With the six-month mark approaching, many are asking, How has legalization gone for Colorado? In the grand scheme of things, six months may not be much, but since marijuana has never been legal before, many are curious how the state has been affected, especially since opponents to marijuana legalization warned of a host of negative consequences, such as an increases in crime, car accidents and teenage use of marijuana, and a decrease in tourism. The Drug Policy Alliance released a report last week revealing that, in fact, legalization's impact on the state has been better than many expected. On the federal level, Congress has introduced legislation in recent weeks that would force the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration to recognize and respect state laws, and allow for more research on the drug's potential medical uses, especially for conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder. The Drug Policy Alliance and other marijuana legalization advocacy groups recognize that it is still too early to say whether marijuana legalization is solely responsible for the positive changes seen in Colorado. But that hasn't stopped many from arguing that this is so, while also noting that 54 percent of state residents still support ending marijuana prohibition. - Mint Press News
A new study suggests that legalizing medical marijuana reduces traffic fatalities. The authors noted that legalizing marijuana reduces alcohol consumption, and people are more wary of driving high than drunk. Which drug is actually more dangerous on the road? Alcohol, and it's not even close. It's hard to directly compare alcohol and marijuana, because driving impairment depends on dosage and the two drugs tend to affect different skills. (Pot makes drivers worse at mindless tasks like staying in a lane, while alcohol undermines behaviors that require more attention like yielding to pedestrians or taking note of stop signs.) Nevertheless, Yale psychiatrist Richard Sewell reviewed the academic literature on driving while intoxicated in a 2009 article, and found that alcohol is significantly more dangerous. Real-world data from auto accidents indicate that a drunk driver is approximately 10 times more likely to cause a fatal accident than a stoned driver. In most studies, smoking one-third of a joint or less has virtually no impact on a driver's performance. A couple of studies even suggest that pot smokers are less likely to cause an accident than sober drivers. It's a little surprising that THC has such a small effect on driving. In experiments testing the skills required for driving, coordination, visual tracking, and reaction time, rather than driving itself, subjects under the influence of pot fare significantly worse than sober people. But when you put them behind the wheel of a driving simulator, tokers perform okay. Those who have taken in a moderate dose of the drug show minimal impairment, and very experienced smokers show almost no deficit at all. (Interestingly, habitual stoners are also better at driving drunk than ordinary people.) - Slate
Making women feel more comfortable about marijuana is key to ending prohibition, according to Wendy Chapkis, a University of Southern Maine sociology professor. Women vote more than men, and the gap is growing among younger voters. "While smoking may culturally be a guy thing, voting is increasingly a girl thing," Chapkis wrote in an academic article titled "The Trouble with Mary Jane's Gender." The more that women influence pot culture, the more they make other women at ease with it. That was crucial, according to Chapkis, to last year's voter-approved initiatives legalizing weed in Colorado and Washington. Few women have wanted to venture into the outlaw world of illegal dealing, with its guns and aggressive competition, said Carter, a grandmother, retired from a career in banking. Instead, women with a passion for the plant tended to gravitate to medical marijuana. In turn, medical marijuana has become "something of a pink-collar ghetto," as Chapkis put it. - The Columbian
A store on Westside Highway will be one of just a few in the state to start legally selling recreational marijuana Tuesday. Freedom Market received its license from the state Liquor Control Board on Monday and expects to be stocked and open at noon. "I expect to sell out, unfortunately," Kathy Nelson, co-owner, said. "No matter what supply I had, I would expect to sell out. Then it's just a matter of hit and miss with suppliers." The licenses come 20 months after Washington voters approved Initiative 502, which set off a scramble to regulate the psychoactive plant for recreational users 21 and older. - The Daily News
State law allows a customer to buy up to an ounce per visit. Freedom Market will charge $25 per gram (there are about 28 grams in an ounce), or $33 with taxes. The price is high compared to illegal street costs in part to a high demand and low supply to start. Kathy Nelson, Freedom Market's co-owner, said she thinks the cost is secondary to the assurances of a regulated pot market. "It's legal, it's not backdoor, there's no risk of being arrested, it's all gone through testing and customers aren't risking someone putting something else on it," she said. "It's packaged by the producer once it's been tested, and the packaging isn't opened until it's brought home." "We will run out (Tuesday)," Nelson said of the limited supply in the state. "It took such a long time for the Liquor Control Board to start licensing (growers and processors). Everything should be smoother by August." For now, just smokeable marijuana will be ready for sale, as edibles such as pot-infused brownies or cannabis coffee have another layer of regulation to go through. Many other methods of delivering THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana that can be concentrated into tinctures or hashish, haven't been approved either. - The Daily News
Legal weed arrived Tuesday. And by late afternoon, the line of hopeful cannabis buyers was still stretched around the first retail store to sell in Seattle. Hours later, the new shop in Seattle and one in Bellingham were still serving customers, but both expected to have marijuana for sale Wednesday and possibly Thursday. Two other stores in the state, in Prosser and Spokane, were also open Tuesday. Top Shelf Cannabis opened its doors in Bellingham to waiting customers and prying reporters at 8 a.m., ushering in the first legal sales of recreational marijuana in the state, 20 months after voters made pot legal. And at high noon, Cannabis City made its first sale in Seattle. - Seattlepi
The start of legal pot sales in Washington Tuesday marks a major step that's been 20 months in the making. Washington and Colorado stunned much of the world by voting in November 2012 to legalize marijuana for adults over 21, and to create state licensed systems for growing, selling and taxing the pot. Sales began in Colorado on January 1 of this year. Businesses including Cannabis City, which will be the first and, for now, only recreational marijuana shop in Seattle, got word early Monday morning from the state that they were licensed marijuana dealers. - The Daily News
Fewer than 100 growers have been approved, and only about a dozen were ready to harvest in time for the market's launch. As for the stores, most first had to get lucky in state-run lotteries for 300-plus retail licenses being issued. Then they had to strike deals to buy product from the growers, in many cases at exorbitant prices. Much of the marijuana being sold Tuesday cost at least twice the $10 to $12 per gram offered by the state's unregulated medical dispensaries. In Seattle, hundreds of people waited in the warm sunshine outside for Cannabis City to open at noon. Store owner James Lathrop declared it time to "free the weed" and cut the ribbon, actually yellow police tape strung across the shop's door. - Hawaii News Now
As soon as the stores were notified Monday, they began working to place their orders with some of the state's first licensed growers. As soon as the orders were received, via state approved software for tracking the bar-coded pot, the growers could place the product in a required 24-hour "quarantine" before shipping it early Tuesday morning. Pot prices were expected to reach $25 a gram or higher on the first day of sales, twice what people pay in the state's unregulated medical marijuana dispensaries. That was largely because of the short supply of legally produced pot in the state. Although more than 2,600 people applied to become licensed growers, fewer than 100 have been approved, and only about a dozen were ready to harvest by early this month. - The Denver Post
Currently more than 30 percent of the U.S. population lives in a place where some type of marijuana decriminalization is the law. According to the federal government, this policy "has had virtually no effect on either the marijuana use or on the related attitudes and beliefs about marijuana use among young people." Since the 1970s, more than a dozen government appointed committees, in the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia as well as in other countries, have issued recommendations regarding marijuana policy. These include the Shafer Commission, appointed by former President Richard Nixon, Canada's Le Dain Commission, and Britain's Wooten Report, all of which concluded that marijuana prohibition causes far more social damage than marijuana use, and the possession of marijuana for personal use should no longer be a criminal offense. - Paul Armentano - NORML
I support decriminalization. People are smoking pot anyway and to make them into criminals is wrong. It's when you're in jail you really become a criminal. - Sir Paul McCartney, Independent on Sunday, 28th September 1997
Compared to alcohol, which makes people take more risks on the road, marijuana made drivers slow down and drive more carefully. Cannabis is good for driving skills, as people tend to overcompensate for a perceived impairment. - Professor Olaf Drummer, a forensic scientist the Royal College of Surgeons in Melbourne in 1996
Medical Cannabis was a standard treatment for migraines from the mid-19th century until it was outlawed in the early 20th century in the USA. It has been reported to help people through an attack by relieving the nausea and dulling the head pain, as well as possibly preventing the headache completely when used as soon as possible after the onset of pre-migraine symptoms, such as aura. There is some indication that semi-regular use may reduce the frequency of attacks.
The people who have taken cannabis made medicines for depression have found that the properties presented in medical marijuana helps to slow down the anxiousness that often occurs due to depression, and it also helps in increasing better appetite and peaceful sleep. Traditionally, various societies have used cannabis to treat symptoms of depression for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. In that entire period of time, there has never been any deaths due to the overdose of cannabis. More recently, scientists have been examining "cannabinoids" for their beneficial budding in the treatment of depression. Cannabinoids are the molecules in the cannabis plant that are named for its higher medicinal qualities.
One of the reasons I think women are kind of invisible in the cannabis industry is because we put ourselves above the fray. The fray is what is most noticeable in the industry. It's the posturing, it's the infighting, it is the jabs at each other, it's the egos. I feel that is what comes to the forefront, and as women we lift ourselves above that because we feel we have a job to do, we have things to accomplish. We have goals, we don't have time for that stuff. While everyone is down here, in the fray, that's where the spotlight is, but most women are above that doing the work. We need to figure out how we can bring the spotlight above the fray to highlight the work that we are doing more often in a better way. - Amanda Reiman, PhD
Even though we are in this place where it is very male gendered and there is a lot of sexism in the marijuana industry, we are now missing the mark. What cannabis is really about is alternative health and natural medicine. I feel that is a very feminine idea and we should be framing cannabis more as a goddess than as a sex symbol. Now, if we are waiting around for a heterosexual male to decide that he is tired of seeing a girl with big boobs and booty shorts holding a bud in a magazine, that day is never going to come. As women, we need to start changing the conversation. We need to start giving the terminology, we need to start using the vocabulary. It is probable that this image of sex and cannabis won't go away, but it doesn't mean that is the way it needs to go culturally. Culturally, I think we as women can raise the plant above the fray, to where we are. - Amanda Reiman, PhD
When you look at who was taking the risks of going to jail and growing cannabis, it was probably the men because women were taking care of the children. Not to sound sexist, but that is really how things used to go. Now, we have seen that start to change. Women have gotten way more involved in drug selling, growing and manufacturing but back when cannabis (use) really started to proliferate in the fifties and sixties, it was the men that were growing it (and smuggling it). When you think about the imagery we complain about, I really feel that is an artifact of how the growing cannabis industry was male driven in the beginning. When we look at how a male-gendered industry has taken to advertising, has taken to magazines, you would expect the traditional sexism we see purveyed elsewhere in the country. That doesn't surprise me in that regard. What does surprise me is that cannabis is a female plant. I feel that we are missing a whole side to that around spirituality and feminism. Some magazines have started to get at that, but I think we have the opportunity to really elevate it above the nurses in booty shorts and to be seen more as a "goddess" plant. - Amanda Reiman, PhD
There is a lot of talk about women in the marijuana movement coming to the mainstream media and questions about womens' roles within the emerging industry. Amanda Reiman, PhD, California Policy Manager for Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) knows about medical marijuana policy here and abroad as well as how women will shape the legal industry. Reiman leads DPA's marijuana reform work in California and is a decade long resident of Oakland. Reiman joined DPA in 2012 after working with Berkeley Patients Group as director of research and patient services. Not only is Reiman a well respected researcher specifically on medical marijuana dispensaries and using marijuana as a treatment for addiction, she also served as the first chairwoman of the Medical Cannabis Commission for the City of Berkeley. Amanda Reiman is only one of the women who are up and coming in the marijuana industry.
A woman embraces her friend during a 4/20 rally to demand the legalization of marijuana outside the Senate building in Mexico City. Marijuana enthusiasts across the world gather every year on April 20 for an International celebration/protest for marijuana legalization. The words read, "Legalize it". - Hindustan Times
Kentucky won a lawsuit on Friday against the federal government for the right to plant a shipment of hemp seeds that had been impounded. The case underscores what appears to be a comeback for the controversial plant, which, despite having much lower THC levels than marijuana, has been classified by the Drug Enforcement Agency as a Schedule I drug on par with heroin. Federal legislation outlawed hemp as part of a war on marijuana in 1937. But this year's Farm Bill, passed on Feb. 4, contains a provision that allows colleges and state agencies to grow and conduct research on the plant in states that allow it. Growing hemp under these circumstances is now legal in Kentucky, along with 15 other states that have removed barriers to hemp production. Though industrial hemp and marijuana come from the same plant, Cannabis sativa, hemp seeds are bred to produce plants with 0.3 to 1.5 percent THC, whereas marijuana has 5 to 15 percent. THC, the ingredient in marijuana that gets people high, is far too low in hemp to have the same effect. Hemp proponents said the plant can be an environmentally friendly source of paper, textiles, oils and biodegradable plastics. - Aljazeera America
