Source: Mlive.com

 

North Muskegon City Council voted to extend its moratorium on medical marijuana businesses Monday night.

 

The moratorium will last six months. It was approved unanimously as part of the consent agenda at Monday’s city council meeting without discussion. Council member Jan Koens was absent.

 

The resolution stated staff was in the process of crafting ordinances governing medical marijuana facilities and that the city had been approached about some possible locations.

 

“Allowing the establishment of medical marijuana facilities, which are at this point not permitted in any zoning district, would cause irreparable harm,” the resolution stated.

 

City Clerk Marcia Jeske said she wasn’t aware of any inquiries about setting up a medical marijuana business in North Muskegon. This is the city’s third six-month moratorium, she said.

 

 

 

 

 

Source: Toke of the Town

 

The secretary of state's office has certified an initiative to legalize marijuana in

 

Washington state, and unless the Legislature acts, the measure will appear on the general election ballot in November.

 

Secretary of State Sam Reed's office announced Friday that New Approach Washington sponsors of Initiative 502 submitted nearly 278,000 valid signatures, more than the 241,153 needed to qualify, reports the Associated Press.

 

I-502 would create a system of state stores where adults 21 and older could buy up to an ounce of marijuana. The cannabis would be grown by a few state-licensed growers, and a 25 percent excise tax would be impose at each stage of the production process.

 

Revenue raised by the excise tax would be earmarked for purposes including "substance abuse prevention," research, education, and healthcare. 

 

Adults will be allowed to buy up to pound of cannabis edibles, such as brownies, or up to 72 ounces of cannabis-infused drinkables (that equals a six-pack of 12-ounce bottles).

 

The most controversial parts of I-502 are its prohibition of home growing (although it doesn't affect the right of qualified medical marijuana patients to cultivate up to 15 plants) and its DUI provision, under which drivers testing more than five nanograms of active THC per milliliter of blood (5 ng/ml) will be considered per se guilty of driving under the influence of cannabis.

 

Medical marijuana patients, in particular, object to the 5 ng/ml cutoff point becoming law, rather than the "visible impairment" guidelines that are currently used. Patients argue that many of them never dip below 5 ng/ml, even when they awaken in the morning unimpaired, since many medical conditions make necessary quite large and regular doses of cannabis.

 

But despite those very real and sobering concerns, the fact remains that a well-funded, prominently backed marijuana legalization measure, flaws and all, is on the way to being decided by the people of Washington state. No matter how many footnotes you put on it, that adds up to some exciting news.

 

 

 

 

Source: Detroit Free Press

 

Narrowing access to medical marijuana is leading Michigan's registered patients, supporters and lawyers to a new strategy: a campaign to gain limited legalization of marijuana in Michigan for all uses.

 

Access to the drug has tightened as doctors increasingly refuse to sign the state forms to approve the drug, patients said. In addition, dozens of communities -- including Birmingham and Livonia -- are enforcing total bans on the drug, and dispensaries that once openly sold it have been raided and shut down by police.

 

Detroit attorney Matt Abel, a state-registered user, is a chief organizer of the petition campaign that is to start Wednesday -- the first day when signatures can be gathered within the 180-day period allowed before the July 9 filing deadline, Abel said. The goal is to be on the statewide November ballot with a proposal allowing Michiganders 21 and older to possess small amounts of marijuana, he said."It would be for religious, medical and personal use, industrial use and agricultural use -- we're putting all that right in the wording," said Abel, 53, of Detroit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The effort to legalize marijuana in Michigan will be officially underway in two weeks. 

The 2012 Michigan Ballot Initiative to End Marijuana Prohibition, sponsored by a grassroots group named Repeal Today For A Safer Michigan 2012, hopes to give the voters a chance to decide for themselves next November, reports Ryan J. Stanton at AnnArbor.com.

 

"We do have language written and petitions getting ready," said RTFASM supporter T.J. Rice on Wednesday afternoon.

 

The petition seeks to amend the Michigan state constitution to legalize marijuana for people 21 and older.

 

Ironically, the momentum of the legalization campaign seems to have been greatly accelerated by notoriously anti-marijuana Attorney General Bill Schuette. The AG -- who claims that Michigan's medical marijuana law has been hijacked by people who just want to get high -- has been throwing his weight around all over the state, trying to shut down dispensaries and intimidate medicinal cannabis providers. He even infamously said at one point "this is Michigan, not a Cheech and Chong movie."

 

Detroit Metro Times reporter Curt Guyette told Toke of the Town on Thursday that Schuette's stubborn anti-dispensary campaign has convinced many medical marijuana suppliers in Michigan that they'll only be safe once cannabis is legalized for everyone, thus possibly avoiding the split in the marijuana vote that doomed Proposition 19 to failure in California in 2010.

 

"Atty. Gen. Schuette may have done more to unite and galvanize the marijuana community in Michigan -- by setting such a negative example -- than anyone else," Guyette told us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

California Attorney General Kamala harris on Wednesday urged state lawmakers to get serious about clarifying the state's 15-year-old medical marijuana law, saying gray areas have left law enforcement and patients in a state of uncertainty.

 

Harris, who was elected with backing from the state's medical marijuana industry (OK, it wasn't exactly a ringing endorsement, it was more a case of "Anybody But Cooley"), has been under pressure to defend the state's medicinal cannabis law since October, when the state's four U.S. Attorneys announced a coordinated crackdown on dispensaries.

 

Dozens of the shops -- which the federal prosecutors claimed were fronts for public drug dealing -- have since closed, reports Lisa Leff at the Associated Press.

 

In a letter to the leaders of the Legislature, Harris said California needs to decide if, in fact, the hundreds of storefront dispensaries and delivery services that sell cannabis are legal, or of the only lawful way to obtain marijuana is through patient collectives in

which all members jointly grow their supply.

 

"Without a substantive change to existing law, these irreconcilable interpretations of the law, and the resulting uncertainty for law enforcement and seriously ill patients, will persist," she wrote in the letter to Senate President Darrell Steinberg and Assembly Speaker John Perez.

 

Harris also sent a separate letter Wednesday to the U.S. Attorneys advising them of her requests to the Legislature. To her credit, the Attorney General asked the federal prosecutors to focus on human trafficking and international gangs instead of California residents who are trying to comply with the state's medical marijuana laws.

 

"The federal government is ill-equipped to be the sole arbiter of whether an individual or group is acting within the bounds of California's medical marijuana laws when cultivating marijuana for medical purposes," Harris wrote to the federal prosecutors.

 

Harris is empowered under the medical marijuana law as California's top law enforcement to issue guidelines on what patients need to do to avoid arrest. Her office spent much of this year preparing to revise the guidelines issued by then-Attorney General, now Gov. Jerry Brown in 2008.

 

But in the letters she sent Wednesday, Harris concluded after talking with city and county governments, law enforcement and the medical marijuana community that it is up to the Legislature to clarify the law, because any directives she issued would by definition lack the force of law.

 

"The facts today are far more complicated that was the case in 2008," Harris said in her letter to Steinberg and Perez. "I have come to recognize that non-binding guidelines will not solve our problems -- state law itself needs to be reformed, simplified and improved to better explain to law enforcement and patients alike how, when and where individuals may cultivate and obtain physician-recommended marijuana."

 

According to Brown's 2008 guidelines, medical marijuana dispensaries are only legal in California if they are set up as nonprofit cooperatives or collectives. Under those rules, anyone running for-profit pot shops can be arrested and prosecuted by local authorities.

 

Among the other issues Harris would like to see clarified, in addition to whether dispensaries are legal and if they need to be nonprofits, is how pot-infused edibles should be regulated. Under current law, companies and individuals that furnish edible forms of cannabis to dispensaries "may be engaged in the illegal sale and distribution of marijuana," she said.

 

The Legislature may have a certain lack of enthusiasm for tackling the thorny subject of medical marijuana again. Earlier this year, two cannabis-related bills -- one that prohibited employers from discriminating against medical marijuana patients, and another that would have made growing marijuana a misdemeanor -- did not get anywhere.

 

 

 

 

'Source: Toke of the Town

 

California Assemblymember Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco) on Tuesday finally got his meeting with federal prosecutor Melinda Haag, the U.S. Attorney for Northern California. But Ammiano left the meeting frustrated and disappointed that Haag doesn't seem to understand the chaos she's creating.

 

"The meeting didn't result in any changes," a clearly disappointed Ammiano told Tim Redmond of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "But it was good that it happened. We cleared the air about the harm that's being done."

 

Haag wasn't at all clear during the meeting about exactly what she wanted -- what, in other words, would end the crackdown, according to Ammiano aide Quintin Mecke.

 

The thrust of Haag's arguments in the meeting were the same tired old lines about "proximity to kids," even though, as pointed out by the Guardian, "that's a really bogus argument."

 

"I've been to a number of local dispensaries and my colleague Steve Jones has been to most of them, and every one requires a drivers license and a medical marijuana ID and they're really serious about security," Redmond wrote. "No high school kids are getting pot from the clubs."

 

Further, San Francisco -- a city that has a fuckload of dispensaries -- has declining marijuana use among teens.

 

Ammiano backs strong regulations for the cannabis collectives, and is supported in that stance by many or most dispensary owners. But Haag wouldn't make any policy recommendations at the meeting, likely to keep her options open so that she can bust any dispensary with or without a real reason, anytime she wants.

 

"So there you have it -- the U.S. Attorney is using demonstrably false allegations to pursue a program that she can't defend -- and she won't help the Legislature find a solution," wrote Redmond. "Thanks, President Obama.

 

 

 

 

Source: 420 Magazine

 

Led by Dr Wai Man Liu, at Barts and the London, Queen Mary’s School of Medicine and Dentistry, the team has followed up on their findings of 2005 which showed that the main active ingredient in cannabis, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, has the potential to be used effectively against some forms of cancer. Dr Liu has since moved to the Institute of Cancer in Sutton where he continues his work into investigating the potential

therapeutic benefit of new anti-cancer agents.

 

It has previously been acknowledged that cannabis-based medicines have merit in the treatment of cancer patients as a painkiller; appetite stimulant and in reducing nausea, but recently evidence has been growing of its potential as an anti-tumour agent. The widely reported psychoactive side effects and consequent legal status of cannabis have, however, complicated its use in this capacity. Although THC and its related compounds have been shown to attack cancer cells by interfering with important growth-processing pathways, it has not hitherto been established exactly how this is achieved. Now Dr Liu and his colleagues, using highly sophisticated microarray technology – allowing them to simultaneously detect changes in more than 18,000 genes in cells treated with THC – have begun to uncover further the existence of crucial processes through which THC can kill cancer cells and potentially promote survival.

 

Whilst leukaemia treatment is on the whole successful, some people cannot be treated with conventional therapy - 25 per cent of children with leukaemia fail to respond to traditional treatment leaving their prognosis outcome poor. Dr Liu’s research findings provide a crucial first step towards the development of new therapies that can eradicate a deadly disease which affects millions of children and adults worldwide.

Dr Liu said: “It is important to stress that these cannabis-like substances are far removed from the cannabis that is smoked. These novel compounds have been specifically designed to be free of the psychoactive features, whilst maintaining anti-cancer action. Ultimately, understanding the fundamental mechanisms of these compounds will provide us with insights into developing new drugs that can be used to effectively treat cancers.”