"Marijuana legalization on cusp of mass acceptance; In long journey, drug soars from illegal to popular" by Marc Fisher | Washington Post, March 02, 2014
Not according to yesterday's Globe and the Dutch experience.
Not according to yesterday's Globe and the Dutch experience.
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — In the ‘‘medication area’’ of the nation’s biggest marijuana exposition, scantily clad young women hand out marshmallows they’ve dipped into a rushing fountain of pot-laced chocolate.
A few steps away, Anthony Ramirez offers free hits from a bong filled with the waxy marijuana extract that his family started producing when a friend’s mother needed relief from the pain of lupus.
Across a vast outdoor plaza lined with hundreds of booths, last month’s Cannabis Cup gathering in southern California attracted more than 10,000 visitors at $40 a ticket.
By midafternoon, some of them are sprawled on overstuffed couches that merchants have thoughtfully provided. Others move from booth to booth, sampling wares from businesses that have risen from the underground economy to create a burgeoning industry of hazy legality.
No, the government cleared all that smoke out.
No, the government cleared all that smoke out.
Vendors hawk brightly colored candies, chocolate bars, slickly designed jars of gourmet peanut butter — all infused with weed. Smokers sample e-cigarettes, vaporizers, and the latest in bongs and glassware.
Agricultural firms display industrial-sized machinery for harvesting plants, electronics firms offer a dazzling array of grow lights, and everywhere, growers lovingly explain the virtues of dozens of plant strains such as Gorilla Glue, Silver Haze, and Crystal Coma.
All in a state where marijuana is not yet quite legal, and all without a single police officer to be seen.
America has been at the edge of marijuana legalization several times during the past half-century, but never as close to mass acceptance of the drug as the nation is today.
You may want to give that a double Dutch of a second thought.
You may want to give that a double Dutch of a second thought.
Since the 1960s, the United States has traveled on a herky-jerky trip from hippies and head shops to grass-roots backlash by suburban parents, from enthusiastic funding of the war on drugs to a gathering consensus that the war had little effect on marijuana use.
Kind of difficult when the people trying to prevent it are the biggest drug-runners going.
Kind of difficult when the people trying to prevent it are the biggest drug-runners going.
Now, for the first time, marijuana legalization is winning majority support in public opinion polls and a drug used by about 6 percent of Americans — and one-third of the nation’s high school seniors — is starting to shake off its counterculture reputation. It is winning acceptance even from some police, prosecutors, and politicians.
But it is nothing like the same sex issue, which is on a fast track, and chemical and pharmaceutical companies that need to keep hemp out of the market will never allow this en masse, no matter how greedy are governments.
But it is nothing like the same sex issue, which is on a fast track, and chemical and pharmaceutical companies that need to keep hemp out of the market will never allow this en masse, no matter how greedy are governments.
But is this time really different? Why is the current campaign for legalization resonating when previous ones did not?
Today’s leap toward legality is entwined with the financial desperation of cash-strapped states, an Internet-driven revolution in how Americans learn about marijuana and its medicinal uses, and a rising libertarian sensibility in which many liberals and conservatives alike have grown skeptical of government’s role in telling citizens how to medicate themselves.
The skies looked bright for legalization at points in recent decades, and those efforts ultimately went nowhere, as campaigns by parents combined with sharp opposition by law enforcement and elected officials to keep marijuana on the list of substances that can land you in jail.
But in 20 states and the District of Columbia, the booming medical marijuana industry (the drug first became legal to treat ailments in California in 1996) has raised expectations of full legalization.
In 2012, legalized marijuana outpolled President Obama in Colorado; the votes for pot and Obama in Washington state were almost identical at 56 percent each.
Activists in at least six states and the District of Columbia are working to put legalization initiatives on the ballot this year or in 2016.
Legislatures in 13 states are considering bills to legalize a plant that in 80 years has traveled from widely used patent medicine to felony to misdemeanor and now to the cusp of acceptance as one more taxed and regulated mind-altering substance, akin to alcohol or tobacco.
In San Francisco during the ’90s, the nation’s 30-year culture war over marijuana had gone silent, replaced by a new urgency. In the city’s devastated gay neighborhoods, AIDS powerfully shifted the debate.
The 1996 campaign for medical marijuana in California pushed aside groovy graphics and hippie rhetoric and repositioned weed as a tonic for cancer, glaucoma, and AIDS patients. Grandmothers took to TV to explain how marijuana eased their pain, and doctors were enlisted to join the campaign.
Then billionaires George Soros and Peter Lewis each pumped half a million dollars into the effort. The initiative won 56 percent of the vote, opening the door.
All of a $udden I don't like how the joint ta$tes.
All of a $udden I don't like how the joint ta$tes.
During the next decade, 20 states and the District of Columbia followed the same path, but with extremely different results. In California, where medical marijuana permits are as easy to get as a bottle of scotch, more than half a million people have cards letting them shop in hundreds of dispensaries.
Dutch will pay for your drink.
Dutch will pay for your drink.
In the District of Columbia, where the law requires a 14-page application and recognizes only four diseases as warranting treatment with marijuana, just 120 people have been approved to purchase it since the first dispensary opened last July.
If legalization spreads beyond Colorado and Washington state, it likely will be because of a confluence of forces that have gathered steam during the past decade: Big money is backing the new, aboveground marijuana industry, and the Internet has altered the kind of messages that Americans hear about pot.
And not just about weed!
And not just about weed!
Americans have grown more libertarian in their perspective on personal freedoms, the most antimarijuana generation has passed on, and people across the ideological spectrum have grown frustrated with the cost, both financial and social, of decades of arrests and imprisonments.
Another WAR we are all WEARY of!
Another WAR we are all WEARY of!
Legalization drives are underway mainly in states facing tough budget problems.
Keith Stroup, founder of National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, says, ‘‘big money can be made and suddenly the sin doesn’t matter that much.’’
Tell me something I don't already know (think drink!).
Related: NORMLizing Relations With the Boston Globe
I don't think that is po$$ible anymore.
Tell me something I don't already know (think drink!).
Related: NORMLizing Relations With the Boston Globe
I don't think that is po$$ible anymore.
--more--"
Smoke is wafting over here:
"Couple in Mass. marijuana firms lost Colo. license; Top managers would be involved in 3 dispensaries" by Kay Lazar and Shelley Murphy | Globe staff, March 04, 2014
A husband and wife forced to shut down their Colorado medical marijuana facility for numerous violations in 2012 have resurfaced in Massachusetts, as the managers of three companies that won preliminary state approval in January to run medical marijuana dispensaries.
Diane and John J. Czarkowski, who call themselves pioneers in the medical marijuana industry in Colorado, founded one of the first marijuana dispensary and cultivation centers licensed in Boulder, in 2009. But three years later, their license to operate a marijuana facility was revoked by the city. Officials found a variety of violations, including that the company lied to obtain a construction permit to expand its operations and stored marijuana in unauthorized areas, according to city and state court records.
Interesting choice of words. I guess there are some people who are liars, some who simply tell untruths, and others that simply tell inaccurate promises. I guess the Globe doesn't like smoking weed.
Now the Czarkowskis are listed as members of the executive management teams of companies planning to open dispensaries in Dennis, Haverhill, and Quincy.
Massachusetts Department of Public Health officials have said background checks were conducted on the executive management teams of all 16 companies that were approved in January for provisional licenses to open 20 dispensaries. But it is unclear whether the Colorado license revocation turned up.
“I can’t believe they wouldn’t find this,” said Lesley Rich, a real estate attorney and president of a group that unsuccessfully applied for a dispensary license in New Bedford. “You would think they would have done the research and vetted out the people who are applying.”
Asked to comment on the applications involving the Czarkowskis, David Kibbe, a health department spokesman, said: “Applicants that fail to meet the state’s standards will not get a license to operate a dispensary in Massachusetts. No license, provisional or final, has been issued.”
The Czarkowskis’ license troubles in Colorado are the latest in a series of problems turned up among applicants who have won preliminary approval for the state’s first medical marijuana licenses. The Globe and other news organizations have reported on questions about the qualifications of key staff of several other dispensaries and documented misstatements that firms made in applications about support from local officials. The health department has since acknowledged that it did not check the veracity of companies’ claims before designating them as provisionally licensed, but says it is doing so.
Questions also have been raised about possible conflicts of interest between the agency and some winning applicants.
The uproar prompted the Boston City Council to schedule a hearing Tuesday into questions raised about the two firms that won preliminary state approval for facilities in Boston....
--more--"
The whole process apparently stunk like skunk weed.
Also see: Two marijuana firms sever ties to Colo. couple
Medical marijuana dispensary seeks new site
On to harder things:
"The sheer size of the death toll — coupled with the passing of Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who had a potent mix of drugs, including heroin, in his system — has cast the narcotic into the public spotlight as a burgeoning public health crisis.
Yeah, it wasn't until that important person -- Hoffman? -- died that the media took notice.
In the shadow of that debate are mothers like Cyr, Howard, and Griffin. Griffin said her son, Zachary Gys, got his first taste of Percocet — which contains oxycodone, an opioid pain medication — after a friend offered it to him when he hurt his ankle playing hockey for Lowell High School. He abused OxyContin during his senior year and became a heroin user at 20, she said. “He used to say it made him feel good. It made him feel better and it made him feel good about himself,” Griffin said. Once Griffin became aware of her son’s addiction, she tried to get him help. Cyr said, “They’re selling poison.”
They still haven't found where the killer heroin is coming from.
Related: Police in Taunton, Brockton battle heroin epidemic
Another lo$t war.
Smoke is wafting over here:
"Couple in Mass. marijuana firms lost Colo. license; Top managers would be involved in 3 dispensaries" by Kay Lazar and Shelley Murphy | Globe staff, March 04, 2014
A husband and wife forced to shut down their Colorado medical marijuana facility for numerous violations in 2012 have resurfaced in Massachusetts, as the managers of three companies that won preliminary state approval in January to run medical marijuana dispensaries.
Diane and John J. Czarkowski, who call themselves pioneers in the medical marijuana industry in Colorado, founded one of the first marijuana dispensary and cultivation centers licensed in Boulder, in 2009. But three years later, their license to operate a marijuana facility was revoked by the city. Officials found a variety of violations, including that the company lied to obtain a construction permit to expand its operations and stored marijuana in unauthorized areas, according to city and state court records.
Interesting choice of words. I guess there are some people who are liars, some who simply tell untruths, and others that simply tell inaccurate promises. I guess the Globe doesn't like smoking weed.
Now the Czarkowskis are listed as members of the executive management teams of companies planning to open dispensaries in Dennis, Haverhill, and Quincy.
Massachusetts Department of Public Health officials have said background checks were conducted on the executive management teams of all 16 companies that were approved in January for provisional licenses to open 20 dispensaries. But it is unclear whether the Colorado license revocation turned up.
“I can’t believe they wouldn’t find this,” said Lesley Rich, a real estate attorney and president of a group that unsuccessfully applied for a dispensary license in New Bedford. “You would think they would have done the research and vetted out the people who are applying.”
Asked to comment on the applications involving the Czarkowskis, David Kibbe, a health department spokesman, said: “Applicants that fail to meet the state’s standards will not get a license to operate a dispensary in Massachusetts. No license, provisional or final, has been issued.”
The Czarkowskis’ license troubles in Colorado are the latest in a series of problems turned up among applicants who have won preliminary approval for the state’s first medical marijuana licenses. The Globe and other news organizations have reported on questions about the qualifications of key staff of several other dispensaries and documented misstatements that firms made in applications about support from local officials. The health department has since acknowledged that it did not check the veracity of companies’ claims before designating them as provisionally licensed, but says it is doing so.
Questions also have been raised about possible conflicts of interest between the agency and some winning applicants.
The uproar prompted the Boston City Council to schedule a hearing Tuesday into questions raised about the two firms that won preliminary state approval for facilities in Boston....
--more--"
The whole process apparently stunk like skunk weed.
Also see: Two marijuana firms sever ties to Colo. couple
Medical marijuana dispensary seeks new site
On to harder things:
"The sheer size of the death toll — coupled with the passing of Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who had a potent mix of drugs, including heroin, in his system — has cast the narcotic into the public spotlight as a burgeoning public health crisis.
Yeah, it wasn't until that important person -- Hoffman? -- died that the media took notice.
In the shadow of that debate are mothers like Cyr, Howard, and Griffin. Griffin said her son, Zachary Gys, got his first taste of Percocet — which contains oxycodone, an opioid pain medication — after a friend offered it to him when he hurt his ankle playing hockey for Lowell High School. He abused OxyContin during his senior year and became a heroin user at 20, she said. “He used to say it made him feel good. It made him feel better and it made him feel good about himself,” Griffin said. Once Griffin became aware of her son’s addiction, she tried to get him help. Cyr said, “They’re selling poison.”
They still haven't found where the killer heroin is coming from.
Related: Police in Taunton, Brockton battle heroin epidemic
Another lo$t war.
