The state Board of Equalization wants to make it perfectly clear: Pay sales taxes on marijuana or risk prosecution. “The sale of medical marijuana is not exempt from sales tax,” said board Chairman Jerome E. Horton. Nor do illegal sales exempt people from paying taxes, he said. That’s not new, but the board has launched a new effort to clarify regulations, both for its own employees and medical pot distributors, Glenda Anderson reports in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. The clarification, combined with a crackdown on dispensaries that have not been paying sales taxes, could [...]
Journalists don’t get any respect, which sucks, but that’s nothing compared with the scorn and ridicule heaped upon our public servants in Sacramento. Let’s face it: It feels good to talk smack about those stuffed suits in the Legislature, especially when it comes to cannabis. Honestly, you couldn’t find a more ignorant bunch of canna-phobes unless you went slumming to your local school board. Enter Mark Leno, the state senator from San Francisco, and a powerful exception to the rule. He was presented the 2010 Friend of Freedom award at the California NORML conference in [...]
It’s funny how elections work sometimes. On the day Californians defeated Proposition 19, voters in 10 cities authorized taxing marijuana. Because Prop. 19 would have legalized the recreational use of pot, these new taxes will fall entirely on medicinal marijuana dispensaries in San Jose, Berkeley, Oakland, Sacramento, Stockton and five other cities. But collecting the taxes might not be as easy as voters think, Dean Schaffer reports in the Peninsula Press, a news site run by Stanford graduate students. Under U.S. law, marijuana is illegal, so to pay a tax for selling it, dispensaries must [...]
Sep 142010
I love the movie “Dazed and Confused,” which I caught the other day on TV. The flick is filled with stoner stereotypes that are funny because they ring so true. At least, they rang true when I went to high school more than 30 years ago. Then Wilford Brimley ruined the movie for me. Not because he’s a bad actor, but because he tried to sell me prescription drugs during the commercial. Despite its countercultural pedigree, “Dazed and Confused” has become an advertising vehicle for catheters, wheelchairs and other products designed for aging boomers. The [...]
We’re going to play “blame the media” in a second. It’s fun and entertaining, even more so if you’re a former print journalist. But first… Time magazine takes notice of the Los Angeles City Council’s efforts to pass an ordinance regulating medical marijuana dispensaries in this article posted Sunday. It begins: “California and Los Angeles have been pioneer sites for the expansion of the legal right to use marijuana. But local officials may now be at the forefront of curtailing some of that exuberance. If the Los Angeles city council has its way, the plethora [...]
A group campaigning to put a marijuana legalization measure before California voters said Monday it has enough signatures to qualify for the 2010 ballot, according to this Associated Press story picked up by the San Diego Union-Tribune. The measure has far more than the nearly 434,000 signatures needed to make the statewide November 2010 ballot, said Richard Lee, an Oakland medical marijuana entrepreneur and the initiative’s main backer. “We’ll keep our organizers on the street to keep the momentum going strong, but today we’re declaring an overwhelming victory,” Lee was quoted as saying in the [...]
Nov 302009
“There’s no doubt the Obama administration has been – as promised – less eager than its predecessor to flout state laws and insist on the primacy of federal drug regulations. “But if you’re a cancer patient who legitimately needs relief, if you’re the grower supplying that patient and others with aches and pains for which doctors recommend pot as the safest palliative, the uncertainty that still remains is unsettling, at best.” So writes Thomas D. Elias in his weekly syndicated column, which is carried by newspapers statewide. This one is posted by the Torrance Daily [...]
Nov 122009
The new federal policy easing enforcement efforts against medical marijuana could lead to a boon in cannabusiness, according to this article in Business Week magazine. Nonetheless, the article says, “cannabis remains mired in legal ambiguities and political sensitivities that—while changing rapidly—are still difficult for entrepreneurs to navigate.” The article notes that most of the 13 states that allow medical marijuana use don’t allow storefront dispensaries, as California does.
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