By Jefferson Dodge

By: Simon Eddisbury
 
 
The First Amendment guarantees American citizens the right to practice their faith without the fear of prejudice. Yet, the dozen or so religious groups whose beliefs involve the sacramental use of marijuana can often find themselves on the wrong side of the law. In Christian churches, wine is often consumed as part of the service. Alcohol is arguably a far more harmful substance than marijuana, so does banning the use of cannabis in religious ceremonies constitute religious discrimination? I caught up with Carl Olsen, a marijuana activist and member of a mansion of Rastafarianism known as the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church, to find out just how difficult it can be to practice a religion that holds cannabis sacred in a country where its use has been prohibited.
 
Read complete article here:
http://nugmag.com/2011/06/does-the-prohibition-of-cannabis-restrict-religious-freedom-marijuana-and-the-first-amendment/

When in Florence

Finally, a card that recognizes marijuana as medicine across the EU

Florence, the birthplace of the Renaissance, has been one of the most beautiful cities in the Western world for almost a thousand years. Now considered one of the most desirable tourist destinations of all, especially for its art, architecture and cultural heritage, the city features elegant plazas, palaces, churches, monasteries, museums, art galleries and magnificent parks and gardens.
I’m here for 10 days on a rare personal mission, visiting my friend Soul Lucille without one gig, personal appearance or other responsibility beyond filing this column for the Metro Times to impede my full enjoyment of this great cultural metropolis, walking the ancient streets where once trod such incredible human beings as Dante, Boccaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Donatello and Gallileo.
I’d been seriously disappointed on previous trips to Italy by the difficulty in finding adequate medicine after the Italian government headed by media baron Silvio Berlusconi (sort of the Rupert Murdoch of Italy) cracked down on marijuana and severely criminalized users and growers. When in Rome the first time in 2006, I met guys who were growing some very good weed where I was staying at Forte Prenestino, the 19th century army installation taken over by the autonomie movement in the 1980s. But the next time I visited, their gardens had been torn up, their growing had ended.

The only smoke I found in Italy was uniformly low-grade hashish. Someone told me that there was a single source for hash in the criminal underworld and everybody got the same stuff to peddle retail, which seemed to make sense in the society that gave “organized crime” its bad name.
Since then I’ve toured Italy extensively, playing gigs and doing readings and lectures, but nobody ever had any good weed to share, and my symptoms — physical aches and pains, mental anguish, the recurring paucity of creative inspiration — would go largely untreated until I could get back to my base in Amsterdam.
It was the same thing in France: Beyond Paris, where I had friends in the viper underground, it was difficult to find something medicinal to smoke. Last year I attended the MNOP festival — Music of New Orleans in Perigeoux — and went three days without a joint or even a whiff on the festival grounds. I suffered along with my compatriots from the 101 Runners Mardi Gras Indian funk band — and the entire New Orleans contingent — from the continuous absence of medication.
As a medical marijuana patient in Michigan, I can travel around the state that once imprisoned me for possessing two joints, and to the other 15 states that recognize cannabis as medicine as well as our nation’s capital, without fear of arrest and with a fair assurance of the availability of dosages of appropriate quality wherever I might go. This spring, my friend Ben Dronkers in Amsterdam alerted me to the benefits of medical marijuana status in the Netherlands and, by extension, the European Union.
While it’s still possible for anyone over 18, sick or well, to purchase up to five grams of cannabis over the counter at any of Holland’s 750 coffee shops, the Netherlands has also recognized marijuana as a medicine and allows for prescription by doctors and medical practitioners for a whole range of illnesses.
So I made an appointment with a doctor in Amsterdam who had been recommended to me. I showed him my Michigan patient card and explained that I would feel better if I had a prescribed dose of marijuana in my possession when I was in Holland and elsewhere in the European Union. He wrote me a prescription for 10 grams of cannabis flos to be taken at the rate of one gram per two days.
Read complete article here:
http://www.theweedblog.com/a-card-that-recognizes-marijuana-as-medicine-across-the-eu/

Posted by Johnny Green
by Al Byrne for Patients Out of Time

Between 1987 and 1992 I became involved with a Veterans Health Administration and Agent Orange Class Assistance Program that funded Vets, acting as peer counselors, to search out and offer aid to fellow Veterans. All the counselors who did the field work fought in Vietnam as did almost all of the clients or patients.
There were a small number of women in the group, all nurses of the Army and Navy. The majority of the guys were Army or Marine enlisted, a smaller number of Navy “brown water” sailors and a few from the Air Force.
My take is that the closer you came to death every day, and there were many ways to observe that act, the likelier a Vet was to be diagnosed with post traumatic stress (PTS).
I was the only counselor to have served as a Commissioned Officer and I doubled as the Contract Administrator for the multi thousand dollar grants we used to help Vets in the Appalachian region of Virginia and West Virginia. I had about 200 guys I worked with over those years.

Johnny worked at a wood yard, so did his son. His boss had called us one day looking for someone to talk to Johnny, get him some help. I showed up late one afternoon and met the boss who was younger than I and Johnny by a dozen years. Johnny was his friend as well as an employee and he was drinking himself to death I was told and it has something to do with Vietnam he was sure.
Johnny and I saw each other every week for months. He was on parole for pistol whipping some loser who thought the little guy in the corner of the bar room could be bullied. Johnny took him for a ride of terror before knocking him in the head and dumping him and his car in a big ditch. I took him for rides through the tree-lined roads of the county, away from the saws, the noise. He was drinking incessantly, doing lines of coke when he could score some and angry.
My job was to find a way to get him to talk out his pain, not physical pain for him but the emotional scars he carried along with their live-in demons. Talk we did about his homecoming, a day late he said to me, because if he had been there when the flood came he could have saved his family; father, mother, two sisters and younger brother. He was convinced that he could have saved them (or at least died with them), but the Marines had him in a stockade for acting up when he came to the states, for refusing to get a “getting out “ haircut, for telling a sergeant to go to hell. Guilt is a primary factor in PTS and Johnny had more than enough because he had not been at home when he could have been.

This was on top of a tour of duty that young 19 year old Marines like him endured in the endless jungles of danger. He was a gunner on an armored vehicle. Four fifty-caliber machine guns fired at his command with the power to blow an engine block to pieces. One night he and his friends were attacked by the enemy. In front of his guns in the morning were over 400 dead men and he was untouched he said to me, but it was 20 months of talk before he remembered that morning, that night, and when he did he cried for a long, long time.
It had not taken the counselors long to determine a trend among the Vets. Some drank to excess and, like Johnny, took any other intoxicating drug they could find. Some did not drink or do coke, they used cannabis instead.
Johnny told me he could not sleep more than a couple of hours at a time. An exhausted rest at best. He told me he could not relax, his appetite was only for alcohol and being unconscious. I urged him to use cannabis and he did. He stopped the coke cold. His alcohol intake decreased to only a few beers a day and he slept.
A cannabis researcher in Italy has coined a phrase about the endocannabinoid system. It helps us eat, sleep, relax, protect, and forget. Cannabis is the only plant that has phyto-cannabinoids (made within the plant) that are similar to the endogenous cannabinoids (made within the body) recently discovered in the human body. When I use cannabis I do not dream and I told Johnny that and I told him that he could sleep again too if he used cannabis. It would help him eat again, real food. That he could smoke a bowl and relax for a while, and concentrate on good thoughts and forget the painful images he carried in his head and while these positives were replacing the negatives, his body would enjoy a return to homeostasis from feeding his system with cannabis compounds.
Johnny called me a couple of years after I no longer worked as a counselor. He was fine now he said and wanted me to know that. “You helped me man” he said on the phone and told me he stopped drinking, was married now, his son with him and he used cannabis every day.
Read complete article here:
http://www.theweedblog.com/feds-need-to-realize-that-medical-marijuana-would-help-war-veterans/

By Mamakind
Flying the pot-friendly skies just got a little easier, now that it’s been confirmed that Health Canada-licensed medicinal cannabis consumers are able to legally consume marijuana both in the airports while waiting for their flights and while on the plane during the flight.
At the end of May 2011, as a license-holder, I took it upon myself to clear up any ambiguities in regards to where and when I’m able to medicate.
Up until this point, we could only speculate as to what exactly the policies were of the corporations and agencies we deal with when we choose air travel. At various times, cardholders have been hassled going through security, as CATSA (Canadian Air Transport Security Authority) agents haven’t been trained to recognize either the MMAR card or paper licenses. The old policy stood that even if the cannabis is legal, if it’s found amongst your carry-on items, a report would have to be made, sometimes involving police stationed in the airport – and it could take up to a good twenty minutes to work through the process. Often insensitive agents pull out bags of medicine to display for the entire security area, remarking at the scent and/or asking what strain it is. After the last time this happened to me, the CATSA representative for Calgary International Airport suggested that I file a complaint in order to get the policy changed.
“Believe me, our agents would much rather just see the card and wave you through without the hassle, so if enough complaints are made, the policy can be changed.”

Whether or not there were several complaints, my complaint was voiced and heard and so I was contacted by a CATSA representative this week, informing me that the policy is indeed changing and that a memo to that effect will be circulated nationwide within the month. This memo/newsletter will explain to CATSA agents about the new policy of recognizing MMAR cards/paper licenses (pictures of the cards will be provided to them) and explain that filing a report when they come across one isn’t necessary. There will be special notes made regarding the professional, courteous conduct required when an agent does come across marijuana; this medicine is to be treated as they would any other prescription medication. Agents don’t pull out your Viagra and comment on it, so therefore, the same should be true for your pot.
So now that we know we can bring our meds with us through security, what about consuming them in the airport? That’s the bailiwick of each individual airport authority, so I called the two airports I was dealing with, YYC (Calgary) and YYZ (Toronto). I asked both if there was any reason why I wouldn’t be able to use my vaporizer once I’m past security and they said, “As long as you can find a plug…”
This left the last piece of the puzzle: could I vape on the plane itself?
Read complete article here:
http://www.theweedblog.com/canada-allows-vaporizers-on-planes-and-in-airports/

By Eric W. Dolan

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said he would support the legalization of medical marijuana after experiencing months of intensive cancer treatment.
“Until you’ve experienced chemo, you can’t describe exactly how it feels,” he said Thursday on KSL Newsradio’s Doug Wright Show. “It’s kind of like having the flu because you ache all over. But it’s worse than that… Everything feels awful.”
Read complete article here:
http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=133067

The two thought they were doing the people of Long Beach a favor. Then they became targets in the city’s weird war on weed

 
By NICK SCHOU
Joe Byron and Joe Grumbine face each other as the two sit on opposite sides of a booth table at Egg Heaven, the popular Long Beach breakfast eatery that the towering, ruddy-complexioned Byron—this morning wearing a somewhat-pained smile—has owned for the past 17 years. Grumbine is shorter, with wavy shoulder-length hair, and is wearing a billowy, white, button-down shirt that has a green ribbon with a red cross pinned to it, the symbol of his medical-marijuana activist group, the Human Solution. Both men poke at their eggs as they struggle to make sense of the fact they’re talking to a reporter about something that, while apparently illegal for them to do, isn’t illegal for a bunch of other people to do. That, at least, seems to be the moral of the Kafkaesque riddle that has become their lives, one that tends to put a dent in one’s appetite and makes one’s brain hurt even if one has had a few cups of coffee.
On June 17, Byron and Grumbine will be put on trial at the Long Beach Courthouse of Los Angeles Superior Court for dispensing medical marijuana to members of their cannabis collective—that is, they sold the pot to qualified patients who showed up at their storefront and presented valid California driver’s licenses and legitimate recommendations from licensed physicians saying they were medical-marijuana patients whose right to obtain and smoke cannabis is protected under state law. The only problem: The patients in question turned out to be undercover police officers who were part of a major operation aimed at taking Byron and Grumbine out of the medical-marijuana trade and sending them to prison. If convicted of selling marijuana, each man faces seven years in state prison.
Read complete article here:
http://www.ocweekly.com/2011-06-09/news/joe-byron-joe-grumbine-egg-heaven-long-beach-medical-marijuana/

By Daily Mail Reporter

Smoking in retirement: Mr Schwartz, a great-grandfather of three, is a stroke sufferer who smokes the drug to alleviate debilitating nausea

 
One of the largest retirement communities in the United States has lit up the national debate over medical marijuana use in Southern California.
Laguna Woods Village, located in one of the most conservative and wealthiest California counties, is a vast 18,000-person gated community that is home to roughly 150 cannabis-smoking senior citizens.

Joe Schwartz, a 90-year-old great-grandfather of three, is one of them.   As a World War II vet and stroke sufferer
Mr Schwartz is part of the Laguna Woods Village medical marijuana collective operating in one of the largest retirement communities in the United States.
The experimental group mirrors a nationwide trend of more senior citizens turning to marijuana – whether legal or not – to ease aches and pains of aging.

 
Read complete article here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2000963/The-150-pot-smoking-pensioners-sparking-medical-marijuana-debate.html
 

By Kathy Ochiai | Email the author

In her Laguna Canyon studio, Laguna Beach artist and designer Michelle Hutchinson proudly holds up a bikini she has created from hemp-based fabric. She excitedly explains why hemp material is so much better to use for a bikini than other fabrics.
“Because hemp is anti-microbial, it doesn’t allow for bacterial growth,” says Hutchinson. “It doesn’t get ‘funky’ after a day at the beach. It’s porous, so it dries more quickly on a clothes line or in a drier. This uses less energy. Every time you wash hemp, it gets softer. Feel how soft this is!”
Chris Boucher, Laguna Beach resident and owner of Hempsteads International, is on hand delivering fabric to Hutchinson in her studio. He supplies Hutchinson with material for her creations.
His company’s products include T-shirts, fabrics, clothing, hemp protein, seeds, oil and body care items. He imports fair trade hemp fabrics from China, as well as products and clothing made from organically grown plants.
“This means,” says Boucher, “that the plants are grown without the use of pesticides and herbicides, and that the fabric producers and clothing manufacturers receive a fair price.” 
Boucher got his start in the surf and beach clothing industry 15 years ago in Costa Mesa. Hutchinson has made clothing for festivals, including the Sawdust Festival, for the same amount of time. Both of them saw the beach apparel industry “vanish” from Southern California.
“Seventy per cent of the apparel industry,” says Hutchinson, “has been outsourced to China.”
 
Read complete article here:
http://lagunabeach.patch.com/articles/laguna-beach-residents-provide-hemp-products-question-the-illegality-of-growing-hemp#c

By Alan Travis

Dame Judi Dench, Sting and Sir Richard Branson are among those who have signed an open letter to David Cameron urging that possession of drugs be decriminalised. Photograph: Jockmans/Rex Features