Border agents seized more than 5,000 pounds of illegal narcotics in a 24-hour period along the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego County, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials said. The largest seizure was at the Otay Mesa cargo facility Thursday night at about 6:15, the San Diego Crime Examiner reports. An Ensenada man, 46, drove in the port in an ’04 Kenworth tractor-trailer rig. The cargo’s manifest paperwork indicated the vehicle was hauling peppers and green beans. An officer sent the load to the secondary inspection area, after “developing information,” the CBP did not disclose. [...]
This unbylined analysis of the impact of Los Angeles’ new medical marijuana ordinance was posted by the Drug War Chronicle. ======================= The Los Angeles City Council voted 9-3 Tuesday to approve a medical marijuana dispensary ordinance that, if enforced, will shut down more than 80 percent of the city’s estimated nearly one thousand dispensaries. The ordinance also bars dispensaries from operating within a thousand feet of schools, parks, day care centers, religious institutions, drug treatment centers, or other dispensaries. There were only four dispensaries in the city when the city council first addressed the issue [...]
In 2005, Mountain View native Jonathan Lustig came to the City Council with a seemingly radical proposal: Let him open a medical marijuana dispensary somewhere in the city. “I believe that all patients should be entitled to safe and affordable and practical means for obtaining their medicine,” he said at the time, as reported in this Mountain View Voice article. The idea was short-lived, however, after the council rejected Lustig’s proposal in a 4-3 vote after a great deal of contention — and what some felt to be intimidation from the federal DEA agents present [...]
Jan 282010
Proponents of the marijuana legalization ballot measure said they submitted far more than enough petition signatures Thursday to get it on November’s ballot, and said they hoped to raise and spend about $10 million to get it passed. Proponent Richard Lee, the president of Oaksterdam University and owner of several related “canna-businesses” in Oakland, said the university already had invested about $1 million just to gather the petition signatures, the Oakland Tribune reports here. “We’ve already started fundraising on the Internet. We’ve hired Obama’s Internet team, Blue State Digital,” he told reporters on a conference [...]
Bud’s intro: One reason that newspapers will survive, I suspect, is that databases and Websites are inadequate vehicles for long-form journalism. It takes a dozen clicks or so and some serious scrolling to wade through Steven T. Jones’ review of Bay Area cannabis clubs, but the quotes in the introduction alone are worth it. Score Bay Guardian print version 1, iPad 0 and Kindle stuck in traffic somewhere. ========= I’ve smoked marijuana on and off for most of my adult life, usually in the evening to help let go of the anxieties associated with being [...]
Los Angeles police released surveillance footage today that might help detectives identify a gunman who shot and robbed an employee at a Northridge medical marijuana clinic, the Los Angeles Times reports. The robber entered the clinic in the 8900 block of Reseda Boulevard shortly after 2 p.m. Jan. 8 and took the victim’s wallet and shot him with a handgun, the Los Angeles Police Department said. The employee was taken to a local hospital and listed in stable condition, according to police. The video footage shows a man pointing a gun at someone’s head as [...]
This L.A. Times guest opinion column is written by Skip Miller, chairman of D.A.R.E. America, the top drug-abuse prevention and education program in the United States, and a partner in the Los Angeles law firm Miller Barondess. =========================== The City Council’s vote Tuesday to shut hundreds of so-called medical marijuana dispensaries across Los Angeles was a welcome move, but the larger battle over pot has just begun. Across the country, lawmakers and residents of cash-strapped states are edging ever closer to legalizing — and taxing — marijuana. In California, the first state in the nation [...]
At night, James Hernandez used to set his alarm for 2 a.m. because he was afraid of dying from all of the pain medications he was taking, The Union reports in this feature article. (Headline: “How marijuana rescued his life.”) But life is better now that the Nevada County resident uses marijuana to ease the pain and extend the effectiveness of the few meds he still needs, writes reporter Kyle Magin. Medical marijuana has absorbed western county governments, with Nevada City’s council voting down an ordinance that would have allowed dispensaries to open and Nevada [...]
Jon Martin professes to be “just a person concerned for persons” in authoring this editorial posted on OpEdNews.com. Works for me. Lightly edited, with a brief Bud’s Nugz added at the end. ============ All around us the country is mired in an economic depression of epic proportions. The people of California have an opportunity, right now on the table, to create a real industry generating millions of jobs in a time and place where jobs are desperately needed. AB 390, introduced by Tom Ammiano to the California legislative system, is one of the first pieces [...]
Jan 262010
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has voted to create a ”Medical Cannabis Task Force” that will make recommendations on everything from medical marijuana cultivation and taxation in the city to devising guidelines for baked goods containing the herb — once again putting San Francisco squarely in the pro-pot camp. But the decision wasn’t unanimous, the San Francisco Chronicle’s City Insider reports. Supervisor Sean Elsbernd cried foul. The west-side supervisor looked at the make-up of the 13-member panel — weighted heavily toward the people who use, run and advocate for medical marijuana — and wondered [...]
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