Grow Life 420

Six years after Colorado first started selling legal marijuana, the sky is still intact and fears of Reefer Madness have largely quieted. Better still, Coloradans are now driving on cleaner highways and attending schools freer from bullying thanks to legal cannabis business profits and the resulting tax revenue.

Here’s how:

Cannabis Businesses Help Clean More Highways Than Any Others

Colorado marijuana businesses have sponsored more highways for cleanup than any other industry, according to data from the Adopt A Highway Maintenance Corporation. Together, 51 cannabis companies—including dispensaries, cultivators and others —sponsor 66 percent of roads, or 198 miles, covered by the state’s Clean Colorado program. The next largest business categories are general services and retail.

In the program, companies pay a fee to sponsor a highway, so they can have their name and logo put on a small blue sign placed on the side of the road in high-traffic areas. The fees cover the costs of road cleanup crews, and busier roads with more litter are more expensive to sponsor.

“It presents marijuana stores in a positive light,” Harsha Gangadharbatla, an advertising professor, told The Denver Post, which first reported the cannabis business boost for clean roads. “The money made from marijuana is put to something good, like keeping up roads and transportation that everyone uses.”

Sponsoring highways can be an especially attractive option for cannabis businesses because, until recently, the state has banned them from advertising on billboards. A new bill passed last year that took effect in January now allows cannabis companies to advertise on billboards, albeit under strict regulations.

Marijuana Taxes Are Helping To Fight Bullying In Schools

Meanwhile, the tax money that cannabis businesses generate for the state is being put towards another purpose: keeping children safe. State education officials have used marijuana taxes to give $6 million to 71 schools since 2016 to fund anti-bullying education. These Bullying Education Prevention Grants have helped teachers and staff train more than 34,400 students.

“[In sixth grade], I just felt like I just didn’t know what to do because no one had ever taught me,” Solana Diaz, an eighth grade student from Denver, told FOX 31 KDVR, which first reported the cannabis funding for anti-bullying.

Diaz said she’s heard about fights on campus almost every week in prior years, but that she’s only seen five so far this year. “We never talked about it. But now that we have a new staff and everything, I feel like I could go and tell somebody. It’s a lot easier to tell,” she said.

Her school received more than $93,000 over three years. Among many techniques students and staff practice, the school rewards students who reduce bullying by “knighting” them with a sword in a special ceremony.

A statewide survey reveals that students who participated in these programs reported a 33 percent decrease in experiencing bullying and a 17 percent decrease in witnessing bullying since the grants first began.

Colorado prioritizes public schools when giving out cannabis tax money. The first $40 million of cannabis excise taxes each year goes towards public school construction. Additional funds go to local governments, affordable housing and substance abuse programs.

While cannabis taxes in Colorado have helped finance programs to boost public safety, new legislation may be even more impactful in addressing other safety issues. Effective as of January, new regulations signed into law by Gov. Jared Polis (D) allow medical cannabis businesses to deliver to patients’ homes. Starting in January 2021, recreational businesses will also be able to deliver to adult-use consumers.

“We’re moving away from the risk of people driving while impaired by having legal delivery to people’s homes,” Polis told other governors from states around the country at a conference last year. “In our state, it’s a constitutional right [for people] to use marijuana in their home—without the risk of them using it somewhere else and driving.”

Earlier this month, Polis unveiled a new plan aimed at increasing the number of banks and credit unions working with cannabis businesses. Increasing legal financing options can allow businesses to move away from operating on a cash-only basis, which makes them vulnerable for theft.

Border Patrol Union Head Admits Legalizing Marijuana Forces Cartels Out Of The Market

The post Colorado Marijuana Money Funds Cleaner Highways And Anti-Bullying Programs appeared first on Marijuana Moment.

Film and television, for many of us, were the first places we saw cannabis users humanized.

In a society where we were raised to “Just Say No,” who can forget the positive impact when we saw the joyous, peaceful festivities depicted in Woodstock? Who didn’t laugh at rather than scorn classic pot-smoking teenage comedies like Dazed and Confused or Superbad? Who didn’t abandon their own ‘Reefer Madness’ stereotypes after getting schooled on medical cannabis by Sanjay Gupta’s Weed?

But across the Pacific, one country is working to make sure its citizens see no marijuana in moving pictures. According to a new report released by digital streaming giant Netflix, the company complied with several demands from Singapore’s government that they remove content from their service. That includes three pieces of cannabis-themed programming: Cooking on High, The Legend of 420 and Disjointed.

The other two films were Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and Brazilian comedy The Last Hangover, which also includes overt drug-use and partying themes. Overall, the company disclosed it has received nine take-down requests worldwide since 2015. As first reported on Friday by Axios, Netflix promised that it will continue making these requests public on an annual basis. The content removed only applies to the country that requested the ban, and it can still be accessed in other markets.

Singapore is notorious for having some of the harshest drug control laws in the world. Possession of small amounts of drugs is punished severely with up to ten years in prison, a $20,000 fine or both. Trafficking, which differs by quantity based on the substance, is punishable by execution. You can be put to death for having less than a pound of marijuana, for example.

Singapore’s government doesn’t seem to be interested in global trends towards decriminalization and legalization of cannabis or other drugs. “Examples of other countries have clearly shown that a permissive attitude towards the use of cannabis exacts a high cost on society,” says the national Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB). “Therefore, we have strict laws against the trafficking, possession, consumption, and import or export of illicit drugs, including cannabis and cannabis products.”

Officials have argued that harsh policies coincide with reductions in rates of drug use and substance use disorder. By the CNB’s estimates, “the number of drug abusers arrested each year has declined by two-thirds, from over 6,000 in the early 1990s to about 2,000 last year [2010].” But as to the agency’s claim that marijuana use causes damage to society, available research on the effect of medical cannabis legalization in the U.S. suggests that it does not lead to increased youth use and has a negligible if any effect on people engaging in more risky behaviors such as consuming alcohol or tobacco.

Meanwhile, Singapore’s northern neighbor Malaysia has considered decriminalizing small amounts of all drugs in an attempt to treat substance use disorder as a public health rather than criminal issue. Farther north, Thailand has made progress by legalizing medical marijuana last year.

Read Netflix’s full Environmental Social Governance report below:

Netflix report by Marijuana Moment on Scribd

Photo courtesy of freestocks.org.

The post Netflix Blocks Marijuana Shows And Films In Response To Government Demands appeared first on Marijuana Moment.

A new bill filed by an Idaho senator would decriminalize possession of currently illegal drugs in the state, though it also contains a provision that advocates consider troubling, allowing the government to involuntarily commit people convicted of certain offenses to treatment.

Sen. Grant Burgoyne (D) introduced the legislation, which would remove criminal penalties for drug use and possession by “requiring intention to deliver for criminal trafficking.”

Burgoyne told Marijuana Moment the bill has been referred to the Judiciary and Rules Committee, where Chairman Todd Lakey (R) has agreed to hold a hearing on it.

“We have too much of a focus on prosecution and punishment and not enough on treatment,” Burgoyne said in a separate interview with KTVB. “We don’t have a functioning mental health treatment and substance abuse treatment capability for the needs of our people. We need new strategies, how we draw the lines between what is criminal conduct and what is not criminal conduct when it comes to drug possession and usage.”

The bill sets different possession thresholds for different drugs. Having just two grams of heroin could be considered trafficking, while for cocaine and methamphetamine, the amount is set at 28 grams. One pound of marijuana, or 25 plants, could be treated as a trafficking offense.

Any amount of LSD could be considered a trafficking offense, as could any amount of a “simulated controlled substance,” possibly referring to synthetic opioids like fentanyl. Using drugs with friends would also be harshly penalized, as “sharing or providing a controlled substance for use by another person shall constitute intent to deliver.”

“This will reduce arrests, but how much is very hard to predict,” Burgoyne told Marijuana Moment. “Unfortunately, illegal drug use, even in private, is too often accompanied by the commission of other crimes, which my bill does not excuse and which could lead to arrest.”

Burgoyne’s bill would also allow people using drugs to be “placed in protective custody” or “admitted for community-assisted behavioral health treatment.” This would apply to people under the influence and in various circumstances, such as being pregnant, posing a risk to themselves or others or in withdrawal.

But existing research on mandatory drug treatment suggests it is not helpful for people with substance use disorder. A 2016 study published in the British Medical Journal, for example, found that when people are ordered to undergo drug treatment without their informed consent, the practice does more harm than good and does not reduce their drug use. The researchers explained that harm reduction efforts like syringe exchanges and drug education were more effective.

“Although there is some theoretical danger of adverse consequences to mandated drug treatment, we already mandate it for prisoners with drug issues,” Burgoyne said. “I’d like to shift treatment out of our jails and prisons to a more appropriate place. Furthermore, a civil commitment is not an easy thing to obtain, and I think our courts will be conservative in how they handle them.”

If the senator’s legislation passes, it remains to be seen what effect it would have on drug arrest rates in Idaho. According to the FBI, in 2017 Idaho had 8,432 arrests for “drug abuse violations,” which is a little over 16 percent of all arrests that year.

Burgoyne’s reform proposal comes amid a growing national debate about the value of decriminalizing drug use over more arrests. Last year in May, Denver became the first city in the U.S. to decriminalize personal use and possession of psilocybin mushrooms. Oakland’s City Council followed the next month by decriminalizing a wide range of psychedelics.

Advocates are also raising the issue on the national stage. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) proposed decriminalizing drug consumption in November. Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, has proposed decriminalizing drug possession and reducing sentences. His primary opponent, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), recently called for legalizing and regulating drugs in order to treat substance misuse as a public health issue.

Tulsi Gabbard Endorses Legalizing Drugs

Photo coutersy of Markus Spiske.

The post Idaho Senator Files Bill To Decriminalize Drug Possession appeared first on Marijuana Moment.

Though eleven states and Washington, D.C. have legalized recreational marijuana, the process of expunging prior cannabis convictions remains complicated and expensive, with methods to clear records varying widely between jurisdictions.

People with marijuana records may struggle to pay outstanding fines or locate documents from different courthouses—if they are even aware at all that they are eligible for expungement.

But against all these barriers, the movement to expunge cannabis records is growing rapidly. That’s the takeaway from a new report on the impact of National Expungement Week (NEW), which launched in 2018 and is now an annual occurrence. NEW offers expungement and post-conviction relief services, as well as other social and support services, at various events hosted throughout the country.

In 2019, NEW helped 652 people start the record clearing process, more than double the 298 people it assisted in 2018. The number of people who received other services like voter registration, job support and health screenings increased by more than 750 percent, to 3,069 people.

Seven hundred and fifty people cleared or reduced their court fines and fees associated with the expungement process. Last year’s event also more than doubled the amount of expungement clinics and events hosted, from 18 events in 15 cities in 2018 to 44 events in over 30 cities in 2019.

A popular video promo by comedy actor Seth Rogen may have also helped new audiences discover NEW. Rogen’s cannabis company Houseplant also sponsored the expungement assistance push, as did Canopy Growth Corporation and Caliva. Rock the Vote and Equity First Alliance were also involved.

“While we are encouraged by the growth of National Expungement Week, it only demonstrates the need for deeper reforms of the record clearing process at the state and federal levels,” Torie Marshall, director of Cage-Free Repair, one of the nonprofits that helps to organizes NEW, said in a press release. “We will continue to fight for those reforms while providing direct services to justice-impacted communities.”

Organizers estimate that the 2019 effort generated a public benefit of $7,143,964, in the form of increased wages, reduced public spending and other benefits over the next two years.

National Expungement Week.

The report describes some of the barriers and challenges facing people who want to expunge their records. Only four-to-six percent of people eligible for expungement or post-conviction relief actually apply for it, the document reports. People with records may have difficulty simply locating their criminal records from courts and offices, or they may struggle to afford an attorney to help them. There’s also the possibility that distrust in the criminal justice system due to prior experiences with arrests or incarceration may be a factor.

“We believe in the necessity of both automation and clinics,” the report states. “Technology offers a chance to provide cost-effective legal relief at scale, and events provide opportunities to connect in-person and deliver wraparound services in a coordinated fashion. With 77 million people in the US in possession of a criminal record, we need multi-faceted solutions to address the challenges of these complex problems.”

Notably in 2019, NEW also partnered with the tech non-profit Code for America (CFA), which hosted the National Day of Civic Hacking on September 21, the first day of NEW 2019. The civic hacking day alone featured 46 events throughout the U.S. focused on the criminal justice system and record clearing.

CFA has been working with county governments to automate the process of cannabis record expungement. In February 2019, San Francisco County used CFA’s special Clear My Record software to expunge 8,100 cannabis convictions. Then, in April, Los Angeles and San Joaquin Counties announced they were partnering with CFA to clear as many as 54,000 convictions. Finally, in September, CFA made their software available for any prosecutor in California to use.

More state and local governments are signing onto not just marijuana legalization, but record expungement as well. Last year, the top prosecutor in Baltimore announced that her office would no longer prosecute marijuana possession cases and would expunge nearly a decade’s worth of marijuana cases. And on December 31, the day before Illinois opened its first adult-use cannabis shops, Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) cleared the marijuana possession records of 11,000 people.

The next National Expungement Week will be held September 19-26.

Federal Prosecutor Says Marijuana Legalization Will ‘Bring Down Our Society’

The post Marijuana Record Expungement Movement Growing Rapidly, Report Shows appeared first on Marijuana Moment.

Tucker Carlson thinks former House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is “disgusting” for being a “marijuana lobbyist.” In an interview with a conservative media outlet on Saturday, the Fox News host blasted Boehner for transitioning from the top lawmaker in Congress to, in the TV talker’s view, making bank at the expense of America’s children.

“John Boehner is like a marijuana lobbyist now, right?” Carlson said. “Waking up every morning taking a paycheck getting your kids to smoke more weed? Why isn’t John Boehner considered disgusting? I consider John Boehner disgusting. Why don’t most Republicans think that? You go from being Speaker of the House to being a weed lobbyist and nobody says anything? Like, that’s totally normal?”

“Really John Boehner—are you making America better, pig? No, you’re not,” Carlson said on Breitbart’s SiriusXM radio show. “You’re making it much, much worse. Ask anyone with teenage children what John Boehner’s doing for America. I’m serious—it’s disgusting.”

But are Carlson’s incendiary comments about the former House Speaker true or false? Firstly, Boehner is not technically a marijuana lobbyist. That job is performed by hardworking activists like those with Students for Sensible Drug Policy, established non-profits such as the Drug Policy Alliance or trade groups like the National Cannabis Industry Association.

Boehner is instead involved in the marijuana industry as a Board member of Acreage Holdings, which runs a chain of cannabis cultivation, processing and dispensing businesses in several U.S. states.

Boehner joined Acreage in April 2018 along with former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld (R). It was then that he first publicly endorsed descheduling marijuana. In October of that year, Boehner teamed up with the National Institute for Cannabis Investors to sell exclusive cannabis stock tips, vowing that he was “all in on the cannabis industry,” predicting it could be worth as much as “$1 trillion” in the future.

So is it “disgusting” that Boehner, who when he was in a position to advance reform as House Speaker claimed he was “unalterably opposed to the legalization of marijuana,” is now profiting from the legal cannabis industry? That’s for you to decide. Carlson is far from the first person to call out the former speaker’s marijuana work, though; this March, cannabis equity activists crashed the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas to protest his keynote presentation.

“It’s hypocritical for an Austin based company like SXSW, a company imbedded in a city that preaches diversity and inclusion, to neglect the work of committing to create an inclusive space, and instead give a keynote platform to John Boehner,” said Chas Moore, executive director of the Austin Justice Coalition, at the time. “This is disgusting.”

The SXSW protesters released public demands for reinvestment of cannabis industry profits in communities being damaged by the war on drugs, full funding of social equity programs and cannabis record expungement.

Boehner aside, should Tucker Carlson be trusted as a good faith commentator on ethics and justice in legal cannabis? That’s highly debatable, to say the least. As recently as October, Carlson ranted on his televised show that a marijuana banking bill that passed the House with wide bipartisan support would help “weed dealers” and make voters so high they won’t notice how much politicians are ruining the country.

“Even though marijuana is still illegal federally, the bill would allow banks and credit unions to provide banking services to people who deal marijuana,” he said. “So in the middle of the deadliest drug epidemic in our history, the only thing Congress can agree on is it ought to be easier to sell drugs to Americans.”

Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore.

The post Tucker Carlson Calls John Boehner A ‘Pig’ For His ‘Disgusting’ Marijuana Work appeared first on Marijuana Moment.

Time is quickly running out for you to participate in the world’s biggest online survey of people who consume drugs.

Through January 5, you can fill out the Global Drug Survey, which assesses your use of everything from cannabis to alcohol to ayahuasca to cocaine to bath salts to…well, pretty much any drug you can think of. Researchers behind the study are examining how (un)safely you drink when you go out, if CBD and microdosing have real therapeutic benefits and how people use psychedelic therapy. The survey is available in 10 languages in 20 different countries, and your responses help researchers develop tools to help people use drugs more safely.

This year’s version of the annual survey started collecting data in November. Global Drug Survey (GDS), the organization based in London that administers the questionnaire, conducted the first version of survey in 2013.

“We’re very interested in making drug use safer regardless of its legal status,” Larissa Maier, PhD, a GDS researcher, told Marijuana Moment. “Every year we add new topics that we’re interested in observing—like microdosing—and can collect data about them with fairly large sample sizes. Unlike national household drug surveys, we’re not studying prevalence of use, rather we’re studying the experiences of people who use drugs.”

Participants access the survey anonymously through an online, encrypted portal, and GDS says it doesn’t collect any personally identifying information. Participants are prompted to answer multiple-response questions about the types of drugs they have used in the past year, how often and in what amounts they used and their preferred routes of administration. They are also asked how much money they spend on their drugs and where they source them.

Some survey questions include:

Please tell us which of the following best describes your reasons for using cannabis:

• I use cannabis exclusively for recreational (pleasure) purposes.
• I use cannabis sometimes for medical reasons and most of the time for recreational purposes.
• I use cannabis most of the time for medical reasons and sometimes for recreational purposes.
• I use cannabis exclusively for medical reasons.

Have you:

• Personally purchased drugs through a darknet market for your own consumption?
• Arranged for someone else to purchase drugs through a darknet market for you?
• Purchased drugs through a darknet market on behalf of somebody else or with the intention to supply someone else?

The survey also collects information about how drug use affects participants’ lives, such as:

In the last 12 months have you sought emergency medical treatment following the use of cannabis?

• Yes
• No

Have you ever lost your driver’s license as a result of cannabis possession?

• Yes, but not in the last 12 months
• Yes, in the last 12 months
• No

Some questions focus on participants’ interactions with police, how they feel the morning after a night of drug use and if they use substances like cannabis or psychedelics to treat a diagnosed health condition. Further questions ask if participants tried using drugs to improve their work performance, and ask about general mental and emotional well-being outside of drug consumption:

Have you ever used LSD, Magic Mushrooms, Ketamine, MDMA, Peyote, Kambo, DMT, 5-MEO DMT (toad venom), Ayahuasca, or Ibogaine with the specific intention of improving your:

• General mental health and well-being when feeling basically OK with life or for personal development?
• Managing a diagnosed psychiatric condition?
• To address a specific worry / concern in your life e.g. relationship issue, bereavement, addiction, trauma?

The survey shows respondents how their drug use compares to other participants in past years. It asks if knowing this information will impact their drug use in any way, and gauges participants’ interest in receiving harm reduction education or resources. Some questions ask participants if they have used harm reduction techniques like drug checking and testing:

In the last 12 months have you used any services or technologies that identify the content and/or purity of illegal or other psychoactive drugs in your country of residence? These include:

• Reagent test kits (used by you or others on your drugs)
• Drug checking or pill/powder testing services at festivals/events,
• Drug checking or pill/powder testing services at offices/fixed sites
• Drug checking or pill/powder testing services where you post drugs to laboratories for testing.

GDS has collected over 140,000 responses thus far for the current survey. In its first year, the researchers collected about 80,000 responses. By 2016 that increased to 101,000 responses, and last year’s survey collected 123,000.

This year, the researchers are focused on better understanding specific patterns of drug use, including problematic drinking, the therapeutic potential of cannabis and CBD and how people are using psychedelics to treat different medical conditions.

“The evidence for cannabis as being effective as a treatment for common psychiatric conditions such as depression, anxiety or PTSD are to date limited,” Adam R. Winstock, GDS CEO, wrote in a blog post. “To those who use cannabis to improve their health and well-being, the outcomes of studies that don’t support their lived experience is frustrating.”

“But we can also compile what we know already from the experiences of thousands of people who use cannabis products to help with their emotional and physical health,” he said. “GDS 2020 aims to become one of the biggest ever studies of medical cannabis. We can learn so much from the lived experience of people.”

In an interview, Maier acknowledged some limitations of the survey, primarily that it is not necessarily representative of all drug users. The reliance on self-reporting may skew some of the data, based on different evaluations of people’s own experiences. The survey becomes longer and more time-consuming if participants report using more drug types, which may cause some responses to be incomplete or false.

And media outlets or organizations that generate responses could also skew the results. If you’re learning about this survey from Marijuana Moment, for example, you might be more likely to be a cannabis consumer than would be the case for a typical CNN viewer, and that may be overrepresented in the survey’s participant responses.

Despite some of these limitations, GDS has developed through its research tools like the Drugs Meter and the Drinks Meter, which are online apps to help people monitor their drug use. The team hopes that this year, with their largest sample size ever, they will discover even deeper insights into people’s different use patterns.

“The key findings can be used as a tool for harm reduction by pointing out safer use strategies,” said Maier. “After you take the survey, you can compare your drug use patterns to people in your same country and age group. The message we hope our data supports is, generally, safer drug use is more pleasurable drug use.”

Those findings would dovetail well with political momentum at the national stage for drug harm reduction measures like safe consumption sites, which 2020 Democratic Presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Andrew Yang and Julián Castro have all endorsed.

The Global Drug Survey will continue collecting responses until January 5, and GDS will publish their key findings with charts in May. You can find the survey here.

1980s Drug Czar Calls Pete Buttigieg’s Drug Decriminalization Plan ‘Nuts’

Image of courtesy of Pretty Drugthings.

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