Oregon has an addiction problem. Pockets of rural poverty, chronic homelessness and cities with lots of young people have given the state one of the highest rates of substance abuse in the nation. It is also, because there is so little money allocated to it, one of the toughest places to get treatment. A proposed solution on the ballot next week would be one of the most radical drug-law overhauls in the nation's history, eliminating criminal penalties entirely for personal use amounts of drugs such as heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine. Tax revenues from drug sales would be channeled toward drug treatment. [continues 1164 words]
PORTLAND, Ore. - About 15 years ago, when she was in her 20s, Erika Walton handed a bong to someone who turned out be a police officer, and was cited for marijuana possession. She paid the fine, she said, but the violation lingered on, haunting her record. On a recent afternoon, Ms. Walton was at a free legal clinic here in Oregon's largest city, filling out paperwork to have that infraction forever sealed. Once the process is complete, she will be able to legally say to an employer, landlord or anybody else who asks that she has never been convicted or cited for any drug crime at all. [continues 1121 words]
ANCHORAGE - Conservative candidates garnered majorities in many elections around the country on Tuesday, but so did efforts to legalize marijuana. And the lessons of that complex pattern - with voters in Oregon, Washington, D.C., and here in Alaska approving recreational marijuana, and in Florida supporting medical marijuana - are already being absorbed for the next wave of state voter referendums, and fights, already planned for 2016. People on both sides of the issue saw the victory in Alaska, where Republicans control most of the state government and liberal ideas rarely get much traction, as a particularly vivid signal flare. [continues 522 words]
KEIZER, Ore. - Two years after voters in Colorado and Washington State broke the ice as the first states to legalize sales of recreational marijuana to adults, residents of Oregon, Alaska and Washington, D.C., will vote next week on ballot measures patterned on those of the two pioneers. People on both sides of the issue say these initiatives could determine whether there will be a national tide of legalization. A changing political landscape has weakened anti-marijuana efforts. As the libertarian movement in the Republican Party has gained force, with leaders like Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, supporting decriminalization of marijuana and others going even further, an anchor of the conservative opposition to legalization has eroded. [continues 1361 words]
VANCOUVER, Wash. - John Larson, a recently retired high school science and math teacher, hopes to be in the first wave of legal recreational marijuana salespeople opening shop here in Washington State this week. Mr. Larson, 67, who was talked into the venture by his children, said he had never tried marijuana, and, in fact, voted against legalizing it in 2012. But as a business idea - well, that's different. "If people were dumb enough to vote it in, I'm all for it," he said over a cup of coffee near his shop here in southern Washington, just across the Columbia River from Portland, Ore. "There's a demand, and I have a product." [continues 929 words]
VANCOUVER, WASH. - John Larson, a recently retired high school science and math teacher, hopes to be in the first wave of legal recreational marijuana salespeople opening shop in Washington state this week. Larson, 67, who was talked into the venture by his children, said he had never tried marijuana, and, in fact, voted against legalizing it in 2012. But as a business - well, that's different. "If people were dumb enough to vote it in, I'm all for it," he said near his shop in southern Washington, just across the Columbia River from Portland, Ore. "There's a demand and I have a product." [continues 410 words]
SEATTLE - Washington State will require its approval of all packaging for edible marijuana products, Gov. Jay Inslee said Tuesday, a pre-emptory move to ban cartoons, toy images and any other labels that might appeal to children. Mr. Inslee announced the emergency set of rules on how marijuana-infused edible products are marketed and sold in retail shops as part of the state's response to reports of overdoses and under-age consumption in Colorado. "We know that people will make arguments about the First Amendment at some point," said Mr. Inslee, a Democrat, referring to the labeling restrictions at a news conference in Olympia, the capital. "But we're here to say the health of our children are predominant, and we're going to take an approach that is focused on the health of our children." [continues 536 words]
SEATTLE - The first retail shops selling legal recreational marijuana in Washington State are preparing to open next month. Cash registers are standing by, and the first crops are almost ready for harvesting. But not every part of the state is joining the party. The state attorney general, in a nonbinding legal opinion, has said local governments can regulate marijuana under the statute legalizing its recreational use, and at least 10 cities and counties in Washington have gone even further, banning marijuana businesses outright. An additional 69 municipalities, and 12 counties, have voted for moratoriums on such businesses, according to the Municipal Research and Services Center, a nonprofit group in Seattle that works with local governments on multiple issues. [continues 734 words]
SEATTLE - Legislation aimed at bringing Washington State's largely unregulated medical marijuana system under state control, which state officials have said is crucial to maintaining order as the legalized sale of recreational marijuana begins this year, died late Thursday night without a vote as the House and Senate adjourned. "I'm taken aback," said Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, after the Legislature concluded its regular session for the year with the legislation still on the calendar. "Many people at the last moment apparently did not want a bill." [continues 462 words]
SEATTLE - There should be, one might think, a note of triumph or at least quiet satisfaction in Muraco Kyashna-tocha's voice. Her patient-based cooperative in north Seattle dispenses medical marijuana to treat seizures, sleeplessness and other maladies. And with the state gearing up to open its first stores selling legal marijuana for recreational use, the drug she has cultivated, provided to patients and used herself for years seems to be barreling toward the mainstream. But her one-word summary of the outlook for medical marijuana is anything but sunny: "Disastrous," she said, standing in her shop, Green Buddha, which she fears she will soon have to close. [continues 1171 words]
SEATTLE - Stoner humor just got a lot more complicated. Back in the days when Cheech and Chong were more risque than wrinkled, it wafted along as one of those cultural subgenres, with its own nudge-and-wink punchlines. If you got it and laughed, you implicated yourself and laughed again. But now the prospect of legalized marijuana in small amounts for personal use approved by voters in Washington state and Colorado on Election Day is creating a buzz of improvisation, from local law enforcement agencies up through state government. [continues 494 words]
SEATTLE - Stoner humor just got a lot more complicated. Back in the days when Cheech and Chong were more risque than wrinkled, it wafted along as one of those cultural subgenres, with its own nudge-and-wink punch lines. If you got it and laughed, you implicated yourself - and laughed again. The police mostly kept their faces straight. But now the prospect of legalized marijuana in small amounts for personal use - approved by voters in Washington State and Colorado on Election Day - is creating a buzz of improvisation, from local law enforcement agencies up through state government. [continues 525 words]
DENVER - Proponents of marijuana have argued for years that the drug is safer than alcohol, both to individuals and society. But a ballot proposal to legalize possession of marijuana in small amounts in Colorado, likely to be on the November ballot, is putting the two intoxicants back into the same sentence, urging voters to "regulate marijuana like alcohol," as the ballot proposition's title puts it. Given alcohol's long and checkered history - the tens of thousands of deaths each year, the social ravages of alcoholism - backers of the pro-marijuana measure concede there is a risk of looking as if they have cozied up too much, or are comparable, to old demon rum. [continues 970 words]
BOZEMAN, Mont. -- With his electrician's tool belt and company logo cap, Rick Schmidt looks every bit the small-business owner he in fact is. That he often reeks of marijuana these days ... well, it is just part of the job, he said. "I went on a service call the other day -- walked in and a guy said to me, 'What have you been smoking?' " said Mr. Schmidt, 39. For Gallatin Electric, a six-employee company founded by Mr. Schmidt's father, Richard, as for other businesses in this corner of south-central Montana, medical marijuana has been central to surviving hard times as the construction industry and the second-home market collapsed. Not the smoking of it, the growing of it or even the selling of it, but the fully legal, taxable revenues being collected from the industry's new, emerging class of entrepreneurs. Three of the four electricians on staff at Gallatin, Mr. Schmidt said, are there only because of the work building indoor marijuana factories. [continues 1041 words]
HELENA, Mont. - The Montana House of Representatives voted Thursday to repeal the state's six-year-old medical marijuana law. The 63-to-37 vote, largely along party lines in the Republican-controlled chamber, pushed Montana to the front lines of a national debate about social policy, economics and health as medical marijuana use has surged in the 15 states and the District of Columbia that allow its use. "We were duped," said the House speaker, Mike Milburn, a Republican and sponsor of the repeal bill, who said he thought that the arguments about medical use had been a pretext for encouraging recreational use and creating a path to full legalization. He said he feared gang drug wars in Montana's cities and debilitation of its youth. [continues 639 words]
NEDERLAND, Colo. -- Millions of Americans expressed their feelings about marijuana last week. In Colorado, 24 communities voted to ban or restrict shops selling legal medical marijuana. In California, voters wrestled with the question of legalization for recreational use -- with issues of health, crime and taxes all coming into play -- then voted no. But here in Nederland, it was just another beautiful day high in the mountains. Marijuana has been mainstream in this outpost of the counterculture, 8,000 feet in the Rockies and an hour northwest of Denver, since the days of Bob Marley's cigar-size "spliffs" and the jokes of Cheech and Chong. [continues 882 words]
GREELEY, Colo. -- Health and law enforcement officials around the nation are scrambling to figure out how to regulate medical marijuana now that the federal government has decided it will no longer prosecute legal users or providers. For years, since the first medical marijuana laws were passed in the mid-1990s, many local and state governments could be confident, if not complacent, knowing that marijuana would be kept in check because it remained illegal under federal law, and that hard-nosed federal prosecutors were not about to forget it. [continues 1058 words]
DENVER -- Ken Gorman, an aging missionary of marijuana, was found murdered in his home here two weeks ago. The unsolved crime is exposing the tangled threads at the borderland of the legal and illegal drug worlds he inhabited. Mr. Gorman, who was 60, legally provided marijuana to patients under Colorado's medical marijuana law, but he also openly preached the virtues of illegal use, and even ran for governor in the 1990s on a pro-drug platform. In recent years, he had grown frightened as the mainstream medicine of cannabis care bumped against the unregulated and violent terrain of the illicit drug market. He had been robbed more than a dozen times in his home on Denver's west side, had recently gotten a gun and also talked of installing a steel door and gates. [continues 1187 words]
A mixture that includes the drug fentanyl has killed more than 100 people and sickened many others. CHICAGO - Police and health authorities are struggling to track down the source of a doctored, intensely powerful heroin that has killed at least 130 people in and around Chicago and Detroit and sent hundreds more to hospitals in cities from St. Louis to Philadelphia. In the labyrinthine and often paranoid world of illicit drugs, tales of killer heroin have come and gone before. But this time is different, law enforcement and health officials say. [continues 276 words]
130 Dead; Police Seek Powerful Drug's Source CHICAGO -- Police and health authorities are struggling to track down the source of a doctored, intensely powerful heroin that has killed at least 130 people in and around Chicago and Detroit and sent hundreds more to hospitals in cities from St. Louis to Philadelphia. In the labyrinthine and often paranoid world of illicit drugs, tales of killer heroin have come and gone before. But this time is different, law enforcement and health officials say. [continues 594 words]
