The head of the Hemp and Cannabis Foundation in Portland, Paul Stanford, is working to put a measure on the 2012 ballot in Oregon to legalize marijuana.

Joining with Rep. Jim Moeller, Sen. Kohl-Welles' introduced new legislation that tries to make crystal clear Washington’s existing medical marijuana laws. "Senate Bill 5073 and House Bill 1100 would establish a regulatory system for the sale and purchase of medical marijuana for qualifying patients," says Kohl. It contains a sales tax exemption for patients, but dispensaries would have to pay a B&O tax. "Other provisions include protecting parental rights of medical marijuana patients and protections against the workplace discrimination of patients," adds Kohl-Welles. "The current legal limits of up to 15 plants and up to 24 ounces of useable marijuana per patient and one patient per provider remain intact."

Opium prices in Afghanistan more than doubled last year after disease cut production in half, the United Nations said, creating a "cash bonanza" for many farmers that could drive up cultivation of the drug in 2011.

Medical marijuana advocates are heading back to Trenton today to make their case against the state's plans for regulating the drug. Patients say the rules proposed by Governor Chris Christie's administration are too restrictive. Both houses of the Legislature have voted that Christie is not following the intent of the medical marijuana law adopted last year.

The United States is urging all countries to file formal objections to Bolivia’s announcement that it had developed a coca leaf soft drink. Bolivia, like neighboring Peru, permits limited cultivation of coca for legal use in cooking, folk medicine and Andean religious rites. Unadulterated coca is a mild stimulant that counteracts the effects of altitude sickness and suppresses hunger pangs.

As Mexico drowns in drug prohibition related bloodshed — suffering almost 12,000 murders in 2010 — it is perhaps unsurprising that government critics turn up their screaming that the war on drugs isn't working. But it was a bit of a bombshell when former president Vicente Fox added his voice to the chorus. The cowboy-boot wearing leader, who ruled Mexico from 2000 to 2006, had once declared the "mother of all battles" against crime and rounded up drug kingpins.

Hemp has omega-3 and omega-6 essential fatty acids, contains 33 percent protein, is a good source of vitamin E and is low in saturated fat. It's an environmentally friendly crop that grows fast and requires few pesticides. But it is also a controversial food source because of its relationship with its cousin, marijuana.

Medical marijuana advertising is taking off, propping up the fortunes of ailing media companies that have seen income from other business sectors plummet in the recession. Advertisements offering free edibles for new patients and products such as "super silver haze" are helping to keep the San Francisco Bay Guardian, SF Weekly and East Bay Express in business. Similar ads have even started cropping up — tentatively — in more staid publications, such as the San Francisco Chronicle.

MarijuanaPOS.com, a business dedicated to helping business owners in the medical cannabis industry, announces risk-free merchant account services with the launch of its new web site. The site's main focus is to provide credit/debit card processing services for medical marijuana dispensaries, collectives, delivery services, and other related businesses secure merchant account services.

Russia has one of the fastest spreading HIV epidemics in the world, driven largely by the government's refusal to institute measures to treat the country's drug addicts — measures that have dramatically reduced HIV infections in drug addicts in other countries, including the U.S.

 

Colombia's largest rebel group FARC may benefit from the recent killing of neo-paramilitary drug lord "Cuchillo," newspaper El Espectador reports. According to the newspaper, the death of Pedro Oliveiro Guerrero, alias Cuchillo, late last month brought an end to the paramilitary rule of the underworld of Colombia's eastern plains that started when the AUC took control of the region in the 1990s. A police investigator told El Espectador that members of Cuchillo's organization ERPAC have been meeting to assure a continuation of the drug trade, but have not been able to appoint a successor of their slain leader.

The number of civilians killed in Mexico’s drug prohibition war soared by 172 percent in the last 12 months. Collateral deaths of civilians increased from 61 in 2009 to 166 last year, according to a report from the Attorney General’s Office.

A Kiwi-born banker has revealed chilling details of his undercover life working for vicious, prohibition-created South American drug trafficking organizations, including watching a hit squad execute and dismember a group of people in front of him. He claims he was approached by the US Drug Enforcement Agency after striking up friendships with Mexican cartel bankers while in jail for conspiring to defraud.

After more than 10 years of trying, 2011 could be the year that Connecticut adopts legislation allowing severely ill patients to smoke marijuana. Governor Dannel P. Malloy says he's inclined to sign that bill. Malloy also supports decriminalization legislation to reduce penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana to the price of a motor vehicle infraction. Now, with a friendly face in the governor's office, all the legislative proponents of the two measures have to do is push the bills through a variety of committee debates and floor battles in the House and Senate, fend off opposition and get the bills approved before the midnight June 8 deadline.

Mayor Luis Jiminez Mata, of Santiago Amoltepec, was shot to death by prohibition-created drug traffickers when he was visiting the state capital of Oaxaca. He is the third municipal leader to be killed in a week and in 2011.

Rhode Island health officials have accepted 18 applications from people interested in opening medical marijuana compassion centers to distribute medical marijuana to qualifying patients. The Department of Health said it would review the applications and hold a public hearing on them February 7.

A string of academics, health experts and former politicians have lent their names in support of a trial of a needle and syringe program in Australian correctional facilities.

Prohibitionist drug policies did not help thirty-four-year-old Corry Thomas who was shot and killed in front of his sister's home. His plea deal was supposed to place him in witness protection, but he was murdered before he ever got the chance to testify. Sources say his testimony could have helped put high-level drug dealers in prison and the drive-by shooters knew that the clock was ticking.

Carole Bennett, a substance abuse counselor and activist who has lectured at a number of rehabilitation centers as well as schools and universities, offers four healthy concepts to consider when talking to children about substance use.

New Jersey's state senator Scutari said he's taking the next step toward voiding Gov. Chris Christie's proposed strict medical marijuana regulations after the Christie administration missed a Wednesday deadline to submit a new version. A hearing on the issue has been scheduled for Jan. 20 before the state Senate's health committee.

Police officers who smell marijuana coming from an apartment can break down the door and burst in if they have reason to believe this evidence might be destroyed, several Supreme Court's justices suggested Wednesday. In the past, the high court has said police usually cannot enter a home or apartment without a search warrant because of the 4th Amendment's ban on "unreasonable searches and seizures."

The federal government of Canada is currently considering Bill S-10, which proposes legislative amendments that, among other things, would introduce mandatory minimum prison sentenc

Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, D-Seattle, and Rep. Jim Moeller, D-Vancouver, announced Tuesday that they had introduced House and Senate bills to clarify the state's medical marijuana regulation.

NORML has recently posted online the fourth edition of its popular and comprehensive booklet, "Emerging Clinical Applications for Cannabis & Cannabinoids: A Review of the Recent Scientific Literature." Updated and revised for 2011, this report reviews approximately 200 newly published scientific studies assessing the safety and efficacy of marijuana and its compounds in the treatment and management of nineteen clinical indications: Alzheimer’s disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), chronic pain, diabetes mellitus, dystonia, fibromyalgia, gastrointestinal disorders, gliomas and other cancers, hepatitis C, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hypertension, incontinence, methicillin-resistant Staphyloccus aureus (MRSA), multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis, pruritus, rheumatoid arthritis, sleep apnea, and Tourette’s syndrome.

Tornillo, Texas and Guadalupe, Mexico are two small towns separated by only a fence. In one, residents go about their daily business. In the other, the community lives in constant fear. KTSM in Texas reports on how the drug prohibition war has deeply changed the relationship between the border towns.

Do you care about how medical marijuana is distributed?  Here's your chance to comment:

The body of a murdered man found dumped on a main road into Acapulco Monday brought the four-day death toll in the once peaceful Pacific coast Mexican resort city to 31. With the weekend toll, Acapulco is facing the highest levels of drug prohibition violence since President Felipe Calderon declared war on drug trafficking organizations in 2006.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 11, 2011

FROM THE DESK OF SENSIBLE COLORADO

Dear Friends,

Electronic systems that track sales of the cold medicine used to make methamphetamine have failed to curb the drug trade and instead created a vast, highly lucrative market for profiteers to buy over-the-counter pills and sell them to meth producers at a huge markup. An Associated Press review of federal data shows that the lure of such easy money has drawn thousands of new people into the methamphetamine underworld over the last few years.

The new dispensary is the first in south Vancouver. Jacob Hunter, director of Imedikate Medical Cannabis Dispensary, said the shops operate "on the edge of the legislative law" because Health Canada refuses to issue a dispensary license, but the country's judiciary has ruled people have a right to medical marijuana.

The fabled resort of Acapulco closed its bloodiest weekend ever due to drug prohibition. In less than a day 14 headless bodies and a 15th intact victim were found on a street in front a shopping mall frequented by locals. On Saturday, six people were shot dead and all their bodies stuffed in a taxi, two police officers were also killed and four others in another part of the city.

For Immediate Release: January 7, 2011

A study of "false positives" involving drug-sniffing police dogs suggests some police forces may be using canines to do an end-run around constitutional protections against search and seizure, and may be profiling racial minorities in the process. A survey of primarily suburban police departments in Illinois, carried out by the Chicago Tribune, found that 56 percent of all police searches triggered by a drug-sniffing dog turned nothing up. But, perhaps tellingly, that number jumped to 73 percent when the search involved a Latino subject -- meaning that nearly three-quarters of all dog alerts on Latinos turned up no contraband.

A woman who's been waiting five months for an updated license to use medical marijuana says the situation for patients is getting worse. Health Canada issues medical marijuana licenses to people with debilitating illnesses and prescriptions from their doctors. Almost 5,000 Canadians have licenses to carry medical marijuana and just over 3,500 have a license to grow it. A spokesman for Health Canada says the department streamlined its process and is now hitting its eight to 10 week processing time target.

Leaders of both political parties have already expressed an unwillingness to move to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes, but that won’t stop advocates of medical marijuana from lobbying for the change when the legislature convenes in January.

Events and quotes of note from this week's drug policy events of years past.

A Superior Court in Ventura County, California, ruled that police in that state can search the contents of an arrested person's cell phone. The ruling allows police in California to access any data stored on an arrestee's phone: photos, address book, Web browsing history, data stored in apps (including social media apps), voicemail messages, search history, chat logs, and more. According to Catherine Crump of the American Civil Liberties Union, "The police can ask you to unlock the phone -- which many people will do -- but they almost certainly cannot compel you to unlock your phone without the involvement of a judge," she said.

Doctors hope further studies of salvia will unlock treatments for a variety of neurological disorders including Alzheimer's disease and illnesses that cause chronic pain.

La Familia leaders say they want the truce to demonstrate they are not responsible for the crimes they are accused in the media of committing. The Mexican Federal Police have been committing much of the recent violence in western and southern Mexico but blaming it on La Familia, the statement says. The police commit the attacks "without caring if it is women, children ... or adults," the La Familia statement said.

Algernon Austin, director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute, explores white privilege in conjunction with the war on drugs against the backdrop of the book Dorm Room Dealers: Drugs and the Privileges of Race and Class by A. Rafik Mohamed and Erik D. Fritsvold.

Conchita Sarnoff explores the cooperation, or lack there of, between Mexico and the U.S. in the drug prohibition war raging at our border and farther south.

The recreational drug known as ecstasy may have a medicinal role to play in helping people who have trouble connecting to others socially, new research suggests. In a study involving a small group of healthy people, investigators found that ecstasy prompted heightened feelings of friendliness, playfulness and love, and induced a lowering of the guard that might have therapeutic uses for improving social interactions. The researchers suggested that ecstasy might help people with post-traumatic stress disorder as well those with autism, schizophrenia or antisocial personality disorder cope with a variety of emotional difficulties.

Out of 320 requests from felons on supervision in Washington, seven people have gotten permission to use medical marijuana — a select group that includes a forger wasting away from AIDS and a white-haired grandmother named Kathy Parkins with fibromyalgia. A frustrated group of advocates, attorneys, physicians and patients says the state's Department of Corrections is ignoring the state medical marijuana law by substituting its judgment for that of doctors who recommend the drug. The policy, they say, is ripe for a legal challenge, although none has been filed.

2010 was huge.  2011 will be even bigger...

Since the start of Mexico's drug prohibition war, 200 people wounded in Mexico have been treated at El Paso's county-run hospital at a cost of $4.7 million, according to the latest figures from the University Medical Center of El Paso. "Local taxpayers are footing the bill for the consequences of a conflict that is occurring on foreign soil," said Jim Valenti, UMC's chief executive officer, and Dr. Jose Manuel de la Rosa, founding dean of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center at El Paso Paul L. Foster School of Medicine.

Longtime marijuana activist Dana Larsen announced his bid for the leadership of the provincial party from the Vancouver office where he dispenses medical marijuana. The 39-year-old is the first candidate to publicly announce his intention to take over the party since Carole James resigned on Dec. 6. James has said she will remain at the helm until an interim leader is chosen in mid-January. Larson, the founding editor of Cannabis Culture Magazine from 1994 to 2004, says he has support from many members of the provincial NDP party, but admits he isn't in the "inner circle."

80-year-old Republican Delegate Harvey Morgan, also an assistant clinical professor of pharmacy at Virginia Commonwealth University, is leading the charge to decriminalize marijuana possession. Legislation proposed by Morgan, known as House Bill 1443, would replace the criminal fine for possession with a civil penalty and eliminate the 30-day jail sentence and criminal record that would follow conviction. "In 2007, nearly 18,000 people were arrested in Virginia for simple possession of marijuana...This places a tremendous burden on law enforcement, prisons and the judicial system. In these times of economic hardship, we need to closely examine how our tax dollars are spent," Morgan said.