Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 4:30 pm | By: Radical Russ
CANNABIS CULTURE – A Canadian care home resident with full body paralysis was confined to his bed against his will after his wheelchair was seized by caregivers – all because he smokes medical marijuana to relieve his Multiple Sclerosis.
CHBC news reported yesterday that Nyle Nagy, a Kelowna, British Columbia man who lives at the Brookhaven care home, was forcefully removed from his wheelchair and put in bed for a week after manager Adrien Vaughan objected to his legal use of medical marijuana.
“She sent two men over here to take my wheelchair and tell me that I’ve got to stay in this chair for seven days, as a punishment”, Nagy told the TV crew.
“To get rid of my pain and my spasms, that’s the only two reasons I smoke it” said Nagy, who has a license from the Canadian government to smoke marijuana.
Cannabis Culture has a video interview with the man as well. This is the stigma even legal users of medical marijuana still face. Sure, places like Canada, California, Colorado, and others won’t arrest you and lock you up if you’re a legit medical marijuana patient, but medical marijuana laws don’t force employers, hospitals, care facilities, landlords, or the government to accommodate your use of medical marijuana. You’re perfectly free to use your medical marijuana, so long as you don’t mind homelessness, joblessness, removal from theorgan transplant list, and revocation of your pain medications.
Don’t like it? Well, here, try some liver-killing addictive pharmaceuticals instead. Yes, I know, they can cause constipation, sexual dysfunction, nausea, lethargy, sleep disturbance, and in severe cases, death, but the good news is that your employers, hospitals, care facilities, landlords, and the government are statutorily forbidden from discriminating against you for using those drugs, or even asking if you use those drugs in most cases, thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act. That’s a federal law, which naturally doesn’t apply to medical marijuana, because as far as the feds are concerned, medical marijuana is an oxymoron.
Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 2:38 pm | By: Radical Russ
(Times & Transcript) Pot smokers in Metro Moncton are expressing concern and dismay that the nemesis of the cannabis community, so-called “grit weed,” has made its way to this region.Grit weed is marijuana that has been embedded with tiny bits of glass or silica to add weight. Since pot is most often sold by weight, unscrupulous dope dealers add the glass to bulk up the value of the pot without regard to what inhaling bits of glass can do to smokers’ lungs.
Many cannabis culture magazines and websites have been warning of grit weed for years. However, it is only now showing up on the east coast of Canada. The phenomenon was first reported in Europe three or four years ago, then last year in the northeastern United States and now in Atlantic Canada, from New Brunswick to Newfoundland and all points in between.
The particles are often so tiny, like dust, that smokers might not even notice. The particles are most often silica, which is used to make glass. Inhaling silica can cause silicosis, a chronic lung disease that can make it hard to breathe and can cause non-cancerous lung tumours.
Silicosis is seen among those who work or live among raw silica, which has jagged edges, for instance miners and those who toil in quarries. The form of silica seen most often in pot is not jagged but has rounded edges, almost like microscopic beads, but which isn’t a whole lot better than the raw product.
[G]roups like NORML Canada, which advocates the repeal of marijuana laws, points to grit weed as a strong factor that favours removing the criminal element from pot by making it legal for smokers to grow their own.
Please be careful out there! Inspect your sack! Get yourself a small pocket jeweler’s loupe to magnify the buds when you’re checking out your purchase.
(By the way, the disease the miners get is fully known as pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. It’s one of those words I learned as a young nerd.)
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2007 archive interview by Chris Goldstein of Rick Steves, European travel guru, author, and TV host, who will be closing the 2009 NORML National Conference.
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 3:28 pm | By: Radical Russ
(The Province) Marilyn Holsten’s last days on Earth were a living hell, according to her sister, Moira O’Neill.
In frail health, the almost-blind, diabetic double-amputee was ordered evicted from her apartment because of her need to smoke marijuana to control her pain.
Holsten, 48, died earlier this month from a heart attack.
“For a whole year, it went on. It was an unbelievable way to treat someone in her health,” said O’Neill.
Holsten lived in a building operated by Anavets Senior Citizens Housing Society in the 900-block East 8th Avenue in Vancouver.
Many of her neighbours told her they did not smell marijuana coming from her apartment, her sister said. But, even though Holsten eventually obtained legal permission to smoke marijuana to deal with excruciating phantom pains, Anavets sought her eviction because of the smell of pot.
“It was a witch hunt,” said O’Neill, who said her sister had to move from her fifth-floor apartment to a ground-floor suite two years ago, after her first leg amputation, for her own safety.
“They knew she smoked marijuana before she moved down to the other suite,” said O’Neill.
“She was in the hospital most of the time, with her amputation — she was gone five days a week, in dialysis six hours a day.”
Holsten fought her eviction at a B.C. Residential Tenancy Branch arbitration hearing in June, but lost.
The night before she died, Holsten visited her older sister.
“We resolved that she was going to stay with me in my small one-bedroom apartment,” said O’Neill.
“She couldn’t take opiates, they made her totally unable to function. Morphine made her throw up, and she was a diabetic, so she had to eat all the time.”
Holsten made every effort to contain the smell from her marijuana use from her neighbors. She originally did not have a doctor’s recommendation to use medical marijuana, so in her original eviction notice, the administrator, Mary McLeod, wrote “Marijuana use is still against the law and … [as] part of your tenancy agreement, you agreed you would not participate in illegal activities.”
She then signed an agreement that she would only medicate outdoors, but the center gave her another eviction notice after someone smelled marijuana in the public areas of the building.
Then Marc & Jodie Emery of Cannabis Culture magazine donated to her a Volcano vaporizer to help alleviate the problem. However, the arbitration hearings would hear none of that and had her evicted anyway – a double amputee who pledged to only vaporize, exhaling outdoors even, her legally recommended herbal remedy for excruciating phantom pains.
I understand that some people do not like the smell of cannabis and to be fair, we should respect their rights, too. However, will the Anavets center evict their residents for cooking that awful-smelling kimchi, sauerkraut, or menudo? Are residents allowed to smoke cigarettes (I have a call in to the Anavets center asking just that question)? Can residents keep pets, even smelly kitties who miss the litter box? Can residents douse themselves with heavy amounts of perfume or cologne? Something tells me that residents are allowed to create all sorts of offensive smells in public areas… just not the skunky sweet smell of burning cannabis.
CANNABIS CULTURE – A diabetic double-amputee who was evicted from her apartment for smoking medical marijuana has died. Protest Marilyn Holsten’s mistreatment: WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2009 from 12-6pm at the Anavets Senior Citizens Housing Society building at 951 8th Ave E, Vancouver.
Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 8:19 am | By: Radical Russ
This is Weedy Wednesdays, the bustling weekly stand-up night at the pot-friendly lounge, Vapor Central – just one of the growing number of weed dens between College and Bloor Sts. that make up the community affectionately known as Yongesterdam. Much like the others, Vapor Central dodges marijuana laws by not actually providing patrons with the substance, and also avoids smoking laws that only target tobacco, its management claims.
Over the next 60 minutes, more than 150 people will pack into the tiny club for an hour of lewd and crude humour as they sit back and get stoned out of their minds – a testament to both the seemingly perfect marriage of weed and comedy and to the (promotional) buzz the show has created amongst comedians and stoners alike.
For the first six months, [says host Bryan O'Gorman], they were lucky to draw 20 people a week. But as word of mouth spread, more and more comedians started asking to perform, and a growing audience was soon to follow. “Now we’re at the point where we’re turning away 20 to 40 people a week,” he says from behind his dark brown aviator glasses.
Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 at 2:58 pm | By: Radical Russ
(MixxCelebrity) Britney Spears halted her show in Vancouver last night after just three songs because it was too smokey in the arena. The singer who is currently on the road supporting her ‘Circus’ album, walked off stage and remained backstage for over 20 minutes while an announcer told the crowd the show would not continue if people in the audience continued to smoke weed and cigarettes.
The announcer told the crowd it was “unsafe” for Spears and her dancers to continue to perform in that environment, reports Perez Hilton.
A statement released to the gossip site said: “We want to apologize to all the fans who attended our Vancouver show tonight for the brief pause in Britney’s set. Crew members above the stage became ill due to a ventilation issue.”
Production staff were reportedly worried that crew working high up would become dizzy from the smoke.
Spears herself then issued an anti-marijuana message at the end of her show, telling the audience: “Thanks Vancouver. You were wonderful. Drive safe. Don’t smoke weed!”
I’m still trying to understand weed smokers at a Britney Spears concert. I thought marijuana smoking was supposed to improve one’s appreciation of music.
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Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 10:20 am | By: Radical Russ
Ontario Provincial Police have harshed the Hempfest buzz once too often, say event organizers who plan to make this year’s celebration of medicinal marijuana the region’s last.
In recent years, the four-day event has been the focus of what organizer Rob Waddell contends is unwarranted police presence, with RIDE checks that focus on “interrogation,” and hindering access, rather than weeding out impaired drivers.
“It’s the harassment of people travelling to and from the festival. The constitution and Charter of Rights guarantee us the right to gather peacefully and demonstrate against unjust laws, which we’re doing,” said Waddell.
“The police keep interfering with our people and the right to gather.”
Waddell said the vehicle infractions and questioning of vehicle occupants are “petty things,”meant to interfere with a staunchly pro-marijuana event, and questioned why OPP have been accompanied by law enforcement from the U. S.
This year’s Aug. 27-30 gathering will be called Hempfest: The End of An Era.
Here’s something fun you can do next year if nobody else takes over and keeps this hempfest alive: count parked cars in bar parking lots that weekend and note how many people leave in them. Because all those cars in bar parking lots are the cars of designated drivers, right? That means you have to have at least two people per car; at least one sober one and the other who may or may not be sober.
Don’t count the employees’ cars. We don’t expect them to be drunk. Just the patrons who leave and their cars. If you divide the people by the cars and come up with less than 2, we can pretty much guarantee somebody’s driving after drinking. Maybe they were drinking Sprite. Maybe they stopped drinking beer a couple hours before they left. Maybe their blood alcohol content is only .04 and they will drive fairly well. But don’t you think we should have a squad car from the Ontario Provincial Police parked out by that bar just in case?
Now let’s count up how many bars there are in province of Ontario. I’m not going to bother to look it up, but I’ll hazard a wild-ass guess that it is a number greater than the number of Ontario Provincial Police squad cars. Suffice to say that even if we parked every squad car near a bar’s parking lot, there would be plenty of bars without one. Whatever that number is times whatever that car-to-patron ratio tells us suggests to me that there are a whole lot of people driving drunk, we know where they are, and we’re not doing much about it.
Why does the police vigilance against hemp festivals in the name of protecting the public from impaired drivers on one summer weekend not seem to apply every weekend to places where we know drunks park their cars?
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 9:20 am | By: Radical Russ
METRO VANCOUVER — Surrey saw an 80.9 per cent decrease in the number of residential marijuana growing operations between 2004 and 2008, a new study shows.
The study also showed that Surrey’s drop is far more dramatic than in other communities in the Lower Mainland or B.C.
Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts said she’s “pleasantly surprised” with the latest numbers, which she anticipated would have been around 65 per cent.
She attributed Surrey’s success to the city’s innovative electrical and fire safety inspection initiative that started in 2005, as well as the efforts of the Surrey RCMP green team, bylaws department, BC Hydro programs, and other crime-fighting initiatives under the city’s crime reduction strategy program.
“This research supports the work that we’ve been doing and confirms that we can succeed in deterring the grow-op industry from establishing itself in our cities,” Watts said. “This gives us increased confidence that we can make our streets safer and improve the lives of our residents through innovative measures that address crime through collaborative efforts.”
I think this news is mistitled. It should read “Surrey forces marijuana growing operations elsewhere” or “Surrey growers learn how to better evade detection”.
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iondrive: ? for Paul-Is there a link to collaege age cannabis useage and prostrate cancer in older men? (long term study?)
SneakerPimp: 420 in 20 min yall so wake n bake
SneakerPimp: hey how many stashers have called into nsl? i have
SneakerPimp: i say stop sit back and relax clear ur minds with a bowl or vape or a jay its all good
SneakerPimp: i feel much better now
RevRayGreen: Cheech and Chong Tomorrow Night.............Iowans 4 Medical Marijuana will be in the house.........
JohnnyReeferseed: The Goldstein vs Farley debate was classic. Farley laid out all the Reefer Madness lies and made a complete ass out of himself. If he's the best debater the other [...]
Legalize-SaveLives: They keep saying MJ's a "dangerous drug". This is 100% bs!
RevRayGreen: I hit them hard on Gil's advice of 15 plant and 24oz....
RevRayGreen: yep......
slash5city: Hey Ray that was you in the very first clip of the video ...what do you think will happen now ?
DocMedPot: Thanks for represnting out there Rev Ray! :twothumbs:
Track Snack: I just love the way Goldstien chows upon Farley in the debate. I can actually feel my I.Q. drop when Farley speaks.
SneakerPimp: hey yall im back with a brand new ps3 controler yay
Missippi Hippy: I met George Carlin once. He hid out at the casino I worked.
Missippi Hippy: Dreaming for the day when we sit around and bitch about the raise in the cannabis tax.
slash5city: In response to Mr Spof ...y am i not gonna take it any more ...well heers y http://bit.ly/eSY1e
RevRayGreen: just got back from the last "odd test"
Track Snack: @Spof, They could set the example (a good one) for recycling.
WakeUpDead: Well I miss all the 420s today, so everyone join me in toke, Yeh its 8:09!
MrSpof: @TS: that's priceless We should demand our government use toilet paper for official correspondence with their constituents. And campaign materials for sure 'Congressman, I received your response and [...]
DocMedPot: attending Miami Valley NORML online meeting now over on Paltalk..
Track Snack: @Missippi, In our state, as we have no patient registry, patients can, and do get CWP's.
bullbog: Heading to ames tomorrow to see Cheech and Chong, I'm so siked
Maine: Voters To Decide Next Week On Medical Marijuana Expansion Measure; Colorado: Breckenridge Voters To Decide Next Week On Eliminating Pot Penalties; California: Lawmakers Hold Historic Hearing On Marijuana Legalization; New Hampshire: Senate Fails To Override Medical Marijuana Veto. […]
Gallup: Majority Of West Coast Voters Back Marijuana Legalization; Pot Arrests Responsible For Majority Of Marijuana Treatment Referrals; DOJ To Federal Prosecutors: Do Not Focus Resources On Medical Marijuana. […]
California: L.A. District Attorney Intends To Prosecute "100 Percent" Of County's Medical Marijuana Dispensaries; Maternal Tobacco and Alcohol Use, But Not Marijuana, Associated With Psychotic Symptoms In Offspring, Study Says; 'Hemperor' Jack Herer Released From Hospital. […]
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. […]
Fully paralyzed Canadian man’s wheelchair seized because of legal medical marijuana use
We should demand our government use toilet paper for official correspondence with their constituents. And campaign materials for sure 
'Congressman, I received your response and [...]
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