| Twitter/@Gabo_Rojas_N |
British F-1 racing team McLaren caused a small political rift over the weekend in Austin after Mexican flags altered to include cannabis leaves were flown over the team’s merch stalls at a race in Austin, Texas.
It probably wouldn’t have been so bad had members of the Mexican consulate’s office not seen it and tweeted it out to the interwebz. The consulate said they were highly offended called the mistake “unacceptable”.
A proposal for marijuana decriminalization of up to 14 grams of cannabis in Puerto Rico lost any chance of moving forward in 2013 after the lower house adjourned for the session.
While certainly a setback, the bill’s sponsor Senator Miguel Periera says he will reintroduce the legislation next year.The bill, which would have also lowered the penalties for possession of between 14 grams and an ounce to a fine of up to $500 and a maximum of six months in jail, heads to a yet-to-be-determined legislative committee in January.
New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy is an ineffective, wasteful, sinister program, and now there’s data to prove it. New York’s Attorney General released a report on Thursday describing in painful detail just how profound a policy failing NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly’s pet program is.
Get this: Only one in 50 stop-and-frisk arrests results in convictions for violent crimes. It’s the same figure for weapons possession convictions — that’s 0.1 percent of all stops made.
The Village Voice has the full story.
An Arizona judge yesterday ruled that medical marijuana patients in that state essentially do not have the right to grow their own medicine anymore.
Judge Katherine Cooper in Maricopa County (yes, that Maricopa County) made the decision yesterday in response to two men filed a challenge to rules in the 2010 medical marijuana laws saying that patients could only grow their own if they lived more than 25 miles from a dispensary.
For the first time, the Colorado Department of Education has broken out marijuana from student expulsion figures related to drugs — and during the most recent school year, pot was by far the leading reason for pupils being expelled.
This information is concerning to two experts with whom we communicated — but figures pertaining to suspensions and expulsions over the past decade show that while the overall trend is rising, the numbers have actually dropped the past couple of years. Denver Westword has the full story.
Fifteen years ago, voters in the state of Washington passed into law one of the nation’s first state-level medical marijuana programs. While certainly flawed, as most of those early laws were, the pioneering program has produced a robust network of doctors, growers, dispensaries, and patients in the Pacific Northwest.
Last year, in the 2012 elections, Washington joined Colorado as the first two states to legalize recreational marijuana use for adults, enjoying an easy 55-45 victory at the polls. More recently, a memo was sent out by Attorney General Eric Holder and the U.S. Department of Justice, essentially giving the two states the feds’ blessing to move ahead with their experiments with legal weed. It’s all good in Washington, then, right? Unfortunately, no.
| Kent Easter. |
Here’s one to wrap your noggin’ around this morning: An Orange County man says his bossy wife forced him into helping to frame a school volunteer the couple disliked by putting a bag of weed and some pills in the volunteer’s car.
Kent Wycliffe Easter was a wimpy husband whose wife was cheating on him, wore the pants in the family and ordered him to make a phone call to police about a woman driving erratically just before parking at an Irvine elementary school. Just to be clear, that’s 40-year-old Easter’s defense. Read the rest on Easter’s strange, pathetic little tale at the O.C. Weekly.
| Gordon Cellum. |
Texans beware: The U.S. Postal service knows exactly why your packages from California smell vaguely like skunks.
Gordon Bryan Cellum, 35, from the (far) South Texas town of Edcouch found that out the hard way this week after federal agents busted him mailing four pounds of ganja and 105 e-cigarettes loaded with THC to himself. If we were subjected to the awful dirt weed Cellum was no doubt accustomed to down there, we’d probably consider the same thing.
| Wikimedia commons/Robert W. Gordon. |
Former NFL wide receiver Sam Hurd was sentenced yesterday to 15 years in federal prison, accused by the feds of being the kingpin behind a start up cocaine smuggling operation. The sentence is much lower than most expected.
Federal sentencing guidelines stipulated somewhere between 27 and 34 years. But U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis says Hurd was charged more with talking about being a cocaine dealer than ever actually being one.
| Wikimedia commons/Shaun Merritt. |
| Rob Ford. |
The story of embattled Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and his binge drinking, blow-snorting, crack-smoking (not so distant) past took yet another strange turn today when his brother berated city council and compared smoking crack to smoking cannabis. Toronto City councilor Doug Ford says his brother Rob is being unfairly persecuted by hypocrites.