| Photo: Elaine Thompson |
| Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn: “We hope that if we can demonstrate, here in Seattle, a more sane approach to how we can work with this, that we can continue to move towards a transition on how we regulate and oversee the use of marijuana in an intelligent way rather than the irrational way that the prohibition era has given us.” |
Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn scheduled a Wednesday signing ceremony with City Attorney Pete Holmes, state Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles and other officials to sign a bill regulating medical marijuana like any other business.
Marijuana prohibition “denies an appropriate medication” to patients who need it, Mayor McGinn said at the ceremony. “Prohibition does not work.”
“We are taking the approach that what we need to do is honor the wishes of the City of Seattle and honor the wishes of the voters of Washington when it comes to medical marijuana, and appropriately regulate its use,” Mayor McGinn said.
| Photo: California Cannabis Coalition |
| Members of California Cannabis Coalition and Patient Care Association celebrate after repeal of San Diego’s highly restrictive medical marijuana ordinance |
On Monday, the San Diego City Council repealed an ordinance that would have forced almost all currently operating medical marijuana dispensaries in the city to close their doors.
If the ordinance had taken effect, only a couple of collectives would have been allowed to open after they came in compliance with with one of the most restrictive ordinances in the state and the most restrictive zoning and operational requirements imposed on any businesses in San Diego, according to the California Cannabis Coalition.
According to critics, the city council ignored its own task force in establishing the highly restrictive rules that would have severely limited the number of dispensaries. Medical marijuana activist Eugene Z. Davidovich, in fact, said the original ordinance effectively banned dispensaries from San Diego, reports Neiko Will at KPBS.
| Photo: The Daily Record |
| Benjamin Jealous, NAACP president and CEO: “These flawed drug policies that have been mostly enforced in African American communities must be stopped” |
The NAACP has just joined the list of prominent organizations and individuals calling for a major paradigm shift away from the failed and punitive “War On Drugs” and toward a health-based approach with a historic resolution passed Tuesday at the organization’s national conference in Los Angeles.
“Today the NAACP has taken a major step towards equity, justice, and effective law enforcement,” said Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP. “These flawed drug policies that have been mostly enforced in African American communities must be stopped and replaced with evidence-based practices that address the root causes of drug use and abuse in America.”
Neill Franklin, an African American former narcotics cop from Baltimore and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), had presented a talk on the need to end the War On Drugs at the NAACP conference on Monday.
“The NAACP has been on the forefront of the struggle for civil rights and social justice in this country for over a century,” Franklin said Tuesday about the passage of the resolution.
“The fact that these leaders are joining others like the National Black Police Association in calling for an end to the ‘war on drugs’ should be a wake up call to those politicians — including and especially President Obama — who still have not come to terms with the devastation that the ‘drug war’ causes in our society and especially in communities of color,” Franklin said.
| Photo: Michael Fagans/Bakersfield.com |
| Israel Cavazos, manager of Nature’s Medicinal Co-Op in Bakersfield, California, measures bags of marijuana for a patient one day after the dispensary was raided again in 2009. Cavazos has been sentenced to 42 months in federal prison, and his co-worker Jonathan Chapman on Monday got 37 months. |
A medical marijuana dispensary employee in Bakersfield, California has been sentenced to more than three years in federal prison for “conspiring to distribute and possess with intent to distribute marijuana.”
Jonathan Michael Chapman, 32, of Bakersfield, was sentenced to 37 months in prison, reports TurnTo23.com. The barbaric sentence was handed down Monday by U.S. District Judge Anthony W. Ishii and announced by U.S. Attorney Benjamin B. Wagner.
Chapman admitted that between 2005 and July 2007, he worked at Nature’s Medicinal Co-op, a Bakersfield business engaged in distributing marijuana. In 2007, federal agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) seized what they claimed was more than 85 kilograms (187 pounds) of marijuana from the dispensary.
| Photo: FOX 43 TV |
A marijuana component helps mitigate cocaine addiction in mice, according to a new study, lending further evidence to the notion that marijuana is an “exit” drug and could become the next big anti-addiction therapy.
The discovery by researchers in China and Maryland was announced in the July 2011 issue of Nature Neuroscience magazine, reports Stephen C. Webster at The Raw Story.
Cannabidiol (CBD), a medically useful component of marijuana that does not produce a “high,” effectively turns down a receptor in the brain that is stimulated by cocaine, the study found.
| Photo: CBS Detroit |
A new technology that analyzes the sweat from your fingertips could revolutionize the drug-testing market, purportedly providing onsite results in minutes with a test so sensitive it can even detect marijuana intoxication.
The test, produced by the British company Intelligent Fingerprinting, uses gold nanoparticles and “special antibodies” to latch onto metabolites in the fingerprint, reports Stephen C. Webster at The Raw Story. It turns a specific color depending on which drug byproducts are detected.
While it can be configured to search for drugs like nicotine, methadone and cocaine, what may turn out to be its most important innovation is its purported ability to help determine if someone is actively intoxicated on cannabis.
| Photo: 2K Industries LLC |
| Diffuser Beads, designed to cool the smoke in your bong or water pipe, come in six colors |
I recently had a chance to try 2K Diffuser Beads, small plastic beads that are placed in the water chamber of a water pipe or bong. The beads cool down the smoke by adding more surface area, acting as a percolation chamber to break up the smoke before it reaches your mouth and lungs, making it less harsh.
They were created for those who enjoy the fun of smoking out of a water pipe, but find the hit a bit harsh.
The beads, made of high-grade recycled plastic described by the company as “100 percent safe and non-toxic,” intermix with the smoke and water. This forces the smoke to separate and travel around each individual bead, softening the hit. Between 500 and 600 diffuser beads come in every jar.
| Photo: Steve Elliott ~alapoet~ |
| Pre-rolled joints at Rainier Wellness Center in Tacoma, one of the dispensaries targeted by the city for shutdown |
Tacoma, Washington’s push to shutter more than 30 medical marijuana dispensaries inched forward on Monday, as cannabis outlets in unincorporated Pierce County also received letters from the Sheriff’s Department putting them on notice.
Sheriff Paul Pastor said his office sent letters to about 15 dispensaries late last week to tell them about the county’s interpretation of a state law that took effect Friday, reports Jordan Schrader at the Tacoma News Tribune. The law is what remains of SB 5073, which would have legalized dispensaries in the state but was instead gutted by a line-item veto from hen-hearted Governor Christine Gregoire.
| Graphic: Voluntary Peasants |
For those who were too young or weren’t born yet, have you ever wondered what it would have been like to be in the first wave of hippies that crested in the late 1960s and early 70s? So have I.
Now you can get a real window on that world, perhaps a clearer window than ever before. Actually, it’s more of a total immersion in that world rather than just a window on it, because Holy Hippies and The Great, Round-the-Country Save-the-World School Bus Caravan is written very much from an inside viewpoint.
Holy Hippies is Book Two of Stiriss’s “Voluntary Peasants Trilogy,” penned by former UPI journalist turned hippie Melvyn Stiriss. Toke of the Town also loved Book One, Enlightenment: What’s It Good For when it was released last December.
The trilogy is the first comprehensive, inside story of The Farm, the biggest, most successful hippie commune in United States history, located at Summertown, Tennessee.
The Farm won the “alternative Nobel Peace Price,” the Swedish-based Right Livelihood Award, “for caring, sharing and acting with and on behalf of those in need at home and abroad.”
The place really was a haven of good vibes; I visited several times during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and got a warm welcome each time. I remember being struck by the fact that the sentries at the front gate of The Farm didn’t shake your hand — they hugged you.
| Photo: Les Bazso, The Province |
| Randy Caine, owner of Langley Medical Marijuana Dispensary, said he has been “blindsided” by a raid on his business by RCMP. |
The owner of a medical marijuana dispensary in Langley, British Columbia is protesting a police raid during which officers confiscated about four kilograms of cannabis meant for sick people.
Randy Caine, 57, who once challenged Canada’s marijuana laws all the way to the Supreme Court, said helping people with chronic pain should not be a crime, reports Kent Spencer at The Province.
“If my greatest fault was being overly helpful to sick people, is that a criminal offense?” Caine, owner of Langley Medical Marijuana Dispensary, said on Friday.
“I have been transparent about medical assistance with the authorities from the start,” Caine said. “I had no idea they were this concerned. I was blindsided.”
Five RCMP officers wearing bulletproof jackets executed a search warrant on July 19, claiming they’d received “numerous” complaints about Caine’s operation.