Tag Archives: cannabis

Congress quietly ends federal government’s ban on medical cannabis

now all we’ve got to do is convince the media that it’s really called “cannabis”…

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Congress quietly ends federal government’s ban on medical cannabis
By Evan Halper at The LA Times

Tucked deep inside the 1,603-page federal spending measure is a provision that effectively ends the federal government’s prohibition on medical marijuana CANNABIS and signals a major shift in drug policy.

The bill’s passage over the weekend marks the first time Congress has approved nationally significant legislation backed by legalization advocates. It brings almost to a close two decades of tension between the states and Washington over medical use of marijuana CANNABIS.

Under the provision, states where medical pot CANNABIS is legal would no longer need to worry about federal drug agents raiding retail operations. Agents would be prohibited from doing so.

Should the U.S. legalize marijuana CANNABIS?
Bloomberg’s Olivia Sterns reports on the New York Times’ advocacy of the legalization of marijuana.

The Obama administration has largely followed that rule since last year as a matter of policy. But the measure approved as part of the spending bill, which President Obama plans to sign this week, will codify it as a matter of law.

Pot CANNABIS advocates had lobbied Congress to embrace the administration’s policy, which they warned was vulnerable to revision under a less tolerant future administration.

More important, from the standpoint of activists, Congress’ action marked the emergence of a new alliance in marijuana CANNABIS politics: Republicans are taking a prominent role in backing states’ right to allow use of a drug the federal government still officially classifies as more dangerous than cocaine.

“This is a victory for so many,” said the measure’s coauthor, Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of Costa Mesa. The measure’s approval, he said, represents “the first time in decades that the federal government has curtailed its oppressive prohibition of marijuana CANNABIS.”

By now, 32 states and the District of Columbia have legalized pot CANNABIS or its ingredients to treat ailments, a movement that began in the 1990s. Even back then, some states had been approving broader decriminalization measures for two decades.

The medical marijuana CANNABIS movement has picked up considerable momentum in recent years. The Drug Enforcement Administration, however, continues to place marijuana CANNABIS in the most dangerous category of narcotics, with no accepted medical use.

Congress for years had resisted calls to allow states to chart their own path on pot CANNABIS. The marijuana CANNABIS measure, which forbids the federal government from using any of its resources to impede state medical marijuana CANNABIS laws, was previously rejected half a dozen times. When Washington, D.C., voters approved medical marijuana CANNABIS in 1998, Congress used its authority over the city’s affairs to block the law from taking effect for 11 years.

Even as Congress has shifted ground on medical marijuana CANNABIS, lawmakers remain uneasy about full legalization. A separate amendment to the spending package, tacked on at the behest of anti-marijuana crusader Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), will jeopardize the legalization of recreational pot in Washington, D.C., which voters approved last month.

Marijuana CANNABIS proponents nonetheless said they felt more confident than ever that Congress was drifting toward their point of view.

“The war on medical marijuana CANNABIS is over,” said Bill Piper, a lobbyist with the Drug Policy Alliance, who called the move historic.

“Now the fight moves on to legalization of all marijuana CANNABIS,” he said. “This is the strongest signal we have received from Congress [that] the politics have really shifted. … Congress has been slow to catch up with the states and American people, but it is catching up.”

The measure, which Rohrabacher championed with Rep. Sam Farr, a Democrat from Carmel, had the support of large numbers of Democrats for years. Enough Republicans joined them this year to put it over the top. When the House first passed the measure earlier this year, 49 Republicans voted aye.

Some Republicans are pivoting off their traditional anti-drug platform at a time when most voters live in states where medical marijuana CANNABIS is legal, in many cases as a result of ballot measures.

Polls show that while Republican voters are far less likely than the broader public to support outright legalization, they favor allowing marijuana CANNABIS for medical use by a commanding majority. Legalization also has great appeal to millennials, a demographic group with which Republicans are aggressively trying to make inroads.

Approval of the pot CANNABIS measure comes after the Obama administration directed federal prosecutors last year to stop enforcing drug laws that contradict state marijuana policies. Since then, federal raids of marijuana merchants and growers who are operating legally in their states have been limited to those accused of other violations, such as money laundering.

“The federal government should never get in between patients and their medicine,” said Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland).

sad

a while ago, i posted about a new cannabis dispensary that had opened up just down the street from my house.

due to “new regulations”, which i don’t completely understand, that dispensary, along with 14 others in this area, was summarily shut down by the county prosecutor last week.

it’s not as though i don’t have two other dispensaries just down the street from my house, and since they opened up, recreational cannabis has become legal in the state of washington, so i don’t really understand why they were shut down to begin with, but it’s sad…

rick and i were the first two customers of a dispensary that is now shut down… 😒

OCF and heat

this is my official pre-OCF post for 2015, among other things.

it has been SO FUCKING HOT for the past couple of days that i haven’t been able to run either of my real “computers” except for a couple of brief periods when i had to set up a trial wordpress instance for AVBT, and then produce some simple graphics for the site. it’s been hot enough that, if i keep my computers running for more than a couple of hours, they start acting funny… and, to be honest, i don’t blame them. it’s a good thing this is a holiday weekend, and even better that we don’t have to go on a one-day road-trip to portland — the mother-in-law and her housemate are not throwing a party this year because the housemate has had another stroke recently, and isn’t in any shape to do anything but smoke cigarettes (which is what caused the first stroke), and convalesce in her air-conditioned house…

on the up side, i’m almost ready to go to OCF again this year. there have been the standard rumours of intense heat, bugs, tight camping, changes in the layout of the fair, and other stuff that may or may not actually be things that affect me… this year, for the first time since i actually started going to the fair (2004), simon will not have to put up the stage (the stage was made into a “permanent structure”, like the ritz and the main stage, last year) which means that he’ll have more time to hang around and get drunk, which may or may not be a good thing, especially since he actually has a speaking part (The Ringmaster of The Ding-A-Ling Brothers Circus) this year.

amazingly enough, i may actually post on this blog from the fair this year, because i have several technological “helpers” that i have never had before: i have a solar charger for my phone and tablet, i have access to a secure cloud storage device, and i am definitely going to take my phone, and probably going to take my tablet to the fair this year… i can just imagine sitting out in the woods and updating my blog… all i need is a wifi password, which i know they have, i just don’t know what it is… yet… and, actually, i don’t even need that, because my phone is also a wifi hotspot… it’s amazing, scary and incomprehensible, all at the same time…

until then, i’m hunkering down in my hole beside the fan, not having access to either of my “real” computers, reassuring the dogs that it will all be over soon (they don’t believe me) and hoping that by next week things will be somewhat cooler. πŸ˜›

and while i have been typing this, i got a text-message from that same mother-in-law, who informs me that she’s getting some cannabis plants tomorrow… and, yes, she lives in a place where it is currently legal on the state level… this is another thing that’s amazing, scary and totally incomprehensible, at the same time… 😐

maybe a tiny step forward…

How marijuana became legal – before they’re going to be able to make cannabis legal, they’re going to have to seriously consider giving it a more scientific name: “pot” and “marijuana” are not going to cut it if you’re going to be able to go down to the drug store and buy it without a prescription. there’s still just too much stigma placed on those words to make it anything other than political suicide.

which is still illegal, by the way…

Continue reading maybe a tiny step forward…

my name is salamandir and i’m a geek

i’m a geek. i have known it for a while, and there have been several events in my life that have made it sometimes painfully obvious. well, this is one of those events in my life. there is a link on the wikipedia page about cantheism which is in the “External link & sorce” part of the page, the first link is to a “Cantheist website”, which, if you click it, takes you to a pretty green page all about cantheism, with a link at the bottom to Chris Conrad’s web site

that is all very well and good, but what i discovered this afternoon is that it is on a domain that i own and have control over… and i didn’t know it was there.

not only that, but there are apparently other pages in the same directory, complete with graphics, that i not only didn’t know about, but have not linked on my own site, that i know of, in at least 10 years. the date on the page that has a date is september 15, 2000, which may be around the time they were placed there.

upon further investigation, of course, i discovered that they actually are linked to one of the pages that i haven’t looked at since about 2001. i posted the information, and forgot about it. but internet didn’t, and now, without me having to do anything, a page of information that I make available is a resource on wikipedia.