Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 7:03 pm | By: Missippi Hippy
Of course, this is comedy from Reason.TV, but it does make a huge point. The cost of our favorite herb is artificially high due to its prohibition. When we make our local, state and federal governments re-legalize marijuana, the price we pay for it will come closer to the cost of production.
What are you waiting for? Write that letter to your government officials. This includes your local government. Comment on those ”reefer mad” news articles and educate the masses. Don’t just sit there on your couch and wonder when… Do something and make it so… Now!
Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 6:49 pm | By: Radical Russ
(Jessica Corry – Huffington Post) Denver is a city in love with its newspapers. Even in 2009, many residents still cling to the scent and grime of fresh newspaper print. But as the recent loss of the city’s beloved Rocky Mountain News still lingers, the focus now turns to saving the publications remaining. In an ironic twist of fate worthy of its own front page feature, essential revenue could come from the most unlikely of sources. Marijuana.
Denver’s top alternative weekly, Westword, gets it. On both sides of its most recent edition’s back cover, 32 medical marijuana dispensaries advertised their services. In addition, in the publication’s “alternative healing” section, nearly nine additional pages were packed with similar plugs.
While the Denver Post has run a series of front page stories over the last month chronicling the brewing debate over how or whether to increase regulations on dispensaries, it has been slower getting into the advertising game, running quarter page ads from a handful of dispensaries, with plans to expand advertising access through a special section devoted to dispensaries and other alternative health outlets.
While most of American business is mired in a rut, for medical marijuana providers in California and Colorado, business is booming. But it’s not just the sales of marijuana that provide jobs and tax revenue to the state. There are also all the construction, advertising, rent, utilities, and other expenses these businesses pay that creates jobs for others. At Oregon’s Cannabis Café, which doesn’t sell any cannabis at all, they are doing the same amount of business in a day that used to take all week to generate, and that’s just the sales of café food and beverages. The café also charges a monthly membership fee and a cover charge minimum at the door.
This is why I always scoff at estimates of money to be made from legalization of cannabis. I believe those estimates are extraordinarily conservatove and don’t even begin to factor in all the ancillary industries that will be formed to support the legal cannabis market. The increase in sales of Ziploc baggies alone could bring enough tax revenue to hire more teachers and cops or fix some roads.
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 4:39 pm | By: Radical Russ
In the face of growing calls to tax and regulate marijuana, the prohibitionists are left with few tools in their rhetorical arsenal. One talking point they’ve trotted out lately goes something like this:
Why not tax pot and alleviate the financial burden of our cities and states? We tax alcohol sales and it earns billions. “The latest studies show that the U.S. collects about $8 billion yearly in taxes from alcohol.” However, this is not the end of the story. “The problem is, the total cost to the U.S. in 2008 due to alcohol-related problems was $185 billion, and the government pays about 38% of that cost (about $72 billion), all due to consequences of alcohol consumption, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse & Alcoholism.”
In other words, if we “legalized” marijuana, the damage caused by all the rampant stoners would cost us more than the pot taxes would bring in.
Of course the argument is silly on its face; alcohol use causes serious health problems, violence, and auto wrecks, so it naturally costs society more than it brings in. Cannabis use is relatively safe and as I’ve argued before, 22 million of us are using it now, so if there is any social cost, why not at least bring in some tax revenue instead of none?
In terms of costs per user: tobacco-related health costs are over $800 per user, alcohol-related health costs are much lower at $165 per user, and cannabis-related health costs are the lowest at $20 per user. On the enforcement side, costs for cannabis are the highest at $328 per user—94% of social costs for cannabis are linked to enforcement. Enforcement costs per user for alcohol are about half those for cannabis ($153), while enforcement costs for tobacco are very low.
Now that’s Canada, so our US numbers may vary a bit, especially when we’re talking about health care costs. But in the title of his post, Paul asked me to “do the math”. So here it is:
Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 7:47 pm | By: Radical Russ
(World Politics Review) For roughly four decades, a clear foreign policy rule set has existed between the United States and Latin America, centering largely on the question of counternarcotics. Starting with Richard Nixon’s “war on drugs,” an explicit quid pro quo came into existence: U.S. foreign aid (both civilian and military) in exchange for aggressive Latin American efforts to curb both the production and trafficking of illegal narcotics (primarily marijuana and cocaine).
By virtually all accounts, that logistics-focused strategy has proven to be a massive failure. America’s focus on interdiction and prohibition has not stemmed domestic drug abuse. Instead, all indications are that preventative education — on a generational scale — has proven far more effective, meaning that demand reduction has trumped supply curtailment as a means of reducing overall prevalence.
Meanwhile, across Latin America, there’s been widespread movement toward decriminalization. Why? Because the benefits of remaining on America’s “good side” on this hot-button issue have been overwhelmed by the negative externalities of overcrowded prisons, rampant drug-related violence, police corruption, and growing organized criminal networks.
The author points to four main reasons why countries like Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Uruguay are decriminalizing personal drug possession:
The rise of a Latin American middle class feeling economic independence from United States aid;
The increase in foreign aid to Latin America from Asia and Latinos sending money back home from the US;
The increase of Latin American trade to China and the European Union that decreases American economic influence; and
The rise of drug cartels, terrorism, and violence that led Latin American countries to directly confront the issue.
Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 12:15 pm | By: Radical Russ
(NY Times via CNBC) Among the 14 states with medical marijuana laws, Colorado has experienced particularly brisk growth in the stores. From fewer than two dozen dispensaries in the state in January, there are now more than 60 just in Denver and nearby Boulder, and more than 10,000 registered medical marijuana patients statewide, according to reports in Westword, a Denver alternative weekly.
Now a business that has nothing to do with cannabis is aiming its ads at medical marijuana patients. A new print ad — by TDA Advertising and Design of Boulder — for Hapa Sushi, a restaurant chain based in Boulder, features a map of Denver and Boulder with 63 dots. Four dots are red, representing the four Hapa locations, and the remaining 59 are blue, representing medical marijuana dispensaries, some of which, it turns out, are just a stone’s throw from the restaurants. The ad was to appear Thursday in the Denver/Boulder edition of The Onion and in Westword later in the month.
“We’re just kind of saying, ‘Look, these dispensaries exist and they’re becoming part of our community, so let’s welcome them in and have some fun,’ ” said Mark Van Grack, owner of Hapa Sushi, a privately held, 10-year-old chain. “If you’re going to smoke pot, you’re going to get the munchies, so come to Hapa to eat.”
And when it comes to tasty munchies, you can’t get much healthier than sushi. (Denver’s one of the few landlocked states where I’ll eat sushi, since they have a major airport just a couple of hours from the coast by air.)
Once again, the business world can’t get enough of the power of pot. There is so much economic opportunity locked up in the underground marijuana market and the money sharks can smell it.
It’s not just the revenues that could be made by taxing cannabis and the savings from not prosecuting its users. It’s also the ancillary businesses that would thrive in a legal marijuana market – glassblowers, paper mills, timber mills (for hemp pressboard), farmers, retailers, restaurants, and so on – and the jobs they would create. It’s also the extra cash freed up for other purchases; if a guy used to paying $400 an ounce is soon paying $100, even with taxes, he can afford to buy some more clothes or go out to a dinner and a movie. Or maybe some sushi.
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 8:30 pm | By: Radical Russ
Canceling his PayPal account with flair
Cancel your PayPal accounts! Steal this graphic! Tell your friends! http://bit.ly/DumpPayPal
This just in from “Big Daddy”:
Just closed my PayPal account…
This is what I wrote in the Comment of why I closed my account:
“Your refusal to allow the National [Organization] for the Reform of Marijuana Laws of California to use the PayPal system because there were Doctors listed on their site who may recommend medical marijuana to their sick patients has offended me and hundreds of thousands of likeminded people. People who believe that sick Americans have a right to medical marijuana in states that allow it are not a minority but a majority. If this is your “Business Decision”, as a Financial Analyst, I don’t think you have made the correct financial calculation. I will blog in protest of PayPal until you reverse your decision. In the mean time you have lost my business and my family’s future business, including my children who will grow up being told that PayPal is against sick people finding Doctors to help them.”
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 6:16 pm | By: Radical Russ
The folks who follow the big money at CBS MarketWatch can see the handwriting on the wall – there is too much money going underground in the War on Drugs that corporate America is missing out on:
ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Mexican drug lord “El Chapo” made the Forbes list of billionaires earlier this year. No, you can’t make this stuff up: He runs the Sinaloa cartel, a major supplier of cocaine to the United States. He’s an assassin, another bin Laden … and Forbes honors him right up there with the world billionaires.
Psychologist Anne Wilson Schaef saw the trend coming a couple decades ago: We’re a “Nation of addicts … our society is deteriorating at an alarming rate.” Why? We refuse to face the real problem: Demand. Legalizing it will.
Till then we’re losing the war. In a “nation of addicts” it doesn’t matter if drugs are legal or not … where the drugs come from … who gets hurt … nor if we have to waste hundreds of billions fighting ineffective wars to protect suppliers … a corrupt Afghan government, the source of 95% of the world’s heroin … or Mexico, the main traffic route for wholesalers feeding America’s addicts … or Big Pharma the biggest pusher for prescription drug addicts. When a “nation of addicts” needs a fix, they always find it.
Seriously, drugs are a megabusiness. America spends about $2.5 trillion on health care annually — including $315 billion in Big Pharma revenues last year. They must be secretly exploring the untapped market in illicit drug traffic that siphons off an estimated $400 billion annually — plus keep in mind another $175 billion on alcohol addiction.
If Big Pharma can capture part of the market share that’s now going to competing Mexican and Afghan drug warlords, then they can feed their shareholders addiction to earnings, feed their CEOs’ addiction for megamillion paychecks, while capitalizing on the American addicts need for a fix. We just need to end our moralistic charade, decriminalize and control all illicit drugs.
The truth is, there’s no war on drugs to win, nor to lose, just millions of addicts who need help. I’ve been in recovery 36 years. Back in the ’80s I worked professionally with hundreds who went through places like Betty Ford Center. Statistics show that over 10% of Americans are physiologically predisposed to addictive behavior. That will never change. It’s in our DNA.
Given that painful reality, Big Pharma should wise up and get ahead of the legalization trend. Lead it. If Big Pharma capitalizes on their unique experience, they can capture new products and new markets driven by the relentless demand for a fix. Lead in the development of a new national policy shifting away from military action to treatment, decriminalization and regulation, generate new sources of tax revenues, and help millions of addicted Americans.
Big Pharma is already on that trend, examining different ways of synthesizing the therapeutically-active cannabinoids in marijuana in pill, spray, lozenge, and inhaler form. The problem for Big Pharma is that their bar-coded, marked-up, highly-profitable cannabis drugs can’t compete with the raw cannabis plant itself. They need a system wherein raw plant cannabis is prohibited, but synthesized cannabinoid extracts are allowed. This would be somewhat like a cookie maker requiring a law that chocolate chip cookie dough is illegal, but a box of Chips Ahoy is not.
Furthermore, Big Pharma is also aware of reports from medical marijuana patients around the country who’ve found they can cut their need for prescription opioids and benzodiazepenes in half by using natural raw cannabis. Big Pharma can’t have a free plant competing with their cannabinoid drugs and reducing demand for their other products!
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 2:05 pm | By: Radical Russ
(From California NORML’s Dale Gieringer)
Paypal, the well-known internet payment company has told California NORML that it will no longer accept payments to our “type of business” because we accept listing payments from cannabis-recommending physicians.
After years of offering free listings to physicians and collectives at our website http://www.canorml.org, CaNORML began charging a yearly listing fee to cover our costs last year.
PayPal froze CaNORML’s account in June, saying that by accepting listing fees from collectives, we were violating their Acceptable Use policy, which says, “you may not use PayPal in the purchase or sale of narcotics.” Although narcotics were not being sold over the CaNORML site, we reluctantly agreed to stop accepting listings fees from collectives that dispense medical marijuana, recognizing that even though they are legal under state law, they are illegal under federal law. However, we continued to accept payments online from doctors, attorneys, and members.
Now PayPal has stopped accepting payments from the CaNORML site because we continued to accept listing payments from physicians.
Please steal this graphic and link back to this story!
Under a ruling upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court (Conant v. Walters, 2003), physicians have the first amendment right to discuss and recommend medical marijuana for their patients, although they may not distribute it or help patients in finding it. PayPal was informed of this and wrote back, “We are not arguing the legality of this issue; we are simply stating that we have made the business decision to not be involved with this type of business.”
Because of its discriminatory policy and disregard of physicians’ first amendment rights, CaNORML submits that PayPal is not the “type of business” to be used by those who advocate for human rights. We will file a complaint with the federal banking committee over their practices.
Located in San Jose, California, PayPal was founded in 1998 and was acquired by eBay (California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s former company) in 2002.
Complain to: PayPal, 2211 N 1st St, San Jose 95131 (408) 376-7400
PayPal has been removed from the Stash Tip Jar and I have canceled my production company’s PayPal account. PayPal’s decision not to be involved in our “type of business”, when that business is the providing of a directory of doctors who recommend a legal medicine, is astonishing. They say it is a “business decision”, which to me means they decided that being involved with a website full of doctors’ names would be too risky… how? The doctors are legal, their recommendations are legal, the people receiving and using the recommendations are legal, so there is no legal risk involved. It can’t be that there is a business risk, that somehow other businesses are boycotting PayPal because it processes legal payments from doctors to California NORML.
No, this is nothing but another bigoted move from a company that thinks it knows more about medicine than doctors do, a company that thinks you and me and others who use marijuana as medicine are criminals, frauds, and economic undesirables. I encourage you to steal the graphic above and place it on your websites and pass it on to everyone you know. We showed Kellogg’s not to mess with the cannabis community; let’s show PayPal that there are a lot of us online and we’re not supporting them anymore.
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 7:03 am | By: Radical Russ
(Washington Post) ARCATA, Calif. — Stiff competition from thousands of mom-and-pop marijuana farmers in the United States threatens the bottom line for powerful Mexican drug organizations in a way that decades of arrests and seizures have not, according to law enforcement officials and pot growers in the United States and Mexico.
Illicit pot production in the United States has been increasing steadily for decades. But recent changes in state laws that allow the use and cultivation of marijuana for medical purposes are giving U.S. growers a competitive advantage, challenging the traditional dominance of the Mexican traffickers, who once made brands such as Acapulco Gold the standard for quality.
Wait, are you telling us the limited legalization of marijuana has put more of a hurt on Mexican drug gangs than all that law enforcement expenditure on arrests and interdiction? Are you telling us that the best way to battle a supply and demand problem is to legalize the supply to satisfy the demand?
While the trafficking of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine is the main focus of U.S. law enforcement, it is marijuana that has long provided most of the revenue for Mexican drug cartels. More than 60 percent of the cartels’ revenue — $8.6 billion out of $13.8 billion in 2006 — came from U.S. marijuana sales, according to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
The exact dimensions of the U.S. marijuana market are unknown. The 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimated that 14.4 million Americans age 12 and over had used marijuana in the past month. More than 10 percent of the U.S. population reported smoking pot once in the past year.
There is no better marijuana on the planet than American-grown marijuana. We’d be more than happy to put Mexican growers out of business. Just let us grow our own! In addition to the elimination of 60% of violent drug gangs* revenue, we’d also create many new jobs right here when we are in an unemployment slump. It would also drive demand for all the stuff growers need, like lights, fertilizer, timers, air conditioning, air filtration, growhouse construction, and so on. Then there are the payroll taxes and sales taxes we’d raise from legal marijuana.
So many who oppose this common-sense solution fear that we’d be sending the message that it’s OK to smoke pot. Well, the messages we’ve been sending so far haven’t convinced anyone to not smoke pot, so are we just funding violent Mexican drug gangs out of stubbornness? Forget about “messages”; people smoke pot, period. Accept the reality that millions of us like to use cannabis responsibly and that the only harms to society from that use are due to its prohibition, not the cannabis.
*By the way, it’s “drug gangs” not “drug cartels”. Cartels are economic units of cooperation, like OPEC, where all the members work together to fix prices and control production. Cartels don’t fight amongst each other and decapitate their rivals.
RevRayGreen: MASS TWEET THIS -@ChuckGrassley Truth is Chuck you follow Nixon's CSA full of reefer sadness. btw Chuck, Marijuana is not a drug.
RevRayGreen: @ChuckGrassley http://bit.ly/55Ejsi Truth is Chuck you follow Nixon's CSA full of reefer madness. btw Chuck, Marijuana is not a drug.
SneakerPimp: one last thing Puff puff pass to any one who wants it
SneakerPimp: i wanna here about the imminent MiniSpof sounds like time for some
SneakerPimp: im estatic and excited for NSL today.
SneakerPimp: mountain time wake n bake
SneakerPimp: oh yea also wake n bake
SneakerPimp: its central im high as a kite everybody
SneakerPimp: ill grab that WUD
WakeUpDead: @Russ, I dont think that wireless is going to work out for the show, it was choppy and studdered just like last week. Hardline may be the only way. Puff [...]
WakeUpDead: A MINI Spof, Lock up your Weed, in 18 years that is. Really Man congrats! Greatest days of my life when my kids were born, hell yeh, great news [...]
BenJaMin: Late night Stash!!!
SneakerPimp: heres a bong rip for spof
RevRayGreen: errr test over....
RevRayGreen: on hold..
RevRayGreen: @RR I'll try and lob a call to you.....
SneakerPimp: where is the first field of cannabis gonna be?
SneakerPimp: !
Radical Russ: Breaking News: MrSpof's wife's water just broke! A MiniSpof is imminent!
SneakerPimp: oh russ its not my fault that i dont understand choppy word:stoned:
SneakerPimp: @Mrspof congratulations tell us all about it tommrow
Radical Russ: OK, test over. Sorry. Only needed a half hour. Be back tomorrow afternoon.
slash5city: don't forget to watch CCS live on u-stream 8 pm west
thaistik: Local Crime Stoppers notice.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Pot shop burglars sought
Crime Stoppers is looking for information on the suspects who police say burglarized a medical marijuana dispensary and stole cash, drugs [...]
Marijuana-Related Health Costs Minimal Compared To Those Of Alcohol, Tobacco; California Medical Association Says Pot Prohibition Is A "Failed Public Health Policy"; Oregon: State NORML Affiliate Opens First 'Cannabis Café'. […]
American Medical Association Calls For Scientific Review Of Marijuana's Prohibitive Status; Dutch Marijuana Use Lower Than European Average, Study Says […]
"Truth In Trials Act" Reintroduced In Congress; Maine: Voters Approve Medical Marijuana Dispensaries Measure; Colorado: Breckenridge Voters Overwhelmingly Decide To End Pot Penalties. […]
Some of the nation’s top athletes discuss why today's pros are turning to cannabis — and away from alcohol and painkillers — off the field, and question why pro sports leagues are continuing to sanction those who do. Moderator: Steve Bloom, Author, Pot Culture; editor, celebstoner.com * Toby Grear, MMA fighter * Sean Neumann, Documentary Filmm […]
Cannabis Law Reform's Missing Link: Law Enforcement Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper; LEAP and NORML Advisory Board; Author of Breaking Rank Putting the Mexican Cartels Out of Business Mexican drug cartels now employ over 100,000 soldiers and are responsible for nearly ten thousand deaths per year. Their largest source of income is marijuana. […]
Marijuana growers say, “Keep it illegal and profits high!”
sounds like time for some 
mountain time wake n bake 
don't forget to watch CCS live on u-stream 8 pm west 
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