Search Results: fake (109)

Plenty of underage tourists who come to Colorado seem to think a bogus identification card will work just as well at a pot shop as it will at a bar. But according to Haley Littleton, spokesperson for the Town of Breckenridge, which has catalogued at least 428 fake ID cases since February 2015 with no end in sight, they’re wrong.

“Our main theory is that people come into town and think, ‘This is great. I can take advantage of this,'” Littleton says. “But it’s not like at a bar, where you can go in, try to order and then give them an ID, and if they just glance at it quickly, you might get a drink or you might not. Marijuana dispensaries are really stringent on fake IDs — and so are we.”

Last August, when veteran reporter Peter Marcus announced that he was leaving the ambitious ColoradoPolitics.com project he’d helped launch the previous year in favor of a communications-director position with the rapidly growing marijuana dispensary chain Terrapin Care Station, he stressed that he wasn’t leaving journalism behind, and that he planned to start a website that would mix original stories with posts intended to counter misinformation being spewed by pot enemies.

That site, TheNewsStation.com, is now live, and included among offerings that Marcus says “promote the positive business and economic impact of the cannabis industry” is a section in which he tears apart what he sees as marijuana “fake news.”

The service also failed to protect customer information.
Here’s your daily round up of pot news, excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek.

Irvine, Calif.-based Weedmaps is full of bogus dispensary reviews, according to an investigation by the L.A. Times.

Reporter Paresh Dave looked at nearly 600 businesses reviewed on the site and found that 70% included reviews submitted from a single IP address (i.e. a single computer). A textual analysis found that 62% of reviews on the site are “fake.”

Weedmaps, a Yelp-like service with operations in several states, had stored the IP addresses of anonymous reviewers, in its publicly available code. A Weedmaps executive said the 62% figure is far too high, and emphasized that reviews are only part of the product.

Photos and more below.

In recent weeks, we’ve posted about several satirical Colorado marijuana sales stories that some are taking seriously, including one that claimed pot overdoses killed 37 people and another about Representative Michele Bachmann supposedly driving stoned that prompted an official denial from Fort Collins.
A piece about folks buying weed with food stamps is a joke, too. But there is now actual legislation intended to ban this nonexistent practice. Denver Westword has more.

Alan David Nixon willingly allowed his name to be used to hide the true owner of a Southern California medical marijuana operation, but his military service, age and extensive medical woes helped a federal judge find mercy at this week’s sentencing hearing.
Assistant United States Attorney Christine S. Bautista recommended five months in prison followed by five months of home detention for Nixon, who admits he aided John Melvin Walker’s massive, flagrant marijuana distribution scheme busted by Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officers. OC Weekly has the full story.

As if making criminals out of marijuana users and growers wasn’t bad enough, Now we’ve got people becoming criminals for making fake marijuana in their home thanks to the prohibition of the real thing. The Dallas Observer has the full story of Mohsin Zia, a 24-year-old Iving, Texas man, who allegedly burned down his apartment complex – including the units and possessions of 56 of his neighbors – while trying to make synthetic pot out of items he discovered in online forums.

While outrageous, it’s actually just another sad example of why this war on a plant is such a failed endeavor.

New Times Broward-Palm Beach

In this week’s issue, New Times Broward-Palm Beach (which, like Toke of the Town, is part of Village Voice Media) looks closer at the rise and eventual crack down on the synthetic cannabinoid industry.
Over the past three years, manufacturers and retailers of so-called “herbal incenses” have popped up in all 50 states. It quickly became a multibillion-dollar industry built on products that had names like Crazy Eyes, Cowboy Kush, and Skull Killa.
It’s actually a horrible misnomer to call these substances “synthetic marijuana” or “fake pot,” because they actually have nothing to do with real cannabis, and unlike herbal cannabis, they can be dangerous.
Until two months ago, many of these herbal incenses remained legal because state and federal lawmakers couldn’t keep up with the onslaught of new chemicals being churned out by overseas labs and imported by herbal-incense manufacturers. Whenever the government banned one synthetic cannabinoid, chemists simply tweaked their formulations to concoct new, legal replacements that still got people stoned.

Texas Department of Safety (DPS)
You know you’re gonna wonder every time you see one of these now, for the rest of your life.

​Your Weed. Delivered.®

Two men were jailed after law enforcement found more than a ton of marijuana aboard a fake AT&T service truck in Texas.

A Texas state trooper pulled over what looked like an AT&T work truck for going 72 miles per hour in a 60 zone, just west of the Hidalgo County community of McCook, reports Sergio Chapa at ValleyCentral.com.
The trooper knew something must be up when the driver took off running on foot. Aaron Arrellano-Salgado didn’t get far, though, before he was caught.

KDKA
Brandon Rice, 14, died last month, four months after destroying his lungs by smoking Spice through a plastic PEZ candy dispenser.

​Despite the true story having been available for some time now, many mainstream media outlets continue to inaccurately report that a 14-year-old Pittsburgh boy died last month after a lung transplant made necessary due to his smoking fake pot which destroyed his lungs in June.

As tragic as the story is — and as bad an idea it is to smoke fake pot — the eighth grader’s death was not, as widely reported, due to chemical burns on his lungs from smoking fake marijuana. It was due to the fact that he smoked the ‘Spice’ out of a plastic PEZ candy dispenser, which partially melted and coated his lungs with toxic chemicals, as reported more than two weeks ago by Lucy Steigerwald at Reason.

Photo: Jack Dillon/NIJ

​A Texas man tried to rob a gas station of fake marijuana, using a hammer as his weapon, but the attempt was foiled when he got shot in the ass by another customer.

Dustin Darsp, 35, tried to steal synthetic marijuana known as K2 from a Shell convenience store at about 9:30 Sunday night in San Antonio, reports KSAT. Carrying a small hammer draped in a block cloth or sock — which he attempted to pass off as a gun — he grabbed a box of K2 and hurriedly left the store.
“He carried it as if it was a gun and pointed it at the clerk and the customer,” said San Antonio Police Detective Robert Bernal, reports Jessica Kwong of the San Antonio Express-News. “He wanted them to believe that what he had was a gun.”
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