cannabisnews.com: Medical Marijuana: Moving Forward





Medical Marijuana: Moving Forward
Posted by CN Staff on June 17, 2004 at 07:53:56 PT
Opinion
Source: Press-Telegram 
We commend the Long Beach City Council's push toward a prompt change in the police department's policy on medical marijuana. A change is long overdue.In an editorial Tuesday we encouraged the council to form a task force that could study the issue and recommend guidelines for patients who legally use marijuana as medicine, as San Diego has done. But if the council can adopt a sound policy change more quickly without a task force, that's even better.
Long Beach will find that San Diego has already done much work in this area. The city's task force met for nearly two years on the medical marijuana issue, conferring with patients, public policy experts, district attorneys, law enforcement officials, and many others. The task force also conducted a survey of doctors on possible approaches to regulating medical marijuana in accordance with the voter-approved state law, Proposition 215.The policy ultimately adopted by the San Diego City Council was immensely sensible. The cornerstone of the plan is an ID card for patients, to be issued by the city upon confirmed proof that the patient has been authorized by a doctor to use marijuana for medical purposes. Patients' names and addresses would be placed into a registry so officers could immediately verify a patient's claim at any hour. Patients would be required to renew the cards every two years.San Diego's adopted guidelines allow patients to possess up to an ounce of marijuana for medical use, and caregivers (which are also narrowly and carefully defined and regulated) can possess up to two ounces. Patients are allowed to grow up to 24 plants indoors, but cannot grow them outdoors.As Long Beach Deputy Police Chief Robert Luna said at Tuesday's council meeting, police officers on the street have a hard time differentiating between patients who have the right to use marijuana legally and those possessing it illegally. That's exactly why an ID card is needed. Officers in the field shouldn't have to assess the validity of a doctor's note or try to subjectively decide whether or not someone is sick.A carefully regulated identification card would solve that problem, and parameters on possession and cultivation would let patients know exactly how much they can grow and store in their homes.The current police policy, which calls for officers to arrest anyone caught with pot and let the courts sort it out, is unacceptable. Because of it, sick and elderly patients legally using marijuana under state law have been subjected to humiliating, stressful and costly arrests and trials. The policy also places an unnecessary burden on the police and judicial systems.Council members Dan Baker and Val Lerch deserve credit for bringing this important issue from a citizens' advisory group to the council, and helping to move it forward in a timely manner. Baker's request, which was met with unanimous council approval Tuesday, ordered the police department and city officials to return in September with a policy change that upholds state law.In September, the council must ensure that Long Beach's medical marijuana patients no longer have to live in fear of arrest and prosecution. There is no humane or remotely logical reason for this unfortunate situation to continue.Note: L.B. aggressively tackles guidelines for medical marijuana.Source: Long Beach Press-Telegram (CA)Published: Thursday, June 17, 2004 Copyright: 2004 Los Angeles Newspaper GroupContact: speakout presstelegram.comWebsite: http://www.presstelegram.com/Related Articles & Web Site:Medical Marijuana Information Linkshttp://freedomtoexhale.com/medical.htmMedical Pot Smokers Sway City Councilhttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread19014.shtmlRx for Medical Marijuanahttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread19004.shtmlL.B. Tangled in Murky Marijuana Lawhttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread15499.shtml 
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Comment #8 posted by FoM on June 17, 2004 at 11:36:34 PT
mamawillie
I just wanted to say welcome back and I hope you had a great vacation.
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Comment #7 posted by FoM on June 17, 2004 at 11:32:25 PT
Virgil
You made me think of this with what you said. I wanted to comment about California and New York. I believe that major changes to laws concerning Cannabis will flow from the east and west coast and will be the areas of the country that will make the laws against Cannabis change for everyone. I don't think too much about states as individual states except New York, California and Washington, D.C. The heart of america's progressive way of thinking always flows east from California. They are the trend setters. I knew in 10 years whatever was happening in California would happen in Ohio then. That's just my observations.
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Comment #6 posted by Virgil on June 17, 2004 at 10:17:41 PT
What has happened in Illinois
Now that I am thinking on it, what is going on in Illinois? It would be nice if Paul Peterson would check in or we could here more.And yes, I know Chicago burnt to the ground and they now are on their Second City.
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Comment #5 posted by Virgil on June 17, 2004 at 09:54:51 PT
MMJ, media, and me, a.k.a. mmm
It was probably about 4 years ago when I got a new computer that I rejoined the Internet. I could not figure out where to find anything so I punched in marijuana.com. It was only then that I found out anything about medical marijuana. Without the Internet in a person's life, there is just not much chance that they know much of anything.They have these cards that let people with satellites get over 900 channels with everything imaginable except for shows that go to the core of reality. There has always been the horse's mouth approach to things, but when things are upside down there is a call to do everything except the most direct approach. I was suprised to read about one dispensory having 150 employees in an article FoM put up a few days ago. Why can we not get one documentary on these compassion clubs and some testimony from those that use their services? Now here I think of pot-tv. It speaks mountains that the media cannot get us some coverage of these compassion clubs. It is not like it takes some big experienced investigative reporter either. I would think some of them would be in the yellow pages, but how the heck would I know.But I want MMJ to come to NC. There was a long rivalry between New York and Chicago and everyone knew that Chicago was the Second City. Chicago is called the windy city because of the hot air the city put out when they had their big expo in the 1890's and not the wind itself.But California was the state that would outshine the Empire State and give the west coast a dominace of its own. Los Angeles would rival NYC and Chicago would now be a third city. It has been decades now that NY yielded leadership in population to California and California became the state where all things happened first.In 1972, Proposition 19 would receive 34% in the effort to make cannabis free in all of California. In 1996, the peopole of California became the first to say that cannabis should not be denied to anyone who would benefit from its use and could get a doctor to say so. There was none of this only for AIDS and cancer. People know that cannabis is not going to eat your liver out or give a man erection that would need help if it lasted over 4 hours. If you take the FDA definition of medicine to mean anything that is better than nothing, then California took the FDA approach. If cannabis helps, then feed them cannabis.We are at the point where the intellectually curious have seen the state of NY embarrassed by such stupid laws. It may not matter to some that injustice has inflicted so much harm to some, but the embarrassment of it all and a fall from leadership so far as to be apologetic instead of proud will drive the MMJ laws through NY. What the prohibitors will want is the most narrow of use and nothing like the sensebill wording now in the Compassionate Use Act in California.The Raich decision and whatever is going before the Supreme Court is the big national issue in MMJ and cannabis in general. If the Supreme Court overturns the 9th Circuit, the Constitution will have been interpreted way beyond its obvious intent. Nobody could tell Jefferson that the Constitution could limit research at the University of Virgina because the concentrations of wealth did not find it in their interest. The decisions from the SC overshadows all things cannabis in this country. It may tell us that we are now the Corporate States of America and that the Constitution is as dead as the CSA says it is.The elites in NY are going to see that NY is not just as backwards as they can be in the 4th year of the 21st century. Then NC will have to say, we are not so backwards either. Then I will give them some me, me, me. But not only me. I am for Free Cannabis For Everyone.
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Comment #4 posted by mamawillie on June 17, 2004 at 09:07:04 PT
Neil Cavuto
I've been on vacation, so please excuse if this has been brought up before.Neil Cavuto was working his book PR on Greta the other night on Faux News. Since he had cancer and has MS, she asked him about stem cell research (he's personally against it for his own diagnosis but was sympathetic to the cause...) and the medical marijuana. This is where it got interesting. He never admitted to using it himself. But he did say he knows people with cancer and MS who use it and find it highly effective and he doesn't see why it is illegal for medical use when so many people say it helps.He said he is worried about the regulation of medical MJ, and that some people would abuse it (this made me think he never did use it... either that or he is pandering to the stiffs, but that he thinks it should be legal for medical purposes.So anyway.. That's my paraphrase from what I remember.It wasnt' a lot, but there are a tremendous amount of stiffs who respect him tremendously, so maybe this will be the cause of a few small minds opening?
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Comment #3 posted by BigDawg on June 17, 2004 at 08:54:25 PT
EXACTLY E_J
Great article. "Most criminologists have never been inside a prison," says Jeffrey Ian Ross, an associate professor of criminology, criminal justice, and social policy at the University of Baltimore.^^^Excellent quote.So true.NOBODY has a clue what goes on inside prison walls, except prisoners (who nobody believes) and gaurds (and they aren't talking).I am willing to bet, we could randomly pick ANY prison... maximun or minimum security... send in undercover feds... and have them come out crying about abuse.The general public just doesn't care. But as a larger and larger percentage of people go to prison... (one in 75 here in the US have been incarcerated one way or another) this will change.I hope.
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Comment #2 posted by E_Johnson on June 17, 2004 at 08:32:55 PT
Liberal academia finally discovers prison
The Chronicle of Higher EDucation is expensive to subscribe to but it has some good articles. Here is a snip from one:http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v50/i41/41a01401.htmMadness in Maximum Security
When scholars get a look inside America's secretive prisons, they find chaosBy PETER MONAGHANWhen America's overflowing prisons boil over, or when television shows such as HBO's prison drama Oz presume to portray the grim conditions inside them, members of the public may think they get a picture of what the institutions are like.Wrong, say criminologists and other social scientists who study incarceration.And yet, academics allow, over the last two decades, they, as much as the public, have had little opportunity to observe prisons from the inside because access has become more tightly controlled. "Most criminologists have never been inside a prison," says Jeffrey Ian Ross, an associate professor of criminology, criminal justice, and social policy at the University of Baltimore.At a time when Americans are discovering, through reports from Iraq, just how grave abuses can become when hidden from view, such secrecy in prisons is unsettling, scholars insist. The situation for scholars is a far cry from that in the 1960s and 1970s, when sociologists and ethnographers worked in prisons and produced many ethnographies and analyses. By the 1990s, those became as rare as escapes from Alcatraz used to be.
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Comment #1 posted by FoM on June 17, 2004 at 08:13:21 PT
Judge Busted for Buying Pot
Isn't it time to change the laws since everyone seems to enjoy the use of Cannabis no matter what position they hold?***Gold Hill’s longtime justice of the peace will appear in Jackson County Circuit Court on marijuana possession charges, after police orchestrated a meeting in which he allegedly bought the drug.Complete Article: http://www.mailtribune.com/archive/2004/0617/local/stories/03local.htm
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