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There are abundant examples of celebrities trying to profit off legal cannabis while the less famous sit behind bars, but some of the OGs of cannabis culture are putting their money where their mouths are. Eric Rachmany, guitarist and singer for Rebelution, is using his national solo tour as a way to raise awareness and money for those imprisoned for cannabis charges.

Proceeds from Rachmany’s concert at Summit Music Hall on Friday, November 29, will benefit the Last Prisoner Project, a nonprofit that helps cannabis offenders apply for clemency, clear their records and re-enter society — sometimes as members of the pot industry. We caught up with Rachmany to learn more about the cause, his connection to cannabis and some of his own close calls while touring.


As far as late Christmas presents go, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon’s decision to pardon nine non-violent offenders is as big and unprecedented as they come.
But for a governor who before Monday pardoned only one person since taking office in 2009, the list of formerly-naughty Missourians is arguably more notable for the name it doesn’t include.
While the eight men and one women Nixon pardoned yesterday already served their sentences for felony and misdemeanor crimes ranging from minor theft, writing bad checks and marijuana possession, there’s no mention of Jeff Mizanskey, the only inmate in the state currently serving a life sentence without parole for three nonviolent pot charges.
Our buds over at the Riverfront Times have the full story.

H-Town.


It’s not decriminalization, but starting October 6 and ending in mid-April if you’re caught with up to two ounces of herb in Houston (or all of Harris County), you’re a non-violent offender and it’s your first time being busted, you won’t face any criminal charges so long as you complete eight hours of community service or an eight-hour drug course.
Oh, but you’ll still have to go through the humiliation of being arrested.

Photo: Douglas County Sheriff’s Office
Matthew Palazzolo, 25, of Sacramento, Calif., has some homework. He is being forced to write a report for a yokel Nevada judge telling “how stupid” California’s medical marijuana law.

​A judge in Nevada has given an unusual sentence in the form of a homework assignment to a 25-year-old Sacramento man who sold marijuana to a police informant in a casino parking lot at Lake Tahoe.

Matthew Palazzolo was ordered to write a report parroting the right-wing views of District Judge Dave Gamble on what the judge called the “nonsensical character” of California’s medical marijuana law, reports Sheila Gardner of the Gardnerville Record-Courier.
The judge gave Palazzolo 90 days to complete the paper discussing his “self-admitted realization” that marijuana was a “gateway drug” that “led him to use more powerful narcotics” — never mind the scientific studies disproving the gateway theory.
“Here’s a young man with a bachelor’s degree and a rosy future and now is a potential felon,” Judge Gamble said during last Tuesday’s sentencing in Gardnerville, Nev., south of Carson City.

Photo: M. Spencer Green/AP
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart: “We will act as we always have, which is arrest”

​Nearly a year after the Cook County Board passed an ordinance allowing sheriff’s police to ticket marijuana smokers for minor possession instead of arresting them, officers still haven’t written the first ticket.

“The ordinance gives us the discretion to choose,” said Steve Patterson, a spokesman for Sheriff Tom Dart. “So we’ll choose to continue acting as we always have, which is arrest.”
County commissioners made headlines last July when they passed the ordinance that gives officers the choice to either arrest people in unincorporated areas possessing 10 grams or less of marijuana, or to hand out tickets for $200 within the county’s unincorporated areas, reports William Lee of the Chicago Tribune.
The ordinance came into being after Commissioner Earleen Collins’s grandson was arrested for possessing half a joint.
The ordinance, which was supported by marijuana legalization advocates, first ran aground after a county board committee rejected Sheriff Dart’s request to extend the discretionary ticket-writing power to wherever sheriff’s officers patrol. This would have included suburban Ford Heights, which Dart’s office patrols because the town doesn’t have its own police force.

More evidence that the economic impact of marijuana goes far beyond the sale of cannabis products: A Denver-metro company is now marketing a brand of paint specifically designed to cover up the smell of pot smoke.

The label wrapped around cans of OdorDefender Paint, created by ECOBOND, a company based in Arvada, sports a green-suited cartoon superhero and text that boasts that the product offers “DEFENSE AGAINST … Marijuana & Odor-producing Drug Fumes.”

Mayor Michael Hancock wasn’t a fan of legal marijuana before Colorado voters approved it in 2012, but he’s since become a public defender of the plant — or at least, the actions taken by the City of Denver to comply with Amendment 64. On Sunday, June 10, Hancock’s office announced that he’s spearheading a coalition of mayors from around the country in an effort to push Congress to protect states with legal pot.

Although he originally opposed legalization efforts, Hancock was the mayor of the first major city to legalize marijuana, and since the first recreational sales on January 1, 2014, Denver has become into one of the nation’s capitals of legal weed, with over 200 dispensaries and 1,100 licensed pot businesses now operating in the city, according to the Denver Department of Excise and Licenses. Now, he and mayors of at least eight other cities are asking Congress to listen to them about their experiences so that legalization “can be done smoothly, safely and effectively.”

It also said other drug problems are more pressing.
Here’s your daily dose of pot news from the newsletter WeedWeek.
In a report, the DEA said media attention is making it more difficult to prosecute marijuana offenders.
Ferrell Scott, sentenced to life without parole for possession and conspiracy to sell marijuana, was denied clemency by President Obama.

Charles “Eddy” Lepp, “a defiant 64-year-old Vietnam vet and ordained Rastafarian minister” was released after serving eight years in federal prison for growing.

Two pieces in The Guardian examine the human toll of Mexico’s decade-old, U.S. supported drug war

A New York Times photojournalist documented dozens of homicide victims of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war. The Duterte administration defended its record to Reuters.

Big deal political thinker Ian Bremmer tweeted that Duterte wants to advise Trump on drug policy.

The activist New Jersey Weedman, who faces cannabis charges, compared himself to a “ prisoner at Guantanamo.

Leafly tells the stories of Sam Caldwell and Moses Baca, “ drug war prisoners 1 & 2,” in 1937. Both were apprehended in Denver. It also cites the work of a “48-year old drug felon and autodidactic cannabis historian who goes by the pen name “Uncle Mike,” maintains a site at UncleMikesResearch.com.

Steve Kerr, coach of the Golden State Warriors, said he tried MED for his back pain. It didn’t help him but he took a strong stand in favor of it for athletes:

“If you’re an NFL player, in particular, and you got lot of pain, I don’t think there’s any question that pot is better for your body than Vicodin,” Kerr, 51, said. “And yet, athletes everywhere are prescribed Vicodin like it’s Vitamin C, like it’s no big deal. And there’s like this perception in our country that over-the-counter drugs are fine but pot is bad. Now, I think that’s changing.”

The comment got attention and he later added to his remarks. Kerr said the NBA should explore MED for pain relief. New York Knicks president and celebrated coach Phil Jackson said he’d also used MED for pain adding, “I don’t think we have been able to stop it in the NBA. I think it still goes on and is still a part of the culture in the NBA. I think it is something that we either have to accommodate or figure out another way to deal with it.”

Forbes has more on the science of athletes and MED.

Vice asked budtenders about their worst customers. They’re not fond of weed snobs and scary types. The Cannabist serves up 10 budtender commandments, including “Thou Shalt Not Be Too High.”

The Pantone Color Institute, picked Greenery as the color of 2017.

The AP visits Malana, India, a Himalayan village that depends on cannabis. Uruguay will host a cannabis museum.

A bestseller in Germany and the U.K. says the Nazis ingested huge amounts of meth, and that Hitler was an opiate addict. “Blitzed,” will be published here in April.

But that hasn’t stopped the guessing.
Here’s your daily dose of pot news from the newsletter WeedWeek.

Speculation continues about what anti-pot U.S. Attorney General nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions could mean for the legal marijuana industry. The Associated Press says cannabis has the upper hand but could still collapse. Fortune says smaller companies, already dealing with larger competitors, can expect more pain.

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee say Sessions will get an  contentious confirmation hearing.

An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal says Sessions is not a racist, and in fact championed the end of sentencing discrepancies between cocaine, associated with affluent whites, and crack, which devastated inner cities. President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act into law in 2010. Sessions later said that by granting clemency retroactively to non-violent drug offenders, Obama was abusing the law.

D.C. pot-activists were received warmly at Sessions office but didn’t leave feeling especially reassured. Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D.-N.Y.) aides weren’t as welcoming. “So typical that you are taking this less seriously than Republicans,” an activist said. The whole piece, in USNews, is worth a read, and funny too.

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Rep. Tom Price (R- Ga.), is another staunch prohibitionist who, if confirmed, would have the authority to interfere with state-legal MED access.

I wrote a story for California Sunday about efforts in Oakland to create a diverse cannabis industry. The photos are by Pulitzer winner Preston Gannaway.

 

President Obama discussed legalization at length in an interview with Rolling Stone, conducted the day after the election:

I’ve been very clear about my belief that we should try to discourage substance abuse. And I am not somebody who believes that legalization is a panacea. But I do believe that treating this as a public-health issue, the same way we do with cigarettes or alcohol, is the much smarter way to deal with it. Typically how these classifications are changed are not done by presidential edict but are done either legislatively or through the DEA. As you might imagine, the DEA, whose job it is historically to enforce drug laws, is not always going to be on the cutting edge about these issues.


            [Laughs] What about you? Are you gonna get on the cutting edge?
Look, I am now very much in lame-duck status. And I will have the opportunity as a private citizen to describe where I think we need to go. But in light of these referenda passing, including in California, I’ve already said, and as I think I mentioned on Bill Maher’s show, where he asked me about the same issue, that it is untenable over the long term for the Justice Department or the DEA to be enforcing a patchwork of laws, where something that’s legal in one state could get you a 20-year prison sentence in another. So this is a debate that is now ripe, much in the same way that we ended up making progress on same-sex marriage. There’s something to this whole states-being-laboratories-of-democracy and an evolutionary approach. You now have about a fifth of the country where this is legal.
Obama added that Trump voters “in large numbers” favor decriminalizing.

After working as a U.S. Senate page when he was sixteen, Jake Lilly went on to intern at the White House in 1998. After receiving his law degree at Cornell, he joined the Army and in 2005 served in Iraq, where he led search-and-rescue teams. Before all that, however, he was thirteen when his Boy Scout troop visited Colorado. He fell in love with the state, went home to Maryland, and told his parents that he would live here someday. Now 39, with thirteen years as a prosecutor, litigator and defense attorney under his belt, Lilly is running for district attorney of Jefferson and Gilpin counties, against incumbent Pete Weir.

His platform focuses on criminal-justice reform — reform he determined was needed after seeing the effects of the drug war up close. Lilly  believes in finding alternatives to prison for nonviolent offenders and finding treatment alternatives for drug abusers. We sat down with Lilly to learn more about his positions, especially his support for continued legalization of marijuana.

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