The thing with setting disfiguring booby traps around your outdoor illegal grow operations is that you’ve got to remember you’ve set them. Case and point: the nearly-headless Daniel Ricketts.
Police say Rickets was drunkenly zipping around a field in upstate New York on Saturday when he ran afoul of a length of piano wire he had strung up around the perimeter of a patch police say he was growing.
| TokeoftheTown.com |
In an unprecedented move that began late last week, and continued over the holiday Labor Day weekend, the Obama Administration, and more specifically, the U.S. Department of Justice ended their silence on the issue of medical marijuana on the state level, announcing that they would not use the courts to challenge state laws recently passed in Colorado and Washington, as long as those states continue to adhere to a strict set of guidelines.
Though many critics, professional or genuine, are carelessly comparing this latest announcement to the 2009 Ogden Memo, those on the front lines of the effort to legalize cannabis know that last Thursday’s announcement, and some follow-up and clarifying releases over the weekend, mark a positive and necessary step towards that goal.
Medical marijuana activist John Tracey was arrested (see video, below) in the parking lot of Cruzan Amphitheatre before Wednesday night’s Black Sabbath concert in West Palm Beach. He was attempting to gather signatures for a petition to allow a referendum on medical marijuana on Florida’s 2014 ballot.
According to a police booking blotter, Tracey was charged with “trespassing – fail to leave property upon order by owner.” But Cruzan is owned by the South Florida Fair and, by state law, is considered public property. Tracey says Live Nation Entertainment, which operates the venue (and also owns Ticketmaster), complained about his being there. Broward-Palm Beach New Times has the full story.
| flikr.com/sarahakabmg |
In news-you-already-knew news today, a study out of the University of Washington found that marijuana is the most popular drug in the world (alcohol was not included).
The study of illicit drugs also found that prescription painkillers used illegally are the most deadly drugs in the world with more than 78,000 deaths worldwide in 2010. For those keeping count that is 78,000 more people than cannabis killed that year or any year in recorded history.
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Attention: If you had a sizable clandestine grow in Santa Barbara County, California near Santa Rosa Road between Lompoc and Buellton, don’t bother showing up to harvest it in a few weeks.
According to the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office, a rancher reported that someone had trespassed onto his grazing land for his livestock, diverted a water source and was growing somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000 plants. The landowner was not a suspect.
| ‘Merica. |
The federal government will not sue Colorado and Washington to stop laws allowing for the possession sale and (in the case of Colorado) cultivation of cannabis from being enacted, nor will they seek out dispensaries for prosecution so long as the dispensaries are following state laws.
Basically: if dispensaries play by state rules, they most likely won’t be targets of federal prosecution. (Read the entire memo below)
The Obama administration will not sue to stop Colorado’s Amendment 64, which allows adults 21 and over to use and possess small amounts of marijuana, and establishes a foundation for retail sales of recreational pot. This long-awaited news was confirmed by the office of Colorado-based U.S. Attorney John Walsh shortly after a phone call involving U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper and Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington, which passed a marijuana measure similar to A64 this past November.
Denver Westword has the local angle, and we’ll have plenty more tomorrow morning right here at Toke of the Town.
Marijuana seems to be on the collective Canadian mind lately as yet another high-ranking official announced that they are not only for marijuana legalization but that they’ve smoked it themselves. These admissions have caused quite the stir.
Shocking, I know. But keep in mind this is quaint, polite, rule-abiding Canada we’re talking about here.
| From the pits of hell comes… |
As the OC Weekly has previously reported, the DEA is attempting to seize a $1.5 million Anaheim business complex from a computer engineer and his dentist wife over a $37 pot sale by a former marijuana dispensary tenant. The engineer, Tony Jalali, is being represented by attorney Matthew Pappas, as well as a team from the libertarian law firm Institute For Justice. The case is rapidly turning into a major showdown over the Obama administration’s heavy-handed crackdown on California’s medical marijuana industry.
Check out the Weekly for the local angle from reporter Nick Schou.
David Wayne Jordan allegedly wrapped marijuana around an arrow and shot it up to a second-story rec yard of the Whatcom County Jail in Bellingham, Washington earlier this week.
As far as smuggling marijuana into a jail goes, this method may take the badassery award. The person executing the maneuver, however, wasn’t quite up to the task. Which, obviously, is why we know his name.