Velký – that’s ‘great’ in Czech.

Pres. Vaclav Klaus

On January 30, by a 67-2 vote, the Czech Senate approved a bill allowing for the medical use of marijuana. The measure affirms the decision reached by the country’s lower house of parliament. On Friday, the bill was signed into law by President Vaclav Klaus. The Czech Republic now joins a number of other European countries that allow the use of marijuana for medical purposes.

The new law received strong support from all parliament-represented political parties and represents an improvement on the country’s already relaxed stance on marijuana prohibition. The Czech Republic decriminalized cultivation (five plants or less) and possession (half an ounce or less) of marijuana by individuals in 2010. The only EU countries with more lenient marijuana laws are the Netherlands and Portugal.

While this is definitely a move in the right direction, some lawmakers were concerned that some parts of the law are too restrictive. Importation of medical marijuana is permitted for distribution in pharmacies, but cultivation by licensed organizations is not currently permitted. Home cultivation by patients is also not permitted, and treatment will not be covered by health insurance.

Parliament may revisit the provisions of the law following a year of implementation and expand it to include registered, domestic production that is strictly monitored.

In the wake of the introduction of federal marijuana reform bills on February 5, the national media has started paying closer attention to the possibility of change in the coming years. One example is this interview with MPP’s director of government relations, Steve Fox:

Such bills have come before Congress in the past with less fanfare, but it seems like this time they are being taken more seriously. Perhaps the fact that voters in Colorado and Washington decided they were sick of marijuana prohibition had something to do with it:

Last week, Delegate Mike Manypanny (D-Taylor) introduced a medical marijuana bill for the third time in the West Virginia Legislature, and this time it looks like people are taking a lot more notice.

It is certainly positive to see the media covering both sides of the issue, including MPP communications director Mason Tvert being quoted in the Charleston Gazette:

“There is no reason this should not be discussed. It is an issue taken up in dozens of states. It is time for it to be discussed in West Virginia.

“This is part of a nationwide increase in momentum. We’ve seen medical marijuana bills introduced throughout the country, including states many people might think would not be supportive,” Tvert said during a telephone interview.

A majority of West Virginia voters believe the state should enact a law allowing seriously ill patients to use medical marijuana, according to a January 2013 poll conducted by Public Policy Polling.

Stay tuned for updates and coverage from the Mountain State!

Like a lot of people, my morning routine involves clicking around a few major news sites to see what people are talking about that day. Disgusting cruise ships and exploding Russian meteorites aside, one of the stories that caught my eye today was a CNN.com story about Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the head of the notorious Sinaloa cartel in Mexico. Yesterday, the Chicago Crime Commission named Guzman “Public Enemy Number One,” a title CNN notes was created for bootlegger and gangster Al Capone.

Not since Capone “has any criminal deserved this title more than Joaquin Guzman,” commission President J.R. Davis said in a news release. “Guzman is the major supplier of narcotics to Chicago. His agents are working in the Chicago area importing vast quantities of drugs for sale throughout the Chicago region and collecting and sending to Mexico tens of millions of dollars in drug money.”

The distinction isn’t surprising. Guzman’s syndicate is the single largest supplier of marijuana and other drugs that come into the U.S. It’s a lucrative gig — according to Forbes, Guzman’s net worth exceeds $1 billion — which explains why Guzman so ruthlessly protects his turf. Estimates of the death toll in Mexico’s drug war are now over 60,000.

What is surprising is that neither CNN’s story nor most of America’s elected officials have connected the dots between Capone and Guzman and how prohibition was the source of their power and wealth. Whether it’s the 1920′s or 2013, ceding control of a lucrative market to criminals enriches thugs like Capone and Guzman. Conversely, just as ending alcohol prohibition put bootleggers out of business, ending marijuana prohibition would deal a significant blow to drug trafficking cartels like Guzman’s.

Rep. Diane Russell (D-Portland) is seeking to make Maine the third state in the country to legalize and regulate the adult use of marijuana. The measure would allow anyone 21 or older to purchase up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana from a licensed retailer. Sen. Russell discussed the bill and its advantages on MPBN’s Maine Watch:

State lawmakers will debate the bill this spring. If the measure makes it through the legislature, it’ll be sent to referendum. MPP’s Maine Political Director, David Boyer, has worked closely with Sen. Russell on her push to put the decision of marijuana reform into voters’ hands:

A medical marijuana conference planned for next week will feature not
just activists and politicians, but John Schwarz, a theoretical physics
professor at the California Institute of Technology and father of
string theory.

Aside from an editorial published in The Huffington Post late last year, the conference will mark Schwarz’s first time speaking publicly on the issue.

"Being a physicist, not a physician, I don’t usually comment on issues in medical science," Schwarz wrote in his editorial.
"But I can no longer remain silent while people in my family and
profession run the risk of federal arrest so that they can follow the
recommendations of their doctors."

One such person is Schwarz’s wife, Patricia, who, after being
diagnosed with a bladder condition in 1995 found medical marijuana was
the only thing that relieved her pain. After listening to her groan
about the issue for years, Schwarz said her husband felt moved to take
up the cause. "We live in a evidence-based society," Patricia Schwarz
told HuffPost. "Why isn’t the science getting through?"

Under federal law, marijuana is considered a schedule I prohibited
substance, defined as having

In 1996 the actor Woody Harrelson, who has a sideline as an activist for legalizing marijuana, was arrested in Kentucky for planting four hemp seeds. Last month Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, announced his support for growing hemp in Kentucky, his home state.

Between those jarringly disparate events lies the evolution of hemp from a countercultural cause to an issue championed by farmers in the heartland and conservative lawmakers.

On Monday, a panel of the Republican-controlled Kentucky State Senate unanimously approved a bill to license hemp growers. It was promoted by the state agriculture commissioner and three members of the state’s Congressional delegation, including Senator Rand Paul, who removed his jacket to testify in a white shirt that he announced was made of hemp fibers.

If the bill is approved by the full Legislature, Kentucky will join eight other states that have adopted laws to allow commercial hemp growing, although the practice is effectively blocked by federal law that makes no distinction between hemp and marijuana.

Mr. Paul, a Republican, said he would seek a waiver from the Obama administration for Kentucky hemp growers, while pressing Congress to delist hemp as a controlled substance, which hemp supporters say is a legacy of antidrug hysteria.

Both plants are the same species, Cannabis sativa, but hemp has only a trace of the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. Hemp’s champions see it as a source of agricultural jobs, an alternative for struggling tobacco farmers and a wonder plant with uses from bluejeans to building materials.

Attitudes are changing in surprising places. At a hearing on Monday in Frankfort, the Kentucky capital, the state police commissioner’s opposition to hemp growing was challenged by a former C.I.A. director, R. James Woolsey.

“The specter of people getting high on industrial hemp,” Mr. Woolsey said, “is pretty much exactly like saying you can get drunk on O’Doul’s.”

Hemp supporters say it is only a matter of time before legalization comes as people more fully understand the plant. They also point to states where voters legalized recreational marijuana in November — Colorado and Washington — as inevitably forcing a change in priorities in the Obama administration.

“The demonology of hemp is exposed as being not valid,” said Representative John Yarmuth, Democrat of Kentucky, a sponsor of a bill in the House to allow hemp cultivation. He said the movement to accept hemp has the same inevitability that he attributed to acceptance of same-sex marriage.

Still, the federal government has been unyielding. Farmers in states that allow hemp must seek a waiver from the Drug Enforcement Administration or risk being raided by federal agents and losing their farms.

Dave Monson, a North Dakota wheat farmer and Republican state representative, has held a state hemp license since 2007, when North Dakota legalized cultivation. But he has no plans to plant. “I applied for a D.E.A. license, never got one,” he said.

A spokesman for the drug agency said it did not keep statistics on permits to grow hemp, which it does not distinguish from marijuana under the Controlled Substance Act of 1970.

Mr. Monson knows farmers just north of the Canadian border who profitably grow hemp, and he argues that it can be an economic boon. “The more states that do what we have done in North Dakota, if we can keep the pressure on, I think we’re going to see some movement at the federal level,” he said.

Hemp supporters claim a total retail value of products containing hemp at more than $400 million in the United States. But a Congressional Research Service report last year found that imported hemp raw materials was small, only $11.5 million. All hemp used in United States today — such as in Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps sold at Whole Foods — is imported, mostly from China.

Rodney Brewer, the commissioner of the Kentucky State Police, said that if hemp farming were legal, marijuana growers would hide their plants in hemp fields and the police could not tell them apart.

“They are identical in appearance when it comes to the naked eye,” Mr. Brewer said, predicting that legalizing hemp would create a boom for pot growers.

But Mr. Woolsey, who said he favored hemp because of “my interest in prosperity for rural America,” argued that no pot farmer would hide plants in a hemp field for fear that low-potency hemp would cross-pollinate with marijuana and lower the concentration of THC, its psychoactive ingredient.

Marijuana growers “hate the idea of having industrial hemp anywhere near,” he said.

The Kentucky bill faces resistance from some lawmakers, including the speaker of the State House.

Mr. Paul, after calling attention to his hemp shirt at the hearing in Frankfort, seemed to roll his eyes when he said, “You’d think you’re at a D.E.A. hearing.”

“This is a hearing about a crop,” he said. “It’s a crop that’s legal everywhere else in the world except the United States.”

Mr. Paul, elected in 2010 with Tea Party support, promised to introduce a Senate bill as a companion to the pro-hemp bill in the House, which has 28 co-sponsors. He is following in the family footsteps, since the first House bill allowing hemp was introduced several years ago by his father, Ron Paul, a former Texas congressman and Republican presidential candidate. Ron Paul’s embrace of the issue fit his deep libertarian streak, which also at times embraced legalizing marijuana and other drugs.

Those positions placed hemp far outside the mainstream in many lawmakers’ minds, just as the image of its products — soaps, sandals and natural foods sold at co-ops — placed it in a counterculture.

But no better sign exists that hemp’s image is changing than its embrace by Mr. McConnell, the minority leader, who said in a statement last month that his mind had been changed “after long discussions” with Rand Paul and the Kentucky agriculture commissioner, James Comer, a Republican.

“The utilization of hemp to produce everything from clothing to paper is real,” Mr. McConnell said.

A version of this article appeared in print on February 13, 2013, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Hemp Growing Finds Allies of a New Stripe in Kentucky.

Source: New York Times (NY)
Author: Trip Gabriel
Published: February 13, 2013
Copyright: 2013 The New York Times Company
Contact: letters@nytimes.com
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/