Thread: Free Weeds !

Common sense, humanity argue for relaxation of La.’s marijuana laws, so it may not happen any time soon.
Claims on pot seem like bunk
James Gill - March 06, 2014

The proposition that marijuana users commit 95 percent of violent crimes in this country is so clearly absurd that state Sen. Bob Kostelka, R-Monroe, was quick to claim he had been misquoted.

Kostelka wants you to know his actual words were that “95 percent of total crime can be associated with illegal drugs.”

That’s OK, then. Here is one legislator with a firm grip on reality.

Kostelka is not just any legislator. A retired judge, he chairs the committee that will consider a bill in the upcoming session to reduce the savage prison sentences prescribed for marijuana possession in Louisiana. He led the fight to kill similar legislation last year.

Even such law-and-order stalwarts as Gov. Bobby Jindal recognize the folly of locking up nonviolent dope smokers for decades, and want to switch the emphasis to rehabilitation. But Kostelka smells a rat. The bill, filed by Rep. Austin Badon, D-New Orleans, “is nothing more than a ruse, a step toward legalization,” according to Kostelka, who vows to “fight it every step of the way.”

Badon’s bill would leave the maximum sentence for first offenders unchanged at six months. A second offense could bring two years, instead of five, and a third offense five years, instead of 20. If Badon’s scheme is really to flood the streets with skunk, he is certainly making a modest start.

Kostelka aired his ideas on drugs and crime at a meeting of the state Sentencing Commission, which nevertheless passed a resolution noting that Badon’s bill “comports with the desires of a majority of Louisiana citizens” and other southern legislatures.

Supporters of Badon’s bill, calling themselves Louisianians for Responsible Reform, issued a news release asserting that Kostelka could have gotten his over-the-top numbers from only one source, a seriously wacky website called Marijuana Makes You Violent. The site not only blames marijuana for 95 percent to 99 percent of violent crime, but claims toking brings “immediate death.” It quotes the imaginary National Institute on Marijuana Abuse and Marijuanaism. A spoof, surely.

Kostelka said he had never even heard of the website, and had arrived at his 95 percent independently. “That comes directly from law enforcement officials I’ve asked and from my 20 years as a judge,” he said. Unless Monroe residents are disproportionately prone to seek narcotic relief from everyday tedium — a possibility we cannot entirely discount — Kostelka’s memory must be faulty.

The law enforcement officials he consulted cannot have been feds, because they would have wised him up to a study of drug use in the criminal classes conducted last year. According to White House drug czar Gil Kerlikowske — try getting a stoner to spell that — more than 60 percent of people arrested in five major cities tested positive for illegal drugs, marijuana being the most common. That falls a long way short of what Kostelka claimed, either in his version or the Responsible Reform crowd’s.

The pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project’s response to the study was to note that most criminal suspects had been drinking water but that didn’t mean water caused crime, which just goes to show that neither side in this debate has a monopoly on dumb remarks. It is true that correlation is not the same as causation, but the link between crime and illegal drugs is too strong to be dismissed as coincidence. Opinions may vary on just how harmful weed may be, but we know for a fact that water does not remove inhibitions, and a ready supply may be obtained without knocking over a convenience store.

Jindal has indicated he might approve marijuana to ease the pain of the chronically sick, but Kostelka thinks any legislation to achieve that would be another “ruse” on the “slippery slope” toward overall legalization.

Common sense and humanity argue for a relaxation of Louisiana’s marijuana laws, so there may not be much chance it will happen any time soon. Kostelka, we may be confident, will play a prominent role in discussions. As to what percentage of his remarks will be tosh, I wouldn’t put it below 95.

http://theadvocate.com/columnists/85...-claims-on-pot

My Trip to the Pot Shop
Medical marijuana is quite literally a life saver.
By Michelle Malkin - March 26, 2014 12:00 AM

Pueblo West, Colo. – It’s 9:00 a.m. on a weekday, and I’m at the Marisol Therapeutics pot shop. This is serious business. Security is tight. ID checks are frequent. Merchandise is strictly regulated, labeled, wrapped, and controlled. The store is clean, bright, and safe. The staffers are courteous and professional. Customers of all ages are here.

There’s a middle-aged woman at the counter nearby who could be your school librarian. On the opposite end of the dispensary, a slender young soldier in a wheelchair with close-cropped hair, dressed in his fatigues, consults with a clerk. There’s a gregarious cowboy and an inquisitive pair of Baby Boomers looking at edibles. A dude in a hoodie walks in with his backpack.

And then there’s my husband and me.

The dispensary is split in two: “recreational” on one side, “medical” on the other. Medical customers must have state-issued cards and a doctor’s approval. The inventory is not taxed, so prices are lower on that side. On the recreational side, where I’m peering at mysterious jars of prickly green goods, “Smoke on the Water” is thumping from stereo speakers. Yes, there’s a massive banner advertising a Tommy Chong appearance, and issues of High Times are on display. But the many imposing signs posted on the wall emphatically warn: No smoking, no open drug consumption, and absolutely no entry allowed into the locked lab where the cannabis plants sit under bright lights.

Before I tell you how and why my hubby and I ended up at Marisol Therapeutics, some background about my longtime support of medical marijuana. More than 15 years ago in Seattle, while working at the Seattle Times, I met an extraordinary man who changed my mind about the issue. Ralph Seeley was a Navy nuclear-submarine officer, pilot, cellist, and lawyer suffering from chordoma, a rare form of bone cancer that starts in the spine. He had undergone several surgeries, including removal of one lung and partial removal of the other, and was confined to a wheelchair.

Chronically nauseous from chemotherapy and radiation, weak from a suppressed appetite, and suffering excruciating pain, Seeley turned to marijuana cigarettes for relief.

Contrary to cultural stereotype, Seeley was far from “wasted.” While smoking the drug to reduce his pain, he finished law school — something he couldn’t have done while on far-more-powerful “mainstream” narcotics, which left him zonked out and vomiting uncontrollably in his hospital bed after chemo. Seeley had the backing of his orthopedic doctor and University of Washington School of Medicine oncologist Dr. Ernest Conrad. He took his plight to the Washington state supreme court, where he asserted a constitutionally protected liberty interest in having his doctor issue a medical-pot prescription.

The court rejected Seeley’s case for physician-prescribed marijuana, arguing that the government’s interest in preserving an “interlocking trellis” of costly and ineffective War on Drugs laws trumped his right to individual autonomy and physician treatment. After a decade-long battle with cancer, Seeley died in 1998. But his spirit persevered. Seeley bravely paved the way for medical-marijuana laws in nearly two dozen states, including Washington’s Initiative 692, approved by voters ten months after he died, and Colorado’s Amendment 20, passed by popular referendum in 2000.

Support for these ballot measures and similar efforts (like the newly enacted Charlee’s Law in Utah, legalizing medical cannabis oil) transcends political lines. Why? Because cancer, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, and other chronic and terminal diseases have no partisan affiliations.

This brings us back to Pueblo. For the past three months, my mother-in-law, Carole, whom I love with all my heart, has battled metastatic melanoma. After a harrowing week of hospitalization and radiation, she’s at home now. A miraculous new combination of oral cancer drugs seems to have helped enormously with pain and possibly contained the disease’s spread. But Carole’s loss of appetite and nausea persist.

A month ago, with encouragement from all of her doctors here in Colorado, she applied for a state-issued medical-marijuana card. It still hasn’t come through. As a clerk at Marisol Therapeutics told us, there’s a huge backlog. But thanks to Amendment 64, the marijuana drug-legalization act approved by voters in 2012, we were able to legally and safely circumvent the bureaucratic holdup. “A lot of people are in your same situation,” the pot-shop staffer told us. “We see it all the time, and we’re glad we can help.”

Our stash included ten pre-rolled joints, a “vape pen,” and two containers of cheddar-cheese-flavored marijuana crackers (they were out of brownies). So far, just one cracker a day is yielding health benefits. Carole is eating better than she has in three months. For us, there’s no greater joy than sharing the simple pleasure of gathering in the kitchen for a meal, with Grandma Carole at the head of the table.

Do I worry about the negative costs, abuses, and cultural consequences of unbridled recreational pot use? Of course I do. But when you get past all the “Rocky Mountain High” jokes and look past all the cable-news caricatures, the legalized marijuana entrepreneurs here in my adopted home state are just like any other entrepreneurs: securing capital, paying taxes, complying with a thicket of regulations, taking risks, and providing goods and services that ordinary people want and need. Including our grateful family.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...ichelle-malkin

Originally Posted by hblueeyes

Illinois has passed medical mj but is moving very slowly. We buy ours from a local dealer which is still illegal buy has been tiered down to a misdemeanor. I do not know how hubby could live day by day without it. It's a beautiful thing. (Martha Stewart voice).

Me

When my dad was terminal I was getting "herbal folk remedies" from a friend. Illegal - yes. Do it again - if I have too

DEA warns of stoned rabbits if Utah passes medical marijuana
By Christopher Ingraham March 2, 2015

Utah is considering a bill that would allow patients with certain debilitating conditions to be treated with edible forms of marijuana. http://fox13now.com/2015/02/25/bill-...juana-in-utah/

If the bill passes, the state's wildlife may "cultivate a taste" for the plant, lose their fear of humans, and basically be high all the time. That's according to testimony presented to a Utah Senate panel (time stamp 58:00) last week by an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
http://utahlegislature.granicus.com/...586KY.facebook

"I deal in facts. I deal in science," said special agent Matt Fairbanks, who's been working in the state for a decade. He is member of the "marijuana eradication" team in Utah. Some of his colleagues in Georgia recently achieved notoriety by raiding a retiree's garden and seizing a number of okra plants. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...e-okra-plants/

Fairbanks spoke of his time eliminating back-country marijuana grows in the Utah mountains, specifically the environmental costs associated with large-scale weed cultivation on public land: "Personally, I have seen entire mountainsides subjected to pesticides, harmful chemicals, deforestation and erosion," he said. "The ramifications to the flora, the animal life, the contaminated water, are still unknown."

Fairbanks said that at some illegal marijuana grow sites he saw "rabbits that had cultivated a taste for the marijuana. ..." He continued: "One of them refused to leave us, and we took all the marijuana around him, but his natural instincts to run were somehow gone."

It's true that illegal pot farming can have harmful environmental consequences. Of course, nothing about these consequences is unique to marijuana. If corn were outlawed and cartels started growing it in national forests, the per-plant environmental toll would be about the same. http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/forest...s-public-lands

But backcountry marijuana grows are a direct result of marijuana's illegal status. If you're concerned about the environmental impact of these grows, an alternative is to legalize and regulate the plant so that people can grow it on farms and in their gardens, rather than on remote mountainsides.

Now, regarding rabbits. Some wild animals apparently do develop a taste for bud (and, yes, best to keep it away from your pets). But I don't know that the occasional high rabbit constitutes grounds for keeping marijuana prohibition in place, any more than drunk squirrels are an argument for outlawing alcohol. And let's not even get started on the nationwide epidemic of catnip abuse.

There was a time, not too long ago, when drug warriors terrified a nation with images of "the devil's weed" and "reefer madness." Now, it seems that enforcers of marijuana law conjuring up a stoned bunny?

Not scary enough for the Utah Senate, it seems: the panel approved the bill and sent it to the full Senate, where it will be debated this week.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...cal-marijuana/

:weed:

Sheriffs sue Colorado over legal marijuana
Trevor Hughes, USATODAY 12:08 a.m. EST March 5, 2015

DENVER — Sheriffs from Colorado and neighboring states Kansas and Nebraska say in a lawsuit to be filed Thursday that Colorado's marijuana law creates a "crisis of conscience" by pitting the state law against the Constitution and puts an economic burden on other states.

The lawsuit asks a federal court in Denver to strike down Colorado's Amendment 64 that legalized the sale of recreational marijuana and to close the state's more than 330 licensed marijuana stores.

Lead plaintiff, Larimer County, Colo., Sheriff Justin Smith, calls the case a "constitutional showdown." Each day, he says, he must decide whether to violate the Colorado Constitution or the U.S. Constitution. Colorado legalized recreational marijuana sales Jan. 1, 2014, but marijuana remains illegal at the federal level.

Colorado is "asking every peace officer to violate their oath," Smith said. "What we're being forced to do ... makes me ineligible for office. Which constitution are we supposed to uphold?"

The out-of-state sheriffs say the flow of Colorado's legal marijuana across the border has increased drug arrests, overburdened police and courts and cost them money in overtime.

Felony drug arrests in the town of Chappell in Deuel County, Neb., 7 miles north of the Colorado border, jumped 400% over three years, a USA TODAY report tracking the flow of marijuana from Colorado into small towns across Nebraska found. Deuel County Sheriff Adam Hayward is one of the plaintiffs.

Police officers monitoring the flow of marijuana outside Colorado say volumes have risen annually. The Colorado-based Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force is still compiling 2014 numbers but expects to see the trend continue, director Tom Gorman said. He said non-residents often strike backdoor deals with legal growers to buy more than they are allowed, then illegally drive, fly or mail the marijuana across state lines.

The lawsuit invokes the federal government's right to regulate drugs and interstate commerce and argues that Colorado's decision to legalize marijuana hurt communities on the other side of the state lines. Attorneys general of Nebraska and Oklahoma filed a similar lawsuit late last year.

Colorado has not responded to the suit from the attorneys general, and Gov. John Hickenlooper, the defendant in the sheriffs' lawsuit, has not been served. Hickenlooper has said he respects the will of Colorado's voters. He has sought guidance from the federal government.

The Justice Department said it would largely take a hands-off approach in states that have legalized marijuana as long as regulations seek to keep the drugs away from children and criminals. Smith, the sheriff from Larimer, said that guidance amounts to instructing people "how to violate federal law but not get prosecuted."

Supporters of legalization criticize such lawsuits as last-ditch attempts by conservative politicians to derail states' movement toward marijuana legalization.

Speaking about the Nebraska-Oklahoma lawsuit in December, Mason Tvert of the Marijuana Policy Project said police should focus their attention on serious crimes and leave alone people who choose to use marijuana. "These guys are on the wrong side of history," Tvert said.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2...uana/24385401/

Legalizing pot ?
Viewing Poll Results: Total Voters: 8.

Good idea ? 6 = 75%

Bad Idea ? 0 = 0%

Only conditionally - for medical use : 2 = 25%

Why Morgan Freeman Thinks Marijuana Should Be Legalized
By Catarina Cowden 22 hours ago

Marijuana legalization has been a hot topic lately and many celebrities have used their status in the media to vocalize their own thoughts on the matter. There are those we’ve grown accustomed to speaking loud and proud of their marijuana use (Snoop Dogg anyone?) but then there are those that to some may seem unexpected. One in particular is Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman who just pretty much destroyed the argument against legalizing weed.

In sitting down with The Daily Beast to discuss Freeman’s newest film 5 Flights Up, the actor opened up about his own use of marijuana as well as his support for the movement to legalize it. Freeman, who suffered a serious injury in a car accident years ago is in a great deal of pain. And marijuana has been the only thing that offers him relief. Freeman is a long time user of weed though, and he says this movement towards legalization has been a long time coming. But the biggest problem is that people need to realize that alcohol has no medicinal use, while marijuana does.

Marijuana has many useful uses. I have fibromyalgia pain in this arm, and the only thing that offers any relief is marijuana. They’re talking about kids who have grand mal seizures, and they’ve discovered that marijuana eases that down to where these children can have a life. That right there, to me, says, ‘Legalize it across the board!’

Clearly marijuana has played an important role in Freeman’s later success. Since, as he puts it, is the only thing truly able to help ease the pain in his arm. Without that relief, who knows whether or not the actor could still be going strong with his film career. But, aside from his own personal use of the drug, he makes a particularly solid point in pointing out the negative effects of weed, where he finds none. Freeman recalls the peaceful Woodstock vs. its less marijuana-friendly 30th-anniversary event where riots broke out:

And what negative effects does it have? Look at Woodstock 1969. They said, ‘We’re not going to bother them or say anything about smoking marijuana,’ and not one problem or fight. Then look at what happened in ’99.

And what negative effects does it have? Look at Woodstock 1969. They said, ‘We’re not going to bother them or say anything about smoking marijuana,’ and not one problem or fight. Then look at what happened in ’99.

http://www.bigbigforums.com/news-inf...ree-weeds.html

Marijuana use involved in more fatal accidents in Colorado
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-mui051514.php

Marijuana use involved in more fatal accidents in Colorado
http://seattle.cbslocal.com/2014/02/...-have-tripled/

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

hmmm... If it had so many medicinal qualities, makes some one wonder why hasn't the big drug companies included that in its pain meds?

Seems like a lot of BS to me.