| Ramsey Orta in a Time interview. |
According to several news sites out of New York, Ramsey Orta, the guy who filmed New York City police officers killing Eric Garner in a chokehold, was arrested Saturday. Cops say he was profiled after going into a Long Island hotel that cops say is a known drug hangout and arrested afterward for gun charges. A 17-year-old female he was with was also charged with marijuana possession.
Seattle police officer Randy Jokela apparently missed the memo that marijuana possession and use is now legal in Washington state, largely citizens people were sick of people like Jokela abusing his power.
This week, Seattle police Chief Kathleen O’Toole announced that Jokela was responsible for 80 percent of the 82 marijuana-related citations issued between January 1 and June 30 of this year – with 37 percent of those tickets going to blacks and about half going to the city’s homeless. To say he was still abusing his power is an understatement.
Did you or somebody you know accidentally leave more than 600 pounds of marijuana on the side of a road in Missouri? Because if you did, we have some bad news: Cops got it.
The St. Joseph News-Press reports that a prison work crew cleaning up the side of a road near St. Joseph in northeast Missouri stumbled upon a substantial sativa stash.
“In all, there were 678 one-pound marijuana packages and three large sacks of loose weed,” Mike Donaldson, commander of the Buchanan County Drug Strike Force, tells the News-Press. Read more at the Riverfront Times.
| Facebook.com/Compassionate-Care-NY |
| Anna Conte passed away July 17. |
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo sent a letter to acting Commissioner of Health Howard Zucker on Tuesday asking Zucker to consider expediting the medical marijuana legalization specifically for epileptic children in New York.
Cuomo’s letter comes after two children, nine-year-old Anna Conte and three-year-old Olivia Marie Newton, died this month. In June, state legislators passed the Compassionate Care Act, legalizing marijuana for patients with conditions including epilepsy, but legalization will not be implemented in the state for at least 18 months.
State health officials are calling for a public rule-making committee this fall to iron out details involving the medical marijuana patient registry, including limiting the ability of caregivers to serve more than five patients. In a letter to the Colorado Board of Health earlier this month, Ron Hyman, director of the Medical Marijuana Registry, outlined areas that he says will require a rule-making hearing on September 16.
| Toke of the Town edit of image by Theredmonkey/Commons. |
It’s a dream of every radio station owner, but a dream that has probably never been realized until now.
“They’re actually thanking me for the ads,” says Elmo Donze, owner of classic-rock station KBDZ (93.1 FM) in Perryville. “This has never happened before.”
But it’s not the ads for car insurance or ambulance chasers that people are praising. Rather, people are grateful for the $10,000 worth of advertisements endorsing medical marijuana legislation that Donze donated to Show-Me Cannabis earlier this year. Such a move might be considered politically risky for the more corporate radio behemoths, but if Donze’s effort is any indication, listeners love it. More at the Riverfront Times.
| Matt Green/Flickr. |
The correctional officer-jail inmate relationship is often a fraught one, rife with resentment, misunderstandings and violence. But sometimes, just sometimes, the two groups can put aside their differences and work together. That’s the silver lining we can take from the news that two current Rikers COs, Steven Dominguez and Divine Rahming, have been charged with smuggling cocaine and oxycodone into the prison with the help of an inmate and his girlfriend. Another former Rikers guard, Deleon Gifth, who resigned earlier this year, was arrested Monday on charges that he was paid $500 to deliver what he thought was oxycodone to an inmate back in February.
The Village Voice has more on these three stooges.
| TRF_Mr_Hyde?FlickrCommons |
Plenty of people say and do really stupid things every day in this country, whether weed is part of the equation or not. It’s just collectively painful when one of “our people” screws up and makes all cannabis enthusiasts look bad, and for some reason those cases seem to come out of the state of Florida all too often.
Since recreational marijuana was legalized in Colorado, much has been made of children accidentally ingesting edible marijuana — but what about when people intentionally feed it to kids? Last week Davirak Ky pleaded guilty to distributing a controlled substance and child abuse for feeding two minors cannabis-infused cookies. In exchange, Ky received three years of probation, must undergo drug and alcohol treatment, and has to take a class on the effects of drugs on children — but he will avoid prison time if he stays out of trouble
| Alex E. Proimos/Flickr. |
The United States government has been getting the average citizen all liquored up and stoned for the past year, and then putting them behind the wheel in the name of high science.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse, the federal agency that earlier this year, predicted legalized marijuana would come with severe consequences, recently set out to determine the effects of alcohol and marijuana on those motorists who engage in white knuckle, red-eyed behavior along the great American landscape.