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Mapping The Legal Marijuana Industry |
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Friday, 20 August 2010 00:00 |
 If a November proposition passes, plenty of moneymakers will want in.
OAKLAND, CALIF. -- Welcome to Oaksterdam, California's newest, least orthodox tourist attraction. Welcome, possibly, to the future of a multibillion-dollar business around legal marijuana.
Spread over an eight-block area of formerly disused downtown Oakland, the self-described Oaksterdam district neighborhood includes clinics and dispensaries for medical marijuana, coffee shops catering to cannabis patient, pot-themed souvenir shops, specialist law offices and Oaksterdam University, an education center for growing and dispensing marijuana. There are Segway tours, tourists and film crews.
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GOP Senate Candidate Ridicules Marijuana Pain Study |
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Monday, 16 August 2010 00:00 |
 GOP Senate Candidate Dino Rossi: "This bill isn't going to stimulate anything other than sales of Cheetos"
Just one day after sending out a news release making pot jokes about a Washington State University study on marijuana’s effect on pain, Republican Dino Rossi’s U.S. Senate campaign is claiming he “intended no disrespect to medical marijuana research.”
On Thursday, Rossi released a statement ridiculing the two-year, $148,000 project by psychology professor Michael Morgan, whose study involves injecting synthetic cannabinoids (the active chemicals found in marijuana) along with opiates in rats to study how to improve treatments for people with chronic pain.
Rossi said taxpayers “are tired of their money going up in smoke,” and that instead of creating jobs, the money isn’t “going to stimulate anything other than the sale of Cheetos.”
Rossi thought it would make an easy target, after all: Talk about “wasteful” federal stimulus spending to rile up the Tea Party faithful, and then drag in a tired old stoner stereotype for good measure.
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Critics of Prop. 19 on marijuana rely on fear, not facts |
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Sunday, 08 August 2010 00:00 |
 The California Legislative Analyst's Office's recently published critique of Proposition 19, the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010, provides needed clarity to the ongoing debate regarding marijuana policy and offers a swift rebuttal to the doomsday scenarios touted by many of the measure's opponents.
According to the Legislative Analyst's Office, the immediate effect of the measure would be to allow adults age 21 and older to possess and grow limited amounts of marijuana in the privacy of their own home. The agency estimates that halting the prosecution of these minor marijuana offenses would save state and local governments "several tens of millions of dollars annually," and enable law enforcement to reprioritize resources toward other criminal activities.
The longer-term impact of Proposition 19 would be to enable "local governments to adopt ordinances and regulations regarding commercial marijuana-related activities." These activities would include taxing and licensing establishments to produce and dispense marijuana to persons 21 and older. By doing so, "state and local governments could eventually collect hundreds of millions of dollars annually in additional revenues," the office estimates.
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Double Trouble for Medical Marijuana Treats |
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Wednesday, 04 August 2010 00:00 |
 (CBS) Medical marijuana users may not have the option of taking a spoonful of sugar with their medicine if a new Senate bill makes it through the House.
Last Thursday, the Senate passed a bill that would double the penalties for people who sell drug-infused sweets.
The bill has garnered support from unexpected quarters. Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), says that "those who say marijuana is medicine had better be prepared to market it as such - and not as candy."
Further, says St. Pierre, those who sell pot-infused brownies, cookies and other "medical edibles," or "medibles," have reason to be worried, because, in his opinion, the bill is written broadly enough to include them.
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Is America heading toward local marijuana regulation? |
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Tuesday, 03 August 2010 00:00 |
 Obama drug official praises local marijuana regulations.
Earlier this year, the Obama administration offered a live-and-let-live approach to medical marijuana providers, so long as they complied with state laws.
As one Obama administration official told the Los Angeles Times in March:
"If you are operating a medical marijuana clinic that is actually a front, we'll come after you. But if you are operating within the law, we are not going to prioritize our resources to go after them."
Since then, marijuana activists in California have been hoping for signs that the administration will move beyond tolerating medical marijuana and consider a major policy overhaul.
Those hopes were revived last week when the head of the White House’s office of national drug control policy, Gil Kerlikowske, offered seemingly friendly words for California’s medical-marijuana laws.
Kerlikowske was in California to announce a crackdown on huge commercial pot farms in the Sierra Nevada foothills near Fresno.
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