By Brittany Anas

Bongo Love, of Lafayette, takes a hit of marijuana from a vaporizer while sitting next to Kyrie Wozab, of Louisville, on Wednesday at the Hive Co-Op. (JEREMY PAPASSO)
 
By day, The Front Tea & Art Shop sells papier-mache piggy banks, handmade flutes and elaborate carvings alongside tea leaves and hemp coffee.
By night, the eclectic cottage at the corner of S. Public Road and Cleveland Street becomes the Hive Co-Op, billed as Colorado’s first cannabis-friendly coffee and tea shop, where customers can gather to smoke pot or use vaporizers.
The co-op is BYOC: bring your own cannabis. There’s a 1-ounce limit, $5 cover charge and 21-years-of-age requirement with a valid ID. Oh, and a point of decorum — former Lafayette dispensary owner Veronica Carpio, who runs the place, prefers the word “cannabis” over “marijuana.”
Full Article:
http://www.coloradodaily.com/ci_22301222/cannabis-friendly-coffee-and-tea-shop-opens-lafayette?source=most_viewed#axzz2GwnS8UPD
 

By Nick Miller
nickam@newsreview.com
 
Enough with the doctors’ prescriptions and medicated gummy worms—how much money can California and Sacramento rake in if marijuana is legalized?
It’s a question political leaders and traditional media outlets are not just quietly wondering—they’re straight-up shouting it out loud on the heels of Colorado and Washington’s big free-weed moment.
Because, frankly, the payday’s looking pretty sweet. Up north in Washington, its Office of Financial Management estimated in August 2012 that legalization would generate the state more than $500 million in tax revenue annually just through the implementation of a pot tax. And that’s just special tax revenue alone, not total economic impact.
 
Full Article:
http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/billion-dollar-doobie/content?oid=8724062

by John Hopperstad

 
Now that marijuana is legal in the state, farmers and others across Washington are starting to look into the idea of growing pot.
When voters on Nov. 6 approved the legalization of marijuana, the state began work on how to regulate and license grow operations and retail stores. It is expected to take more than a year before the rules and regulations are in place.
The owner of a pig farm on Ebey Island in Everett sees a lot of potential in adding a pot crop to his operations.
“Farming is a game of pennies,” pig farmer Bruce King said. “You don’t really make a lot of money at farming.”
King said pigs have been profitable, but growing marijuana could be a jackpot.
Just one acre could yield 2,700 pounds, “and at the current retail price, that’s about 75,000 bucks.”
King said he’s never tried marijuana or any other drug, but now that pot is legal, he wants to be first in line for the permit to grow it.
 
Full Article:
http://q13fox.com/2013/01/02/everett-pig-farmer-growing-pot-would-smell-pretty-sweet/

 
My name is Jacqueline Patterson and I am a human rights advocate who uses cannabis (marijuana) therapeutically to mitigate (among other things) my very severe stutter.  Born with cerebral palsy, I have always had very limited use of my right side, tension, painful muscle spasms, and speech spasms.  I was in my teens when I found that cannabis made me feel better and stutter less but didn’t think of myself as a patient until I was in my twenties and a parent.
 
I could not, in good conscious, teach my children that it was acceptable to break a law that one wasn’t willing to work to fix so I began visiting my legislators in Missouri, where I lived at the time, and expanded my advocacy to include Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska. My work in Iowa led to my involvement in the Showtime documentary “In Pot We Trust” (which you can youtube to see the effect that cannabis has on my stutter) and my participation in the movie enabled me to become a more effective advocate: I’m excited to say that this year, I am turning my attention to the Southern states beginning with Tennessee.
 
At the beginning of January, I will be traveling to Memphis to meet with would-be patients and organizing a small group to lobby legislators to introduce a medical cannabis bill or reintroduce last year’s bill.  It is crucial, in the instance of something as controversial as medical cannabis, to make face to face contact with politicians, to show them that patient protection is vital to the virtues of compassion and justice. The federal government, unbeknownst to many people, gives monthly marijuana to four patients as part of an “investigational new drug program” instigated in the 70’s and closed by the first Bush administration in the 90’s tragically in response to thousands of applications from ill and dying AIDS patients seeking relief from nausea and wasting syndromes.  Cannabis saves lives, kills cancerous cells, and improves the quality of existence for millions of people in our great nation and if there is one belief I hold to be true, it is that the rights of of American belong to every American.  It is in this spirit that I speak out for those who cannot or who are too afraid to speak for themselves.
 
In the past, I have always paid my own advocacy expenses, however, the high cost of living in California (where medical cannabis is legal) limits my ability to do this.  I hope that I have supporters who believe enough in the rights of an individual to utilize a safe effective herb to alleviate his/her pain and heal his/her body to contribute to my work.
 
http://www.gofundme.com/1rf6o8
 

Posted by Johnny Green
 
If you are facing prosecution for cannabis, my heart goes out to you. You are on the front lines of marijuana prohibition, and it’s extremely unfortunate that you have to face prosecution for doing something so harmless. Below is a message from a person in your shoes, urging you to keep fighting.

 
http://www.theweedblog.com/a-message-to-cannabis-defendants-from-a-cannabis-defendant/
 

By Beverly Fortune — bfortune@herald-leader.com

Men worked in a hemp processing plant in Versailles circa 1920. Advocates say growing hemp again could help the state’s economy.
 
For advocates of reviving industrial hemp production in Kentucky, the state’s past as a leading hemp producer shows the crop’s potential.
Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner James Comer and Republican U.S. Sen. Rand Paul are among those pushing to revive industrial hemp in the state.
It’s ironic, Comer said in a recent interview, that until the Civil War, Kentucky led the nation in industrial hemp production.
The earliest settlers westward brought hemp seed in their baggage, James F. Hopkins points out in A History of the Hemp Industry in Kentucky. During the early 1800s, Kentucky hemp fibers were in demand for rope, sailcloth and rough fabrics used to wrap bales of cotton and make pants that were called Kentucky jeans.
Lexington was at the center of that production.
In 1838, there were 18 rope and bagging factories in Lexington that employed 1,000 workers, according to research by Lowell H. Harrison and James C. Klotter.
Lexington’s John Wesley Hunt, the first millionaire west of the Alleghenies, made his fortune growing hemp and manufacturing the fibers into rope, said Jamie Millard, former president of the Lexington History Museum.
One of Hunt’s factories was in downtown Lexington near North Broadway and West Third Street, Millard said.
“Hemp was the main cash crop of the state up until the Civil War, much more than tobacco was,” said Klotter, state historian and a professor of history at Georgetown College.
 
Full Article:
http://www.kentucky.com/2013/01/01/2461252/advocates-of-industrial-hemp-point.html

By ISABEL KERSHNER

Tikkun Olam, a medical marijuana farm in Israel, blends the high-tech and the spiritual.

“In a story the mystics of Safed would appreciate, Ms. Sikorin related the case of a 97-year-old Holocaust survivor at the home whose hands and forearms had long been frozen in an upward, twisted position. After taking medical cannabis, the nurse said, she joined a tai chi class.”

Full Article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/world/middleeast/new-insights-on-marijuana-in-israel-where-its-illegal.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&

 
Club 64, a marijuana club, was the second of its kind to open in the entire nation. Following the legislation that legalized pot smoking, which was codified as the 64 constitutional amendment, smoking marijuana is permissible at home. But not all homes are viable. Some local ordinances and landlord’s threats might make using the recreation drug difficult. Club 64 aims to relieve that problem.
 
Full Article:
http://www.jdjournal.com/2013/01/01/club-64-one-of-the-first-marijuana-clubs-opens-for-new-years-celebration/

William Lopez Argus Observer

William Lopez | Argus Observer
 
Ray was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a debilitating disease that, along with pharmaceutical poisoning due to the number of medications she was prescribed, caused a rapid decline in Ray’s health.
Within just a few years of her diagnosis, Ray was in a wheelchair, and her health had deteriorated to the point that she couldn’t speak or even open her eyes.
“I was entombed in my body and in terrible pain, like a fire,” Ray said. “As far as everybody knew, I was sleeping, but I was awake and alert.”
Ray said that a friend came over one day and somehow knew that she was awake. He told her that he was going to put something to her lips and that she needed to inhale.
She did as instructed, and the result was immediate, Ray said.
“My eyes snapped open and I yelled! I hadn’t been able to speak for the last month and now I yelled, ‘What was that,’” Ray said.
When he told her that it was a marijuana cigarette, Ray said that she had never experienced anything so instantaneously beneficial.
“I knew, right then, that I’d be able to live my life again,” Ray said.
 
Full Article:
http://www.argusobserver.com/news/stormy-ray/article_0c5f7116-521d-11e2-8920-0019bb2963f4.html

For those who think we don’t have political prisoners in this country listen to this documentary. Njweedman was put in prison for making commercials advocating ending the War on Drugs.
 

POLITICAL PRISONER – The Politics of Pot!!! from Edward Forchion on Vimeo.