Customers of Arizona’s largest utility shouldn’t be forced to help contribute to an anti-marijuana-legalization campaign, consumer advocates say.
As Phoenix New Times reported on Monday, Pinnacle West Capital Corporation, the holding company for Arizona Public Service, made a recent donation of $10,000 to Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy, a group led by Yavapai County Attorney Sheila Polk that’s fighting to keep cannabis a felony in Arizona. Click here for story.
Patrick Moran, CEO of Texas Cannabis, plans to turn the former cotton gin in Gunter into a facility to produce cannabis oil.
The old cotton gin on the west edge of Gunter seems an odd place to launch an economic boom. A breeze blows through broken windows and holes in its rusting, corrugated metal walls. Inside, a half-dozen or so squat machines that once separated cotton from seed sit corroding in a jumble of elevated metal walkways and busted machinery. Fistfuls of cotton, blackened by age and dirt, still rest in their bins.
High above, a buzzard ruffles its wings from its perch on the edge of a gaping hole in the roof. Visitors have driven it from the eggs it’s brooding in a tin flue near the gin’s floor, so Patrick Thomas Moran urges his guests to step outside.
“We don’t want to disturb the mamma buzzard,” he says.
A buzzard setting up a nursery on a factory’s floor is generally a good sign that the time has come to call in the wrecking crew and start looking for greener pastures, but Moran has plans to relight this old gin with a new cash crop, even if he has to ruffle a few feathers. The CEO and managing partner of AcquiFlow LLC, which bills itself as “the first open, transparent and legal Texas-based cannabis company,” wants to strip out the old machinery and build a cannabis oil production facility inside the gin’s old shell.
For more on the state of marijuana in Texas, visit the Dallas Observer‘s full story.
CannaKids founder Tracy Ryan with her daughter Sophie.
When Tracy Ryan’s daughter Sophie was just 8 months old, doctors found a tumor in the newborn’s brain.
Doctors told Ryan that the slow-growing optic pathway glioma tumor near her daughter’s left eye would never go away. And if the tumor continued to grow, Sophie could lose vision in that eye.
Faced with the prospect of their daughter’s blindness, Ryan joined an increasing number of parents who are turning to cannabis to treat their children for illnesses ranging from cancer to epilepsy.
After nearly two years of chemotherapy combined with highly concentrated cannabis oil, made mostly of non-psychoactive, can’t-get-you-high cannabidiol (CBD) with traces of psychoactive tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) — Sophie’s tumor has shrunk.
Did you miss us? We certainly missed you.
After an 18-month hiatus, Toke of the Town is back with a new, responsive redesign and new marijuana stories (coming soon). As marijuana continues to grow as an important national (and international) political and cultural issue, Toke of the Town has returned to bring you pot news and views from across the country, via Voice Media Group’s alt-weekly network. If you don’t already, we hope that you’ll follow us on Facebook and Twitter to stay in touch with the latest developments in the world of marijuana.
| Brandon Marshall |
Update, June 14, 2016: We’re back, and we hope we’ll see you again.
Since 2009, Toke of the Town has brought you the biggest marijuana news and loudest pot views from across the country — and around the world. Along the way, we’ve covered the huge progress many states have made towards legalization and wondered why others are so far behind. The country still has a long way to go, but things are looking up — and we have our fingers crossed that 2015 will be another big year for legalization.
But Toke won’t be around to see it — at least, not in its present form. This is Toke of the Town’s final day of publication.
Don’t worry: We’re not quitting the movement. We’re just returning the focus of our marijuana coverage to our local Voice Media Group papers. You can still read William Breathes’ weekly pot reviews and Ask a Stoner column at Westword.com, where they started, and you can continue to follow him on Twitter and Facebook. And you can keep following Toke on Facebook and Twitter, too, for the latest marijuana news from all our papers.
Many thanks for reading and supporting us for the past five years! We couldn’t have covered the marijuana community without such a strong one reading us.
And all our archives will remain online, because we wouldn’t want you to lose access to our serious reporting on issues of medicine and our lighthearted coverage of stoner movies.
Light one up for us, won’t you?
| Azel Praer/Flickr |
| The seeds of change are sprouting in Kansas |
The way that the laws are currently written, you really do not want to get busted with weed in Wichita, Kansas…or any part of Kansas for that matter.
A first-time offense for simple pot possession in Kansas will earn you a misdemeanor charge on your record, up to a $2,500 fine, and even a year in jail. Get popped a second time and you could be looking at a felony.
But if the pro-cannabis advocacy group Kansas for Change has their way, that may be about to change for the better.
As far as late Christmas presents go, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon’s decision to pardon nine non-violent offenders is as big and unprecedented as they come.
But for a governor who before Monday pardoned only one person since taking office in 2009, the list of formerly-naughty Missourians is arguably more notable for the name it doesn’t include.
While the eight men and one women Nixon pardoned yesterday already served their sentences for felony and misdemeanor crimes ranging from minor theft, writing bad checks and marijuana possession, there’s no mention of Jeff Mizanskey, the only inmate in the state currently serving a life sentence without parole for three nonviolent pot charges.
Our buds over at the Riverfront Times have the full story.
| Ray Stern |
| Finding banking services for his business, Encanto Green Cross, has been difficult for Nick Kriaris. |
On a recent Friday afternoon, Nick Kriaris, owner of Encanto Green Cross medical-marijuana dispensary in Phoenix, and his brother, Chris, tried to open an account at Bank of America for their nonprofit business with $420 in cash.
The attempt at the bank branch at 3030 North Central Avenue was, to some extent, a stunt, from the pot-culture-inspired amount of the initial deposit to the dispensary employee videotaping his bosses. They knew the odds of success were minimal, if not zero.
But if the bank agreed to take the medical-marijuana retail shop’s money, it would have been something of a minor historical moment. Although dozens of dispensaries are authorized to operate in the state, no bank will deal openly with them — yet.
Ray Stern has all of the details over at the Phoenix New Times
In 1999, the voters in Maine approved the state’s first medical marijuana bill with a lopsided 61% approval. A decade later, the law was improved upon to allow for storefront dispensaries and to broaden the list of acceptable medical conditions that marijuana could be recommended for. In 2011, the law was built upon once again, protecting patients’ rights by making many registration processes optional.
In November of 2013 Portland, Oregon became the first city on the east coast to legalize recreational marijuana use for adults over the age of 21. In November of this year, the city of South Portland became the second.
Statewide recreational marijuana legalization -similar to what we’ve seen in Colorado, Washington, Alaska, and D.C. – appears to be inevitable in Maine.
| You have the right to remain silent…seriously |
With cannabis laws in flux not only from state to state these days, but even from city to city and county to county, it is more important than ever to know your rights should you ever get pulled over by the police.
More often than not, the best advice is to keep your record – and your car – clean as can be, and if you do get rolled, shut the hell up and give as little information as possible.
Here we present two recent examples of exactly how not to deal with the cops when it comes to cars and cannabis.