Cannabis News – Page 77

8 Aug 2013

Fla. Medical Marijuana Petition Pushes For 2014

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Michael Derigo arrived home from a trip to the grocery store June 25 to find half a dozen police cars surrounding his mobile home in Gibsonton. A neighbor had complained about his marijuana plants.

Since he was diagnosed with AIDS in 2004 and started on drugs to suppress it, Derigo, 59, has grown marijuana plants and juiced the leaves to drink. Unlike smoking dried leaves, he said, it doesn’t get him high.

“I’ve been able to keep my weight on where I’ve seen others just shrivel up and die,” he said.

Derigo has pleaded not guilty to possessing and manufacturing marijuana. His lawyer, Michael Minardi of Stuart, who specializes in such cases, plans a medical necessity defense.

“The war on drugs is a war on the American people,” Derigo said. “People sometimes do less time for murder than for marijuana.”

Cases such as his have led to a new petition drive to put a proposal on the 2014 ballot to legalize medical use of marijuana in Florida.

Similar efforts have failed before, but this one is backed by a new level of legal and political muscle — mainly from trial lawyer John Morgan of the Morgan & Morgan firm, a major Democratic political fundraiser. With his help, the United for Care campaign group has crafted a ballot proposal and hired petition gatherers.

Asked how much he’s willing to spend, Morgan, who’s known for seven-figure contributions to charitable and political causes, said simply, “As much as it takes.”

He plans to start running radio ads later this year; newspaper stories on the proposal have already drawn scores of volunteers, he said.

But the proposal could face high-powered opposition, possibly involving Republican political fundraiser, shopping center magnate and former ambassador Mel Sembler of St. Petersburg.

Sembler and his wife, Betty, are the founders of the charitable Drug Free America Foundation and a related public education group, Save Our Society from Drugs, which can act in political causes.

Calvina Fay, executive director of Drug Free America, said discussions are starting on legal and political strategies against the initiative, but she didn’t want to go into details.

Asked whether he’ll be involved, Sembler would say only that if an opposition group “gets organized, I’ll make that decision then.” Betty Sembler couldn’t be reached for comment.

Morgan has a personal interest in the campaign.

His brother Tim, now 55, is a quadriplegic as result of an accident when he was a teenager and uses marijuana to control muscle spasms. Their father, who had esophageal cancer and emphysema, used it for nausea before his death.

His father “was just in agony, nauseated, sick,” Morgan said. “He was one of these guys who said, ‘Don’t smoke, don’t do drugs,’ but Tim said try it. Overnight he was able to sit up and eat meals. He was able to enjoy life. It made his last days more restful and calm.”

Controlling the spasms enables Tim to work for Morgan’s firm, he added.

“This isn’t Cheech and Chong,” Morgan said. “This is people who have ALS, bone cancer where the pain is unrelenting, MS where their body is withering away. It wasn’t party lights and strobe music with my dad and brother. It was just peace and lack of pain.”

Ben Pollara, a veteran South Florida Democratic political strategist prominent in the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama presidential campaigns and in Alex Sink’s 2010 gubernatorialrun, heads United for Care.

He and Morgan said their proposal is crafted to allow only tightly controlled, medically prescribed uses of marijuana, prohibiting home growing and and without contributing to recreational use — which critics say has happened in other states.

The potential for abuse will be a subject of debate in a referendum campaign, promised Fay. But before that can happen, the organizers face a tight deadline to get the proposal on the ballot. They need petition signatures equal to 8 percent of the 2012 presidential election vote, or 683,149, verified by local elections supervisors by Feb. 1. Allowing for invalid signatures and time for verification, that means getting nearly 1 million by early January, Pollara said.

Paid petition gatherers charge $3 per signature, but volunteers will supply some, Morgan said.

Another hurdle is state Supreme Court approval of the amendment.

Under the state Constitution, amendments proposed by citizen petitions, unlike those proposed by the state Legislature, must deal with a single subject. The court interprets that requirement strictly and has often used it to throw out proposed amendments.

The two-page marijuana amendment, which can be viewed at the www.unitedforcare.org, lists medical conditions for which marijuana may be prescribed; exempts it from mandatory insurance coverage; requires that the state Department of Health regulate dispensaries providing marijuana and related products; and sets up a system of state identification cards for prescribed users and their designated caregivers.

Pollara said he hopes to have 10 percent of the necessary signatures — the number required for Supreme Court review — in about a month.

He and Morgan took over a smaller-scale effort launched by a citizen activist, Kim Russell of Orlando, but decided to replace the amendment the group was pushing, ditch 30,000 signatures, and start from scratch.

“When we first met, John said this was not going to be a free-for-all, defacto legalization — it has to be a tightly controlled situation,” Pollara said.

They hired University of Florida law school professor Jon Mills, a former state House speaker whom Morgan called “the best constitutional lawyer in the state,” to rework the amendment with an eye toward Supreme Court approval.

Using money left over from a political committee he ran last year, Pollara commissioned a poll that found support for the measure topped 60 percent, Florida’s threshhold to pass a constitutional amendment.

An organized campaign could cut that level of support, but it would require substantial spending for advertising and voter outreach, said Fred Piccolo, a Republican political strategist.

Fay, with Drug Free America, said there will be a legal challenge to the wording before the Supreme Court and a campaign against the measure if it gets on the ballot.

She called medical marijuana “a scam” intended to lead to legalization for recreational use.

It’s dangerous, she contended, because users, already sick, risk ingesting an unregulated substance subject to contamination whose components and effects haven’t been rigorously studied.

“Just because somebody says it makes them feel good, where do we draw the line? Crack cocaine?” Fay said. “We once had people peddling crude oil as a medicine in this country. Think of Laetrile — it was a disaster,” she said, speaking of the cancer treatment banned as poisonous in most states.

There’s already an FDA-approved drug that includes the most sought after ingredient in marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, Fay noted.

But advocates say this drug is a poor substitute, and other ingredients, notably cannabidiol, or CBD, provide some of the most important benefits with no psychoactive effect. Some grow strains rich with CBD but low in THC.

“We get emails from people all the time saying they were prescribed Marinol but couldn’t afford it, or it gets them stoned, whereas one or two puffs of marijuana doesn’t get them stoned and alleviates the symptoms,” Pollara said.

Marijuana user Derigo said his method of juicing the leaves calms nausea that would otherwise prevent him from eating, which would start the “downward spiral” of “AIDS wasting syndrome.” It also eases pain from nerve damage caused by shingles that struck while his immune system was depressed.

Formerly a quality control engineer, Derigo hasn’t worked for several years. He can’t afford the synthetic opiates prescribed at pain clinics, even if he wanted to take them, and the county health department, which provides his AIDS treatment, doesn’t give him anything effective for the nausea, he said.

Minardi, his lawyer, said he has handled about a dozen medical marijuana cases and has half a dozen pending. Prosecutors recently dropped charges against one, Robert Jordan of Parrish, charged with growing marijuana for his wife, who’s confined to a wheelchair with ALS.

Nearly all his marijuana clients are over age 50.

There have been suggestions that Morgan, who hopes to back former Gov. Charlie Crist in a 2014 race against Gov. Rick Scott, hopes the amendment campaign will spur turnout of young and liberal voters likely to oppose Scott.

In response, Morgan said, “I started thinking about this way before I knew that (Crist) would be in this position. I don’t think medical marijuana is going to motivate an 18-year-old. Legalizing it might.”

Morgan is right, according to officials with the Marijuana Policy Project, an advocacy group for legal use of marijuana that has participated in several medical use and legalization campaigns.

“Legalization initiatives do seem to have an impact on young voter turnout, at least based on exit poll studies, but we haven’t seen the same dynamic on medical marijuana issues,” said political director Steve Fox.

A 2012 study found “a significant boost” in youth turnout in elections on legalization measures in Colorado in 2000 and Oregon and Washington in 1998, he said, but there’s been no indication of such an effect in the 2010 vote in Arizona on medical use. It passed by a razor-thin margin, 50.1 percent to 49.9 percent.

Source: Huffington Post (NY)
Author: William March, The Tampa Tribune
Published: August 5, 2013
Copyright: 2013 HuffingtonPost.com, LLC
Contact: [email protected]
Website: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

5 Aug 2013

Anti-Pot Campaigns Face New Obstacle

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Gabrielle Abesamis said she and her classmates at Niles West High School in Skokie receive plenty of information about marijuana from their health teachers, but when it comes to using the drug, some of her peers shrug off the lessons and just say YOLO — “You Only Live Once.”

With medical marijuana now encoded into Illinois law, she said, that attitude will only strengthen. “Even though it’s for medical use, I don’t think that matters to them,” said Abesamis, 17. “The fact that it’s legal for some people to possess it, they feel it’s OK for them to have it too.”

Illinois on Thursday became the 20th state to legalize pot for some medical patients, and although lawmakers say the rules will be among the toughest in the nation, educators and treatment experts worry that putting a partial stamp of approval on a once-forbidden drug will send a confusing message to young people.

“What happens with teenagers is (that) they begin to have that medicine-versus-drug argument,” said Andy Duran of Linking Efforts Against Drugs, an educational group based in Lake Forest. “They begin to think it’s not harmful or it’s not addictive because it’s a medicine.”

Teen views about the risks of marijuana have been easing for more than 20 years, according to the University of Michigan’s authoritative Monitoring the Future study. In 1991, about 4 in 5 high school seniors believed that people put themselves at great risk by smoking pot regularly. In 2012, fewer than half shared that opinion.

Attitudes appear even more casual around Chicago. The Illinois Youth Survey, which polls students about alcohol, tobacco and drug use, found that only a third of suburban teens and a quarter of those in the city believed that smoking pot once or twice a week brought great risk.

“Already, adolescents perceive marijuana to be not harmful, so I don’t know that we’re in a position where they could perceive it to be less harmful,” said Pamela Rodriguez of TASC, or Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities, which connects teens coming from juvenile court with drug treatment specialists.

She said the new marijuana law might actually prompt productive discussions about the proper use of medications. The abuse of prescription drugs is another major issue among her clientele, she said, and talking about medical pot could be a way to address the risks that any medication can pose.

The Robert Crown Center for Health Education in Hinsdale teaches thousands of children about drugs each year, and Margo Schmitt, the center’s director of education and evaluation, said its science-based presentations won’t change with the new law.

“We have actually been getting a lot of questions about it, especially this last spring,” Schmitt said. “Many of the kids have family in other states that have had something to do with (liberalized marijuana laws), so we get a lot of questions. We always answer them scientifically.”

Frank Pegueros, president of the international D.A.R.E. program, based in Los Angeles, said it has not made substantive changes to its anti-drug lessons, taught by police officers, even as states have relaxed their laws on pot.

“The fact that states have legalized marijuana for some purposes really calls for additional prevention education … because the fact is, the greater prevalence of the substance, the more accessible it is to minors,” he said.

Kate Mahoney of PEER Services, which provides drug education and treatment in Evanston and Glenview, said teens have long pointed to the medical use of marijuana to excuse their own pot smoking. Her response, she said, has been to say that she hopes they’ll never have a condition like cancer that might justify such a prescription.

“It is really challenging, because the truth is that most teens really do best with clear black-and-white boundaries,” she said. “We have muddied the waters.”

Dr. Thomas Wright, chief medical officer at the Rosecrance treatment center in Rockford, said he will try to draw parallels between marijuana and other legal substances.

“Just because it’s not illegal doesn’t mean it’s going to be good for you,” he said. “It’ll just join the ranks of alcohol and tobacco — two of the deadliest and most addictive drugs we have.”

Source: Chicago Tribune (IL)
Author: John Keilman and Lisa Black, Chicago Tribune Reporters
Published: August 4, 2013
Copyright: 2013 Chicago Tribune Company, LLC
Website: http://www.chicagotribune.com/

3 Aug 2013

Quinn To Sign Medical Marijuana Bill Thursday

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Gov. Pat Quinn will sign a bill into law Thursday legalizing the use of marijuana for medical purposes in Illinois at an event at the University of Chicago, two state government sources told the Tribune today. Supporters say the four-year trial program here will be the strictest law of its kind in the nation.

For years, the measure had failed to gain traction at the Capitol, particularly in the House. But sponsoring Rep. Lou Lang, D-Skokie, was able to cobble together a simple majority in the spring to send the bill to the Senate, where a similar but less restrictive bill had passed in previous years.

As the legislation was gaining momentum, Quinn indicated that he would keep an “open mind” about the issue. Proponents took it as a positive sign from a governor who has displayed his liberal tendencies on issues ranging from abolishing the death penalty to supporting a gay marriage bill.

One reason Quinn said he was giving legalized pot more thought was that he was impressed by an injured military veteran who maintained marijuana provided him relief from war wounds.

Under the new law, which would take effect Jan. 1, an individual could be prescribed no more than 2.5 ounces of marijuana over two weeks. The prescribing doctor must have had a prior and ongoing medical relationship with the patient.

Patients would have to buy the marijuana from one of 60 dispensing centers throughout the state and would not be allowed to legally grow their own.

Workers at dispensing centers would undergo criminal background checks, the stores would be under round-the-clock camera surveillance and users would carry cards that indicate how much they had bought to prevent stockpiling.

Marijuana would be grown inside 22 cultivation centers registered with the Illinois Department of Agriculture.

Source: Chicago Tribune (IL)
Author: Ray Long
Published: July 31, 2013
Copyright: 2013 Chicago Tribune Company, LLC
Website: http://www.chicagotribune.com/

3 Aug 2013

Public MJ Use is Illegal but Seldom Punished

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Denver police have written more tickets for public marijuana use so far this year than in all of 2012, but the crime is rarely punished, according to new statistics from the city. Though Colorado voters in November legalized marijuana use by adults, consuming marijuana in public remains illegal, under both state law and Denver municipal ordinance. It brings a $100 fine under the state law.

According to figures provided by the Denver Department of Safety, police in the city wrote just 20 tickets for public marijuana consumption during the first half of 2013. Fifteen of those tickets came in May and June. Officers wrote only eight tickets in all of 2012, all but one of those pre-legalization.

“Nothing has changed for us policy-wise,” Denver police spokesman John White said. “If individuals are observed consuming marijuana in public, they will be cited.”

It’s difficult to determine whether public pot use has actually increased. There have been no scientific studies about public marijuana use in Denver, either pre- or post-legalization.

But people concerned about the impacts of marijuana legalization say, anecdotally, they have noticed a significant increase in open marijuana consumption.

“We’ve heard from a lot of people in the community that they’re seeing more and more of that,” said Diane Carlson, an organizer for the group Smart Colorado.

Carlson said she saw people smoking marijuana at the Denver Zoo’s Zoo Lights event in December as children walked nearby. Some visitors to the city also say public marijuana use is a problem in Denver, with one Chicago resident writing in a letter to The Denver Post that he and his family observed pot smoking “literally every block” on the 16th Street Mall.

Visit Denver spokesman Rich Grant said the tourism office has received several letters from visitors dismayed at the public pot smoking they saw in the city. But Grant said the number of those letters isn’t any more than letters Visit Denver receives on other topics. The office even receives letters from people concerned that — with bans on public consumption and prohibitions on marijuana use at many hotels — they won’t have a place to puff.

“At this point, nobody really knows what it’s going to be like or a lot of the details,” Grant said.

Snipped

Complete Article: http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_23779561/

Source: Denver Post (CO)
Author: John Ingold, The Denver Post
Published: August 2, 2013
Copyright: 2013 The Denver Post
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Contact: [email protected]

31 Jul 2013

D.C. Records its First Legal Pot Deal in 75 Years

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The 15-year struggle to legalize medical marijuana in the District ended like this: A 51-year-old Northwest resident entered a North Capitol Street rowhouse Monday evening and emerged 90 minutes later with slightly less than a half-ounce of street-legal, high-grade, D.C.-grown cannabis.

Shortly before 6 p.m., Alonzo walked into the high-security sales room of the Capital City Care dispensary with two store employees to consummate the city’s first legal marijuana deal in at least 75 years. He purchased about $250 worth of three strains of cannabis.

“It’s a beautiful natural product that is from rain, sun and soil,” Alonzo said, wearing a dark T-shirt with a green logo of a cannabis leaf over a medical cross. “Mother Nature doesn’t make mistakes.”

Alonzo agreed to share his experiences navigating the District’s medical marijuana system on the condition that he be identified only by his middle name, concerned that public knowledge of his medical marijuana use could prove sensitive at work.

Capital City Care’s sales Monday to two patients represent the culmination of a fight that dates to the mid-1990s, when HIV/AIDS activists first fought to put medical marijuana on the citywide ballot. Nearly 70 percent of voters approved a 1998 legalization initiative, but Congress intervened for more than a decade, preventing the implementation of a medical marijuana program.

After Congress lifted its restrictions in 2009, the District government started a slow process to set up a strict regulatory and licensing regime limited to city residents with specific chronic illnesses, with lawmakers and city officials saying they were moving deliberately to reduce the risk of future federal intervention.

Initial hopes that cannabis could be made available to patients in late 2010 gave way to early 2011 and then mid-2012 as the city moved through the painstaking and politically sensitive process of licensing marijuana growers and retailers, as well as certifying the doctors who would recommend the medicine and patients who would consume it.

Alonzo, who is HIV-positive, said he had been following the rollout of the medical marijuana program since the beginning of the year. The combination of antiviral drugs he takes to manage his infection, Alonzo said, causes him frequent insomnia and occasional difficulty in swallowing and digesting.

Marijuana, he said, was not initially his preferred therapy. “Like many people, I certainly had my fair share in college, but then I really left it alone for a long time,” he said. A mid-1990s trip to Amsterdam with his former partner, who had a more advanced HIV infection, demonstrated how cannabis could help address the virus’s symptoms and the side effects of the drugs used to treat them.

In March, Alonzo approached his doctor about seeking a marijuana recommendation.

“He asked why, and I outlined my challenges,” he said. “I really don’t want to have a prescription drug dependency, and they weren’t working for the insomnia. He was agreeable to it. And then the long wait.”

To secure his first dose, Alonzo had to visit his doctor, who had to request recommendation forms from the health department, which then processed the forms and issued him a patient card.

Although the city’s medical marijuana program has started, it remains a slow start.

D.C. Health Department spokeswoman Najma Roberts said that as of Monday, only nine patients have obtained a city-issued medical marijuana card. About 20 doctors, she said, have requested forms from the city allowing them to recommend cannabis to their patients.

Capital City Care, the first of three planned District dispensaries to secure an operating license, offers four strains of medical cannabis, priced from $380 to $440 an ounce, grown by Northeast-based Holistic Remedies. More varieties will be offered once two other cultivation centers — including Capital City Care’s own — produce their first salable harvest, said Scott Morgan, a spokesman for Capital City Care.

Morgan said he was not aware of any health insurers willing to cover medical marijuana purchases. The prices, he said, reflect the highly regulated nature of the District’s system and the firm’s investment in its dispensary and growing operations.

Senior citizens, veterans and low-income patients are eligible for discounts of 10 to 15 percent, he said.

“After a couple of years of hard work, it’s exciting to open our doors and serve the patients our facility is really for,” Morgan said. “This is a moment we’ve all been looking forward to for a long time.”

Alonzo opted for the Blue Dream, Jack Herer and Master Kush strains and, to consume it, a $120 Magic Flight vaporizer.

The StickyGuide, a Web site reviewing medical marijuana strains and dispensaries, said Blue Dream “is helpful for reducing pain and stress while maintaining energy levels” and offers a flavor “reminiscent of hash with a subtle hint of blueberry underneath.” Master Kush, the site says, is a “classic indica-dominant strain” whose characteristics include “helping [to] promote relaxation and assisting with sleep.”

Wayne Turner, one of the leaders of the 1998 initiative effort, called Monday’s sales “the end of the beginning.”

“It’s taken us 15 years to get to this point,” he said, adding that the program had much left to prove. “We can do this. We can do this right. The world isn’t going to come to an end. People are going to have access to something that really is going to help them, really help them ease their suffering.”

Source: Washington Post (DC)
Author: Mike DeBonis
Published: July 29, 2013
Copyright: 2013 Washington Post Company
Contact: [email protected]
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/

31 Jul 2013

D.C. Records its First Legal Pot Deal in 75 Years

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In March, Alonzo approached his doctor about seeking a marijuana recommendation.

To secure his first dose, Alonzo had to visit his doctor, who had to request recommendation forms from the health department, which then processed the forms and issued him a patient card.

Although the city’s medical marijuana program has started, it remains a slow start.

Senior citizens, veterans and low-income patients are eligible for discounts of 10 to 15 percent, he said.

Alonzo opted for the Blue Dream, Jack Herer and Master Kush strains and, to consume it, a $120 Magic Flight vaporizer.

Wayne Turner, one of the leaders of the 1998 initiative effort, called Monday’s sales “the end of the beginning.”

Source: Washington Post (DC)
Author: Mike DeBonis
Published: July 29, 2013
Copyright: 2013 Washington Post Company
Contact: [email protected]
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/

28 Jul 2013

Pro-Pot Ad Debuts At NASCAR Race

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Spectators streaming into the NASCAR Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway starting on Friday might notice something a little different about one of the advertisements on screens nearby. The 30-second spot, seen above, might look and sound a lot like a typical beer ad, but it’s actually promoting an alternative: legal marijuana.

The ad, titled “New Beer,” is from the Marijuana Policy Project — the nation’s largest pro-marijuana legalization advocacy group — and will air dozens of times beginning Friday. It marks the first time a pro-pot ad has been shown at a major sporting event, though technically it is being shown outside the stadium’s grounds.

The spot notes that marijuana is different from beer, which will likely be flowing generously at the weekend NASCAR race, frequently regarded as one of the year’s biggest. Pot has no calories, does not cause hangovers and does not contribute to violent or reckless behavior, the ad says. It concludes with the tagline, “Marijuana: Less harmful than alcohol and time to treat it that way,” which is laid over stock footage of some people who look like they’re high and happy on a beach.

“Our goal is to make this weekend’s event as educational as it will be enjoyable,” Mason Tvert, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project, said in a statement. “We simply want those adults who will be enjoying a beer or two to think about the fact that marijuana is an objectively less harmful product.”

Marijuana is not legal in Indiana, for medical or recreational use, and punishments governing the substance are quite strict. In fact, marijuana has only been legalized for recreational use in two states, Colorado and Washington. But Tvert says the ad is designed to educate and encourage people to get behind the wider legalization movement.

“Marijuana is less toxic and less addictive than alcohol, and it is far less likely to contribute to violent and reckless behavior,” he said. “We hope racing fans who support marijuana prohibition will question the logic of punishing adults simply for using a product that is safer than those produced by sponsors of NASCAR events and teams that race in them.”

USA Today reports that upwards of 600,000 fans may attend the race, 225,000 of them whom can be packed into stadium seating. Tvert told USA Today that the ad was purchased for a “non-profit” rate of $2,200 and made on a $350 budget.

Source: Huffington Post (NY)
Author: Nick Wing, The Huffington Post
Published: July 26, 2013
Copyright: 2013 HuffingtonPost.com, LLC
Contact: [email protected]
Website: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

27 Jul 2013

Recreational-Marijuana Merchants Rattled by Raids

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Federal raids of Washington state medical-marijuana dispensaries this week are raising concerns among state officials and entrepreneurs that recreational-marijuana may be similarly targeted when the market opens in the state early next year.

Drug Enforcement Administration spokeswoman Jodie Underwood said agents executed several search warrants involving “marijuana storefronts” Wednesday, but she declined to comment on why they were targeted or whether recreational pot shops might get the same treatment.

A person familiar with the raids said agents went after four medical-marijuana dispensaries related to a 2011 investigation into allegations of money laundering and illicit marijuana sales.

Residents in Colorado and Washington voted to legalize recreational marijuana last year. But federal authorities haven’t said how they will address these new state-regulated markets for marijuana, which remains illegal under federal law. Washington and other states allow medical marijuana, but this is also illegal under federal law, and federal authorities have raided dispensaries around the country.

Washington officials said this week after the raids that they were pushing forward with plans to permit recreational-marijuana production facilities and retail shops. But in light of the raids, coming months before the state rules on recreational marijuana take effect, state officials reiterated the need for guidance from the U.S. Department of Justice.

“We would welcome clarity from the federal government on how they expect to address Washington state’s emerging recreational system,” said Brian Smith, a spokesman for the Washington State Liquor Control Board, which has been charged with regulating legal pot. “With a lack of clarity, you’re always operating in an area of risk.”

Allison Price, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said the “department is continuing to review the legalization initiatives passed in Washington and Colorado.”

Bayside Collective in Olympia, Wash., was one of the dispensaries agents raided Wednesday, said Bayside office manager Addy Norton. Ms. Norton said she had just opened at 10:30 a.m. when DEA agents came with guns drawn. Ms. Norton said the DEA agents threw a search warrant on the floor when she asked to see it and they wouldn’t say what they were looking for.

“They said we are part of a two-year ongoing investigation,” Ms. Norton said, adding that agents took “all of our medicine” as well as documents from another medical-marijuana dispensary that Ms. Norton and her partner operated before it closed.

Ms. Underwood declined to comment on details of the raids or names of the dispensaries.

The raids put entrepreneurs set to enter the legal pot market on edge. “It’s really tough, the federal government hasn’t been clear about what their position is and all of us are just waiting, hoping and crossing our fingers,” said Jamen Shively, a former Microsoft executive who is planning to open retail pot shops in Washington and Colorado with his company Diego Pellicer Inc.

“Right now it’s impossible for me to tell whether this is part of a bona fide sting operation with cannabis crossing state lines or something like that, or is this more like sending a message?”

Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Author: Zusha Elinson and Joel Millman
Published: July 25, 2013
Copyright: 2013 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Contact: [email protected]
Website: http://www.wsj.com/

25 Jul 2013

Denver Auditor Suggests 3.5 Percent Tax

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Denver Auditor Dennis Gallagher disagrees with Mayor Michael Hancock’s recreational marijuana tax target, arguing the city should seek a starting tax rate of 3.5 percent instead of the mayor’s suggested 5 percent tax rate.

Gallagher warned Denver City Council members in a letter sent to Councilman Charlie Brown Monday, that the city’s 5 percent tax rate plan risks sending users back to the “dark shadows of the black market.”

“He wants the city to be very careful about not putting too much of a tax on it, because you (could) then defeat the purpose of what Amendment 64 was meant to do, which is not buying on the black market,” said Denis Berckefeldt, spokesman for the auditor.

The city expects it will have to spend about $9.4 million on education, enforcement and regulation of the pot industry, for which the tax would compensate.

The council will determine a starting tax rate and ceiling at its meeting Monday. The city will then pose those rates to voters in November. If approved, the council can raise the recreational marijuana tax rate to the determined cap.

Councilwoman Jeanne Faatz said she is concerned with providing Denver with the necessary resources to regulate this new industry.

“I see no reason to start worrying about competing with the black market,” she said. “I want to set (the tax) where I feel makes sense, and I don’t believe that 5 percent is excessive.”

The letter came less than a week after an audit found grievous problems with how the city licenses, tracks and manages Denver’s medical marijuana industry.

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Complete Article: http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_23717369/

Source: Denver Post (CO)
Author: Ally Marotti, The Denver Post
Published: July 24, 2013
Copyright: 2013 The Denver Post
Website: http://www.denverpost.com/
Contact: [email protected]

25 Jul 2013

Activists Decry New Legal Marijuana Rules

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Changes to Dealer Provisions May Make It Harder for Those in Need to Get Medication

Marijuana activist Sam Mellace hopes to be the first licensed medical marijuana producer in Canada after spending the past 10 years running his “pretty much” legal operation.

The Abbotsford, B.C., resident has been producing marijuana since 2002 for himself and three other medical users, in accordance with current laws.

But starting on April 1, 2014, authorized users will not be able to grow their own pot – they will have to get it from licensed producers.

Mr. Mellace finalized an application to Health Canada on Monday for his company, New Age Medical Solutions, and his lawyers plan to send it by courier on Tuesday.

“I just want to be able to dispense so I can finally start making some money instead of being in the hole,” he said. But he has stiff competition. For 13 years, Prairie Plant Systems Inc. has been the only company producing legal marijuana and seeds on contract to Health Canada. The company submitted an application earlier this month.

“Up to this point, we’ve been the only ones working with the rules,” said the company’s CEO, Brent Zettl.

He said this has led to “unfair competition” from amateur operations because they have no requirements about quality control.

“They can do whatever they want,” he said, adding that now everyone will be on the same page.

Mr. Mellace said his system is advanced as well. At his compound, with security cameras and dogs, he said, he profiles the plants and checks them regularly.

“Our main objective is to help as many people as we can and give them the best product possible,” he said.

But he admits he has not always operated strictly to the letter of the law.

Mr. Mellace, who uses medically prescribed marijuana for chronic pain from a bad car accident about 10 years ago, does not like to smoke marijuana. Instead, he turns his crops into a kind of butter in a process that skirts the law. He uses the butter in cookies and even spaghetti sauce. He has also made a cream from marijuana for arthritis.

“We follow, pretty much, the rule of law,” he said, although he added that he occasionally processes more than the legally allowed amount when making his butter.

“I would say it’s a grey area,” he said.

Jeannine Ritchot, Health Canada’s director of medical marijuana regulatory reform, said the new rules answer concerns from municipalities and fire and law enforcement officials about public health and safety.

“The purpose of that is to make sure that consumers are having access to quality-controlled marijuana,” she said.

The ministry’s marijuana is supplied to authorized users by mail and she said the government has seen this as the safest way to provide it.

“There’s been virtually no episodes of diversion as a result of this system,” she says.

The new rules, announced in June, create a system of supply and distribution by licensed producers regulated by the government ministry. These producers will be subject to security requirements, inspections and good production practices.

The new system will run alongside the old one until April 1, 2014. Under the old system, people prescribed medical marijuana could grow their own plants and buy seeds and marijuana from Health Canada. Starting in April, authorized people will be able to get medical marijuana from private licensed producers only.

Instead of having to get a special license through Health Canada, patients will have to get a prescription for medical marijuana.

Mr. Mellace worries that patients may have trouble. “If [doctors] don’t sign prescriptions, that means there isn’t anything going out.”

Health Canada has said in a statement that it will increase the price – – currently $5 per gram – to match that of “the first established licensed producer.”

According to the most recent statistics released Dec. 31 by Health Canada, 28,115 people are authorized to possess dried marijuana in Canada. Of those, 18,063 have licenses to produce their own marijuana for personal use while 5,283 indicated they will get marijuana or seeds from Health Canada.

Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Copyright: 2013 The Globe and Mail Company
Contact: [email protected]
Website: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Author: Joshua Rapp Learn

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