10,000 Smoke Out on 4-20 at CU Boulder!
By: skip
An unprecendented crowd numbered at 10,000 turned out on a sunny Sunday at the University of Colorado, Boulder for the annual 420 Event. There wasn’t a single citation or arrest this year, unlike previous years where police were actively disrupting the event and fining participants. This year everyone got to smoke without hassles as the police were overwhelmed by the turnout!
Views: 8999
Marijuana Reality TV Show Seeks Participants
By: skip
Do you have interest in the general area of marijuana, especially based around the major new openness in the industry following California’s medical cannabis laws?
Hollywood production crew seeks individuals interested in furthering their knowledge by attending part-time classes at the well-known Oaksterdam University in Oakland and exploring study, work, and vocation within the world of cannabis growing, dispensing, and medical services.
We are searching for individuals from all walks of life with an interest in this subject matter and a relative comfortability being on camera and being recognized in public. All we need from you is passion and honesty.
Participants in the program will receive free school tuition, nice housing, money for living expenses, and per diems.
If interested, please respond via email with some basic information on yourself, contact information, your relationship, if any, to the subject matter, preferably a photo of yourself, and your willingness to be on camera. We will be setting up local interviews for those interested.
This is going to be a lot of fun.
Thanks.
Reply to: info@upshotmanagement.com
Source: Craigslist
Views: 14769
Germans poisoned by Lead added to Marijuana!
By: skip
Apparently there’s another contaminant appearing in marijuana, this time in Germany. So besides the tiny glass beads in Dutch grass exported to the UK, and the sickening crap found in British soapbar hash, now Europeans have a new worry… Lead particles. It seems some dealers/distributors have decided to make even more profit from cannabis by adding lead to the pot they sell.
Fortunately we don’t have any of these problems in the USA. But always BE CAREFUL what you purchase! Purchase only from reliable sources and inspect your weed carefully!
Here’s the story:
Here’s yet another reason to "just say no" to drugs: Smoking marijuana could lead to lead poisoning. Doctors in Germany have linked a mysterious outbreak of lead intoxication to contaminated street supplies of marijuana.
In a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, Franziska Busse, M.D., of the University Hospital Leipzig and colleagues detail a puzzling occurrence of lead poisoning symptoms over a 3- to 4-month period among patients aged 16 to 33 years old. Twenty-nine patients at four different hospitals had abdominal cramps, nausea, fatigue , and anemia – classic signs and symptoms of lead intoxication.
Yet the source of the lead remained inexplicable. After eight weeks of investigation, Busse and colleagues finally found a common link: all of the patients admitted to smoking pot on a regular basis, either in joint form or through a water pipe.
Tests done on remaining supplies from some patients revealed traces of lead particles mixed with the marijuana leaves. Lead’s grayish color allowed the metal to blend easily with the illicit drug. The large size of lead particles found in one package strongly suggested that the poisoning did not result from soil contamination. Busse writes that police suspect street dealers of deliberately lacing street bags of marijuana with the toxic metal in an effort to increase profits. The weight of the lead particles found in the supplies studied would roughly translate into a profit of $1,500 per kilogram of marijuana.
An anonymous screening program involving 145 people ultimately showed that about two-thirds of the participants had high levels of lead in their blood, requiring treatment. For example, a male patient who smoked nine joints a week had a blood lead level nearly 50 times greater than normal.
Lead poisoning can have serious effects on every part of the body. It can damage the nervous system, impair fertility, and lead to memory and concentration problems. Severe lead poisoning can lead to death. Smoking lead is particularly dangerous, because it allows the metal to be easily absorbed into the airways.
The letter appears in the April 10 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/10/health/webmd/main4005638.shtml
Views: 14719
Huntington Beach Police Return Marijuana to Medical Patient
By: skip
What’s interesting here is that the California Supreme court has refused to listen to this case, letting the Appeals court ruling, which ordered a return of the cannabis to the patient, stand. Now perhaps California law enforcement will start doing what it is paid to do – enforce California’s laws, not each officer’s personal morality!
Acting on court orders, Huntington Beach police returned 30 grams of pot taken from a medical marijuana patient last year.
An appellate court ruled in a Garden Grove case that seized medical marijuana must be returned to a patient, and three weeks ago the California Supreme Court declined to review the appeals court ruling.
That meant Huntington Beach resident David Alan Lucas could retrieve his high-grade purple urkel marijuana and a couple of smoking pipes. The 43-year-old man, who uses pot to relieve stress, says he’s surprised to get it back.
Police Capt. Chuck Thomas says the department is complying with the court order. California voters in 1996 approved the Compassionate Use Act allowing medical marijuana use.
Views: 5780
John Sinclair Once Again Calls for Legalization of Marijuana
By: skip
ANN ARBOR, Mich., April 6 (UPI) — Noted poet John Sinclair, speaking at the annual Hash Bash at the University of Michigan, called for the legalization of marijuana.
While the annual pro-marijuana event on the university was minimized to a mere half-hour this year due to a conflict with another student group’s program, Sinclair used that time to promote the drug’s legalization, The Ann Arbor (Mich.) News reported Saturday.
"People want drugs," Sinclair told the assembled crowd of as many as 2,000 students. "They want to get high … Because it’s all good."
Sinclair gained notoriety at the university for a 1971 "Free John Sinclair" rally held on campus following a marijuana conviction by the poet. He was immortalized in the John Lennon song, "John Sinclair". Sinclair is also noted as being the manager for the breakthru band, MC5.
The newspaper said there was one arrest for disorderly conduct and no tickets were issued for marijuana use during this year’s gathering.
Views: 6306
Tom Cruise Purple – Latest Cannabis Strain!
By: skip
Tom Cruise isn’t getting any giggles from a new strain of medical marijuana being marketed as "Tom Cruise Purple."
Word is that the actor’s lawyers are taking a serious look at the strong brand of bud after we brought it to their attention.
One of Cruise’s friends found it "outrageous" that licensed cannabis clubs in Northern California are selling vials of pot featuring a picture of Cruise laughing hysterically.
Like other followers of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, Cruise is opposed to the use of psychotropic drugs.
Staffers at several California clinics we called said they were forbidden to discuss any of the herbal varieties in their "inventory."
But one weed devotee said, "I heard it’s the kind of pot that makes you hallucinate."
Source: NY Daily News
Views: 6215
Cannabis to Remain Class C Drug in UK!
By: skip
The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs believes that cannabis should remain in the lowest category, Class C. All council members agreed that it there was no evidence that marijuana causes schizophrenia.
The council – the official body which advises the government on drugs policy – was asked by the government to review cannabis’s legal status amid concerns over stronger forms of it.
Its decision leaves the government in an awkward position, said BBC home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw. Gordon Brown is still gung ho about increasing penalties for cannabis possession.
If the government went ahead and reclassified cannabis to class B, ministers would be rejecting the findings of the council’s panel of 23 drug experts – which has never happened before on a decision about drug classification.
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7327702.stm
Views: 3004
Rhode Island bill would create dispensaries.
By: skamikaze
PROVIDENCE — A year after passing permanent medical marijuana legislation, lawmakers say it’s time to establish a safe and legal means for patients to obtain the drug.
Right now, qualifying patients may grow marijuana, but since the state provides no access to the drug, they often resort to buying it on the street.
Legislators and doctors call that scenario an unwanted weak link in an otherwise successful law. They’ve heard too many stories like that of Warwick’s Buddy Coolen, 29, a medical marijuana user who three months ago was robbed at gunpoint by the drug dealer while trying to buy marijuana to treat his debilitating gastrointestinal condition.
Now Rep. Thomas C. Slater and Sen. Rhoda E. Perry, both of Providence, who sponsored the permanent medical marijuana law, propose expanding its scope to create licensed marijuana dispensaries, or “compassion centers,” which would legally grow and distribute the drug at affordable prices to the 359 patients who partake of the state’s program.
The centers would be regulated by the Health Department and would also offer education services to eligible patients and their caregivers.
Testifying at a Senate hearing on the subject last night, Dr. Todd Handel, a physiatrist and pain-management specialist, said such clinics would resolve a host of obstacles that currently accompany the use of medical marijuana in this state.
“The problem now is, how are my patients supposed to get it? If I write a prescription for Oxycontin, they’re not going to the street to buy it, they’re going to a pharmacy,” he noted. “… But when it comes to marijuana I can’t tell them how much to take, how to use it and where they can get it because it’s illegal for them to get it. So I’m saying to them, ‘you have a diagnosis that the state allows for but it’s illegal for you to obtain it and I can’t tell you how to do it.’ ”
Handel was one of several doctors and almost a half dozen patients who testified in support of the proposed centers. Together, they agreed that the state’s medical marijuana program has been invaluable in helping relieve the chronic pain and nausea that accompanies cancer, AIDS and other illnesses. But growing enough healthy plants for regular dosages, or finding reliable places to buy the drug, can prove challenging, they admitted.
It’s a set of circumstances Slater and Perry say already weakened patients should not have to grapple with.
Slater said he omitted the creation of compassion centers from the original proposal –– which passed as a temporary measure in 2006 and was written into permanent law last year –– because he felt it was important to pass the legislation incrementally, to allow lawmakers to warm up to the idea. “But I think now is the time to help protect those patients who really need it and give them a safe place to get it,” Slater said yesterday.
Nationwide, the use of medical marijuana has increased in recent years. At least 12 states now have laws allowing use of the drug for medical purposes. But according to the Rhode Island Patient Advocacy Coalition, only New Mexico and California have laws governing dispensaries: California’s centers are not regulated by the state and need not be nonprofit agencies, and so far New Mexico has not yet licensed any clinics, said Jesse Stout, executive director of the coalition.
Rhode Island’s compassion center proposal is not without its critics, including the governor and others who say Rhode Island shouldn’t be passing laws that ignore federal law, which still bans marijuana usage.
“To continue to flout the federal law and to start dealerships or whatever you want to call them is just irresponsible,” said Rep. Nicholas Gorham, R-Coventry, who has in the past opposed marijuana legislation. Gorham pointed to the spate of federal raids on California dispensaries in recent years as examples of the problems Rhode Island could face if it creates such centers.
Health Department spokeswoman Helen Drew voiced similar concerns, saying the department does not want to jeopardize the program in its current format.
Furthermore, she said, the Health Department “has no expertise in licensing these types of facilities” and no expertise in establishing regulations. “We feel it moves us way beyond the scope of public health,” she said.
A Carcieri spokesman said the governor continues to oppose any medical marijuana legislation, having twice vetoed the measure.
Slater acknowledged yesterday that the compassion-center proposal will encounter obstacles. “But it’s a start,” he said, noting that it took almost a decade to garner enough support to pass the medical marijuana legislation.
The Senate Committee on Health and Human Services took no action on the bill yesterday. A hearing on an identical House bill is expected sometime next week.
Patient Buddy Coolen believes that passage can’t come soon enough to safeguard the state’s sickest residents, to avoid other violent attacks such as the one against him. “Hopefully we can prevent innocent patients from getting into a situation that could turn deadly,” he said.
Source: The Providence Journal
Views: 3584
Cannabis ‘should remain Class C
By: skamikaze
The official body which advises the government on drugs policy has decided that cannabis should remain a Class C drug, the BBC understands.
The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs’ decision would appear to go against the view of Gordon Brown, who favours returning the drug to Class B.
The government asked the council to review cannabis’s legal status, amid concerns over stronger forms of it.
The council refused to confirm or deny a decision.
Chairman Professor Sir Michael Rawlins said a report would be sent to Home Secretary Jacqui Smith this month.
University study
BBC home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw said the decision was taken at a private meeting of the council, which discussed some significant new research from Keele University about links between cannabis and mental illness.
The study found nothing to support a theory that rising cannabis use in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s led to increases in the incidence of schizophrenia later on.
The Advisory Council’s decision leaves the government in an awkward position, our correspondent adds.
Gordon Brown has indicated he favours transferring cannabis back to Class B to send a message about the dangers of the drug.
If the government does reclassify, it would be rejecting the findings of the Advisory Council’s panel of 23 drug experts, which has never happened before on a decision about drug classification.
Source: BBC online
Views: 2914
Dutch Smoking Ban – Pure Cannabis Joints OK!!!
By: skip
This is GREAT NEWS for cannabis users in Holland (and tourists of course!). Now maybe the Dutch will STOP mixing their marijuana with tobacco in their joints! It’s very unhealthy and addictive to smoke tobacco!
By Bruno Waterfield in Brussels
Cannabis will be exempt from a Dutch smoking ban that comes into force in two months.
Restrictions on smokers in cafes and restaurants will not apply as long as cannabis is consumed neat, without tobacco. The exemption follows fears that many of Amsterdam’s lucrative "coffee shops" would be forced to close if soft drug users had to smoke elsewhere.
Liberal Dutch policies, introduced in 1972, on the sale and use of cannabis have generated a trade valued at more than £3 billion a year.
Source: Telegraph
Views: 3257