Lansing - A member of a state board charged with creating new rules for the virtually unregulated medical marijuana industry on Monday called for all existing dispensaries to be shuttered until official licenses can be doled out. But the board tabled the issue until the Bureau of Medical Marijuana Regulation and the office of Attorney General Bill Schuette can weigh in after retired State Police sergeant David Bailey raised the idea. Anxiety quickly rippled through the boardas second public hearing as people lined up to express fear and anger that they would have to resort to the black market to find medical marijuana. [continues 187 words]
Former Fox 2 Detroit anchor Anqunette Jamison Sarfoh is throwing her support behind a movement to legalize all forms of marijuana for adults over 21 in Michigan. Sarfoh was previously on a leave of absence from Fox due to medical issues related to her multiple sclerosis condition and announced her decision to retire on Tuesday. Sarfoh will be introduced as a leading member of the grassroots organization MILegalize at a fundraiser Wednesday at Weber's Inn in Ann Arbor. "I loved my job, but multiple sclerosis was making it harder and harder to do it," she said in a video post on social media Tuesday morning. [continues 252 words]
A new study put out by University of Michigan researchers suggests that over time, marijuana use dampens the response of the area of the brain that responds to rewards. Researchers with UM's Addiction Research Center and Department of Psychology found over time marijuana use shifts the brain's reward system so that a person may need more of the substance to get that level of satisfaction they would normally get from "natural rewards," such as food. "This kind of suggests that marijuana may be biasing the brain's reward system away from things the brain would normally find pleasurable," said the study's Senior Researcher and UM Assistant Professor Mary Heitzeg. [continues 543 words]
Windsor - Canada is moving to legalize recreational marijuana use next year and authorities here say it could mean an influx of Metro Detroiters craving cannabis. However, experts said that depends on how Canadian laws on the drug are set up and whether Michigan's legislators and municipal governments continue relaxing marijuana rules. "Being neighboring jurisdictions, we've always taken advantage of the other jurisdiction for one thing or another," Windsor Police Chief Al Frederick said. "Canadians have shopped in the United States, and because we had a younger drinking age, Americans took advantage of that. [continues 905 words]
Detroit - Several medical marijuana caregivers and patients have filed a class-action lawsuit alleging the Michigan State Police crime lab intentionally misrepresented test results that expose thousands of people to possible felony charges. The civil rights lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court in Detroit, alleges the state police acted in concert with the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan (PAAM) and other law-enforcement agencies, including the Oakland County Sheriff's Office. The lawsuit was triggered by an alleged ongoing policy by the state to produce inaccurate test results that show marijuana seized during criminal investigations contained the synthetic cannabinoid Tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which is responsible for marijuana's psychoactive effects. THC has little or no psychoactive effect when a marijuana plant is converted to an oil or edible, according to the lawsuit. [continues 350 words]
Roadside Drug Testing Is a Back Door Prohibition on Marijuana, a Nightmare for Medical Users Before breaking for the summer, the Legislature approved an extra-constitutional one-year pilot program that allows police officers to conduct roadside saliva testing on drivers they suspect might be under the influence of a variety of drugs. It's the kind of legislation that sounds beneficial, but threatens privacy and due process rights. Gov. Rick Snyder should veto a bill that is bound to be a litigation machine. [continues 420 words]
MI Legalize's Lawsuit Challenges Law, Policy That Nulls Signatures Lansing - A Michigan group seeking to put a marijuana legalization question on the November ballot is taking its fight to court. MI Legalize on Thursday filed a lawsuit against the state in the Michigan Court of Claims, challenging a law and policy that effectively invalidated its petition signatures collected outside of a customary 180-day window. Attorneys Jeff Hank, Thomas Lavigne and Matthew Abel, members of the MI Legalize board, argue the law and policy are inconsistent with the Michigan Constitution, which allows for initiated petitions but does not specify a time limit for signature collection. [continues 680 words]
Lansing - A group seeking to legalize marijuana in Michigan submitted an "insufficient" number of valid signatures to qualify for the November ballot after collecting outside of a traditional 180-day window, state elections officials said Tuesday. In a staff report, the Bureau of Elections recommended the Board of State Canvassers reject the MI Legalize petition at its Thursday meeting. The activist-led group last week submitted an estimated 354,000 signatures, more than the 252,523 required to make the ballot, but the bureau said only 146,413 were collected within 180 days of the filing. State law, updated Tuesday to tighten that window, had treated older signatures as "stale and void." [continues 456 words]
Lansing - Michigan marijuana activists on Wednesday submitted more than 350,000 petition signatures in hopes of putting a recreational legalization question before voters this fall, but the prospects of making the November ballot remain cloudy. "It was a huge effort," Jeff Hank, executive director of MI Legalize, told reporters outside the Michigan Secretary of State's Office. "We had thousands of people volunteer to circulate petitions, and we had all sorts of people donate small amounts of money." MI Legalize needed to submit at least 252,523 signatures by Wednesday, but it's unclear how many of its signatures will be considered valid because the group collected well beyond a traditional 180-day window written into state law. [continues 316 words]
Lansing - An increasingly long-shot effort to put a marijuana legalization measure on Michigan's 2016 ballot suffered another setback Thursday, when the Board of State Canvassers deadlocked on a policy revision for proving the validity of old signatures. The two Republicans and two Democrats on the board were at odds over state Bureau of Elections recommendations that would have updated and eased the state policy for "rebutting" and rehabilitating signatures collected outside a traditional 180-day collection window. The proposed updates stalled in a series of 2-2 votes. [continues 633 words]
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. [continues 472 words]
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. [continues 479 words]
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. [continues 476 words]
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. [continues 502 words]
Re: The Detroit News' Dec 12 story, "FBI agent shot in Detroit drug raid": We seem to hear stories like this one about the enormous drug bust and injured FBI agent so often that it makes you wonder whether police officers really still believe we're making a dent in the drug market. It makes you wonder whether it's even worth it, considering a veteran officer was shot during this big drug bust. Officers are hurt and killed in the line of duty, and we can do something about it. [continues 129 words]
Lansing - A group seeking to put recreational marijuana legalization on the November 2016 ballot abruptly stopped collecting signatures at the end of September, prompting a competing pro-pot group to speculate the other campaign is faltering. "We've heard rumors they were out of money. We haven't seen them on the street," said Jeff Hank, chair of the MI Legalize campaign. "To take a month off from petitioning is odd." But Republican political consultant Matt Marsden, who is heading the Michigan Cannabis Coalition, says the campaign is taking a "pause" to study the 210,000 voters who have already signed in pursuit of the minimum 252,523 valid voter signatures needed to get on the ballot. [continues 333 words]
We may not think of ourselves as a vindictive country, but consider this: To even get us back to the incarceration rate of 1972 - hardly ancient history - we would have to reduce the number of people in prison by 80 percent. That's how overboard we've gone when it comes to locking people up. Trying to dial us back from this hyper-incarceration is a group called JustLeadershipUSA. It teaches former prisoners how to open America's eyes to our jail addiction. The other night, I attended the graduation for 19 fellows who'd just finished the yearlong course in leadership. They'd been chosen from 117 applicants nationwide on the basis of the good they'd been doing since they got out of prison. [continues 331 words]
In the United States, and in Michigan, autism is growing. In fact, it is growing at such an alarming rate that it has just recently been identified as a significant public health issue, due to statistics provided by the Center for Disease Control's Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, a nationwide federal program that tracks autism rates around the country. Estimates show that autism rates have risen in every report since tracking began in 2002, from one in 150 in 2002 to one in 68 in 2010. There is not a cure, however, new studies show, autism can be treated. [continues 378 words]
I was saddened and disappointed to read The Detroit News report that Detroit police officers had raided a medical marijuana dispensary and arrested several apparent bad actors who were allegedly selling marijuana to eighth graders. As a member of the Michigan Cannabis Development Association (MCDA), I was appalled and disgusted by these alleged actions, as were many of my colleagues, who are legitimate businessmen and businesswomen trying to provide medicine to patients with serious illnesses. The MCDA believes that medical marijuana, which can be tremendously beneficial to legitimate patients with serious medical conditions, should be for the medical use of registered patients only. [continues 250 words]
I read with interest Nolan Finley's Editor's Note, "Get pot legalization right," and his prediction that marijuana would be legal for adults in Michigan by the end of 2016. To that end, I have been working on legislation to decriminalize and regulate the trade in marijuana. Getting it right and learning from the experience in Colorado is critical if Michigan is to maximize the public safety and financial gains of ending prohibition. Marijuana prohibition is a colossal failure. It is an expensive and hopeless endeavor that drives profits for violent criminals. Our head-in-the-sand policy doesn't keep marijuana out of the hands of adolescents, and it pushes the trade in marijuana into neighborhoods. Additionally, it distorts the priorities of our law enforcement resources. Rather than wasting hundreds of millions of dollars every year arresting and prosecuting marijuana users, we can redirect those efforts toward providing substance abuse treatment and taking down violent criminals. [continues 480 words]
