If law enforcement officials in Montana have their way, they’ll know exactly where every single private, state-legal medical marijuana grow in the Big Sky state is located.
Search Results: dhhs (14)
| Seattle Weekly |
If you’re a low income medical marijuana patient in the state of Maine, you definitely want to be in Portland on Saturday.
According to the Maine Patients Coalition, based in Portland, Maine, low income patients have been priced right out of using the state-run medical marijuana program in the Pine Tree State. “And these are the sick Maine patients who need this program the most!” said Chris Kenoyer, director of the MPC.
Kenoyer said that Maine’s low income patients have been “completely abandoned” by Maine’s state-run program, administered by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and by the legal Maine dispensaries. “There has to be ‘compassionate caregiving’ here in Maine for ALL sick patients!” he said.
The Patients Coalition invites legal medical marijuana patients in Maine to come watch history being made at noon this Saturday, September 1, at the Atlantic CannaFest in Deering Oaks Park, Portland. “Maine law allows us to donate excess medical marijuana to other sick legal Maine patients,” Kenoyer said.
| Bangor Daily News |
It’s often hard to know exactly what government bureaucrats want from medical marijuana dispensaries. Despite the fact that voters in 16 states (and the District of Columbia) have decided for themselves to allow the medicinal use of cannabis, it seems that stuffed-shirt anti-pot types always find objections to the existence of places where patients can actually, you know, get marijuana.
When the shops are quick-and-easy, in-and-out types of places where one just goes in, makes the donation or payment, and gets the medicine, they’re criticized as “drug dealers, not health establishments.” And when the dispensaries attempt — as is now the case in Maine — to offer additional services to their seriously ill patients, they’re told that isn’t OK, either.
A dispensary scheduled to open next month in Portland, Maine, is designed as a “California style” wellness center, promoting a free coffee and tea bar, acupuncture clinics, support groups, counseling and a “welcoming vapor lounge,” reports Tom Bell at the Portland Morning Sentinel.
| The Mercury |
| Greg Barns, president of Australian Lawyers Alliance said that cannabis use is primarily a health issue, and the state would save money by treating is as such |
One of the reasons cannabis use is so high in Tasmania is because it is illegal and not treated by authorities as a health issue, according to the Australian Lawyers Alliance.
Greg Barns, Alliance president and barrister based in Hobart, said decriminalizing the use, possession and sale of small amounts of marijuana would reduce its appeal to young people, reports Sally Glaetzer at The Mercury.
“Most kids want to try dope,” Barns said. “If it wasn’t illegal, it would be less attractive.”
Cannabis use should be treated as a health issue, Barns said, with “offenders” referred to a health or counseling service rather than the criminal justice system.
While that’s far from ideal — ideal being “it’s none of your damned business if I use cannabis” — it’s certainly an improvement over locking people in cages for weed.
According to Barns, instead of spending enormous amounts of police and court resources on cannabis-related offenses, money should be redirected to a service to provide lifestyle and health advice for cannabis users.
Barns said that cannabis use is primarily a health issue and the state would save money by treating it as such. He added that making the medical use of cannabis legal and allowing doctors to supply high-quality marijuana to patients for pain relief would “dim the supply of bad quality cannabis.”
| Montana Biotech |
| U.S. federal government-issued cannabis |
Welcome to Room 420, where your instructor is Mr. Ron Marczyk and your subjects are wellness, disease prevention, self actualization, and chillin’.
Worth Repeating
By Ron Marczyk, R.N.
Health Education Teacher (Retired)
DEA policy is a violation of the fundamental principles of the scientific method. Seventy-five years of bias must come to an end.
First, the backstory.
Jan 12, 2009:
“With one foot out the door, the Bush administration has once again found time to undermine scientific freedom,” said Allen Hopper, litigation director of the American Civil Liberties Union Drug Law Reform Project. “In stubbornly retaining the unique government monopoly over the supply of research marijuana over the objections of DEA’s own administrative law judge, the Bush administration has effectively blocked the proper regulatory channels that would allow the drug to become a wholly legitimate prescription medication.”
“The federal government’s official policy is that marijuana has no medical benefit.”
The American Civil Liberties Union said in a legal brief that the DEA’s politics are keeping
cannabis-based medicines off shelves.
| Photo: The Julius Axelrod Papers |
| Dr. Julius Axelrod, pictured above, conducted some of the original research which culminated in the United States government getting a patent on all cannabinoids in 2003. |
Welcome to Room 420, where your instructor is Mr. Ron Marczyk and your subjects are wellness, disease prevention, self actualization, and chillin’.Worth Repeating
By Ron Marczyk, R.N.
Health Education Teacher (Retired)
The United States federal government holds a “medical patent” for all cannabinoids — a patent which it has held since 2003.
Let’s take a look at the rationale behind this patent, and highlight the good news it actually contains for disease prevention, medical treatment and for cannabis legalization.
This patent was the outcome from research conducted by:
• Dr. Aiden J. Hampson, a neuropharmacologist at the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland
• Dr. Julius Axelrod (1912-2004), Professor Emeritus, National Institutes of Health, pharmacologist and neuroscientist who shared the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine
• Dr. Maurizio Grimaldi, professor of neurology/neuropsychopharmacology and toxicology, NIMH
Here’s how it all went down in 1998.
| Photo: MyFoxMaine |
| Starting January 1, medical marijuana patients in Maine are required by law to register with the state. |
More than 400 residents of Maine have applied to be medical marijuana patients under a new state law. Starting January 1, Mainers must be registered with the state before legally using cannabis medicinally.
For the past decade in Maine, ever since voters approved medical marijuana in 1999, patients had needed only a doctor’s authorization to use cannabis medicinally.
Applications flooded into the Maine Department of Health and Human Services in the final days and weeks of 2010, with hundreds more expected in the next several weeks, reports John Richardson at The Portland Press Herald. State officials said that expect to register 1,200 or more patients by the time the initial rush is over this spring.
“Everybody’s coming in at the last minute,” said Catherine Cobb, director of licensing and regulatory services for the health department. “We’ve been hammered.”
| Graphic: Maine.gov |
| Safe Harbor Maine is expected to open early next year in Biddeford, becoming New England’s first medical marijuana dispensary. |
Until two weeks ago, it appeared that Rhode Island would open New England’s first marijuana dispensary. Now it looks as if Maine will be doing the honors.
One of the two will be the first state in New England to open a compassion center to sell cannabis to patients registered in state-authorized programs.
“It appears our neighbor to the north will beat Rhode Island to the punch,” concedes W. Zachary Malinowski of The Providence Journal.
A spokesman for the Maine Health Department said the first of eight dispensaries across the state should open for business soon after January 1, 2011. Licenses have been awarded over the past two months to operate dispensaries in each of the state’s eight public health districts, according to the Health Department’s Division of Licensing and Regulatory Services.
Safe Harbor Maine Inc., a nonprofit organization, hopes to be the first to open early next year in Biddeford, Maine, not far from the New Hampshire state line. The business will probably serve fewer than 100 patients in the first year, according to Glenn Peterson, Safe Harbor’s CEO.
| Graphic: Reality Catcher |
Maine’s medical marijuana program took a big step towards safe access for patients Friday, with the announcement of three licensed, non-profit corporations to grow and sell marijuana.
Northeast Patients Group, a recently formed corporation with roots in California, was selected to establish four of the eight approved dispensaries. The nonprofit organization will establish facilities in Portland, Thomaston, the Augusta area and the Bangor area, reports Meg Haskell at Bangor Daily News.
Aroostook County will be served by Safe Alternatives for Fort Kent, and western Maine will be served by the Remedy Compassion Center.
With 27 separate applications to start one dispensary in each of Maine’s eight public health districts, the state approved only six. According to state officials, the criteria for approval included applicants’ experience and proposed plans for record keeping, inventory control, security and patient education.
No applicant was approved for the districts that serve York County and Washington and Hancock counties., said applications for these regions failed to meet the state’s dispensary standards.
| Photo: Shroomery.org |
The people of Eliot, Maine, have just said “yes” to dispensaries by saying “no” to a moratorium on the pot shops.
Organizers behind an effort to open a nonprofit medical marijuana dispensary in Eliot cleared a big hurdle Saturday when voters at a town meeting turned down a proposed moratorium that would have stopped the pot shop until local elected officials had “more time to study the issue.”
After a “substantial” debate on the topic, a simple hand vote saw the proposed moratorium failing to pass, with some voters saying they didn’t want to support a “temporary” ban that seemed too open-ended. One resident argued the moratorium would let selectmen study the issue “in perpetuity,” reports Geoff Cunningham Jr at Foster’s Daily Democrat.
About 100 Town Meeting voters were gathered at Marshwood Middle School on Saturday to vote on 40-plus articles. The most heavily debated and discussed item was the proposed marijuana dispensary moratorium, which was a reaction to inquiries from organizers looking to establish a pot shop in Eliot.