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Editor’s note: The July 25 post “Shawn Geerdes’s Marijuana-Grow Murder Used to Attack Legal Pot” asserted that 18th Judicial District DA and 2018 Colorado gubernatorial candidate George Brauchler had attempted to score political points with anti-cannabis critics by way of post-prosecution statements such as, “Here is yet another violent crime related to marijuana. Whatever benefits there may be from the legalization of marijuana, eradicating violent crime associated with it is not one of them.” Here’s his response.

Kevin Sabet, the president and CEO of Virginia-based Smart Approaches to Marijuana, has become arguably the most influential critic of marijuana legalization in the United States. But in an extended interview on view below, he fights against the perception that he’s a one-dimensional prohibitionist along the lines of U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sabet stresses that he and his organization, shorthanded as SAM, take what he sees as a sensible approach to cannabis by arguing in favor of treatment rather than jail time for users in trouble and advocating for greater study of the substance to determine the best ways to utilize it medically.

The recent arrests and legal actions against a former Marijuana Enforcement Division official and several marijuana industry license-holders here in Colorado has been touted by Attorney General Jeff Sessions as an example of why this industry is not working. In a letter to congressional leaders on May 1, he also suggested that in some way the regulated marijuana industry contributes to more illegal marijuana trafficking. In actuality, a regulated system like the one in Colorado has created a boom for us in the areas of job creation, revenue generation and increased law enforcement support, and the list goes on.

Pro-marijuana activist David Wisniewski pointed out repeatedly last year that Prop 205, the adult-use marijuana initiative, did not have the full support of the cannabis-consuming community.

Now he’s running a new legalization campaign that has the same problem.

The Safer Arizona 2018 recreational-marijuana initiative campaign has been getting positive press lately, including an article in Saturday’s Arizona Republic that claimed “Recreational Marijuana May be Headed Back to the Ballot.”

The reality, though, is that key legalization proponents believe Safer Arizona isn’t likely to collect enough signatures to make the ballot — and they have little or no intention of helping to make it happen. The Phoenix New Times has the story…

States with legal medical marijuana have fewer opiod-related hospitalizations per capita, according to new research published early this month in the Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence. At the same time, those states did not see an increase in hospitalizations related to the consumption of cannabis, the study determined.

Yuyan Shi, the lead author of the study, is an assistant professor of family medicine and public health at the University of California in San Diego. Using the State Inpatient Database, Shi looked at hospital records in 27 states between 1997 and 2014. Over that time, she found that marijuana and opiate hospitalizations increased by an average of 300 percent. (Over 50,000 people died in this country last year from drug overdoses.)

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.

Marijuana legalization has apparently failed in Arizona, with uncounted votes unlikely to turn the defeat into victory as they did with the state’s medical-marijuana measure in 2010.

As evidence mounts that the gulf between the “no” and “yes” votes on Prop 205 is too vast for the measure to catch up, cannabis supporters are left with one burning question: How could this happen in Arizona, when voters in California and as many as five other states approved the legalization of recreational or medical marijuana?

 

On the surface, Arizona’s rejection of Proposition 205, the Regulation and Taxation of Marijuana Act, seemed like a clear victory for the various anti-legalization organizations throughout the state. However, a look at the opposition and the contents of the proposition itself show a more complex political situation.

Arizona passed Prop 200 and legalized marijuana for medical use in 1996 — before Colorado did. Even so, Arizona was the only state out of nine with marijuana questions on the ballot to reject a marijuana measure this round. Over one million voters, constituting 52 percent of the result, voted against Prop 205. This despite the fact that Arizona has over 130 medical dispensaries in operation and Prop 205 was polling at 50 percent in OctoberSo what happened?

If the latest crop of polls is correct, medical marijuana will be legally available to sick people in Florida tomorrow. As of late October, close to 80 percent of Floridians supported Amendment 2, which would legalize weed statewide for medical purposes, such as helping cancer or Alzheimer’s patients. Sixty percent of the electorate needs to approve the measure for it to pass.

But even assuming it passes, many Florida residents might need to travel pretty far to get their hands on medicinal cannabis. That’s because multiple cities are already gearing up to pass six-month “moratoriums” on medical marijuana — including Miami Beach.

The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office could see a substantial drop in revenue if Proposition 205 passes, owing to the sudden disappearance of thousands of marijuana-possession cases.

Prop 205, which Arizona voters will decide on November 8, would give adults 21 and older the freedom to possess personal amounts of marijuana and set up a limited retail-sales system.

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