Tag Archives: marijuana

Chronic Marijuana Use Is Up In Colorado

by WilhelmHiller Posted on February 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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A new report from the Colorado Retail Marijuana Public Health Advisory Committee tells us that among 18-25 years olds, 13 percent report using marijuana daily or near-daily. Mark Kleiman is taken aback that this has gotten hardly any attention:

We know from other studies by Beau Kilmer and his group at RAND that daily/near-daily smokers consume about three times as much cannabis per use-day as less frequent smokers, enough to be measurably impaired (even if not subjectively stoned) for most of their waking hours….The National Survey on Drug Use and Health finds that about one-half of daily or near-daily smokers meet the diagnostic criteria for Substance Use Disorder. That’s a frightening share of users, and of the total population, to be engaging in such worrisome behavior.

….More and more people using cannabis more and more often is a trend that pre-dates legalization and is not restricted to states that have legalized….What is clear is that lower prices…make it easier for users to slip into heavy daily use. Indeed, that’s the main — some of us would say the only significant — risk of legalization. That risk could be reduced by using taxes to prevent the price collapse. So a report on the effects of legalization that neglects heavy use is like a review of the last performance of “Our American Cousin” that doesn’t mention John Wilkes Booth.

That sounds like a lot. On the other hand, if half of daily marijuana users typically have substance use disorders, that about 6.5 percent in Colorado. Here are the national figures for the past decade:

The Colorado figure is higher than than the national figure, but not hugely higher. It’s probably not a reason to panic, but it does bear watching.

The kind of people who read this blog are probably in favor of marijuana legalization—as I am—largely because they’re the kind of people who use it occasionally and don’t see a lot of harm in it. But like alcohol, there’s a certain share of the population that will fall into addiction, and that share is likely to increase as marijuana prices come down. There’s never a free lunch.

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Chronic Marijuana Use Is Up In Colorado

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These Are the States That Might Legalize Pot Next

by donlink237 Posted on August 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Talk of legal marijuana is growing across the US like a—well, you get it.

This November, voters in five states where some form of medical marijuana is already legal will decide whether to authorize recreational use: Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada.

Another four states, Arkansas, Florida, Montana, and North Dakota, will vote on legalizing medical marijuana. Michigan, Missouri, and Oklahoma may also vote on medical marijuana, but advocates are still working to get their initiatives on the ballot.

With the presidential election likely to boost voter turnout and polls showing as many as 54 percent of Americans in favor of legalization, pot supporters are feeling confident, says Mason Tvert, communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project.

While opponents warn of unknown health effects and the possibility of spawning a “big marijuana” industry, Tvert argues that “life has gone on as usual” in states where marijuana has already been legalized—Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, along with the District of Columbia.

All five of this fall’s state legalization campaigns have adopted the same slogan, “Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol.” The measures would allow anyone 21 or over to use the drug, and establish legal cultivation and retail markets, alongside taxation and regulatory regimes.

Here’s a rundown on where voters could choose to legalize this November:

Arizona

Supporters of Proposition 205, the legalization measure, withstood a challenge this summer from a collection of business groups and individuals who sued claiming that backers didn’t have enough valid signatures to get on the ballot. Upon review, the secretary of state found the campaign had well over the necessary 150,642 signatures.

But opponents of the bill, including Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery and Yavapai County Attorney Sheila Polk, are still trying to knock the question off the ballot. They’re among the backers of another suit filed last week aiming to have the measure tossed, arguing the proposed law is flawed, and that the brief summary of the law that voters will read on election day fails to effectively explain what all the bill would do.

Latest poll: 52 percent oppose legalization (O.H. Predictive Insights, July)

California

After an attempt to legalize recreational marijuana in California failed in 2010, both supporters and opponents of legal weed see the state as a key battleground.

As of early August, the pro-legalization camp had raised nearly $7 million. ($2.5 million came from Napster founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker.)

While the opposition campaign in the state had only raised $125,000 at that time, at least one national organization has signaled it’s intentions to fight the measure: Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), a group which includes former Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.) and former George W. Bush administration official David Frum, has put up $2 million to fight legalization efforts in November.

SAM president Kevin Sabet, a former advisor in the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, told the Los Angeles Times he expects a lot of the group’s resources will go to the Golden State.

“If there is one thing we agree on with legalization advocates,” Sabet said, “it’s that California is important.”

Latest poll: 60 percent support legalization (Public Policy Institute of California, May)

Maine

Early opponents feared Maine’s Question 1 could allow large companies to push out the state’s already established and thriving medical marijuana industry, which has nearly tripled in size since 2011. But the measure would reserve 40 percent of business licenses for small-scale growers.

Last fall, the MPP-backed Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol campaign joined forces with a local organization, Legalize Maine, in order to avoid having competing ballot measures. The pro-legalization campaign raised $1 million in June and July.

Latest poll: 53.8 percent support legalization (Maine People’s Resource Center, May)

Massachusetts

Polls over the past two years have been close, and the state’s contest may shape up to be the tightest of the five.

The opposition has some big names on their side, including Republican Governor Charlie Baker and Attorney General Maura Healey and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, both Democrats.

But the pro-campaign claims support from Democratic Boston City Council President Michelle Wu, who has said “it just seems ridiculous that kids at Harvard can smoke pot and have incredibly successful careers while blacks and Latinos, particularly boys and men, who are using the same substance are sent to jail.”

Latest poll: 51 percent oppose legalization (Gravis Marketing, July)

Nevada

Not long ago, legalization supporters had the backing of the editorial board of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the largest paper in the state. But after Sheldon Adelson, a casino magnate and Republican megadonor, purchased the paper late last year, the editorial board published an piece predicting that the new owner would enforce a “complete reversal” on marijuana legalization.

In June, the paper ran an editorial with a simple takeaway: “Voters should ‘just say no’ to legalizing recreational marijuana on Election Day.”

Supporters of the initiative include several state legislators, including Nevada State Sen. Richard Segerblom, a major proponent of the state’s medical marijuana system. (A local dispensary has named a sativa strain, “Segerblom Haze,” in his honor.)

The state’s most prominent Democrat, Senator Harry Reid isn’t so supportive. “If I had to vote on it now, I wouldn’t vote for it,” Reid said Tuesday. “That’s something we need to look at quite a bit longer. I think it’s something that we have to be very careful with.”

Latest poll: 50 percent support legalization (KTNV-TV/Rasmussen, July)

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These Are the States That Might Legalize Pot Next

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Obama Has Granted More Commutations Than the Past 6 Presidents Combined

by BLMWaylon7619 Posted on March 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama commuted the sentences of 61 drug offenders on Wednesday, as part of his push to ramp up clemencies and reform sentencing laws. That brings his total commutations to 248 since taking office, more than the past six presidents combined.

More than a third of the 61 inmates were serving life sentences on charges related to possession and distribution of drugs including cocaine, methamphetamines, and marijuana. Unlike recent rounds of commutations, however, none of them were serving life sentences for marijuana-only crimes. As Mother Jones has reported in the past, scores of so-called pot lifers remain behind bars.

“Sadly none of my guys are on this list,” says Cheri Sicard, founder of the Marijuana Lifer Project, a nonprofit advocacy group that aims to reverse the life sentences of people charged with marijuana crimes. “That will be a huge disappointment to all of them, especially 81-year-old Antonio Bascaro,” she says, referring to the longest-serving marijuana prisoner in the United States. “He does not have much time left.”

Neil Eggleston, the White House counsel, wrote in a blog post that Obama will continue his relatively aggressive pace of commutations during the remainder of his presidency. But his administration is still far from the goal it announced as part of a clemency initiative in 2011, when former Attorney General Eric Holder said that some 10,000 prisoners “were potentially going to be released.”

More than 10,000 inmates have since applied for relief, but there’s mounting evidence that the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney (OPA)—which is responsible for vetting and recommending clemency petitions to the White House—has been hampered by a bureaucratic culture and broken process in which the cases of qualifying applicants often go unheard or are regularly rejected against the OPA’s recommendations.

In January, former Pardon Attorney Deborah Leff resigned from her post after less than two years on the job. Her resignation letter, obtained by USA Today under a Freedom of Information Act request, offers a rare glimpse into a department that is shrouded in secrecy. “Given that the Department has not fulfilled its commitment to provide the resources necessary for my office to make timely and thoughtful recommendations on clemency to the President, given your statement that the needed staff will not be forthcoming, and given that I have been instructed to set aside thousands of petitions for pardon and traditional commutation, I cannot fulfill my responsibilities as Pardon Attorney,” Leff wrote to Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates, who is responsible for forwarding the OPA’s recommendations to the White House.

Leff criticized Yates for overruling her recommendations and said the president was often not informed of the differences in opinion. “I believe that prior to making the serious and complex decisions underlying clemency, it is important for the President to have a full set of views,” she wrote.

Leff’s letter placed the blame for much dysfunction on the OPA’s supervisors. But in the past, Samuel Morison, a former OPA staff attorney turned whistleblower, has accused the OPA itself of routinely denying petitions “without any real consideration.” Morison noted that once cases do reach the White House, the president often takes the OPA’s advice. “The number of times the president doesn’t do what the pardon attorney suggests is extremely low,” he told me last August.

Under Leff’s leadership, Obama’s clemency numbers slowly rose. Her predecessor, Ronald L. Rodgers, a former military judge and a major prosecutor of drug crimes, was removed from office in April 2014 after failing to accurately share key information with the president in a high-profile clemency case, and during his tenure Obama granted fewer clemencies than any other modern president.

America’s federal prisons hold nearly 200,000 people; some 95,000 of them are incarcerated on nonviolent drug charges. Sicard of the Marijuana Lifer Project believes the marijuana lifers offer low-hanging fruit for an administration that has vowed to reverse “unduly harsh sentences” for drug crimes. Of Wednesday’s commutations, Amy Povah, president of the CAN-DO Foundation, which advocates on behalf of individuals charged with nonviolent drug crimes, says that while she is “thrilled that President Obama has chosen to end the suffering of these deserving applicants,” she remains concerned about others whose long-standing petitions for clemency have not yet been granted. These include Michael Pelletier, who has been in a wheelchair since he was 11 years old and is serving a life sentence for marijuana charges. The way Povah sees it, “we have a long way to go before Obama leaves office.”

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Obama Has Granted More Commutations Than the Past 6 Presidents Combined

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The Secret of El Chapo’s Success: Diversification

by AngelikFosbery Posted on January 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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By some estimates, the just-nabbed billionaire drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera, a.k.a. El Chapo, supplies more than half the cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana that comes into the United States. But not all of those drugs were created equal in his eyes. While pot undoubtedly helped El Chapo get his start, it’s no longer the key to his dominion.

Guzmán, who was arrested by the Mexican police on Friday, grew up in the 1960s in Sinaloa, the remote, rugged, West Coast state still known as Mexico’s marijuana heartland. As a boy, he earned money working in marijuana fields before a friend’s father—one of the first Sinaloan farmers to traffic pot in bulk—brought him into what later became the Sinaloa Cartel. And although pot was the cartel’s bread and butter for years, El Chapo’s syndicate long ago branched into other drugs.

It was a prescient move. Since 2011, competition from high-quality pot grown legally and quasi-legally north of the border has cut the wholesale price for Sinaloan marijuana by 70 percent. Mexico now supplies only about one-third of America’s pot, down from two-thirds as recently as 2008. “It’s a big difference,” a Sinaloan farmer told NPR. “If the US continues to legalize pot, they will run us into the ground.”

Like any good businessman, El Chapo understood the importance of a diverse portfolio. In the late 1970s, Mexican traffickers began moving cocaine for producers in Colombia and Central America, first by air and boat to Central America and Mexico, and then by land into the United States. Sinaloa now controls an estimated 35 percent of Colombian cocaine shipments.

Unique among Mexican cartels, Sinaloa is both horizontally and vertically integrated. It produces its own marijuana and heroin, and starting in the 1990s it expanded into methamphetamine. After regulations made it more difficult to manufacture large quantities of meth in the United States, Sinaloa ordered precursor chemicals by the boatload from India and China to supply its own Mexican superlabs.

More recently, El Chapo has cashed in on America’s growing appetite for heroin. Since 2009, domestic seizures have increased by more than two-thirds. Almost all heroin consumed here is now smuggled across the US-Mexico border. An increasing share of the opium used to make it is grown in Mexico—mainly in Chihuahua, Durango, and Sinaloa’s “Golden Triangle” region.

DEA 2015 National Drug Threat Assessment

Even the heroin that isn’t grown by the Sinaloa Cartel is likely being smuggled by it. The orange areas in this map show the cartel’s sphere of influence in the United States:

DEA

The cartel’s evolution shows how the legalization of pot has taken business away from criminal syndicates. But it also suggests that the cartels will continue to thrive amid the prohibition of other popular drugs. “It’s a reality that drugs destroy,” Guzmán told actor Sean Penn shortly before his capture. “Unfortunately, as I said, where I grew up, there was no other way and there still isn’t a way to survive, no way to work in our economy to be able to make a living.”

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The Secret of El Chapo’s Success: Diversification

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Obama Is Setting Free 95 Nonviolent Drug Offenders—Including 2 Pot Lifers

by Kali73Ukpvrtfio Posted on December 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Marine veteran William “Billy” Ervin Dekle, 66, used to fly planeloads of weed into South Florida in the 1970s and ’80s in his single-prop airplane. Charlie Cundiff, now approaching 70, had two minor priors for growing and possessing marijuana before he got caught up in a pot sting in Tallahassee in 1991. Both men have been behind bars since the early 1990s after getting life sentences for conspiracy to distribute a substance that’s now legal in some form in 23 states and Washington, DC.

On Friday, Dekle and Cundiff were among the 95 nonviolent drug offenders granted clemency by the Obama administration as part of its efforts to reduce the federal inmate population and give relief to those sentenced under the war on drugs. Today’s commutations are more than twice as many as he announced last March, which were the most granted at a single time since Lyndon B. Johnson.

As Mother Jones has reported, at least 69 people have been sentenced to life without parole for marijuana crimes, sometimes with charges as insignificant as serving as go-betweens in the sale of minor quantities of marijuana to undercover police officers—as in the case of Fate Vincent Winslow, a homeless man who provided two $10 bags of weed in exchange for a $5 commission he intended to use to get something to eat.

While today’s announcements are a step in the right direction for the administration’s intention to reduce harsh sentences for drug offenders, it’s a far cry from the 10,000 prisoners who former Attorney General Eric Holder said “were potentially going to be released” under the new clemency initiative announced in 2011. For Winslow, the dozens of other pot lifers, the 95,000 federal drug offenders, and the more than 35,000 inmates who have applied for clemency relief, today’s news will be met with disappointment.

“For an activist like me who works with marijuana lifers and who has been working directly with these two men, the news does not get much better than this,” says Cheri Sicard, former vice president of the CAN-DO Foundation, an advocacy group for nonviolent drug offenders. “At the same time, I am deeply disappointed for the many marijuana lifers left behind. I am in regular contact with them and their families, and I know the anticipation that comes with waiting for the clemency announcements, as well as the subsequent devastating blow it is to not see their names on the list.”

Today’s announcement brings Obama’s clemency total to 91 pardons and 159 commutations. To put those numbers in perspective, federal prisons hold approximately 200,000 people. “We take President Obama at his word that there is no ceiling on the number of commutations he will grant before leaving office,” said Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, in a statement Friday. “And so while we are grateful for every single commutation, there are many hundreds more who deserve relief. We urge the President to confound the skeptics by making 2016 an historic year for clemency grants.”

Dekle and Cundiff will first be sent to lower-security prisons and then to halfway houses to begin their transitions before being released from Federal Bureau of Prisons custody. The process is expected to take four months. Meanwhile, as the Washington Post reported this morning, lawmakers in Congress are debating several bills aimed at changing sentencing laws.

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Obama Is Setting Free 95 Nonviolent Drug Offenders—Including 2 Pot Lifers

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Congress Is Blocking Legal Weed in DC—and Maybe Causing a Spike in Murders

by CorrineMcCullou Posted on September 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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With John Boehner’s impending retirement, there isn’t much lingering fear that Congress will fail to pass the spending bills needed this week to avert a government shutdown. But in the process of keeping the government open, Congress will yet again trample on local governance in Washington, DC. Unless the legislative language is altered at the last minute before final passage, Congress will renew a rider from the last near-shutdown deal that prohibits the city government from spending any funds to set up a legal market for marijuana—as in Colorado and Washington State—despite the fact that DC voters approved, by an overwhelming majority, a ballot measure last fall to legalize weed.

There are a whole host of reasons the city government and voters would prefer a market where marijuana is sold in approved storefronts just like liquor. As Colorado has shown with its regulated system, bringing drug sales out of the black market can be a boon for tax revenue, with the state set to collect about $125 million this year from marijuana sales taxes. And before the ballot initiative last year legalized personal possession of small quantities of the drug, studies had shown that black residents of DC were 8.05 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than white residents, even though blacks and whites smoke pot at equal levels nationally.

But over the course of the past year, the DC government has found yet another reason to push for a fully legalized system: the role alternative, synthetic drugs might be playing in a rising murder rate.

Like many cities across the country, DC saw a sharp uptick in the number of homicides over the summer, which has continued into fall. Once the so-called murder capital of the United States, DC has steadily reduced its crime rate in recent years. But there have been 120 murders in DC in 2015, compared to just 80 at this time last year.

Analysts have yet to settle on a persuasive explanation for the spike in murders in many major American cities. DC’s city government has pointed to several possible causes. Perhaps it’s guns with larger magazines, making more shootings lethal. Or maybe it’s a glut of past offenders repeating. But there is one explanation that city officials have seemed surest about: an increase in synthetic-drug usage that has caused people to act erratically and sometimes violently.

Synthetic marijuana first hit DC head shops about five years ago, sold alongside pipes and bongs as a legal substitute for cannabis. Back then, drugs like K2 and Spice were milder cannabinoids that produced similar effects to marijuana. “They were much safer when they were legal than when they became illegal,” says Adam Eidinger, the author of last year’s ballot initiative to legalize marijuana and owner of Capitol Hemp, a local head shop that sold synthetic drugs when they were legal. But once the government banned the substances that produced the high, manufacturers went underground, experimenting with different strains of chemicals. The spiraling arms race to tweak formulas and stay ahead of regulators produced a far more dangerous substance, which in its current iteration induces more a high more like PCP than the mild cannabinoids of a few years ago.

Proponents of marijuana legalization avoid referring to the new product synthetic marijuana, as it’s commonly called. “Marijuana users should be outraged over this slanderous and fraudulent reference to the cannabis plant,” Jon Gettman wrote for High Times. “These drugs do not contain cannabinoids, natural or synthetic, and are in no way related to marijuana and/or the cannabis plant.”

“Often referred to as synthetic marijuana, this drug is not at all like marijuana, and the effects are very different,” DC police chief Cathy Lanier said in August. “It is an extremely dangerous drug and if not addressed federally, we will have a public health crisis on our hand as its use continues to expand.” She noted that 30 percent of police departments in major cities had reported more violent crime being committed by people under the influence of synthetic drugs.

In June, Mayor Muriel Bowser introduced emergency legislation to impose harsh penalties on stores caught selling the synthetic drugs: an automatic 96-hour shutdown for police to investigate the first offense, with a second offense prompting a 30-day closure and a $10,000 fine.

It’s not always clear that synthetic drugs are behind the crimes, as police struggle to test suspects and instead rely on visual clues to pin crimes on these drugs. In August, the NYPD held a press conference warning of the terrors of “weaponized marijuana” that had turned people into crazed criminals ready to wreak havoc on the streets. The presentation included a video a naked man trying to punch his way through a fence and then turning on a cohort of cops, and pointed to it as evidence of the perils of synthetic marijuana. But as Gothamist noted shortly afterward, the clip was actually pulled from an old episode of Cops. The footage, from 12 years earlier, showed a Des Moines man high on PCP, not K2. The footage still made it onto a CNN segment warning America about synthetic marijuana.

Although no one has conclusively traced the murder spike to synthetic drugs, usage of the drugs is certainly on the upswing this year—often with dangerous effects. DC recorded 439 trips to emergency rooms due to synthetic drugs in June alone.

DC officials and activists think the problem wouldn’t be so severe if Congress hadn’t interceded to block implementation of a legal market. “It would depend on the cost of the marijuana, entirely,” says David Grosso, a member of the DC Council and a longtime proponent of a tax-and-regulate system. “If it’s accessible and not expensive and not hard to get a hold of, then I think you’d probably see less synthetic drugs.”

Eidinger puts it more categorically. “There would be no demand for synthetic drugs if marijuana could be bought at any corner store in the city the same way alcohol is sold,” he says.

In November 2014, 70 percent of DC voters backed Initiative 71, a ballot measure that legalized possession of up to two ounces of marijuana and home cultivation in the capital. Shortly after the initiative passed, the DC Council drafted legislation to regulate the sale of marijuana like alcohol. In November, a council committee approved a bill that would have set the rules for production and sales taxes on marijuana. DC appeared set to follow Colorado and Washington in having legal dispensaries.

This prospect raised the ire of the Republican majority in Congress. Rep. Andy Harris, whose Maryland district sits on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, far from DC, had long challenged the District’s political autonomy, previously attempting unsuccessfully to prevent the city from lowering fines for marijuana possession. Shortly after the referendum passed, as part of a deal to avert a government shutdown Harris and his GOP colleagues in Congress barred the DC government from spending any funds on the legalization of marijuana. “The fact is, the Constitution gives Congress the ultimate oversight about what happens in the federal district,” Harris said at the time.

While the DC Council found a way around that spending prohibition to implement the exact text of the ballot measure, Harris’ rider has prevented DC from advancing toward a real legal market. That’s left the city in a limbo state. Instead of a fully legal market, DC currently has a hybrid system whereby possession of marijuana is legal but buying or selling it is not. Some enterprising individuals have entered what the Washington Post recently termed the “gray market,” starting clubs or selling other goods that just so happen to come with a free bonus gift of some weed. But for the most part, DC’s marijuana market is still operating just like every other black market in country, just a little bit more out in the open when it comes to possession, but still sold with the risk of arrest.

“Congress has failed us,” says Grosso. “They continue to block this effort. The people of the District of Columbia deserve this kind of a marketplace, and we don’t have the opportunity to do that.”

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Congress Is Blocking Legal Weed in DC—and Maybe Causing a Spike in Murders

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Marijuana might be the “Ferrari” of THC production, but could yeast be the Tesla?

by LesleeLkdf Posted on September 15, 2015

Marijuana might be the “Ferrari” of THC production, but could yeast be the Tesla?

By on 15 Sep 2015commentsShare

If we start making THC with microbes, rather than marijuana plants, what image will we use to replace the iconic pot leaf?

This isn’t a ridiculous question — well, it is, but it’s not unfounded. Researchers at Technical University of Dortmund in Germany have genetically modified yeast to make THC. (For a primer on how scientists engineer microbes, check out this video on synthetic biology.)

Fermenting THC with microbes could be much less resource-intensive than growing actual pot plants, which require a lot of water and light. It could also help facilitate much-needed medical research on the potential health benefits of THC and other compounds in marijuana. Here’s more from The New York Times:

Synthetic versions of THC are available in pill form under brand names like Marinol and Cesamet; they are generally used to treat nausea,vomiting and loss of appetite caused by H.I.V.infection or cancer chemotherapy. Genetically modified yeast could make THC in a cheaper and more streamlined way than traditional chemical synthesis.

Using yeast could also shed light on the clinical usefulness of cannabis-derived compounds. Marijuana is increasingly embraced as medicine, yet there is limited evidence that it is effective against many of the conditions for which it is prescribed. Researchers hoping to separate fact from wishful thinking will need much better access to marijuana’s unique constituents. Modified yeast may provide them.

“This is something that could literally change the lives of millions of people,” said Kevin Chen, the chief executive of Hyasynth Bio, a company working to create yeasts that produce THC and cannabidiol, another marijuana compound of medicinal interest.

For now, microbe-made THC is pretty far from commercial viability. The yeast can only churn out small amounts of THC at a time, and they require special “precursor molecules” in order to do so, The Times reports. In a perfect world, they’d be able to make a lot of THC using only simple sugars, and then, presumably, they’d crave even more of that sugar once they’re drowning in THC (just kidding — that’s not how this works). Jonathan Page, an adjust professor at the University of British Columbia who contributed to this research, told The Times:

“Right now, we have a plant that is essentially the Ferrari of the plant world when it comes to producing the chemical of interest,” Dr. Page said. “Cannabis is hard to beat.”

Still, this research shows that it’s possible to get THC from microbes. So while these scientists have a lot of work ahead of them, it’s not too early to start thinking about how we’re going to rebrand pot culture. I say we replace the leaf with a microbe munching on a THC-infused brownie — you know, because it’s like it’s eating its own excrement, which is hilarious, especially if you’re high.

Source:

Newly Risen from Yeast: THC

, The New York Times.

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Marijuana might be the “Ferrari” of THC production, but could yeast be the Tesla?

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Marijuana might be the “Ferrari” of THC production, but could yeast be the Tesla?

Police Say the Biggest Pot Raid in Years Wasn’t Really About Pot

by EcacDespeissis Posted on June 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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There were helicopters, SWAT teams, and nearly 100,000 marijuana plants yanked out of the ground, but last week’s massive raid in Northern California’s rugged Emerald Triangle was not your father’s pot bust. Carried out by county law enforcement with no help from the DEA, it targeted private landowners—and not just because they were growing pot, police say, but because they were illegally sucking some 500,000 gallons of water a day from a section of the nearby Eel river that is now stagnant and moss-ridden.

In short, the cops say this was as much a water raid as a pot raid. One certainly could imagine, in this era of evolving attitudes toward marijuana, a shift in enforcement focus toward environmentally problematic grows on steep wooded hillsides or above sensitive salmon streams in an increasingly dry climate. These are not isolated issues: Among the growers targeted in last week’s raid, according to the Lost Coast Outpost, were members of California Cannabis Voice Humboldt, a group working to bring growers into compliance with state and federal environmental laws.

A leading advocate for Northern California pot growers scoffs at the notion that the raid was environmentally motivated. “This isn’t about the environment; this is about business as usual,” says Hezekiah Allen, director of the Emerald Growers Association. Allen challenges the authorities’ water use estimates, pointing out that the extensive reservoirs discovered at the grow sites could be eco-friendly ways of storing winter runoff for use during the summer growing season. He also questions the value of criminal raids at a time when the California Water Board is drafting a system of water-use permits and civil fines for pot farmers.

“There are 2,200 un-permitted water diversions for wine grapes in the Central Valley,” he points out, citing a state report, “so I am curious when we are going to see the sheriff show up and chop down un-permitted vines. If we are agnostic about what the crop is, the same crime should lead to the same activity. That is all we are asking, just to be treated like any other crop.”

Yet if state and local officials are to be believed (they did not respond to requests for comment), the raid suggests that even the most eco-conscious Emerald Triangle growers could face a reckoning once California (probably inevitably) legalizes cannabis and starts subjecting pot farms to agricultural inspections. Even with the the best land-use practices, many Emerald Triangle farms likely draw too much water from sensitive mountain streams and headwaters. Growers may find that it’s cheaper and more eco-friendly to relocate to the Central Valley.

Or why stop there? Cannabis, indigenous to moist river valleys in Central and South Asia, uses about six gallons per day per plant. That’s more than many other thirsty crops, such as cotton, which uses 10 gallons per plant for the entire growing season. Which suggests that cannabis should be grown somewhere wet—somewhere other than California.

Allen doesn’t see that happening. He argues that cannabis farming in the Emerald Triangle can be sustainable when farmers cultivate drought-tolerant Kush varieties from Afghanistan, and irrigate entirely with rainwater stored in tanks onsite. After all, no crop offers a greater financial yield per gallon of water. “If we step back and take a look at this industry and the jobs that it creates, California cannot afford not to grow cannabis in the 21st century,” he says. “It’s one of the most adaptable, resource-efficient ways of generating revenue on small farms.”

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Police Say the Biggest Pot Raid in Years Wasn’t Really About Pot

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Illegal Pot Farms Are Literally Sucking California Salmon Streams Dry

by PhilDrechsler Posted on March 27, 2015

Mother Jones

Outlet Creek watershed in Northern California’s Mendocino County. Scott Bauer

Northern California pot farmers are using up all of the water that normally supports key populations of the region’s federally protected salmon and steelhead trout.

That, at least, is the conclusion of a new study, published last week in the journal PLOS One, that examined four California watersheds where salmon and trout are known to spawn. In the three watersheds with intensive pot cultivation, illegal marijuana farms literally sucked up all of the water during the streams’ summer low-flow period, leaving nothing to support the fish.

Author Scott Bauer, a biologist with the state department of fish and wildlife, estimated the size and location of outdoor and greenhouse pot farms by looking at Google Earth images and accompanying drug enforcement officers on raids. He did not include “indoor” grows—marijuana grown under lamps in buildings.

After visiting 32 marijuana greenhouses in eight locations and averaging the results, Bauer extrapolated his findings to all greenhouses in the study area—virtually nothing else is grown in greenhouses in this part of the country. The sites contained marijuana plants at a density of about one per square meter, with each plant (taking waste and other factors into account) using about six gallons of water a day. Overall, he calculated, pot operations within the study yielded 112,000 plants, and consumed 673,000 gallons of water every day.

And that is water the area’s fish badly need. The Coho salmon population is listed as threatened under both state and federal Endangered Species Acts, and is designated as a key population to maintain or improve as part of the state’s recovery plan.

Bauer collected his data last year, at a time when California’s drought had already become its worst in more than 1,200 years. When I spoke to him at the time, he told me that pot farming had surpassed logging and development to become the single biggest threat to the area’s salmon. Now that that the drought is expected to extend into a fourth year, the same streams could run dry again this summer, and remain so for an even longer period of time.

Overall, the outdoor and greenhouse grows consume more than 60 million gallons of water a day during the growing season—50 percent more than is used by all the residents of San Francisco.

“Clearly, water demands for the existing level of marijuana cultivation in many Northern California watersheds are unsustainable and are likely contributing to the decline of sensitive aquatic species in the region,” Bauer’s study concludes. “Given the specter of climate change”—and the attendant rise of megadroughts—”the current scale of marijuana cultivation in Northern California could be catastrophic for aquatic species.”

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Illegal Pot Farms Are Literally Sucking California Salmon Streams Dry

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Even Life Insurance Actuaries Are Coming Around on Pot

by MaynardMcnutt Posted on March 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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A copy of Contingencies—the official magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries—came in the mail on Monday. I don’t know why—I’m not an actuary; I’m not even in a celebrity death pool. But there’s some interesting stuff in there. AAA president Mary D. Miller, in a column titled “It Takes an Actuary,” boasts that “our world will be more vital than ever” in the era of drones and Big Data, as people find more and more innovative ways to die; the puzzle columnist is retiring.

But I was mostly struck by the cover story:

Contingencies! Tim Murphy

Weed!

With the legalization movement racking up victory after victory, the writer, Hank George, seeks to correct a misunderstanding among his actuarial colleagues—that marijuana “conferred the same relative mortality risk as cigarette smoking.” To the contrary, he writes, “recreational marijuana users enjoy better physical fitness and get more exercise than nonusers” and “have even been shown to have higher IQs.” He concludes: “The tide is turning—life underwriters would be wise to be at the front end of this curve, and not stubbornly digging in their heels to the detriment of their products.”

For now, at least, life insurers are still holding the line on pot smoke as a vice on par with cigarettes. But it’s a testament to how far the legalization movement has grown beyond its hippie roots that even the actuaries are starting to fall in line.

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Even Life Insurance Actuaries Are Coming Around on Pot

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