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.

Yes, the Respect State Marijuana Laws Act is a good thing. It would force the feds to actually have to respect state marijuana laws on paper, as opposed to the less binding, more vague verbal assurance being paid to the marijuana community right now by the Department of Justice. It’s such a good thing that more than 20 lawmakers and several groups have signed on to endorse it, including the Marijuana Policy Project and NAACP.
That last one is a little bit ironic, given that the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican from California, has been labeled as a racist by several people, including our sister paper, the L.A. Weekly. Is that the case? Does it matter? Click over to the Weekly to find out for yourself and take part in the discussion.

In southwestern Arizona, along a lonely stretch of Highway 86, lay the Tohono O’odham Indian Nation and the tiny village of Pisinemo. The village itself, home to only about 250 full-time desert-dwelling residents, is actually known by the locals as Pisin Mo’o (or Buffalo Head), but somebody at the Arizona Motor Vehicle Division blew it when they made the road signs, forever giving it the bastardized version now in use.
It was on the western edge of Pisinemo, on a cold fall night four years ago, on November 12, 2008, where U.S. Border Patrol Agents Dario Castillo (25) and Ramon Zuniga (31) finally caught up to the prey that they had been hunting throughout the night, a group of four suspected drug smugglers. The four men were suspected to be in the country illegally, part of a larger group of smugglers that had scattered earlier in the night, leaving behind an alleged $600,000 worth of weed.

Project SAM (Smarter Approaches to Marijuana) likes to tout themselves has having some progressive ideas on marijuana legalization and criminalization. They say their goal is to “inform public policy with the science of today’s marijuana,” for example. But they’re really an anti-marijuana group trying a new approach to the same old Reefer Madness.
And now the Marijuana Policy Project is calling SAM out on it, with MPP Maine director David Boyer urging SAM to join forces with MPP to promote “an honest, evidence-based public dialogue about marijuana” in Maine, where recreational cannabis legalization efforts are starting to take shape.

In what is arguably one of the most vile stories out of the medical marijuana world we’ve ever seen, four people have been charged with kidnapping, torturing and castrating the owner of a medical marijuana dispensary in California.
Their reasoning? They thought the unnamed owner has buried a large amount of cash in the desert and they wanted the location.

Alan David Nixon willingly allowed his name to be used to hide the true owner of a Southern California medical marijuana operation, but his military service, age and extensive medical woes helped a federal judge find mercy at this week’s sentencing hearing.
Assistant United States Attorney Christine S. Bautista recommended five months in prison followed by five months of home detention for Nixon, who admits he aided John Melvin Walker’s massive, flagrant marijuana distribution scheme busted by Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officers. OC Weekly has the full story.