The Denver City Council has dealt a crushing blow to private medical marijuana caregivers, passing regulation to make such operations all but obsolete within the Mile High City.
In a 12-1 vote Monday night, the council approved a measure to limit city households to just 12 plants total, and only two patients per home, who must also live in the household, reports Tim Martin at John Doe Radio.
Only Councilman Doug Linkhart dissented, reports Christopher N. Osher at The Denver Post.
The South Dakota Highway Patrol isn’t officially allowed to interfere with elections. But they found a way around the rule.
South Dakota’s medical marijuana initiative, Measure 13, is fending off a new foe: the state’s Highway Patrol.
The South Dakota Highway Patrol saved “news” about marijuana busts from the summer — supposedly related to “out of state medical marijuana” — to release two weeks before the election, Michael Whitney of JustSayNow.com told Toke of the Town on Wednesday.
“It certainly looks like the South Dakota Highway Patrol is interfering with the state’s medical marijuana ballot initiative,” Whitney told us Wednesday afternoon.
“Just Say Now is working with Measure 13’s campaign to fight back,” Whitney said.
Measure 13, which would legalize the medicinal use of cannabis in South Dakota for patients with a doctor’s authorization, is in a tight race going down to the wire on November 2.
Candi and Bill Teichman, owners of Everybody’s Café in Wateford Township, Mich., have lost their children, their bank accounts, and their dispensary — all because police officers made fake patient ID cards and bought medical marijuana from them.
How’s this for a waste of taxpayers’ money and law enforcement’s time? Oakland County Sheriff’s deputies used phony Michigan patient cards they created on a county computer to trick state-approved medical marijuana providers into selling cannabis to the cops.
Days after cops bought cannabis with the fake IDs, county narcotics agents raided two medical marijuana dispensaries on August 25, in Ferndale and Waterford, Mich., reports Bill Laitner at The Detroit Free Press.
“These officers were denied entrance on several occasions because of improper paperwork, but when they appeared with these cards, I had no way to check,” said Brian Vaughan, former doorman at the now-closed Everybody’s Café dispensary in Waterford. Vaughan is charged with multiple marijuana violations.
“You’ve got law enforcement spending time and money to entrap users of medical marijuana,” Southfield attorney Michael Komorn said on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the cops are claiming that the phony patient ID cards weren’t entrapment, but were a legitimate way to get “evidence.”
“Regardless of whether the cards were real or not, the pure and simple fact is, dispensaries are not legal in Michigan,” claimed Oakland County Undersheriff Mike McCabe.
With hundreds of cannabis supporters in attendance, the Tacoma City Council on Tuesday night agreed to a compromise plan that would allow established medical marijuana dispensaries to continue selling to patients until the Washington Legislature spells out more clearly how patients can legally access the herb.
“The Tacoma City Council is not opposed to safe and legal access to medical marijuana for patients with legitimate need,” Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland said, reports Lewis Kamb of the Tacoma News Tribune.
A 52-year-old Texas man will use medical necessity as a defense after police found one marijuana plant and 1.5 ounces of cannabis at his home on September 30, according to his attorney. The man smokes marijuana to alleviate his suffering from diabetic neuropathy with severe symptoms including chronic pain and insomnia.
The detectives told the man they had received a tip that he was growing marijuana on the premises. After finding the growing plant and the dried marijuana, officers arrested the man for marijuana possession. Whether the case will be prosecuted as a misdemeanor or a felony will be decided depending on the dried weight of the cannabis seized.
The man, who lives in Weatherford, Texas, uses marijuana with the full knowledge and support of his physicians, who claimed they could not provide him with the synthetic substitute, Marinol, because it was heavily regulated and reserved for cancer and HIV patients.
Republican state Senator David Brinkley wants to renew efforts to legalize medical marijuana in Maryland. Brinkley said if he is reelected, he will introduce a bill that would not only protect medical marijuana patients from arrest, but would also address the issue of providing authorized patients with safe access to cannabis, rather than forcing them to obtain it on the black market.
Defendants charged with use or possession of marijuana can argue medical need as a mitigating factor in their sentencing under Maryland’s current “affirmative defense” law. But judges can still fine patients $100, even if medical necessity is proven.
N.J. State Sen. Nicholas Scutari: Gov. Christie’s proposed rules “unreasonably limit the supply of, and reduce qualifying patients’ access to medical marijuana”
A sponsor of New Jersey’s medical marijuana law on Monday introduced a resolution that would repeal what he called “restrictive” proposed rules for the program if Gov. Chris Christie does not make them at least resemble the original legislation.
“Many of the rules are not only burdensome and unnecessary, but they propose amendments to the new law, not merely regulations to enact it,” wrote Ken Wolski, a registered nurse who is also executive director of the Coalition for Medical Marijuana-New Jersey (CMMNJ), on Tuesday.
Angry words were exchanged between the offices of Gov. Christie and of Sen. Nicholas Scutari (D-Union), the medical marijuana law’s sponsor, reports Susan K. Livio at NJ.com.
Behind the controversy is the Christie administration’s decision to license just two growers statewide, to supply just four dispensaries from which cannabis could be sold. Dispensary owners could apply and pay an additional fee to open one satellite location each, according to the proposed rules.
Bernie Ellis: “If I were a rapist, the government couldn’t take my farm.”
A public health scientist is losing his retirement, along with part of his farm, in the fight to legalize medical marijuana in Tennessee.
Bernie Ellis grew marijuana on his farm to help dull the pain from fibromyalgia and a degenerative disorder in his hip and spine. When neighbors told him about terminally ill patients in the area, he gave them free cannabis as well.
That’s until helicopters came flying over, and the federal government raided Ellis’s farm, seized 25 acres of it, and sent him to a halfway house for 18 months.
“If I were a rapist, the government couldn’t take my farm,” Ellis said in 2007. “I grew cannabis and provided it free of charge to sick people, so I run the risk of losing everything I own.
“That just doesn’t compute to me,” Ellis said.
“I don’t want to appear to be obstinate, but there’s a point at which you say enough is enough,” Ellis said. “They can’t have my home.”
Does he regret growing marijuana? “There are a number of things I regret in this experience,” he said. “I regret being naive to the process. But I do not regret using marijuana, and I do not regret helping people.”
Barbara Agro, office manager at the Clinical Relief medical marijuana dispensary in Ferndale, Michigan, talks on her cell phone outside the clinic on August 26, the day after police raided the facility and confiscated patient records, TVs, computers, a small amount of marijuana and even the business’s telephones.
A judge has ordered Oakland County prosecutors to provide copies of seized patient files and ID cards, and to return computer hard drives and other items to two defendants charged in the county’s largest-ever raid on medical marijuana dispensaries.
Attorneys representing the owners of Ferndale medical marijuana dispensary Clinical Relief, Nicholas Agro, 38, of Lake Orion, Mich., and Ryan Richmond, 33, of Royal Oak, Mich., argued Thursday for the return of the items, which were taken by narcotics officers with the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office.
Officers raided the business, along with another dispensary in Waterford Township and multiple homes on August 25, reports Jennifer Chambers of The Detroit News.
When will Pennsylvania legislators finally get it? Their constituents support medical marijuana! Supporters of the the movement to legalize cannabis for medicinal purposes rallied on the steps of the state Capitol in Harrisburg in July 2009.
“It may be as addictive as chocolate.”
~ Rep. Mark Cohen (D-Philadelphia)
A bill has been introduced in the Pennsylvania Legislature to legalize the medicinal use of marijuana — and a new survey shows that about 80 percent of state voters support the move.
“Even though there is broad popular support for legalizing medical marijuana in the state, prospects for its legalization seem slim,” wrote pollsters G. Terry Madonna and Berwood Yost, both Franklin & Marshall College staffers.
The poll also showed that only 33 percent of the state’s voters favor the outright legalization of marijuana, reports David Warner of the Mechanicsburg Patriot-News.
