Update 4/18/14: Sorry Rhode Island, no pot legalization – no matter how limited – for you this year. After meeting yesterday, the state House Judiciary Committee decided to table seven marijuana-related bills until next year.
Lawmakers were apparently not swayed by public testimony earlier this week in favor of legislation that would have legalized sales of up to an ounce of cannabis at a time to adults 21 and up as well as the personal cultivation of one plant at a time.
| Denver police after last year’s shooting in Civic Center Park. |
There’ll be a lot of pressure on Denver police officers working this weekend’s annual 4/20 event at Civic Center Park. Organizers have been asked to discourage public smoking even though lighting up at 4:20 p.m. on April 20 is arguably the gathering’s most sacred tradition — and security concerns are higher than ever given a still-unsolved shooting last year that resulted in one day’s worth of festivities being canceled.
Federal officials have now brought charges against ten additional people in Michigan for allegedly using the state medical marijuana program as a front for illegal sales and cultivation, bringing the total number of people “busted” in the sting to 37.
According to the feds, the group called themselves the Medical Marijuana Team and was growing in multiple small towns in the western part of the state as caregivers for medical marijuana patients.
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.