Liquor and Cannabis Board Would Double Number of Stores in Seattle

Trying to fold medical marijuana into the state's retail system, state Liquor and Cannabis Board (LCB) staff are recommending an additional 222 retail stores around Washington, including 21 in Seattle.

If adopted on Jan. 6 by the LCB's three board members, the Wednesday proposal could double the number of stores in Seattle and increase the statewide total from 334 to 556 stores.

In all, King County could see 53 additional stores. Bellevue could double its number of stores from four to eight. Ten other King County cities could see one or two more stores.

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I have a few concerns.

I'm concerned that I may be fronting the largest drug operation since Scarface and meth labs ruled the night.

I'm concerned about kids and marijuana and making more of it available to their developing young flea-brains (which, if they're like mine, will remain half-baked until their late 20s).

I'm concerned about involving the government in oversight and taxation, as we know full well they fuck up everything they get their grubby hands on (and are already squabbling over and redirecting the massive tax revenue being collected).

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The "Just Say No" campaign kept me off drugs.

NOT! Still, I appreciate Nancy Reagan for using ignorant scare tactics to at least try to keep kids like me away from the Devil's Lettuce. Drugs are for adults, and having a dialogue about that notion is important.

The conversation does not, however, require a sizzling egg to represent your brain on drugs.

Drug Abuse Resistance Education campaigns, aka DARE, were all the rage in the 1980s and '90s, sucking up hundreds of millions of tax dollars on TV spots, branded backpacks, stickers, and even cartoons featuring Daren the Lion. At its peak, the program was deployed in 75 percent of American schools, with police officers leading classroom discussions and assemblies that students absolutely loved-not because of the content, but because it got us out of math class.

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Counterintuitive but true: Pot can make you more productive.

One of my favorite things to do is get stoned to the bejesus and clean house. And I'm not just talking about casual dusting, either; I'm talking about down on your belly, shoving the long extension vacuum tool deep under the bed and sucking up dust mites and fur balls, only to discover long-lost socks, exercise equipment, underwear (whose are those?!), and enough change to go out and buy MORE weed to smoke and then Shop-Vac the garage. In this way, stoned cleaning is a sustainable endeavor.

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Medical-Marijuana Merchants

Smaller Buffer Zones Would Rule Out Some Current Sites

Alex Cooley was a pioneer in legitimizing the pot industry in Seattle. But after seeing Mayor Ed Murray's plan for licensing more pot merchants, Cooley wonders why he bothered.

The mayor's proposal would not allow Cooley, the first medical marijuana grower to come out of the shadows and gain all appropriate city building permits, to continue farming at his Sodo location because it is too close to a childcare center.

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Our King County Sheriff is outspoken in his support for legalization.

The sky has not fallen because we have legalized marijuana in Washington. Is it going to work long-term? I don't know; we'll have to wait and see. But clearly, what we were doing before-the War on Drugs-did not work, so it was time to try something new. The citizens suggested legalizing marijuana-and I support it."

It's a reasonable-enough statement, but somewhat surprising in that it comes from our own King County Sheriff, John Urquhart. "I still think it was a good decision for the citizens of Washington," Urquhart told me in an interview last week. "The initiative [I-502] passed statewide with 56 percent supporting it, and 63 percent in King County, so that's clearly what the citizens wanted."

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The U.S. Smart Act Would Protect Marijuana Users and Businesses in States Where It Has Been Legalized.

In 2012, voters in Washington state passed Initiative 502, which legalized the sale, consumption and taxation of marijuana products. Including Washington, 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized some form of marijuana, and in 2016, several more states are expected to consider marijuana legalization ballot initiatives.

Yet, marijuana possession or use for any purpose is still prohibited under the federal Controlled Substances Act, leaving participants in all of the state markets - including cancer patients - at risk of arrest by federal authorities.

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Wants to Ease Buffer-Zone Rules

No Change in Distance of Shops From Schools

Seattle could see a significant increase, perhaps a tripling, in the number of retail-pot stores in city limits under a proposal by Mayor Ed Murray.

The mayor wants to loosen buffer zones that now require legal pot businesses to be 1,000 feet from child-care centers, libraries, recreation facilities, public parks and transit centers. Murray would decrease the required distance to 500 feet, roughly a city block or two.

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This week, just some cold, hard stats.

Clearly I am in support of the legalization of marijuana. And I'm passionate about the subject not only because I enjoy smoking weed, but I'd also prefer not to be arrested for buying it. Regardless, I try to be objective on the matter, understanding that not everyone likes to get high (on cannabis, anyway), and that countering decades of Reefer Madness may take time. So in an effort to be more neutral and journalistic, I'd like to let the plethora of statistics I've gathered speak for itself. Although numbers, of course, cannot speak.

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The Country Could Have Saved the Lives of a Lot of White People If We'd Adopted a Better Approach to Drug Abuse by People With Darker Skin.

While the country was focused on locking up black and brown people for drug-related offenses, an epidemic of drug use was building elsewhere, and ignoring it for years hasn't been a kindness to the people affected.

The Seattle Times recently ran a national story headlined, "Drug war shifts as heroin use soars among whites." A few days later that was followed by an article on a study that found death rates have been climbing for poorly educated, middle-aged white people.

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Tips and pointers for your Halloweed.

Time once again to answer Stoner Mail! Given the season, I'm going with a Halloween theme.

I'm worried about some idiot putting weed-laced candy in my kid's stash-bag on Halloween. I know a lot of the urban legends about razor blades in apples were bunk, but this genuinely scares me. Should it? - -Bryan, Bothell

There are plenty of things for parents to worry about, but having your child get his or her grubby hands on marijuana-laced candy should be low on your priority list. While I do despise cannabis edibles that look like kids' candy (there's no reason for ganja gummy bears or Reefer's Peanut Butter Cups), we've now had three years of trick-or-treating in legal weed states-and not one incident involving THC-laden candy disguised as store-bought. There are, of course, plenty of items that can kill yer kid, but pot's not one: Aspirin killed 7,500 Americans last year, peanuts another 100. Hell, since 2010, poison-control-center hotlines have seen a 400 percent increase in calls in which whippersnappers got drunk on hand sanitizer! Selfies killed four people this year, vending machines another three! And those colorful laundry-detergent pods that actually look like candy have poisoned 17,200 children under the age of 6 in the past year-so I'd definitely check the Halloween bag for those suckers!

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You would have been hardpressed to find a police chief in his office in the last few days.

Dozens of them were in Washington, D.C., lobbying to get more people out of prison. They want to end the mandatory jail terms judges are forced to bestow for what are seen less as criminal acts than cries of desperation.

America's prisons are overflowing. The United States has more people in jail than any other country, including some of the harshest, most backward nations. Democratic and Republican presidential candidates may not agree on much, but they accept one statistic: With less than 5 percent of the world's population, the United States holds about 25 percent of the world's prisoners. For every 100,000 Americans, 716 are jailed - a far, far higher rate than anyplace else.

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News that's stranger than fiction.

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." That's a Hunter S. Thompson quote, and absolutely applies to the latest news related to marijuana and its legalization. Much of it is so weird, in fact, ya just can't make this shit up.

A group of Bigfoot hunters (seriously) were in search of their nonexistent furry friend in a Wildlife Management Area in Texas last month when they came across a giant crop of weeds in the woods. The hidden garden, northeast of Dallas, had almost 6,500 mature plants, worth around $6.5 million, on an acre of land. Turns out the Delta County Sheriff's department had been scoping the ganja farm to bust the guerrilla growers, but when the Bigfoot team accidentally stumbled onto the scene, they ruined the police operation-in-progress. (Probably the same reason these buffoons haven't nabbed Yeti yet.) Had the coppers been able to bust the black-market growers-who had set up generators, camouflaging tents, and watering systems-they would have faced felony charges with fines of up to $50,000 and 99 years in the slammer. Who knew Bigfoot has such a big green thumb!

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Salon Goes Deep into Pot's Role in Creativity

The subject of the lecture was infinity. The setting was the Cloud Room on Capitol Hill, where folks sat on couches and a thick white rug, nibbling on dried apricots dipped in chocolate. Jerry Zimmerman, a fixture at Canlis for decades, played a baby grand piano as the crowd of about 80 settled in.

Speaker Lesley Hazleton, an author and psychologist, then uncorked her tale of wonder and love for infinity at the event, which had sold out of $16 tickets in four hours.

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Calling out cannabis testing in sports.

Mixed-martial-arts superstar Ronda Rousey is obviously, pound for pound, the most kick-ass fighter in the world, and not to be messed with. She has also ignited a firestorm with her articulate and accurate attack on the idiocy of marijuana testing in her sport. "Rowdy" Rousey made her argument when her friend and training partner, Nick Diaz, was suspended for five years by the Nevada Athletic Association after testing positive for pot.

"I'm sorry, but it's so not right for him to be suspended five years for marijuana," Rousey said at a UFC press conference in Melbourne last week. "If one person tests for steroids, that could actually hurt a person, and the other person smokes a plant that makes him happy, and he gets suspended for five years.

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WE insist on all-natural products in our baby food and household cleaners; why don't we demand natural moods for ourselves?

Americans suffer from an overabundance of processed foods, synthetic hormones, virtual relationships, silicone breasts and, now, fake moods, brought about by an ever-increasing percentage of us taking psychiatric medications.

The patients I meet in my Manhattan psychiatric practice are stressed, sad and scared. Many lead lives with little movement, sunshine or human touch, spent staring into a computer screen, under fluorescent lights. Chronically sleep-deprived and eating poorly, they feel terrible. Women shuttling between work (where they earn less than men) and home, straddling child care and aging parents, are stretched to their limit. They escape by drinking, texting, shopping or eating. My patients want pills to make them feel better but, honestly, I'm afraid it's to make them feel less.

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Not Mandatory

However Growers Who Comply Can Show 'Seal of Approval'

Washington state announced new rules for pesticide testing in pot as the first product liability lawsuit was filed against the pot industry in Colorado over pesticide use.

New emergency rules, which took effect this week in Washington, do not make testing for pesticides mandatory. Instead, they create a system that aims to give legal pot merchants and consumers who want it some assurance that their pot does not contain residue of unapproved pesticides.

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Legal pot was supposed to bring Oregon some joy.

October 1 was supposed to be a day of historic joy in Oregon, as legal sales of marijuana were finally allowed, ending decades of Prohibition in one of the states leading the charge on the issue. Instead, the celebration was interrupted by a shooting at Umpqua Community College, where (yet another) mentally disturbed young man went on a mass killing spree with a semi-automatic weapon. Hard to stand in line for an ounce of primo weed, high-fiving budtenders, and fellow stoners at a recreational store when friends and neighbors next door are unsure if their own children are among the dead.

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With Voodoo doughnuts in hand, some Portlanders got their first taste of legal, recreational, purchased-in-Oregon weed early Thursday morning.

With cheaper taxes, legal home grow and a regulated medical marijuana system, some in the Washington pot industry worry the state will struggle to compete once Oregon's market gets running at full speed.

Here's how Oregon's law compares:

Possession

In Washington, people 21 and older can possess up to an ounce of marijuana. An ounce is the equivalent of about 60 average-size joints.

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The marijuana grow that netted jail time for four members of a self-proclaimed medicinal farming family out of Stevens County may have started with good intentions, but ended as a "distribution center," said the federal judge who handed down their sentences Friday.

"Maybe that was a byproduct of being so successful," said U.S. District Court Judge Thomas O. Rice, ruling the members of the so-called Kettle Falls Five grew more than 150 pounds of marijuana in the hills of Stevens County between 2011 and 2012.

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