Herbwise

Oh high!

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caitlin@sfbg.com

HERBWISE Say “cannabis,” not “weed.” Couch discussion in the language of medicine, not intoxication. There are a lot of rules when it comes to talking about marijuana — and the country’s most beloved cannabis publication breaks most of them.

That’s because at High Times magazine, the general take is that herb should be legal across the board, not just for consumption by the verifiably sick. “Until it’s legal for all adults, medical marijuana patients are going to be regarded as second class citizens,” said Elise McDonough, who besides having worked as a graphic designer with the magazine for 10 years is the author of the brand-new-for-420 Official High Times Cannabis Cookbook (Chronicle Books, 160pp, $18.95).

>>Join the Guardian and a stellar lineup this Friday 4/20 at El Rio for the Stoned Soul Picnic party!

In her Guardian phone interview, McDonough pointed out that eating may be the first way human beings consumed cannabis. She’s certainly done her part to give us options beyond the basic brownie — the book includes recipes for “psychedelic” spanikopita, tamales, cocktails, holiday feasts, and a host of canna-bases, from dosed butter to olive oil. McDonough wrote many, but also gets help from other High Times luminaries, like the dearly departed Chef Ra, who contributed to the rag’s recipe column for 15 years.

Interest, ahem, sparked? The following recipes from the book will make a stellar foundation for next week’s holiday festivities, medicinal or not. 

 

SIMPLE CANNABUTTER

Makes 1/2 cup

1/2 cup (1 stick) salted butter*

1/4 ounce cannabis buds, finely ground

*To make cannamargarine, simply substitute margarine for butter in this recipe

1. Melt the butter on low heat in a saucepan. Add the ground buds, and simmer on low heat for 45 minutes, stirring frequently.

2. Strain the butter into a glass dish with a tight-fitting lid. Push the back of a spoon against the plant matter and smash it against the strainer to squeeze out every drop of butter available. When you’re done, discard the plant matter.

3. Use your cannabutter immediately, or refrigerate or freeze until it is time to use. You can easily scale this recipe up for larger batches of cannabutter. One pound of butter (4 sticks) can absorb 1 ounce of cannabis, but you may want to simmer for up to 60 minutes.

Drizzle this cannabutter over freshly cooked pasta or popcorn for instant satisfaction. Reserve large batches in the fridge or freezer for use in recipes.

 

GREEN GANJA GARLIC SMASHED POTATOES

Stones 4

1 1/2 pounds potatoes, unpeeled and cut into chunks (Yukon Gold potatoes are great)

1 pound parsnips, peeled and cut into chunks

1 head garlic, cloves separated and peeled

1 1/2 tablespoons salt, plus more as needed

4 tablespoons Simple Cannabutter

Black pepper

1. Put the potatoes, parsnips, and garlic in a large pot and cover them with water. Bring to a boil over high heat and then add the salt. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer for about 15 minutes. The potatoes, parsnips and garlic should be tender and easy to smash. Drain the vegetables and reserve 1/2 cup of the cooking water.

2. In a small saucepan over medium heat, melt the cannabutter.

3. Return the vegetables to the pot or a large serving bowl, and begin to smash them with a potato masher, slowly adding the melted cannabutter a little at a time. Use spoonfuls of the reserved cooking water to thin the mixture if the smashed veggies are too thick. Season with black pepper and more salt and serve.

 

Oaksterdam University gets a Monday morning federal raid

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Good morning cannabis patients. Hopefully you weren’t planning on attending horticulture classes at Oaksterdam University today. The cannabis school in the heart of downtown Oakland is being raided by IRS and the DEA with support from US Marshals right now. 

At this point, little is known about the motivations behind the raid. The Huffington Post reports that an IRS spokesperson could only say that the incursion was authorized by a federal search warrant. There are reports that Oaksterdam owner Richard Lee was also detained and then released early today. 

A throng of protesters have gathered around the taped-off entrance to Oaksterdam, holding signs, heckling official vehicles for lacking valid license plates. Andrew Deangelo, brother of founder of Harborside Health Center Steve Deangelo, pleaded with law enforcement guarding the doors to Oaksterdam to refuse similar assignments “to arrest sick and suffering people” in the future. The federal agents have so far removed documents, safes, and cannabis plants from Oaksterdam. 

Oaksterdam University was founded in 2007 by Richard Lee as a place where patients and caregivers could learn the necessary skills to grow quality cannabis. The syllabus now includes courses in cannabis politics, history, and the legal rights of patients. Lee was one of the primary forces behind the 2010 California ballot measure Proposition 19 that would have legalized marijuana for use across the board. One of the central figures in the cannabis community, this raid is a bold move in a creeping movement by the feds that is curtailing patient access of late. 

A call this morning to Anne Campbell Washington, Quan’s chief of staff, yielded little information regarding the city’s response. “We don’t have information on it yet, because it wasn’t our operation,” Washington said. 

The Guardian will have a reporter on the scene shortly, so check back here and in this week’s Herbwise print column for updates on the fate of the University. 

UPDATE: The LA Times has reported that Richard Lee’s house was also raided today. 

District attorney distances self from anti-cannabis memo, ‘unequivocally supports medical marijuana’

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Don’t believe everything you read, especially when it comes out of the District Attorney’s office. D.A. George Gascon’s press representative Stephanie Ong Stillman says a memo covered in this week’s Herbwise column circulated earlier this month outlining the “continued illegality of selling marijuana” — even in state regulated cannabis dispensaries — was sent out without Gascon’s knowledge and “does not represent his views on medical marijuana.”

“He unequivocally supports medical marijuana,” Stillman told the Guardian on the phone this afternoon. “Prosecuting illegal marijuana sales is not a priority.”

This is — unequivocally — good news for San Francisco’s medical cannabis patients. The memo (signed by assistant district attorney John Ullom) stated that cannabis dispensaries were acting under protection of state law were perpetrating “a marijuana mega-myth.” According to the East Bay Express, it was released in response to indignation expressed by an unnamed dispensary’s deliveryperson was apprehended by law enforcement. 

But Stillman says the brief was written over three years ago, before Gascon was elected to office. Calling it “a template brief,” she says it’s not the first time the memo has been circulated in response to legal questions about cannabis — but that it has not been since Gascon has been in office, and will not be used again under his administration. 

But what of today’s headline of the SF Examiner, a quote presumably attributed to Gascon reading “all sales of marijuana are illegal”? 

“It’s a misquote,” says Stillman. “They’re going to print a correction.”

UPDATE: The Guardian just recieved a call from Gascon himself, who confirmed Stillman’s comments, saying “I’ve already taken steps to make sure that this will not happen again.” Can we just say we’re pleased as punch that he’s upholding the values that he shared with us in his Guardian endorsement interview last September?

UPDATE: Although felony charges against the deliveryperson who was initially apprehended have not been dropped, Gascon’s office has filed for a two-week continuance.

Two incidents

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caitlin@sfbg.com

UPDATE: The District Attorney’s office has retracted the memo detailed in this article, and told the Guardian that D.A. George Gascon “unequivocally supports medical marijuana.” Full story here

HERBWISE “If they can successfully take out San Francisco, then medical marijuana is gone,” said spokesperson of SF’s Medical Cannabis Task Force Stephanie Tucker. I had given Tucker a call because I was trying to salvage some meaning from last week.

It was a confusing one for followers of local cannabis news. News broke of the district attorney’s memo calling marijuana sales illegal (more on this later). They canceled Discovery Channel’s Weed Wars reality TV show. Thieves dressed as ninjas robbed a cannabis deliveryperson in West Covina, Calif. Anti-cannabis driving laws were proposed by Chino Assemblymember Norma Torres. In a long-awaited KQED interview with US Attorney Melinda Haag, Haag pegged the blame for the threatening letters she’s sent to the landlords of cannabis dispensaries on unsubstantiated crime spates such businesses invite to their communities. News reports circulated that Florida teen Trayvon Martin had been suspended from school for petty cannabis possession, as if that explained his murder at the hands of a racist crank. In the middle of it all, SF’s Department of Public Health launched a campaign against the sale of hash and medicated edibles — but only for nine hours.

Well then, that’s something. Of this last incident, at least, Tucker could offer some small clarification. On Tuesday, March 20, someone at the DPH sent out a memo outlining steps that could be taken to reduce the unspecified “potential hazards” of cannabis edibles. One of these counseled against selling products that “required concentrating cannabis active ingredients” — products like hash or kief, which is composed of sifted cannabis trichomes.

“Immediately after the advisory was issued, activists were alerted,” Tucker said. The curtailing of concentrated products and edibles especially worried patient advocates because many can’t — or choose not to — ingest marijuana by smoking it. After informal dialogue with the Department, the matter was squashed, the memo’s message retracted by the agency.

That responsiveness is heartening for those concerned with safe and easy cannabis access, though the thought that a city agency would harsh on medical marijuana particularly now, at a time of heightened scrutiny by the federal government, is disquieting. Or perhaps the agency saw the memo as a way to patrol commercialization and increased branding of edible products. In recent years, everything from chocolate-covered waffle tacos to peanut butter energy bars have been infused with cannabis for commercial sale. Ironically, this kind of increased professionalization has also led to tighter quality control testing in analytical labs around the Bay Area — hypothetically making those products safer.

At any rate, cannabis patients won that office memo battle. The same has yet to be determined in regards to another recent threat to patient rights: a 14-page review that district attorney George Gascon’s office produced this month calling out the “marijuana mega-myth.” Stoners will be surprised to learn Gascon used the colorful term (he also employs the use of “semantogenic shell game” to describe efforts to normalize sales, vivid!) in reference to the belief that dispensary sales of cannabis are legal.

What will this mean for the future of SF dispensaries? Without a doubt there will be many more angry phone calls from patients. But it’s already having legal ramifications. The memo was a response to an objection from a dispensary’s attorney who was perturbed by an incident in which the collective’s delivery driver was arrested by law enforcement en route to making a delivery. Gascon’s assertion that the entire business was illegal was surely not the reaction the attorney had hoped for.

In the SXSW green room

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culture@sfbg.com

HERBWISE DIY pop star Lisa Dank doesn’t smoke marijuana to help with her art — smoking weed is her art. The Seattle singer-producer — known for her florid, handmade costumes and gonzo stage presence — crafts odes to cannabis (check out her aural fixation at www.soundcloud.com/lisa-dank), and has a day job at 4Evergreen Group, a patient network that supplies legal and educational resources to its members, as well as physician recommendations for medical marijuana.

Dank was headed down to South By Southwest to do shows at house parties and on the street with the aide of a PA system jacked into her car, but she managed to snag an artist wristband and also logged in hours in the green room chatting with performers about weed culture today. She’ll be publishing her findings in 4Evergreen Group’s new bi-monthly lifestyle magazine — but first, we got her to share her favorite snippets from South By.

 

TOP 11 MEDICAL MOMENTS FROM A POTSTAR AT SXSW

1. My Omicron hash oil vaporizer pen. Didn’t leave my side. Not even on the airplane. ‘Nuff said.

2. Austin loves pot. Especially at the Wells Fargo. Every time I went to withdraw cash, the point was brought up that I work in the medical marijuana industry. These boys couldn’t get enough! They sang the praise of medical pot (literally — shouting and fist-pumping.) They even brought out their camera-phones to show me the NORML cop car rolling around town.

3. MPP (Most Popular Piece): Quartz glass pieces are popular amongst locals and musicians for their affordability, cleanliness, and durability. Local glass pieces were a close second. Note: My all-star award goes to the editor of UC Berkeley’s student newspaper, who pulled out a gorgeous hand-blown, sandblasted Sherlock similar to the work of glass artist Snic. The editor had bought it at the smokeshop across the street from campus on Bancroft Way. We loaded bowl after bowl of Sour Diesel and Grape Ape six feet from Diplo in the VIP section of Speakeasy’s rooftop patio all Tuesday night, as Teki Latex and the Sound Pelligrino team did their thing.

4. Let’s just say Talib Kweli and his crew are fortunate that I have such a good weed connect in Texas.

5. Chali 2na smokes joints! Hemp extra-long! He had his own stash but took my number just in case. You can never have enough weed connects in Austin. He’s also a sweetheart because he let me use one of his papers.

6. Shiny Toy Guns does not smoke pot.

7. Bands on the run: Brick and Mortar (from New Jersey), Fox and the Law (Seattle), and The Sundresses (Cincinnati) stocked up on buds at home and drove slow all the way down to Austin.

8. Sub-pop recording artists Spoek Mathambo and Thee Satisfaction enjoyed the relief brought forth by the herb after a long walk and checking out Sub Pop’s great showcase at Red 7 on Friday night.

9. Strain trend: Sour Diesel. My guy had it. When he was out, the pedi-cab that I tried to buy from told me he had Sour Diesel too. Just hours later on the official SXSW artist’s deck-lounge at the Austin Convention Center, some locals pulled out two grams of S.D. to roll up in our blunt.

10. Underground future-super-producer Dubbel Dutch had a quandary for me: “I can’t smoke weed anymore! I used to smoke weed every day when I was younger, but now I take one hit and I’m done!”

I explained to him the brain schematics of cannabis, how we have cannabinoid receptors built into our brain but don’t produce cannabinoids endogenously. I hypothesized that his adult brain’s super-sensitivity to THC was due to his excess smoking during the formative years of his brain’s development. I told him he’d trained his brain to be extra-receptive to cannabinoids.

11. Smoking joints throughout my house party set. And for that I thank you, kids of Wilson House.

Power puff

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HERBWISE I remember the first time I saw photographer Robyn Twomey‘s work — talk about simpatico. It was a huge print of a photo of an elderly woman sitting in front of a piano and a mirror with an immense Persian cat, lighting a joint firmly held between her lips. I’d never seen anything like it — documented in a gallery, that is.

In some version of my future life, I’d like to make a nest inside Twomey’s photographer bag and travel the country with her. Not that she’d need my services. Her shots speak loudly, from her descriptive portraits of T.I., Bill Gates, Rosie O’Donnell, to Attorney General Kamala Harris.

Small wonder that the smoke-filled photos of Harborside Health Center’s women patients (originally shot for a Fortune Magazine feature) are part of the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts’ new group exhibition “Solo Esas Mujeres”, which opens March 17. The show assembles the work of 14 female artists in an effort to reaffirm feminine power through its documentation.

So of all the females that Twomey’s captured throughout her career, why use the shots of these cannabis smokers for this particular exhibition? Perhaps these females — all of whom use the stuff for real serious medical conditions — have the most need of documentation. Easy access to medical marijuana is important, oh federal government of ours. Hey Robyn, any chance of getting Harris out to the Mission for the opening reception? I can help host.

“Solo Esas Mujeres” March 17 through May 5. Opening reception March 21, 6:30 p.m.-9:30 p.m., free. Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, 2868 Mission, SF. (415) 643-2785, www.missionculturalcenter.org

 

The patient that time forgot

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caitlin@sfbg.com

HERBWISE I contact a lot of stoners throughout the course of writing Herbwise — activists, businessmen, artists — but none has had a more crisp-sounding receptionist answer the phone than Ft. Lauderdale stockbroker Irvin Rosenfeld, who is one of four citizens of the United States legally allowed to smoke marijuana by the federal government.

No really, he is.

In 1982, Rosenfeld hit upon a winning combination of perseverance, legal precedent, and audacity when he succeeded in suing the US government to prescribe him cannabis for his painful, bone growth-causing condition. After filing a civil suit that claimed weed was the only palliative that helped his intense physical discomfort, Rosenfeld became part of the FDA’s short-lived Investigational New Drug Program. Calling Rosenfeld, original patient Robert Randall, and the subsequent 11 others who qualified for the program participants in a clinical study was the only way the feds could justify supplying the weed.

In 1992, the program was terminated. But the 13 patients — only four survive today — continued to receive tins of pre-rolled joints, the cannabis for which is grown (shoddily) at a government-run farm near the University of Mississippi. Rosenfeld tells me the weed he smokes is “12 years old,” and so dry that he’s compelled to unroll the cigarettes, store with fresh lettuce for six to eight hours to rehydrate the bud, then re-roll before smoking.

He tokes nine ounces a months and, he says, never gets high. He tells all his clients about his prescription because, as he puts it “I don’t want them seeing, for example, this article and thinking ‘oh, he lost us that money because he was high off that marriage-ja-wanna.'”

I ask him if he’s surprised, 20 years since he won his legal battle, that patients like himself are still battling for access to the plant. He reels off a series of crucial court hearings that, to his disbelief, swung time and time again in the direction of continued Schedule I status for cannabis. Rosenfeld says has made it able for him to leave the house on a regular basis.

“As a stockbroker I look at it economically. I think about, if I didn’t have my medicine, where would I be today? I’d be homebound. Is it just me? Or maybe there’s other people sitting at home that could be productive members of society. It irritates me.”

Our conversation is over, but there’s time left for two plugs from Rosenfeld. One for his book, My Medicine: How I Convinced My Government to Provide My Marijuana and Helped Launch a National Movement (www.mymedicinethebook.com). Buy it?

The second is for himself. Anyone need a stockbroker with experience in battling the US government?

“The expertise I used to take on the federal government is the same expertise I use in my business,” Rosenfeld assures me before we hang up. “If you want that expertise, you should hire me as your broker. If you don’t, then have a good life.”

Cannabis’ unlikely new crusader: Pat Robertson?

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File this one under #OKsure: Televangelist and all-around dubious individual Pat Robertson has come out in support of the decriminalization of marijuana.

Of course, it’s all the liberals’ fault. Robertson made the following comments on the March 1 episode of the 700 Club. (Many thanks to Tom Angell of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition for providing us with the link fest, lookit this hilarious retraction his network posted when Robertson made similar comments in December!)

Even though these prisoners may have been sentenced by some court for some offense, should they be behind bars? Here’s the thing, we have over 3,000 – the number must be much higher than that, but over 3,000 federal crimes.

And every time the liberals pass a bill, I don’t care what it involves! They stick criminal sanctions on it. They don’t feel that there’s any way that people are going to keep a wall unless they can put them in jail. And so we have the jails that are filled with people who are white collar criminals and I’ve became sort of a hero of the hippie culture I guess when I said I think we ought to decriminalize the possession of marijuana.

I just think it’s shocking how many of these young people wind up in prison and they get turned into hardcore criminals because they had a possession of a very small amount of controlled substance. I mean, the whole thing is crazy! And we’ve said, we’re conservatives, we’re tough on crime – that’s baloney! It’s costing us billions and billions of dollars.

Look at California. California is spending more money on prisons than it spends on schools! I mean there’s something wrong about the equation, there’s something wrong. 

Here’s the video itself (start at 20:40 and go until 29:25) — the comments precede a pretty interesting segment on how the NAACP, the Tea Party, and a group called Prison Fellowship, a faith-based counseling group for prisoners and families founded by a Watergate ex-con and one-time Nixon aide.

Despite his classist assertion that white collar criminals shouldn’t get jail time, we’re with ya, homeslice. Hero of the hippie culture, yes you are. 

And so, our nominally-progressive president now has a less tenable position on the War on Drugs than one of our country’s head crazies (who — let us not forget despite his newfound stoner ways — was the one who announced that Haiti was hit by those earthquakes in 2010 because it was “cursed” by a “pact to the devil.”)

Holler back, President Obama? Personally, we’d be happy if his attorneys would just stop shutting down our local dispensaries

 

Herbwise: Shambhala Healing Center next on the federal chopping block

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When Al Shawa, founder of Shambhala Healing Center, was asked about what he was going to do now that the federal government is trying to shut down his business, he was (understandably) irresolute. 

“I have no idea. Who comes first, the chicken or the egg? Do I blame the federal government or the city? Somebody did me wrong.”

Shawa opened his medical cannabis dispensary one short year ago on Mission Street. He knew he was close to Jose Coronado Playground, but that’s why he underwent an 18-month permitting process with the city, which assured him that the playground’s clubhouse was not being used. In late February, his landlord received a letter from US attorney Melinda Haag that asserted illegal trafficking of drugs were taking place near a children’s playground. His landlord, Haag informed, risked criminal prosecution, imprisonment, fines, and civil forfeiture if Shawa’s business wasn’t out of the space in 40 days. Similar letters were sent out to roughly 12 dispensaries last autumn. Those dispensaries are now closed.

But on Saturday morning, Shawa seemed confused, and not entirely hopeless that his small business could be saved. He sat in his back office, a man trimming weed one room over. “I would hope the city would stand firm and protect these entities,” he said from behind his desk, next to a bank of security cameras. “I don’t understand where it stands on this – it should be taking a leading role.”

Posted: these signs now greet patients at the Shambhala Healing Center. Guardian photos by Caitlin Donohue

Though the SF Board of Supervisors passed a resolution in support of cannabis dispensaries’ right to operate without federal persecution last October, Mayor Ed Lee has yet to speak out on the federally-compelled closures, besides to comment that he’ll kow-tow to the authorities on the matter of marijuana’s medicinal efficacy. We asked Lee’s office for comment when the Department of Justice requested Department of Public Health records for 12 Bay Area dispensaries in February (a move that preceded the previous round of letters from Haag), to no avail. 

Shawa had previously operated a clothing store named Privilege at the address, but opened up Shambala when a fire damaged his inventory. Since opening, he said he’s become attached to many of the regular patients. “You feel like your responsible for their wellbeing,” he said, before talking about how his dispensary passed out 200 turkeys to the community on Thanksgiving, and gave the nearby Folsom Street firehouse $5,000 worth of toys to distribute during the holiday season. 

Throughout the recent travails of the medical cannabis industry, one of the more frustrating issues has been the seemingly random way businesses have been targeted by federal agencies. Shawa’s is a case in point. While he grapples with the notion of shutting his doors, the owner of a restaurant across the street, Gus Murad of Medjool Restaurant and Lounge, is applying for a permit to open a new dispensary on the same block (as reported by Mission Local). 

Lupe Ruiz, who has been floor manager at Shambala since the dispensary opened, seemed likewise shaken and frustrated with the city’s lack of response in the matter. 

“I’m kind of devastated,” she told me in between helping patients. “How do you allow someone to open and then when things get hot you don’t say anything about it?” She recalled a picnic in Dolores Park Shambala recently organized for its patients at which people played ball games and got to meet each other.

The dispensary does seem to be a gathering place of sorts – on the morning I interviewed Ruiz and Shawa, patients consulted budtenders about the right strain of cannabis for them, joking and friendly-like. Shawa says that more than one patient has teared up when he told them that the dispensary’s future was uncertain. 

“Who listens to these stories?” Ruiz concludes sadly, with a sentiment that the rest of the medical marijuana community can surely sympathize with. “People are not being heard.”

Wicka wicka

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HERBWISE I absolutely hated the hemp wick the first time I saw one on of my stoner friends’ lighters – and oh yes, at the moment this particular product will only show up in connection with your most stoner of friends. 

“What the hell is that?” They were sparking a joint with this awkwardly long waxed hemp string that they’d wrapped around the torso of their lighter. 

I was an idiot. I apologize, hemp wicks. Now I know you only have my best interests at heart. 

You’ll have to excuse my insta-hate. There are a lot of superfluous weed products out there (I’ve bitched about it before). Generally, I think the system we have going – plant, smoking device, flame, occasionally ingesting bud-inflected edibles – has served fairly well up until this point and anyone who messes with it runs the risk of a gimmicky high. See: the cannabis aphrodisiac shot. Case in point. 

But – as my red-eyed friend mellowly explained – the hemp wick is a different sort of animal. It’s not adding superfluity to one’s toke, it’s taking it away. Namely, it’s taking artificial gases out of your smoking experience. If you’re lighting your spliff, blunt, pipe, bowl, bong with a lighter, you’re channeling butane right at your point of inhalation. That’s a bummer not just because you’re adding chemicals to your high, but also because butane messes with your ability to taste whatever strain you’re smoking. Believe me, your Banana Kush sloughs its peel when it doesn’t have to combat that stream of gas you’re bathing it in with the lighter. Not to mention, with a steady flame you can spot control where your heat winds up, all the better for working that bowl. 

And so: the wick. Though HempWick claims to be the originators of the commercially-produced organic spool, Humboldt Hemp Wicks is experiencing a certain vogue as the choice strand in the Bay Area. The company has been selling wick for four years through the Internet, and its website proudly proclaims that it has every shop in Arcata and Eureka hawking its wares. You can get 10 feet for under two bucks, 200 feet for about $17. 

Not that hemp wick doesn’t come without certain professional hazards. Managing an – albeit waxed – thread with flame on the end does require a certain amount of grace. Does your focus intensify or wane when stoned? Beware the flailing wick. (And distinct possibility that, with the purchase of this product, you will graduate to the next echelon of stoner identity. This can either impress or upset those around you.)

But if my stoniest of baloney friends can wield the wick, I’m confident that my fearless readers will be able to. Just what you needed, right? Another reason to smoke.  

A taxing situation

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HERBWISE It’s happening again. Last autumn when your favorite dispensary got shut down in the wake of receiving a threatening cease-and-desist letter from the Department of Justice — well there’s warning signs that the remaining 21 cannabis collectives in San Francisco won’t be 21 for much longer. The DOJ requested the Department of Public Health records for 12 dispensaries in January, a move that preceded its last round of forced dispensary shut-downs.

It’s a time of a lot of uncertainty for the medical marijuana (although you could make a compelling argument that it’s never been on completely solid footing). Various tactics are being taken to shore up its legality, including a passel of proposed ballot initiatives that have varying chances of presenting themselves to California voters in November, from bids to legalize weed entirely to proposals for a statewide regulatory body for the existing medical system. Hey, there’s even reality TV shows (the Discovery Channels Weed Wars, which focused on Oakland’s Harborside Health Center) out there on which earnest dispensary staffers let the United States public in on just how above-board working in a cannabis center can be.

Henry Wykowski is not a signature collector. Nor is he a television producer. Wykowski is actually a San Francisco-based trial attorney, one that specializes in the field of cannabis tax law. This fact makes him the perfect candidate for the endeavor he is currently embarking on: to kickstart a nationwide campaign to convince the federal government to change a part of the national tax code that disallows cannabis dispensaries from deducting business expenses on their taxes — a tactic recently harnessed by the IRS to demand $2.4 million from Harborside in “owed” taxes (Wykowski represented Californians Helping to Alleviate Medical Problems in a similar case in 2007, in which a court decided that business expenses were deductible for cannabis dispensaries except where they pertained to the actual dispensing of marijuana).

How does Wykowski hope to enthuse a nation over tax code quibbles? The Guardian contacted him via email to find out. His answers were somewhat tax lawyerly — which definitely doesn’t mean we don’t applaud his efforts. 

San Francisco Bay Guardian: What’s the goal of the 280E reform campaign?

Henry Wykowski: To have IRS Section 280E modified to exclude state authorized medical cannabis dispensaries. 280E was instituted to deprive drug dealers from being able to deduct their business expenses before any states passed laws authorizing the sale of medical marijuana. There are now 16 states and the District of Columbia that have authorized the use of medical marijuana. It was not intended to deprive dispensaries of the right to deduct ordinary and necessary expenses and should not be used to do so.

SFBG: How do you plan to make this campaign go forward?

HW: By letting people know that there is an organized effort to change this punitive provision and enlisting their support in doing so.

SFBG: Do you imagine it’ll be difficult to get people behind an imitative to change the tax code?

HW: No. The majority of people support the legalization of medical cannabis. Once the patients and other supporters learn that the unfair application of 280E could tax dispensaries out of business, the support will come. Right now most people aren’t aware of Section 280E or its potential consequences.

SFBG: How will you activate people that aren’t cannabis’ traditional base? Will you need to?

HW: By getting the message out. We welcome everyone’s support.

Find out more about Wykowski’s campaign at www.280ereform.org

 

Federal government sets its sights on 12 more SF dispensaries

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Bad news for medical marijuana patients in the Bay Area: as reported by the SF Examiner, the DEA has requested records from the city’s Department of Public Health for 12 of San Francisco’s existing 21 cannabis dispensaries. This is the same move the DEA made before sending the threatening letters to five other cannabis collectives last fall. Those five dispensaries are now closed.

In fall of 2010, US Attorney Melinda Haag targeted five SF dispensaries in school zones with letters declaring them in violation of federal law. In the face of potential jail time for dispensary staff and even the landlords of the buildings that housed the dispensaries, they shut their doors. Now, more than 50 percent of the city’s dispensaries could have to follow suit. 

The really upsetting part about all of this? The sheer randomness of it all. In our recent Cannabis Issue, the Guardian interviewed Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, who said that in his meeting with Haag over the matter, the US Attorney said the orders to persue the dispensaries came from above. “She said she was only doing what the boss was telling her to do,” Ammiano told the Guardian. “We had a hard time with that.” The Obama Administration has been frustratingly opaque about the motives behind, and future plans for, persecuting an industry that Attorney General Eric Holder once called a “low priority” for federal law enforcement. 

The Guardian has sent an email to Mayor Ed Lee for his comments on the request for records, and will update this post when we hear back. Even then-Mayor Gavin Newsom, as the Examiner pointed out, sent a letter in 2008 to Congress to encourage it to act against the DEA’s attempts to intervene in California’s medical marijuana industry.

Assemblymember Ammiano and Senator Mark Leno are leading the efforts to establish a statewide regulatory board cannabis that would, among other things, demonstrate to the feds that the industry is being well-regulated in California. Americans for Safe Access and UFCW (the union representing cannabis workers in California) have also introduced a ballot initiative called the Medical Marijuana Regulation, Control, and Taxation Act that would establish a regulating board made of patients, government representatives, medical professionals, and cannabis industry folks. A poll conducted by Probolsky Research recently put voter support for that measure at 59.2 percent.  

But who knows if California voters will get a chance to regulate marijuana as they see fit. If these requests for records proceed as the last round of them did, SF could be down to nine dispensaries in a city with not only a large base of cannabis patients, but also a thriving cannabis culture. 

The dispensaries whose records were requested by the DEA were: 

Bay Area Safe Alternatives Collective

Emmalyn’s

Good Fellows Smoke Shop

Grass Roots

The Green Cross

Hope Net

Re-Leaf Herbal Center

SF Medical Cannabis Club

Shambala Healing Center

Valencia Street Caregivers

Vapor Room

Waterfall Wellness

New year

1

MUSIC Waiting for his coffee at Cafe Divis, Ezra Furman (who performs Sat/11 at Hotel Utah) flips through the latest issue of the Guardian. “I’ve been meaning to do more drugs,” he says, pointing to the cannabis column, Herbwise. The wheels in Furman’s head seem to always be in motion; there’s a constant mischievous look in his eyes. We’ve met here to discuss the most recent product of his overactive imagination — his solo debut, The Year of No Returning, released on Tuesday through Furman’s own Kinetic Family Records.

Making records is by no means unfamiliar territory for this San Francisco-via-Chicago transplant. After Furman’s band Ezra Furman & the Harpoons formed in the dorms of Tufts University in 2006, they released three studio albums and completed several tours throughout the United States and Europe. As the title suggests, however, The Year of No Returning is in many ways a departure for the 25-year-old musician.

Abandoning the comfort of recording live with the band in lieu of endless “tinkering” at Studio Ballistico — which is in a Chicago attic above his old apartment — Furman lovingly assembled these songs piece by piece. “It’s more like a Russian doll,” he explains, “cause you can find the first piece that was there.” Though a guitar remains his primary songwriting instrument, for his solo effort Furman often swapped the Harpoons’ standard rock’n’roll set up for instruments like an upright bass, cello, violin, clarinet, and saxophone.

“Bad Man” features a brooding Furman backed by piano reminiscent of early Tom Waits, and the rollicking chorus on “Sinking Slow” is Beatles-esque. These nods to great songwriters of decades gone by are no coincidence. Some of his first memories are “running around” to the Beatles, and howling along to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.” Now all grown up, Furman can be heard howling and snarling on the retro power pop track “That’s When It Hit Me.”

Furman began emulating his heroes long before he picked up a guitar. “When I was 10 or 11 I used to just, like, make whole albums,” he says. “I would make [them] up in my head and write on a Microsoft Word document. I knew how they all went and I would go through the lyrics when I was alone with the door closed, and just kind of sing them to myself. They’re all Beatles and Billy Joel rip-offs.”

Although it’s not uncommon to catch glimpses of Bob Dylan or the Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano in Furman’s songs, he has different tools at his disposal than his predecessors. “I don’t need the Internet / I don’t need TV,” he declares on the sunny album closer “Queen of Hearts,” but in 2009 Furman took full advantage of modern day accessibility for a special project. Each copy of the bootleg Harpoons album Moon Face came with a personalized track for its recipient. “I was just writing so many songs at the time that I didn’t know what to write them about anymore,” he says. “So I asked people what they wanted songs about. And they had some good ideas.”

For Furman, The Year of No Returning isn’t just a title, it’s a way of life. “I’ve been doing a lot of things just ’cause [they] seem risky,” he tells me. “And that just becomes enough reason to do it.” These risks include leaving Chicago behind to make a new home in San Francisco, and taking a solo tour of Europe last November. “[I] was like, I can fucking do this,” he says. “I can just be a force of nature on my own.”

“It gives a feeling, that phrase Year of No Returning, of changing your life,” Furman says. “You know, having a year when you do everything differently. I guess I’ve had a year like that.”

The Year of No Returning is available at www.ezrafurman.com

EZRA FURMAN

With Clouds & Mountains, and Debbie Neigher

Sat/11, 9 p.m., $10

Hotel Utah

500 4th St., SF.

(415) 546-6300

www.hotelutah.com

Hippies do it better

0

caitlin@sfbg.com

HERBWISE I am not given overmuch to squealing over technology, particularly weed technology. Over the past few months I have sampled candy cane-flavored rolling papers, a cannabis aphrodisiac shot, the Ziggy Marley-endorsed Marijuana Man comic book.

Mind you, I’m not complaining. But –- minus perhaps Humboldt Hemp Wicks –- none of those products have found their way into my everyday retinue. Until, that is, the subject of last week’s Herbwise, Randy Thompson of the vaporizer website Puff it Up, introduced me to a singular machine.

The Magic-Flight Launch Box is a thing of beauty. A clean maple wood box barely larger than a matchbox, it makes the black plastic tabletop models I once associated with vaporizing look clunky, wasteful. Vaporizing, university studies show, cuts down on the lung-coating tar that results from pipes and joints. Plus, it imparts a much cleaner marijuana taste –- perfect for the scores of cannabis connoisseurs who are popping up across the Bay Area.

Operating the Launch Box is simple. Insert the glass mouthpiece into the small round hole, a battery (two lithium batt’s and a recharger come with the starter kit) into the large round hole, press down for about five seconds, and inhale. No wall jack, no noise, no black plastic. The back of the box is engraved with a manifesto on what love is.

Obviously, hippies made it. Namely, a one Forrest Landry, who in a recent phone interview with the Guardian explained that the Launch Box’s ingenious design is a reflection of a New Age philosophy he’s cultivated over decades.

“Understanding the nature of communication allows us to understand the nature of community,” Landry says. “The vaporizer as a device is a communication event. We’re helping people breathe easier because of what we do.” The Launch Box’s backside is engraved with Landry’s personal philosophy on love (precious!)

He says the internationality of the product extends to the mindset of the company’s staff, who convene in a workshop located just outside San Diego. “Working with these tools is a kind of meditation. Doing this kind of work allows for an expanded awareness. You’re not aware just of how the tool is cutting the wood.”

Once an East Coast software developer, Landry changed careers upon his migration to California (to follow a lady love, he tells me). “I was thinking about what community of folks I want in my life.”

The answer was cannabis folks –- or more accurately, herbal folks, since the Launch Box can be used to ingest other plants like St. John’s wort (a useful tool for fighting seasonal affective disorder) and tobacco. Magic-Flight plans to start selling its own herbal blends in the next few months that can be vaporized solo or with cannabis.

The last thing that Landry wants is for Magic-Flight to be considered an activist company –- but that’s not to say that there’s nothing the federal government can learn from his philosophy.

“We’re not trying to shift the laws or policies per se, but we’re promoting the idea that love is enabling choice. We’re hoping the government realizes that enabling choice is a good thing.”

The key is patients

14

HERBWISE “Never in a million years would I have chosen to do this,” wrote Randy Thompson’s mother in the September 1997 issue of Good Housekeeping. The title of Karen Thompson’s article was “I Broke the Law to Save My Son.” Her choice? To allow Randy to use marijuana to mitigate the gastrointestinal irritation, nausea, vomiting, and lack of appetite he suffered chronically from his Crohn’s Disease.

Two months after Karen’s article appeared, the magazine published letters it had received in response under the header “A Controversial Choice.” One respondent, a Crohn’s sufferer who opted to have her small bowels re-sectioned to mitigate her symptoms, claimed to be “disgusted” with the Thompsons: “It was the best decision I ever made. How foolish of Simon’s parents to not exhaust all medical possibilities before allowing him to smoke pot.”

Today Randy, undeterred by such suggestions, helps other cannabis users to find healthy ways to smoke. He is the sole proprietor of a San Jose vaporizer distribution company, Puff It Up (www.puffitup.com). Medical studies have suggested that using vaporizers dramatically cuts down the amount of tar ingested compared to smoking joints.

Johnson’s company is entirely staffed by patients — he has had his card since before Proposition 215 passed — and tries to stock the “little guys” of the vaporizer world, like San Diego’s Magic-Flight company. Surprisingly, Puff It Up doesn’t sell Volcano vaporizers, the most popular “vape” brand whose products you’ve probably seen filling massive plastic bags with smoke on a dorm room coffee table somewhere.

Randy says Volcanoes, which begin at $539 for a starter package, just aren’t practical. “Simplicity, that’s what we’re going for,” he says. Thompson’s favorite vaporizers — which he proceeded to pull out of his backpack by the handful at his Guardian interview on a sunny day on the Zeitgeist patio — are the kind of affordable, easy-to-use, portable tools you would expect people to use for self-administering medicine. Many of the models he brought go for under $200.

“We’re non-evil,” he says of Puff It Up’s small box approach. “We don’t like to think of ourselves as profit-driven, we’re just trying to get the word out that there’s a better way to smoke.”

Randy is still dealing with blowback from his decision to be involved with marijuana. Like many greater Bay Area dispensaries, Puff It Up received a letter from the Department of Justice a few months ago threatening punitive action if it did not stop selling vaporizers, which exist in a legal netherworld.

In the 1997 article, the Thompsons went by aliases. But in 2012, Randy is done with hiding. He thinks it’s important to stick his neck out for the medicine that he says has made his life better so that other people might have the same option.

In the struggle to make cannabis accessible to everyone who needs it, he thinks patients have a big role to play. Says Randy: “People need to stand up and say ‘I’m human too.'” 

Next week in Herbwise: We test out Randy Thompson’s favorite vaporizer — does the Magic Flight live up to its name?

 

Legal, not legal

4

caitlin@sfbg.com

HERBWISE It’s been a weird year to start a marijuana column. Shortly after we started Herbwise, which was intended to be our weekly look at marijuana culture and events, politics reared its ugly head, rendering it necessary to go to hearings at the State Building, call up California Assembly members, and occasionally wade through seas of legalese. Such is the state of cannabis under ongoing federal prohibition, but it’s been a particularly dramatic year.

And in some moments, news and culture reporting melded together in the marijuana world. Take, for example, the case of Oakland’s Harborside Health Center, which is often called the largest dispensary in the world (it is certainly the largest in California). After years of painstakingly crafting a working relationship with city government, the business was heavily audited by the IRS. The federal agency decided Harborside — and 40 other California dispensaries — fell under the jurisdiction of Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code, which denies the right for businesses involved in illegal drug trafficking to claim standard business expenditures. The collective now owes $2.4 million in back taxes, an amount that founder Steve DeAngelo asserts will bankrupt it if his business is forced to pay up.

Despite the ever-growing acceptance of the plant in the United States — a Gallup poll put the number at 50 percent in the fall of 2011 — medical marijuana is under attack by the federal government. Last fall, US Attorney for Northern California Melinda Haag sent out letters to the landlords of roughly a dozen Bay Area dispensaries threatening them with civil forfeiture, or possibly four decades in prison, if they failed to move this “trafficking” off their property within 45 days. The letters targeted dispensaries considered to be in a school zone.

Most left without a fight. In San Francisco, the Tenderloin’s Divinity Tree Patients Wellness Cooperative, the Market Street Collective on Upper Market, and the Mission District’s Medithrive and Mr. Nice Guy were among the businesses that shut their doors, some completely and some to transition into delivery-only services. [UPDATE: Attorney Matt Kumin tells the Guardian that Divinity Tree and Medithrive have filed a “coordinated federal lawsuit” through his office in protestation of the closures]

Fairfax’s sole dispensary, Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana, was forced to close after 15 years of legal operation overseen by long-time cannabis activist Lynette Shaw. The 7,500-person Marin County berg’s town council passed a resolution supporting the Alliance, which served as a symbol of popular support for legal cannabis in a county beset with some of the highest breast cancer rates in the country.

Assemblymember Tom Ammiano and Sen. Mark Leno have been the most outspoken California politicians in coming out against the federal government’s meddling with the state’s cannabis. At a press conference at San Francisco’s State Building in October 2011, Ammiano announced his frustration that the feds would “upset the will of the people” by curtailing safe patient access. Proud to be an elected gay official, he promised to continue to crusade for an issue that he says disproportionately affects the LGBTQ community.

One of the steps Ammiano took was to meet with Haag to discuss what could be done to assuage her concerns with the industry. “That was very, very disappointing,” Ammiano commented on this initial talk. In a recent phone interview with the Guardian, he remembered that Haag implied that the order was coming from above, from high up in the Obama Administration.

Ammiano doubts her assertion that she had little discretion in the matter. “She said she was only doing what the boss was telling her to do. We had a hard time with that.”

He does think that the Obama Administration is sending its attorneys mixed messages — case in point, US Attorney General Eric Holder’s repeated comments that federal interference in state-legal marijuana operations would be “a low priority.” Ammiano also makes the connection between the attacks on cannabis and the self-sustaining industries behind the War on Drugs. “The DEA, some of the diehards, this is like a jobs program for them,” he said.

His meeting with California Attorney General Kamala Harris went more smoothly. Ammiano says Harris, who voiced cautious support for the industry last fall, was eager for a more comprehensive regulatory system to be put into place, but she supported Proposition 215 — the 1996 measure that legalized medical marijuana in California — on principle.

Faced with an ambiguous future, medical cannabis’ proponents — politicians, activists, entrepreneurs, and patients — are putting forth plans for just such a system. This year will be the playing field for a passel of campaigns to take medical marijuana out of the under-supervised arena in which it’s found itself.

Three ballot initiative campaigns seek to address the issue. Two — Regulate Marijuana Like Wine and Repeal Prohibition — would legalize cannabis use for adults across the board. Another, which has perhaps the most likely chance to succeed in the $2 million process of getting onto the ballot, is being put forth by patient advocacy group Americans for Safe Access, the United Food and Commercial Workers (the union that represents many cannabis workers in California), and marijuana collectives. It’s called the Medical Marijuana Regulation, Control, and Taxation Act.

“We decided to focus on medical because we figured that taking that further step at this point is unwise given the federal government’s actions over the last months,” said attorney George Mull, who is part of the team that proposed the measure. If passed, the initiative would establish a 21-member state regulatory board comprised of doctors, industry folk, patients, activists, government officials, and others. A state supplemental tax on cannabis would be levied and local governments would be required to allow one dispensary per 50,000 residents. Ammiano said that he and Leno were also working on proposing legislation that would provide regulations.

But the future of medical marijuana in California remains somewhat cloudy. “I’m worried that even if we come up with the regulations, the feds will find something else,” said Ammiano. Complicating the matter, the California Supreme Court moved unanimously on Jan. 18 to review the power that cities and counties have to make their own laws concerning cannabis accessibility — plus, it plans to look at the old disconnect between state and federal law on the matter..

So much for the politics of marijuana in 2012. Away from the headlines, it’s plain to see that the plant is increasingly accepted in popular culture. On a local level, East Bay YouTube stoner Coral Reefer continues to tweet to thousands of followers every time she sparks a bowl, and on the national stage, Miley Cyrus admits to smoking “way too much fucking weed,” after seeing the birthday cake friends had gotten her. (It had Bob Marley’s face on it.)

On television, the United States is learning about Harborside’s travails — but not just from the news shows. Discovery Channel shot a season of reality TV following DeAngelo and his staff, telling the stories of patients and about the reality of running a dispensary for a show they entitled Weed Wars even before the final $20 million IRS ruling. As the collective is being persecuted by the feds, its fan base across the country grows.

Will Discovery Channel renew Weed Wars for a second season? Regardless of the network’s views on the protagonists’ profession, if the cameras are kept rolling they’re sure to capture another year of interesting times for California cannabis.

 

Chem Dawg to the rescue

17

caitlin@sfbg.com

HERBWISE The Kings of Destruction, more popularly known as KOD, were an hour and a half late for our interview. Being that the hip-hop-graff-clothing-medical-marijuana-advocacy collective is from the East Bay and we had arranged to meet at the Guardian Potrero Hill office, I figured I’d better look for them.

I didn’t have to go far: all five of the group’s members who had stopped by were sitting amid SF political activists in the Guardian conference room, mistakenly ensconced in a discussion of the new supervisoral district lines. They’d introduced themselves along with everyone else, but then faltered when the meeting’s facilitator asked to what he owed the pleasure of having Oakland residents at the table.

All good. Soon enough I have Dogz One, Lil’ Zane, Josh, Tase 1, and Don Juan assembled on the roof standing around a picnic table and talking about marijuana. They’ve brought some of their products for show ‘n’ tell; t-shirts emblazoned with characters culled from local marijuana strains. They’ve brought Grape Ape, a gorilla pulling on a joint with a purple berry-emblazoned baseball hat. Another shirt features Chem Dawg, a husky that figures in an upcoming KOD comic book in which the character (Dogz One is his alter-ego) will fight the government’s attempts to keep marijuana from the people. Pending designs include Girl Scouts Cookies, which will feature a woman wearing a midriff-bearing scout uniform in honor of the SF-specific strain rumored to smell of pastries (those buds available locally at the Green Door dispensary).

Kings of Destruction started out as a graffiti crew, and though members still throw up pieces on walls occasionally (“go down around the train tracks, you’ll see some things,” counsels Don Juan) now its focus is on — state — legal activities: music, clothing, and the catalyst for this interview, advocating for medical marijuana. Though I’m unable to hear samples of the tracks before press time, the group tells me members have been in the studio laying down tracks about their medicine, and they hope to join this spring’s Prohibition Tour (www.prohibitiontour.com), a California college event series that plans to raise awareness among students this spring with lectures and musical performances.

“Oakland has been on the forefront of the medical marijuana movement, so we’re trying to keep everything alive so that everyone can keep their medicine,” says Don Juan. Many in the group are patients and growers themselves who naturally find themselves in the activist role around friends and family who don’t use weed.

KOD sees marijuana as a healthy alternative to pharmaceuticals — many of which have adversely affected friends’ lives in their East Bay community. A prime example is bo, as the promethazine-codeine cough syrup that figures prominently in Bay Area hip-hop these days is popularly called. Compared to the dangers of that kind of drug, KOD members say, the federal government’s resistance to legalizing marijuana seems foolish. Not that there aren’t side effects of marijuana: “You might get a little hungry, might go to sleep,” says Don Juan. “You might just lay back instead of getting mad when somebody cusses you out,” adds Tase 1.

In closing, I ask KOD to tell me a story about the group and marijuana. They give each other looks and chuckle. Finally Tase 1 steps up to the plate. “One time, we were going to do something bad. And then we smoked some weed.” 

Find KOD clothing at www.kronicoverdose.com

 

By the roots

0

caitlin@sfbg.com

HERBWISE Where (besides this column, of course) do you get the latest on marijuana? When it comes to distributing accurate information about buds, Steph Sherer, executive director of medical cannabis advocacy group Americans for Safe Access (ASA), makes no bones about her organization’s role. “Most of our members depend on us for news,” she told the Guardian in a recent phone interview.

Even when clashes between marijuana proponents and the government are brought to light — not always a given in this political climate — Sherer finds the one note handling of cannabis issues by the mainstream media troubling. “[Cannabis] gets thrown on [journalists covering] judicial beats instead of getting picked up by the human interest, or the health and science side of things,” she said.

ASA’s response to this dearth of useful reporting on cannabis was to develop a free iPhone application that serves as a media catch-all for medical marijuana advocates. At no cost, anyone concerned with losing their right to access their medicine safely — or who wants to learn the latest about the sticky green — can now download an interface that pulls together news updates, alerts for upcoming political actions, and materials that can add to one’s activism repertoire; things like phone numbers for legal counsel and advocacy training videos.

For Sherer, the app has the potential to empower the people in the crossfire of the ongoing clashes between the federal government and state-legal growing and retail facilities: patients. “We are creating a platform that empowers people to be their own advocate. The people who can advocate for this the best are the people who are affected.” 

ASA EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR STEPH SHERER’S TOP 6 CANNABIS STORIES YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED IN 2011

1. In March, the National Cancer Institute recognized marijuana’s medical benefit, classifying it as a “complementary alternative medicine.” Days later, the reference was diluted on its website, per the recommendation of the National Institutes on Drug Abuse.

2. After Obama’s Justice Department fought their appeal, Californian breast cancer survivor Dr. Mollie Frye and her husband were sent to prison in April for five years because of their state-legal growing operation.

3. In October, California patient advocates sued the Obama Administration for violating the 10th Amendment by coercing and obstructing local and state officials, preventing them from implementing medical marijuana laws.

4. The governors of Washington State and Rhode Island petitioned the federal government to reschedule cannabis to allow for medical use.

5. In Connecticut and New Jersey, governors continue to move forward with cannabis access legislation despite threats from US Attorneys.

6. 63-year old Norman Smith uses cannabis to mitigate the symptoms of his inoperable liver cancer. Smith is being denied a transplant from Los Angeles’ Cedar Sinai Medical Center until he agrees to stop using cannabis.

 

What the new year brings

0

caitlin@sfbg.com

HERBWISE 2011 was a harsh year for medical marijuana. During its first half, the number of California dispensaries burgeoned. But a federal crackdown in September has left much of the industry shaking in its buds. By bombarding landlords with cease-and-desist letters threatening 40 years of jail time if they continue to let marijuana be sold on their property, the Department of Justice has effectively closed down walk-up operations for many smaller dispensaries.

But as we head into the year of the Mayan overhaul, one thing seems certain: advocates for safe and available access to medical cannabis aren’t going anywhere. How can they? Since Proposition 215 made it legal in 1996, 200,000 Californians have gotten physician recommendations to alleviate health concerns with marijuana. People use it for chronic pain, to make it through chemotherapy, for multiple sclerosis, severe anxiety.

“We can’t wait for the federal government to do the right thing in California,” said the state director of Americans for Safe Access Don Duncan. “As the state of California gets its marijuana house in order there will be less incentive for the feds to come in.”

Duncan and his organization were co-authors of the Medical Marijuana Regulation, Control, and Taxation Act — a unified voter initiative that was turned in to the California Secretary of State’s office last Wednesday, Dec. 21. Other contributors include NORML, the California Cannabis Association, the Humboldt Growers Associations, and the United Food and Commercial Workers — the union that now represents workers across the state, including Oaksterdam University employees.

“We’re hoping that this policy will reassure people that we can have a rational system,” continued Duncan in a phone interview with the Guardian. Duncan is convinced that the recent aggression by the Obama administration can be traced to people’s discomfort with the industry’s wild growth, and that a good faith effort to institute a comprehensive regulation system will assuage people’s confusion and fears about marijuana.

His initiative calls for the establishment of a centralized bureau of medical marijuana enforcement, to be comprised of 21 members from various state government offices, patients, advocates, a physician, a nurse, individuals from the marijuana research and policy fields and six people with experience in dispensary operations.

The bureau would be in charge of cannabis registration, industry regulations, and the use of funds that are generated by administrative fees. The initiative also calls for a sales tax of 2.5 percent on medical marijuana retail sales and states that cities — unless voters approve other guidelines — must follow a minimum zoning restriction of a dispensary for every 50,000 people.

In January, a campaign supporting the initiative will begin to drum up awareness. Backers are hoping that by instituting stricter and more consistent controls of dispensaries and growing operations, 2012 will look a lot brighter for the 200,000 Californians that have relied on their marijuana prescription to live their lives.

“I think this is really going to resonate with voters,” said Duncan. “We just need for officials to be able to step outside the controversy of it all.” It’s a hopeful stance. Let’s see how it holds up in the roiling of the upcoming election year.