(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.

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Thanks to a tip from our friends at LEAP, I reported on Tuesday about Iowa Senator Charles Grassley offering an amendment to Senator Jim Webb’s prison reform bill that forbids the commission from recommending the legalization of marijuana or even studying what effect legalization might have on society.  Well, thanks once again to the Tom Angell, blogging for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, we now have audio of Senator Grassley defending this censorship of science, even as he talks about putting “all options on the table.”  (Catch the audio on tonight’s Stash.)

QUESTION: I hear there was an amendment to a bill tomorrow that would legally prevent some of the government’s top advisers from — according to some of the memos we’ve seen — even discussing the idea of legalizing or decriminalizing drugs.

Can you talk a little bit about that? I understand that you pulled that amendment, but, nonetheless, I wanted to ask you what your intent is with that.

GRASSLEY: Well, my intent on that amendment isn’t any different than any other amendments that are coming up. The Congress is setting up a commission to study certain things. And the commission is a — is an arm of Congress, because Congress doesn’t have time to review some of these laws.

And — and — and the point is, for them to do what we tell them to do. And one of the things that I was anticipating telling them not to do is to — to recommend or study the legalization of drugs.

Their — their program would be what we tell it it is. …

Senator Webb wants to understand why we have 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s imprisoned.  Sen. Webb understands that the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs™ has a lot to do with it.  Sen. Webb understands that discussion of marijuana legalization must be on the table. I’m not sure which concept is more misunderstood by Senator Grassley: science, democracy, free speech, or justice.  Wait, maybe it’s compassion:

QUESTION: Would your amendment have even stopped the discussion of legalized marijuana for medical purposes?

GRASSLEY: I think that would not — let’s see. Yes, the extent to which it would be decriminalization, the answer is yes.

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I reported yesterday on the Israeli research on THC and PTSD.  TIME Magazine has a post written by the wonderful Maia Szalavitz covering the study.  The post itself is fantastic, but I don’t know if Ms. Szalavitz or an editor came up with this awful headline:

Dude, Where’s My Trauma? Marijuana Could Treat PTSD

I’ve got friends who are Vietnam and Gulf War vets who suffer to this day with PTSD.  But they are a whole lot better off here in Oregon.  While Oregon doesn’t recognize PTSD as a qualifying condition for a medical marijuana card, these fellows have plenty of chronic pain from injury to qualify for a card.  To a man they tell me they just could not go out in public and function without it.

I also read day after day so many news stories and so many pot-pun headlines that I’ve become sick of them.  So maybe I’m the wrong guy to judge; what do you think?

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This is the comment I left for TIME:

Congratulations, TIME, you’re my 2009 Winner for the NORML Daily Audio Stash Worst Pot-Pun Headline of the Year. An Ashton Kutcher stoner movie reference to preface a medical miracle that far too many Vietnam vets already realize and far too many Iraq and Afghanistan vets are denied now. You narrowly eked out a win over:

KTVU San Francisco: “Puff Puff Tax” (coverage of Assemblymember Tom Ammiano’s historic cannabis legalization bill in California.)

Kansas City Star: “A tiny Joplin, Mo., suburb has rolled itself a fat one” (coverage of the town passing a symbolic medical marijuana ordinance.)

The Oregonian: “Sex-for-marijuana sting in Tigard goes to pot” (coverage of police using Craigslist to lure guys into prostitution busts with girls in singles ads who will “party” for “420″.)

Willamette Week: “High-Jacked” (coverage of a rural 53-year-old medical cannabis patient in Oregon who was threatened at gunpoint and beaten with a golf club in a home invasion robbery attempt.)

Willamette Week had won last year for “Working Spliffs”, its coverage of attempts by business and law enforcement lobbyists to deny medical marijuana patients the right to work.

Seriously, the article is great, but the pot-pun headlines have got to go. The prohibition of cannabis is a serious issue, but the media continue to frame it with ridiculous double entendrés that would be completely forbidden if the topic were women, gays, race, or religion, to name a few. It is bad enough that the constraints of headlines force editors to use “pot” instead of “cannabis” and search engine optimization dictates the use of “marijuana” if there’s enough room for “cannabis”.

Medical miracles in cancer, pain, spasticity, and other treatments are being denied, even the research into them is being denied, because of the prohibition of cannabis. Supermajorities of people in every part of the country support medical access to cannabis. Yet the politicians lag behind the people, partly because they don’t take it seriously or fear ridicule in the media.

Treat the issue with more respect, please.

Russ Belville
NORML Outreach Coordinator
Host – NORML Daily Audio Stash podcast

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SALEM, Ore. (AP) — The right of Oregonians to use marijuana for medical reasons and also to obtain concealed handgun permits is being challenged by local sheriffs who say federal law prevents those people from packing heat.

Advocates for the state’s medical marijuana law countered Wednesday in the Oregon Court of Appeals that the sheriffs simply don’t like the program and are looking for ways to undermine it.

Both sides now are looking to the courts to say definitively whether there’s anything to prevent Oregon from issuing the concealed handgun permits to users of medicinal pot.

Sheriffs from Washington and Jackson counties say, though, that they want clarification from the court on whether federal gun laws prohibiting illegal drug users from possessing handguns applies to people who have permits to use marijuana for medical reasons. Marijuana is still classified as a controlled substance under federal law, they said.

Lower courts had twice ordered the two sheriffs to give weapons permits to people who had lost them because they are medical marijuana users, and both appealed those rulings.

I hope the Oregon court takes some guidance from the California Supreme Court and US Supreme Court rulings on San Bernardino and San Diego counties’ suit over registry ID cards.  The California counties, headed up by law enforcement ideologues that hate their state’s medical marijuana law, thought they didn’t have to enforce the state law that required counties to make ID cards because the federal law says all pot is illegal.  Both the state and federal supreme courts deferred to earlier appellate judgments that state and local cops are charged with enforcing state and local law, not federal law.

By that reasoning, I’d assume county sheriffs in Oregon are bound to enforce state law, and since Oregon’s medical marijuana law says it is to be treated “like other medicines”, unless the sheriffs are pulling concealed handgun permits from Vicodin and Oxycontin users, they shouldn’t be pulling them from medical marijuana users.

Furthermore, since this state has no dispensary system, patients are forced to grow their own or store large quantities of medicine, making them prime targets for robbers and home invasions – disabled people with lots of weed in their homes are the very people the 2nd Amendment was enacted to protect!

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I have about a half dozen Vietnam vets as friends who would tell you, “no shit,” but it’s always good to get the official science on our side.

Newswise — Use of cannabinoids (marijuana) could assist in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder patients. This is exposed in a recent study carried out at the Learning and Memory Lab in the University of Haifa’s Department of Psychology. The study, carried out by research student Eti Ganon-Elazar under the supervision of Dr. Irit Akirav, was published in the prestigious Journal of Neuroscience.

The present study, carried out by Dr. Akirav and research student Eti Ganon-Elazar, aimed to examine the efficiency of cannabinoids as a medical treatment for coping with post-traumatic stress. The researchers used a synthetic form of marijuana, which has similar properties to the natural plant, and they chose to use a rat model, which presents similar physiological responses to stress to that of humans.

Dr. Akirav and Ganon-Elazar also examined hormonal changes in the course of the experiment and found that synthetic marijuana prevents increased release of the stress hormone that the body produces in response to stress.

According to Dr. Akirav, the results of this study show that cannabinoids can play an important role in stress-related disorders. “The results of our research should encourage psychiatric investigation into the use of cannabinoids in post-traumatic stress patients,” she concludes.

I agree with Willie Nelson when he says “The biggest killer on the planet is stress and I still think the best medicine is and always has been cannabis.”  I think cannabis is good not just for PTSD, but for everyday stress most of us feel from time to time.  How much could we reduce road rage, ulcers, and domestic abuse if our hyper-stressed, always-on culture embraced a little more cannabis and a little less caffeine?

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(Westword) To make a long story short, the board voted 9-0 this morning to strike language stating that a marijuana caregiver has to have “significant responsibility for managing the well-being of a patient.”

This summer, the board determined that all a caregiver had to do was provide a patient with marijuana. However, the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that this concept was invalid in a decision last week. So today, the board wasted no time in chucking their whole definition into the waste bin.

The board didn’t come up with a new definition, though — suggesting that it will wait for its regularly scheduled December 16 meeting to tackle the challenge. As of now, in other words, there’s no definition anywhere in state regulations stating what, exactly, it means to be a marijuana caregiver.

Gee, I wonder how many new dispensaries can set up shop in Colorado between now and December 16?  Haven’t they learned anything from Los Angeles?  State and local governments can’t just abdicate their responsibility to come up with clear regulations regarding medical marijuana.  In the absence of guidelines, people will assume the best-case scenario that allows their businesses to flourish, and then when the government does come up with regulations, they end up destroying the businesses of many people who had the best of intentions along with the carpetbaggers who were just looking to make a buck of medical marijuana.

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With 18% of the returns in, the election in Maine is being watched nationwide for its contentious “Question 1″, a vote on whether to reject the state’s recognition of same-sex marriage.  It’s too close to call in that race, but most of the other statewide questions seem to be being decided rather strongly.

Currently, “Question 5″, the proposal to create a statewide registry ID card system for medical marijuana patients (a la Oregon) and medical marijuana dispensaries (a la Rhode Island and New Mexico), is winning by a 63% – 37% vote.

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(KOIN 6) PORTLAND, Ore. – A café set to open next week in northeast Portland will be serving up more than your morning latte.

Café Rumpspankers (yep, that’s the name) will open next week serving coffee and sampling different types of marijuana for Oregon Medical Marijuana Cardholders to try.

Per state law, only members of Oregon’s Medical Marijuana Program are allowed in.

The Oregon chapter of NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) will run the café which will open November 13th on Northeast Dekum.

The café will be the first of its kind in Oregon and will be similar to those found in Europe.

Flock to the website of KOIN (ABC affiliate) in Portland, my minions, for they have an online poll asking whether you support this “type of business.”  It’s barely a “Yes” at this point – 50.4% when I first voted!

Whoa.  I just tweeted it before I wrote this post and now it’s up to 54.6%.  Correlation ain’t causation; maybe they just aired it on the news and more people clicked in.  Or maybe, just maybe, I have the power to sway online polls in 140 characters or less!  Bwaa-ha-ha-ha!

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(Globe Gazette) DES MOINES — The White House’s drug czar said Monday that Iowa officials should look at the problems California has seen after allowing the use of marijuana for medical purposes as they consider the idea here.

Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, specifically cited problems regulating the clinics in the Los Angeles area that dispense medical marijuana.

Kerlikowske recounted going to Venice Beach and seeing people holding signs advertising marijuana and ads in newspapers.

He also pointed to reports of robberies and assaults that have occurred in and around medical marijuana dispensaries in the Los Angeles area.

“I would say that the recommendation for any state that’s considering moving to medical marijuana is to look very closely at what’s been occurring in California,” Kerlikowske said.

Kerlikowske, the former police chief in Seattle, reported better results for the medical marijuana law in Washington State.

“It was not as significant a problem for law enforcement as it was in, as it is in, Los Angeles,” Kerlikowske said.

We often hear the prohibitionists play the “Look at California” card when it comes to medical marijuana, ignoring the fact that the other twelve states with protection for medical users did look at California and crafted tighter regulations than the Golden State.  Rarely do we hear one bring up another medical marijuana state in comparison.  I’m sure Iowans looking to pass medical marijuana wouldn’t mind at all the protections of the Washington State law, which allows a patient to grow up to fifteen plants and store a pound and a half of marijuana.  Though they might want to look at the Oregon law, which allows close to the same limits and establishes a patient card registry that helps the patient identify his grow to law enforcement and avoid the arrest and investigation required in Washington to verify a patient’s status.

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