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Toke Of The Town Announces Partnership With Herban Planet

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By on Uncategorized

Toke of the Town is joining forces with one of the Internet’s best cannabis guides to give consumers and marijuana businesses greater access to a national platform of online resources.

Toke’s parent company, Voice Media Group, owns and operates the cutting-edge digital advertising agency V Digital Services and publishes an array of iconic print newspapers and websites, including Phoenix New Times, Denver Westword and Miami New Times. In 2017, V Digital Services posted 40 percent year-over-year growth and was named to Inc. Magazine’s list of the 5,000 fastest-growing companies in the U.S.

Our new partners at Herban Planet publish one of the most comprehensive online cannabis guides, offering a one-stop ecosystem for cannabis producers, business owners, consumers, medical professionals, patients, caregivers and activists. Now Herban Planet’s content will be available directly from Toke of the Town – see the nifty link at the righthand side of our top navigation bar. We’ll also be linking to Herban Planet from from the websites of VMG’s core branded properties, putting a vast nationwide marijuana database at our readers’ fingertips.

VMG chief executive officer Scott Tobias notes that VMG and Herban Planet are already leaders in providing readers, consumers and businesspeople with information about the cannabis industry. And thanks to its decades of doing business in major markets across the country, VMG brings something else to the mix: Hundreds of long-established relationships with business owners, dispensary owners, cultivators and leading figures in the industry. Those carefully nurtured local, regional and national relationships should accelerate growth of Herban Planet’s market share.

Denver Westword was the first publication in the country to hire a marijuana reporter and is known for its expert coverage of the industry. And V Digital Services has long specialized in helping marijuana businesses maximize their digital footprint through its work with Marijuana Marketing Xperts.

As a division of VDS, industry-leading MMX has the advantage of focusing solely on marketing for the marijuana industry and helping business owners in the rapidly growing field devise smart digital strategies designed to increase web and mobile presence, generate leads to expand their customer base, and navigate a maze of legal restrictions and regulations. Equally unique is its programmatic advertising network for cannabis, a pioneering technology specially engineered to engage audiences interested in medical and recreational marijuana.

Combining Herban Planet’s thriving web platform with VMG’s technology, marketing and media muscle is the goal of the new partnership, says Tobias. “Joining with Herban Planet to help grow a national marijuana platform made perfect sense,” he adds. “We are very excited about this partnership.”

Herban Planet founder and chief executive officer Babak Motamedi says he’s also excited about the synergies made possible by the partnership. VDS marketing services will now be available to Herban Planet customers at preferred prices, and the companies will also continue to explore additional content-sharing opportunities on their websites.

“People in the industry have a choice between platforms,” says Motamedi. “Now Herban Planet will be powered by a multi-market media company, so obviously we will have broader reach. We think we can really change the industry, both in terms of connectivity and bringing it more mainstream.”

Here’s Who’s Already Getting Rich from Florida’s Medical Pot Boom

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By on Medical

Over the past several months, New Times dug into the backgrounds of the seven companies’ current and former owners, executives, and partners. These marijuana moguls include some of the state’s best-connected and savviest businesspeople. Many also have backgrounds that haven’t been explored in-depth. Among them are a real-estate developer once tied to political corruption, a hedge fund manager who recruited two gambling tycoons as investors, an attorney embroiled in a burgeoning Tallahassee FBI probe, a Gainesville entrepreneur who bought a franchise from one of the largest cannabis companies in Colorado, an ex-IBM executive, a Miami mortgage broker, and some of the largest nursery operators in Florida.

Study: With Legalization, Teens Find It Harder to Buy Weed

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By on News

The study is from a U.S. government agency.

Here’s your daily dose of pot news from the newsletter WeedWeek.

U.S. teenagers find it harder to buy weed than they have for 24 years, according to an annual survey by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). The same study found that teen drug use is declining nationally.

Humboldt County’s growing areas voted against REC, but the cities voted for it.

A long awaited task force report in Canada recommended 18 as the legal buying age. For more see hereand here. The country plans to legalize REC next year.

REC businesses in Portland, Oregon, are struggling to obtain licenses. And the head of the state’s lab accrediting agency is stepping down.

Florida lawmakers are thinking about how to regulate MED. For more see here. A proposal in Ohio would allow 40 MED dispensaries in the state.

Tennessee Republicans are considering a MED program.

Radio Free Asia reports that Chinese visitors to North Korea buy pot by the kilogram and sell it for a healthy mark-up in China.

Australian economists say legalizing REC would be good for the Queensland economy.

Stanford Medical School professor and tobacco advertising expert Dr. Robert K. Jackler editorializes that “If nationwide legalization happens, it is essential that the tobacco industry is banned from the marijuana market.”

L.A. Weekly profiles Seventh Point LLC, a cannabis private equity firm focused on Los Angeles. The firm expects L.A., the world’s largest cannabis market, to be the “Silicon Valley” of weed. The city’s cannabis community is uniting to legalize dispensaries.

Keith McCarty, CEO of delivery app Eaze, is stepping down, shortly after the company secured $13M in funding. He’ll be replaced by Jim Patterson, who, like McCarty was a senior executive at Yammer, a workplace social network which sold to Microsoft for more than $1 billion.

Lack of Realistic Cannabis Regulation Leads to High Crime in San Diego

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By on Legalize It, Media, Medical

San Diego Police Department
Evidence photo from an October 15th raid on Market Greens marijuana dispensary in San Diego, CA


Another week means another horrible round of cannabis-related headlines coming out of sunny San Diego, California. In an attempt to turn America’s Finest City into the nation’s Ground Zero in the War on Weed, San Diego city officials, backed by a militant branch of the DEA and weed-hating local law enforcement, have almost totally shut down any idea of safe access to medical marijuana.
San Diego’s scene has been slashed from over 300 storefront medical marijuana dispensaries in 2011, to less than 40 in operation today – and not one of those 40 is operating with the consent of the city.

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Why Does The Government Want To Shut Up Bryan Epis?

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By on Growing, Medical, News

NORML
Bryan Epis has been silenced by the federal government as a condition of his sentencing agreement

Editor’s note: Recently, a remarkable resolution was reached on a federal medical marijuana case involving Bryan Epis, a California cannabis club operator, under which Epis had to agree not to be involved in marijuana activism. Epis’s attorney, John Balazs, has contributed his thoughts about the case below in a guest post which is reprinted here with his permission.

By John Balazs
Attorney
Bryan James Epis is a well-known medical marijuana activist who is believed to be the first person to be tried in federal court for cultivating marijuana for medical purposes after the 1996 ballot initiative that legalized medical marijuana in California. Although only 458 plants were found at his residence, the government extrapolated from a disputed spreadsheet to project that his “conspiracy” to grow marijuana was for at least 1,000 plants, the threshold to trigger a mandatory minimum 10-year sentence. 
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Oaksterdam: ‘They Didn’t Knock Us Out – Just Down’

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By on Culture, News

Narfolaxer
Oaksterdam founder Richard Lee is fully separating himself from the school and his other cannabis-affiliated businesses

By Jack Rikess

Toke of the Town

Northern California Correspondent

Two weeks and a few days after the Federal Government raided Richard Lee’s world in Oakland, showing the Cannabis World who’s boss, Oaksterdam is back.
At a mid-morning press conference held in the last remaining quarters left to the University, Richard Lee officially stepped down as the school’s dean to pursue drug policy reform, on a national level, full-time. Dale Sky Jones, Oaksterdam’s executive chancellor, will continue the University’s commitment of quality training for the cannabis industry, as per Richard’s mission statement.  
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4/20 and 5: Five Minutes To Change Your World

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By on Culture

GoldenGatePark.com
San Francisco’s 4/20 celebration typically culminates in Golden Gate Park at Hippie Hill


By Jack Rikess
Toke of the Town

Northern California Correspondent

“People are coming to Haight-Ashbury like the Grateful Dead is back in town,” said longtime resident Jack Rikess. “They’re walking down the street and smoking joints. It’s going to be unreal. This could be the last illegal 4/20 in San Francisco.”
That was the quote I gave to the Sacramento Bee way back in 2010 when asked about living next to Golden Gate Park where San Francisco holds one of the biggest smoke-outs in the nation celebrating April 20th, the traditional marijuana smoker’s holiday.
Back then, I actually thought the marijuana wars were over. The public was having a change of heart and mind, and I thought that marijuana, if not legalized soon, would be decriminalized to the point of equating smoking a joint to the same enforceable penalty as pulling the “Do Not Remove” tag off of a pillow.
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It’s A Wild Day In Weed News! Here’s The Roundup

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By on Culture

Old Hippies Cookbook
“Fifteen minutes before the homeroom bell, I spy a long-haired student being dropped off by his long-haired father in a Prius in front of the school with a public radio playing and a Greenpeace sticker on the bumper.”

​By Jack Rikess

Toke of the Town

Northern California Correspondent


Jazz Musician’ Son Brings Brownie To Fourth Grade Class!

Panic broke out this morning at Redwood Elementary School when a local jazz guitarist’s son smuggled in through the opened doors of the grammar school a “red” sequestered Tupperware-covered container of evenly-cut Betty Crocker’s “More Fudge Than Fun Brownies,” for Pebbles Shapiro-Naguchi’s birthday party. There’ll be no birthday celebration in Room 102 this afternoon because of the quick judgment of a teacher who thinks profiling is more than tracing a child’s silhouette.  
This fast-acting teacher intercepted the suspicious treats once the child was caught off-guard opening his desk. Fearing the inevitable — that the child was part of a drug ring intended to imprison our innocent youth from their eight to nine hours of day of playing ‘World Demands To Die Warfare,’ videogames, the untested, sugar-laced, possible store-bought opiates were removed. 
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