Pubdate: Wed, 29 Jun 2005
Source: Weymouth News (MA)
Copyright: 2005 Weymouth News
Contact:  http://www2.townonline.com/weymouth/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3594
Author: Tom Henshaw/ Henshaw
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Sativex (Sativex)

NEW BATTLEFIELDS IN THE POT WAR

I don't know about you but if I were a narc I'd dump the badge and 
invest my IRA in Acapulco Gold, Jamaica Ganja or Big Sur Holy Weed. I 
don't know if it is worth the effort fighting "reefer madness" anymore.

Now, don't confuse me with a fan of marijuana.

I haven't had a cigarette of any shape, form, medical quality or 
condition of legality since May 17, 1964, at 3 o'clock in the 
afternoon when I got on a Fifth Avenue bus in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral.

But it seems like every time the Good Guys get a break, like the 
Supreme Court giving permission for the Feds to overrule the state 
laws on medicinal pot, the Bad Guys come up with a game-tying 
touchdown of their own.

I was reading last week where Federals narcs knocked over a 
storefront medical research center in Cool, Calif., and arrested 
attorney Dale Schafer, 50, and his wife, Marion Fry, 48, on charges 
of growing and distributing marijuana.

California was one of those states where folks with glaucoma were 
allowed to puff away on the weed legally on the assumption it was 
good for you. Of course, anything that is good for you immediately 
comes under government suspicion.

"They are charged with violating the old marijuana laws, which are 
now back in effect, and I'm hoping that the jury will see that Dr. 
Fry was acting as a physician," said their attorney, Laurence Lichter,

But that's not all, as the TV pitchmen like to say.

On the same page in USA Today was a report that Canadians now have 
access to a new drug called Sativex, which is derived from the 
marijuana plant and which you spray in your mouth rather than smoke.

Sativex is expensive, $124.95 a vial, which provides 51 squirts, and 
that averages out to $2.44 a squirt. Not that I know anything about 
it personally, but if you could get a quality toke for $2.44 or less 
before May 17, 1964, the dealer wasn't advertising.

Of course, Sativex is unauthorized in the United States and will be 
for years but I'm sure it won't be long before a brisk trade has 
developed between Niagara Falls, Ont., and Niagara Falls, N.Y. among 
grandsons of men who did it in the 1920s.

But that's still not all, as the TV pitchmen still like to say.

Chronic Candy of Corona, Calif., is marketing hemp-flavored 
lollypops, with two of them sold in a "nickel bag," and the guarantee 
that "Every lick is like taking a hit." You don't have to be a 
pothead to understand the meaning of "hemp" and a "nickel bag" and a "hit."

"The last thing we need is for kids to be acquiring a taste for a 
drug that's illegal," says Michigan State Rep. Dudley Spade, who has 
proposed a state ban on candy that contains pot-flavoring.

"There's nothing in it to get you high," says Tony Van Pelt, the 
president of Chronic Candy, who imports them from Europe. "My mom 
thinks she gets a buzz from it. I don't have the heart to tell her 
it's just the sugar."
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MAP posted-by: Beth