marijuana

By Tony Newman

Need more evidence that marijuana has gone mainstream in America? Two weeks ago on NBC’s “Today” show, Matt Lauer chatted up a piece on so-called Stiletto Stoners — educated, professional women with killer careers and enviable social lives who favor marijuana as their intoxicant of choice, and are increasingly comfortable admitting it.

The sympathetic piece featured interviews with a wide range of successful women who wind down at the end of the day with a joint instead of a martini.

The coming-out party is happening in more and more places. The entertainment newspaper Variety recently ran a story on the depiction of marijuana as an everyday, normal occurrence on TV and in movies. The story references NBC’s “Parks and Recreation,” the CBS pilot “Accidentally on Purpose” and AMC’s “Mad Men,” all portraying marijuana use matter-of-factly without the “reefer madness” story line. Read more »

The Daily News Tribune

A threshold was quietly crossed last week on Beacon Hill: Marijuana legalization was discussed with barely a giggle.

Thirty years after a trend toward liberalizing marijuana laws was reversed by Nixon's "war on drugs," we're seeing a shift in attitudes and laws. In California, a medical marijuana initiative approved by voters has changed the facts on the ground. Pot shops are everywhere, operating on the tissue of legality provided by medical professionals with the broadest possible interpretation of the ills cannabis may be presumed to treat. But there are no signs of great damage done by making the drug more openly available, and no sign of a serious movement to recriminalize it.

Instead, California is moving toward the next obvious step: legalizing, regulating and taxing cannabis. Two referendum questions are being proposed for the 2010 ballot. Read more »

Taylor Armerding

Think about the money.

Yes, it's time for our elected leaders here in Massachusetts to apply a little consistency to their deliberations on what we used to call moral issues. What business does anybody have imposing their moral values on anyone else anyway? That's so 1950s.

The only thing that really matters is how much revenue the things we used to call vices will generate to let government provide critical services and avoid devastating cuts.

We've done it with gambling. So why not bring on a new, tax-generating agricultural industry — pot. Don't think about morality. Don't think about addiction. Think about the money. Read more »

Dave Stancliff/For the Times-Standard

Marijuana opponents in the federal government are up against the wall and the wall is crumbling. The feds have fought marijuana use for decades, disregarding its medicinal applications, in a senseless war against the herb.

The demonized killer weed is turning out to be anything but that. As myths about this ancient herb are dispelled, scientists are using it to treat everything from chemotherapy-induced nausea to different cancers.

In August, The British Journal of Cancer published the results of a study that found THC (the main active component in marijuana) is effective in fighting prostate cancer. Reportedly, pot attacks prostate cancer cell types that do not respond to the usual hormone treatments. Read more »

The olives are bountiful, but so was another green crop that Sara was surprised to find.
BY SARA WILSON

One of the best things about living in Spain is the fields and fields of crops. We pass by them when we’re on our way to see David’s family in their small village, or getting lost trying to find the water reserve, or when we’re simply just out and about exploring our surroundings. It’s refreshing to know that fresh produce is being harvested, that nature is being valued and preserved, and that the people here are still able to live off of the land. Read more »

By Peter Ladner, Business in Vancouver - Friday, October 16 2009

As economic cutbacks continue to slice up our social infrastructure, it's time to look more seriously at the futility of paying vast sums to keep pot illegal.

I'm writing this on the day marijuana entrepreneur Marc Emery is being taken in handcuffs to the U.S. to plead guilty for selling marijuana seeds from his multimillion-dollar Vancouver-based mail-order business.

Leaving aside all the galling issues about U.S. legal control over a Canadian business, the arrest of a Canadian citizen who has never visited the U.S., the inexplicable length of his expected sentence - five years incarceration in the U.S. for a one-month offence in Canada - the victimless nature of his crime and the self-defeating wounds he inflicts on himself from incendiary pro-pot campaigning, his case highlights the role of pot as the elephant in the B.C. economy. Read more »

The son of a respected rabbi, Harvard grad, and former Princeton professor might seem like an unlikely advocate for legalizing marijuana. But when you meet Ethan Nadelmann, it all makes a lot of sense.

By Daniel Lyons | Newsweek Web Exclusive

How Ethan Nadelmann, a former Princeton professor, became the public face of marijuana decriminalization. (click volume for sound)

Ethan Nadelmann was sitting in a small plane flying low over the remote, hilly farm country of Mendocino County, north of San Francisco, surveying small clusters of marijuana plants scattered among the woods and fields. "You'll see eight plants in somebody's backyard," Nadelmann says. "Or you'll see six or 12 or 22 out in a field. You see greenhouses in the middle of nowhere. You see tarps." Read more »

By Amanda Gillooly

Call them what you will – stiletto stoners, marijuana mamas, or pot parents, but national surveys overwhelmingly agree: Whatever the nickname, plenty of American parents are going green.

A recent nation-wide survey conducted by Web site Chikii.com asked women between the ages of 25 and 60 about their toking habits. More than half those women said they used pot at least 10 times per year, while 27 percent indicated they smoked up between once and seven times a week.

Almost 80 percent of those women said they know other women who get high regularly.

And Pittsburgh parents are no different. Plenty of moms and dads in the Golden Triangle admit they still enjoy rocking the proverbial ganja.

Take Mark and Pearl of Forrest Hills. (last names have been omitted to protect privacy) Read more »

By Tiffany Crawford

A report released Thursday that shows the number of pot smokers in the world has grown to more than 160 million people has Canadian advocates renewing calls for legalization of the drug.

An Australian study, citing United Nations data from 2006 and published Thursday in the journal Lancet, found that about 166 million people aged 15-64 — or an estimated one in 25 in that age range — reported using cannabis. That's up from about 159 million people in 2005.

"It's not going away. So should one in 25 people be criminalized for smoking pot?" asked Eugene Oscapella, an Ottawa professor and spokesman for the Canadian Foundation For Drug Policy. "What this number says to me is the world is not drug free. Some people prefer alcohol over cannabis and some people prefer cannabis."

The foundation is urging the Canadian government to legalize and regulate marijuana, by allowing people to grow their own and taxing sales the way it regulates alcohol or tobacco. Read more »

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