Cannabis Issue: Medical Cannabis Industry Thrives Even As the Economy and Legalization Movement Sputter CANNABIS When we did our first Cannabis Issue a year ago, the Bay Area's medical marijuana industry was booming, and there was high anticipation that California would soon legalize weed for everyone. Proposition 19 divided even those who fully support decriminalizing cannabis - partly because the existing system was working so well in San Francisco and many other cities, so people were wary of an uncertain future - and voters rejected the measure in November. [continues 695 words]
San Francisco's Foodies Are Bringing New Tastes and Sensibilities to Eating Marijuana CANNABIS Marijuana edibles have come a long way in a short time. Just a few years ago, the norm was still brownies of uncertain dosage that tasted like eating weed, right down to the occasional stem or lump of leaf, served in a wax paper envelope. But now the foodies have gotten into the game, producing a huge variety of tasty treats that are incredibly delicious even before the munchies kick in. [continues 1613 words]
Determent Program Offered To Seventh- And Fifth-Graders SHALLOTTE, N.C. -- Brunswick County school board members plan to spend $50,000 this year to expand an anti-drug education program that some studies say does not work. In addition, school board members voted to begin a Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program for Brunswick County seventh-graders without having qualified educators review the curriculum. "It is supposed to be better," said Reeda Hargrove, Brunswick County Schools' director of student support services. [continues 519 words]
Combining marijuana possession penalties with meth law penalties is like combining jaywalking penalties with drunken-driving penalties. This is not right; these are two totally different things. Come on members of the House, pull your head out. - ---- Steve Jones Eagle River [end]
Why Some Former Cops Argue That All Drugs A Cents - Not Just Pot - Should Be Legal San Francisco is home to a wide variety of drug users, from the hardcore smack addicts on Sixth Street to the club kids high on ecstasy or crystal meth to the yuppies snorting lines off their downtown desks or getting drunk after work to the cornucopia of people across all classes smoking joints in Golden Gate Park or in their living rooms on weekends. Drug law reformers come in similarly wide varieties, but most have a strong preference for first legalizing the most popular and least harmful of illegal drugs: marijuana. That's how medical marijuana got its quasi-legal status in the city, and why San Francisco hosted the huge state conference of California National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws conference that began on 4/20. [continues 420 words]
San Franciscans Support Medical Marijuana, But Not Necessarily In Their Neighborhoods Everybody in San Francisco supports medical marijuana, but nobody wants to live next to a pot club. That's the simple ' - if overgeneralized ' - political truth now plaguing Sup. Ross Mirkarimi and others at City Hall who want to regulate the quasi-legal dispensaries that were proliferating in the city before a moratorium went into effect earlier this year. Mirkarimi spent six months developing legislation to regulate pot clubs, which was considered by the Board of Supervisors Oct. 18, heavily amended, and continued to Oct. 25. That hearing was later postponed after a representative for some club owners filed a challenge under the California Environmental Quality Act that requires a 45-day comment period. [continues 705 words]
BOLIVIA, N.C. - The need to serve the public is a powerful force in the life of Greg Bellamy, the newly appointed executive director of the Brunswick County Board of Elections. Bellamy was the elected clerk of Brunswick Superior Court in the mid-1980s when he was ensnared in a drug net cast by then-District Attorney Mike Easley. Bellamy pleaded guilty to possession of a controlled substance, resigned his county post and faded from public view. [continues 635 words]
Ose Urged Federal Raids Even As Courts Consider Challenge To Congress's Authority Over Marijuana The questionable legal status of medical marijuana is confusing, even for Congressman Doug Ose. Yet a resolution to that legal ambiguity could be coming soon. The Woodland Republican (who didn't return repeated calls from SN&R) probably wouldn't admit to being confused, and he's certainly cast the matter in black-and-white terms in recent letters he's written on the topic, including a May 23 letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft urging a federal crackdown on California pot smokers. [continues 705 words]
In the wake of marijuana being legalized for medical use in California by Proposition 215 in 1996, Michael Riggs founded FloraCare, a group dedicated to helping bona fide patients get their medicine. Riggs says he has long taken marijuana for chronic pain and other ailments related to a heart defect that required open-heart surgery as a child and from a 1988 accident that broke several vertebrae in his neck. Along with fellow patients, Riggs began operating a "cannabis club" out of his Citrus Heights home and growing marijuana for club members in a Carmichael warehouse. [continues 907 words]
Two November Ballot Measures Aim To Scale Back The Nation's Toughest Crime Law Crime is down, way down, since 1994, when California voters approved the "Three Strikes and You're Out" ballot measure, the toughest anti-crime law in the country. "Three Strikes has revolutionized the way we combat crime in this country," declared Secretary of State Bill Jones, who co-authored the measure while a Republican member of the Assembly, in a press release last year. "By closing the revolving prison door we have created an effective deterrent to crime that has helped reduce the crime rate in California by 38 percent in just five years." [continues 4376 words]
Through its Office of National Drug Control Policy, the federal government spends $17 billion per year fighting drugs. That's roughly the same thing it spends on the Food Stamp program, which feeds poor Americans, and on our country's entire General Sciences, Space, and Technology budget. But the actual financial cost of the drug war is much higher, with many drug-reform advocacy groups quoting the cost at $50 billion, which is equal to the combined budgets for all of our country's agriculture, energy, and veteran's programs. [continues 316 words]
Can Stricter Laws and Enhanced Enforcement Subdue 'Immorality'? The public "debate" over drug policy really hasn't been a debate at all, but a one-sided crackdown on drug users driven by misinformation, the doomed politics of morality, and political demagoguery. Such is the conclusion of Ken Maier, a political science and public administration professor at Texas A&M University whose extensive research into morality politics resulted in his book "The Politics of Sin." Maier presented his views during a forum at Cal Poly earlier this years, sponsored by Cal Poly's Political Science Department. [continues 1234 words]
Spending, Arrests, Use, And Support For Legalization Are All On The Rise This spring Maurice Pitesky's front door became collateral damage in the War on Drugs, just one more barrier to a drug-free America that needed to be smashed. San Luis Obispo County Narcotics Task Force officers kicked in the front door to Pitesky's Oceano home on March 3, broke another door and a wall, and ransacked the house before realizing the people who lived there didn't fit the names on their search warrant. [continues 3057 words]
Beware: Reading This Article Could Make You Into A Felon, But Not Reading It Could Get You Arrested They are grayish-black flecks, such weightless objects for their potential. Poppy seeds grow into beautiful flowers, taste good in muffins, and produce opium. It is this latter trait that got Tom Dunbar and Jo-D Harrison into so much trouble. Take the smallest pinch of poppy seeds, the exact same kind that top your bagel, and plant them. In a few days, they will sprout tiny white stems, then slender green leaves, and will keep growing into hardy annuals with vibrant flowers. [continues 3109 words]
