SF Weekly _CA_ 1/1/1997 - 31/12/2024
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21 US CA: Column: End Of The Marijuana Free For All?Thu, 03 Sep 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:141 Added:09/03/2015

Governor Jerry Brown has spoken: It is time to get a grip on California's unregulated medical cannabis industry.

But even with JB's blessing, nothing is guaranteed.

It's nearing the 11th hour in Sacramento, where lawmakers and lobbyists are hammering out the final details of the first statewide regulations for California's multibillion-dollar marijuana industry.

Last week, Brown circulated among lawmakers his preferred vision for a regulated California cannabis industry.

Licenses would be required for every level of commercial cannabis activity - with a carve-out for individual patients and patient caregivers - and each license would be tiered, giving mom-and-pop operations a chance while taxing Big Marijuana appropriately. All this would be overseen by the state.

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22 US CA: No FixThu, 27 Aug 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:185 Added:08/27/2015

The Drug Trade Is Entrenched in the Tenderloin, the Only Place in S.F. Where Drug Users Have Some Political Power

They're outside on the corner when John Lorenz leaves his girlfriend's Tenderloin apartment in the morning; they're there when he returns. Sometimes he catches them on a shift change - like union workers clocking out after their eight hours, they're punctual. "Regular as clockwork," he told me recently.

"They" are a couple of teenage males - Honduran, says Lorenz, comfortable enough to engage them in small talk - who come into San Francisco from the East Bay for work. They're parked on the street corner, selling drugs.

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23 US CA: Column: U.S. Drug Cops Ease Up On PotThu, 27 Aug 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:124 Added:08/27/2015

As America's multibillion dollar cannabis industry continues to expand, the nation's drug cops are seizing less weed.

In 2009, the first summer of Barack Obama's presidency, a record 10.4 million marijuana plants were eliminated in America, according to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

California alone accounted for 7.5 million plants that year, according to the DEA's annual report on its "Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program," one of the biggest multi-agency law enforcement efforts in the country.

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24 US CA: Column: Superman FallsThu, 20 Aug 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:116 Added:08/20/2015

His indictment is barely a week old, but many of his former friends in organized labor and the cannabis industry have already buried Dan Rush.

Rush, 54, was once the gregarious director of the United Food and Commercial Workers' national medical cannabis and hemp division; on Aug. 10, he was indicted in federal court on two felony counts of violating labor law.

The lifelong union man - the first labor organizer to make a serious effort to bring the nascent marijuana industry on board in 2010 - is accused of selling out those same workers in order to pay off a debt.

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25 US CA: Column: Weed's Water WarThu, 13 Aug 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:120 Added:08/14/2015

This summer has been busy for law enforcement in California's Emerald Triangle, the sparsely populated rural counties where as much as 70 percent of the cannabis smoked in America is grown.

Large raids in Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity counties have yielded few arrests - a cop convoy is not subtle and provided outlaw growers enough advance warning to flee, and at least one search warrant was served at a grow that was legal - but have turned up tens of thousands of plants, worth tens of millions of dollars, plus one startling find.

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26 US CA: Column: Cannabis's No. 1 Enemy ExitsThu, 06 Aug 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:130 Added:08/06/2015

Last week, Melinda Haag, who served as the United States Attorney in San Francisco since 2010, announced her resignation effective Sept. 1. During her five years as the federal Justice Department's local prosecutor, the former corporate lawyer became the only local official I ever saw mocked in effigy.

A ten-foot-tall Haag caricature was a regular sight at protests in the Bay Area in 2012 and 2013. When not in public, the Haag effigy lived at cannabis industry trade school Oaksterdam University, one of the many marijuana businesses to suffer under Haag. Oaksterdam was lucky: the business stayed open after a federal law enforcement raid.

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27 US CA: Column: The 'Marijuana Smear' Job On Sandra BlandWed, 29 Jul 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:119 Added:07/30/2015

For those charged with ensuring her welfare, it wasn't enough to say that Sandra Bland, the 28-year-old black woman discovered dead in a Texas jail cell on July 13, died by her own hand.

Last week, authorities in Waller County, Texas, added another incredible layer to their narrative that Bland hanged herself with a garbage bag. She was under the influence of marijuana, they suggested, drugs she may have consumed - nobody can say how - during her three days in jail following a traffic stop.

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28 US CA: Column: No Piece, No JusticeThu, 23 Jul 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:124 Added:07/24/2015

Last week, on the same day Jeb Bush was in San Francisco taking Uber to a startup, President Barack Obama made a headline that, in a different context, would warm even the nuttiest Tea Partiers' hearts.

Obama went to prison.

While there, the first sitting president to go inside the national institution that houses 2.3 million Americans at a cost of $80 billion a year made an observation. His own teenage party habits - smoking marijuana, sniffing cocaine - could easily have landed the first black president in prison instead of the White House.

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29 US CA: Column: SF Nixes Pop-up Cannabis MarketplacesThu, 16 Jul 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:121 Added:07/16/2015

Last month, a collection of food trucks and vendors with portable tables under pop-up tents gathered on a strip of pavement in South of Market for a pancake breakfast. The Saturday morning meal was noteworthy enough to draw the attention of The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle, because it involved cannabis.

The "loaded" pancakes were the opening ceremony for the "Get Baked Sale," a cannabis-laced food emporium that took over the space for the day. Attendees with a medical marijuana recommendation - available from doctors on-site, as always - could sample THC-laden treats until they became comatose, and buy an armload of their preferred super-strength brownies to bring home from the vendors. If you wanted a bag of regular old cannabis flower without the hassle of going to a dispensary, you could buy that, too.

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30 US CA: Don't Let That Deal Go DownThu, 09 Jul 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:606 Added:07/09/2015

Organized Labor Helped Cannabis Evolve From a Movement to a Multi-Billion Dollar Industry. Now, Organized Labor Is Working to Ensure It Keeps a Piece of the Action.

Cannabis was good to Debby Goldsberry. The time she spent in the late 1980s and early '90s following the Grateful Dead on tour, passing out photocopied fliers that agitated for marijuana legalization, led to a high-paying career. After California legalized medical cannabis in 1996, Goldsberry cofounded one of the state's first major marijuana businesses, Berkeley Patients Group.

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31 US CA: Column: SF's Dianne Feinstein: 'Worst Senator onThu, 02 Jul 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:132 Added:07/03/2015

Four decades ago, activists gathered once a year in front of San Francisco City Hall to agitate for their cause.

The highlight of the "Day on the Grass" was a ritual smoke-in, with some of the cannabis that one of them also happened to sell out of a Castro District restaurant. Without fail, and in stark contrast to today's elected officials, a sitting San Francisco supervisor would join them.

Harvey Milk was a pioneer not just for gay rights, but also cannabis legalization. He frequently fraternized with self-described dope dealer Dennis Peron, who by 1978 had been busted by San Francisco police multiple times for dealing marijuana.

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32 US CA: Column: During Pride, Thank the Gay People Who Made PotThu, 25 Jun 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:110 Added:06/25/2015

The next time you relax over a glass, a joint, or a dab of your favorite recreational tonic, I want you to ask yourself a question: "Who had to die so I could have this?"

It will be an uncomfortable thought, but if your drug of choice is cannabis, it is necessary, whether your flower was sustainably grown in Mendocino or came from the cartel. For the experiment with ending cannabis prohibition in America to begin here in California and spread to most of the country, people had to die. In marijuana's case, those people were gay men - specifically, gay men dying from complications of AIDS in droves in apartments in the Castro, in an overwhelmed San Francisco General Hospital, and in childhood bedrooms in hometowns across flyover country.

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33 US CA: Column: Ubers of Marijuana Stick Workers With the RiskThu, 18 Jun 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:113 Added:06/18/2015

At about 2:30 p.m. on June 10 last year, San Francisco police pulled over Cathy Smith while she was driving on Bryant Street in SoMa, just a block away from police headquarters at the Hall of Justice. It was bad timing. Smith, who at 5-foot-2 and not quite 60 years old has the bearing of a favorite, fun aunt, had just smoked a joint in her Honda hatchback, which also had expired registration tags.

After sniffing the odor of burned pot, the cop, in his first year on the force, asked Smith if she had any more cannabis on her. She did. A former operator of a SoMa medical marijuana dispensary, HopeNet, which was shut down under federal Justice Department pressure in 2012, Smith was out that day doing deliveries to her former patrons. In various forms - hash, edibles, and individually wrapped bags - she had about 8 ounces, the legal limit for medical marijuana patients in San Francisco under SFPD policy.

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34 US CA: Column: San Francisco's First Drug WarThu, 11 Jun 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:122 Added:06/11/2015

"It was stated the other day, before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, that as many as eight Chinese opium smoking houses had been fitted up in that city for the use of white men and women, and the announcement has created a good deal of discussion, and elicited from the press recommendations for the suppression of these places.

"We are inclined to doubt whether the spread of the opium habit can be checked in this way. Opium smoking is a species of intoxication, and legislation has certainly not proved effective in dealing with vices of that kind." - Sacramento Daily Record, Nov. 20, 1875

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35 US CA: Column: Industry FearsThu, 04 Jun 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:122 Added:06/06/2015

Before shaking hands with the political establishment, most small-town chambers of commerce will dress to impress. To meet California's most electric politician last Friday, the entrepreneurs and workers in the heartland of the country's fastest-growing industry donned Carhartt work jeans and wide-brimmed sun hats, in some cases still dirty from the morning's work in the family cannabis patch - their version of "business casual."

That was fine with Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom. For his daylong visit to Garberville in remote southern Humboldt County, he was dressed down, too, having swapped his suit with trademark open-collar shirt for a pullover, jeans, and sneakers. He'd just come from a tour of a marijuana garden himself, and was now ready to present an unprecedented opportunity to the crowd of 200 farmers, hash-makers, and edibles bakers stuffed into a small community theater: to listen to what they had to say about legalizing marijuana, the basis for the local economy.

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36 US CA: Column: Drug Eviction: Pot Shop Suffers 'HostileThu, 28 May 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:127 Added:05/28/2015

These are good times in the marijuana business. With an adult recreational market still on the horizon, the California medical cannabis industry is enjoying its biggest boom time yet. Mobs of customers are fueling over a billion dollars a year in legal sales, but more important are the "investors." The cannabis game usually takes unkindly to outsiders, but not when they're carrying suitcases of cash, as the strange faces in expensive suits circling around the industry at all levels, looking for opportunities to buy into this multibillion-dollar game, are.

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37 US CA: Column: City Attorney Declares War on McDrugs in theThu, 21 May 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:118 Added:05/22/2015

I'm eating in a McDonald's for the first time in years. I'm here looking for drugs.

To enter the Haight Ashbury's most dangerous business, I must run a gauntlet at the door. A quick sidestep is needed to avoid bumping into three unattended young children bounding out into the Saturday evening sunlight, presumably in the throes of a salt-and-fat rush.

Inside, the L-shaped dining room is half-empty. A few people stand by the bathrooms; older solitary men nurse cups of coffee and shuffle through newspapers at tables near the service counter. Scanning the menu, I try to remember what Michael Pollan - or was it Eric Schlosser? - said is acceptable to eat here. I opt for small fries, and $1.95 later I'm seated on a plastic stool at a plastic table, ready to observe a hotbed for drug sales and violence in action.

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38 US CA: Column: City Changes Rules To Ban Weed In SunsetThu, 14 May 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:117 Added:05/14/2015

Lawmaking in San Francisco is a time-intensive process - except when there's an emergency, like the one Supervisor Katy Tang's office dealt with in late April.

Tang - the Board of Supervisor's youngest member, who serves the Sunset District where she grew up - introduced new legislation on April 21. Usually, new laws go through a 30-day waiting period before the next step. But Tang was in a rush. "This is very timely and needed in a short period of time," Tang aide Ashley Summers wrote in an email that asked for a hearing within a week.

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39 US CA: Column: Dry HighThu, 30 Apr 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:123 Added:04/30/2015

Last week, 60 law enforcement officers raided a massive and sophisticated illegal marijuana grow operation in Tulare County. The bust - 49 greenhouses, 12,000 plants, 50 pounds of processed product, and 2,600 pounds of "partially processed" marijuana - is one of the biggest in recent memory. It also provided an unwitting preview of what commercial cannabis cultivation will look like in post-legalization California: large farms on cheap real estate in the Central Valley, near highways and population centers, using the sun.

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40 US CA: Column: No MaThu, 23 Apr 2015
Source:SF Weekly (CA) Author:Roberts, Chris Area:California Lines:130 Added:04/24/2015

Want to escape the booming neighborhoods of San Francisco? Head west, where the rows of single-family Mediterranean-style or boxy Doelger homes that make up the Sunset District are virtually unchanged since their construction in the mid-20th century, giving the avenues a timeless feel. There are no towering construction cranes putting up condos, and 21st-century conveniences fail you: My Sidecar ride request to be taken to the Sunset was rejected three times before I settled in for a $40 cab ride.

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