"Former principal promotes marijuana for ailing seniors" by Tom Moroney | Bloomberg News September 21, 2014
ANTIOCH, Calif. — Sue Taylor stands before her Rotary Club audience in her ‘‘principal’s suit’’ — matching black blazer and pants, heels, pearls, and a pocketbook holding a secret.
At 67, Taylor has made a giant leap. The retired principal of two Catholic schools today calls herself America’s only full- time senior cannabis advocate.
She is paid $4,500 a month to tell Grandma and Grandpa and those closest to them that marijuana — in joints, cookies, just about any form imaginable — can ease pain and promote sleep and appetite.
She points to her traveling medicine show’s cache of balms, sprays, tinctures, ointments, and salves, all infused with cannabis.
‘‘Sometimes you need just a little,’’ she tells 15 Rotarians gathered for coffee and eggs at the Lone Tree Golf Course in Antioch.
Marijuana, tea, dope, herb, grass, pot — a weed by any other name still conjures evil for many in the plus-65 set. Taylor says her generation was scared stiff by the 1936 classic ‘‘Reefer Madness,’’ and is in desperate need of her message.
She goes to nursing homes, assisted-living complexes, senior centers, and health fairs.
‘‘Our seniors are our forgotten ones,’’ Taylor says. ‘‘Just give them a pill or whatever. They’re going to die anyway. That’s the attitude I’m fighting.’’
Cracking the Rotary took some doing. For two years, she tried chapters near Oakland. She persisted because if the Rotarians said yes, she would have the ear of mainstream America.
Taylor works for Harborside Health Center in Oakland, which bills itself as the world’s largest medical marijuana dispensary. It has 150,000 registered patients and gross annual revenues of $25 million.
Five years ago, founder Steve DeAngelo decided that for the elderly to accept marijuana as medicine, get California’s doctor-authorized card and shop at places like his, they would need coaxing.
When he met Taylor, he knew she had the passion and the wardrobe. DeAngelo’s look? Decidedly un-Rotarian. He wears two ponytails behind each ear. In a website photo, cofounder David Wedding dress — yes, the ‘‘d’’ is lowercase — sports a ZZ Top beard.
‘‘Sue bridges the gap for us,’’ DeAngelo said.
And if her wardrobe does not do the trick, her resume just might. Six of her 18 years in education were spent as a principal. In those days, she railed against marijuana and threatened to call the police on her own three sons if it ever showed up in the house.
‘‘If you had told me I’d be promoting cannabis someday,’’ Taylor tells Rotarians, ‘‘I would have said you’ve been smoking too much.’’
The grandmother starts each morning with a kale- spinach smoothie and occasionally takes an edible nonpsychoactive form of cannabis for back pain. She says she has never smoked it.
It’s the kind of detail she peppers her speeches with, stories from her own life.
She has two education degrees and a certificate as a metaphysical minister. No longer a practicing Catholic, she hoped for a day she would open a holistic health center.
In 2009, her oldest, Jamaal, called with a stunning suggestion for funding her center. Getting licensed as a medical marijuana dispensary would generate profits.
She began researching marijuana’s medicinal effects when she learned her best friend, Sonia, had a fast-moving pancreatic cancer. In early December of that year, Sonia told Taylor that her aunt had suggested a cannabis cookie for her pain.
Sonia said no. ‘‘I don’t put drugs in my body,’’ she said even as morphine coursed through her bloodstream. Taylor was not sure what she thought about marijuana, but she knew morphine was turning her friend into a zombie.
Sonia died the next month, in January 2010, at age 63.
After Sonia was gone, Taylor got deeper into the research. She began volunteer work for Harborside before being hired in 2011, meeting elderly cancer patients who testified to marijuana’s good effects.
She thought of Sonia.
--more--"
"Marijuana industry battling stoner stereotypes" by Kristen Wyatt | Associated Press September 18, 2014
DENVER — Tired of Cheech & Chong pot jokes and ominous antidrug campaigns, the marijuana industry and activists are starting an ad blitz in Colorado aimed at promoting moderation and the safe consumption of the drug.
To get their message across, they are skewering some of the old Drug War-era ads that focused on the fears of marijuana, including the famous ‘‘This is your brain on drugs’’ fried-egg ad from the 1980s.
They are planning posters, brochures, billboards, and magazine ads to caution consumers to use the drug responsibly and warn tourists and first-timers about the potential to get sick from accidentally eating too much medical-grade marijuana.
‘‘So far, every campaign designed to educate the public about marijuana has relied on fear-mongering and insulting marijuana users,’’ said Mason Tvert, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, the nation’s biggest advocacy group for the drug.
The group unveiled a billboard on Wednesday on a west Denver street where many marijuana shops are located that shows a woman slumped in a hotel room with the tagline: ‘‘Don’t let a candy bar ruin your vacation.’’
It’s an allusion to Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist who got sick from eating part of a marijuana-infused candy bar on a visit to write about the drug.
The campaign is a direct response to the state’s post-legalization marijuana-education efforts.
One of them is intended to prevent stoned driving and shows men zoning out while trying to play basketball, light a grill, or hang a television. Many in the industry said the ads depended on a tired stereotype.
Even more concerning to activists is a youth-education campaign that relies on a human-sized cage and the message, ‘‘Don’t Be a Lab Rat,’’ along with warnings about marijuana and developing brains.
The cage in Denver has been repeatedly vandalized. At least one school district rejected the traveling exhibit, saying it was well-intentioned but inappropriate.
‘‘To me, that’s not really any different than Nancy Reagan saying ‘Just Say No,’’’ said Tim Cullen, co-owner of four marijuana dispensaries and a critic of the ‘‘lab rat’’ campaign, referring to the former first lady’s effort to combat drug use.
A spokesman for the state Health Department welcomed the industry’s ads and defended the ‘‘lab rat’’ campaign. ‘‘It’s been effective in starting a conversation about potential risks to youth from marijuana,’’ Mark Salley said.
The dueling campaigns come at a time when the industry is concerned about inexperienced consumers using edible marijuana. The popularity of edibles surprised some in the industry when legal marijuana retail sales began in January.
Edible products have been blamed for at least one death, of a college student who jumped to his death in Denver in March after consuming six times the recommended dose of edible marijuana.
The headlines have prompted the industry to promote moderation with edible marijuana.
‘‘I think the word has gotten out that you need to be careful with edibles,’’ said Steve Fox, head of the Denver-based Council for Responsible Cannabis Regulation.
The group organized the ‘‘First Time 5’’ campaign, which cautions that new users shouldn’t eat more than 5 milligrams of marijuana’s psychoactive ingredient, or half a suggested serving.
The campaign warns users that edible products can be much more potent than the marijuana they’re smoking — and that the infused treats on store shelves are much stronger than homemade brownies they may recall eating.
The advocacy ads tackle antidrug messaging from years past. Inside pictures of old TV sets are images from historic ads. Along with the fried-egg one is an image from an ad of a father finding his son’s drug stash and demanding to know who taught him to use it.
The kid answers: ‘‘You, all right! I learned it by watching you!’’
The print ad concludes, ‘‘Decades of fear-mongering and condescending anti-marijuana ads have not taught us anything about the substance or made anyone safer.’’
It then directs viewers to consumeresponsibly.org, which is patterned after the alcohol industry’s ‘‘Drink Responsibly’’ campaign.
--more--"
Related: Alaska TV Reporter Quits on Air to Promote Pot
Did that help or hurt?
"MAKING THEIR POINTS -- Luke Schleyhahn talked with Bob Whetstone of Chelsea as he passed out religious literature during the Freedom Rally on the Boston Common Sunday. The rally, in its 25th year, was sponsored by the Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition, the state affiliate of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (Boston Globe September 15 2014)."
"Medical marijuana license winner’s record is uncertain" by Kay Lazar and Shelley Murphy | Globe Staff September 19, 2014
A company that was awarded a medical marijuana dispensary license in Lowell and is vying for two more in Massachusetts appears to have overstated the scope of its operations at a counseling and research program for HIV and AIDS patients at dispensaries it owns in other cities.
The company, known in Massachusetts as Patriot Care Corp., said in its application for a Massachusetts license that the AIDS program was “in place” in other cities, including Washington, D.C., but company officials provided conflicting accounts this week about whether the program is indeed operating.
“It is not operating in DC yet very simply due to the fact we do not have enough patients,” Patriot Care spokesman Dennis Kunian said Wednesday. And it has yet to be launched in other cities, he said
Kunian said the company did not mislead Massachusetts health regulators by stating the program was “in place,” because it had been organized and was “ready to go” once there were enough patients.
A day later, after the Globe called regulators in Washington and Massachusetts, Patriot Care’s officials made an abrupt about face and offered a different account, saying a pilot program had been running since the dispensary opened in Washington.
They were, however, unable to say how many patients have received counseling or other services from the AIDS and HIV program.
The program, Integrated Medical Marijuana and Care program or IMMAC, was to be the cornerstone of the company’s operations in Washington, helping to “redefine the concept of a model dispensary,” according to its application submitted to city regulators in November 2011.
IMMAC would provide “comprehensive and individualized counseling and treatment plans for each patient” and also monitor whether patients were taking medications prescribed by their physicians, according to the application. The company assured Washington regulators that it would be running when the company opened there in July 2013.
The revelation is the latest chapter in Massachusetts’ protracted selection system to award highly coveted medical marijuana dispensary licenses. Nearly half of the applicants tapped for licenses in January have since been knocked out of the running over questionable finances or for providing misleading information.
Patriot Care is the only license holder in Massachusetts to have been invited by state regulators to apply for two more. The company recently submitted applications for dispensaries in Boston and in Greenfield. Patriot Care goes by the name Capital City Care in Washington.
Patricia Hawkins, the clinical psychologist who created IMMAC, told the City Council in Washington in March 2013 that Capital City Care would be “offering these critically important services on-site” as soon as the city’s board of health began its patient registration process, according to a copy of her testimony from that hearing.
But last week, she lamented in an interview with the Globe that a lack of patients at Capital City Care’s Washington dispensary forced IMMAC to be put on hold.
“All I want to do is get this working because I really think it will make a difference for these AIDS patients,” said Hawkins, a leader in Washington’s AIDS community for three decades. “The IMMAC program is designed and ready to be implemented, but I can’t say we actually have patients.”
In a separate interview last week, Leigh Slaughter, a lawyer who created a partnership with Hawkins and was to provide case management and legal counseling for IMMAC, said she and Hawkins invested their own money in the program and spent hours developing it. But then they were told by one of the company’s top executives, Nicholas Vita, that they could not launch it because the Washington dispensary did not have enough patients. “We could never get it off the ground,” Slaughter said.
Kunian acknowledged in an interview Wednesday that the program, envisioned to launch first in Washington and then extend to the company’s Arizona facility, had not yet started.
Those accounts changed after Globe inquiries to regulators and to an AIDS organization in Washington.
Hawkins, in an e-mail Thursday, said that she offered the IMMAC counseling services to some of her private patients before the dispensary opened and that those patients continue to receive these services in a “pilot” phase of the program.
Yet a spokesman for Whitman-Walker Health, a leading Washington community health center that specializes in HIV care, said no one at the clinic, nor health providers affiliated with the center, had ever heard of the program. Shawn Jain also said that they had not heard of any medical marijuana programs in the city that are “specifically targeting HIV/AIDS patients.”
Kunian insisted in an interview Thursday that the company’s “pilot” program had been operating at the Washington dispensary since it opened over a year ago. “I was obviously not up to speed when I spoke to you yesterday,” Kunian said. “Shame on me.”
When asked why Hawkins and Slaughter had yet to be paid if the program was running, Kunian said the dispensary did not have the resources now, but would pay them later.
In its Massachusetts applications for dispensary licenses last November, Patriot Care told regulators that its company was, even then, on very solid footing. It wrote that in Washington, D.C. “our licensed dispensaries already boast market share of over 58 percent because of the value and quality we provide.”
Additionally, public records on the Washington health department website show that as of Thursday, more than 1,100 patients in the city are registered to receive medical marijuana and that at least 15 percent of them live in the neighborhood where the Capital City dispensary is located.
The health department’s website also shows that Hawkins and Slaughter, who were to be running the IMMAC program at Capital City, have expired registrations, a document needed to work in a dispensary in Washington.
“If they are working in a registry and it is expired, that would violate our regulations and we would investigate,” said Rikin Mehta, senior deputy director of the health department’s Health Regulation and Licensing Administration.
Kunian said of the expired registrations: “They have not renewed it yet because any patients they are seeing, they are seeing in Pat’s private office. When they have more patients in the system, they will be renewing it.”
But Mehta said Washington regulations do not require dispensary companies to follow through with many of the programs promised in their 2011 applications. He said most companies pledged educational and other services in their applications to win points in the license review process.
“So the IMMAC program is not a regulatory requirement, because educational programs are not a regulatory requirement,” Mehta said. “It is a business decision.”
--more--"
Also see:
Delay in marijuana outlets is decried
I'm done doing that and never want them to open.
Medical marijuana advocates’ growing impatience
That's what happens when you smoke that shit.
Police seize 49 marijuana plants in Wilmot, N.H.
Think of it as Green Hood.
Judge rejects effort to get marijuana question on York ballot
Just quit it, will ya?
I'm going to forget the blog for a while and go watch some football.
NEXT DAY UPDATE: Thought I would offer you one more hit:
"1,000 veterans line up for free marijuana" Associated Press September 29, 2014
COLORADO SPRINGS — A marijuana giveaway for veterans attracted about 1,000 people to a Colorado hotel.
The Operation Grow 4 Vets giveaway in Colorado Springs aimed to bring cannabis-based treatments to veterans with service-related conditions as an alternative to pain medications.
The veterans were given a bag of items that included cannabis oil, an edible-marijuana chocolate bar, and seeds to grow plants.
Marijuana activists have tried unsuccessfully to have post-traumatic stress disorder added to the Colorado list of medical conditions that qualify for joining the medical marijuana registry. Now that pot is legal for all adults over 21, organizers are free to give away marijuana.
Not all who received the bags were veterans. A $20-dollar donation from nonveterans was encouraged.
A similar event was held last weekend in Denver, when hundreds of military veterans received free marijuana. The event aimed to offer veterans an alternative to prescription drugs to help with anxiety, pain, and other problems.
The organization, founded by veteran Roger Martin, also gave out 400 bags of marijuana-infused products at the Denver giveaway.
--more--"
Marijuana may help wounded and scarred war vets?
Also see: Civil War in the Civil Service
Won't the pot smoking interfere with the employment, and when is the government going to get off the weed?
Related: Alaska TV Reporter Quits on Air to Promote Pot
Did that help or hurt?
"MAKING THEIR POINTS -- Luke Schleyhahn talked with Bob Whetstone of Chelsea as he passed out religious literature during the Freedom Rally on the Boston Common Sunday. The rally, in its 25th year, was sponsored by the Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition, the state affiliate of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (Boston Globe September 15 2014)."
"Medical marijuana license winner’s record is uncertain" by Kay Lazar and Shelley Murphy | Globe Staff September 19, 2014
A company that was awarded a medical marijuana dispensary license in Lowell and is vying for two more in Massachusetts appears to have overstated the scope of its operations at a counseling and research program for HIV and AIDS patients at dispensaries it owns in other cities.
The company, known in Massachusetts as Patriot Care Corp., said in its application for a Massachusetts license that the AIDS program was “in place” in other cities, including Washington, D.C., but company officials provided conflicting accounts this week about whether the program is indeed operating.
“It is not operating in DC yet very simply due to the fact we do not have enough patients,” Patriot Care spokesman Dennis Kunian said Wednesday. And it has yet to be launched in other cities, he said
Kunian said the company did not mislead Massachusetts health regulators by stating the program was “in place,” because it had been organized and was “ready to go” once there were enough patients.
A day later, after the Globe called regulators in Washington and Massachusetts, Patriot Care’s officials made an abrupt about face and offered a different account, saying a pilot program had been running since the dispensary opened in Washington.
They were, however, unable to say how many patients have received counseling or other services from the AIDS and HIV program.
The program, Integrated Medical Marijuana and Care program or IMMAC, was to be the cornerstone of the company’s operations in Washington, helping to “redefine the concept of a model dispensary,” according to its application submitted to city regulators in November 2011.
IMMAC would provide “comprehensive and individualized counseling and treatment plans for each patient” and also monitor whether patients were taking medications prescribed by their physicians, according to the application. The company assured Washington regulators that it would be running when the company opened there in July 2013.
The revelation is the latest chapter in Massachusetts’ protracted selection system to award highly coveted medical marijuana dispensary licenses. Nearly half of the applicants tapped for licenses in January have since been knocked out of the running over questionable finances or for providing misleading information.
Patriot Care is the only license holder in Massachusetts to have been invited by state regulators to apply for two more. The company recently submitted applications for dispensaries in Boston and in Greenfield. Patriot Care goes by the name Capital City Care in Washington.
Patricia Hawkins, the clinical psychologist who created IMMAC, told the City Council in Washington in March 2013 that Capital City Care would be “offering these critically important services on-site” as soon as the city’s board of health began its patient registration process, according to a copy of her testimony from that hearing.
But last week, she lamented in an interview with the Globe that a lack of patients at Capital City Care’s Washington dispensary forced IMMAC to be put on hold.
“All I want to do is get this working because I really think it will make a difference for these AIDS patients,” said Hawkins, a leader in Washington’s AIDS community for three decades. “The IMMAC program is designed and ready to be implemented, but I can’t say we actually have patients.”
In a separate interview last week, Leigh Slaughter, a lawyer who created a partnership with Hawkins and was to provide case management and legal counseling for IMMAC, said she and Hawkins invested their own money in the program and spent hours developing it. But then they were told by one of the company’s top executives, Nicholas Vita, that they could not launch it because the Washington dispensary did not have enough patients. “We could never get it off the ground,” Slaughter said.
Kunian acknowledged in an interview Wednesday that the program, envisioned to launch first in Washington and then extend to the company’s Arizona facility, had not yet started.
Those accounts changed after Globe inquiries to regulators and to an AIDS organization in Washington.
Hawkins, in an e-mail Thursday, said that she offered the IMMAC counseling services to some of her private patients before the dispensary opened and that those patients continue to receive these services in a “pilot” phase of the program.
Yet a spokesman for Whitman-Walker Health, a leading Washington community health center that specializes in HIV care, said no one at the clinic, nor health providers affiliated with the center, had ever heard of the program. Shawn Jain also said that they had not heard of any medical marijuana programs in the city that are “specifically targeting HIV/AIDS patients.”
Kunian insisted in an interview Thursday that the company’s “pilot” program had been operating at the Washington dispensary since it opened over a year ago. “I was obviously not up to speed when I spoke to you yesterday,” Kunian said. “Shame on me.”
When asked why Hawkins and Slaughter had yet to be paid if the program was running, Kunian said the dispensary did not have the resources now, but would pay them later.
In its Massachusetts applications for dispensary licenses last November, Patriot Care told regulators that its company was, even then, on very solid footing. It wrote that in Washington, D.C. “our licensed dispensaries already boast market share of over 58 percent because of the value and quality we provide.”
Additionally, public records on the Washington health department website show that as of Thursday, more than 1,100 patients in the city are registered to receive medical marijuana and that at least 15 percent of them live in the neighborhood where the Capital City dispensary is located.
The health department’s website also shows that Hawkins and Slaughter, who were to be running the IMMAC program at Capital City, have expired registrations, a document needed to work in a dispensary in Washington.
“If they are working in a registry and it is expired, that would violate our regulations and we would investigate,” said Rikin Mehta, senior deputy director of the health department’s Health Regulation and Licensing Administration.
Kunian said of the expired registrations: “They have not renewed it yet because any patients they are seeing, they are seeing in Pat’s private office. When they have more patients in the system, they will be renewing it.”
But Mehta said Washington regulations do not require dispensary companies to follow through with many of the programs promised in their 2011 applications. He said most companies pledged educational and other services in their applications to win points in the license review process.
“So the IMMAC program is not a regulatory requirement, because educational programs are not a regulatory requirement,” Mehta said. “It is a business decision.”
--more--"
Also see:
Delay in marijuana outlets is decried
I'm done doing that and never want them to open.
Medical marijuana advocates’ growing impatience
That's what happens when you smoke that shit.
Police seize 49 marijuana plants in Wilmot, N.H.
Think of it as Green Hood.
Judge rejects effort to get marijuana question on York ballot
Just quit it, will ya?
I'm going to forget the blog for a while and go watch some football.
NEXT DAY UPDATE: Thought I would offer you one more hit:
"1,000 veterans line up for free marijuana" Associated Press September 29, 2014
COLORADO SPRINGS — A marijuana giveaway for veterans attracted about 1,000 people to a Colorado hotel.
The Operation Grow 4 Vets giveaway in Colorado Springs aimed to bring cannabis-based treatments to veterans with service-related conditions as an alternative to pain medications.
The veterans were given a bag of items that included cannabis oil, an edible-marijuana chocolate bar, and seeds to grow plants.
Marijuana activists have tried unsuccessfully to have post-traumatic stress disorder added to the Colorado list of medical conditions that qualify for joining the medical marijuana registry. Now that pot is legal for all adults over 21, organizers are free to give away marijuana.
Not all who received the bags were veterans. A $20-dollar donation from nonveterans was encouraged.
A similar event was held last weekend in Denver, when hundreds of military veterans received free marijuana. The event aimed to offer veterans an alternative to prescription drugs to help with anxiety, pain, and other problems.
The organization, founded by veteran Roger Martin, also gave out 400 bags of marijuana-infused products at the Denver giveaway.
--more--"
Marijuana may help wounded and scarred war vets?
Also see: Civil War in the Civil Service
Won't the pot smoking interfere with the employment, and when is the government going to get off the weed?