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.

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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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