Is smoking pot a guaranteed religious freedom?
Excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek. Get your free and confidential subscription at WeedWeek.net.
The activist known as New Jersey Weedman will be able to argue in court that raids on his Trenton, N.J. “cannabis temple” violate his religious freedom.
Kayvan Khalatbari, a prominent activist and businessman in Denver, discussed the industry’s lack of diversity with Vice.
Sports Illustrated travels to Humboldt to ask about the industry’s impact on high school and college sports there. “There are probably no other public schools in the world that have ever offered clipping trays — trays for clipping marijuana on — as part of their auction for the PTA fair,” local journalist Kym Kemp says.
NFL running back turned cannabis investor Ricky Williams is the subject of a new Sports Illustrated documentary. He estimates that 70 percent of NFL players smoke marijuana.
Harper’s Bazaar visits the annual Spirit Weavers Gathering, a getaway for New Age-inclined women, that the article calls “the world’s chicest cult.” There, author Marisa Meltzer hears of a California pot farm that has fertilized the plant with menstrual blood for two generations.
A Canadian known as Marijuana Man makes $78,000 a year getting high on Youtube. He told an interviewer that he’s had internet “since 1984.”
There’s a crowdfunding campaign to bring “industrial hemp building and farming ambassador” Klara Marosszeky to California for a visit. She’s based in Australia.
Wired visits high-end edibles maker Défoncé Chocolatier. (Défoncé means ‘wasted’.)
“The Summer Fair,” a festival in Portland this month, will have free pot giveaways.
Netflix will make “Disjointed,” a weed sitcom starring Kathy Bates.
The Reductress recommends “ Healthy Snacks To Balance Out All The Junk You’ll Devour When You’re High Tonight.”
Talk of rescheduling marijuana has kept the cannabis industry and social media ablaze in 2016 — the year when theDrug Enforcement Administration will supposedly announce whether it will reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule II drug.
Recent rumors had a decision coming down as early as July 1 — but it looks as though we may have to wait a little longer.
Dear Stoner: My dad has expressed an interest in getting in on all this marijuana business; as a supportive daughter, I’m wondering if there is any opportunity for a veteran civil engineer in the industry.
Marisa
Dear Marisa: Your dad is probably overqualified for 99.5 percent of the jobs in the marijuana industry at the moment — but he could still find ways to use his skills, and there may be more opportunities in the future. Depending on what sort of civil engineer he was/is, he could help design the exteriors of grow houses. With all of the energy that hydroponic systems use in warehouses, I’m sure commercial growers and environmentalists alike would be interested in maximizing efficiency and minimizing energy use.
State-of-the-art grow warehouses will be more in demand as other states legalize pot. And if the federal government ever reclassifies it, big business will get involved — and will need people like your dad to make sure it’s not wasting money. If this whole legal-weed thing stays around long enough, businesses might even want to invest in artistic or sustainable cultivation operations, similar to what breweries and wineries do. How cool would it be to become the Frank Lloyd Wright of commercial pot cultivation?
Governor Ducey imagines Arizona students lounging around, stoned out of their minds on marijuana-laced lollipops.
A Scottsdale mom worries about pot stores on every corner.
The Arizona Public Health Association sees benefits as well as risks.
Arizona voters will find these opinions and more among the pro and con arguments for Arizona’s marijuana-legalization initiative that the state published last week. It’s an entertaining, albeit lopsided, glimpse into various views on the issue.
Legalization troubles some cops.
Excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek. Get your free and confidential subscription at WeedWeek.net.
LA Weekly asked cops why they oppose the Adult Use Marijuana Act (AUMA) California’s REC ballot initiative. “This is not a law-enforcement jihad or Reefer Madness,” Ken Corney, Ventura’s police chief and president of the California Police Chiefs Association said. “Proposition 64 isn’t about green, leafy marijuana that people smoke at home or pass across the aisle at a concert. It’s a for-profit play to bring the commercialization of marijuana to California.”
The piece continues: “[Corney] subscribes to the theory, so far unproven, that the proposition’s biggest financial backer, Holmby Hills tech billionaire Sean Parker, is in it to open the door to Big Marijuana profits for rich folks like himself.”
The group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition endorsed AUMA.
Three Santa Ana, Calif. cops who were caught on video last year snacking and mocking an amputee (“I was about to kick her in her fucking nub”) during a dispensary raid are no longer with the department. The Orange County District Attorney’s Office has filed petty theft charges against the three officers.
The three had argued that they believed police had already disabled all of the cameras and therefore “had a reasonable expectation that their conversations and actions were no longer being recorded.”
Art Way, Colorado state director for Drug Policy Alliance writes:
Those with vested interest in the devaluation of black life and the criminalization of black communities need the drug war for political cover. Those who want to end state sanctioned murders should consider joining forces to end the drug war.
This is a war waged to keep the black, brown and poor disenfranchised all while using their bodies as commodities for a prison industrial complex similar to the human commodification witnessed during slavery. ( H/T Word on the Tree )
A small but growing number of Canadian RCMP officers (the equivalent of FBI agents) are getting their MED reimbursed by the government.
In the Philippines, imprisoned drug lords have raised a $21 million reward for whoever kills the country’s new president Rodrigo Duterte. For his part, Duterte offers bounties of $1 million for drug lords killed and $600,000 for drug lords captured. According to his administration, 75 percent of the drugs in the country were manufactured inside its largest prison.
Industry hub Pueblo, Colo. has seen quite a few drug busts.
A Pennsylvania man has been charged with abuse of a corpse after blending weed with brain embalming fluid.
The question of use by women who are expecting heats up.
Excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek. Get your free and confidential subscription at WeedWeek.net.
A study suggests that cannabis use during pregnancy affects brain development. More Colorado newborns are testing positive for THC.
Thirty-three were hospitalized in Brooklyn, for suspected synthetic cannabis (“K2”) overdoses in the area around a subway stop.
The National Institutes of Health sent out a request for information about varieties of marijuana and their possible research value.
Check out this chart which illustrates last week’s remarkable finding that drug prescriptions are falling in MED states.
Project CBD published a CBD Users Manual. It’s one of the better ones I’ve seen.
Cannabis allergies are climbing.
The big move by Scotts Miracle-Grow into cannabis is dividing the industry.
Buzzfeed makes the case that Facebook and Google’s cannabis policy enforcement is a mess.
The U.K.’s GW Pharmaceuticals which has seen its stock soar on data from its cannabis-based drug Epidiolex, plans to raise $252 million on the Nasdaq exchange with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Merrill Lynch shepherding the deal.
Business attorney Hilary Bricken lays out six weed scams for investors and others to watch out for.
Compliance at Millennium Bank, a community bank in Des Plaines, Ill. is reportedly under scrutiny from state and federal authorities for working with marijuana companies.
Whitney Hobbs, a founder of Oregon distributor Highly Distributed, has sued CEO Christopher Mallott for sexual harassment that led to her departure from the company. She says he groped and smelled her. The company declined to comment but an employee refuted Hobbs’ claims.
Cannabis sales continue to climb in Colorado and support the state’s economy. See here for more.
A glimpse of the future? A group of Colorado’s largest craft breweries, led a break-up of the Colorado Brewers Guild to form a new group called Craft Beer Colorado. The split follows an overhaul of state alcohol laws.
Analyst Alan Brochstein writes that Canada’s pot policies make more sense than America’s.
Former NORML head Allen St. Pierre joined a publicly-traded consultancy called Freedom Leaf.
Democrats have adopted a platform that their members are trumpeting as the “most progressive platform in party history” — and when it comes to marijuana, Dems aren’t just blowing smoke. The Party of the Donkey has taken a position on marijuana that no major political party in the United States has taken before.
The preliminary draft of the platform, released on July 1 by theDemocratic National Convention Committee, asserts that states should be “laboratories of democracy on the issue of marijuana.”
It goes on to say states that wish to decriminalize marijuana should be allowed to do so.
Voters will have a clear choice in November.
The following is excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek. Get your free and confidential subscription at WeedWeek.net.
The Democratic Party Platform states “We encourage the federal government to remove marijuana from its list as a Class 1 Federal Controlled Substance, providing a reasoned pathway for future legalization.” The Washington Post describes the language as a nod to Bernie Sanders.
For its platform, the Republican Party rejected language supporting MED. It was proposed by Dale Jackson, a GOP delegate from Georgia with an autistic son. Another delegate said mass-shooters are, “young boys from divorced families, and they’re all smoking pot.”
Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) opposed reducing marijuana penalties in 2013.
The Cannabist released its 2016 election guide.
The industry-loathed “ potency amendment” will not be on the Colorado ballot. Frank McNulty (R), a former speaker of the Colorado House and supporter of the measure said the industry paid signature gathering firms to not gather signatures. “Without [signature gathering companies]we didn’t have the ability to get it to the ballot,”McNulty said.
An industry spokesman denied the accusation andThe Denver Post editorial page finds it “dubious.” “ Big marijuana trashes democratic process,” the Colorado Springs Gazette editorializes.
Campaign filings released on August 1 will clarify what happened. (An email query from WeedWeek was not returned.)
The Amendment would have banned products with higher than 16% THC, which account for 80% of cannabis products in Colorado. “Make no mistake,” the Post writes, “139 was an anti-pot measure designed to gut the industry. And it’ll be back.”
With industry support, California plans to regulate water use by growers.
Hezekiah Allen, executive director of the California Growers Association, explains his ambivalence about California’s upcoming Adult Use of Marijuana Act vote: “The initiative is decidedly more friendly to big business and will lead to rapid consolidation of the industry. This is an avoidable and undesirable outcome.” (See the initiative’s exact language here.)
Montanans will vote on a measure to expand the state’s MED program. L.A. County voters will decide on a marijuana business tax to benefit the homeless. The L.A. Times tells government officials, “Legal marijuana should not be seen as the solution to your revenue problems.”
A federal judge rejected the claim that current federal laws are “so arbitrary and irrational as to be unconstitutional.” The complaint was brought by Charles and Alexander Green, two Californian brothers accused of trafficking.
A proposed MED measure in North Dakota would be too expensive, the state health department said. The Pennsylvania legislature approved growing hemp for research.
Dear Stoner: I’ll be visiting Colorado this summer, and everyone is telling me I can only buy a quarter-ounce. Is that true? If so, is that for every shop, or can I buy more at another?
Dear Based: It used to be that way, but not any longer! In June, Governor John Hickenlooper signed a law bumping up the out-of-stater limit to an ounce, so you don’t have to limit yourself to a quarter-ounce at each shop you visit. Not that I’ve met many people who go through a quarter in a day — but they’re out there.
Yogi D and his dog want to teach you a thing or two about cannabis and yoga practice.
Yogi D has a solution to the nation’s “stress epidemic”: a weed-and-yoga retreat in Aspen from September 30 through October 2 called the 420 Yoga Retreat. A 25-year yoga veteran who was dubbed “America’s relaxation expert” by CNN, Yogi D has just recently come out of the dark as a cannabis user. All stereotypes of the “lazy stoner” went up in smoke as the influential and respected yoga instructor admitted to the world that he has been pairing yoga and cannabis for the past twenty years.
“For this retreat, we want to reach the state of our dogs. Be in the moment, love unconditionally, playful, no judgment, love and care,” says Yogi D. “The crazy thing about yoga is, I’ve been doing it for 25 years, and I feel like a total beginner. I get more than my students. I get a state of bliss from teaching. I am a yoga addict, that’s for sure.”