We really feel for our fellow writers at our sister paper in Houston, The Houston Press. Not only can they not legally go home and smoke marijuana, they don’t get the pleasure of covering the medical marijuana industry and culture from a first-hand perspective (except for the occasional strain review of lab-make smokable drugs often called “synthetic cannabis).
But they can dream, can’t they? Case and point: Angelica Leicht’s Best Pot-Related Jobs in the Cannabis Industry. Read on for more.
In an epically misguided Sunday sermon for the op-ed page of the Christian Post, Professor Michael Brown puts his dynamic range of ignorance about cannabis on display, summed up simply in the title of his piece, “What are they smoking in Colorado?”
More specifically, Brown targets Colorado Governor, John Hickenlooper, by asking…again…”What in the world is he smoking?” Completely ignoring the will of the voters in Colorado, who overwhelmingly supported Amendment 64, Brown goes right after the governor, attacking him for taking the estimated multimillion dollar revenues that legal weed is expected to deliver, and putting it back into the community.
| Miami New Times. |
Is Florida ready for medical marijuana? Well, yeah actually. The latest polls show that seven in ten statewide support legalized weed for various ailments, and supporters have gathered enough signatures to put the question on November’s ballot. One way or another, loosened mary jane restrictions seem coming to the Sunshine State.
But everyone knows Miami rocks to its own beat on just about every statewide issue. How’s the average Magic City resident feel about medical marijuana? Miami New Times‘ Kathryn Sotolongo took a camera to Bayfront Park to find out.
In a stunningly misguided article written by Dennis Thompson for HealthDay.com, and unfortunately republished on WebMD.com, he asserts that society is bound to pay a steep price for allowing various forms of marijuana legalization to be passed into law.
In his hit piece on pot, Thompson warns of the “dark side” of legal weed, claiming that the growing trend we are seeing in marijuana acceptance is directly creating a major uptick in fatal car accidents, and that soon the dangers of drunk driving will pale in comparison to the dangers of driving with weed in your system.
After New Jersey Governor Chris Christie caught his breath from the walk to the podium to give his 2nd-term inauguration speech on Tuesday, he made a lot of headlines by vowing to “end the failed war on drugs”.
His plan, an inevitable failure in its own right like so many others’ before him, is to treat “addiction” with treatment, rather than incarceration. Of course, he makes no mention of those already unfairly incarcerated in New Jersey on trumped up drug charges, and how to…ahem… balance those scales. As Jacob Sullum writes for Forbes, why should otherwise law-abiding citizens be forced into a situation where they may be forced to decide between rehabilitation and incarceration?
Despite the state being home to the great Willie Nelson, Texas and marijuana don’t go hand-in-hand. You’re looking at a misdemeanor for carrying anything under two ounces with up to 180 days in jail and $2,000 in fines. Cultivation is based on weight, and cops love to weigh everything attached to a plant – easily putting you at the four-ounce felony threshold and getting you anywhere from 180 days to five years mandatory prison time.
Yee-haw, indeed. Texas, your laws are absurd.
Angelica Leicht with the Houston Press knows this, and lists off ten reasons why the Lone Star State needs to legalize the herb.
| Henry Rollins. |
Henry Rollins doesn’t smoke pot, but he doesn’t give a damn if you decide it’s right for you. That’s the way the entire country should approach pot legalization, according to the spoken-word poet and founder of hardcore punk band Black Flag:
“I think smoking pot is a monumental waste of time, so I don’t do it. However, I am not at all interested in keeping you from it. If America can regulate, tax and sell alcohol and tobacco – two wildly addictive and potentially harmful substances – you would think legalizing marijuana shouldn’t be an insurmountable hurdle.”
Read more in Rollins’ weekly column for the LA Weekly’s music blog, “West Coast Sound”.
Along with Colorado’s new marijuana laws legalizing limited amounts of herb for adults 21 and up came liberalization in the conversation around the state. People aren’t afraid to talk about marijuana in public anymore, largely because it’s not illegal to do so. It’s not uncommon now to hear people talking about strains or growing in any number of settings, including at ski areas.
Those pot conversations apparently bothered Christine Arakelian of New York on her recent trip to Vail so much that she wrote to Vail Resorts and cc’d the Vail Daily newspaper with her petty complaints about things that are now completely legal in Colorado.
As long as the federal government continues to make it impossible for California’s biggest cash crop to find legal customers, the harvest will inevitably end up on the black market. Because it remains illegal for Golden State growers to export their plants to other states where it is legal to smoke cannabis for medical or recreational purposes under state law, a lot of folks unload their plants the old fashioned way–illegally.
The latest example: a coast-to-coast marijuana smuggling operation based out of San Diego that allegedly used the U.S. Postal Service to do the heavy lifting. Nick Schou at the OC Weekly has more.
| Flickr.com/Simon Strandgaard.td> |
It was a Tuesday morning in San Diego, just over a month ago on November 7th, when SDPD received reports of broken glass at a local business, with a possible burglary having had occurred overnight. Police investigators arriving on the scene quickly determined that the business in question was a medical marijuana dispensary, and the focus of their investigation quickly shifted from aiding possible burglary victims, to persecuting law abiding citizens and shuttering a legitimate business.
You see, San Diego was home to nearly 300 storefront medical marijuana dispensaries as recently as two years ago, but an intense crackdown by joint task forces, combining the might of local and federal authorities, led to nearly every single brick and mortar storefront being closed by the end of 2011.