If you believe a report this week from the Washington Post, increasing the freedoms of marijuana users in the United States by legalizing limited amounts of pot is a huge reasons for the increasing heroin problem in this country.
Browsing: Say what?
After a recent post about marijuana profiling, the Denver Westword newspaper was contacted by plenty of folks who said law enforcers in other states conducted traffic stops and searches that appear to have been based solely on their Colorado license plates.
Among the most memorable tales comes from 65-year-old Sandra Lenga, who was told by an Alabama officer that she and her husband, 71, fit the profile of drug smugglers because they didn’t fit the profile of drug smugglers — which presumably means every other Colorado driver matches, too.
Accused international marijuana smuggler Nickolas Leivas came close to successfully landing at the harbor in Newport Beach last June, but he’s now in the custody of U.S. marshals and facing federal narcotics transportation charges because of his own stupidity.
Check out the rest at the OC Weekly.
| Tim Norris/LA Weekly. |
A proposal in the state legislature could mean DUIs for drivers who aren’t stoned but who toked a few days ago.It would also hit motorists with even a trace of such prescription drugs as Ambien, Vicodin and even phentermine, a diet drug, with DUI cases if they’re stopped by cops who think they’re impaired.
Medical marijuana supporters are aghast. And they might have good reason to be.
In a highly unusual move, the Denver coroner’s says that marijuana intoxication was the major contributing factor in Levy Thamba’s death by jumping from a hotel balcony last month because the college student had eaten a marijuana edible before the incident.
The coroner’s office says the facts of the case explain why the decision to include information about marijuana was made, though the facts leave a lot of unanswered questions.
A federal judge has green-lighted a lawsuit brought by Occupy protesters against law enforcement agencies that allegedly gave them pot as part of officers’ Drug Recognition Expert training.
The ruling means the case is headed toward a trial which could reveal where officers got the pot they allegedly doled out to protesters in exchange for their participation in the controversial program, which was the subject of a five part report from the Minneapolis City Pages.
| Jesse Holland |
| Screenshot from digital Weedmaps ad playing in Times Square, NYC |
As terribly predictable April Fool’s Day jokes rang out everywhere you looked yesterday, both online and off, somewhere around a million motorists and pedestrians passing through Times Square in midtown Manhattan probably wondered if they were getting fooled with when they saw the first ever pro-marijuana advertisement to ever be displayed in the historic mecca of marketing.
Your average U.S. truck driver in the makes something like $.30 or $.40 cents per mile. It’s enough to make a living but not much else.
Swap the 18-wheeler full of widgets for one full of Mexican marijuana, and the job becomes way, way more lucrative. Reliable data are tough to come by — this particular sub-occupation isn’t tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and it’s not a topic that comes up in online trucking forums — but anecdotally, a driver transporting weed can make $50,000 for a 430-mile trip, or roughly 300 times his law-abiding counterpart. That’s at least the amount that was offered last week to an undercover law enforcement officer in Laredo for the eight-hour drive to Dallas.
A Florida woman was abruptly visited by Florida Child Protective Services last week on an anonymous tip that she had been administering marijuana to her son, who suffers from a rare form of epilepsy.
Turns out, Renee Petro was not administering any marijuana to her 12-year-old son, Branden. Petro has, however, been an outspoken advocate for medical marijuana. The real crime, it would seem, was the intrusion of CPS agents arriving at her home to interrogate her 9-year-old daughter and the nurse who takes care of Branden.
The world’s smallest island nation is banning alcohol and legalizing cannabis. Members of the Nauruan Parliament approved a measure legalizing the sales, cultivation, use and possession of marijuana for adults on the island with a fifteen to four vote.
Nauru now joins Uruguay as one of the two nations to outright legalize the plant. Government offiials say the hope to boost travel to the extremely remote island, which has been almost entirely decimated by 50 years of phosphate strip mining.