Picture: Anti-Pot DA Melinda Haag

Go into any strip mall “pain clinic” and grab a bottle of Oxycontin. Wander into a corner liquor store and grab a few bottles of Everclear and a pack of cigarettes. Load up on McDonald’s and Burger King until your heart explodes. All of that is fine. Meanwhile, controversy continues over the sale of a readily available, easily grown plant of proven medical benefit. A that law stands against the wishes of a majority of the populace is an unjust law.

Via Alternet:

In the latest act in the ongoing drama pitting federal drug laws against state legislation permitting the sale of marijuana, a U.S. Attorney is threatening the landlords housing medical marijuana dispensaries with 40 years in federal prison. After ballot measures legalizing the sale and possession of recreational use pot passed in Colorado and Washington state, we wondered whether Obama’s second term would see the beginning of the end of the federal war on drugs.

But as the San Jose crackdown among others suggests, the Justice Department will not be backing down.

Keep reading.

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Pic: Hupu2 (CC)

Sick people being condemned to a painful, lingering death due to using a medicinal plant that doesn’t have the blessing of Big Pharma? It’s the American Way!

Via Alternet:

After being diagnosed with liver cancer in 2009, Norman B. Smith applied to the liver transplant list at Cedar-Sinai hospital. While waiting for a transplant, Mr. Smith underwent chemotherapy in an attempt to destroy the cancer eating away at his liver. This caused severe side-effects, common to many cancer patients. In an attempt to curb the pain, and on the recommendation of his oncologist, Mr. Smith began using medical marijuana. Cannabis has become increasingly common as a medicine of choice for patients undergoing chemotherapy, since it increases appetite and reduces pain—minimizing the chance of a patient developing cancer related wasting syndrome. Finally, in September of 2010, Mr. Smith was notified that he was eligible for a liver transplant and was placed on the liver transplant list. Mr. Smith continued his treatment and submitted to drug testing per the hospital’s transplant list policy. After testing positive for THC (one of the active chemicals in marijuana), Mr. Smith was taken off the transplant list and denied a life saving procedure.

Keep reading.

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A Putnam County assemblyman received a ticket for marijuana possession Thursday after he was stopped for speeding on the New York State Thruway.

Assemblyman Steve Katz, a 59-year-old Republican who voted no last year on a bill to legalize medical marijuana, had been traveling 80 mph on I-87 through Coeymans, N.Y., where the speed limit is 65 mph, state police said. During the speeding stop, police said a trooper noted the odor of marijuana and found Mr. Katz in possession of a small bag.

State police released Mr. Katz with a ticket and ordered him to appear in court on March 28. He didn’t immediately return a call for comment.

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Christine L.’s Rottweiler, Sampson, had a rare form of blood cancer. After giving Sampson cannabis flower-bud material mixed with virgin coconut oil, whereas before Sampson had been too weak to walk, almost overnight he became a born-again youngster. “He was a puppy again, happy and playful,” Christine recalls. “Cannabis saved my dog’s life,” she says. “It brought him back from the brink.”

Since Sampson’s passing, Christine consoles herself by reaching out to others in a similar situation. Online, she found Dr. Doug Kramer, whose mission is to improve pets’ quality of life by outlining safe and effective dosing guidelines.

Kramer’s become an outspoken, tireless advocate of pain control for animals and has established a veterinary practice, Enlightened Veterinary Therapeutics, specializing in palliative and hospice care. He’s the first vet in the country to offer cannabis consultations as part of a comprehensive treatment plan for pet patients.

In doing so, Kramer is putting his professional reputation on the line and risking jail time. “The decision was an easy one for me to make,” he says. “I refuse to condemn my patients to a miserable existence for self preservation or concerns about what may or may not happen to me as a consequence of my actions.”

As Ohio vet Neal J. Sivula explains, “I am very frustrated by veterinarians’ seeming lack of interest in exploring this potentially very useful plant, Dr. Kramer being the exception. The bottom line is that we absolutely need the DEA to reclassify MM so that it can be studied.”

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Let Colorado and Washington be the marijuana trailblazers. Let them struggle with the messy details of what it means to actually legalize the drug. Marijuana is, as a practical matter, already legal in much of California.

No matter that its recreational use remains technically against the law. Marijuana has, in many parts of this state, become the equivalent of a beer in a paper bag on the streets of Greenwich Village. It is losing whatever stigma it ever had and still has in many parts of the country, including New York City, where the kind of open marijuana use that is common here would attract the attention of any passing law officer.

“It’s shocking, from my perspective, the number of people that we all know who are recreational marijuana users,” said Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor. “These are incredibly upstanding citizens: Leaders in our community, and exceptional people. Increasingly, people are willing to share how they use it and not be ashamed of it.”

Marijuana can be smelled in suburban backyards in neighborhoods from Hollywood to Topanga Canyon as dusk falls — what in other places is known as the cocktail hour — often wafting in from three sides. In some homes in Beverly Hills and San Francisco, it is offered at the start of a dinner party with the customary ease of a host offering a chilled Bombay Sapphire martini.

Lighting up a cigarette (the tobacco kind) can get you booted from many venues in this rigorously antitobacco state. But no one seemed to mind as marijuana smoke filled the air at an outdoor concert at the Hollywood Bowl in September or even in the much more intimate, enclosed atmosphere of the Troubadour in West Hollywood during a Mountain Goats concert last week.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former Republican governor, ticked off the acceptance of open marijuana smoking in a list of reasons he thought Venice was such a wonderful place for his morning bicycle rides. With so many people smoking in so many places, he said in an interview this year, there was no reason to light up one’s own joint…

[continues in the New York Times]

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O'Dea (CC)

Last week we posted a story about legal ways to invest in the medical marijuana boom. One of the suggested companies whose stock is publicly traded, Medbox, says it’s stock price is now ridiculously high after climbing 3000%. Story from MarketWatch:

A company that creates medical-marijuana dispensing machines says its stock is getting way too high.

Medbox shares surged 3,000% this week — from roughly $4 Monday to $215 Thursday — before falling to $100 after executives sought to dampen investor enthusiasm.

In a news release today, the company said that the stock’s rocket launch, which sent its market cap skyrocketing from $45 million at the start of the week to a staggering $2.3 billion, was ignited by a MarketWatch story Tuesday on how to invest in legalized marijuana (see How to invest in legalized marijuana .) (That’s about double the market capitalization of retailer Jos. A. Bank Clothiers.) The stock, which fell around 50% in early trading Friday, still hovers at $100. “We believe an appropriate trading range is between $5 and $10 but, alas, the market will do what it will do,” says Medbox founder Vincent Mehdizadeh.

At the height of trading this week, $600,000 to $700,000 worth of purchases were made, an unusually high volume for a company of this size. “It was astonishing,” Mehdizadeh says. “We couldn’t really understand why that was happening other than that there was a high demand for stock with limited supply.” It was “thin volume,” but Mehdizadeh says he doesn’t know whether it was one hedge fund or several big buyers…

[continues at MarketWatch]

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Mjpresson (CC)

You know a tipping point has been reached when the financial press starts writing about ways to profit from legalized marijuana! From MarketWatch:

Mark Twain is said to have remarked that a gold rush is a good time to be in the pick and shovel business. Investors may be able to apply that same bit of wisdom to the growing number of U.S. states that have legalized pot.

Although federal law prohibits the sale or possession of marijuana, Massachusetts last week joined the ranks of states — 18 plus Washington, D.C. — that allow its use for people suffering from chronic illnesses like cancer, HIV/AIDS, multiple sclerosis and epilepsy. In Washington and Colorado, meanwhile, voters passed an initiative to allow pot for recreational use. Those changes have kickstarted a small but fast-growing medical-marijuana industry, estimated to be worth about $1.7 billion as of 2011, according to See Change Strategy, an independent financial-analysis firm that specializes in new markets. In Colorado alone, sales topped $181 million in 2010, and the business employed 4,200 state-licensed workers, says Aaron Smith, executive director of the National Cannabis Industry Association , a nonprofit trade group that campaigns for marijuana’s federal legalization.

In addition to profiting itself from growing and selling marijuana, the industry benefits a slew of other businesses, such as insurers, lawyers and agricultural-equipment firms, experts say. “Call it the ‘green rush,’” says Derek Peterson, CEO of GrowOp Technology, an online retailer of hydroponics — products used in the cultivation of indoor plants — and a subsidiary of OTC stock Terra Tech. “The industry is expanding, and there are all kinds of investment opportunities.”

For regular investors looking to get in on the action — and without having to actually grow or sell drugs — there are several small-cap stocks that stand to gain from marijuana’s growing acceptance. Medbox, an OTC stock with a $45 million market cap, for example, sells its patented dispensing machines to licensed medical-marijuana dispensaries…

[continues at MarketWatch]

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Mounting evidence shows ‘cannabinoids’ in marijuana slow cancer growth, inhibit formation of new blood cells that feed a tumor, and help manage pain, fatigue, nausea, and other side effects. [This] offers hope of a non-toxic therapy that could treat aggressive forms of cancer without any of the painful side effects of chemotherapy.

Cristina Sanchez, a young biologist at Complutense University in Madrid, was studying cell metabolism when she noticed something peculiar. She had been screening brain cancer cells [and realized] the cancer cells died each time they were exposed to tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the principal psychoactive ingredient of marijuana.

Sanchez had stumbled upon the anti-cancer properties of THC. Subsequent peer-reviewed studies in several countries would show that THC and other marijuana-derived compounds, known as “cannabinoids,” are effective not only for cancer-symptom management (nausea, pain, loss of appetite, fatigue), they also confer a direct antitumoral effect.

Around the same time, Harvard University scientists reported that THC slows tumor growth in common lung cancer and “significantly reduces the ability of the cancer to spread.” What’s more, like a heat-seeking missile, THC selectively targets and destroys tumor cells while leaving healthy cells unscathed. Conventional chemotherapy drugs, by contrast, are highly toxic; they indiscriminately damage the brain and body.

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Nine San Francisco-area dispensaries have closed since last November, when 600 landlords across California were first contacted regarding the clubs operating in their buildings.

In June, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said only dispensaries breaking state law would be targeted, which made HopeNet’s closing particularly frustrating to Smith – she had served on the city’s Medical Marijuana Task force and helped put together the 2006 local ordinance expanding tolerance for smoking marijuana on private property.

Read more at Raw Story.

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