Looking around last week at the exhibitor showroom of CannaCon, the huge marijuana-business expo held outside Seattle, Greg James had something of an epiphany: The pot industry in America is growing like, you guessed it, a weed. "There was everybody from soil companies to grow-light companies to lawyers and security and insurance firms to a TV network doing shows just on marijuana," said James, whose Seattle-based Marijuana Venture newsletter has exploded from eight to 84 glossy pages since it launched in March and is already turning a profit. "I'm not sure how many of them will survive, but it's amazing how fast this thing is moving." [continues 1098 words]
Fueling Their 80-Hour Work Weeks With a Cocktail of Drugs, Many Tech Workers - and Execs- Are Slipping into a Dangerous Spiral For Google executive Forrest Timothy Hayes, heroin was the killer app. From the way the Santa Cruz cops talk about it, the security camera video that captured a reputed high-price call girl injecting the 51-year-old tech veteran with a fatal dose of the drug aboard his yacht in Santa Cruz was surely horrific. But it was particularly chilling for another reason: [continues 1871 words]
BERKELEY -- To legalize pot or not? That's the question California voters will face in the fall now that the ballot measure has qualified for the November election. The state's political candidates got to face it this past weekend. And their answers -- more or less -- were no, no, no and no. Asked whether any of them had ever smoked marijuana, the answers were, again: No -- except for the occasional "dunno." "I am not supporting the initiative," said Republican U.S. Senate candidate Tom Campbell, unable to comment at length because he was driving at the time. Before hanging up, though, he was able to add: "I've never smoked marijuana in my life." [continues 383 words]
Police Chief Vows to Clean Up Cul-De-Sac While the justice system deals with accused cop-killer Alberto Alvarez, East Palo Alto Police Chief Ron Davis is going after his main accomplice: The one-block-long cul-de-sac called Sacramento Street. This gritty tenth of a mile is close to where police officer Richard May was gunned down the night of Jan. 7 after responding to a disturbance call at a nearby taqueria. It's where Alvarez, now being held without bond in San Mateo County Jail, was discovered hiding the next morning. And for over a decade, police say, it has served as an open-air drug bazaar for the Sac Street Gang, one of the city's three major crime groups and Alvarez's suspected crew. [continues 857 words]
Politician-Academic Plays Both Fields Students and professors at the Haas School of Business at UC-Berkeley should know this about Tom Campbell, selected this month as their new dean: He sees good in everything, even in very bad movies. "They're really ponderous, think they have a message, are poorly made, and have terrible acting," Campbell said last week. "Yet they are like humanity at its best -- frail, but not knowing how frail they are." Campbell was not selected to lead the nation's second-oldest business school because he could recite dialogue from "Plan 9 From Outer Space," though he certainly can. But that passion for things small and great -- most notably in education and politics -- helped the Stanford University professor and former congressman from Silicon Valley win over the Berkeley crowd. [continues 1268 words]
EUREKA -- The marijuana growers of Humboldt County already have enough to worry about -- cops dropping in by helicopter to trash their plants, stoned-out neighbors ripping them off and nasty rainstorms washing out their roads. Now, just as winter's indoor-growing season demands more electricity than ever, here comes the state's power burnout. Many of the big-time growers have moved indoors and off the PG&E grid, producing their own diesel-generated power to avoid detection. But smaller entrepreneurs -- some of them growing marijuana semi-legally for medicinal use -- remain plugged in. [continues 924 words]
SANTA FE, N.M. -- Here's how Gov. Gary Johnson plans to relax next weekend: Fly to Hawaii. Swim for 2.4 miles off the Kona coast. Bike 112 miles over lava fields. Then wrap up the rest of the Ironman Triathlon with a 26.2-mile marathon by nightfall. For Johnson, baby-faced self-made millionaire, health nut and first governor in state history to serve back-to-back terms, the Ironman will seem like a luau after what he has been through this month. When Johnson recently became the highest-ranking elected official to call for legalization of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs, he set a fire under what basically has been a dormant debate about legalizing drugs as a way to wrestle the problem to the ground. [continues 1196 words]
