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The effort to legalize marijuana in Missouri is going full-steam ahead with everyone from activists and lawmakers to the state’s only prisoner serving life without parole for marijuana-only offenses trying to free the weed.

Kholood Eid
Mizanskey hopes a measure will pass that would free him from prison after more than 20 years behind bars.


Show Me Cannabis is currently polling two initiatives to see if there’s enough support to try to get on the 2014 ballot. State Representative Chris Kelly (D) introduced House Bill 1659 last week, which would legalize and regulate marijuana for people over the age of 21. And Jeff Mizanskey, the man who has been in prison for the past 20 years serving life without parole for marijuana, has submitted a proposal that would make him a free man.
Dubbed the “Mizanskey Measure” by Mizanskey’s attorney, Tony Nenninger, who filed the paperwork in Mizanskey’s name, the initiative would legalize marijuana for people over the age of 21 and release nonviolent offenders from prison.
Ray Downs at the Riverfront Times has all of the details

Visitors to the DEA Headquarters building, located in Washington D.C., may be surprised to learn that there is an actual museum onsite. Fun for the whole family, hard-earned taxpayer dollars were used to construct not only a fully detailed mock medical marijuana dispensary, but a quaint faux crack house right next door. Because, you know, Schedule I, etc.
DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart passes by the monuments to the War on Drug’s failures each day when she arrives to work, and the constant reminder has her lashing out with blame for everyone but her own department.

Ever since Colorado’s medical marijuana boom, law enforcers have been worried about people driving stoned

Toke of the Town

— and these concerns likely helped motivate strict open-container laws related to marijuana.
But now, following the launch of recreational pot sales, one of Colorado’s most powerful legislators has introduced a bill that would make it more difficult to prove an open-container violation — and a marijuana attorney sees the move as a positive one.
Michael Roberts at Westword has the rest of the story.

Toke of the Town

You may have heard the sarcastic saying that “95% of statistics are made up on the spot”. It is beginning to look like that may be the case for the decades-old study on addiction rates by the National Institute on Drug Abuse(NIDA) that both pro- and anti-cannabis supporters cite when they say that roughly 9% of marijuana users will become addicted.
The same NIDA study, released in a trade journal named Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology in 1994, actually places pot near the bottom of the list, if that 9-10% figure is to be believed. Marijuana advocates can point to the study and show that addiction rates, according to the study, are much higher in substances like heroin (23-25%), cocaine (15-20%), or even tobacco (20-30%) and alcohol (15%), but progressive thinkers on the topic feel that even 9% is way off on weed, and that the number is truly much lower.

Though he spared exactly zero words regarding cannabis, drug policy, or criminal justice reform in his 2014 State of the Union address, President Obama and his administration have been increasingly more vocal on these issues as he settles into his second, and final, term in office.
Both the President and Attorney General Eric Holder in the Department of Justice have earned few friends and little trust in the cannabis community, but both wings of the Executive Branch have vowed to address the undeniable fact that when it comes to victimless, drug-related crimes, our criminal justice system is broken. This past Thursday, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee took an historic step to begin the long overdue reform process.

Lawmakers in Mexico City fed up with the social and financial cost of marijuana criminalization in their city are floating the idea of decriminalizing up to 35 grams of cannabis.
Currently the possession of up to five grams of marijuana is legal in Mexico under 2009 minor drug possession reforms aimed at curbing police corruption and crime. It’s done nothing to end cartel violence, but so far hasn’t been a major issue.

Arkansas AG Dustin McDaniel

Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel ruled that a marijuana legalization measure that repeals state laws on marijuana possession, use and cultivation for being too vague.
This is the second time that McDaniel has rejected the ballot proposal. And no, he is not unclear as to what “repealing all laws related to cannabis” means, nor does he seem to have a personal grudge against pot. Basically, the proposal just doesn’t make sense.

As we’ve reported before, Arizona law allows for medical marijuana dispensaries around the state, but one county has been fighting a battle against legal pot shops (and private patients). Of course, it’s Maricopa County, so nobody is really that surprised.
Thankfully, the fight for a medical-marijuana dispensary on unincorporated Maricopa County land won a key victory on Wednesday with the Board of Supervisors lifting its ban on the shops. But the five Supervisors — one Democrat and four Republicans — and the county attorney continue to see the case as their ticket to overturning the state’s voter-approved medical-pot law. The good people at the Phoenix New Times have the details.

Larger image below.

Somebody in Miami has been watching too much Cheech and Chong. Miami-Dade cops say they have uncovered a huge pot growing operation in the city that was hidden in a camouflaged underground swimming pool.
Which, honestly, is one of the most bad-ass grow spots we’ve ever heard of. It seriously is straight out of Nice Dreams and probably wouldn’t have been discovered if it hadn’t have been for the blunders of the current caretakers of the property.

Florida voters won’t get a chance to approve a medical marijuana ballot measure until November, but already ganjapreneurs are moving in. Take Jeremy Bufford.

Jeremy Bufford, proprietor of Medical Marijuana Tampa. He is preparing to open a chain of 15 dispensaries with a quality control-lab, and next week will launch his school for medical marijuana workers and entrepreneurs in Tampa.
He has already hired five people and expects to hire 350 more, plus trigger a mini-real estate boom assuming the initiatve passes and he signs leases on the properties he’s already scoped out. His website is already advertising for 15 positions from “lead botanist” to “delivery driver” to “executive chef” to “professor of cannabis.”
The Broward-Palm Beach New Times spoke to Bufford at length about his preparations and predictions for the medical marijuana industry in Florida.

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