Marijuana

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Apollonius
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Marijuana

Post by Apollonius »

This discussion is intended for all subjects relating to marijuana, including botany, cultivation, distribution, legal status, spiritual, health, and environmental issues.


It is inspired by some recent news from Canada:




Legalize pot, say former B.C. attorneys general – CBC News, 14 February 2012
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-c ... alize.html


Four former B.C. attorneys general are joining a coalition of health and justice experts calling for the legalization of marijuana.

Colin Gabelmann, Ujjal Dosanjh, Graeme Bowbrick and Geoff Plant have all signed a letter to B.C. Premier Christy Clark and B.C. NDP Leader Adrian Dix, calling on the politicians to endorse legalizing, taxing and regulating marijuana.

The former attorneys general say the move would help reduce gang violence associated with the illegal marijuana trade, raise tax revenues and ease the burden on the province's court system.

"As former B.C. attorneys general, we are fully aware that British Columbia lost its war against the marijuana industry many years ago," the letter reads.

"The case demonstrating the failure and harms of marijuana prohibition is airtight. The evidence? Massive profits for organized crime, widespread gang violence, easy access to illegal cannabis for our youth, reduced community safety, and significant — and escalating — costs to taxpayers."

'Dismayed' by mandatory minimum sentencing

The letter goes on to say that as attorneys general, the four men were responsible for overseeing the province's justice system and are well aware of the "burden" imposed on the court system by the enforcement of marijuana prohibition.

"We are therefore dismayed that the B.C. government supports the federal government’s move to impose mandatory minimum sentences for minor cannabis offences," says the letter. "These misguided prosecutions will further strain an already clogged system, without reducing cannabis prohibition-related violence or rates of cannabis use."

The letter goes on to compare today's marijuana laws to alcohol prohibition in the United States in the 1920s.

"It is time B.C. politicians listened to the vast majority of B.C. voters who support replacing cannabis prohibition in favour of a strictly regulated legal market for adult marijuana use," the letter reads. ...



In January the Liberal Party of Canada comitted to a resolution that states:

a new Liberal government will legalize marijuana and ensure the regulation and taxation of its production, distribution, and use, while enacting strict penalties for illegal trafficking, illegal importation and exportation, and impaired driving.
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Apollonius
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Re: Marijuana

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Prohibition on medical pot cookies unconstitutional - CBC News, 13 April 2012
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-c ... okies.html

A B.C. Supreme Court judge has struck down a section of Canada's medical marijuana laws that said licensed users cannot possess pot cookies or marijuana body creams. ...
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Apollonius
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Re: Marijuana

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Marc Emery's U.S. prosecutor urges pot legalization - CBC News, 18 April 2012
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-c ... ation.html

John McKay once prosecuted B.C.'s 'Prince of Pot' Marc Emery

The former U.S. district attorney who prosecuted B.C. marijuana activist Marc Emery in a cross-border sting is calling for the legalization and taxation of pot in Canada and the U.S.

John McKay, a former U.S. attorney for the western district of Washington State, was joined by Emery's wife Jodie and former B.C. Attorney General Geoff Plant at a lecture in Vancouver on Wednesday.

McKay said he did not regret prosecuting Emery because he broke U.S. law, but he believes the war on pot has been a complete and total failure. He said the laws keeping pot illegal no longer serve any purpose, but allow gangs and cartels to generate billions in profits.

"I want to say this just as clearly and as forthrightly as I can, marijuana prohibition, criminal prohibition of marijuana is a complete failure," McKay said.

McKay said marijuana, like alcohol, should be produced and sold to adults by the government, and that would generate at least half a billion dollars in revenue annually in Washington State alone.

More importantly, he said, ending prohibition would end the violent reign of gangs and drug cartels who are profiting from the situation. He said any prohibition in society requires broad support from the population, and that isn't the case with marijuana.

The appearance was organized by Stop the Violence BC, a coalition of high-profile academic, legal, law enforcement and health experts, which is working to reduce crime and public health problems stemming from the prohibition on marijuana.

The group includes several former B.C. attorneys general, several former Vancouver mayors, a former B.C. premier and a former RCMP superintendent for the province.

McKay, a Republican, was a U.S. Attorney from 2001 to 2007, when he resigned or was fired along with eight other U.S attorneys by President Bush.

He is now a professor in the faculty of law at Seattle University and an avid supporter of the Washington State ballot initiative for the November election to implement a regulated, taxed market for marijuana.

Marc Emery remains in prison in the U.S., serving a five-year sentence for conspiracy to manufacture marijuana through his mail-order cannabis seed business.
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Re: Marijuana

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Happy 4/20!
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Re: Marijuana

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Image
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Enki
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Re: Marijuana

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CT legalized medical marijuana.
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Re: Marijuana

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TIME | What Is President Obama’s Problem With Medical Marijuana?
For a brief moment in 2009, medical marijuana advocates exhaled. A new President had taken office promising to call off the federal prosecutors in states that had legalized weed for the sick. “What I’m not going to be doing is using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue,” Barack Obama had said during his presidential campaign. In his first year in office, the Justice Department told prosecutors not to focus on “individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana.” Medical marijuana patients and the growing industry that supported them thought they were in the clear.

But they weren’t. Two years later, the Obama Administration is cracking down on medical marijuana dispensaries and growers just as harshly as the Administration of George W. Bush did. In 2011, the Department of Justice revised its guidance to U.S. Attorneys, allowing them to target any medical marijuana activity except for ill patients and their immediate caregivers. The Drug Enforcement Administration has made it clear that “medical marijuana is not medicine,” and even called it a “mortal danger.”

The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms has banned the sale of guns to medical marijuana patients. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has told public housing authorities that they can’t rent to medical marijuana patients.
And the Internal Revenue Service has reiterated its position that medical pot businesses cannot deduct expenses related to an illegal drug. Fearing federal intervention, many banks are now dropping medical marijuana dispensaries as customers.
May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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Re: Marijuana

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5 Special Interest Groups That Help Keep Marijuana Illegal

1.) Police Unions: Police departments across the country have become dependent on federal drug war grants to finance their budget. In March, we published a story revealing that a police union lobbyist in California coordinated the effort to defeat Prop 19, a ballot measure in 2010 to legalize marijuana, while helping his police department clients collect tens of millions in federal marijuana-eradication grants. And it’s not just in California. Federal lobbying disclosures show that other police union lobbyists have pushed for stiffer penalties for marijuana-related crimes nationwide.

2.) Private Prisons Corporations: Private prison corporations make millions by incarcerating people who have been imprisoned for drug crimes, including marijuana. As Republic Report’s Matt Stoller noted last year, Corrections Corporation of America, one of the largest for-profit prison companies, revealed in a regulatory filing that continuing the drug war is part in parcel to their business strategy. Prison companies have spent millions bankrolling pro-drug war politicians and have used secretive front groups, like the American Legislative Exchange Council, to pass harsh sentencing requirements for drug crimes.

3.) Alcohol and Beer Companies: Fearing competition for the dollars Americans spend on leisure, alcohol and tobacco interests have lobbied to keep marijuana out of reach. For instance, the California Beer & Beverage Distributors contributed campaign contributions to a committee set up to prevent marijuana from being legalized and taxed.

4.) Pharmaceutical Corporations: Like the sin industries listed above, pharmaceutical interests would like to keep marijuana illegal so American don’t have the option of cheap medical alternatives to their products. Howard Wooldridge, a retired police officer who now lobbies the government to relax marijuana prohibition laws, told Republic Report that next to police unions, the “second biggest opponent on Capitol Hill is big PhRMA” because marijuana can replace “everything from Advil to Vicodin and other expensive pills.”

5.) Prison Guard Unions: Prison guard unions have a vested interest in keeping people behind bars just like for-profit prison companies. In 2008, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association spent a whopping $1 million to defeat a measure that would have “reduced sentences and parole times for nonviolent drug offenders while emphasizing drug treatment over prison.”
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Re: Marijuana

Post by Milo »

Demon of Undoing wrote:5 Special Interest Groups That Help Keep Marijuana Illegal

1.) Police Unions: Police departments across the country have become dependent on federal drug war grants to finance their budget. In March, we published a story revealing that a police union lobbyist in California coordinated the effort to defeat Prop 19, a ballot measure in 2010 to legalize marijuana, while helping his police department clients collect tens of millions in federal marijuana-eradication grants. And it’s not just in California. Federal lobbying disclosures show that other police union lobbyists have pushed for stiffer penalties for marijuana-related crimes nationwide.

2.) Private Prisons Corporations: Private prison corporations make millions by incarcerating people who have been imprisoned for drug crimes, including marijuana. As Republic Report’s Matt Stoller noted last year, Corrections Corporation of America, one of the largest for-profit prison companies, revealed in a regulatory filing that continuing the drug war is part in parcel to their business strategy. Prison companies have spent millions bankrolling pro-drug war politicians and have used secretive front groups, like the American Legislative Exchange Council, to pass harsh sentencing requirements for drug crimes.

3.) Alcohol and Beer Companies: Fearing competition for the dollars Americans spend on leisure, alcohol and tobacco interests have lobbied to keep marijuana out of reach. For instance, the California Beer & Beverage Distributors contributed campaign contributions to a committee set up to prevent marijuana from being legalized and taxed.

4.) Pharmaceutical Corporations: Like the sin industries listed above, pharmaceutical interests would like to keep marijuana illegal so American don’t have the option of cheap medical alternatives to their products. Howard Wooldridge, a retired police officer who now lobbies the government to relax marijuana prohibition laws, told Republic Report that next to police unions, the “second biggest opponent on Capitol Hill is big PhRMA” because marijuana can replace “everything from Advil to Vicodin and other expensive pills.”

5.) Prison Guard Unions: Prison guard unions have a vested interest in keeping people behind bars just like for-profit prison companies. In 2008, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association spent a whopping $1 million to defeat a measure that would have “reduced sentences and parole times for nonviolent drug offenders while emphasizing drug treatment over prison.”

I would add cotton farmers and associated fabric industries, insect/herbicide industries, and the pulp and the paper industry.
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Marcus
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Bleeding the body-politic . . .

Post by Marcus »

Milo wrote:
Demon of Undoing wrote:5 Special Interest Groups That Help Keep Marijuana Illegal

1.) Police Unions: Police departments across the country have become dependent on federal drug war grants to finance their budget. In March, we published a story revealing that a police union lobbyist in California coordinated the effort to defeat Prop 19, a ballot measure in 2010 to legalize marijuana, while helping his police department clients collect tens of millions in federal marijuana-eradication grants. And it’s not just in California. Federal lobbying disclosures show that other police union lobbyists have pushed for stiffer penalties for marijuana-related crimes nationwide.

2.) Private Prisons Corporations: Private prison corporations make millions by incarcerating people who have been imprisoned for drug crimes, including marijuana. As Republic Report’s Matt Stoller noted last year, Corrections Corporation of America, one of the largest for-profit prison companies, revealed in a regulatory filing that continuing the drug war is part in parcel to their business strategy. Prison companies have spent millions bankrolling pro-drug war politicians and have used secretive front groups, like the American Legislative Exchange Council, to pass harsh sentencing requirements for drug crimes.

3.) Alcohol and Beer Companies: Fearing competition for the dollars Americans spend on leisure, alcohol and tobacco interests have lobbied to keep marijuana out of reach. For instance, the California Beer & Beverage Distributors contributed campaign contributions to a committee set up to prevent marijuana from being legalized and taxed.

4.) Pharmaceutical Corporations: Like the sin industries listed above, pharmaceutical interests would like to keep marijuana illegal so American don’t have the option of cheap medical alternatives to their products. Howard Wooldridge, a retired police officer who now lobbies the government to relax marijuana prohibition laws, told Republic Report that next to police unions, the “second biggest opponent on Capitol Hill is big PhRMA” because marijuana can replace “everything from Advil to Vicodin and other expensive pills.”

5.) Prison Guard Unions: Prison guard unions have a vested interest in keeping people behind bars just like for-profit prison companies. In 2008, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association spent a whopping $1 million to defeat a measure that would have “reduced sentences and parole times for nonviolent drug offenders while emphasizing drug treatment over prison.”



I would add cotton farmers and associated fabric industries, insect/herbicide industries, and the pulp and the paper industry.



We live in a system designed to make us sick and keep us sick in far more ways than one . . how many leeches can the body-politic support before becoming a corpse?

We are, I'm afraid, about to find out . . :o
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Mr. Perfect
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Re: Marijuana

Post by Mr. Perfect »

Isn't MJ legal in a great many countries? Any reason we don't have large corporations cashing in on these great MJ products where it's legal?
Censorship isn't necessary
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Enki
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Re: Marijuana

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Mr. Perfect wrote:Isn't MJ legal in a great many countries? Any reason we don't have large corporations cashing in on these great MJ products where it's legal?
Because US foreign policy has tied economic subsidies and foreign aid to making this stuff illegal.
Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
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Re: Marijuana

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Err, we barely impede the production of pot in our own country, how could we possibly do anything about what happens in the continent of Africa?
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Enki
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Re: Marijuana

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Mr. Perfect wrote:Err, we barely impede the production of pot in our own country, how could we possibly do anything about what happens in the continent of Africa?
It's easier to napalm crops in Africa than it is in the United States. The import is illegal in most major countries markets. The industry does exist internationally if that's what you are asking.

My family has an invite to come to the crop circle making a bit west of London this fall.
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Re: Marijuana

Post by Mr. Perfect »

The US is napalming in Africa? Tell me more. :)

Poor countries don't need cotton products. medicine, fabrics and what not?
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Re: Marijuana

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A Judge’s Plea for Pot
By GUSTIN L. REICHBACH
Published: May 16, 2012

THREE and a half years ago, on my 62nd birthday, doctors discovered a mass on my pancreas. It turned out to be Stage 3 pancreatic cancer. I was told I would be dead in four to six months. Today I am in that rare coterie of people who have survived this long with the disease. But I did not foresee that after having dedicated myself for 40 years to a life of the law, including more than two decades as a New York State judge, my quest for ameliorative and palliative care would lead me to marijuana.

My survival has demanded an enormous price, including months of chemotherapy, radiation hell and brutal surgery. For about a year, my cancer disappeared, only to return. About a month ago, I started a new and even more debilitating course of treatment. Every other week, after receiving an IV booster of chemotherapy drugs that takes three hours, I wear a pump that slowly injects more of the drugs over the next 48 hours.

Nausea and pain are constant companions. One struggles to eat enough to stave off the dramatic weight loss that is part of this disease. Eating, one of the great pleasures of life, has now become a daily battle, with each forkful a small victory. Every drug prescribed to treat one problem leads to one or two more drugs to offset its side effects. Pain medication leads to loss of appetite and constipation. Anti-nausea medication raises glucose levels, a serious problem for me with my pancreas so compromised. Sleep, which might bring respite from the miseries of the day, becomes increasingly elusive.

Inhaled marijuana is the only medicine that gives me some relief from nausea, stimulates my appetite, and makes it easier to fall asleep. The oral synthetic substitute, Marinol, prescribed by my doctors, was useless. Rather than watch the agony of my suffering, friends have chosen, at some personal risk, to provide the substance. I find a few puffs of marijuana before dinner gives me ammunition in the battle to eat. A few more puffs at bedtime permits desperately needed sleep.

This is not a law-and-order issue; it is a medical and a human rights issue. Being treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, I am receiving the absolute gold standard of medical care. But doctors cannot be expected to do what the law prohibits, even when they know it is in the best interests of their patients. When palliative care is understood as a fundamental human and medical right, marijuana for medical use should be beyond controversy.

Sixteen states already permit the legitimate clinical use of marijuana, including our neighbor New Jersey, and Connecticut is on the cusp of becoming No. 17. The New York State Legislature is now debating a bill to recognize marijuana as an effective and legitimate medicinal substance and establish a lawful framework for its use. The Assembly has passed such bills before, but they went nowhere in the State Senate. This year I hope that the outcome will be different. Cancer is a nonpartisan disease, so ubiquitous that it’s impossible to imagine that there are legislators whose families have not also been touched by this scourge. It is to help all who have been affected by cancer, and those who will come after, that I now speak.

Given my position as a sitting judge still hearing cases, well-meaning friends question the wisdom of my coming out on this issue. But I recognize that fellow cancer sufferers may be unable, for a host of reasons, to give voice to our plight. It is another heartbreaking aporia in the world of cancer that the one drug that gives relief without deleterious side effects remains classified as a narcotic with no medicinal value.

Because criminalizing an effective medical technique affects the fair administration of justice, I feel obliged to speak out as both a judge and a cancer patient suffering with a fatal disease. I implore the governor and the Legislature of New York, always considered a leader among states, to join the forward and humane thinking of 16 other states and pass the medical marijuana bill this year. Medical science has not yet found a cure, but it is barbaric to deny us access to one substance that has proved to ameliorate our suffering.

Gustin L. Reichbach is a justice of the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn.
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Re: Marijuana

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wWWOJGYZYpk
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Re: Marijuana

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Study: The ‘gateway drug’ is alcohol, not marijuana
By Stephen C. Webster
Thursday, July 5, 2012 13:52 EDT

A study in the August edition of The Journal of School Health finds that the generations old theory of a “gateway drug” effect is in fact accurate for some drug users, but shifts the blame for those addicts’ escalating substance abuse away from marijuana and onto the most pervasive and socially accepted drug in American life: alcohol.

Using a nationally representative sample from the University of Michigan’s annual Monitoring the Future survey, the study blasts holes in drug war orthodoxy wide enough to drive a truck through, definitively proving that marijuana use is not the primary indicator of whether a person will move on to more dangerous substances.

“By delaying the onset of alcohol initiation, rates of both licit substance abuse like tobacco and illicit substance use like marijuana and other drugs will be positively affected, and they’ll hopefully go down,” study co-author Adam E. Barry, an assistant professor at the University of Florida’s Department of Health Education & Behavior, told Raw Story in an exclusive interview.

[...]
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Re: Marijuana

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May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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Re: Marijuana

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May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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Re: Marijuana

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May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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Re: Marijuana

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May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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Re: Marijuana

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Uruguay lawmakers consider legalizing marijuana with goal of outselling pot dealers - Washington Post, 15 November 2012
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the ... story.html


MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay — Uruguay came one step closer to turning the government into the country’s leading pot dealer on Thursday, as lawmakers formally introduced to Congress a framework for regulating the production, sale and consumption of marijuana.

The proposal is much more liberal than what Uruguay’s government initially proposed months ago, when President Jose Mujica said only the government would be allowed to sell pot.

The draft law would instead create a National Cannabis Institute with the power to license individuals and companies to produce and sell marijuana for recreational, medicinal or industrial uses. It would foster marijuana growing clubs to provide the weed to their members. And most significantly, it would allow anyone to grow a limited amount of marijuana in their own homes, and possess marijuana for their own consumption.

[...]

Ruling party Deputy Sebastian Sabini told the AP that opposition lawmakers were invited Thursday to present alternatives to the proposal. He expects it to be quickly forwarded by the Commission on Addiction to the full lower house of Congress, which will pass the law next month. Uruguay’s Senate would then take it up early next year, and if it passes, developing the necessary infrastructure and regulations would take much of 2013. Mujica’s ruling Broad Front coalition enjoys ample majorities in both houses, so passage isn’t in doubt.

The goal of promoting public health remains the same, said sociologist Agustin Lapetina, a Uruguayan drug policy adviser to the Social Development Ministry.

“The central objective is to separate the two markets, that of marijuana from riskier drugs, to minimize the probability that a cannabis consumer goes to the black market and ends up in other drugs,” Lapetina told the AP.

“The state certainly will not be the main producer, but instead will license those who produce, distribute and sell” marijuana, Lapetina added. “And with this licensing money, it will collect funds to finance public health and prevention campaigns.”

Marijuana legalization activist Juan Vaz has worked with government officials for more than a year on the law, and was pleased with the draft submitted Thursday, although he was surprised to see that pot-growing clubs would be limited to 15 members.

“It is becoming tangible and real. Anything can be improved, but we’re in a time of change, during which there are no clear recipes, because nobody has traveled down this path before,” he said.
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Re: Marijuana

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What Stephen Harper and his crony capitalist friends dislike most about legal marijuana is the prospect that some people might grow their own, perhaps cutting their friends out of some business:



Proposed medical marijuana changes have doctors on edge - CBC News, 7 December 2012
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2 ... ctors.html

Other proposed changes would replace individual growers with commercial operations
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Re: Marijuana

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Liberal Party committee suggests four-ounce marijuana possession limit - Carlito Pablo, Georgia Straight, 23 January 2013
http://www.straight.com/news/345321/lib ... sion-limit


Marijuana is already legal in Washington state and Colorado, as long as it’s an ounce or less and the person who has it is at least 21 years old. But is one ounce good enough for Canadians? How about four ounces?

The policy committee of the B.C. branch of the Liberal Party of Canada discusses this point and a lot more in a draft policy paper entitled Legalization of Marijuana: Answering Questions and Developing a Framework.

“We feel Washington’s one ounce limit may create unnecessary, ongoing enforcement requirements and restrict people growing their own for personal use—where one plant may yield more than an ounce of product,” the draft paper states.

“In this light we recommend a four ounce (.10 kg) limitation be considered for the amount a non-licensed vendor or distributor can purchase or possess without obtaining a special permit, subject to consultation with consumers, distributors, law enforcement and producers. We feel this is reasonable and akin to purchasing a 40 or 60 oz. bottle of vodka or whisky a couple times a year instead of buying a small bottle each month.”

The paper’s authors cite statistics indicating that regular users of marijuana in Canada use an average of one gram a day, or one ounce (28 grams) per month.

They likewise point to the need to establish other limits for cannabis-infused goods, plants for personal use, and marijuana in liquid form. They note that Washington has possession limits of 16 ounces (0.45 kilograms) for cannabis-infused goods and 72 ounces (2.4 kilograms) for cannabis in liquid form.

Citing 2005 figures compiled by the United Nations, the authors note that Canada’s cannabis consumption rate is “one of the highest in the world” at 17 percent of the population aged 15 to 64. That’s higher than Asia (two percent), Europe (five percent), and the U.S. (12 percent). “This translates to 3 million Canadians using marijuana each year,” the authors write.

Released this month, the paper was scheduled to be presented to the public on January 23 at SFU Harbour Centre.

“Once we legalize, then we can regulate the product,” coauthor Sangeeta Lalli told the Straight in a phone interview. “We can regulate the use and safety. And I think that’s important for all Canadians.”




Legalization of marijuana:: answering questions, developing a framework - draft - Liberal Party of Canada (BC) Standing Policy Committee, January 2013
https://bc.liberal.ca/files/2013/01/DRA ... Jan-13.pdf
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