Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 4:49 pm | By: Radical Russ
(Santa Fe Reporter) New Mexico’s Medical Cannabis Program coordinator has resigned and, due to budget constraints and a hiring freeze, the state Department of Health has not refilled the position yet.
Melissa Milam, who had served as the program’s administrator since the Lynn and Erin Compassionate Use Act went into effect in 2007, left the position in mid-July.Milam cites the recent birth of her daughter as one reason for leaving her position. Another is she hopes to form a nonprofit to produce and dispense medical cannabis.
So far, 540 patients have received licenses, but only one nonprofit—Santa Fe Institute for Natural Medicine—has been approved. As a result, the majority of patients can only acquire cannabis through illicit means.
This is part of Milam’s motivation to form a nonprofit.
“The program has been slammed so hard, but I really am proud of it,” Milam tells SFR. “I want to make it better and that’s why I’m interested in taking care of patients on the nonprofit side. I feel like I’ve done all I can do for them on the government side.”
While proud of the structure of the program, Milam says she is disappointed in the practices exhibited by the single licensed producer.
For one thing, Milam says, SFINM’s prices are comparable to what would be paid on the street. More disturbing, she says, are reports that SFINM requires patients to meet delivery drivers in parking lots in order to obtain their medication.
“Asking people to meet you in a parking lot, I mean, how is that any different from a drug deal?” Milam says.
Las Vegas, NM-based cancer patient and medical cannabis license-holder Robert Jones tells SFR he agrees with Milam’s evaluation of SFINM.“They said it’s going to cost $400 an ounce and they won’t be delivering to Las Vegas, so you’d have to meet them somewhere else,” Jones says. “I’m not capable of driving to Santa Fe and I can’t afford $400.”
Dispensaries exist in California, Colorado, Washington, Rhode Island, and New Mexico, operating collectives, co-ops, and in the case of the latter two states, state-licensed non-profits. Dispensary supporters often proclaim they are providing safe access to patients to acquire medicine without dealing with the dangerous and unpredictable black market. For that, they should be commended.
However, if you can’t afford $400/ounce for plant material that costs $1-$2 to produce outdoors or $10-$20 to produce indoors when grown in volume, it doesn’t matter if it’s sold by the Santa Fe dispensary or Sam the weed dealer in the park, you have no access to medicine.
To be fair, the dispensaries’ economics are dictated by the black market. They can’t sell marijuana at less than street value, or buyers will sell it on the street for profit. They can’t buy the marijuana at less than street value, or the sellers won’t sell to the dispensaries when they can make more on the street. The notion that more dispensaries will lead to more competition is also ludicrous, not only based on the evidence of 600+ Los Angeles dispensaries not leading to a reduction in price there, but also because no matter how many dispensaries and patients there are, there are ten to twenty times that many black market buyers and sellers.
Only when marijuana is fully legal; when all sellers are in open competition; when all buyers can avoid high prices by growing their own; when all growers are able to grow huge outdoor fields; only then will patients truly have safe and affordable access to medicine.
Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 11:23 am | By: Radical Russ
This week brings more harassment to collectives and patients in San Diego by our local law enforcement. There are now reports from patients that police officers are parking their squad cars outside of collectives to intimidate the members as they go inside to get their medication. This, just weeks after Pierre Tiberius Uggla (a.k.a. San Diego Green Rx Detective Mike Mendez) was caught trying to join two collectives in town and months after Jamie Conlan (a.k.a. San Diego Green Rx Detective Scott Henderson) went to a local doctor and lied to obtain a valid recommendation for medical cannabis then joined all the collectives he could reach listed on the CA NORML.
All this for Operation Green Rx; the intent to target and eliminate all medical cannabis related activity in San Diego as well as help overturn Proposition 215 voted in by the people of California. Operation Green Rx was organized by detectives from the San Diego Police Department’s Narcotics Task force in collaboration with the District Attorney’s office and has been ongoing under one name or another for years in order to thwart the will of the people.
In this operation, detectives go to local doctors, lie about their symptoms, conditions and identities to obtain recommendations for medical cannabis. With these recommendations in-hand, detectives join as many of the collectives and cooperatives they can. The operation usually includes the detectives phoning collectives, providing all pertinent information to prove their status as legitimate patients, and then requesting to join each individual collective. Keep in mind, these collective and their existence is legal under California law.
The undercover officers proceed to request deliveries, make contributions, or pick up medicine form the collectives themselves. Last November the Operation Green Rx team rented and occupied a house in Pacific Beach for this purpose, (I wonder how much that cost the taxpayers?), then three months later, raided over 15 houses, sticking true to their motto of “Let the courts sort it out” at more cost, I might add.
Please visit Eugene’s blog at http://www.operationgreenrx.blogspot.com to follow this case. These rogue cops and DA’s must be forced to obey the will of the California voters who approved Prop 215 and who overwhelmingly support access to medical marijuana.
Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 12:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
The Los Angeles Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) Committee of the City Council will be holding a special meeting next Monday June 29, 2009 to hear 29 medical marijuana collective hardship exemption applications.
A medical marijuana dispensary at South Lake Tahoe has reopened, three months after shutting down following a raid by federal agents.
Patient to Patient Collective last week reopened next to its previous location, and plans to offer a full line of marijuana products to eligible patients.
Federal agents seized about 10 pounds of processed marijuana and a small amount of cash during January’s raid, but no arrests were made.
This is akin to the turtle poking his head out of his shell to look around and see if that little boy is going to try and cut it off again. In this metaphor, the little boy, Attorney General Eric Holder, promised not to target medical dispensaries, with provisions, and we are all waiting to see if he keeps his promise. With one exception, there have not been any further raids on dispensaries by federal troops.
But, therein lies the problem. The prohibition continues to fuel the black market, and the government has their finger on the grenade pin 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. At any time, the government can pull the pin and blow up every life involved in the legitimate cannabis industry in every medical marijuana state and people are scared.
[Therein lies another problem: the feds will only bust dispensaries that break state law, but the feds, not the state, get to decide if you broke state law. There are no state charges filed for breaking that state law, whatever it was, only federal charges. When you're facing federal charges in a federal court, you're not allowed to mention that you were following a state medical marijuana law. -- "R"R]
People are legitimately afraid of the federal government, and there are no protections for them. With only a small handful of congressional leaders willing to champion the cause, the entire House of Representatives have become a sniveling group of cowards afraid to lead their country because they believe their constituent support may suffer.
Contact your elected representative and let them know if they support medical marijuana laws then you will support them. They need to know who their support base is, then get active and get involved.
Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 8:34 am | By: Radical Russ
SAN FRANCISCO – One might guess that tough economic times would only fuel the desire for mind-altering substances. For San Francisco’s cannabis clubs, however, nothing could be further from the truth.The deepening economic crisis has hit the dispensaries hard, forcing the nonprofit collectives to cut staff, business hours and donations to charities.
Charlie Alazraie, manager of Bay Area Safe Alternatives, said business has dropped about 60 percent since summer, as the economy forces patients to buy smaller quantities. Alazraie had to let go of one full-time employee and two part-time workers at the small Western Addition collective.
Kevin Reed, founder of the Green Cross, which delivers medical marijuana to patients in San Francisco, said his sales are down 25 percent in the past 40 days, and dropped 45 percent in the past two weeks.
To survive, the collective cut its hours and cut its 12 employees’ pay by $2 an hour.
The cost of the pot hasn’t risen, but the $300-an-ounce price tag has become a heavy burden for people who have lost their jobs and cut back on expenses. Insurance does not cover medicinal marijuana.
Well, imagine that. In tough economic times that $45/eighth or $15/gram price is just a bit too steep, huh?
Some supporters of medical marijuana do not like us “legalizers”. They may feel that we confuse the issue of medical marijuana, that they want to be known as “patients not potheads”. Some even truly believe that while sick and disabled people should have access to marijuana, healthy people like me should not because we’re just “abusing” the medicine.
As long as marijuana is prohibited for the vast majority of its users who use it socially, this price problem will always exist for the medical users. Prohibition is what prevents insurance from covering medical marijuana. Prohibition is what prevents commercial growers from planting cannabis in massive outdoor fields and reaping such yields that would drop the price of retail cannabis from $15 per manicured gram to $15 per half-pound.
* Saffron is the world’s most expensive spice at about $1,000/lb. It only grows in limited places on earth, with 94% of saffron production coming from Iran. It must be harvested by hand, for the saffron is actually the individually-picked stamens (or “threads”) of the saffron flower. It takes a football-field sized plot to produce one pound of saffron, which takes about 20 hours of labor per pound, and only one harvest of saffron can be cultivated per year.
Cannabis, a weed that grows damn near anywhere on earth, that produces a pound or more of product per plant, that can be harvested at the rate of about an hour per pound, and can be cultivated up to four times per year, costs about $2,000/lb. Only prohibition could make a weed worth twice as much as saffron.
This is where I worry about the dispensary model. I completely support patients’ access to medicine and will never oppose any effort to achieve those ends, even dispensaries. But what I fear about dispensaries is they legitimize black market pricing for marijuana. People begin to get the idea that $45 is a fair price for 3.5g of an herb, which is only reasonable if you’re talking about saffron. Then once these businesses are set up on a black market pricing model, they are crushed when hard economic times cause patients to reevaluate their “luxury” spending (medicine shouldn’t be a luxury, but anything that costs $15 per gram is “luxury priced”).
When dispensaries can’t survive hawking $45 eighths, what incentive do they have to lobby for dropping that to $2 per ounce by ending prohibition? With prohibition, not only is there an artificially high prohibition price support, but also dispensaries don’t have to compete with Walgreen’s, CVS, and every little local farmer’s market in existence.
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 5:10 pm | By: Radical Russ
While the DEA continues to stage medical marijuana raids in California, nearly three-quarters of voters think President Obama should honor his campaign pledge to end the raids, according to a poll of 1,053 likely voters by Zogby International.
In a question sponsored by NORML, voters were asked:
During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama said he would stop federal raids against medical marijuana providers in the 13 states where medical marijuana has become legal. Should President Obama keep his word to end such raids?
Response: Yes – 72% No – 21% Not sure – 7%.
Yes votes outnumbered No by over 2 to 1 in all geographic, political, and demographic groups. The poll, conducted Jan 29-31, had a margin error of +/-3.1%.
In view of Obama’s pledge to end federal medical marijuana raids, advocates have been disappointed by the fact that they have continued since Jan. 20th. Yesterday, the DEA raided four LA-area medical marijuana dispensaries: Venice Alternative Healing, Marina Caregivers, Alternative Caregivers Discount Dispensary, and the Beach Center Collective (contrary to initial reports, a fifth dispensary wasn’t raided). The raids were all “smash and grab” operations, in which agents took medicine and cash, destroyed surveillance cameras, and grabbed computers, but did not arrest anyone.
California NORML coordinator Dale Gieringer denounced the DEA for “unprofessional and piratical conduct” and is calling on supporters to urge President Obama to end the raids. A rally to protest the DEA raids will be held on Thursday, Feb 5th at noon at the LA federal building, 255 E. Temple St.
Agents seized between five and 10 pounds of processed marijuana and a “small amount” of U.S. currency from the collective, said DEA Special Agent Gordon Taylor.
Police made no arrests on Thursday.
Taylor declined to comment on additional details of the raid, saying Patient to Patient Collective is part of an ongoing investigation.
Say, Californians! How do you feel about voting to allow sick people to use marijuana free from police harassment, only to have your state, county, and city law enforcement helping to serve a federal warrant? Don’t you just love the idea that your California tax dollars paid for this raid? You helped to take a whole 5-to-10 pounds of dangerous marijuana off the streets of Tahoe, so the Californians who buy hard liquor at the grocery store and gamble in the Nevada casinos won’t have to fear those out-of-control medical marijuana patients. Sure, you could allow the dispensaries to operate and collect their sales tax revenue, or you could just legalize marijuana for all adults and collect the revenues from taxation, law enforcement savings, and a brand new hemp industry, but then you wouldn’t get enjoy your swell State Tax Refund IOUs this spring, would you?
RevRayGreen: I'll post a pic of me and my son....gimme a minute
Missippi Hippy: Guess what... I'm gonna be a new... ummmmm well, my pet piggie Ganja is in labor and they ain't mine in the same sense. See what your wife [...]
RevRayGreen: days they didn't talk back..or act disrespectful..
RevRayGreen: feel so lucky my son is 18 going 19 and my daughter 16 going on 17..relish the days that can't talk back
Urb Age: Congrats Spof thats awesome. My little Clara is about to hit 20 months. Im not the activist I used to be, but its made me a better man.
Urb Age: Heck I was gonna go up there, but just not feeling well this weekend..Dang it, I hate it when that happens..
RevRayGreen: wishing I was hanging at NORML cafe...
JohnH: Just a quick comment about tokin' and sperm motility....been tokin since age 14 and have 8 kids ranging in age from 30 to 9...(what can I say, I found 2 [...]
slash5city: really ..oprah 35 yr or more in the closet toker ...outed ....o my god !!
SneakerPimp: that would be huge news just imagen the headline
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