The California Legislature will soon vote on two marijuana reform bills that seem to be more popular with the public than with the politicians in Sacramento: SB 129 by state Sen. Mark Leno, which would prohibit employment discrimination against medical marijuana patients, and AB 1017 by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, which would allow for reduced, misdemeanor charges in marijuana cultivation cases. Both bills have strong public support according to a newly released poll of state voters by EMC Research, CalNORML Director Dale Gieringer writes in an e-mail advisory. However, both have had trouble getting through the [...]
Proposition 215, passed by voters in 1996, leaves too many things open to interpretation and needs to be clarified by the Legislature. As the California Legislature gets back to work next week, there’s no more important duty than addressing the state’s budget crisis. A close second in terms of priorities should be medical marijuana, the Chico Enterprise-Record writes in an unsigned editorial. While the budget is job one, the Legislature can’t say it doesn’t have time for clearing up the medical marijuana confusion at the same time. After all, the Legislature last year had the [...]
SAN FRANCISCO — Attorney General Kamala Harris urged California lawmakers Wednesday to get serious about clarifying the state’s 15-year-old medical marijuana law, saying numerous holes in the notoriously liberal statute have left law enforcement and legitimate patients in a near-constant state of uncertainty. In a letter to the Legislature’s leaders, Harris said the state needs to spell out if the hundreds of storefront dispensaries and delivery services that sell marijuana—purportedly for medical use—are legal, or if the only lawful way to obtain the drug is through patient collectives in which all members jointly grow their [...]
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? That ancient philosophical – or would it be biological? – question has a political counterpart in California, Dan Walters observes in his McClatchy Newspapers column. To wit: Did California’s Legislature become dysfunctional because voters adopted too many contradictory ballot measures, or were those ballot measures merely responding to the chronic inability or unwillingness of the Legislature to deal with substantial issues? Countless academic conferences, newspaper op-ed essays and even books have been devoted to answering, or attempting to answer, the question ever since ballot measures became the [...]
Fifteen years after California voters legalized medical marijuana, state lawmakers are still struggling with how to regulate and tax what has become a billion-dollar industry fueled by the growing number of pot dispensaries up and down the state. Lawmakers took steps recently to ban pot shops from residential neighborhoods and give local governments the authority to shut down problem operators. They also rejected proposals to reduce penalties for illegal pot cultivation and protect medical marijuana patients from workplace discrimination, Michael J. Mishak and Patrick McGreevy report in the Los Angeles Times. Some legislators and others [...]
Feb 132011
One of the joys of having your own blog is setting your own deadlines. Sure, it’s been a couple of weeks since the California NORML reform conference in Berkeley, but it’s taken that long to figure out my new video-editing software. So the game plan is to play catch-up over the next week or so with fresh videos from that uber-important conference; contact me if you like what you see and/or think I should stick to writing. ;o) Today’s selection features Joe Rogoway, a criminal defense attorney who’s involved with the California Cannabis Initiative, which [...]
In 2008, then-state Assemblyman Mark Leno got a bill passed in both houses of the California Legislature to prohibit employees from firing workers simply because they were medical marijuana patients. A little more than two years after the bill was vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Leno, now a Democratic state senator from San Francisco, has introduced similar legislation. Leno’s Senate Bill 129 would prohibit employers from discriminating against workers with medical marijuana recommendations in hiring or firing decisions or in their rights to participate in the workplace, Peter Hecht reports in his “Weed Wars” blog. [...]
Apr 202010
As California’s marijuana movement and a few thousand pot smokers celebrate today’s 4th of July of weed, state Sen. Mark Leno is convening an April 20 session of his public safety committee in a bid to make possession of an ounce or less an infraction. Under California law, people arrested for simple possession face a penalty akin to an infraction – a fine of $100. But they are still charged with a misdemeanor, Peter Hecht writes in “Weed Wars.” But Leno, who notably returned a call on his pot bill at 4:20 p.m., said misdemeanor [...]
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