by Johnny Green

 
Below is information about a very worthy cause. Please consider helping these two hardworking activists get to Washington DC for the Americans For Safe Access Unity Conference. Jim Greig is set to get an award, so he HAS to be there!!!! Go get ‘em Oregon!
 
Full Article:
http://www.theweedblog.com/send-sam-and-jim-to-the-national-medical-cannabis-conference-in-d-c/
 

BY ALEX SEITZ-WALD

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Oregon(Credit: AP/Rick Bowmer)
 
In 1973, Oregon rode the hippie wave to became the first state in the country to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana. Within five years, eight other states had followed, but momentum soon lagged, and then reversed in the Reagan era.
Lately, however, it’s beginning to feel like the ’70s again, with numerous polls showing amajority of Americans in favor of legalizing marijuana and the recent referenda in Colorado and Washington to do just that.
Earl Blumenauer voted on that first decriminalization bill 40 years ago in Oregon — as a “child legislator,” he jokes — and now that he’s in Congress representing the state, he thinks we’re approaching a moment where things are about to speed up very quickly for drug policy reform advocates.
“It’s just come to a head,” he told Salon Thursday afternoon. “This is largely going to be resolved in the next five years.”
Blumenauer, along with Colorado Democratic Rep. Jared Polis, introduced legislation this weekto make the federal government treat cannabis like alcohol and let states decide whether to keep it illegal. And they think they have a real chance of getting somewhere this time.
 
Full Article:
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/08/why_congress_might_legalize_marijuana_this_time/

CTVNews.ca Staff

Pot activist Robert Erb, 60, says he will use his lottery winnings to help support the legalization of marijuana in B.C. November 10, 2012. (CTV)
A British Columbia pot activist is putting his money where his mouth is — literally — by putting up his lottery winnings in the fight to legalize marijuana in the province.
Bob Erb won a $25-million jackpot in November and, at the time, pledged to use some of his new-found wealth to support  cannabis decriminalization efforts.
Now, the 60-year-old has followed through on his promise, pledging up to $500,000 to match donations made to Sensible B.C. over the coming months.

“The biggest social injustice I’ve seen in all my entire lifetime is the criminalization and prohibition of marijuana,” Erb told CTV British Columbia on Friday.
Full Article:
http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/b-c-man-puts-lottery-win-towards-fight-to-legalize-cannabis-1.1149949

By: Samuel Jacobs and Alex Dobuzinskis

A woman buys a massive, totally legal, dagga joint at a shop in Washington.
 
The medical marijuana shop next to a tattoo parlor on a busy street in Los Angeles looks much like hundreds of other pot dispensaries that dot the city. Except for one thing: on the glass door — under a green cross signalling that cannabis can be bought there for medical purposes — is a sticker for the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW), the largest retail union in the US.
The dispensary, the Venice Beach Care Centre, is one of three medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles that are staffed by dues-paying union members. Another 49 in the city plan to enter labour agreements with the UFCW this year, the union says.
Together, the dispensaries are a symbol of the growing bond between the nascent medical marijuana industry and struggling labour unions.

During the past few years unions, led by the UFCW, have played an increasingly significant role in campaigns to allow medical marijuana, now legal in California, 17 other states and Washington, DC.
In the November elections, UFCW operatives also helped get-out-the-vote efforts in Colorado, where voters approved a measure that made possession of one ounce (28.3g) or less of the drug legal for anyone 21 and older. Washington state approved a similar measure and both states require regulation of marijuana growers, processors and retailers.
Union officials acknowledge that their support stems partly from the idea that the marijuana industry could create hundreds of thousands of members at a time when overall union membership is shrinking.
 
Full Article:
http://business.iafrica.com/news/841496.html?p=1

by Phillip Smith
 
 
Bills that would decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana have been introduced in both houses of the Vermont legislature. A Senate bill, Senate Bill 48, was introduced late last month, and its House counterpart, House Bill 200, was introduced Tuesday.

The bills are not identical. The Senate bill would decriminalize the possession of up to an ounce of pot by those 21 and over, while the more far-reaching House bill would decriminalize the possession of up to two ounces and the cultivation of to two mature and seven immature marijuana plants. Under both bills, people under 21 who are caught with pot would be treated like minors caught possessing alcohol.
The bills have tri-partisan support (Democrats, Republicans, and Progressives), with 39 cosponsors in the House and eight in the Senate. Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) has also repeatedly indicated strong support for a decriminalization bill.
 
Full Article:
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2013/feb/07/vermont_marijuana_legalization_b

AUSTIN, Tex.—The American Botanical Council‘s (ABC) HerbalGram has a new cover herb: cannabis. For the first time in its 30-year history, the journal will feature the cannabis plant on its cover to accompany its cover story on Israel’s federal medicinal marijuana program.
“There is obvious growing social demand for and acceptance of medicinal cannabis, and for this, and other reasons, ABC has increased its cannabis coverage in recent years,” said Mark Blumenthal, ABC founder and executive director. “Now, more than 20 years since our first cannabis story, we have decided to recognize this important plant with the first-ever HerbalGram cannabis cover.”
 
Full Article:
http://www.naturalproductsinsider.com/news/2013/02/cannabis-abc-s-new-cover-herb.aspx
 

By Jim Hightower
Four years ago, Michelle Obama picked up a shovel to make a powerful symbolic statement about America’s food and farm future: She turned a patch of White House lawn into a working organic garden.
I’m guessing that now, as she begins another four years in the people’s mansion, the First Lady is asking herself: “What’s next? What can I do this time around to plant a crop of common sense in our country’s political soil that will link America’s farmers, consumers, environment, and grassroots economy into one big harvest of common good?”
If she’s asking this question, I’m happy to offer a one-word answer: Hemp. How about planting a good healthy stand of industrial hemp next to your organic garden?
 
Full Article:
http://www.registercitizen.com/articles/2013/02/06/opinion/doc511321f73cc2b410509666.txt
 

by JointBloggers

In what could turn out to be a groundbreaking study, a group from Neuroscience Research Australia has been examining if cannabidiol – one of the main ingredients in cannabis – could reverse some of the symptoms of dementia, specifically Alzheimer’s disease.
Early research for the study has found that it does.
 
Full Article:
http://thejointblog.com/new-study-shows-cannabis-may-reverse-symptoms-of-dementia/#.URdbUx3LdMJ
 
 

by Phillip Smith
 
New York City has earned itself the sobriquet of Marijuana Arrest Capital of the World, with tens of thousands of minor pot possession arrests every year — mostly of young men of color — generated in good part by the city’s equally infamous stop-and-frisk policing, again aimed primarily at the city’s young and non-white residents. There’s a man running an outsider campaign for the mayor’s office there this year who wants to end all that.
 

Randy Credico during 2010 Senate campaign

Veteran Big Apple civil rights, social justice, Occupy Wall Street (OWS), and drug reform activist Randy Credico, who also doubles as a professional comedian, is mounting an insurgent campaign for the Democratic Party mayoral nomination, and he wants to end the city’s drug war and a whole lot more, and he wants to do it now.
The inventively funny, yet deadly serious, agitprop artist has an ambitious 17-point program for his first day in office, with promises that range from going after “the biggest criminals in our city” — the Wall Street bankers — and reforming the city’s tax code to favor the poor to rolling back privatization of city schools and reforming various city agencies.
But just beneath banksters and taxes is a vow to begin reining in the NYPD by firing Police Commissioner Ray Kelly (to be replaced with Frank Serpico) and “abolishing the NYPD’s unconstitutional policies of racial profiling, stop and frisk, domestic spying, entrapment, and its infamous (albeit unadmitted) ‘quota system.'”
Central to that policing reform plank, Credico says, is reclassifying the smoking and carrying of marijuana as no longer an arrestable offense. He also vows to fire any officer who lies or perjures himself on the stand, and to bar the use of “no-knock” warrants and stun grenades “except in the case of legitimate terrorist attack.”
And he wants to replace the city’s Special Narcotics Office with a Harm Reduction Office, whose leadership he has offered to Drug Policy Alliance head Ethan Nadelmann. He also vows to shut down the Rikers Island prison and turn it into a treatment center and education facility with a state of the art library, and to nominate law professor Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-blindness, to run it.
That’s quite a tall order for a first day in office, but Credico says he’s up for it.
“I plan to stay up for 24 hours and get all that stuff done,” he told the Chronicle.
 
Full Article:
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2013/feb/05/look_out_new_york_its_credico_ma