthusiasts to their local pot shops based on an archive of tens of thousands of peer reviews and dynamically updated and easy to read menus.
With weed laws loosening nationwide and new dispensaries cropping up in record numbers, it would be easy for Weedmaps to rest on what they’ve built and just keep cashing checks. But lately, the multifaceted marijuana marketing magnate has been expanding its horizons a bit, and bunking down business-wise with some pretty odd bedfellows.
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| Virginia Ervin gave up college and motherhood to protect her criminal boyfriend after he set her and her baby on fire |
“She then realized that both her and her child’s hair were on fire”
Not the sort of words you’ll ever hear leading up to a ‘Mother of the Year’ acceptance speech, but those just so happen to be the exact words written in the affidavit prepared by officers from the Missoula Police Department after investigating the aftermath of a hash oil related explosion earlier this month.
18-year old Virginia Ervin, a student at the University of Montana, initially avoided being arrested in connection to the apartment explosion that we reported on two weeks ago. As the smoke was still clearing on the scene, she readily admitted that she made a conscious decision to “just chill” with her infant child in the same apartment where the highly explosive hash oil extraction was being performed. Still, she walked away free…until last Friday.
Yesterday, we told you about the Twitter spat that erupted after Dr. Christian Thurstone, an addiction specialist who’s also a major player in Project SAM, a national organization fighting to prevent greater access to cannabis, shared a blog post in which he implied that marijuana contributed to — and perhaps even caused — the death of Michael Brown, whose shooting by a police officer caused weeks of rioting in Ferguson, Missouri. Now, Thurstone has pulled the controversial post and put in its place an item insisting that his intentions had been “misstated and mischaracterized.” We’d say so…
More at the Denver Westword.
| A cropped image from the Denver Police Department Facebook page. More photos plus two videos below. |
Last month, we shared Denver Police Department concerns about trick-or-treaters possibly being slipped marijuana edibles on Halloween. Literally hundreds of readers ripped such fears as unreasonable and reactionary. But rather than backing down, the DPD upped the ante with a video on the alleged threat, plus a Facebook campaign rolled out over the past couple of weeks. Thus far, the majority of those who’ve responded to the department on Facebook have been more upset by what they see as fear-mongering than by the prospect of kids being dosed without their knowledge.
Soft spoken leftist Uruguayan President Jose Mujica’s dream of legalizing cannabis to curb violence and drug problems in his country may be on the outs along with his role as the country’s leader.
A week ago we told you about controversial cop Frank Lyga with the Los Angeles Police Department, who has been accused of being a racist asshole. It seems Lyga’s bosses think so, too. Lyga was terminated by Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck, the detective’s attorney, Ira Salzman, told L.A. Weekly yesterday.
Lyga was sent home with pay in June after a recording of comments he made to an ongoing-training course for law enforcement was brought to the media’s attention by political consultant Jasmyne Cannick. The white detective, who justifiably* shot a black officer in 1997 while both were out of uniform, said, “I could have killed a whole truckload of them.”
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Back in 2008, a massive DEA sweep through suburban Philadelphia took down a multimillion dollar cannabis cultivation ring, resulting in the arrest and indictment of twelve Vietnamese Americans who stood accused of conspiring to grow thousands of highly illegal pot plants across several grow sites in Berks County, Pennsylvania.
Among those rounded up in the raids was then 40-year old Dung Bui, also known as “Danny Bui”. Facing compounded consequences due to the fact that his grow site was within spitting distance of a school-owned park, Bui pled guilty to charges of conspiracy to manufacture more than 1,000 marijuana plants and manufacturing and distributing marijuana within 1,000 feet of an athletic field owned by the school district.
Now, six years later, the 3rd Circuit Court has tossed the 2008 ruling out the window, vacating Bui’s guilty plea based on his appeal that he was given bad advice by his attorney.
| Keep your friends close. Keep your enemies closer. Keep your Friends List private. |
You may remember a couple of weeks ago we reported here on a story about DEA agents in New York stealing a suspect’s online identity and creating a fake Facebook profile in her likeness in an attempt to lure her friends into guilt-ridden admissions of their own.
The suspect, Sondra Arquiett, sued the Drug Enforcement Agency and the federal government for $250,000 and was due to begin court proceedings on the matter this week, but the suit is now in mediation as the feds try to buy their way out of the embarrassing situation. The revelation that law enforcement was using the popular social media networking site to conduct undercover investigations was just another on a growing list of incidences that have left those still logging on wondering just how real, and how safe, Facebook actually is.
The Long, Strange Saga of Kent Easter has ended. Sunbeams breaking through clouds, birds singing again and our collective sigh of relief being accompanied by a pleasing endorphin rush can mean only one thing, Orange County: Kent Wycliffe Easter is officially jail-bound.
The Hon. Judge Thomas Goethals made it official this morning, sentencing the Irvine dad to six months in jail–minus 76 days already served–for joining his fellow attorney wife in trying to frame an elementary school volunteer for drug possession because they thought she’d insulted their then-6-year-old son. She hadn’t.