Six New England governors called on health care professionals Tuesday to work with government officials to combat the opioid epidemic and control prescriptions, describing a grim reality of addiction across the region they govern. "There is not an issue more pressing I know for all of us at this table," said Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, addressing an audience at Harvard Medical School. "We are losing good people to the opioid crisis that is sweeping across America, and we need your help." [continues 542 words]
Personal pot possession in California was reduced from an arrest to an infraction in 2010, but systemic racism around pot enforcement continues, a new study finds. The American Civil Liberties Union of California, in conjunction with the Drug Policy Alliance, published a groundbreaking, heavily reported piece of research Monday that concludes that the Black community in California faces ticketing for pot at a rate four times as high as whites. Latinos have about double the rate of pot tickets as whites. [continues 1008 words]
Editor's note: This is day three of a four-day series that examines the impact heroin is having on the community through the eyes of the addicts, their families, law enforcement and the groups that provide treatment. MOUNT ZION - Hearing a 35-year-old addict say things her son might have said made Kathy Burkham apprehensive. That's because Tyler Yount's decision to use heroin "one more time" after staying clean 11 months and two weeks was the last one he ever made. He overdosed on June 14, 2009, dying at age 23. [continues 729 words]
EDITOR'S NOTE: Legalizing recreational marijuana is being seriously considered in New Jersey. The most recent Rutgers-Eagleton poll shows public support for legalizing recreational marijuana in New Jersey is 58 percent -- the highest it's ever been -- with 39 percent opposed. Although Gov. Chris Christie has said he would not sign a bill legalizing recreational marijuana, both the state Senate and Assembly are working on legislation. This is the second in a three-part series that will explore the issue of legalizing recreational marijuana and its potential effects on Sussex County and the surrounding area. The series will look at the economic, public health and criminal justice impact legalization could have. [continues 2557 words]
NORTH OLMSTED, Ohio - Nicholas DiMarco was 18 when he died from a dose or heroin laced with fentanyl. He left behind a grief-stricken father tormented by questions. "The biggest mistake that I made I looked at my son and I thought of it as a rational, normal person," Fred DiMarco said. "I was like, well he's going to quit. If he doesn't quit, he's going to go to prison for three years. Who would take that risk? He's going to quit. It's killing people. Who would take something that's going to kill them?" [continues 605 words]
Businessman Seeks to Open Dispensaries, Share Revenue With Schools From a veranda overlooking Avalon harbor, real estate broker Mark Malan gazed at oceanfront cottages, a curved promenade and passing sailboats with brightly colored pennants. To tourists, it was a place to bask in sun and surf just an hour from the California coast. But that's not what the Long Beach businessman saw. Malan aims to turn his real estate office here into the first medical marijuana dispensary on Santa Catalina Island, and he's trying to make the idea attractive by promising to share a small portion of the revenue with local schools and city government. [continues 619 words]
Congress and President Obama are under pressure to reschedule marijuana. While rescheduling makes sense, it doesn't solve the state/federal conflict over marijuana (descheduling would be better). But more important, it wouldn't fix the broken scheduling system. Ideally, marijuana reform should be part of a broader bill rewriting the Controlled Substances Act. The Controlled Substances Act created a five-category scheduling system for most legal and illegal drugs (although alcohol and tobacco were notably omitted). Depending on what category a drug is in, the drug is either subject to varying degrees of regulation and control (Schedules II through V) - or prohibited, otherwise unregulated and left to criminals to manufacture and distribute (Schedule I). The scheduling of various drugs was decided largely by Congress and absent a scientific process - with some strange results. [continues 601 words]
Home groan Clint and Rebecca Lockwood rushed to City Hall when they heard Colorado Springs City Council was about to limit home grows to 12 plants, but Council had already adopted the ordinance. So they went home worried sick about their son, Calvin, who's severely autistic and relies on homemade CBD oil to keep his aggression under control. Without it, their home is hell. The Lockwoods say that, unmedicated, Calvin won't sleep, sweats, shakes, eats furniture, attacks his younger brother and bashes his head into the wall until he bleeds. [continues 800 words]
Colorado pot smokers are helping send 25 students to college, the first scholarships in the U.S. funded with taxes on legal marijuana. The awards offered by Pueblo County, in southern Colorado, are the latest windfall from legal Colorado marijuana sales that are also helping build schools and aid the homeless - and in one county, providing 8% raises to municipal workers. Pueblo County is granting $1,000 each to the students; recipients will be announced later this month. "It's incredible," said Beverly Duran, the executive director of the Pueblo Hispanic Education Foundation, which is overseeing the scholarships. "Every year we get a nice pool of students ... but we can always only award to a small percentage. This for us expands that to extraordinary lengths." [continues 221 words]
A school district board in El Paso County approved Thursday a policy to allow therapeutic marijuana products at its schools. The District 49 Board of Education, in Peyton, unanimously, in a five-to-zero vote, approved the "Compassionate Administration of Therapeutic Cannabinoid Products on District Property" policy, the district announced in a media release. The policy, known as "Jaxs' policy," was approved as part of a regularly scheduled monthly meeting and is the first of its kind in the state, according to the district. [continues 286 words]
On a recent bright afternoon, two teenage boys in boat shoes and shorts strolled up Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in a crowd of passers-by. At 56th Street they paused as one pulled an electronic pipe out of his pocket and held it to his friend's lips. Inside was a potent and little-studied drug made from distilled marijuana; they were emboldened, they said, by the fact that the gooey wax hardly has a smell, and is so novel in New York that, even if discovered, parents, teachers or even the authorities hardly seem to know what it is. [continues 1085 words]
In the week leading up to the end of the Second Regular Session of the State Legislature, two major pieces of marijuana legislation met their fates. In the first week of May, a proposal to certify organic marijuana at the state level was rejected in a Senate committee by a vote of 4-3, while Jack's Law, a bill requiring Colorado schools to accommodate the use of non-smokeable medical marijuana by students, passed both the House and Senate. These bills are small, but significant pieces of legislation. They were necessitated by conflicts between state and federal laws concerning the rights of cannabis patients and consumers. [continues 571 words]
Massachusetts voters are evenly divided over a proposed ballot question that would legalize the recreational use of marijuana, but they strongly support another proposed referendum that would allow more charter schools in the state, according to a new Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll. Voters also overwhelmingly back legislation that would protect transgender people from discrimination in malls, restaurants, and other public accommodations - and allow people to use the public restroom that matches their gender identity. Even more popular was a proposed "millionaires' tax" that would raise rates on residents with annual incomes of $1 million or more. It garnered runaway support in the poll. [continues 1127 words]
UKIAH - Mendocino County's needle exchange is reached off Highway 101 after winding through verdant hills and past multimillion-dollar wineries. It's a simple two-story bungalow with white lace curtains on a Ukiah street where, on a recent sunny afternoon, several drug addicts waited to exchange used syringes. Operated as part of the Mendocino County AIDS/Viral Hepatitis Network, it collected and redistributed about 127,000 needles last year over the course of 6,259 visits, said Libby Guthrie, the network's executive director. [continues 876 words]
FAIRBANKS - When Megan and Marcus Mooers started thinking about opening a private marijuana club, they knew they wanted the name to have the initials THC. THC is short for tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient in marijuana. "We kind of spitballed for names until we found one that worked," Megan Mooers said. "It had to be something clever, something we could brand." They came up with The Higher Calling, opened their doors in November and attracted hundreds of members. But five months later, Fairbanks' first marijuana business closed because it lacked enough dues-paying members to continue. Now, under local law, marijuana clubs in the Fairbanks North Star Borough are illegal. [continues 1106 words]
County Ran into City Pushback on Authority to Levy on a Single Product Adams County's voter-sanctioned special tax on recreational marijuana sales, which went into effect last summer, was no easy thing. Three cities - Northglenn, Aurora and Commerce City - sued the county, claiming that it didn't have the authority under state law to levy a tax on a single product. Coupled with their own municipal taxes on pot, they argued that an additional county levy would put retail pot stores in their jurisdictions at a competitive disadvantage to others. [continues 304 words]
It's Relevant to Student Discipline, Employment Policy TAMPA - City officials toiled over the details for months before adopting a law decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana. It's been a month since the regulation took effect, but one segment of the community is still wrestling with its reaction to changes that make possession no more serious than a traffic ticket in the eyes of the law: Hillsborough County schools. Students likely still will be punished for possession - Hillsborough County schools are drugfree for all students and employees - but decriminalization could change the way teachers and other employees are hired, school officials say. At least in Tampa. "The world is changing around us," school board Chairwoman April Griffin said. "We need to have a conversation about what it means if you've received a citation as opposed to being arrested." [continues 784 words]
Congress and President Obama are under pressure to reschedule marijuana. While rescheduling makes sense, it doesn't solve the state/federal conflict over marijuana (de-scheduling would be better). But more important, it wouldn't fix the broken scheduling system. Ideally, marijuana reform should be part of a broader bill rewriting the Controlled Substances Act. The Controlled Substances Act created a five-category scheduling system for most legal and illegal drugs (although alcohol and tobacco were notably omitted). Depending on what category a drug is in, the drug is either subject to varying degrees of regulation and control (Schedules II through V) -- or completely prohibited, otherwise unregulated and left to criminals to manufacture and distribute (Schedule I). The scheduling of various drugs was decided largely by Congress and absent a scientific process -- with some strange results. [continues 607 words]
In modern medicine, it is only common sense that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It is well understood by patients and doctors alike that it is much more effective and cheaper to prevent a disease, or catch it in its early stages, than to treat it once it has become a serious health risk. Although there is now an overwhelming expert consensus that drug and alcohol addiction are medical conditions, just like breast cancer or diabetes, our approach to prevention has not caught up to the medical science. [continues 537 words]
David Umeh's rented SUV yanked to a halt in front of the glass-and-steel facade of City-Center DC, glitzy home to Gucci and Dior and Hermes and the next customer of the marijuana revolution. A young woman slid out the passenger side and strode up to a man still dressed in the sharp gray suit of a Washington nine-to fiver waiting outside the center's tony apartment building. He grinned as she handed him a bottle of apple juice with lemon and mint, for which he had shelled out upward of $55. "Fresh-pressed," she told him, sticking to the script that Umeh had taught her. [continues 1192 words]
