cannabisnews.com: Dr. Kush










  Dr. Kush

Posted by CN Staff on July 21, 2008 at 05:25:44 PT
By David Samuels  
Source: New Yorker 

USA -- The Tibetan prayer flags suspended on a string over the sleeping body of Captain Blue rose and fell in fluttering counterpoint to the wheezy rhythm of his breath. Lifted by a gentle breeze off the Pacific Ocean, each swatch of red, white, yellow, or green cotton bore a paragraph of Asian script. Every time a flag flaps in the breeze, it is thought, a prayer flies off to Heaven. Blue’s mother says that when her son was an infant he used to sleep until noon, which is still the time that he wakes up most days, on his platform bed in a one-bedroom apartment overlooking Venice Beach, a neighborhood of Los Angeles.
It was now three o’clock in the afternoon, and Captain Blue was dozing after a copious inhalation of purified marijuana vapor. (His nickname is an homage to his favorite variety of bud.) His hair was black and greasy, and was spread across his pillow. On the front of his purple T-shirt, which had slid up to expose his round belly, were the words “Big Daddy.” With his arm wrapped around a three-foot-long green bong, he resembled a large, contented baby who has fallen asleep with his milk bottle. Captain Blue is a pot broker. More precisely, he helps connect growers of high-grade marijuana upstate to the retail dispensaries that sell marijuana legally to Californians on a doctor’s recommendation. Since 1996, when a referendum known as Proposition 215 was approved by California voters, it has been legal, under California state law, for authorized patients to possess or cultivate the drug. The proposition also allowed a grower to cultivate marijuana for a patient, as long as he had been designated a “primary caregiver” by that patient. Although much of the public discussion centered on the needs of patients with cancer, AIDS, and other diseases that are synonymous with extraordinary suffering, the language of the proposition was intentionally broad, covering any medical condition for which a licensed physician might judge marijuana to be an appropriate remedy—insomnia, say, or attention-deficit disorder.The inside of Blue’s apartment, where he spends most of his time, measures less than four hundred square feet. It opens onto a huge wraparound terrace that offers mind-bending views of the ocean and the Hollywood Hills. The apartment, which is in the vicinity of Washington Boulevard, used to be occupied by another pot dealer, who moved out a few years ago, leaving Blue with his crash pad and a list of about a hundred patients. The building is near Abbot Kinney Boulevard, the commercial drag in Venice that, in recent years, has been transformed from a low-rent strip of bars and secondhand-clothing stores into a destination for well-heeled shoppers and restaurant-goers. The building retains a funky seventies vibe, with white wood floors, murky brown walls, and faded Morrison Hotel-style carpets. The sounds of “Tom and Jerry” episodes blare through locked doors in the middle of the day. I recently spent six months, off and on, with Blue—at his apartment, in private homes, on farms, in pot grow rooms, and in other places where “medical marijuana” is produced, traded, sold, and consumed in California. During that time, I saw thousands of Tibetan prayer flags. The flags identify their owners with serenity and the conscious path, rather than with the sinister world of urban dope dealers, who flaunt muscles and guns, and charge exorbitant prices for mediocre product. For Blue and tens of thousands of like-minded individuals, Proposition 215 presented an opportunity to participate in a legally sanctioned experiment in altered living. The people I met in the high-end ganja business had an affinity for higher modes of thinking and being, including vegetarianism and eating organic food, practicing yoga, avoiding prescription drugs in favor of holistic healing methods, travelling to Indonesia and Thailand, fasting, and experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. Many were also financially savvy, working long hours and making six-figure incomes. Blue and I have known each other for almost two decades. Our fathers were both professors of political science, and, starting in the mid-eighties, we both attended Ivy League colleges in the Northeast, where we shared a fondness for illegal drugs. After graduation, Blue spun records and taught nursery school in Manhattan. He left for California in 1998, not long after the state banned cigarette smoking in workplaces—Blue is highly allergic to cigarette smoke—and passed Proposition 215. After working for a while as a bouncer, he began selling pot full time.In 2003, the California State Legislature passed Senate Bill 420. The law was intended to clear up some of the confusion caused by Proposition 215, which had failed to specify how patients who could not grow their own pot were expected to obtain the drug, and how much pot could be cultivated for medical purposes. The law permitted any Californian with a doctor’s note to own up to six mature marijuana plants, or to possess up to half a pound of processed weed, which could be obtained from a patients’ collective or coöperative—terms that were not precisely defined in the statute. It also permitted a primary caregiver to be paid “reasonable compensation” for services provided to a qualified patient “to enable that person to use marijuana.”The counties of California were allowed to amend the state guidelines, and the result was a patchwork of rules and regulations. Upstate in Humboldt County, the heartland of high-grade marijuana farming in California, the district attorney, Paul Gallegos, decided that a resident could grow up to ninety-nine plants at a time, in a space of a hundred square feet or less, on behalf of a qualified patient. The limited legal protections afforded to pot growers and dispensary owners have turned marijuana cultivation and distribution in California into a classic “gray area” business, like gambling or strip clubs, which are tolerated or not, to varying degrees, depending on where you live and on how aggressive your local sheriff is feeling that afternoon. This summer, Jerry Brown, the state’s attorney general, plans to release a more consistent set of regulations on medical marijuana, but it is not clear that California’s judges will uphold his effort. In May, the state Court of Appeal, in Los Angeles, ruled that Senate Bill 420’s cap on the amount of marijuana a patient could possess was unconstitutional, because voters had not approved the limits. Most researchers agree that the value of the U.S. marijuana crop has increased sharply since the mid-nineties, as California and twelve other states have passed medical-marijuana laws. A drug-policy analyst named Jon Gettman recently estimated that in 2006 Californians grew more than twenty million pot plants. He reckoned that between 1981 and 2006 domestic marijuana production increased tenfold, making pot the leading cash crop in America, displacing corn. A 2005 State Department report put the country’s marijuana crop at twenty-two million pounds. The street value of California’s crop alone may be as high as fourteen billion dollars.According to Americans for Safe Access, which lobbies for medical marijuana, there are now more than two hundred thousand physician-sanctioned pot users in California. They acquire their medication from hundreds of dispensaries, collectives that are kept alive by the financial contributions of their patients, who pay cash for each quarter or eighth of an ounce of pot. The dispensaries also buy marijuana from their members, and sometimes directly from growers, whose crops can also be considered legal, depending on the size of the crop, the town where the plants are grown, and the disposition of the judge who hears the case.California’s encouragement of a licit market for pot has set off a low-level civil war with the federal government. Growing, selling, and smoking marijuana remain strictly illegal under federal law. The Drug Enforcement Administration, which maintains that marijuana poses a danger to users on a par with heroin and PCP, has kept up an energetic presence in the state, busting pot growers and dispensary owners with the coöperation of some local police departments. In the past five years, an unwritten set of rules has emerged to govern Californians participating in the medical-marijuana trade. Federal authorities do not generally bother arresting patients or doctors who write prescriptions. Instead, the D.E.A. pressures landlords to evict dispensaries and stages periodic raids on them, either shutting them down or seizing their money and marijuana. Dispensary owners are rarely arrested, and patient records are usually left alone. Through trial and error, dispensary owners have learned how to avoid trouble: Don’t advertise in newspapers, on billboards, or on flyers distributed door to door. Don’t sell to minors or cops. Don’t open more than two stores. Any Californian who is reasonably prudent can live a life centered on the cultivation, sale, and consumption of marijuana with little fear of being fined or going to jail.Captain Blue displays his pot on a shelf by his bed, next to two new laptop computers and an assemblage of high-end stereo equipment. The weed is kept in silver Ziploc bags. All the pot that Blue sells is grown in accordance with California state law, he says, and is provided only to dispensaries of which Blue is a member, and to patients for whom he is the primary caregiver.Blue has a photo I.D. card from the City of Los Angeles confirming that he is a bona-fide medical-marijuana patient. His malady is anxiety. On a side table by his bed, he keeps a Volcano, a German-made vaporizer that resembles a stainless-steel coffeemaker. The Volcano, which costs five hundred dollars, warms dried marijuana, releasing vapor into a plastic bag and leaving behind a toasted brown chaff that smells oddly like popcorn. When Blue uses the Volcano, he inhales the contents of the plastic bag through a bong, which purifies the vapor. While Blue napped, I wandered around his apartment, and counted nearly a dozen images and carvings of the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesha. The proliferation of Ganesha dates back to a well-publicized federal bust in January, 2007, when the D.E.A. seized the medicine and cash of eleven pot dispensaries in Los Angeles. The only major dispensary that wasn’t busted had a Ganesha in its window. Now it is hard to find a karmically inclined ganja dealer in Los Angeles who doesn’t own a herd of lucky figurines.Blue’s cell phone rang several times in succession, rousing him. His phone rings, on average, once every two and a half minutes between noon and 2 A.M., and I soon developed a Pavlovian aversion to his ringtone, a swirling, Middle Eastern-inflected electronica tune called “Lebanese Blonde.” Blue switches phone numbers every six months or so. Although it is unlikely that the D.E.A. would tap his phone, he told me, it doesn’t hurt to take simple precautions, if only to reassure his more paranoid clients. Blue answered the phone, rubbed his eyes, and began rattling off numbers. “Three hundred fifty? Three-fifty? Three-twenty-five? We could do three-twenty-five,” he said, quoting a final price per ounce. Assuming a sitting position on his bed, he punched numbers into a calculator and suggested some designer strains that his patient might enjoy. “Try Sour Diesel,” he told the client. “Take that and the Bubba Kush.” In addition to Sour Diesel and Bubba Kush, which are grown indoors, he also had AK Mist, an outdoor strain; Jedi, which is brown and fuzzy; Purple Urkel, whose hue is suggested by its name; O.G. Kush and L.A. Confidential, two particularly potent strains; and Lavender, a fragrant purple grown up North. Modern Kush plants are derived from a strain that is said to have originated in the Hindu Kush mountains, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and, according to stoner lore, was imported to Southern California by some hippie surfers in the seventies, and then popularized in the late nineties by the Los Angeles rap group Cypress Hill. Stronger, better-tasting varieties of pot can sell for more than five thousand dollars per pound, more than double the price of average weed. The premium paid for designer pot creates a big incentive for growers and dealers to name their product for whatever strains happen to be fashionable that year. The variety of buds being sold as Kush has proliferated to the point where even the most catholic-minded botanist would be hard pressed to identify a common plant ancestor. Only a small percentage of consumer marijuana sales in California occur within the medical-marijuana market. Even so, the dispensaries, by serving as a gold standard for producers and consumers, have fuelled the popularity of high-end strains in much the same way that the popularity of the Whole Foods grocery chain has brought heirloom lettuce to ordinary supermarkets. To serve these sophisticated new consumers, growers in California and elsewhere are producing hundreds of exotic new strains, whose effects are more varied, subtle, and powerful than the street-level pot available to tokers in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. “Does Terrence have paperwork with him?” Blue asked the customer. From the living room, I could hear the hum of the Volcano and the crinkle of the expanding plastic bag. The vapor in the bag was Gush, a robust mixture of Goo—a lighter, giddier high—and Kush. Blue’s business consists mainly of selling a few pounds a week to various dispensaries; occasionally, though, a single outlet will buy five or more pounds at a time. In the course of a month, Blue is typically in debt to half a dozen people, and in turn holds markers for twenty to thirty thousand dollars that he is owed by distributors around town. Because Blue works only with people he trusts, he usually gets his money back, although it can take as long as two or three years for some debtors to make good. Understanding the abstractions of ganja credit and debt is important in the pot business, where financial success is determined largely by the velocity of your cash transactions. A practiced flipper like Blue can make twenty to thirty dollars on an eighth of an ounce of high-grade pot, which retails for anywhere between fifty and seventy-five dollars. Last year, Blue made roughly a hundred thousand dollars, and paid some ten thousand in taxes.Later in the afternoon, a friend of Blue’s, who calls herself Lily, showed up with a duffelbag. She unzipped the bag and placed on Blue’s kitchen table three black trash bags filled with ganja. Lily is a courier; she transports pot to Los Angeles from the growing regions upstate. A witchy Japanese-American girl with a dolphin tattoo on her right shoulder, she wore large gold hoop earrings, a Lucite cross necklace, and sunglasses perched on top of her hair. She said that she got into the business because she suffers from chronic back and neck pain from a spinal injury, and found that smoking weed helped her with symptoms such as nausea and a loss of appetite. Captain Blue encourages the growers he deals with to stay within legal cultivation limits, and makes sure that the dispensaries he joins keep the doctor’s recommendations of members on file. The only participants in Blue’s transactions whose activities are not strictly covered by prevailing interpretations of state law are couriers, or mules, who usually transport marijuana in airtight containers in the trunk, seats, or tires of a car. Neither Proposition 215 nor Senate Bill 420 spelled out how medical marijuana should be transported from rural growers to urban patients, leaving the mules as the least protected link in the distribution chain. Once the mules reach Los Angeles, they make the rounds of middlemen like Blue, who can legally broker their product to dispensaries where they are members. Mules receive a cut that ranges from five to sixteen per cent of the purchase price.Being a courier was risky, Lily said, but the pay was good enough to let her not work for half the year. Her methods of transporting the pot from Northern California to Blue’s apartment were time-tested and low-tech. You get the largest garbage bags you can find, some food bags, and a vacuum sealer. Then you double- or triple-bag the pot, seal it, pack it in garbage bags, put the bags inside some old newspapers, and stuff the bags into some cheap knapsacks, and then put three knapsacks each into duffelbags, along with a few hockey gloves or soccer balls. Then you pack the duffelbags in the back of the trunk and throw an old blanket over them, and toss on top a few folding chairs, along with some grocery bags full of fresh organic apples, to mask the scent of pot.Blue, having assessed Lily’s stash, made his offer for a portion. “Six thousand,” he said.One day, Blue and I went for a drive up the Pacific Coast Highway, in his blue hybrid S.U.V. I watched him make more than a thousand dollars in under an hour, dealing on the phone. “I’ve got some tasty L.A. Confidential,” he told a customer, motioning me to extract a disk of trance music from a pile of stale laundry in the back seat. “It’s like O.G. Kush. A pound? I think I can do that.” Blue said that he sells pot solely for medical purposes, although he conceded the possibility that some clients might break their purchases down into smaller amounts for the street trade. Asking questions about what buyers intend to do with their pot is not friendly behavior, Blue explained with a smile. We were headed up to Topanga Canyon, in the mountains near Malibu, to meet a broker who supplies Blue with some of the best weed in the state. I’ll call him Guthrie. A lifelong resident of Humboldt County, he funds a number of growing operations, ranging from a large underground bunker to smaller outdoor plots of fewer than a hundred plants. He also uses a fat bankroll to buy product from other producers, which he takes to Los Angeles two or three times a month. The house in Topanga, an old hippie enclave, belonged to a friend who let Guthrie sleep outside in a blue-and-green tent that resembled one of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes. I ducked to avoid a string of Tibetan prayer flags that hung over the entrance. Guthrie was a lean, healthy-looking, brown-eyed man in his mid-thirties. “We have a list of all the pot growers in Humboldt County,” he said, repeating an old Northern joke for my benefit. “It’s called the Yellow Pages.” He reached beneath a table and handed Blue a large black trash bag. Blue untied the bag and stuck his head inside, as the rich aroma of Purple Kush filled the interior of the tent.“Mmm,” Blue said, inhaling. Purple Kush smells like a mixture of cardamom and cloves, with a darker, earthier undertone of dried peat moss, and an acidic top note evoking freshly ground coffee. The two men agreed on a figure of forty-four hundred dollars a pound; the price had eased somewhat since its peak, in 2005. A large number of new growers entering the market had nudged prices down. Guthrie’s parents had been hippies. Growing up in Humboldt, he and his siblings got used to fleeing their house in the middle of the night when D.E.A. helicopters raided his family’s growing patch. Perhaps a quarter of the kids in his class had parents involved in the marijuana trade. “You’d say, ‘My dad, he fixes our house a lot,’ ” Guthrie recalled with a laugh, as he offered me a loaded pipe. By the end of the summer, the family was usually broke. In October, the harvest would come, and the family would sell their crop and have a great Christmas; by the next summer, they’d be back in a jam. Guthrie stayed out of the family business until he was twenty-seven. Then he obtained a trucker’s license and began hauling propane. Since truckers who transport hazardous materials are professional drivers who must go through background checks, the police generally leave them alone once they show their license, whether they are driving a truck or not. Guthrie’s trucker’s license gave his family a free pass through the “gantlet”—a stretch of Highway 101 between Humboldt and Santa Rosa where state police routinely search cars for pot.Guthrie said that the quasi-legal status of smaller growing arrangements, combined with consumers’ preference for potent, high-maintenance weed, has shifted the balance of the pot business away from large-scale farms. “There’s a lot more people doing little scenes,” he said. The welter of laws pertaining to medical marijuana in California has offered careful operators like Guthrie the best of both worlds: prosecution for growing and selling has become much less likely, while federal busts and seizures keep prices high. Guthrie sells about ten per cent of his product to dispensaries and collectives. Starting up a sophisticated indoor farming operation costs about three hundred thousand dollars, he said, including the cost of making a building airtight—to lock in the humidity, and to keep passersby from smelling the pot and calling the cops—and fitting it with thousand-watt grow lights. Guthrie grows his plants in octagons, a hydroponic arrangement that allows producers to maximize the number of plants in a confined space. The cost of a piece of property upstate can run an additional three hundred thousand to one and a half million dollars, he said. After a few years, if you know what you are doing, you can make your investment back, and then you can pay a sharecropper to run your operation and spend your time travelling. Guthrie told Blue that he would soon be heading to Indonesia. “It’s amazing over there,” he said. The last time he was in Java, he recalled, he stayed in a Muslim village near the beach, and found the people generally relaxed and welcoming, if somewhat hostile to the Western habit of lying in the sun without clothing. Life was good, he said; the only problem was that too many other people wanted the same life. Most people who moved up North to become pot entrepreneurs fucked it up, he said. Their failures, however, did nothing to diminish the potency of the dream. One of Captain Blue’s regular marijuana customers was a dispensary in Venice Beach. The store, which has cement floors, a glass display case, and a couch the color of aluminum, looks like a cross between a photographer’s loft and a Kiehl’s boutique. When I last visited, large Mason jars in the display case were filled with designer strains of weed selected by the owner, Cindy 99, whose nickname refers to a variety of designer pot. In a refrigerator, and marked “For medicinal use only,” were treats such as marijuana granola and marijuana milk chocolate with crispy wafers. Above the counter hung a notice: “To our valued patients: in accordance with California law, we are required to add 8.25% sales tax.” Cindy 99’s employees included a receptionist, a full-time counter girl, a part-time counter girl, and a bonded security guard—a former Green Beret—who is licensed to carry a weapon. Dr. Dean, a local physician, saw aspiring patients at the dispensary once a week. As long as they had a California state I.D., those who received recommendations for marijuana could buy some immediately from the dispensary’s stock. Cindy told me that when she opened her shop, in 2007, she needed the same licenses that she would have needed to open a newsstand on the Santa Monica Pier: a commercial lease, a seller’s permit, a federal tax I.D. number, and a tobacco license (for selling rolling papers and pipes). She estimated that forty per cent of her clients suffer from serious illnesses such as cancer, AIDS, glaucoma, epilepsy, and M.S. The rest have ailments like anxiety, sleeplessness, A.D.D., and assorted pains.Like many other dispensary owners I spoke with, Cindy derives particular satisfaction from providing medication to people who suffer from chronic diseases. Although she suspects that there is nothing seriously wrong with many of the young men who come in to buy an eighth of L.A. Confidential, she doesn’t regard marijuana as a harmful drug when compared with Xanax, Valium, Prozac, and other pills that are commonly prescribed by physicians to treat vague complaints of anxiety or dysphoria. It was easy to see why the dispensary was so popular with young men: there was good pot, and Cindy 99, who is in her thirties, looks like an adolescent boy’s fantasy of his best friend’s hot older sister. The day I was there, she wore a tight sleeveless blue T-shirt with a gilt-winged emblem of a flying horse.The first customer of the day was a Hispanic guy with three tattoos, the biggest one of which read “Angeles del Inferno.” He had a doctor’s note on file. After a short discussion, Cindy recommended two strains, which cost sixty-five dollars for an eighth. “These two have sativa in them,” she said. “They’re really good for daytime use.” All strains of pot sold in the United States are derived from two varieties of the plant—indica and sativa—which have discernibly different effects on the user. Indica is a heavier, numbing drug; sativa is better for doing creative work or listening to music. Cindy refers to a popular book called “The Big Book of Buds” to determine the precise balance of indica and sativa in the strains she sells. Purple Urkel, Cindy explained, was mostly indica, making it better for alleviating pain. “The percentages are arbitrary, because of all the cross-breeding,” Cindy admitted to me. “You take a Blueberry and you cross it with a Kush and you go back into Trainwreck, and how do you get a percentage from that?” A young white man, barely out of his teens, with lace-up black boots, a nubby backpack, and a goatee, came in and bought an eighth of Trainwreck. He selected a chocolate turtle from the edibles case while gazing shyly at Cindy. “Don’t eat it all at once if you have anything to do,” she warned him. Cindy has been in the ganja business for seventeen years, her entire adult life. Both of her parents grow pot. She began selling weed in high school, in British Columbia, where enforcement of anti-marijuana laws was famously lax. One day, a friend asked her if she would help distribute what his mom had grown. Within six weeks, they had doubled their money. “We started bringing it from Canada down to California,” she recalled. “And then we moved to snowmobiles and then hollow-panelled speedboats on trailers, and then semis and shadow-planes. A plane would go up in the States and another plane would go up in Canada, and they’d fly around as if they were sightseeing, and you’re allowed to switch airspace as long as you don’t land. And then they would land in each other’s countries looking like each other, same serial number, same everything.” A patio in back of the shop had been set up with a white plastic table with a batik tablecloth and two plastic chairs, in preparation for Dr. Dean’s weekly visit. Each prospective patient pays the Doctor a hundred and fifty dollars, in cash, for a diagnostic interview. Dr. Dean’s full name is Dr. Dean Hillel Weiss. Forty years old, he is one of a few dozen doctors in Los Angeles who regularly write medical-marijuana recommendations. In the past few years, he said, he had written several thousand such letters, none of which had been successfully challenged in court. I told Dean that I wanted a doctor’s recommendation that would allow me to legally smoke pot. He began a fifteen-minute interview, asking me about my reasons for wanting the drug. “How long have you been under the care of a psychiatrist?” he asked me, writing down the answer on a notepad. I provided him with a bill from my psychiatrist in New York, along with proof that I was currently living in California. He then quizzed me about my brief and unsatisfactory experiences with prescription medications for anxiety and depression, and my history of illegal drug use. Deciding that I was a suitable candidate for a medicalmarijuana recommendation, Dr. Dean took my money and provided me with a quick tutorial on strains of pot—indica offered a “body high,” whereas sativa was “more heady and abstract”—along with a signed letter certifying that I was a patient under his care. The letter was good for a year, after which I could renew it, for a hundred dollars. So far that day, Dr. Dean had seen seven patients, including a former doorman at a Manhattan night club, a musician working on a Bob Marley tribute album, and a young woman named Cassandra who was in the publishing business and came armed with a purse full of prescription medications for anxiety and depression. The vast majority of his referrals, he said, were by word of mouth. Though he was always careful to observe the letter of California state law, he said, “My personal belief is that marijuana is a useful and relatively harmless substance and that adults should be free to choose whether they want to use it or not.”Dean graduated from Columbia University and SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and began an orthopedics residency in his home town of Detroit before moving to Los Angeles, in 1998, and becoming an emergency-room doctor at Martin Luther King, Jr./Drew Medical Center—known to locals as Killer King. By 2005, he was burned out. One day, a friend invited him over to his house to sample some marijuana that he had obtained from his fiancée’s boss, who had a recommendation for pot. “My friend said, ‘I’ve got six strains you’ve got to try. I’ve got lollipops, I’ve got brownies,’ ” Dr. Dean recalled. “I went over. It was like being in Amsterdam. At the end of the night, he turned to me and said, ‘You know, you hate working in the emergency room. Maybe you should look into this.’ ” Cassandra, the publishing employee, was interviewed by Dr. Dean after I was. Emerging from the patio, she said, “That was amazing! That was fantastic!” She went over to the display case.“What’s the best in terms of social life, having other people around?” she asked. As Cindy discussed the relative merits of the various sativa strains, Cassandra noticed some small hash pipes in the glass case. “It’s a great little travel device that you can take to the beach,” Cindy explained.“No way! Cool! I love it!” Cassandra said. She bought one.As Cindy weighed out Cassandra’s marijuana purchases, which totalled a hundred and ten dollars, she commiserated with her new customer about the unattractive names of some popular strains. “Cat Piss?” she said. “Dog Shit? If it’s going to be legal, the stoners can’t still be making up the names.” The Farmacy, which has outlets in West Hollywood, Venice, and Westwood, made Cindy 99’s dispensary look like a mom-and-pop operation. Famous for the “Very Open” neon sign in the window of the West Hollywood location, the Farmacy has the carefully art-designed “natural” aesthetic of an Aveda boutique. The reigning concept is that pot is simply another benign medicinal herb, like echinacea or ginkgo biloba. The Farmacy is the brainchild of Michael, an elusive hippie who doesn’t give out his last name and whose defiant nature and marketing prowess have made him a celebrity on the medical-marijuana scene. His success has begun to irritate the authorities: the D.E.A. recently forced the Farmacy’s landlord to close a fourth outlet, in Santa Monica. I met Michael one afternoon at the Venice store, a large retail space on Abbot Kinney. In the front of the shop, Asian handicrafts are for sale. Saint-John’s-wort and various Chinese herbs are stocked in jars behind the main counter; a forty-two-inch plasma TV screen displays Tao symbols and other karmic imagery. An extensive selection of organic soaps and shampoos is available in the back of the store, near a children’s-medicine section. The main sign that the Farmacy is not, in fact, a Body Shop is a large color portrait on the wall of Bob Marley, smiling broadly while toking on a fat spliff. Customers with a valid doctor’s letter may request one of the bamboo-bound menus kept behind the counter, which list available strains of pot, some of them requiring a “donation” of seventy-five dollars per gram. There is also a gelato bar, which offers a variety of flavors laced with marijuana and other herbs. Michael, a sixty-year-old man with a gray ponytail, was wearing jeans, a faded navy T-shirt, a yellow flannel shirt, and a battered fleece vest. Shifting impatiently from one foot to the other, he read from a poster on the wall stating that words and phrases like “weed,” “dope,” and “getting stoned” were used to “devalue, disempower, and criminalize people who choose to use medical cannabis.” Recently, he noted, characters on “Desperate Housewives” had used the words “medicine” and “medicating” while referring to cannabis consumption. The culture was changing. “We see cannabis as a gateway herb,” he said. Upstairs, he showed me a light-filled waiting room with a grand piano and handcrafted wood chairs and couches. Someday soon, he said, the room would be filled with patients waiting to meet with therapists practicing massage, acupuncture, and other healing arts. Licensed professionals would be available to consult about medication, diet, and exercise. The waiting room was even equipped with children’s toys, so that mothers could bring their kids to appointments. As we spoke, he trimmed some long-stemmed flowers that were in a vase on top of the piano. He then sat down and played a passage of Brahms. Michael had trouble sitting in one place for any length of time, a legacy, in part, of five and a half years he says he spent in San Quentin for various pot-related offenses. (Spending years in a small, cramped prison cell had made him antsy, he said.) Michael has been involved in the marijuana business since he was eighteen years old. His first big deal, with an Arab partner, was smuggling into California two hundred pounds of hash from Lebanon. In the early seventies, he attended a pot-legalization rally in Washington, D.C. While in the city, he did some research on cannabis at the Library of Congress. He found a trove of cannabis studies from the early twentieth century; botanists at the time had studied the plant extensively. According to a paper from 1903, the internal clock that tells a marijuana plant whether to flower or not could be turned on or off by varying its exposure to light. By lengthening the “day” to sixteen or eighteen hours, growers could speed up the initial growth of the plants; later in the growing cycle, they could cut back on light exposure, causing female plants to flower. The useless male plants, which produce pollen rather than smokable buds, could then be thrown away. By speeding up the growing cycle and getting rid of the males, you could produce three or four times the amount of pot indoors. In the winter of 1973, Michael, who was living in Mendocino County, put together a slide show for upstate growers based on what he had learned about manipulating the growing cycle. “Nobody ever grew males again,” he boasted. Michael said that he served two stints in San Quentin. After he was discharged the second time, in 1999, he grew tomatoes for Whole Foods and worked for a seed bank. After the passage of Senate Bill 420, a friend told him about the dispensary scene and loaned him a 1987 BMW. Michael placed an ad in the newspaper saying that he would deliver cannabis right to a customer’s door. He opened the first Farmacy in 2005.I asked Michael if being involved in the dispensary business was a wise choice for a two-time drug offender. “I’ve got two strikes around my neck, and, yes, I’ve been anxious,” he said. He noted that he had ten children from various wives and girlfriends, all of whom were supported by the income from his stores. He declined to reveal how much money he made.Michael jumped off the couch and bounded downstairs to take care of some business, leaving me with JoAnna LaForce, who helps run the business side of the Farmacy. A cheerful woman in her fifties, she believes that she is the only pharmacist in the United States who actively participates in a medical-cannabis dispensary. Though doctors are protected under California state law, she explained, pharmacists are not, which means that she is theoretically subject to arrest, although the D.E.A. generally avoids entanglements with medical professionals. LaForce told me that she had once been married to Michael; they did not have children. “I met him in San Diego in February, 1993, through a mutual friend,” she said. “At the time, he was on the lam. We were together for a year before the feds took him away.” When he got out of prison, they were together for two more years, and then he went to Mexico, to live on the beach and surf. When Michael decided to open the Farmacy, she was happy to help. LaForce spent fifteen years working in a hospice with dying patients. “I saw the value of alternative medicine, particularly cannabis, in helping with appetite, pain management, and anxiety,” she said. “I found that I could use cannabis to decrease the pain medication, which in turn made patients able to spend their last days talking to their friends, spouses, to share good times.” The upcoming pot harvest, she said, was set to be the largest in the state’s history, adding, “There is a gold rush going on with cannabis in the state of California.” The dispensary owners of Los Angeles hold a meeting once a month in an anonymous office building in the shadow of Cedars-Sinai hospital. At a recent gathering, a sign on the wall said “Stop Arresting Medical Marijuana Patients.” The shades were drawn. There were twenty-five people in attendance, and most of them were either in their mid-twenties or in their mid-forties. A few—such as a muscular man in biker gear and a woman in glittery flip-flops and not much else—looked like refugees from the porn industry.The meeting began with a “raid update,” delivered by Chris Fusco, a young field coördinator for Americans for Safe Access. In the past month alone, ten dispensaries had been raided in Los Angeles by the D.E.A. “Raids suck,” Fusco said. “I think things will get worse before they get better,” said Don Duncan, the owner of the California Patients Group, a large dispensary that was raided by the D.E.A., and then shut down, in the summer of 2007. He owns another dispensary, the Los Angeles Caregivers and Patients Group, which was raided a few months later but has subsequently reopened, despite the rumored seizure of close to a million dollars in marijuana. (Duncan puts the figure at thirteen thousand dollars’ worth of cannabis-based products.)Several of the top dispensary owners had recently attended meetings with the city planning department, the city attorney, and the L.A.P.D. The meetings were intended to help draft a set of legal guidelines to govern the conduct of the dispensaries. Despite the dispensary owners’ willingness to coöperate with the city, Duncan said, everyone who attended the meetings had either had his dispensary raided by the D.E.A. or received a letter from his landlord asking him to give up his lease, owing to threats from federal authorities that the property would be seized.“What is the information that the D.E.A. wants from the people they detain in these raids?” a man asked.“They want to know who is in charge and where the medicine comes from,” Duncan answered. “They want growers.” Patient records were untouched. “They left all the concentrates,” he added, describing the aftermath of the raid on the Los Angeles Caregivers and Patients Group. “That’s how we reopened the vapor bar.” “Did they take computers?” another person asked. “They planted some tracking software that records user names and passwords which was transmitting to an I.P. address in Virginia,” Duncan said. “Our computer guy found it right away.”After the meeting, I paid a visit to Allison Margolin, who calls herself “L.A.’s dopest attorney.” Her trade is a sort of family business—her father, the lawyer Bruce Margolin, is the author of the Margolin Guide, which enumerates the legal penalties for the sale and possession of pot in each of the fifty states. She works in a black-glass office tower on Wilshire Boulevard owned by Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler. On the walls in her office, a Harvard Law School degree is juxtaposed with a pictorial layout from the magazine Skunk, featuring her in a low-cut leopard-print dress. Margolin’s sexpot image is an advantage with clients, who, more often than not, are socially isolated men. Margolin has a reputation for getting cases dismissed, and for retrieving marijuana plants that have been seized by the police. “The truth is, it’s very rare to get plants back,” Margolin said. Her long auburn hair was in a tidy French bun, but a few strands had been allowed to slip loose. Like many of her clients, she adopted a tone of adolescent vulnerability and outraged innocence when talking about the mean grownups who don’t like pot. “People are talking about how it’s being over-recommended and abused,” she said. “I mean, big fucking deal. It’s not toxic!” I asked her if she had a doctor’s letter, and she nodded vigorously, explaining that she suffers from an anxiety disorder. She said that courts are sometimes sympathetic to her arguments about the relative safety of pot, but most judges and prosecutors seem to have only a glancing acquaintance with the case law since the passage of Proposition 215. “I’ve gone to court, like, several times where the judge has read only the first half of the case, which talks about how dispensaries are not legal according to Proposition 215,” she said. “I think it’s just intellectual and physical laziness.”A patient whose plants Margolin had recovered, Matt Farrell—known in the community as Medical Matt—stopped by for some counsel. Medical Matt was hardly an advertisement for the curative wonders of medical marijuana, or for the idea that all medical-marijuana patients are enjoying themselves by gaming the system. His cheeks and chin were covered in a three-day growth of dark stubble, and his red-rimmed eyes got wet as he spoke. “I’ve always suffered from mental problems,” Farrell said, reciting a long list of prescription drugs that he had taken, including Paxil, Wellbutrin, Risperdal, and Prozac. He had obtained his first doctor’s letter for pot in late 2001 or early 2002—his memory wasn’t clear. He began growing pot to support his habit, which costs him between sixty and a hundred dollars a day. In December, 2005, he said, police officers ransacked his house—seizing about a hundred and twenty plants and nine grow lights—even though he showed his doctor’s letter, and contended that the plants were for his own use and the use of the members of the collective to which he belonged. He was accused of unlawfully cultivating marijuana; the charge was dismissed in 2006. The police came back to his house in 2007, he said, once again trashing the premises and charging him with the unlawful cultivation of marijuana and the possession of marijuana for sale. They froze his bank account, which, he said, destroyed his credit rating. The second case against him is still pending.Although the police behavior he described may seem excessive, it is usually forgiven by judges who try to balance the competing demands of state and federal law. By routinely looking the other way when law-enforcement officers make “mistakes,” the courts have allowed police departments that don’t like current state law to work around it, and put pressure on people like Farrell.In the wake of the seizures and the property damage, Farrell said, he was borrowing money from his parents, and his house was going into foreclosure. “It’s either a joke or I’m delirious,” he said, starting to cry. “I mean, I’m not the smartest person in the world, but I sure as hell can read something pretty simple and understand it. If the state, county, city council, and everybody else is saying you can, how the hell does the L.A.P.D. come in to say you can’t?” Spokesmen and officers of the D.E.A. and the L.A.P.D. told me, off the record, that the federal laws regulating the possession and distribution of marijuana took precedence over the laws of the State of California, and that, until federal law changed, the D.E.A. and the L.A.P.D. would continue to work together in their fight against the drug trade.Sitting beneath a willow tree on a breezy day in Sonoma County, you can see why the idea of leaving the city behind and growing your own weed exerts such a pull on the holistic health nuts, masseurs, d.j.s, art-school dropouts, and New Age types who populate the medical-marijuana scene in Los Angeles. Farming a crop of twenty-five or thirty plants of killer weed is an updated (and highly profitable) version of the age-old California dream of an orange tree in every back yard. For those who can’t afford to pay for a prime plot of land in Humboldt, there is the possibility of renting a small split-level house in Sonoma or Mendocino and converting the master bedroom into a grow room, where you can turn around an indoor crop every sixty days. Captain Blue and I took a five-day excursion to the growing fields up North. Our guide was an old friend of his, a woman who called herself the Kid. She had been minding a grow house in Sonoma since being laid up with a half-dozen broken ribs after a bad motorcycle accident. The Kid had large eyes, a big nose, and long hair, and a squat, powerful body covered in black-ink tattoos, which ran across her chest and arms and up the back of her neck. “There’s a lot of women in the bud scene that are just looking to be with some guy that has some property and some plants, so that they can sit on their ass and do nothing,” she said, as we sat outside on her porch and watched horses graze. “There is a large percentage of really fabulous beauties. And then there’s the hard, serious worker girls that dig holes all day.” Blue wiped the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his loose plaid shirt. He wasn’t used to being outside. He asked for a glass of water and drank it in a single gulp. Then he wrapped his arms around his friend and gave her a hug, taking care not to put pressure on her ribs. They made for a weird, medieval-looking couple; both had long hair, round bodies, and shoulders strong enough to chop wood. Both had spent years smoking pot and consuming staggering quantities of mushrooms, cactus powders, LSD, and other mind-altering substances. The Kid made her bed by the picture window in the living room, next to a plaster Buddha and a shelf of books about plants, including “Marijuana Horticulture,” by Jorge Cervantes. The dining room was occupied by a pool table. If you are selling your own product, she explained, you can clear as much as seventy-five thousand dollars, after expenses, on a duffelbag filled with thirty pounds of pot. The easiest way to make this kind of small indoor scene work is to live in someone else’s house and nurture the plants in exchange for a third or half the profits, and that is how the Kid would be spending her time for the next two months. The Kid’s plants, all Sour Diesels, were being raised on a mixture of nutrients which changed every three to five days, in accordance with a detailed regimen that had been laid out, in black Magic Marker, in a battered spiral-bound notebook. The notebook had been bequeathed to the Kid by a longtime friend. The cost of the nutrients was approximately six hundred dollars a week.We entered the darkened bedroom, and were confronted by the fetid smell of plant life. Without the ventilation system that the Kid had installed, the temperature would have been about a hundred and ten degrees in the dark, largely from the stored-up heat of the lights—seven of them, a thousand watts each. There was a tank of carbon dioxide in the corner. “The more CO2, the thicker the bud,” the Kid explained.It was a relatively small operation: the lights and their installation had cost about fifteen thousand dollars, and power and nutrients had cost an additional twelve thousand or so. The array of nutrients along the walls included specialized growing products such as Bud Blood (“promotes larger, heavier & denser flowers and fruit”) and Rizotonic (a powerful root stimulant). “Voodoo Juice is going to go in here, and Scorpion, and it goes on and on,” the Kid said. Every three or four days, she ran purified water through her hydroponic growing medium for a full day, in order to give the plants a break. After the full, eight-week growth cycle, the Kid planned to harvest her crop and clear out. Up North, the marijuana harvest is known as “trimming season.” In Humboldt and Mendocino, she said, October is a month-long sleepover, with all the free ganja, beer, and organic food you want. A really good trimmer can trim two pounds of pot a day, at a rate of two hundred and fifty dollars per pound, while sitting around a table with three or four friends. Kids from San Francisco or even Australia hear about the harvest from friends of friends and show up for the pot and the cash. The D.E.A. routinely busts a few big scenes each year, and the local police have been known to stop cars and check the passengers for telltale scratches on their arms or sticky resin under their fingernails. None of this intimidated the Kid. “It’s a fucking blast,” she said. “This is crop No. 6 for me this year.” After a month of being cooped up, she was eager to get on the road. I agreed to drive, because her license had been suspended since the motorcycle accident. Along the way, she recounted a transformative experience that she had had at the age of nineteen with the psychedelic drug DMT. While tripping, she had a vision of herself lying down on a forest floor. She heard a growling sound and saw a twenty-foot-tall woman guarded by a gigantic dog. “She was enormous, and definitely not attractive, and I recognized the look in her eye,” the Kid remembered. “I said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s me.’ And she said, ‘Yep, I am you. But I’m very old. My energy is very big.’ I was kind of in shock, but I didn’t feel threatened.” The old woman explained that the Kid didn’t need to worry about death anymore. There was no such thing as death, in fact. Energy returned to its source and then took another form.The Kid fell silent for a moment. “I only saw her that one time,” she said. Afterward, she recalled, she felt a bit woozy, and a friend sat her in front of the television and let her watch cartoons.The Kid, Blue, and I arrived in Arcata, a small, well-kept Northern town, around dusk. After dinner, we drove to a farm owned by a couple whom I’ll call Nick and Danielle. Nick, who had long brown hair and Mediterranean features, and Danielle, a yoga-toned blonde, had both worked as massage therapists in Malibu. One day, a massage client of Nick’s asked him about dispensaries, and he took her to one. “She saw people spending two thousand dollars at the counter,” Nick said, with a laugh. “She said, ‘What kind of business is this?’ ” Her next reaction was to suggest that Nick and Danielle could run a dispensary, and that she could front them the fifty thousand dollars they would need to get started. They soon opened one, and, after the business took off, they bought the property up North. Nick and Danielle’s farm was at the end of a long, well-protected valley surrounded by high mountains. The turnoff was a dirt path barred by a classic old wooden ranch gate featuring the longest string of Tibetan prayer flags I saw during my stay in California.Arriving at the house, we dumped our bags on a wooden deck. Nick, who was dressed in jeans and a sweaty T-shirt, showed us around the property. He was already a skilled grower: last year, he told me, he won second place in the Los Angeles Cannabis Cup, an annual competition, for a particularly potent strain of marijuana that he had grown from seeds he ordered through the mail from Amsterdam. But he did not consider pot his life’s calling. He spoke of one day starting up a healing center on Mt. Shasta, where people could clean out their systems and go hiking. The property lacked sufficient water for pot growing, Nick said, but their neighbor up the mountain helped them out. “He’s a great bro,” he said. “Every few days, he drops two thousand gallons down a pipe.” In exchange, Nick paid the neighbor a minimal fee. “He’s an older guy, he’s been up here for forty years. He knows how hard it can be when you first move somewhere.” Nick had about three hundred plants in the ground on a hill behind his house. On another plot of land, a few hills over, he had two hundred and fifty plants, as insurance against a targeted raid on his property. A perfect half-moon was shining brightly in the twilight. The North Star was already visible. Nick, Danielle, and some friends had gathered in the living room, whose focal point was a large homemade altar, for meditation, surrounded by burning tea candles. At the kitchen table, a friend of Nick’s, Charlie, packed a large water pipe with the smoke of the day. Next to Charlie was Nick’s friend Dylan Fenster, from Venice, who was spending a few months up North to help with the harvest. He said that he smoked marijuana primarily to deal with the pain from a degenerative spinal condition; he carried his doctor’s letter in his back pocket. “Twice in the last six months, I’ve been cited for smoking in public,” he told me. “Both times I got the weed back, and both times the judge admonished the cops, ‘You know, this is legal.’ ” On the fridge, someone had posted a handwritten sign with the motto “Today is the day we manifest heaven on earth and godly bliss.” Water pipes were passed around, and everyone got high. After four hits on Nick’s bong, the slogans on the refrigerator started to vibrate with uncommon significance. I looked over at Blue and saw that he was dozing off again, this time with a homemade bong resting on his chest. “I always wanted to heal the world or find the cure for cancer,” Nick told me, with a faith-healer stare. “I have massaged over ten thousand people, and I hope to massage ten thousand more, and to heal the world with good medicine that I can grow here and provide on a compassionate basis to the people who need it.”Danielle started talking with the Kid about her wedding. “It was three days,” she said. The wedding was held in a clearing in a forest, and a cigar box was passed around containing two hundred hand-rolled joints of Kush. I headed out to a swinging bench on the porch and gazed intently at dozens of bright stars, and thousands of lesser stars. Nick came outside and offered another hit. “I love it here,” he said. “I love the earth and the sounds and the smells and the sounds at night.” The farm’s location at the tip of the valley was particularly sweet. “There are no cars driving by and no planes flying over and no sirens going off or any kind of negative frequencies,” he said. “It almost feels like it must have felt for the original pioneers who were first exploring California.” Every morning, Nick said, he woke up at seven, had a smoothie, and got in tune with nature. “Then I’ll head out to the garden and I’ll do some watering,” Nick continued. “Depending on the day of the week, I’ll maybe feed the plants, check in with them. Double-check for damage from the deer and whatever else has been creeping in through the cracks. Make sure the praying mantises are on duty.” Growing marijuana outdoors, he felt, emphasized the holistic qualities of the plant rather than its psychotropic function. Someday, he said, he wanted to plant cherry trees, and peaches, plums, and apricots. Nick said that he hoped to have kids, and he liked the idea of raising children on a farm. When I asked him whether he worried about the atmosphere of danger and illegality that came with operating a gray-area business, he shook his head. “I really feel like my karma’s good,” he said. “I’m not doing anything wrong.” He owned the dispensary for which his crop was intended. He had never been arrested or done time in jail. “We’ve got a good lawyer, and we pay state sales tax,” he said. Nick’s income from the dispensary last year, he said, was only around fifty thousand dollars. “That’s what I make for all the scary shit I do,” he said, looking up at the constellations. “I’m not making millions of dollars. I’m a hardworking, compassionate person, and I spend my time helping people. It makes me feel happy to bring smiles to the faces of people that have frequented my collective.” The next morning, I woke up on the floor of Nick and Danielle’s living room, a ceiling fan whirring stale air above my head. There were three other people asleep in the room. As my head cleared, I perused a nearby bookshelf, which contained various speculative and esoteric texts, including “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth,” “Secrets of Shamanism,” and “Crop Circles: Signs of Contact.” I wandered outside. Behind the building were two long greenhouses made of translucent plastic sheeting supported by bent steel ribs, which sheltered smaller plants until they were ready to be put in the ground. I ran into Nick, who was already at work, and he led me on a tour of the slopes at the back of his property. “I planted these at the end of May,” he said. “They’re three months old.” Outdoors, the sativa growth cycle is eleven weeks; the indica cycle is seven to nine. Toward the end of the cycle, the flowering plant loses its lush green leaves and manifests a shrivelled brown bud. “This is Afghooey crossed with Maui Wowie,” Nick said, pointing to a six-foot plant with half its leaves missing. So far, he said with equanimity, he had lost about a quarter of his crop—more than a hundred thousand dollars’ worth—to nibbling deer.The three hundred or so plants on this part of the mountain were arranged in a V shape. The arms of the V ascended the mountain and spread out beneath the shelter of the surrounding forest. Nick admitted that the plants were not particularly well hidden, and said that the planting formation was mainly a respectful tip of the hat to the D.E.A. planes that flew over the valley. “They appreciate it when you’re not growing it in rows, like a cornfield,” he explained. Small planes had been buzzing overhead lately. Last night, one of Nick’s visiting friends had reported that a helicopter had canvassed the property and shone a light down onto the front porch. The friend admitted to having been stoned when he saw the searchlight.Virtually everyone in the valley made a living from growing pot, Nick said. The signs of their activity were hard to miss. To illustrate his point, he indicated to the top of a mountain across the way. “It’s quite expensive to put electrical poles up a mountain,” he said. As I followed his gaze, I caught sight of what looked like a sail. “You’re looking at greenhouses,” he explained. With so much pot on the market in California, it paid to differentiate your crop. Later that day, Nick and Danielle’s investor from Malibu arrived with a lawyer, who was there to inspect the farm’s organic-farming methods. If the farm passed, the pot would be certified as an organic product. The lawyer was a tall, fit-looking middle-aged man from San Francisco who wore a gray suit and a white starched shirt with no tie. He declined to be interviewed about his business. Captain Blue spent the day outside, roaming the property and taking photographs with a digital S.L.R. camera. He took pictures of Nick’s friends working the pot fields and tending to the mature mother plants. And he took closeups of the enormous brown buds on a fifteen-foot-high pot plant. The physical exertion was hard for Blue. Beads of sweat collected on his forehead, and his shirt was soon soaking wet. Complete Article: http://drugsense.org/url/SKJVqYJlSource: New Yorker, The (US)Author: David Samuels Published: July 28, 2008Copyright: 2008 Conde Nast Publications Inc.Website: http://www.newyorker.com/Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/vWkEpS4MCannabisNews Medical Marijuana Archiveshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/list/medical.shtml

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Comment #168 posted by Mahakal on August 23, 2008 at 15:49:01 PT
FoM
Mahk works too. That's how my wife usually pronounces my name anyhow. I'd really abandoned using Whig almost everywhere but here a long time ago. It's really not what identifies me now. I'd been going by Michael elsewhere but there are too many of those and it gets confusing sometimes. But I'm still the same, anyhow, whatever you want to call me.
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Comment #167 posted by FoM on August 23, 2008 at 09:35:29 PT
Mahakal
Hi Whig. You'll always be Whig to me. I can spell Whig too! LOL! 
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Comment #166 posted by Mahakal on August 23, 2008 at 08:51:34 PT
Hello to all
I am who was formerly known as whig. I will be using this name now. Mahakal / מהכאל is a one-letter change from my birth given name Michael / מיכאל. Love to all.Aum Namah Shivaya.Aum Shanti Shanti Shantihi.Shalom.
My Cannablog
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Comment #165 posted by Hope on August 15, 2008 at 08:48:13 PT
Hey Gloovins!
Thank you for the love and blessings. Back at you, too. We all need all the love and blessings that can come our way.Thank you and good to know you're still hanging in there.
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Comment #164 posted by FoM on August 15, 2008 at 06:24:59 PT
gloovins
Today it is 65 and sunny with a pleasant breeze. We have had a very mild summer this year. We barely had to use the air conditioner. Soon we'll start getting our firewood for the winter. I can't imagine what it will cost to heat a home with oil. I am feeling much better. I think I'm over the worst of it. Thanks for asking. 
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Comment #163 posted by gloovins on August 15, 2008 at 00:07:41 PT
thanks FoM
my summer is going good so far, loving every bit of sunshine I get. Bet Ohio is tropical now, uh? MMM only bout 3 more weeks till cooler air will roll in to your neck of the woods...I hope you are feeling better, btw...you are in my prayers for good health...* much love * 
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Comment #162 posted by FoM on August 14, 2008 at 06:53:20 PT
gloovins
Hello to you too. I hope you are having a nice summer.
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Comment #161 posted by gloovins on August 14, 2008 at 01:55:41 PT
and i want to point out
this article - Dr Kush - is somewhere between an article for Rolling Stone & a piece maybe written for my college newspaper. It's poorly written. It scratches the surface but tells us only hollow things. Yeah a couple of stories from a tredge along & maybe some scatter facts associated with calif medcann politics today but like todays print media journalists -- their stories they end up writing are too slanted and their position in today's media is devalued because of their lack of spice in their article and obvious bias. One can read it but they are not impressed. This is the main stream media today. I think this author is okay and got somewhat into it but this could be alot better in my opinion.
I really like the translations too whig, btw.
Namaste~
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Comment #160 posted by gloovins on August 14, 2008 at 01:33:54 PT
I too am 
ShivaHi FoM & Hope....The summer is here now - like a dream that extends to autumn that then comes back around again later as a cold wind called winter.Many seasons; many emotions...pow tho - enlightment!Day to day our blood runs different as the sun (hopefully) hits our skin and gives us a taste of sunshine life. Orange in the morning, green and lush at breakfast! Shout all - life is here...Much love and 1000 blessings ~ Gloovins 
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Comment #159 posted by whig on August 13, 2008 at 23:16:30 PT
Shaktipat
ברוך אתה יהוה אלוהינו מלך העולם בורא קנה־בשם העץ חייםBlessed are you who are God sovereign of the universe who makes cannabis the tree of lifeWho is the master who makes the grass greenיהוהשועIA HU VE HA SHI VAI am who is the God withinיהוהשועIA HU VE HA SHI VAI am the eternal OneBefore Abraham was, I AMשכינה שועShekinah Shivaשכתי שועShakti Shivaשוע שכתיShiva Shaktiאם שנתי שנתי שנתיAum Shanti Shanti Shanti
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Comment #158 posted by whig on August 07, 2008 at 15:56:30 PT
Just for good measure
Allah Peanut Butter Sandwiches.
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Comment #157 posted by whig on August 07, 2008 at 15:51:47 PT
Testament
I tell you that if you are people of IA HU VE HA SHI VA then you are my people, be you Jew or Christian or Hindu or whatever you may choose to call yourself. Let this be sufficient that all may have the tree of life.
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Comment #156 posted by whig on August 07, 2008 at 15:43:36 PT
Congregation name
שכינה שועShekinah Shiva
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Comment #155 posted by whig on August 07, 2008 at 11:13:34 PT
Because it's never really finished, I guess
Responsa:ברוך אתה יהוה אלוהינו מלך העולם בורא קנה־בשם העץ חייםBlessed are you who are God sovereign of the universe who makes cannabis the tree of lifeWho is the master who makes the grass greenיהוהשועIA HU VE HA SHI VAI am who is the God withinיהוהשועIA HU VE HA SHI VAI am who is the eternal OneBefore Abraham was, I AM
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Comment #154 posted by whig on August 07, 2008 at 02:09:12 PT
Namasté
I think that will do for now.
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Comment #153 posted by whig on August 07, 2008 at 01:52:46 PT
Roll it all together
ברוך אתה יהוה אלוהינו מלך העולם בורא קנה־בשם העץ חייםBlessed are you who are God sovereign of the universe who makes cannabis the tree of lifeWho is the Master who makes the grass greenיהוהשועIA HU VE HA SHI VAI am who is the God Within
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Comment #152 posted by whig on August 06, 2008 at 12:14:16 PT
Hear and understand
Before Abraham was, I am Shiva.
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Comment #151 posted by whig on August 06, 2008 at 11:55:13 PT
Name of salvation
If you can say this with understanding, cannabis prohibition is ended.יהושועIAHUVESHIVA
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Comment #150 posted by whig on August 05, 2008 at 18:32:38 PT
Pronuncuation and translation
יהוהשועIAHUVEHASHIVAI am Shiva
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Comment #149 posted by whig on August 04, 2008 at 13:12:09 PT
It is accomplished
יהוהשועhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiN6lX4RPMM
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Comment #148 posted by whig on August 02, 2008 at 01:12:25 PT
Working on the Hindu perspective
Here's something I found:To its devotee bhang is no ordinary plant that became , holy from its guardian and healing qualities. According to one account, when nectar was produced from the churning of the ocean, something was wanted to purify the nectar. The deity supplied the want of a nectar-cleanser by creating bhang. This bhang Mahadev made from his own body, and so it is called angaj or body-born. According to another accountsome nectar dropped to the ground and from the ground the bhang plant sprang. It was because they used this child of nectar or of Mahadev in agreement with religious forms that thee seers or Hishis became Siddha or one with the deity. He who, despite the example of the Hishis, uses no bhang shall lose his happiness in this life and in the life to come. In the end he shall be cast into hell. The mere sight of bhang, cleanses from as much sin as a thousand horse-sacrifices or a thousand pilgrimages. He who scandalizes the user of bhang shall suffer the torments of hell so long as the sun endures. He who drinks bhang foolishly or for pleasure without religious rites is as guilty as the sinner of lakhs of sins. He who drinks wisely and according to rule, be he ever so low, even though his body is smeared with human ordure and urine, is Shiva. No god or man is as good as the religious drinker of bhang.
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Comment #147 posted by FoM on July 28, 2008 at 13:26:09 PT
whig
I know you're right. The world is made up of so many different ideas and we learn from what helps us in some way as individuals. 
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Comment #146 posted by museman on July 28, 2008 at 13:22:52 PT
R.A.W.
Was a great man. A pioneer on the front lines of consciousness, and one of the authors of import of the 20th century.I highly recommend his books. They are very entertaining, as well as intellectually stimulating. 
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Comment #145 posted by whig on July 28, 2008 at 12:58:22 PT
FoM
I think you might not understand because you haven't read his books, but I do not think that Robert Anton Wilson wrote for men as opposed to women. I know that his approach may be different from yours, but he was a stoned philosopher par excellence.
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Comment #144 posted by FoM on July 28, 2008 at 12:06:55 PT
whig
That is very interesting. I can tell you like your new home state.
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Comment #143 posted by whig on July 28, 2008 at 12:06:22 PT
Correction
I shouldn't say his body left us, though it was cremated before the Meme-orial, rather that he left his body on January 11, 2007.
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Comment #142 posted by whig on July 28, 2008 at 11:58:10 PT
Oh.
Also, he was proclaimed Saint Bob for those who desire to venerate.
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Comment #141 posted by whig on July 28, 2008 at 11:56:16 PT
FoM
Robert Anton Wilson's body left us on January 11, 2007. I attended his meme-orial, and attendees were invited to speak. I invoked the rule of OM, and proclaimed that Jesus smoked pot, cannabis prohibition is over, at that event.
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Comment #140 posted by FoM on July 28, 2008 at 10:53:40 PT
Robert Anton Wilson
I really don't know anything about him except he was famous. I did a search on google and I still don't understand but that's just me. I think he is talking to men more then women and that could be the divide I feel. I don't think that way is what I'm trying to say. 
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Comment #139 posted by FoM on July 28, 2008 at 09:11:46 PT
museman
Thank you. I'm downloading them now. I caught myself the other day humming your one song and then I smiled.
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Comment #138 posted by FoM on July 28, 2008 at 08:55:47 PT
fight_4_freedom 
I like it too. I must admit that CSNY Deja Vu is the CD I am playing the most right now but that's not unusual since I am such a big fan of Neil Young.
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Comment #137 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 28, 2008 at 07:48:32 PT:
The CD is pretty good so far
It'll take a couple of times of listening to it before it really grows on me, but I like what I hear.They are just so different from everybody else.Like you, I'll probably be giving it a much better review after the 2nd or 3rd time listening to it.
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Comment #136 posted by FoM on July 28, 2008 at 05:31:26 PT
Pictures of Robert Anton Wilson at WAMM Protest
Robert Anton Wilson, who says he suffers from
post polio syndrome, is wheeled away after
receiving marijuana from Jeremy Griffey, left,
and Kathy Nicholson, second from left, both 
with the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana,
at City Hall in Santa Cruz, Calif., Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2002.Calling Santa Cruz a "sanctuary" from federal authorities,
medical marijuana advocates _ joined by city leaders
_ passed out pot to about a dozen sick
and dying patients from City Hall Tuesday.(AP Photo/Mike Fiala) http://www.freedomtoexhale.com/rw.jpghttp://www.freedomtoexhale.com/wilson.jpg
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Comment #135 posted by museman on July 28, 2008 at 01:53:36 PT
and to wrap up my insomnia..
If this changing world has you captured in embrace,and you're so unidentified, you gotta hide behind your face,well there's illusion in a moment, there's truth inside a jar,there's a reason to be livin';Your Love. Stand up and shout about it.You Love.Just can't do without it.Your Love.That's what its all about.Now don't forget what the wise men say;"Just one thing matters anyway."We really need it now.Well it seems like yesterday there were flowers in the street,a kingdom of children with no shoes upon their feet.There's a record in the rock,there's a message in our hearts,for the one who comes to claimYour LoveStand up and shout about it.your love, that's what it's all about, your love, just can't do without it, your love.  That long long war with darkness is all over now, but those guns held in the shadows gotta find the light somehow. You gotta stand up to their hearts bein' strong and right, you gotta face those empty fears, and fill 'em up with light, and do it all with your love, stand up and shout about it, your love, that's what it's all about, your love, just can't do without it, your love. Your love, that's what it's all about.this is what the 7Thunders spoke...
Your Love
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Comment #134 posted by museman on July 28, 2008 at 01:28:23 PT
and just for entertainment...
Here's a rare auditory glimpse into the actual psychedelic realm that was a favorite way of playing music, once upon a time.This band, called "True Believers" was performing live, 'underground' in a barn that no longer exists, on land that was long ago sold, in a community that will not be named, somewhere in the State of Jefferson.In the background you might hear a baby crying, or children making odd noises. It is a rare recording. Usually no one thought to press the 'record' button.It's not hollywood quality, recorded on a cassette originally, though I tweaked it as best I could.On the day that the media began to go on and on about David Koresh and his 'fanatic group of 'true believers,' we changed our name to "Merkabah." (Whig probably knows what that is/means)True psychedelic music. I know, I was there, we played it. I believe the 'medicine' we used to perform the magic was called 'Crystal Light' a derivative of L-D25 that has a story that might get told in the new world that's arriving, but not yet... Thats me on the guitar, still in my 30's at the time. It's not a short piece, I definitely suggest a comfortable chair and of course, good herb.enjoy
World Of Illusion
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Comment #133 posted by museman on July 28, 2008 at 00:17:59 PT
Not My Usual 
But reminiscent of days gone by...and somehow appropriate
Touched by Love
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Comment #132 posted by museman on July 27, 2008 at 23:32:39 PT
not wierd
but pertinent. Since Robert Anton Wison is a 'published' author, that gives him credibility, if he says a thing, more folks are likly to look at his 'reality tunnel' than say my 'reality tunnel.This helps back up a point I'm laboring at on another thread.The decision of consciousness and will is the master that makes the grass green. 
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Comment #131 posted by whig on July 27, 2008 at 21:22:41 PT
Who is the master?
This may seem weird, but here's Robert Anton Wilson.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY5r_zox-a8
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Comment #130 posted by whig on July 27, 2008 at 21:17:56 PT
FoM #121
You are who is, and I am who is. We are all branches of the same tree.
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Comment #129 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 20:09:34 PT
Had Enough
Please share this with your Bride.Spirit of The Horsehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMD0xq3gh5w
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Comment #128 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 19:51:52 PT
Had Enough
I knew you meant she. Get some quality rest. I am meeting with a lady from the Obama campaign tomorrow morning. She is coming to my house. This should be interesting since this site will be mentioned.
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Comment #127 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 19:49:07 PT
Had Enough
A horse is the essence of pure unadulterated freedom. When a rider becomes part of the horse only then can a person understand how it can effect those who have devoted a part of themselves to this noble animal.
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Comment #126 posted by Had Enough on July 27, 2008 at 19:42:43 PT
opps...
"'Bride' he"I left out the S as in She...Getting tired... calling it a night..
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Comment #125 posted by Had Enough on July 27, 2008 at 19:39:32 PT
Spirit
I’ve noticed something on my journey though this life.People who are connected with animals, farms, places closer to nature, seem higher spirited than those who get further from nature.Out of those, I observe people who are or have been connected with horses, are even higher spirited.Talk about high spirited…you need to check out ‘Bride’ he is a horse lover too…and she has that spirit that goes with it…Never been around horses a lot, but I do recognize their effect.
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Comment #124 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 19:27:01 PT
Had Enough 
No one can have my spirit either. Life's too darn cool to give it up. From the beginning and I know up until the end.Hope the song is really good. It isn't what the lyrics are like. They seem really down. It's amazing how the song can change the words when they are put together.
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Comment #123 posted by Had Enough on July 27, 2008 at 19:20:55 PT
Yes FoM…
You got it…You are the Master of your own destiny…But those behind the curtain are doing everything it can to take that away…however…
It is difficult to capture a true free spirit…and that’s one thing they will never take from me…and others I see here too…!!!When you are standing on the side of the road with nothing left, no house, no stereo, no food, no water. Your clothes are even gone…What do we have left???We got our spirit that has been steeled by TIME. Nobody but Nobody, will ever get that from me…
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Comment #122 posted by Hope on July 27, 2008 at 19:16:59 PT
Pink Floyd-Free Four
Doesn't sound very uplifting. It's kind of "educational", though.
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Comment #121 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 19:10:45 PT
Master?
You must forgive me but that sounds weird. I am the Master of my own destiny. So I am my own Master I guess.
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Comment #120 posted by Had Enough on July 27, 2008 at 19:03:32 PT
Who is the Master...???
Feeling musical tonight…Re: #119Pink Floyd-Free Fourhttp://youtube.com/watch?v=7EG37Q4sHI4Lyrics:Free Four (Waters) 4:15 The memories of a man in his old ageAre the deeds of a man in his prime.You shuffle in gloom of the sickroomAnd talk to yourself as you die.***Life is a short, warm momentAnd death is a long cold rest.You get your chance to try in the twinkling of an eye:Eighty years, with luck, or even less.***So all aboard for the American tour,And maybe you'll make it to the top.And mind how you go, and I can tell you, 'cause I knowYou may find it hard to get off.***You are the angel of deathAnd I am the dead man's son.And he was buried like a mole in a fox hole.And everyone is still in the run.***And who is the master of fox hounds?And who says the hunt has begun?And who calls the tune in the courtroom?And who beats the funeral drum?***The memories of a man in his old ageAre the deeds of a man in his prime.You shuffle in gloom in the sickroomAnd talk to yourself till you die.
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Comment #119 posted by whig on July 27, 2008 at 18:13:47 PT
museman
Who is the master who makes the grass green? :)
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Comment #118 posted by museman on July 27, 2008 at 18:06:21 PT
# 107
Whig that is just excellent, thank you.
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Comment #117 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 17:13:47 PT
whig
Yes it is good. When a musician can take you on a slow gentle prodding trip thru a song then to me they are the best. I'm sure many good musicians believe in Leonard Cohen's music style. 
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Comment #116 posted by whig on July 27, 2008 at 17:01:53 PT
FoM
That was really good. It's nice that so many musicians love and respect Leonard Cohen.
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Comment #115 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 16:44:06 PT
fight_4_freedom 
You got Viva La Vida! It's really good. I think you'll enjoy cleaning the house too. Good music makes chores go so much easier.
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Comment #114 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 27, 2008 at 16:40:27 PT:
I finally went and picked up the new album
Now I will crank it up and test it out while I'm cleaning the house. And the sale at target ended so I had to pay an extra $5 for it. It was at $9.99 for the sale. See, my procrastination cost me again. lol
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Comment #113 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 16:33:02 PT
whig
That was different. I don't know who Imogen Heap is though. I like Leonard Cohen for a number of his songs. He has had such a colorful life. Leonard Cohen & U2 - Tower of Songhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsB1nfjWFSs
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Comment #112 posted by whig on July 27, 2008 at 16:22:07 PT
FoM
I have a collection of covers of that song too. They are all special and unique. Here is one by Imogen Heap.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNQu9rP7xwI
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Comment #111 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 16:10:56 PT
whig
I love that song. When I go out to mow I listen these days to Leonard Cohen and it's really nice. Leonard Cohen is so special.
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Comment #110 posted by whig on July 27, 2008 at 16:10:46 PT
FoM
Glad you like it.This should be usable by anyone anywhere if they can interpret it. Cannabis prohibition is over.
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Comment #109 posted by whig on July 27, 2008 at 16:03:51 PT
Hallelujah
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf36v0epfmI
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Comment #108 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 16:02:09 PT
whig
That's good too.
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Comment #107 posted by whig on July 27, 2008 at 15:59:27 PT
Nah
One more change. Take out all punctuation.ברוך אתה יהוה אלוהינו מלך העולם בורא פרח קנה־בשם העץ חייםBlessed are you who are God sovereign of the universe who makes cannabis the tree of lifeMichael
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Comment #106 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 15:51:56 PT
Whig
That is very nice. 
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Comment #105 posted by whig on July 27, 2008 at 15:49:54 PT
Revised blessing
This should be the final version.Feel free to use it.ברוך אתה יהוה אלוהינו מלך העולם בורא פרח קנה־בשם העץ חייםBlessed are you who are God, sovereign of the universe who makes cannabis the tree of life.Michael
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Comment #104 posted by whig on July 27, 2008 at 11:42:14 PT
fight_4_freedom
You might want to try taking 30C homeopathic Lachesis if you have cravings for alcohol that you are trying to control.
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Comment #103 posted by Hope on July 27, 2008 at 10:43:13 PT
Fight!
Fight_4_Freedom!
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Comment #102 posted by Hope on July 27, 2008 at 10:41:51 PT
(even though I would have much rather had a kiss )
Grace, blessings, and hope to you for the coming New Year, Figh_4_Freedom!
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Comment #101 posted by Hope on July 27, 2008 at 10:38:16 PT
Fight_4_freedom 
Early morning stomach cramps! That sets off alarms in me. I hope it's not the beginnings of an ulcerated gut. I feel for you. My stomach churns at the thought.
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Comment #100 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 09:47:38 PT
fight_4_freedom 
I know some people love to drink. I only drank for a total of a couple of years and that was enough for me. 
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Comment #99 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 27, 2008 at 09:35:11 PT:
Last saturday night I went out to the bar district
with some friends and drank a few beers. I did not fully recover from that hangover until Sunday night at 8:00. And that was just drinking somewhat lightly (compared to my friends). This was the first New Year's Eve I didn't drink in a while and you're right, it's a lot better to start off the new year alcohol free. I took a hit off of a spliff right at midnight to bring in the new year (even though I would have much rather had a kiss instead).
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Comment #98 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 09:27:14 PT
fight_4_freedom 
Even a beautiful sunny day won't help people with a hangover! LOL! I love feeling good on New Years Day. That can be a big bummer day for drinkers.
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Comment #97 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 27, 2008 at 09:23:54 PT:
Thanks FoM
I might not have been able to get back to sleep at all without the help of my sidekick mary. For some reason my connection is lagging quite a bit today as well.I'm trying to round up some people to go to the beach before it gets too late, but nobody seems to be up for it. It's such a beautiful day out there I can't imagine why everyone wants to stay in today. Except for the fact that everyone else drank last night while I avoided the alcohol. So now everyone is paying for it today. lolIt's supposed to be 85 and sunny. Same tomorrow, and I have both days off :) woo hoo
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Comment #96 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 09:07:28 PT
fight_4_freedom 
I'm glad you are feeling better. The Red Hot Chili Peppers do the Bridge School Benefit or did it. I can't check out the video links while they are doing something to the towers but thank you for the links.
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Comment #95 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 27, 2008 at 09:05:57 PT:
The last link worked
Thanks FoM!
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Comment #94 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 09:04:09 PT
Link to Pictures
Hope I like your comment.http://rustedsister.smugmug.com/gallery/81357_tfqTB#2826859_qdGn7
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Comment #93 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 27, 2008 at 09:04:09 PT:
Another song for the day
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nq_5zwEUukRed Hot Chili Peppers "The Zephyr Song"Very trippy video!
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Comment #92 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 09:02:26 PT
fight_4_freedom 
Does this one work? If not I can go get the page and post it.http://rustedsister.smugmug.com/photos/2826859_qdGn7-L.jpg
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Comment #91 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 27, 2008 at 09:00:50 PT:
For some reason the last links you gave me are 
not working.
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Comment #90 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 27, 2008 at 08:59:11 PT:
I woke up early this morning with unbearable 
cramps in my stomach that seemed like they would never go away. So I waited a while, hoping they would go away on their own. About half an hour after holding my stomach, I decided to turn to old Mary. Within seconds of inhaling, the cramps subsided to the point where I could relax and go back to sleep. And I woke up feeling just fine. This plant continues to amaze me with each passing day.Just thought some of you would like to hear how our favorite herb helped me this morning.
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Comment #89 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 08:58:15 PT
fight_4_freedom 
They must be working on towers because my connection is shakey today. I had to do a search but found these pictures on Joan's (Rusted Sister) picture page.Neil's Bushttp://rustedsister.smugmug.com/photos/2826832_ZU8Xs-L.jpgBen at The Greendale Tour 2003-2004http://rustedsister.smugmug.com/photos/2826859_qdGn7-Ti.jpg
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Comment #88 posted by Hope on July 27, 2008 at 08:43:57 PT
Neil isn't a wimp of any kind... that's for sure.
He's made mistakes, I'm sure, in his life. It's part of it. Yet, he's consistently made what I see as the right choices, often hard choices, when faced with hardship of many kinds. He's worked diligently and not let despair cripple him to the very soul. Something I can really admire and hope to do even half as well as he has in his journey, with what I face in my particular personal journey.He could have given up and hidden his children away in institutions. He could have been so destroyed by worry, guilt, doubt, a sense of imperfection, fear, and despair that he became a derelict and died in some back alley or deserted building. He's fought all that with admirable character. Very admirable character, all the while being subjected to an unprecedented amount of public scrutiny and judgment. The imperfections some would point to in him, for me, only magnify the beauty of the perfection.
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Comment #87 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 27, 2008 at 08:39:01 PT:
Some Sublime for the Soul on Sunday
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sal-bp_ciC4 "What I Got"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKrzZCbV0DA&feature=related"Smoke 2 Joints" with a creative little video. 
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Comment #86 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 27, 2008 at 08:25:13 PT:
That must be a more recent photo
How old is Ben? A picture like that gives me hope that there is still a lot of caring and compassion in this world regardless of what we see on tv. 
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Comment #85 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 08:12:05 PT
I Love Neil Young and Pegi
Neil and Pegi take Ben with them when they tour. They brought him out on stage during the Greendale concert with an American flag on one side of the wheel chair and a Canadian flag on the other side of the wheel chair. As I remember Neil's son by Carrie Snodgress (Diary of a Mad Housewife) worked on the tour. He (Zeke) is less handicapped then Ben. Carrie Snodgress died at the end of the Greendale tour in 04 from Liver failure. 
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Comment #84 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 07:44:26 PT
fight_4_freedom 
This is Neil with Ben.http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/0cwEejQ3la7FA/610x.jpg
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Comment #83 posted by Hope on July 27, 2008 at 07:41:56 PT
Neil's story
is one of those stories that I see as Biblical in it's proportion. Lots to see and learn in it.
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Comment #82 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 27, 2008 at 07:40:53 PT:
That is fantastic FoM
He really seems like a truly giving person. It's always good to see people giving back. Nice concert clip too! Thanks.
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Comment #81 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 07:26:29 PT
fight_4_freedom 
Here's some clips of the Bridge School Benefit.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfFPspQW6rY
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Comment #80 posted by FoM on July 27, 2008 at 07:23:15 PT
fight_4_freedom 
Neil and Pegi took a devastating event and created a wonderful school. Every Fall they have a benefit for the school and they always have superb musicians to come and play in support of the children with special needs.http://www.bridgeschool.org/
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Comment #79 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 27, 2008 at 07:12:57 PT:
Sounds like Neil really turned a negative into a 
positive with his situation. And because of his kids giving him inspiration, he will pass on that inspiration to many others through his music. It's actually quite a beautiful thing.I'm starting to realize why you like him so much.
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Comment #78 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 26, 2008 at 20:22:19 PT:
Whig 
I absolutely love the prayer. I can already foresee a sign with that prayer on it, hanging right above the doorway at my future dispensary :) FoM- Tomorrow is my day off so I am going to go spoil myself and buy the CD finally. I can't wait any longer! Now you have me really excited after hearing that last review :)Good Night C-Newsers!One Love
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Comment #77 posted by FoM on July 26, 2008 at 15:20:13 PT
Hope
It was a young seminary student and probably reacted instead of thinking about it. The paper that published it knew it would sell papers.
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Comment #76 posted by Hope on July 26, 2008 at 15:13:57 PT
Is that not a serious infraction of some kind
taking that prayer out of that wall?
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Comment #75 posted by FoM on July 26, 2008 at 13:47:14 PT
whig
If that is what you feel you should do you should do it. 
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Comment #74 posted by whig on July 26, 2008 at 13:27:09 PT
FoM
Maybe we should find a good Hindu prayer to put on the sticker too, and as many other faiths as we can find.
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Comment #73 posted by FoM on July 26, 2008 at 13:19:02 PT
fight_4_freedom 
I just listened to Coldplay for the 3rd time and it is getting better and better the more I listen to it. Good stuff.
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Comment #72 posted by FoM on July 26, 2008 at 11:52:19 PT
whig
That is beautiful. My oh my. I guess I'm different in many respects because I love Israel and always have. I value all Faiths because with out all Faiths we wouldn't have any recorded history. To me it is like Neil said it's all one song. The good, the bad and the ugly. It's very important to me to look at it all this way.
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Comment #71 posted by whig on July 26, 2008 at 11:46:45 PT
Blessing
ברוך אתה יהוה אלוהינו מלך העולם בורא פרי קנה־בשם העץ חייםI think that will do. The Baruch is actually Bet-Resh-Vav-Kaph, btw.
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Comment #70 posted by FoM on July 26, 2008 at 11:04:00 PT
whig
I knew his name meant something but I wasn't sure. That is a beautiful prayer. When I was young I prayed for wisdom. I didn't know what I was asking for with that one and he probably doesn't either. I agree they shouldn't have removed the prayer and published it. That should be very private and personal.
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Comment #69 posted by whig on July 26, 2008 at 10:52:11 PT
FoM
I like Barack's prayer, do you know in Hebrew his first name is the first word of the prayer I gave, too? Barack or Baruch are the same word, just slightly different pronunciations, in Hebrew it's still Bet-Resh-Kaph and it means "bless."I don't think it was right of someone to take his prayer out of the wall and publish it, though. It should have been kept private.
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Comment #68 posted by FoM on July 26, 2008 at 08:44:25 PT
whig
I thought of you when I read the prayer that Obama left in the Wall in Jerusalem. I don't know why they published it but here it is."Lord — Protect my family and me. Forgive me my sins, and help me guard against pride and despair. Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just. And make me an instrument of your will," reads the note published in Maariv.http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080725/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_obama_s_note
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Comment #67 posted by FoM on July 26, 2008 at 07:10:30 PT
whig
Very nice.
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Comment #66 posted by whig on July 26, 2008 at 00:36:15 PT
Actually
I'll leave off the Hebrew unless I write it in Hebrew, the transliteration can't be done correctly.Anyhow, I'm going to figure it out and give stickers away.
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Comment #65 posted by whig on July 26, 2008 at 00:32:19 PT
New prayer
I think I'll put these on stickers.Bless you who is God, sovereign of the universe and creator of cannabis, the tree of life.Baruch atah Adonai Elohenu melech ha'olam borei p'ri kanehbos ha'etz chaim
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Comment #64 posted by FoM on July 25, 2008 at 20:27:45 PT
fight_4_freedom 
Coldplay's CD was very good. Tomorrow we will both listen to it. I think the reason I like Neil Young so much is because of his life's story. The fact that he has two son's from different mothers born with Cerebral Palsy and his youngest son is severely handicapped has helped Neil be all that he can be. He said that his son is something like a guide for him. That's not exact. If Neil is angry his son gets upset and won't stop protesting until Neil calms down and Neil said he can't fake it. He loves his family and that means a lot as to the reason I like him so much. 
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Comment #63 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 25, 2008 at 15:26:52 PT:
Whig
I suppose you cannot really ever feel completely safe with the situation out there right now no matter where you are.But you are certainly involved for the right reasons. It sounds like you would get the same satisfaction that I would from helping at one of these dispensaries. Good luck on your journey my friend. Good Karma shall come your way.FoM- I'm going to download some of them tonight and make my first Neil Young Cd. I listened to a couple of them on youtube and I liked what I heard. He has a real soothing voice. And his songwriting is superb as well.I hope you had fun jamming to Coldplay today. lolThe only one I've really heard off of their new cd is Viva la Vida. But I'm sure there is a couple other good songs.I was rockin' out to some sublime this afternoon while doing some work out in the yard. Picked my first tomatoes and green peppers of the summer. My tomato plants are out of control. They are branching out every which way possible. I'm going to get more memory for my camera one of these days here, so I'll show you some pictures pretty soon.
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Comment #62 posted by Hope on July 25, 2008 at 08:44:00 PT
It looks like, from the tone of this article...
That "Tibetan prayer flags" are the new "Freak Flag".This article makes it sound like they could be used as "Probable cause".
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Comment #61 posted by FoM on July 25, 2008 at 08:17:51 PT
One More Thing
The Politics of Song - New York Timeshttp://movies.nytimes.com/2008/07/25/movies/25csny.html
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Comment #60 posted by FoM on July 25, 2008 at 07:30:06 PT
fight_4_freedom 
If you or anyone wants to hear CSNY Deja Vu Live here it is.http://www.kbgo.com/cc-common/ondemand/music.html?apid=4461
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Comment #59 posted by FoM on July 25, 2008 at 06:40:07 PT
fight_4_freedom 
Nothing is happening on the news so I am playing Coldplay with all the speakers in the house turned up. I saw Coldplay on The Daily Show and I really liked the song they played. That's why I bought their new CD. It does sound good. So far it is the 4th song I really like.
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Comment #58 posted by whig on July 24, 2008 at 21:29:28 PT
fight_4_freedom
There are always raids happening somewhere or other I think. It's definitely not a situation that anyone can feel like it's safe. It's definitely better to be in a friendly county and municipality, some parts of California are still very hostile.I totally agree about being as careful as possible and that goes no matter where. I have a sort of idea how things should be and no place that I've found does it the way I really want them to, and if I want a job I do it their way but I don't think this is a way for me to make money. I see this as what I can do to help people and end cannabis prohibition everywhere.
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Comment #57 posted by FoM on July 24, 2008 at 18:37:08 PT
fight_4_freedom 
I haven't listened to music today but I sure enjoyed CSNY Deja Vu Live last night. He did Living With War on the piano. It's beautiful. I love Greendale but I saw the concert/play live two times. Neil Young can do like Rockin In The Free World and amaze everyone that sees and hears him play it. I love Harvest Moon. He has done so many albums and his style is broad that I don't even know where to begin. Neil Younghttp://ca.youtube.com/results?search_query=neil+young&page=1
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Comment #56 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 24, 2008 at 18:24:54 PT:
Maybe I'll have to download more Neil Young
I hear You and others always talk about him when really I haven't heard much of his music. What are some of your favorites?Coldplay is definitely one of my favorite bands. I think I'm going to go buy the new CD tomorrow. I'll see if I can get a good price on it from Target. Here's some of my faves.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWtbXpyqPGU "Clocks" (live)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBEYyHGbwto "Fix You"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYuyar-rrNY "Yellow" (live)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMOOHGhB_b4 "Speed of Sound"
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Comment #55 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 24, 2008 at 17:59:59 PT:
Whig
Take home tests are always nice. Even though those ones do tend to be lengthier and more in depth. I'm sure you'll pass with flying colors though. I'm still just so happy to hear that a school like this even exists in this country. Although it is in California, which is like it's own separate country anyways.I think by the time I'm actually ready to start a dispensary or join one, the federal law will have already changed. And I really do feel that is going to happen fairly soon. Maybe not legal medical marijuana across the country, but at least a law protecting the patients, growers, and dispensers in MM states. But for now I would be as careful as possible. This administration is coming to an end and they know that. I have a feeling they will try to do as much damage to our movement as possible before January. Although I don't really see them messing with San Francisco or the Bay Area at all for that matter. As far as I know there really hasn't been too many raids in that area, am I right?And I would imagine anybody representing Eddy Lepp would be a good choice for a defense in case anything were to happen.
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Comment #54 posted by OverwhelmSam on July 24, 2008 at 07:17:09 PT
Scott Burns (Weed In His Basement)
This guy is lying through his teeth about marijuana. Although I can't entirely blame him, he is paid to lie about marijuana. The real blame now shifts to the politicians who believe his crap. I understand that as a species, we are territorial about our beliefs. Belief systems fall into two main categories, absolutist and developmental. The absolutists are generally taught their beliefs and attack anyone who believes differently. Developmentalists tend to hold their beliefs until reality causes a shift or epitome which causes a realignment of their working model of beliefs.The politicians who are absolutists, usually Republicans, tend to work in their own best interest based on their beliefs. These politicians are also not the best representatives of the People and they should be repeatedly turned down at the voting booth.
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Comment #53 posted by whig on July 24, 2008 at 00:29:14 PT
Hi Hope!
Hope you're doing well too.
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Comment #52 posted by FoM on July 23, 2008 at 20:40:33 PT
News Article From The Arcata Eye
Arcata Cannabis Crisis Gets Bush Administration's Attention July 22, 2008http://drugsense.org/url/Ajl2qkHM
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Comment #51 posted by FoM on July 23, 2008 at 19:48:18 PT
fight_4_freedom 
I like it. This is my first CD of Coldplays. I only listened to it once so far because I am stuck on a loop listening to CSNY's Deja Vu. I loved the concert so much I can't quite turn it down or off. I shut my windows ( like anyone will hear it where I live lol ) It sounds perfect nice and loud to me.
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Comment #50 posted by Hope on July 23, 2008 at 19:32:16 PT
Whig,
It's good to know you're doing well, thriving even!:0)
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Comment #49 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 23, 2008 at 19:23:58 PT:
FoM
How was the coldplay CD? I have just about every cd they have put out so far and love them all. I was thinking about downloading it but I've decided I'm just going to buy it instead. I will be getting tickets for their upcoming concert in Detroit for sure. They rescheduled it for some reason so now the concert that was supposed to be in July will be in November.Let me know how you like it.
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Comment #48 posted by FoM on July 23, 2008 at 12:02:01 PT

whig
I know where you are coming from. I really do.PS: I've been on interesting journey while news is slow. Since I have pictures of my childhood home now memories are flooding back and I search on google and find more things. It's rather an amazing journey for me right now. I just got 3 new CDs in the mail today. CSNY tour, Looking Forward a CSNY CD and Coldplays new cd. I'm having fun.
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Comment #47 posted by whig on July 23, 2008 at 10:48:52 PT

FoM
I don't think many people are prepared to go with a first amendment/RFRA (Religious Freedom Restoration Act) defense if necessary, and sincerely. There is no medical defense in federal court for dispensing, but if we are healing the sick as a mission, without doing commercial sales if we can meet our expenses through suggested donations, we should be able to stand on solid ground. Generally if we keep below certain limits the feds should leave us alone anyhow, and I'm definitely not interested in making ourselves a target, the idea is to make it easy for them to leave us alone.
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Comment #46 posted by FoM on July 23, 2008 at 06:46:11 PT

whig
I have a very hard time understanding why more isn't being done on the Federal level. Maybe in the future it will happen. We're in a state of limbo now. It's like reading a book and getting almost to the end but the end isn't written yet. Maybe no one has pushed on changing Federal law because people know where this administration stands on the issue.
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Comment #45 posted by whig on July 23, 2008 at 02:27:05 PT

What do we all affirm?
Do we have a duty, if possible, to heal the sick?
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Comment #44 posted by whig on July 23, 2008 at 02:21:13 PT

BGreen
I've got another place, but this still is a kind of family to me too, and it's good to visit sometimes.
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Comment #43 posted by BGreen on July 22, 2008 at 23:49:51 PT

It's good to see you, whig
I've been wondering where you were. Take care and don't be a stranger.The Reverend Bud Green
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Comment #42 posted by whig on July 22, 2008 at 21:34:02 PT

FoM #40
That's a sad example of my point that people need to be prepared, and not just rely on state law to protect ourselves. Plus by making sure we're prepared to stand up to the Feds we help the rest of the country and we don't make this into a Hotel California situation.
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Comment #41 posted by whig on July 22, 2008 at 21:20:52 PT

fight_4_freedom
The exam was take home and it was pretty detailed, as far as needing to be able to locate the right information, they recommend about five hours to complete it, I didn't keep track of how much time it took me but I spent a few hours a day over a couple days. I'm certain that I passed, at least.I'm not going to decide where to go or what to do without being very careful, and I look at it as where I fit in not where someone else is doing something that I'm not entirely comfortable with. I know the laws in California are one thing and people can be very well prepared for it, but I still see a lot of people taking pleas from the Feds if they happen to get involved, and I'm not willing to stake my future on a bet they won't. Being prepared for that possibility is important to me.I know that the lawyer who spoke to us also represents Eddy Lepp and he probably knows a lot about how we might be sure to have a good defense in advance. I'd definitely want to talk with him and maybe give him a retainer before I go do anything.
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Comment #40 posted by FoM on July 22, 2008 at 17:44:09 PT

Another Sad Story
Medicinal Pot Law Doesn't Save Man from Federal PrisonTuesday, July 22, 2008http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/1101302.html
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Comment #39 posted by FoM on July 22, 2008 at 16:08:31 PT

fight_4_freedom 
When the risk factor is gone it will become as inexpensive as corn practically (when it can be grown outside and in volume). Then and only then will it be what it should be. Just a weed with qualities that can help people. Once the profits are gone it will become a non issue like it should be.
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Comment #38 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 22, 2008 at 14:20:37 PT:

Whig
Sounds like a good way to get started. The prices do not really seem too bad either. I may have to do that in the near future. How long was the exam?And that does seem like a good idea. Take a good look at as many dispensaries as possible before making any decisions. I would rather take my time and find a place where I'd be comfortable over just choosing the first one available.FoM- You are right about the cost of living being expensive out there. So I guess that and the fact that they are taking so much risk does drive up the price. So maybe when the feds stop interfering the price will drop a bit. 
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Comment #37 posted by FoM on July 22, 2008 at 13:40:22 PT

Whig
About comment 30. I know how people think around here too. I have had a hard time relating to people. My eastern Pa upbringing is nothing like what is around this area. I love where I live because in the country you aren't in a lot of contact with people. You can be selective with your friends and associates.
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Comment #36 posted by FoM on July 22, 2008 at 12:53:27 PT

Whig
I am thrilled with the young people's involvment. They are awake and engaged and it does my heart good. Go young folks. Change our direction and make it good for everyone young and old.
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Comment #35 posted by whig on July 22, 2008 at 12:47:22 PT

media vs internet
This is an information war. The younger wired generation is going to win because our network is better, even though the old one is still strong. We have the ability to penetrate the media with truth now.
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Comment #34 posted by FoM on July 22, 2008 at 12:46:26 PT

Whig
My man really values Obama. That's one down and lots to go! LOL!
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Comment #33 posted by FoM on July 22, 2008 at 12:44:07 PT

Sam and Whig
I know this won't be easy but he does stand a good chance. I never thought Bush would have a second term. If Obama doesn't win I'm done with anything with politics. I'll have given it my all and I'll have no more to give.
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Comment #32 posted by whig on July 22, 2008 at 12:43:57 PT

Sam Adams
Most old white men will vote for John McCain. When you refer to "most men" I think that's who you really mean.
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Comment #31 posted by Sam Adams on July 22, 2008 at 12:41:05 PT

movie
http://www.hackingdemocracy.com/
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Comment #30 posted by whig on July 22, 2008 at 12:39:14 PT

FoM
I'm not sure what's strange about your thinking, at all, and being from where I'm from I know how people think in that part of the country. It's hard to explain, but the media plays it for all it's worth and they will use the argument that Barack Obama is an elitist to try to make some people hate him. Barack Obama came up from nothing, he worked hard to be where he is. John McCain, son of an admiral, is the elitist.
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Comment #29 posted by Sam Adams on July 22, 2008 at 12:37:31 PT

McCain
I read yesterday that ever since Reagan was first elected in 1980, the Democrats have never won a majority of the presidential vote. I think most people don't give a hoot how smart or prepared the guy is, there's probably at least 1/3rd of voters that will never vote Democrat for president. Many men, if not most, feel this way. Of all the people that cannot vote due to felony, probably 80-90% would vote Democrat. I would guess most un-registered voters would vote Democrat as well.I still have people I know tell me on a regular basis that they vote Republican because they are the party of smaller government - it makes me want to throw up. Bush/Cheney grew the federal govt. more in their first term than any president since LBJ.Many old people will vote for McCain. They will be scared by ads and like the military guy. Instinctively many of them won't like Obama, the whippersnapper. Old, affluent white people vote the most. More than minorities, more than poor people, more than young people.I think Obama is going to have fight hard to have a chance of winning. This is an American election, it doesn't necessarily mean more people want McCain to be president. Based on turnout for Obama, it seems obvious more people want him to win.The question is can he win this American presidential election, after Bush/Cheney has been in charge for 8 straight years. It's going to be very difficult for Obama to win IMO.If anyone thinks Obama beating McCain is an easy slam dunk you should go watch the movie "Hacking Democracy" right now. After watching you'll realize it will take a near miracle for him to win.
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Comment #28 posted by FoM on July 22, 2008 at 12:31:00 PT

whig
I also believe that some people don't want someone who they think is an elitist whatever that is. I really want a president that knows how to speak period. 
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Comment #27 posted by FoM on July 22, 2008 at 12:28:32 PT

whig
You probably are right. I talk strangely because I think strangely.
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Comment #26 posted by whig on July 22, 2008 at 12:25:13 PT

FoM
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I think that the main opposition to Barack Obama at this point has to be coming from people who are flat out racists, because he's so clearly more competent and prepared and correct than John McCain.
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Comment #25 posted by FoM on July 22, 2008 at 12:19:08 PT

whig
I believe in thinking broadly. I believe most of the negativity has come from people who are narrow in their thinking. Sometimes I think people hate just because it isn't the Party they are into. 
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Comment #24 posted by whig on July 22, 2008 at 12:16:26 PT

FoM
I believe in being optimistic but prepared, if that makes sense to you. I think that if people do things correctly and think ahead of time about what can happen and how we should know what to do then it makes it a lot less likely that we have problems, at all.As far as Obama being good for America, you'll get no argument from me.
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Comment #23 posted by FoM on July 22, 2008 at 11:50:42 PT

If Blackwell Doesn't Like Obama
That's a good thing to me.Former Ohio Official Appears in Anti-Obama Adhttp://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-07-22-blackwell-obama_N.htm
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Comment #22 posted by FoM on July 22, 2008 at 11:40:28 PT

whig
I also don't believe that being optimistic is a bad thing. I don't like living in the mullygrubs. It's a terrible place to live. It reminds me of a cereal commerical Just ask Mikey he hates everything! LOL!
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Comment #21 posted by FoM on July 22, 2008 at 11:35:16 PT

whig
I believe any politician deserves our attention. I know one thing though. An Obama administration will be much better then the current administration and that's a good beginning.
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Comment #20 posted by whig on July 22, 2008 at 11:31:20 PT

FoM
I agree, McCain would be bad. I'm just saying we need to be careful even with Obama.
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Comment #19 posted by FoM on July 22, 2008 at 10:39:49 PT

fight_4_freedom 
I think the profit is way too much in California but it costs alot more to live there. Cities do it one way but less populated areas could do it differently since it wouldn't be driven in the same manner.Whig I don't think McCain would be better for us.
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Comment #18 posted by whig on July 22, 2008 at 10:31:24 PT

fight_4_freedom
It was inexpensive, a couple hundred dollars to have basically all the people who started the medical marijuana movement in California teach us about how they have been doing things for the last decade and a half here. I did the basic classes in a weekend intensive and just finished the final exam a couple days ago.Here's the curriculum:http://oaksterdamuniversity.com/curriculum.htmlI'm really open to suggestions on what to do now, I was thinking of making a tour of all the dispensaries in SF and see if any of them is a good fit for me to help. Oakland rules don't let patients medicate on the premises, I'd prefer to have a sanctuary where people can be comfortable. I'd also prefer to make it donation based and be prepared with a first amendment/RFRA defense with respect to the federal government.As much as I am looking forward to the Obama administration, there is no guarantee we will be safe. He promised to call off raids on patients, he didn't specifically promise to leave dispensaries alone, and the reversal on FISA gives me reason to be concerned with having a viable federal defense in the event that it is needed.
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Comment #17 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 22, 2008 at 09:28:48 PT:

Very True Sam & FoM
Thinking big is the way to go. My brother-in-law told me last summer he would be willing to dish out the cash to start one once we knew for sure that the feds would stop interfering with state laws. So hopefully come November, Obama wins and goes through with what he said. I still think it would be possible to make quite a bit of money while having reasonable prices that people can actually afford. I think a lot of the current dispensaries are only charging so much because there is still such a big risk involved. That or they are just being extremely greedy. I've heard some are charging $70-$80 an eighth for the highly potent herb. I don't believe people in need should be spending that much on an easily grown plant.Whig- How long did it take you to get through the basic program? And was it very costly?
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Comment #16 posted by FoM on July 22, 2008 at 07:16:23 PT

Sam
It's enough to make my head spin. Obama is doing a wonderful job on his world tour. The troops just love him. It isn't polite applause but energized applause. I am looking forward to having a President that I like.
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Comment #15 posted by Sam Adams on July 22, 2008 at 07:04:30 PT

Obama
Isn't it fascinating that the propaganda casts Obama as the Muslim, when it was Bush/Cheney and Howard Baker that flew the Bin Laden family back to Saudi Arabia, without being interviewed, right after their son killed 3000 Americans.But Obama is the Muslim sympathizer! Right.The Republicans are the ones sending all our money to Iraq, a Muslim country. How much cash has been paid to Islamic warlords & sheiks in Iraq by Bush/Cheney? How many bridges and power plants are we building RIGHT NOW in Iraq, a Muslim country, while our country's infrastructure goes down the tubes?That is the nature of Doublethink. Cuba is evil, China is good. Just keep repeating until it makes sense.
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Comment #14 posted by OverwhelmSam on July 22, 2008 at 06:35:07 PT

Developed Strains and Variety 
I noticed that these guys have specific strains down to a Science. I look forward to sampling the free market developments in variety as soon as it's legal.
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Comment #13 posted by FoM on July 22, 2008 at 06:17:32 PT

ripit 
I'm glad this article was in the New Yorker. I think the cover that was about Obama showed how stupid people think about Obama and his wife. 
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Comment #12 posted by FoM on July 22, 2008 at 06:15:54 PT

whig
It's nice to see you. That is really cool.
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Comment #11 posted by ripit on July 22, 2008 at 05:26:13 PT:

i'm slightly
suprized and very happy that they printed this in the new yorker!especailly after all this hype about the obama cover!seems to me it just the sort of mag that politions and media types read.not just a little fluff piece in the back of some prohibitionist fish wrapper!
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Comment #10 posted by whig on July 22, 2008 at 01:40:58 PT

fwiw
I didn't take dispensary management and the other second level stuff, just the basic program, but hopefully enough to get started.
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Comment #9 posted by whig on July 22, 2008 at 00:54:34 PT

Hello y'all
I'm actually trying to decide what to do out here now. Just finished Oaksterdam University.
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Comment #8 posted by FoM on July 21, 2008 at 17:42:41 PT

Sam
We've been self employed since the mid 80s when GE moved the plant to Mexico. Being self employed is really hard. I am glad we have done it though. It's nice to make your own way and learn from the experience. California will just be one state when all states are legal. I don't think that the way California does it will be how other states do it. It will be unique to each area and that will make it special. I agree think big. 
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Comment #7 posted by Sam Adams on July 21, 2008 at 17:32:30 PT

California
definitely think big, you don't want to work for someone else's dispensary! don't work for the man, be the man! California right now is like a view of 10 or 20 years into the future for everyone else. I've visited San Francisco many times, even in the early 90's before Prop 215 everyone I knew in SF always seemed to have very high quality herb. It's around the east coast for the same price but MUCH harder to find in my experience.
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Comment #6 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 21, 2008 at 16:45:49 PT:

Let's all put our money together and become 
the C-News California Collective. Start our own dispensary with high quality herbs, low prices, and a friendly environment. Make decent money by helping out people in need while living in paradise. Sounds like a plan to me :P
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Comment #5 posted by RevRayGreen on July 21, 2008 at 16:30:53 PT

California dreaming
in Iowa...........should've made an exodus years ago.....no that my kids are almost grown I would really like to move to a friendlier, warmer location to retire..
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Comment #4 posted by fight_4_freedom on July 21, 2008 at 16:18:39 PT:

Sam
"The sleek blue wool of the $900 Claiborne suit hugged Jessica's shapely hips as she walked up to the Orthopedist's front desk. The brilliant platinum highlights reflected off the long blonde tresses reaching down her shoulders as she flashed a coy smile and pushed the box of Prozac samples over to the receptionist......."Too Funny :)I didn't get to finish reading the entire piece but it definitely looked intriguing. And I'm with you Sam, I'm ready to pack my suitcase and say "California, Here I Come".I'm actually visiting my sister in San Diego for about 10 days coming up here in August. I can't wait! I stashed a little bit away from last summer out there so I'm really curious to see how well it maintained through the year.Either way, it's extremely easy to find. It's funny, out there they go by the name of the strain, whether it's sativa or indica and so on. Here, we go by shwag, mids, and kind bud. Out there I have never came across anything but high quality nuggs. In fact some of the guys I met last year didn't even know what "shwag" was.But if I could get a decent paying job at a dispensary or something out there, I'd be on my way. After we of course make Michigan the 1st midwest state to legalize MM this Fall!
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Comment #3 posted by Sam Adams on July 21, 2008 at 12:20:51 PT

I read the article
wow, I read it all the way through.  It is a great piece of work, real journalism that we don't see much. Aside the from the disproportionate sweating descriptions that keep popping up. It's definitely laced with some New York literary upper crust snobbieness. But seriously, what a great in-depth view into the actual people in the cannabis trade. The overwhelming theme seems to be - these people are harmless and not hurting anyone! OK, so I am the only one who's ready to move to Northern California after reading this or what? It sounds awesome, we don't have any beautiful women tending coffeeshops here. All our beauties are Sex-in-the-City types, they'd never even get a tattoo.Isn't it interesting how everything is is hand-made, hand-crafted, all individuals owning small craftsman-type businesses. Even the business of cannabis goes directly against the predominate corporate culture of mass standardization. It's populated by thousands of middle and upper-middle class shopkeepers and craftsman (growers). No surprise that our corporate-ruled political establishment is trying to kill the medical cannabis scene.
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Comment #2 posted by Dankhank on July 21, 2008 at 10:16:58 PT

Amen bro
frakin' Big Pharma pushers .....wha'd Steppenwolf's man say?G*d damn the pusher ...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2JrnF-7PNw
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Comment #1 posted by Sam Adams on July 21, 2008 at 08:01:46 PT

question
How come we never get any articles about visiting the OxyContin factory in China, or following the sexy Big Pharma ladies around on the job? "The sleek blue wool of the $900 Claiborne suit hugged Jessica's shapely hips as she walked up to the Orthopedist's front desk. The brilliant platinum highlights reflected off the long blonde tresses reaching down her shoulders as she flashed a coy smile and pushed the box of Prozac samples over to the receptionist......."
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