Pubdate: Wed, 29 Jun 2005
Source: Marshfield Mariner (MA)
Copyright: 2005 Marshfield Mariner
Contact:  http://www2.townonline.com/marshfield/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3710
Author: Tom  Henshaw

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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