Marijuana Blog

Massachusetts doctor recommending Medical Marijuana despite lack of dispensaries

Massachusetts' medical marijuana regulations officially went into effect on Friday, but thats not stopping one doctor from already recommending it  to patients. Dr. Jill Griffin of Northhampton, Mass, began writing marijuana recommendations for her patients before dispensaries were even open in the state!

While she was not originally sold on marijuana's medical use, she took a chance by writing one recommendation for an elderly cancer patient. "She was able to eat and get up and go out and go shopping," said Griffin. Prior to recieving her mmj recommendation, the  cancer patient had really been "housebound."

Part of the reason Dr. Griffin chose to open her office, she says, is the hesitance of many primary care doctors to recommend marijuana to patients. And though Griffin says many of her patients are new to her, she maintains the required relationship with them through follow-up calls and visits.

Keep up the good work Dr. Griffin! The majority of America stands behind you. 

Thanks for joining us this weekend at the AMMP Expo! Check out our raffle ticket winners!

Thank you to everyone who came out to the American Medical Marijuana Professionals Expo this weekend in Detroit, Michigan. It was a fun filled weekend featuring tons of vendors, speakers, educational classes, and so much more. There was even a Magic Vapor bus that took patients back and forth between the medicating site! 

We raffled off a few very nice pieces from Boro Boutique, including: a Chad G Mini Tube, a Hitman mini beaker, and a Relik dry pipe! Below are the winners for all of the glass pieces:

The Hitman Mini Beaker- Ticket # 754112

Chad G Mini Tube- Ticket #:753615

Relik Dry Spoon- Ticket #:753046

Chad G Lay Back Dry Pipe- Ticket #: 024006

The raffle winners have already been contacted via email, so make sure to go check yours!

Join us in Detroit, MI March 22nd-24th for the AMMP Expo

The 3rd Annual American Medical Marijuana Professionals Expo is kicking off this Friday in Detroit, MI! Join WheresWeed.com at the expo and experience hundreds of vendors, educational classes, speakers, and demonstrations. You can even catch a ride on the Magic Vapor Bus to the nearby medicating site!

The knowledgeable doctors will be there to quickly and easily evaluate  atients to determine if medical marijuana is a viable treatment option. Their customer care representatives are there to help you through every step in receiving your medical marijuana card from the state of Michigan. 

The expo will also have tons of live music from local bands, and a FREE concert featuring Afroman! 

Colorado Medical Marijuana Enforcement Division Proposes Changes

The Medical Marijuana Enforcement Division has released the set of rules personnel hope to change over the next year in order tostreamline the state medical marijuana industry. See the full document below.

The seven page list, issued late yesterday, covers a wide range of subjects, ranging from cultivation standards to dispensary bookkeeping. There's a lot to cover, so here's a breakdown of the highlights:

• The MMED wants to tackle issues in the area of licensing and application requirements, including laws concerning businesses in banned communities, validating the so-called 70/30 medicine rule, as well as licensing and application fees.

• Transfer of ownership issues have been a problem for the MMED, as well as local municipalities, with dispensaries frequently changing hands over the last year. In addition to addressing them, staffers want to look at ownership interests like requirements for residency and reporting criminal history.

• Vendor registration topics are on the list, as is laboratory registration -- something testing facilities have been requesting clarification about for quite some time.

• The MMED is considering changes to existing video monitoring rules, with "more general, reasonable requirements requiring consistent and reliable video monitoring of specified areas of the licensed premises, with the corresponding obligation of providing video records to the division or local authority upon request and without unreasonable delay."

• In regard to cultivation, the state wants to consider definitions for "cannabis plant: seed, seedling, cutting, grafting, immature plant-statutory definition, vegetation or sporophytic state, flowering or gametophytic state; stem, leaf, sweet leaf, trichomes, cannabinoid, Flower/Bud;Hashish/Hash, Kief, Bubble Hash, Hash Oil/Resin, concentrate, waste, etc."

• Also on the table are guidelines authorizing extraction methods for MMJ (Hash/hash oil) that can't be defined as an MMJ-infused product, plus defining specific extraction processes like manual sifting, water hash and solvent-based extractions

• Rules pertaining to prohibited processes, additives, chemicals and fertilizers are also on the list.

The MMED will be taking written comments from the public on the proposed changes until December 28, when employees will compile the suggestions and release draft language. That said, the MMED's release doesn't include where the suggestions should be sent. We've contacted the MMED for clarification, but in the meantime, its physical mailing address is:

Public comment will be held January 11, February 15 and March 22 at the Jefferson County Courthouse. The final proposal will be available in early April.

"The division is hopeful that opening the discussion beyond the designated advisory panel will encourage the participation of those with valuable and constructive input," officials said in a release last week. "Before the meetings, the division will release the agenda and general guidelines for constructive participation."

Original article: http://blogs.westword.com/latestword/2012/12/medical_marijuana_enforcement_division_rule_changes.php?page=2

Ireland pushes for legalisation of medical marijuana

Ireland has recently announced an initiative to bring legalisation of medical marijuana early next year. While the Misuse of Drugs Act currently prohibits possesion and distribution, the Irish Medicines Board has seeked permission to sell medical marijuana drugs.

While an exact timeline has not been set, legislators expect proposals in early 2013.

Source: Independent.ie

The Price of Legalization

Just as Prohibition bore Al Capones and strengthened the Frank Costellos and "Lucky" Lucianos, American drug prohibition has spawned a host of cartels south of its border. They wage war against each other for the rights to the most lucrative illegal drug market on Earth -- the United States -- which by some estimates, consumes two-thirds of all the illegal drugs in the world.

Yet there is a major difference between Capone's henchmen and the Mexican cartels: "The violence is not to the scale of what's going on in Mexico," Peck said.

The St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929, one of the most heinous crimes of the era, left seven dead. That many could be murdered in a Mexican border town on your average Wednesday.

How big a hit the cartels would take if the United States legalized pot is a matter of debate, and conclusions vary widely. While U.S. officials said in 2009 that 60% of cartel revenue came from weed, the RAND Corporation said the following year that "15-26 percent is a more credible range."

A report this month by the Mexican Competitive Institute predicted Mexican drug organizations, namely the Sinaloa Cartel, could lose almost $2.8 billion just with the legalization votes in Colorado and Washington.

When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, states saw two immediate benefits aside from neutering the criminal gangs, the first being that they could regulate the product.

Under Prohibition, unscrupulous bootleggers had manufactured moonshines and bathtub gins that could render tipplers blind or dead. Once alcohol was legal, you had a return to quality control, Peck said.

The second immediate benefit? They could also tax the hooch.

"It was a huge consideration. The Great Depression was going on at that point," Peck said. "FDR pays for the New Deal with excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco."

In President Franklin Roosevelt's first two terms, federal taxes jumped from $1.6 billion in 1933 to $5.3 billion in 1940.

How that might translate to marijuana taxation today is debatable, and the ends of the gamut are nowhere near middle ground.

"Medical marijuana helped save the economy in California ... The counties north of San Francisco survived the recession through marijuana," said Aldrich, the marijuana historian.

He was referring to the Emerald Triangle, which is known for producing and exporting some of the country's highest-grade cannabis.

On the other side, you have President Barack Obama's drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, who emphatically denied that marijuana legalization would prove a boon to state coffers. Taxes on alcohol, he told CNN in 2010, amount to $14.5 billion a year, where as the social costs are closer to $185 billion.

Ahead of the recent ballot initiatives in Colorado and Washington, the Colorado Center on Law & Policy estimated that legalization would yield $60 million in state and local revenue and savings by 2017, and perhaps double thereafter. And Washington's Office of Financial Management estimated that a "fully functioning" marijuana industry could bring in nearly $2 billion in revenue over the next five years.

"Fully functioning." Therein lies the rub.

Both the Colorado and Washington estimates came with caveats explaining the obvious: Any revenue projection is contingent on the federal government not enforcing the laws that still render possession of an ounce of marijuana illegal -- even in Colorado and Washington.

University of Virginia law professor Richard Bonnie, co-author of "Marijuana Conviction: A History of Marijuana Prohibition in the United States," said it's a tricky equation.

"There is something attractive about saying you've got this underground market that's not going away, that you're missing a tax opportunity," he said. "The amount of tax revenue you're going to derive from it is going to depend on what your regulatory approach is going to be."

Bonnie was part of the commission that futilely recommended marijuana decriminalization to President Richard Nixon in the 1970s, but he is quick to emphasize that states must step gingerly if marijuana is legalized.

There were many problems with regulating alcohol post-Prohibition, and there still are today. More than a third of eight-graders say they've used alcohol, and almost three-quarters of high schoolers have gotten drunk.

"You have to have a model that doesn't seem to actively encourage use in ways that are harmful to society and the individual," he said, noting the modern regulation of cigarettes provides an admirable model.

Though the Tax Policy Center reports state and local governments collected $17.3 billion in tobacco taxes in 2010, cigarette use, especially among youngsters, has dropped almost 33% since 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Original article: http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/01/us/marijuana-legalization-and-prohibition/