Hub top cop William B. Evans yesterday slammed medical marijuana dispensaries as crime magnets, while city councilors were left fuming after state officials blew off a public hearing on the siting of two local pot shops - one of them less than half a mile from a Roxbury grade school. "I can just see this being abused big-time. You can imagine how many phony scripts are going to be out there for people with their bad backs, their ingrown toenail. You name it. And then they're going to be out there with their 2 pounds - they get two months' supply when they go in - they're going to be out there selling it," Evans said on Boston Herald Radio. [continues 519 words]
A Madison Heights businessman is building a facility in Canada to grow government-controlled medical marijuana that he hopes to turn into a $5 billion a year business that could spread to the U.S. Bill Chaaban, CEO of Creative Edge Nutrition Inc. headquartered in Madison Heights, is working with that company's Canadian subsidiary, CEN Biotech, to build a marijuana growing facility near Windsor in Lakeshore, Ont. The company has gotten permission from the national Health Canada department to build its industrial growing facility. Once it is complete and Health Canada inspects it, Chaaban expects he will get permission to grow and sell marijuana for import and export with the roughly 30 countries worldwide that allow for medical or legal marijuana use. [continues 675 words]
Activist Dean Wilson says he's no longer a drug user Dean Wilson is having a good laugh as he recalls the time a popular Canadian author assessed the drug activist's celebrity status way back in the day. "Michael Ondaatje told me I was Canada's most famous junkie." Famous because of his real-life role in Fix: The Story of an Addicted City, a documentary film by Nettie Wild that captured Wilson's battles with addiction and his fight with city hall to do something about the mounting drug deaths. [continues 986 words]
'Demons: Our Changing Attitudes to Alcohol, Tobacco and Drugs' By Virginia Berridge In 2007, scientists writing in the British medical journal the Lancet caused a stir when they ranked 20 often-abused drugs in terms of their degree of harm. Few readers had objections to the scientists' naming heroin as the worst drug, or khat (a stimulant popular mostly in the Arab world) coming in as least dangerous. What raised hackles was their uncompromising evaluation that alcohol was worse than cannabis, which in turn was worse than LSD; and that the street version of the synthetic narcotic methadone was worse than any of them. [continues 104 words]
Boston's two proposed medical marijuana dispensaries - both of which have rankled city councilors over their location or claims of support - - will be the subject of a City Council hearing next week. City Council President Bill Linehan and District 3 Councilor Frank Baker announced the March 4 hearing yesterday, billing it as "an opportunity to hear questions, concerns and recommendations from city agencies, neighborhood stakeholders and the proponents themselves." "I just think it's important, anytime a new business model shows up near a residential or a business location, that people have an opportunity to come in and voice their opinion on it," Linehan said. "Because this is a state-regulated activity, there were no opportunities for the city government to get involved, until this point." [continues 162 words]
In response to Cindy O'Neill's belief that marijuana will only benefit addicts: Cindy you've obviously never watched a loved one die a slow, excruciating death; or known someone who did receive relief from your so-called stronger pills, but was still left with nausea and drastic weight loss from chemo. It's been proven with medical research that marijuana does help cancer patients, people with nerve damage pain and, yes, those with anxiety, to name a few. You will find it is no longer the nickel bag from the street helping these people. There are now many different strains, each containing different medical properties responding to different illnesses. They have even recently discovered a strain that will alleviate seizures in children with epilepsy and other brain disorders; would you deny them the chance at living a normal life? [continues 196 words]
CRASS, CALLOUS, AND unethical are three words the federal representative for Vancouver Centre uses to describe a Conservative Party website attacking supervised injection facilities like Insite. "Addiction should be treated as a medical problem," Liberal MP Dr. Hedy Fry told the Straight. "There is absolutely no reason that politicians should be putting their heavy hands into clinical decisions=C2=85.I think that this is ideology." The website, titled "Keep heroin out of our backyards", asks citizens to support new requirements for the approval of supervised injection facilities. It's part of a new Conservative re-election strategy, according to a February 10, 2014, report in the Toronto Star. [continues 416 words]
Addicts Are Packing Naloxone to Help Fellow Drug Users Who Have 'Gone Down' TORONTO - David Wheeler deftly snaps off the top of a tiny vial of naloxone, draws the drug up into a syringe and gives it several sharp raps with his fingernail to make sure it contains no air. The next step would be to plunge the needle into a drug user who has "gone down." This is a demonstration, but Wheeler has been through this process for real 19 times - six of those for one person - reversing heroin or other opiate overdoses in fellow drug users, most of them living in his downtown Toronto apartment building. [continues 572 words]
TAMPA - Heroin deaths across the Tampa Bay area remain relatively low, but experts warn the crackdown on prescription drug abuse could reverse that trend. Hillsborough County reported two heroin deaths in 2012 and two in 2011. Pinellas and Pasco counties, which are grouped together in Florida Department of Law Enforcement statistics, reported one death each in 2012 and 2011. Law enforcement officials and drug experts, though, say they expect to see more addicts turning to heroin as Florida clamps down on prescription drug abuse, which has risen to epidemic levels in recent years. [continues 488 words]
Co. Switched Out Prez With Weed Conviction A West Coast medical marijuana magnate and convicted felon whose role in a proposed Roxbury pot shop was downplayed as a "strategic adviser" was, in fact, the company's president until the day before the firm applied for a state weed-dealing license, the Herald has learned. Corporate filings for Green Heart Holistic Health & Pharmaceuticals Inc. list Stephen R. DeAngelo - who pleaded guilty to possession with intent to deliver 50 pounds or more of marijuana in Maryland in 2001 - - as the company president and a member of the board of directors as of Nov. 18. [continues 307 words]
It's obvious Orchard Gardens principal Andrew Bott is passionate about his school and cares deeply for his students. And he worries about them all the time. He worries about them walking to school when it's icy. He worries about them taking the T late at night. And now, there's a new worry. A medical marijuana dispensary is coming to Southampton Street, less than a half-mile from the cheery-yellow Roxbury school, which houses kindergarten through eighth grade. [continues 357 words]
MUCH OF THE recent controversy over medical marijuana licenses centers on complaints that some companies exaggerated how much local support they had. The application process gave extra points to firms with letters of support or statements of non-opposition in the places where they plan to open a dispensary. But city officials across the state shied away from writing such letters. Some applicants were unable to show any sign of local support. So it is understandable that those who failed to get the highly coveted licenses are upset by the notion that some winners may have stretched the truth. [continues 447 words]
Philip Seymour Hoffman's Death Opens a Door on an Epidemic of Drug Abuse. The death of Philip Seymour Hoffman last week, apparently of a heroin overdose, says a lot about the epidemic of opiate abuse gripping the United States. That epidemic, which I've spent the last year researching for a forthcoming book, is rooted in a 20-year revolution in medicine that has resulted in far wider prescribing of opiates. Narcotic painkillers are now prescribed for chronic back and knee pain, fibromyalgia, headaches, arthritis and other ailments. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, consumption of these opioids has risen 300% since 1999, making them the most prescribed class of medicines in America. [continues 767 words]
Massachusetts health regulators took the unusual step late Wednesday of ordering companies that received medical marijuana dispensary licenses to submit sworn statements that their applications were truthful, while on Beacon Hill the House speaker called for an investigation into whether some dispensary applicants submitted false information. The Department of Public Health in a statement raised the prospect of rejecting any of the 20 dispensary licenses awarded last month, saying, "None of the dispensary licenses are final." The companies will now be required to "verify local support and other information provided in the application through a signed attestation to [the agency] before any final licensure is determined." [continues 826 words]
I wish Paul Greenberg would dismount from his moral high horse and give marijuana a rest. Instead of listening to his Guy Lombardo and Lawrence Welk records tonight, perhaps Paul should watch the 1930s propaganda classic, Reefer Madness. My favorite scene that I remember is the guy smoking a joint and then jumping out of an upstairs window. Gateway drug? Sure, and those two beers at the fraternity house party turn you into an alcoholic. I believe decriminalization of the possession and use of small amounts of marijuana is both smart and inevitable. Too many law enforcement resources are wasted on chasing weed. [continues 59 words]
PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN, who died of an apparent heroin overdose on Sunday, was just one of hundreds of New Yorkers who fall victim to this drug each year. Heroin-related deaths increased 84 percent from 2010 to 2012 in New York City and occur at a higher rate - 52 percent - - than overdose deaths involving any other substance. I am an emergency physician at NYU Langone Medical Center and Bellevue Hospital, but I rarely see victims die of heroin overdose because most fatalities occur before patients get to the hospital. Overdoses often take place over one to three hours. People just slowly stop breathing; often they are assumed to be sleeping deeply, or they are alone. [continues 698 words]
It was bound to come to this. First "medical" marijuana is being peddled in our neighborhoods and now we find out it will be advertised - - hell, is being advertised on radio. At the end of last week the Department of Public Health awarded 20 of the 35 licenses permitted under a voter-approved law to outfits vying to set up the state's first pot shops. The Boston ones are slated to open at 70 Southampton St. - less than half a mile from the Orchard Gardens K-8 School in an area already home to three methadone clinics - and at 364 Boylston St. in the heart of Back Bay and a stone's throw from dorms for students from Emerson and Suffolk. [continues 227 words]
Mayor Martin J. Walsh backed off his strong stance against medical pot dispensaries near schools and neighborhoods yesterday, admitting "you can't stop them" even as rattled Hub residents learned one weed shop won state approval to set up near a Roxbury school and another in the posh Back Bay. "I'm going to live up to the terms of the law," Walsh said yesterday. "We have requirements now that are out there, and as mayor of the city we're going to enforce those. You can't stop them. We just got to make sure when they're sited, they follow all the proper procedures." [continues 389 words]
Towns are grappling with the decision last year to legalize the manufacture and sale of medical marijuana. Change can be difficult for Connecticut's 169 municipalities. It's especially challenging for local planning and zoning commissions to wade into uncharted waters. And nothing is more uncharted than a medical marijuana dispensary. Towns are grappling with the General Assembly's decision last year to legalize the manufacture and sale of medical marijuana. To say that towns are unprepared to regulate such enterprises is quite an understatement. Since there was never any need to address them, marijuana dispensaries have gone unmentioned in local zoning codes for as long as zoning has been around. [continues 638 words]
Orangeville council will get a legal opinion to guide them on how the town may deal with applications for commercial marijuana grow operations in the town. Councillor Jeremy Williams said during Monday's council meeting the possibility of a facility opening in Orangeville where medical marijuana would be grown, and how such an application could be dealt with, needs to be discussed in detail. Otherwise, he said, council may face a similar situation to one experienced in 2012 when the prospect of a methadone clinic opening caused people anxiety. [continues 319 words]
