Regarding legalizing it…
Tag: marijuana
Lawmakers strike the word ‘marijuana’ from all state laws, calling term racist
“Pot,” “weed,” “grass,” “Mary Jane,” “flower” — there is no shortage of terms to describe cannabis. However, Washington state is taking one word officially off the table: “marijuana.”
Legislators recently passed a law that changes every Revised Code of Washington with the word “marijuana.” The change gets rid of the term, swapping it out for the word “cannabis.”
Supporters say the word “marijuana” has a long history of racism.
“The term ‘marijuana’ itself is pejorative and racist,” said Washington state Rep. Melanie Morgan during testimony in 2021. Morgan is a Democrat representing the 29th Legislative District and sponsored the bill — House Bill 1210. Morgan discussed the history of the word, which originates from Spanish.
“As recreational marijuana use became more popular, it was negatively associated with Mexican immigrants,” Morgan said.
Governor Jay Inslee signed the bill that passed unanimously into law March 11. The changes will take effect in June.
Brave Entrepreneurs Openly Defy Licensing Laws and are Selling Cannabis Even Though it’s “Illegal”
So far, New Yorkers in 2022 have seen a massive increase in crime across the city. For the month of February 2022, New York City saw a 58.7% increase in overall index crime compared to February 2021. Every major index crime category saw an increase for the month of February 2022. Robbery increased by 56 percent, grand larceny increased by a whopping 79.2 percent, and grand larceny auto more than doubled, jumping up a massive 104.7 percent.
So, what are the politicians doing about it? Drafting legislation to shut down family-owned businesses for selling a plant. That’s right, currently, politicians in New York are moving through legislation to shut down honest mom and pop operations who would dare to sell a plant to a willing customer — without first paying the state for the privilege of doing so.
In March of 2021, New York legalized recreational marijuana and that’s where the progress stopped. Despite legalization, the state of New York requires businesses to obtain a license from the government before they can legally sell the plant. There’s only one problem… for an entire year, the state didn’t issue any licenses.
In the land of the free, attempting to earn money in certain professions without first paying the state for the privilege of doing so can and will get you kidnapped and extorted. These laws are applied to children behind lemonade stands as well as adults selling flowers. The state callously and with extreme prejudice has been documented arresting people, or even beating up women to enforce these licensing laws.
Instead of focusing on their rampant crime problem, legislators in New York are using their authority to continue this disturbing cycle. They are now going after unlicensed cannabis companies who dared to earn a living without first obtaining a license that didn’t exist.
The good news is that many folks aren’t waiting for the state to give them permission and are openly defying the licensing requirement — and they’re doing so successfully.
FDA Takes Only Months to Approve Pfizer Jab Yet Cannabis Remains Schedule 1 Despite Centuries of Data
Since Dec. 11, 2020, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine has been available under the Food and Drug Administration’s Emergency Use Authorization in individuals 16 years of age and older, and the authorization was expanded to include those 12 through 15 years of age on May 10, 2021. On August 23, 2021, it was granted full approval by the FDA.
The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine now become the fastest created, deployed, and subsequently approved vaccination in history. Previously, the fastest vaccine to go from development to deployment was the mumps vaccine in the 1960s, which took about four years.
The swift approval of the vaccine illustrates just how fast the government can react if it wants to do so. On the contrary, however, there have been hundreds if not thousands of studies on the benefits of cannabis to safely treat multiple ailments and diseases, spanning the course of centuries, yet the FDA has failed to approve its use for anything.
To be clear, the FDA has approved patentable pharmaceutical synthetic compounds such as dronabinol. The pharmaceutical patented drugs Marinol and Syndros both use dronabinol which is nothing more than a chemical synthetic equivalent to delta-9- tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) — but the plant-based version you can grow in your own home remains off the list.
65 Teens, Arrested, Shackled, Jailed Because Cops Found a Small Bag of Weed Outside of a Party
House parties among teenagers and young adults are a part of growing up. When kids experience freedom from their parents for the first time, they will often make poor choices and this is a part of experiencing life so one can learn. Poor choices that cause harm to others are certainly not acceptable but when young people are experimenting with substances and make choices which have no victims, they should never have to worry about their lives being ruined over it. Unfortunately, for 65 young people in Cartersville, Georgia, they had no say in the matter when cops arrested all of them — despite none of them making any poor choices.
The nightmare for these 65 teenagers and young folks started back in 2017 as they gathered at a home to celebrate the New Year. As is common on New Year’s Eve, firecrackers can be heard going off all around town. Thought none of the teens involved in this party were popping fireworks, police used it as a reason to enter the home, without a warrant, claiming they heard gun shots.
When police came to the door that night, they had no evidence of a crime being committed, nor did they have reasonable suspicion. Nevertheless, they barged into the legally rented Airbnb, paid for by 21-year-old Deja Heard, who was celebrating her 21st birthday that night.
Officers had no warrant as the shut down the entire party and searched everyone. The only evidence of a crime — which is not a crime at all — was claimed when police found a small bag of weed in the front yard.
Because no one wanted to go to jail over a plant, no one fessed up, or perhaps the person who dropped it, left the party. Regardless, the solution proposed by the officers that night was to arrest everyone and charge them all with possession of marijuana. And they did exactly that.
These teens and young adults were then hauled off to jail, booked into the Bartow County lockup and shackled — for a small bag of weed found outside on the ground.
Let’s be honest…
NIH spends $14 million to study reproductive effects of marijuana on macaques
This week’s Golden Horseshoe is awarded to the National Institutes of Health for a $14 million experiment last year on monkeys that included feeding them marijuana edibles and then monitoring the effects, according to the watchdog group Open The Books.
The primate marijuana experiment had two parts, according to an investigation by the White Coat Waste Project (WCWP).
In the first part, female macaques were served THC edibles daily for up to four months. They were then observed to see if any changes occurred in their menstrual cycles.
In part two, male macaques were fed the edibles for up to seven months and then observed to see if any fertility changes occurred.
NIH awarded the two grants for the experiments. A $13.1 million grant was awarded to the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), and $1.1 million was awarded to the University of Missouri-Columbia.
“The White Coat Waste Project was only able to find the enormous price tag of this project by filing a complaint with the NIH,” wrote Open The Books CEO and founder Andrew Andrzejewski. “Federal law known as the Stevens Amendment requires labs to say what percent of the costs of the experiment come from taxpayer money, the dollar amount of taxpayer funds used, and the percent and amount of funding by non-governmental sources. The Oregon Health and Science University disclosed none of these figures in its reports announcing the research results.”
Andrzejewski also pointed out that since recreational marijuana is legal in Oregon, experiments could have been conducted on humans.
U.S. Cops To Become Brain Scanning Marijuana Detectors
If Mass General Hospital (MGH) has its way, law enforcement officers in the United States will soon be using portable functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) scanners on motorists.
A recent Boston Globearticle describes fNIRS as a “breakthrough” in detecting marijuana impairment.
“Boston researchers say they’ve developed a new, noninvasive technique for detecting marijuana highs that can reliably tell the difference between people who are truly impaired by the drug and those who merely used it recently.”
What has happened to so-called Drug Recognition Experts (DRE)? Have the courts finally realized that police officers using pupil dilation charts to determine which type of drugs a motorist is under is junk science?
Nope, because soon, DRE police officers across the country will be using pupil dilation charts and portable fNIRS brain scanners to determine if someone is under the influence of drugs.
“For so long, our model has been alcohol, so there’s been a lot of focus on breath and blood levels,” Dr. Jodi Gilman, who led the research, said. “Our thought was, ‘What about looking directly at the brain?’ “
The MGH study claims that fNIRS scanners are accurate 76 percent of the time.
This is bat country…
California Escalates Its War on the Marijuana Black Market
Having utterly failed to end the marijuana black market in California, lawmakers have decided to backslide into the drug war by increasing fines on those who operate outside of the state’s very costly and tightly regulated legal cannabis system.
California will begin 2022 not just by increasing taxes on legal marijuana cultivation but also by introducing new fines against anybody “aiding and abetting” any unlicensed dealers in the state.
Lawmakers passed A.B. 1138 in September, and it was signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in October to take effect at the start of 2022. California law establishing recreational marijuana already permits civil penalties against unlicensed marijuana dealers. A.B.1138 threatens civil fines of up to $30,000 per violation against anybody providing assistance to an unlicensed dealer. And each day of doing so counts as a new violation.
California’s implementation of recreational cannabis regulations, authorized by the passage of Proposition 64 in 2016, has been a massive mess. The ballot initiative allowed for municipalities to decide whether to allow cultivation and dispensaries, and two-thirds of them still refuse to do so despite the public vote. The state levies high cultivation and excise taxes that are escalated further by local sales taxes in any municipality that does allow for dispensaries to open up shop.
The result has been price and availability issues so severe that experts estimate that between two-thirds and three-quarters of all marijuana purchases take place through unlicensed dealers, which means that the state isn’t getting its share of the revenue. The problem is so severe that the editorial board at the Los Angeles Times recently acknowledged that high taxes for goods fuel black markets.
But instead of eliminating or reducing these taxes, the state is instead taking a more punitive approach. And it’s not just lawmakers looking to make sure the state is getting its cut of the money. The bill was introduced by Assemblywoman Blanca E. Rubio (D–Baldwin Park), but the Assembly analysis of her proposal explains that it was co-sponsored by the United Cannabis Business Association and The United Food and Commercial Western (UFCW) States Council, the union that represents some licensed cannabis industry workers. Several licensed cannabis industries and trade groups have also signed on in support.
Hellbound and Down 
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