Apparently the Florida legislature didn’t get the memo that CBD doesn’t get you high. Currently, lawmakers are working on a CBD-only bill that would give children suffering from rare seizure disorders to access to the extract. It should be a no-brainer. But because CBD is pot-related, lawmakers are still freaked out about it being abused.
| Greg Skidmore/Flickr. |
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie doesn’t even want to try and have an honest discussion about cannabis anymore, even if his constituents demand it. Christie was on local New Jersey radio yesterday for his monthly “Ask the Governor” program when a caller asked Christie about the tax revenue and other benefits (like job creation) that comes with decriminalized cannabis and recreational sales.
A new report published by Minnesota 2020 reiterates what cannabis activists have been saying for years, in some cases decades — that marijuana reform is not merely a matter of medical necessity but of civil rights.
Relying on FBI statistics from 2011, the progressive think tank found that black Minnesotans are 6.4 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites. That figure is twice the national average and mostly represents men under the age of 25.
The Colorado company that invented the formula for MED-a-Mints, a popular cannabis-infused mint candy, has announced that it will sue Denver-based edibles manufacturer Dixie Elixirs for trademark violations. Inventor Gary Gabrel claims that Dixie Elixirs violated the contract between them when it changed the MED-a-Mints packaging, making its own name more prominent and removing the words “cannabis infused.”
The new label is dangerous, he says: “The label says THC infused, 100 milligrams. So you’ve got to have at least some knowledge to recognize that as a cannabis product. A twelve-year-old or a ten-year-old might not know.”
The ringleader of a huge, Southern California medical marijuana distribution network has won a whopping 94-month reduction in his punishment, according to federal court records reviewed by our friends at the OC Weekly.
In July 2013, U.S. District Court Judge James V. Selna sentenced John Melvin Walker to a term of 262 months in prison, but this week amended the punishment to a term of 168 months for the conspiracy and efforts to evade federal tax obligations.
Pueblo, Police Chief Luis must have a lot of time on his hands. This week he publically announced his fears that if his officers ever have to respond to a pot club (they haven’t ever) that they may get a contact high.
“I am concerned that if there are some kind of disturbance inside one of those clubs and our officers get there, they will be entering a structure that will be nothing but laden with [marijuana]smoke,” Pueblo Police Chief Luis Velez told Denver’s KUSA. His biggest worry: that they’ll be too high to drive afterward. Seriously.
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.
| 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.
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.
A husband allegedly shot is wife in the head in Denver Monday night. And while the crime is horrible, it is primarily making news because police and Denver media are latching on to the rumor that the man may have been high on marijuana at the time.
But what police aren’t making a big deal is their absurdly slow reaction time – 13 minutes – nor do they have any concrete evidence of marijuana consumption or that it contributed to the incident (hint: it didn’t).