California Rep. Barbara Lee won’t be spooked by the Justice Department’s aggressive curtailing of medical marijuana dispensaries in her own backyard.

Lee, a top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, introduced the States’ Medical Marijuana Property Rights Protection Act in Congress this week, which she says would curb the Obama Administration’s efforts to intimidate state medical marijuana dispensaries from setting up shop.

“The people of California have made it legal for patients to have safe access to medicinal marijuana and as a result thousands of small business owners have invested millions of dollars in building their companies, creating jobs, and paying their taxes,” Lee says. “We should be protecting and implementing the will of voters, not undermining our democracy by prosecuting small business owners who pay taxes and comply with the laws of their states in providing medicine to patients in need.”

The bill will make it illegal for the federal government to seize the assets of medical marijuana business owners, a tactic DOJ has begun using to crack down on pot shops. While DOJ rarely takes legal action against businesses that comply with their local and state laws, Americans for Safe Access, a group that is committed to legalizing medical marijuana says the threat alone has been enough to scare roughly 400 medical marijuana dispensaries in the state of California to close their doors.

The Justice Department has sent roughly 300 letters to landlords in California and Colorado threatening to file lawsuits if they don’t stop operating dispensaries.

“For the price of postage, the Justice Department gets to threaten an entire population of property owners and it is a very effective tactic,” says Kris Hermes, a spokesman with Americans for Safe Access.

Lee announced her legislation just weeks after U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag filed a lawsuit against Oakland and San Jose, Calif.-based medical marijuana dispensary Harborside Health Clinic. Haag argues the clinics, which serve about 100,000 medical marijuana users, could be violating local laws because of the number of patients they provide pot to.

“The larger the operation, the greater likelihood that there will be abuse of the state’s medical marijuana laws, and marijuana in the hands of individuals who do not have a demonstrated medical need,” Haag said in a statement.

The asset forfeiture lawsuit caused an uproar in the community, with thousands of signatures gathered for an anti-lawsuit petition drive, protests, and political rallies.

“They won’t stop until they have closed every single regulated law-abiding dispensary in California unless people rise up and say enough is enough,” says Steve DeAngelo, the executive director at Harborside Health Clinic. But DeAngelo says it wasn’t always this way.

The federal government’s dogged pursuit of medical marijuana dispensaries has escalated since 2009. On the campaign trail and at the beginning of President Barack Obama’s time in office, medical marijuana seemed low on the administration’s priority list.

“I think the basic concept of using medical marijuana for the same purposes and with the same controls as other drugs prescribed by doctors, I think that’s entirely appropriate,” Obama said in the Spring of 2008 during an interview with Oregon Newspaper, the Mail Tribune. “I’m not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue.”

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have medical marijuana laws and Americans for Safe Access estimates the Justice Department has carried out roughly 200 raids on dispensaries or growing facilities in nine states.

Hermes fears if the lawsuits persist, patients who need medical cannabis could be forced into the unregulated drug market. “[Rep. Lee’s] law would take the wind out of the sails of the Justice Department to intimidate dispensaries who are serving patients in need,” Hermes says.

Source: U.S. News & World Report (US)
Author: Lauren Fox
Published: August 3, 2012
Copyright: 2012 U.S. News & World Report
Website: http://www.usnews.com/

Legalizing marijuana in even a single state could drive down prices dramatically across the country, encouraging more people to smoke the drug, a panel of experts said at a briefing Tuesday.

Last week, Oregon became the third state that will vote this November on a ballot measure to legalize marijuana, joining Colorado and Washington.

“Legalization is unprecedented – not even the Netherlands has done it – – it is entirely possible it will happen this year,” said Jonathan Caulkins, co-author of “Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

“The effects will be enormous,” said Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, during an event at the American Enterprise Institute.

The Obama administration opposes legalizing marijuana and has taken action to shut down some medical-marijuana dispensaries in California and Colorado.

Caulkins said one of the main reasons for outlawing the drug is to make it riskier to produce and sell, driving up prices and curbing use.  A price collapse after legalization in some states could undermine marijuana laws nationally.

Caulkins said Colorado’s proposition would allow residents to obtain a grower’s license fairly easily, making the state a good home for exporters of marijuana.

“They would be able to provide marijuana to New York state markets at one quarter of the current price,” he said, predicting similar price declines in other states.

Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, said his advice to federal officials would be “to sit down with the governor of the state and say, ‘Look, we can make your life completely miserable – and we will – unless you figure out a way to avoid the exports.”

One option would be to impose strict limits on how much of the drug retailers could sell to each customer.

Washington’s proposal would present authorities with a different problem.  The state is proposing to create a strong system of regulations with the aim of propping up prices.  Caulkins said the federal government could strike down the regulations but would leave a free for-all behind.

“The federal government will face some really difficult choices where actions are like double-edged swords,” Caulkins said.

ource: Seattle Times (WA)
Copyright: 2012 The Seattle Times Company
Contact: opinion@seattletimes.com
Website: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/
Author: Ian Duncan, Tribune Washington bureau

One in eight people with the painful condition fibromyalgia self-medicate with pot and other cannabis products, according to a new Canadian study.

“That is not unusual behavior, in general, for people with chronic medical illnesses for which we don’t have great treatments,” said Dr. Igor Grant, who heads the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research at the University of California and was not involved in the study.

“People start looking around, they look for other types of remedies, because they need the help,” he told Reuters Health.

The question is if self-medicating with cannabis is really helpful for people with fibromyalgia, researchers say.

Marijuana has been shown to ease certain types of pain in patients with HIV and other conditions. But Grant said he doesn’t know of any research showing the drug can relieve the pain associated with fibromyalgia.

And the question of whether it helps fibromyalgia sufferers regain some of their daily functions, such as housekeeping or working, remains up in the air, too.

“We don’t want to just see pain reduction, but an improvement in function,” said Peter Ste-Marie, a pain researcher at McGill University in Montreal, who worked on the new study. “If it’s not helping them get back into a daily life pattern, is it helping them?”

People with fibromyalgia typically experience pain in their joints and muscles and may also suffer from frequent headaches and fatigue.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about two percent of adults have fibromyalgia, which remains a mystery to scientists.

The condition can be treated with physical therapy, antidepressants, pain medications and other approaches, although none of them is a cure.

To see how many people turn to marijuana, Ste-Marie and his colleagues collected information from the medical records of 457 patients who came to the pain unit at McGill University Health Center. Their findings are published in the journal Arthritis Care & Research.

All of the patients had been referred to the clinic for fibromyalgia symptoms, although only 302 of the patients were confirmed to have fibromyalgia as their primary diagnosis.

About 10 percent said they smoked marijuana for medical purposes and another three percent had a prescription for a synthetic form of the active chemical in the cannabis plant.

“The popular knowledge of marijuana being available for pain would tend to demonstrate why 10 percent of patients would give it a try,” said Ste-Marie.

“There really is no miracle drug for fibromyalgia. We definitely understand that patients would try to find something else,” he told Reuters Health.

The researchers couldn’t tell from the study which of the patient had started smoked pot before their fibromyalgia developed. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 40 percent of U.S. adults have tried marijuana at some point.

The study showed that pot smokers and non-users had the same rates of disability and unemployment. However, patients who had unstable mental illness or had a worrisome use of opioid pain medications were more likely to report using cannabis – a finding that raised concerns with Ste-Marie and his colleagues.

“Before saying herbal cannabis has a future in fibromyalgia, there are multiple things that need to be looked at,” he said.

Newshawk: Konagold
Source: Reuters (Wire)
Author: Kerry Grens, Reuters
Published: July 13, 2012
Copyright: 2012 Thomson Reuters