the herb grinder

I don’t smoke pot. And I pretty much think people who do are idiots. This certainly includes Marc Emery, the self-styled “Prince of Pot” from Canada whom I indicted in 2005 for peddling marijuana seeds to every man, woman and child with an envelope and a stamp. Emery recently pleaded [...]

Jim Lewis, a 76-year-old grandfather and former missionary worker, got a surprise visit from the police last month. It was around dinnertime, when he heard a knock on the door of his Flint Township home.  He answered the door and found police officers from the Flint Area Narcotics Group. Someone had given a tip [...]

National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML, was presented to SGA by the local chapter’s founders and it became official an official student organization on April 13th of this year. Chris Cahill, a senior from Memphis, Tenn., and president of the UTC chapter of NORML, said he felt inspired to start a local [...]

Butte County Stalls in the March Toward Regulation, Choosing Prohibition Instead The day started off like any other.  Rick Tognoli was tending to his indoor garden.  Robert Galia was at home with his fiancee.  And Hilary Tellesen was doing laundry.  Then unexpected visits turned their lives upside down. Tognoli saw the Butte County Sheriff’s Office vehicle heading [...]

California — The Los Angeles County sheriff has escalated his war of words against California medical marijuana dispensaries, saying as many as 97 percent operate as criminal enterprises. Some of the pot shops get marijuana from Mexican drug cartels, and most dole out pot to people with no medical need for [...]

There is something very weird about asking directions to the marijuana expo at the Anaheim Convention Center. You feel like a young rebel.  You wonder if the security guards think you’re high.  And you fear someone’s going to get busted. Paranoid? Hardly.  Marijuana’s illegal and the smell of pot is in the air.  I’m [...]

Marijuana is thought by some to be a gateway drug among young people who eventually go on to try stronger substances. But that may be the exception rather than the rule, a new study finds. Researchers from the University of New Hampshire looked at data from a random group of 1,286 children, [...]

Colorado — New legislation regulating Colorado’s budding medical marijuana industry is leaving local dispensary owners and county officials in a grey area, as dispensaries try to meet a new requirement that they cultivate at least 70 percent of their cannabis on site or at an optional premises cultivation operation. A number [...]

With the passing of Initiative 59 this spring, medical marijuana became legal in the District. Finally, the D.C. Council realized the lunacy of keeping the substance illegal for medical purposes. But GW administrators clearly still fear the reefer, because they have banned the use or possession of medical marijuana on campus. While [...]

I’ll bet a beer that most of you would have no problem finding a gin and tonic, if booze was illegal today. Guys like Al Capone would see to that.  Big Al, they say, was knocking down $60 million per year in the late 1920s from alcohol alone, during a period when our government brain trust [...]

Central City, Colo. — Don Boring owns a grocery store, a liquor store and now, a medical marijuana dispensary. The main difference among them is that he has to produce his own pot inventory. Colorado set a Sept. 1 deadline for dispensaries to show they grow at least 70 percent [...]

The investor saw potential in the scrubby 67 acres tucked away amid multimillion dollar homes: He would turn the land into a vast pot farm and capitalize on the booming medical marijuana industry. But Scott Mullner, a city councilman from Laramie, Wyo., infuriated his Colorado neighbors with his plan to place [...]

Albuquerque, N.M. — New Mexico is proposing an increase in fees on medical marijuana producers to help fund administration of the state’s program. The New Mexico Department of Health, which operates the program, wants to increase the application fee on would-be producers from the current $100 to $1,000 [...]

Calgary company with help from local firms develops electric vehicle with body parts made from hemp Don’t call it the cannabis car, but a Calgary transportation company and its partners including some Toronto firms have developed an electric vehicle with hemp body parts. Calgary-based Motive Industries says it will unveil the design of the [...]

Smoking pot can make some of the pain go away, without the patient getting high. The finding comes from what researchers in Montreal believe to be the first outpatient clinical trial of smoked cannabis, involving 21 people with chronic neuropathic pain. The results, which included improvements in mood and sleep, were published today in the [...]

World — Smoking cannabis, also known as marijuana, reduced pain in patients with nerve pain stemming from injuries or surgical complications, new research shows. Twenty-one adults with chronic nerve pain were taught to take a single inhalation of 25 milligrams of cannabis through a pipe, three times a day, for five [...]

The shift by some states to legalize marijuana is being invoked by a pair of New York City attorneys who are challenging whether a Saratoga County man implicated in a coast-to-coast drug smuggling case should be subjected to severe federal penalties at a time when the Justice Department has arguably softened its position on the [...]

The District is writing strict new rules to regulate its nascent medical marijuana industry, but some of the entrepreneurs best positioned to lead the way have blemished backgrounds – including drug convictions at odds with the city’s vision. Among the District’s 300 proposed rules is a requirement that operators would need to [...]

Calif. — When the Los Angeles City Council adopted its medical marijuana ordinance, it aimed to rout unscrupulous dispensary operators whose unruly customers irritated residents and operators who opened up willy-nilly across the city, ignoring a ban on new stores. But the ordinance has snared operators who appear to have [...]

USA — Residents in 14 states and Washington can now appeal to their doctors for prescriptions for medical marijuana to help them with their pain. Their employers, however, may not be so understanding. In some cases, workers have been fired for failing drug tests despite having prescriptions saying, in effect, that [...]

There were 72 bodies found on a ranch ninety miles south of the Texas border — obvious victims of a drug cartel massacre.  Bullets have been hitting public buildings in El Paso, and the Washington Post is reporting that at least $20 billion a year in cash is being smuggled across [...]

Forget Reefer Madness. What we’re experiencing across North America these days is Reefer Sanity. In an Angus-Reid poll conducted last year, more than half of those Canadians asked said possession of marijuana should be legalized. And in the U.S., California voters will soon determine that very issue. Reefer Madness was the name of a 1936 cautionary [...]

Students who are prescribed marijuana under the new D.C.  law permitting the drug for medicinal use will not be able to possess or use the drug on campus under the current GW student conduct policies, a University official said in August. Although medicinal marijuana was approved by the D.C.  Council in July, GW’s Code of Student [...]

The smoking of marijuana has always been a controversial subject.  Some think of it as a gateway drug, while others contend it’s healthier than drinking alcohol. That aside, a group of volunteers are coming together this weekend to increase awareness of the use of medical marijuana. For more than a decade a Hempfest festival has been held [...]

One day after an investigation that resulted in 15 arrests, the closure of two medical marijuana dispensaries and the seizure of approximately $750,000 worth of marijuana products, Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard spoke about what he sees as a growing problem. “This is Michigan.  This is not a Cheech and [...]

California — Los Angeles officials announced Wednesday that only 41 medical marijuana dispensaries are eligible to stay in business under the city’s restrictive ordinance, a number so low that the city will suspend the winnowing process and ask a judge to rule that it is legal. “It was a surprise,” [...]

Colorado — For months, media reports have chronicled fiery debates over marijuana’s medicinal utility and its impact on our broader communities. But what about those constituencies who don’t have a lobbyist down at the Capitol or City Hall? What about our veterans? National polls consistently show support for medical marijuana rights [...]

Some AIDS patients in Portland hoping to have legal access soon to medical marijuana may be disappointed. A medical team at the city’s India Street Public Health Center, Maine’s largest HIV practice, notified most of its 170 patients last week that it won’t grant medical marijuana certificates to everyone who asks for one.  The drug is [...]

Sound the alarm! Man the battlements! Another threat to Utah’s guarded way of life looms large on the horizon. Colorado, California, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico and Oregon now allow use of marijuana as medicine. That the West is going to pot is a troubling development for those Utahns already feeling besieged by socialists, Mexicans, homosexuals and garden-variety nutcakes. I [...]

Washington, D.C. — The District is writing strict new rules to regulate its nascent medical marijuana industry, but some of the entrepreneurs best positioned to lead the way have blemished backgrounds — including drug convictions — at odds with the city’s vision. Among the District’s 300 proposed rules is a requirement [...]