SANTA CRUZ — A soft drink laced with the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, a tsunami that swept through the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor and a woman arrested on suspicion of throwing a duck were just a few of the stories that captured online readers’ attention in 2011. The Santa Cruz Sentinel website averages more than 400,000 unique visitors each month, and the top story of the year about Canna Cola was viewed more than 150,000 times since it appeared in January 2011, Stephen Baxter reports. Canna Cola, a soft drink aimed at medical marijuana [...]
From the early moments of the groundbreaking reality TV show, “Weed Wars,” it’s clear that longtime pot reform activist Steve DeAngelo is ready for his close-up. After a snappy title track by Snoop Dogg, the opening episode quickly cuts to scenes of a pony-tailed DeAngelo cruising the streets of Oakland and extolling the virtues of medical marijuana. “I have a very close, personal relationship with the cannabis plant,” says the loquacious founder of Harborside Health Center, the state’s largest medical marijuana dispensary. “It was love at first sight.” Cable television in recent years has introduced [...]
Federal prosecutors are preparing to target newspapers, radio stations and other media outlets that advertise medical marijuana dispensaries in California, another escalation in the Obama administration’s newly invigorated war against the state’s pot industry. This month, U.S. attorneys representing four districts in California announced that the government would single out landlords and property owners who rent buildings or land where dispensaries sell or cultivators grow marijuana. Now, newspapers and other media outlets could be next, Michael Montgomery reports in California Watch. U.S. Attorney Laura E. Duffy, whose district includes Imperial and San Diego counties, said [...]
Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims and local attorneys Rick Horowitz and Brenda Linder will debate local regulation of medical marijuana and answer online questions in a one-hour chat beginning at 10:30 a.m. Monday on fresnobeehive.com/news. Fresno County supervisors are expected to enact a ban on medical-marijuana dispensaries at their meeting Tuesday, the Fresno Bee reports. But advocates of the drug are preparing to launch a signature drive to overturn the ban, and local dispensary owners are vowing legal action to block the law.
Once again, government servants have told Americans that marijuana ranks right up there with heroin. The Drug Enforcement Administration ruled on July 8 that marijuana has “no accepted medical use” and will continue as a Schedule 1 drug — the most forbidden category. The DEA is a law enforcement bureaucracy, the Appeal-Democrat of Marysville observes in this refreshingly blunt editorial. The medical opinions of law enforcement bureaucrats should be of little interest. We do not ask cops to make laws; we pay cops to enforce the laws established by constitutions or enacted by the people [...]
Feb 152011
Regulation of medical marijuana in California is a mess. In a column on this page last month, San Jose City Councilman Sam Liccardo suggested the best solution: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration should establish national standards. That won’t happen anytime soon, since obsession with the war on drugs still grips much of the nation. But Assemblyman Tom Ammiano is offering the next best thing. The San Francisco Democrat plans to introduce a cannabis bill that would set state rules governing marijuana dispensaries. Almost anything would be better than the current chaos, the San Jose [...]
Bud’s note: I managed to write a few editorials in my time as a newspaper dude, but as the Prop. 19 campaign proved it’s something of a dying art. Today’s Santa Cruz Sentinel editorial on proposed dispensary regulations is notable by its mere existence, but the author takes it up a notch with spare language and clear logic. Newspapers still serve a purpose … who knew? ================ The county Board of Supervisors should heed recommendations by the county Planning Commission regulating medical marijuana dispensaries. If anything, supervisors could strengthen some of the principles adopted by [...]
Feb 042011
For months, Oakland has struggled with a perplexing dilemma: how can the city regulate marijuana sales and production — forbidden by federal law — while providing medical cannabis, as state voters decreed in a 1996 measure? Now the hammer has come down, observes this San Francisco Chronicle editorial. A plainly worded message from the local U.S. attorney, Melinda Haag, makes it clear that the city’s latest scheme won’t fly legally and leaves Oakland open to civil and criminal lawsuits. What part of “no” don’t you understand, Haag is suggesting. Oakland’s nonstop probing for a solution [...]
Sorry for the late notice, but I’ve been working on an Internet radio show that focuses on the cannabis scene in Fresno. Barring technical difficulties (cross your fingers), The Medical Marijuana Show will air live at 5 p.m. today on wsRadio.com, Studio A. The Medical Marijuana Show is something of a work in progress, with a national broadcast and affiliated shows in Montana and Southern California. It’s a pay-to-play formula that I couldn’t sell on short notice, so we just ditched the playbook for two 15-minute segments. I interviewed Diana Kirby, a longtime medical cannabis [...]
In early March, the tension among the crowd at Cesar Chavez Park ran thicker than the wafting marijuana smoke. Medical pot patients protested across the street from the old Sacramento City Hall building, decrying a plan to close dozens of dispensaries and impose strict rules on a handful of cannabis stores that might survive. Before suspicious eyes, Max Del Real stepped onto a stage in one of his signature designer black suits, Peter Hecht recalls in “Weed Wars.” “As soon as I got to the microphone,” he recalls, “somebody yelled, ‘Capitalist! Get him off the [...]
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