A proposal to let Maine voters decide if marijuana should be regulated like alcohol received near majority support Friday in a vote of the Maine House of Representatives.

Rep. Diane Russell

The proposed amendment to LD 1229, a bill introduced by Rep. Diane Russell (D-Portland) with a bipartisan group of 35 co-sponsors, was defeated 71-67. It would have placed a measure on the ballot calling on the Maine Department of Administrative and Financial Services, Bureau of Alcoholic Beverages, and Lottery Operations to develop rules and legislation for a legal marijuana market for adults 21 years of age or older. The proposal will now be considered in the Senate where it must receive a simple majority to be sent back to the House for reconsideration. A two-thirds majority will then be required to refer the measure to the ballot.

This is some of the highest level of support seen for such a bill in a state legislature. Recently, the Colorado legislature approved bills to establish regulations for the legal marijuana market. HB 1318 received votes of 37-27 in the House and 25-10 in the Senate. HB 1317 got 35-29 votes in the House and 32-3 in the Senate, and SB 283 was 62-3 in the House and 32-2 in the Senate.

As more and more states consider reforming their marijuana laws, we can hopefully expect the level of support to rise as more of their constituents come to see the failure of marijuana prohibition.

Mike Cuthriell has navigated D.C. government regulations for
two-and-a-half years to open a medical marijuana dispensary and now only
needs a final inspection from the Department of Health before he can
officially open his Metropolitan Wellness Center. But the center won’t
be able to stay open unless the health department sanctions one more
thing: patients.

As of Thursday, 18 doctors had received
applications to allow them to recommend medical marijuana to qualified
patients, health department officials said. Forms that would allow
patients to apply for registration cards are supposed to be available by
mid-June, the agency said.

The status of the forms is a matter of dispute.

Mike
Liszewski, policy director of the D.C.-based nonprofit Americans for
Safe Access, which promotes safe and legal access to marijuana, said his
understanding was that the forms have not yet been created. But health
department spokeswoman Najma Roberts said the forms have been developed.

Even
if the health department does release patient forms later this month,
Mr. Cuthriell predicts that marijuana dispensaries may have to wait
additional weeks or months while patients complete a multi-step process
to request the form and apply for a registration card.

Mr.
Cuthriell said the financial effect of the delay is "a big question."
The Metropolitan Wellness Center at Eastern Market in Southeast and two
other dispensaries, the Takoma Wellness Center and Capital City Care,
both in Northwest, are paying for security systems, rent, staffing and
more so that if and when patients begin patronizing the dispensaries
they are ready to receive them.

A November 2010 fiscal impact
statement provided by the District’s chief financial officer estimated
that 800 patients would qualify and be registered to use medical
marijuana and that the number would increase 50 percent each year for
the first five years. Mr. Cuthriell and other dispensary owners used
this number to gauge the potential size of their market.

The
Metropolitan Wellness Center spends its time doing preparatory work,
"little things, but we’re not just sitting around," Vanessa West,
general manager, said.

"Because we haven’t had our final
inspection by DOH, we’re not exactly complaining yet," she said. "I’m
more disappointed because there are patients who have a qualifying
disease, but it’s taking forever for physicians to get recommendation
forms."

Asked
about the frustrations expressed as a result of the delays, Ms. Roberts
said three cultivation centers have been issued registrations and are
growing medical marijuana.

"It takes 90 days to grow the plant.
While the dispensaries are ready there is nothing to dispense until the
product is ready," Ms. Roberts said.

Patients eligible to use
medical marijuana include those with cancer, glaucoma, HIV, AIDS and
conditions characterized by severe and persistent muscle spasms, such as
multiple sclerosis. Patients undergoing chemotherapy or radiotherapy or
patients using azidothymidine or protease inhibitors also qualify.

While
lobbying a section of the federal tax code that bars businesses selling
certain drugs

With 16 states having decriminalized or legalized cannabis for non-medical use and eight more heading toward some kind of legalization, federal prohibition’s days seem numbered. You might wonder what America will look like when marijuana is in the corner store and at the farmers market. In three years spent researching that question, I found some ideas about the plant that just don’t hold up.

1. If pot is legal, more people will use it.

As drug policy undergoes big changes, I’ve been watching rates of youth cannabis use with interest. As it is for most fathers, the well-being of my family is the most important thing in my life. Whether you like the plant or not, as with alcohol, only adults should be allowed to partake of intoxicating substances. But youth cannabis use is near its highest level ever in the United States. When I spoke at a California high school recently and asked, “Who thinks cannabis is easier to obtain than alcohol?,” nearly every hand shot up.

In Portugal, by contrast, youth rates fell from 2002 to 2006, after all drugs were legalized there in 2001. Similarly, a 2011 Brown University-led study of middle and high school students in Rhode Island found no increases in adolescent use after the state legalized medical marijuana in 2006.

As for adult use, the numbers are mixed. A 2011 University of California at Berkeley study, for example, showed a slight increase in adult use with de facto legalization in the Netherlands (though the rate was still lower than in the United States). Yet that study and one in 2009 found Dutch rates to be slightly lower than the European average. When the United States’ 40-year-long war on marijuana ends, the country is not going to turn into a Cheech and Chong movie. It is, however, going to see the transfer of as much as 50 percent of cartel profits to the taxable economy.

2. Law enforcement officials oppose legalization.

It is true that many law enforcement lobby groups don’t want to end America’s most expensive war (which has cost $1 trillion and counting), but that’s because they’re the reason it’s so expensive. In 2010, two-thirds of federal spending on the drug war, $10 billion, went toward law enforcement and interdiction.

But law enforcement rank and file know the truth about the drug war’s profligate and ineffective spending, says former Los Angeles deputy police chief Stephen Downing, one of 5,000 public safety professionals who make up the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “Most law enforcers find it difficult not to recognize the many harms caused by our current drug laws,” he wrote to me in an e-mail. Those harms include, according to a new ACLU report, marijuana-possession arrests that are skewed heavily toward minorities.

Since marijuana prohibition drives the drug war, these huge costs would end when federal cannabis law changes. Sheriff Tom Allman in Mendocino County, Calif., helped permit, inspect and protect local cannabis farmers in 2010 and 2011. When I asked him why, he said: “This county has problems: domestic violence, meth, poverty. Marijuana isn’t even in the top 10. I want it off the front pages so I can deal with the real issues.”

3. Getting high would be the top revenue generator for the cannabis plant.

I called both of my U.S. senators’ offices to support inserting a provision into this year’s farm bill to legalize hemp for domestic cultivation. Based on my research on industrial cannabis, commonly called hemp, I’m staggered by the potential of this plant, which is not the variety you smoke.

In Canada, where 90 percent of the crop is bought by U.S. consumers, the government researches the best varieties for its hemp farmers, rather than refusing to issue them permits, as the United States tends to do. In a research facility in Manitoba, I saw a tractor whose body was made entirely of hemp fiber and binding. BMW and Dodgeuse hemp fibers in their door panels, and homes whose insulation and wall paneling are made partially of hemp represent a fast-growing trend in the European construction industry.

Jack Noel, who co-authored a 2012 industrial hemp task force report for the New Mexico Department of Agriculture, says that “within 10 years of the end of the war on drugs, we’ll see a $50 billion domestic hemp industry.” That’s bigger than the $40 billion some economists predict smoked cannabis would bring in.

Foods such as cereal and salad dressing are the biggest U.S. markets for hemp today, but industrial cannabis has the brightest future in the energy sector, where a Kentucky utility is planning to grow hemp for biomass energy.

4. Big Tobacco and Big Alcohol would control the legal cannabis industry.

In 1978, the Carter administration changed alcohol regulations to allow for microbreweries. Today the craft-beer market is worth $10.2 billion annually. The top-shelf cannabis farmers in California’s Emerald Triangle realize this potential. “We’re creating an international brand, like champagne and Parmigiano cheese,” says Tomas Balogh, co-founder of the Emerald Growers Association in Humboldt, Calif. Get ready for the bud and breakfast.

When America’s 100 million cannabis aficionados (17 million regular partakers) are freed from dealers, some are going to pick up a six-pack of joints at the corner store before heading to a barbecue, and others are going to seek out organically grown heirloom strains for their vegetable dip.

As Balogh puts it: “When people ask me if the small farmer or the big corporation will benefit from the end of prohibition, I say, ‘Both.’ The cannabis industry is already decentralized and farmer-owned. It’s up to consumers to keep it that way.” So Big Alcohol might control the corner store, but not the fine-wine shop or the farmers’ market.

5. In the heartland, legalization is a political nonstarter.

President Obama, in an interview last December, for the first time took seriously a question about the legalization of cannabis. He said that he didn’t yet support it but that he had “bigger fish to fry” than harassing Colorado and Washington.

In Colorado in 2012, 40 percent of Republican voters chose to legalize cannabis, and a greater share of Coloradans voted for legalization than voted for Obama.

In Arizona, a pretty conservative and silver state, 56 percent of those in a poll last month supported regulating cannabis for personal use. Maybe fiscal conservatives know about the $35 billion in annual nationwide tax savings that ending prohibition would bring. In Illinois, 63 percent of voters support medicinal marijuana, and they’re likely to get it. Even 60 percent of Kentuckians favor medical cannabis.

I’m not surprised. I live in a conservative valley in New Mexico. Yet as a woman in line at the post office recently told me: “It’s pills that killed my cousin. Fightin’ pot just keeps those dang cartels in business.”

Doug Fine is the author of “Too High to Fail: Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution,” in which he followed one legal medicinal cannabis plant from farm to patient.

Source: Washington Post (DC)
Author: Doug Fine
Published: June 7, 2013
Copyright: 2013 Washington Post Company
Contact: letters@washpost.com

Marijuana has become the drug of choice for police departments nationwide — a trend that is playing out with serious consequences here in Brown County.

According to a new report released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union, police have turned much of their zeal for fighting the failed War on Drugs toward the enforcement of marijuana laws in communities across Wisconsin and the country.

In 2010, cops in Wisconsin busted someone for having marijuana once every 28 minutes. The majority of these arrests are happening in communities of color. Despite roughly comparable usage rates, blacks in Wisconsin are nearly six times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession.

These racial disparities are particularly bad in Brown County. Compared to other Wisconsin counties with more than 300,000 residents, in 2010 Brown had the third-highest rate of racial disparity for marijuana possession arrests.

Black people in Brown County are more than seven times more likely than whites to be arrested for the same offense — even though blacks constitute only 2.2 percent of Brown County’s population.

And across Wisconsin, these disparities are only getting worse. Between 2001 and 2010, racial disparities in marijuana possession arrests soared more than 150 percent. Only two other states in the nation had higher increases during this period.

The aggressive enforcement of marijuana possession laws in Wisconsin needlessly ensnares thousands of people in the criminal justice system, crowds our jails, diverts precious police resources away from focusing on serious crimes, and wastes millions of taxpayer dollars. In 2010 alone, Wisconsin blew as much as $73.1 million enforcing marijuana laws.

Legalizing, taxing and regulating marijuana in Wisconsin would end racially biased enforcement. Taxing and regulating marijuana would also save millions of dollars currently spent on enforcement while raising millions more in revenue, which could be invested in community and public health programs, including drug treatment.

Barring legalization, state legislators should work with law enforcement to de-penalize marijuana possession by removing all civil and criminal penalties. Low-level marijuana possession should be decriminalized to a civil offense, and prosecutors should focus on more serious offenses.

Brown County police departments can take action by reforming policing practices, including ending racial profiling, unconstitutional stops, frisks, searches, and programs that create incentives for officers to make low-level drug arrests.

This is an issue of racial justice, fiscal responsibility and common sense. What’s happening in Brown County, all over Wisconsin and across the nation proves that it’s time to end the failed War on Marijuana.

Source: Green Bay Press-Gazette (WI)
Copyright: 2013 Green Bay Press-Gazette
Website: http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/
Author: Chris Ahmuty

Marijuana-themed publications won’t be treated like pornography in Colorado, state regulators announced Thursday in the face of lawsuits.

The rule would have forced stores to keep publications with a “primary focus” on pot away from shoppers under the age of 21, and was mandated by a package of legislature-approved marijuana regulations signed into law by Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper on May 28.

Colorado’s State Licensing Authority said the rule was unconstitutional and would be ignored. An “emergency rule” issued by the licensing authority said “such a requirement would violate the United States Constitution” and Colorado law.

The decision was made with input from the state attorney general’s office. “We support the laudable goal of keeping retail marijuana out of the hands of those under 21, but that has to be consistent with the Constitution,” a spokesperson for the state attorney general told The Denver Post.

Colorado’s marijuana-regulating legislation mandated that the licensing authority adopt a rule by July 1 “requiring that magazines whose primary focus is marijuana or marijuana businesses are only sold in retail marijuana stores or behind the counter in establishments where persons under [21] years of age are present.”

“We applaud the Attorney General’s decision to declare as unconstitutional this absurd rule that marijuana-related publications be treated like pornographic material,” said Mason Tvert, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project.

“The idea that stores can prominently display magazines touting the joys of drinking wine and smoking cigars, yet banish those that discuss a far safer substance to behind the counter, is absolutely absurd,” said Tvert, who co-directed the successful Amendment 64 campaign that legalized pot in Colorado. “The fact that legislators passed this rule despite being informed it is a gross violation of the U.S. Constitution demonstrates the bigotry that still exists with regard to marijuana. It is time for our elected leaders to get over their reefer madness and recognize that a majority of Coloradans – and a majority of Americans – think marijuana should be legal for adults.”

It’s unclear if other restrictions might be deemed unconstitutional. Two federal lawsuits, one filed by the three pot publications – High Times Magazine, The Daily Doobie and The Hemp Connoisseur – and another by the ACLU on behalf of booksellers, had sought to have the rule declared unconstitutional in court.

Permanent rules for recreational marijuana will be crafted by Colorado’s State Licensing Authority with input from an appointed “representative group” of citizens over the summer. A formal rule-making hearing is scheduled for the week of August 19.

Source: U.S. News & World Report (US)
Author: Steven Nelson
Published: June 6, 2013
Copyright: 2013 U.S. News & World Report
Website: http://www.usnews.com/

On Thursday, the New Jersey Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would make it easier for minors suffering from debilitating illnesses to procure medical marijuana.

The bill eliminates the requirement of written confirmation from a pediatrician and a psychiatrist in order for juveniles to get medical marijuana. It also calls for medical marijuana to be produced in edible form and allows more strains to be made available.

Compassionate Care Foundation CEO William J. Thomas

Also out of New Jersey, the state’s Health Department issued a permit for the second medical marijuana dispensary to begin growing its first crop. Compassionate Care Foundation Inc. will now join Greenleaf Compassion Center in bringing relief to the nearly 1,000 patients that have registered for the state’s medical marijuana program.

MPP’s Mason Tvert debating Attorney General Suthers in 2006

Colorado’s staunchly anti-marijuana attorney general, John Suthers, has declared that a rule created by the legislature to treat marijuana-themed publications like pornography is unconstitutional and said the state will not defend it in court. His determination came after state marijuana regulators concluded that it was not constitutional and should not be enforced.

The Associated Press reports:

The magazine requirement was part of a larger set of laws enacted to state how the newly legal drug should be grown and sold. The behind-the-counter restriction was adopted after parents testified that their children should be protected from exposure to magazines touting the drug,  which remains illegal under federal law.

The resulting law left Colorado in an unusual position — one of only two states to allow recreational use of the drug,  while also the only state to restrict the display of publications about marijuana. The state’s decision to reject the magazine restriction was applauded by marijuana legalization activists.

“The idea that stores can prominently display magazines touting the joys of drinking wine and smoking cigars, yet banish those that discuss a far safer substance to behind the counter, is absolutely absurd,” wrote Mason Tvert,  who campaigned for Colorado’s pot law and now is spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project.

Gov. Shumlin

This afternoon, Vermont became the 15th state to decriminalize marijuana possession (two others have made it legal). Gov. Peter Shumlin, a vocal champion of sensible marijuana policies, signed H. 200 at about 1:30 p.m.

Beginning on July 1, H. 200 will eliminate Vermont’s criminal penalties for possession of up to an ounce of marijuana and replace them with civil fines for adults and generally with diversion for those under 21. Click here for details on how H. 200 will change Vermont’s penalty structure.

Attorney Gen. Sorrell

This is a major victory for MPP and our legislative allies in Montpelier, who have worked hard to build support for this sensible reform.

The next step for Vermont policymakers will be to consider legal alternatives to the illicit market for marijuana. Attorney General William Sorrell has publicly argued in favor of decriminalizing plants, and many legislators have made the case for replacing marijuana prohibition with a taxed and regulated system.

The New Hampshire House voted yesterday to reject the Senate’s amendments to HB 573. Rather than sending the flawed Senate version of the bill to Gov. Hassan’s desk to receive her signature, the House has requested that a special committee be formed in one final effort to negotiate a compromise.

The most talked-about issue with the bill is the removal of the home cultivation provision, but there are a number of other serious concerns about the bill. Fortunately, the House has been very strong in its desire to protect patients now rather than expecting them to wait.

You can read a complete run-down on the Senate’s changes here.

Gov. Hassan

If you are a New Hampshire resident, please call Gov. Hassan’s office one more time and urge her to agree that patients should be protected in the here and now. It’s unreasonable that Gov. Hassan thinks patients should have to wait more than a year for legal protections and at least two years for access to medical marijuana.

Additionally, if you haven’t already done so, please take a moment to sign Clayton Holton’s petition at Change.org!

During a press conference on Wednesday, Democratic congressmen from Oregon, Colorado, Washington, and California announced that they will push for legislation to loosen the restrictions on state-legal marijuana businesses.

The five representatives sponsoring reforms hope to ease the burden for businesses in the cannabis industry by allowing them to file for federal tax deductions, open bank accounts, and operate without fear of property or forfeiture claims. They plan to introduce three bills — the Marijuana Businesses Access to Banking Act, the States’ Medical Marijuana Property Rights Protection Act, and an amendment to the IRS code relating to state-legal marijuana sales — and will seek to attach these measures to other legislation moving through Congress.

“These are relatively minor technical adjustments,” said Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, “and in times past, things like this would find their way to be part of larger pieces of legislation.” The Hill reported that the sponsors believe the bills have “little chance at moving on their own,” but that they may make it to the president’s desk if they are included in, say, the broader farm bill being debated before Congress.

The Democratic representatives were joined by businessmen involved in the sale of legalized marijuana for the announcement. Aaron Smith of the National Cannabis Industry Association told the press, “We are asking to be taxed. We are one of the only industries in the country coming to D.C. asking, ‘Tax us, but tax us fairly.’”

Supporters of the legislation claim that it will help end the dangerous “cash only” nature of state-legal marijuana businesses as well as solving conflicts between state and federal laws on the issue.

Link: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/350273/democrats-promote-bills-loosen-restrictions-marijuana-industry-lindsey-grudnicki#comments

Source: National Review Online

Author: Lindsey Grudnicki