GAYLORD - It's been nearly six weeks since all of the medical marijuana dispensaries in Otsego County were raided by law enforcement officials, resulting in two arrests and an ongoing investigation.

As of Friday afternoon, the execution of search warrants at nine dispensaries in Gaylord and one in Vanderbilt March 10 have been proceeded with the arrest of two men, including [name1 redacted], 45, of Gaylord, and [name2 redacted], 36, of Gaylord, though more are expected to be made, possibly by the end of the month.

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Will the marijuana game change this year?

There has been a good bit of speculation that President Obama will reschedule marijuana before he leaves office. I first heard that concept a couple of years ago from somebody at one of the national marijuana policy organizations. I took it for wishful thinking. We can wish Obama reschedules marijuana, but that doesn't make it true.

But maybe we can stop holding our breath about that. Last week the Washington Post reported that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) sent out a memo to lawmakers that it plans to decide in the first half of 2016 if it will reschedule marijuana. I'm assuming that the "first half of 2016" means by the end of June.

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The Iconic Stoner Chats With Us About Detroit, Cancer, and Donald Trump

It's a Friday morning, and Tommy Chong is about to ride up John R in a replica of The Love Machine, the 1964 Chevy Impala from Up in Smoke. He has one hand on the chain link steering wheel and what Cheech Marin might call a Led Zeppelin-sized joint in the other.

When asked if he wants to blaze, though, the most iconic of stoners declines. "It's still Michigan," he says.

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The Family Trees dispensary near Seven Mile and Plainview sits within eyeshot of a vacant liquor store and small storefront church, which are less than 1,000 feet away.

As of April 1, that means Family Trees is breaking the law. While the business has provided marijuana to patients at the location for two years without incident, owner Reginald Venoy, like many of Detroit's dispensary operators, faces an uncertain future.

Will the police kick down his door and seize his marijuana and assets? Or will he answer a knock at the door to find he's being served? Or will nothing happen?

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The Justice Department recently announced that it is resuming the "equitable sharing" part of its civil asset forfeiture program, thus ending one of the major criminal justice reform victories of the Obama administration.

Civil asset forfeiture is a legal tool by which police officers can seize and sell private property without a convicting the owner of any crime, and equitable sharing is a process by which state and local police can circumvent state restrictions on civil asset forfeiture and take property under the color of federal law.

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As a Colorado voter who helped end cannabis prohibition in my state, I've observed the current laws work as planned, protecting responsible adults who choose to use the extremely popular, God-given plant. Every subsequent poll indicates Colorado voters continue to support it, and there's every reason to believe Michigan voters will end the discrimination and continue supporting it in the future.

By any measure cannabis is safer than alcohol, and it's less addictive than coffee. In over 5,000 years of documented use, it has not killed one person, while cigarettes kill over 1,000 Americans daily. That's safety on a Biblical scale.

A sane or moral argument to continue caging or punishing responsible adults who use cannabis doesn't exist.

Stan White

Dillon, Colo.

[end]

As Michigan considers marijuana, ("Michigan voters would OK legal pot, poll says," March 28), it is important to understand the impact on public health, especially the health of teens. The debate over legalization may be confusing and contributes to the perception that marijuana is harmless.

Research shows otherwise. For example, one in six teens who start early will become addicted to marijuana, a statistic that rises to 25-50 percent with daily use. Legal-pot states are beginning to see the effect. Colorado, for example, now leads the nation in past-month marijuana use by young people.

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March 31 marks a new day in Detroit for medical marijuana. It's the last day for Medical Marijuana Caregiver Centers to apply for a license to operate in the city.

Before this, provisioning centers multiplied in a gray area of the law where they weren't exactly legal but were tolerated. That's an outgrowth of how Michigan's medical marijuana law played out when the courts ruled patients can have marijuana but didn't allow for venues to sell it. It's right in line with the weird machinations prohibitionists have always gone through to keep people away from the weed.

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A new survey of state residents likely to vote this fall found that a clear 53% majority of Michiganders would just say yes to legalizing and taxing marijuana.

The survey's result was no surprise to groups hoping to gather 253,000 signatures in Michigan to get a marijuana measure on November ballots.

"Support for legalizing marijuana continues to increase here at a rate of at least 2% per year - that's what we've been tracking in Michigan, and it seems to be roughly the same across the country," said Detroit lawyer Matt Abel, a long-time supporter of legal pot.

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The first time Brandy Zink lobbied in Congress for medical marijuana, she wasn't taken very seriously. But that was in 2000, long before the dam burst on the bud.

"Capitol Hill is very intimidating with those big stone buildings; you can hear every step you take echo down the halls," says Zink, a then-fledgling lobbyist in her early 20s. "At first it was very difficult to get an appointment with a representative. We'd be received politely, but there would be no follow-up. They would make jokes like asking, 'Do you have any samples?' or 'Are you high right now?' We were not taken seriously."

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Lansing - The Michigan Senate voted Thursday to place a hard cap on the 180-day signature collection window for statewide ballot proposals, a move that may snuff out a rule change sought by a pro-marijuana legalization group.

The legislation, now headed to the state House of Representatives, would eliminate a part of state election law allowing petitioners to challenge the presumption that signatures are "stale and void" if they are collected outside a 180-day period.

The Republican-led Senate approved the bill in a 26-10 vote, mostly along party lines.

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While many citizens accept regulations when they seem reasonable, "95 percent" of cannabis (marijuana) dispensaries being affected by new regulations do not seem reasonable. It's another achievement of government-subsidized discrimination in a country where the prevalence of discrimination is undeniable. And make no mistake: Bigots orchestrated cannabis prohibition from the beginning as an act of racism, greed, and control.

Stan White

Dillon, Colo.

[end]

The Elite Detroit medical marijuana provisioning center is located in a former car dealership on Woodward not far north of Seven Mile Road. There is a tall cyclone fence surrounding the entire facility, including a spacious parking lot. Customers can only enter and exit the lot from Woodward; there's no way to go directly into the neighborhood from there.

The self-contained little compound would seem to be the perfect place for the security conscious set.

A littler farther south, on the other side of Seven Mile, the Miles Green Acres provisioning center sits in a former ice cream shop. Fortuitously, it's next door to the Dutch Girl Donuts store. There's some convenience there: Stock up on weed and stock up on doughnuts.

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Lansing - Regulating and taxing the medical marijuana industry could generate up to $63 million a year for the state and local governments, according to a new economic analysis.

It's a conservative estimate, said Gary Wolfram, director of economics at Hillsdale College and a former deputy state treasurer for taxation and economic policy. He released the calculations Monday on a legislative package approved last year by the state House but not yet taken up by the Senate.

"This is going to generate revenue - probably a lot of revenue," Wolfram said Monday on a conference call organized by the Michigan Cannabis Development Association, which commissioned the report.

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Last spring Michigan was popping with a potential of three different initiatives to legalize recreational marijuana statewide. Today it looks like the last initiative standing is the MILegalize effort.

"I think that our approach represents the centrist position and is capable of being a reasonable and comfortable policy for the majority," says Jamie Lowell of MI Legalize. "It's not something that's super prohibitive and only allows a few to participate in this new emerging market. We kind of find ourselves with the most appealing, sensitive and grounded approach."

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The administration has opined that our country incarcerates too many people for nonviolent drug offenses. It recently decided to address that problem. However, the only people who are going to be happy about the solution are drug dealers.

In December, the federal government quietly cut almost half of the funding for Drug Enforcement Agency task forces across the country. Police chiefs across the country received a letter from the Department of Justice entitled "Deferral of Department of Justice Equitable Sharing Payments." It explained that drug forfeiture funds, which local agencies receive for working with DEA, would be "deferred" until further notice. DOJ referred to this as a $1.2 billion "rescission" needed to balance its budget.

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I've sometimes wondered what the cannabis lounge of the future will be like when cannabis connoisseurs don't have to sneak around and keep their pleasure on the down low. Will it have the typical bar and lounge look? Will it look like a coffeehouse? Will it have a psychedelic feel? Will there be overstuffed chairs providing something soft and comfortable for customers to settle back into? Will there be ferns at the windows while patrons sip chai?

I've been to a place in Holland where there was a guy selling hash from a table in the back of a regular bar but never saw any place that was specifically catering to a specific cannabis atmosphere.

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Recently an old family friend got in contact with me because she has cancer and wanted to use cannabis to alleviate the side effects of her chemotherapy. She got her card from the state and had gone to provisioning center in Detroit to buy some items. She didn't want to smoke or get high so she bought edibles. She called me to figure out if she'd got the right stuff. Personally I thought that she had bought a little too much of the wrong stuff. She had bought a bunch of CBD-infused articles that she'd been told would bring her down from the THC oil that she'd purchased.

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Apparently there is a third marijuana legalization petition that has been given the thumbs up by Michigan election officials - and it's not the investor-backed plan from the Michigan Responsibility Council that made some waves last year. This new one comes from a group calling itself MichICan and its petition is called Abrogate Prohibition in Michigan 2016.

This particular effort has been running under the radar for a short while but its plan is pretty much the most radical of all proposals so far. It calls for the legalization of marijuana without restrictions of any kind. In the words of the petition: "The agricultural, personal, recreational, medicinal, commercial, and industrial use of cannabis in any form shall be a lawful activity."

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Local doctors are not writing any pain medicine prescriptions when they find the patient is using medical marijuana. This is why we have a local heroin epidemic. Medical marijuana serves as a pain medicine, but does not cover all pain. Why are these doctors/hospitals willing to write multiple scripts for powerful pain pills, but stop writing any scripts for pain pills when they learn of the patient's medical marijuana use? Doctors, please help patients: write one script for pain pills to cover the horrific pain (some of these people are dying), and let medical marijuana get them through the rest. Or this problem will get worse.

Beverly Hynes

Lansing

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