Re "Lost Dowd in high weeds" (Notes from the Neon Babylon, July 10):

Great column regarding marijuana edibles. Just as most people have to suffer the seriously unpleasant effects of alcohol poisoning before they truly understand how to use that well known drug, so do people need to learn how to dose themselves on edibles.

As one who suffered an MJ overdose more than 40 years ago, I have been absolutely gun shy around pot munchies. One of the best things that should come out of legalization is an understanding of dosage, regulated content and potency of edibles.

I can't wait. I would love to be able to eat just enough to relax me to sleep.

Roll on, reefer sanity!

Paul Blakey

via email

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Re "Lost Dowd in high weeds" (Notes from the Neon Babylon, July 10):

Let's remember that dumbass Dowd gobbled an entire edible that was clearly marked as a 16-dose edible. Hell, that kind of edible dose would would have given Rasta Bob Marley heart palpitations. I have been a California medical cannabis patient since 1998 and now, after recent heart surgery and a complication or two, I can not vaporize flowers ever again, and I depend entirely on edibles and tinctures for pain medication.

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Newsrooms always get a lot of material on financial services-public offerings, merger announcements, that kind of thing.

Those materials are getting more interesting these days. For instance, this came in on July 1, datelined from Mesquite in Clark County:

"Cannabis Sativa, Inc. (OTCQB:CBDS) announced today that on June 30, 2014, it consummated the acquisition of Kush, a Nevada corporation ('Kush'), and its consolidated subsidiary, following which Kush became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Company (the 'Merger'); ... Kush is a development stage company engaged in the research, development and licensing of specialized natural cannabis products, including cannabis formulas, edibles, topicals, strains, recipes and delivery systems."

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Regarding Erin Ryan's July 7 column, "A child of the '80s grapples with the failures of the =80'war on drugs,'" the drug war is largely a war on marijuana consumers. Marijuana is by far the most popular illicit drug. In 2012, there were 749,825 marijuana arrests in the United States, almost 90 percent for simple possession.

If the goal of marijuana prohibition is to subsidize violent drug cartels, prohibition is a grand success. The drug war distorts supply and demand dynamics so that big money grows on little trees. If the goal is to deter use, marijuana prohibition is a catastrophic failure. The United States has almost double the rate of marijuana use as the Netherlands, where marijuana is legal.

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Medical Marijuana Access Spotty As Local Jurisdictions, Entrepreneurs Show Little Interest

CARSON CITY - Much of urban Nevada is quickly moving forward to license medical marijuana dispensaries, but patients in some rural areas might find it difficult to obtain the drug because local governments are opting out.

Another barrier to getting the drug is the apparent lack of interest by entrepreneurs to operate in the sparsely populated areas. Nevada's rural counties reported little to no interest from applicants wishing to establish dispensaries, according to the Nevada Association of Counties.

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Restaurant's Slot Operator Removed

The Gaming Control Board told owners of a Las Vegas restaurant Thursday to find a new slot machine route operator for the business's games - one whose owner doesn't have ties to medical marijuana.

The decision marks the first time gaming regulators have ruled on a licensing matter concerning a gaming business in light of the state's fledgling medical pot industry.

In May, the Control Board in an industry notice admonished gaming license-holders and prospective license applicants to stay away from the medical marijuana business in light of continued federal enforcement of anti-drug laws.

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On June 3, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd blew a lot of minds when she wrote about her experience in Colorado with one of the newly legal pot-laced candy bars now available there.

What made it memorable was that Maureen got rocked hard by her stony treat. "I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. ... I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. ... I was thirsty but couldn't move to get water. ... I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me" and so on and so forth.

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Nevada's implementation of the law requiring medical marijuana establishment (MME) licensing is so far plagued by hidden financing, proxy companies, questionable campaign contributions and forbidden crossovers between gambling licensees and dispensary ownership in Clark County. The problem is that the state has capped the number of dispensaries by county, has required enormous capital to apply, and the licenses are awarded by politicians. What could possibly go wrong?

When the state artificially creates a market, rather than markets creating themselves, there will be corruption. When the number of legalized outlets is capped by government, and only government can approve new applications, the opportunity for start up competition is capped as well. Without competition, there will be a few entrenched special interests who will dominate the industry. Nevada promised transparency in the selection process, but so far the process has been opaque.

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War has been declared on the "war on drugs." Not by violent cartels, but by economists, public health workers, human rights advocates and others who believe that punitive, blanket prohibition is not only failing but has done enormous harm. Thousands took to the streets of more than 100 cities across the globe June 26, "reclaiming" the United Nations' International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking by protesting the fallout of the drug war, from health crises to mass incarceration.

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Americans Fund Cartels That Have Kids Fleeing

Since Oct. 1, U.S. Border Patrol agents have apprehended more than 52,000 children traveling alone from Central America and Mexico. Many of these kids made the dangerous trip to escape even more dangerous conditions in their home countries. According to a 2013 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees survey of 400 children who fled to the United States from Central America and Mexico, nearly half said drug cartel and gang violence had affected them personally, while 20 percent said they had been abused or otherwise experienced violence in their own homes.

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Cannabis Convention Attracts Business-Minded Attendees

Attendees at the International Cannabis Association's convention Sunday sought to apply their business experiences to an emerging market.

Among those present at the two-day convention at the Hard Rock Hotel were a security expert, a New York ammunitions manufacturer, a self-described reverend of cannabis, a real estate investor and others - all eager to learn more about the emerging industry.

The keynote speaker was New York state Sen. Diane Savino, a Democrat and a sponsor of a medical marijuana bill that passed in New York on Friday. New York would become the 23rd state to legalize medical marijuana if Gov. Andrew Cuomo signs the bill.

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Taking a slow but steady approach, the city of Las Vegas has a tentative plan to handle applications for medical marijuana establishments in its own fashion. Not the way Clark County did it. Not the way Henderson is doing it. Not the way North Las Vegas is expected to do it.

"The tentative plan is to have special use permits before the Planning Commission with meetings in the month of September," Planning Director Flinn Fagg said Wednesday. "Then it would be forward to the City Council in October. It would be about the same time the state will be reviewing it."

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Permits Granted to Production, Cultivation Firms

Clark County commissioners on Tuesday approved 101 applications from medical marijuana developers seeking to open production, cultivation and laboratory facilities from Laughlin to Las Vegas.

With unanimous votes, commissioners approved the vast majority, rejecting only five applications from a pool of 106. Commissioners started the day with 112 applications, but six were withdrawn.

The seven-hour hearing capped the county's foray into approving medical marijuana applications for special use permits. They approved 58 permits for cultivation facilities, 38 for production facilities and five for laboratories for testing medical marijuana.

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Henderson on Right Path, but Don't Over-Regulate

Henderson is taking the high road in licensing medical marijuana dispensaries. Rather than pick favorites at the outset of the process, the city proposes to screen license applicants based on defined suitability criteria, then forward them to state regulators for evaluation. Under ordinances that will be considered by the City Council today, Henderson would not take the approach of Clark County, which invited a lobbying frenzy - and questions of integrity - by marching every applicant in front of the board and making its picks before state consideration. If the state doesn't license a dispensary, the application dies.

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Columnist's Pot Candy Flipped Switch in Brain

NEW YORK - Maureen Dowd, a 62-yearold Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, had a bad marijuana trip earlier this year. As part of her research into the legalization of recreational cannabis in Colorado, she ate a few too many bites of a pot-infused candy bar, entered a "hallucinatory state," and spent eight paranoid hours curled up on her hotel room bed.

Dowd used the experience as a jumping-off point to discuss the risks of overdosing on edible marijuana, which has become a major issue in pot-friendly states.

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Financial Institution Eager to Do Business With Would-Be Marijuana Dispensary

If finance executives are worried about getting involved with medical marijuana clients, don't tell Las Vegas banker John Sullivan.

First Security Bank of Nevada, led by CEO Sullivan, has signed on to manage cash and other banking transactions for would be dispensary operator GrowBlox Sciences.

GrowBlox, which said it "operates with the utmost compliance integrity," said its arrangement with First Security would eliminate the "cash-only" status of medical marijuana shops that have left them vulnerable to devastating theft.

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After my admission that I did a foolish thing in Denver - failing to realize that consuming a single square, about a quarter, of a pot candy bar was dicey for an edibles virgin - many in the pot industry upbraided me for doing a foolish thing.

But some in Mary Jane world have contacted me to say that my dysphoria (i.e., bummer) is happening more and more in Colorado.

Justin Hartfield is the California founder of Marijuana.com and Weedmaps.com (a sort of Yelp for pot), and an entrepreneur involved in some of the nation's top marijuana-technology companies. As The Wall Street Journal noted in a profile in March, the 30-year-old former high school pot dealer wants to be "the Philip Morris of pot."

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Council Meeting Will Set Up Parameters for Businesses

Henderson is getting ready to enter the medical marijuana fray a year after the state signed the industry into law.

The city is scheduled to introduce a series of bills at the June 17 City Council meeting that would set the parameters for medical marijuana establishments including locations, fees, application process and general regulations.

The new ordinances are scheduled for final approval at the July 1 council meeting.

However, no time frame for accepting applications and beginning the approval process for licensing dispensaries has been established, according to city spokeswoman Karina Milani.

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When Alecia Phonesavanh heard her 19-month-old son, Bounkham, screaming, she thought he was simply frightened by the armed men who had burst into the house in the middle of the night. Then she saw the charred remains of the portable playpen where the toddler had been sleeping, and she knew something horrible had happened.

Bounkham "Bou Bou" Phonesavanh, who is in a medically induced coma at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, may never wake up. But the appalling injuries he suffered during a police raid in Habersham County, Ga., last month should awaken the country to the moral obscenity that is the war on drugs.

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Winners Must Go Through State's Vetting Process Before Opening Shops

They came from near and far. Las Vegas Valley developers, medical marijuana industry veterans from Colorado and area doctors were among them.

The odds were against them. Seventy-nine applicants - down from 81 - aiming for part of the region's next industry: medical marijuana. And Clark County had just 18 slots for medical marijuana dispensaries.

There were familiar names among the winners that county commissioners picked Friday at the end of a three-day hearing. Longtime developer and gaming executive Randy Black, who retired last year as chief operating officer at Mesquite Gaming, for example, hopes to open a dispensary in Laughlin. He was the only applicant there.

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