According to state courts, Michigan medical marijuana laws technically don’t allow for edibles made from concentrated cannabis, which includes infused butter. It’s a stupid loophole that any medical marijuana advocate should be closed, but in the meantime cops and courts are still using it to hang patients and caregivers out to dry.
| Legalize it. |
Voters in Washington D.C. may have approved the legalization of limited amounts of pot for adults 21 and up earlier this month, but the U.S. Congress will have the final say. According to D.C. law, any new legislation Congress can either approve or reject new legislation in within 60 days.
The bill would also become law if no action is taken in that time – and that’s exactly what some lawmakers want to see happen.
Medical marijuana patients in Maryland will soon be able to finally actually access medical marijuana as the state approved medical cannabis rules Thursday.
But it has taken the state forever – and left patients languishing – to get this far. And patients will still have to wait until 2016 to access any buds.
| Cosmonaut. |
We told you earlier this year about Vermont teaming with the RAND Corporation to study what the legalization of limited amounts of cannabis for adult use would look like.
The study is now complete – it’s apparently as thick as a phone book — but won’t be released until January. But the public is getting hints as to what it contains.
| FlickrCommons |
In Florida, like pretty much every other state in the nation, black people get arrested on pot charges four times as often as whites. The state is consistently in the top five in the country for marijuana-related arrests, and getting busted with anything under 20 grams can get you a year in jail.
So when four plainclothes cops from the Miami Dade Police Department walked up on Tannie “T-Man” Burke and two of his buddies on the evening of August 27th and accused them of smoking weed, it’s really no surprise that Burke ended up in the back of a police cruiser.
What is pretty disturbing is what the cops did with him next.
| Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe. |
Getting arrested for marijuana can ruin your life in Arkansas. Unless you are the governor’s son, that is.
Outgoing Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe announced yesterday that he plans to pardon his son’s 2003 felony marijuana charges. Kyle Beebe was convicted of marijuana possession with intent to deliver. Mike Beebe has pardoned nearly 700 nonviolent offenders in during his tenure in office and says his son deserves the same second chance as all the other people he’s let off.
By allowing Colorado, Washington, Alaska, Oregon and Washington D.C. voters to legalize limited amounts of cannabis for personal use, the United States has violated United Nations conventions. That’s the gripe from the head of the U.N. director of the Office on Drugs and Crime, Yury Fedotov, who says he plans to take official actions.
“I don’t see how (the new laws) can be compatible with existing conventions,” Fedotov told reporters this week.
Inmates of a Lebanese prison camp might be having vegetables for dinner later this week, but the hash potatoes they hoped to get their hands are now in the possession of authorities. A report from Al Arabiya News indicates that a load of potatoes delivered to the Tyre prison in Lebanon was discovered to contain hashish. Hash browns anyone?
| The person pictured above is not the teen discussed in this article, though we assume he would be pleased with the verdict. |
A West Palm Beach teenager’s conviction for possessing a half gram of weed was reversed because the cop who arrested him says he stopped the kid for truancy — but the kid wasn’t actually skipping school at the time, making the initial stop unlawful and the evidence obtained inadmissible.
According to a ruling by the appeals court issued on November 5, the kid, a 15-year-old referred to only as “J.R.” in court documents because he’s a minor, had his rights violated when the unnamed police officer stopped and searched him. The cop claims he saw J.R. leave a designated school bus stop before the bus arrived and believed the kid was skipping class, so he decided to see what the youngster was up to.
| These High-ly Legal flipflops won’t be able to sell at DIA. |
There is a difference between cannabis and a t-shirt. But the distinction doesn’t really matter much at Denver International Airport, which recently published the details for a public hearing at which it plans to ban the sale of marijuana-themed souvenirs.