Could it be Canadian envy that’s got Americans a little more 420-friendly? American support for cannabis legalization has increased 5% since January to 63%, the highest yet recorded in human history, or at least in the authoritative Quinnipiac University Poll. In January weed legalization support was at 58%. 33% opposed it in this go round of the poll.

Other cannabis-related questions found even higher levels of support. 93% of Americans said they support medical marijuana, with only 5% opposing it.

A majority of voters also opposed federal interference in state-legalized medical cannabis programs, with 70% being against it and 23% thinking it was cool. 74% approved of the new proposed STATES Act which would change federal law to protect state cannabis laws.

A couple of other quick facts learned from the poll:

• Tax revenue is a good reason to legalize cannabis: 54% agreed, 42% disagreed.
• Cannabis is a “gateway drug”: 61% agreed, 31% disagreed.
• Legalizing cannabis will make people more likely to use opioids: 20% agreed.
• Legalizing cannabis will make people less likely to use opioids: 20% agreed.
• 43% of Americans say they have used cannabis recreationally, 54% of men and 33% of women.

The poll was conducted on 1,193 voters nationwide by telephone, with an estimated 3.4% error rate. 22% of those polled said they lived in states with legal recreational cannabis.

“Voters are more favorable to legalizing marijuana than in any previous Quinnipiac University survey, and do not see its use as a gateway to more serious drugs,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, summarizing the fairly obvious.

The same poll hit on some other issues in modern life, like ones surrounding that one dude in the White House with the funny hair. For instance, 30% had a negative view of former FBI Director James Comey, but 54% said they believe him more than President Trump. 74% said that Trump should not fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Stuff like that. You can read more here.

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In these divided political times, it’s hard to know where allegiances lie. For instance, who would have thought that White Castle, a stoner profiteer and maker of some of the most munchable munchies in the realm of fast food ,would be opposing a bill to reform cannabis and other drug laws?

In addition to selling the perfect stoner group snack in the form of their bargain-priced burger sliders, the restaurant chain also participated in the major studio mega-hit stoner comedy Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.

But now the company is donating money to actually fight drug reform in Ohio. The ballot measure State Issue 1 aimed to reduce incarceration in the state by reducing many drug crimes, including marijuana possession, to misdemeanors. It also would have allowed prisoners to reduce their existing sentences if they completed educational, vocational, or rehab training. The measure failed to find voter approval in the state and was defeated on Tuesday with only 35 percent of the vote, as reported by The Cincinnati Enquirer.

White Castle was one of the largest contributors to the State Issue 1 opposition campaign “Vote No to Protect Ohio,” donating $15,000.

In an in depth article on the issue, Leafly points out that while White Castle regularly makes political contributions, they are rarely as high as $15K. A look at their past contributions also shows that their donations do not fall neatly along partisan lines. In 2016, the company gave $5,000 to Republican John Kasich’s presidential primary campaign, but this year it also donated $5,000 to the Franklin County Democratic Party.

Leafly reached out to the company and found them relatively open to talking about their political leanings. Their opposition to State Issue 1 “isn’t related to cannabis,” said Jamie Richardson, White Castle’s vice president of government and shareholder relations.

“It’s about the opioid crisis. Ohio’s really been ground zero,” he said. Richardson outlined the toll that opioids have taken on the state in general and also on the restaurant in particular, saying that White Castle have had drug overdoses in their bathrooms within the last year. Richardson also said that the company had made a donation to a nonprofit aimed to target the health effects of the local opioid crisis.

“We don’t have a position on cannabis decriminalization,” he said. “We’re not actively opposing decriminalization of marijuana anywhere.”

Photo via Flickr user farrellink

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In what may be the most eventful day for cannabis in the United States in two years, the country has gained three new legal marijuana markets and lost one of its most powerful adversaries in less than 24 hours.

Yesterday, voters in Michigan voted to legalize adult use of cannabis statewide, while in Utah and Missouri they legalized medical marijuana initiatives. Meanwhile, in the midst of a political whirlwind, President Trump has fired Jeff Sessions, the nemesis of all things cannabis, from the position of Attorney General.

Michigan Mainstreams Mary Jane

Michigan has had a long, if troubled, history of legalized medical marijuana, and on Tuesday voters opted to go full hog and legalize the recreational stuff. Proposition 1 won’t go into effect immediately, but it looks like it will go ahead much quicker than it has in some states which previously legalized.

Legalization will take effect as soon as the Secretary of State can certify the election results, roundabout November 16, according to Leafly. Once that happens, individuals 21 and over will be able to possess up to 2.5 ounces of cannabis on their person and as much as 10 ounces in their home as long as it is locked up.

The state will have one of those interesting catch 22’s where it will be legal to possess (in fairly large quantities) but illegal to buy or sell outside of the regulated medical marijuana market. The state is expected to begin issuing licenses for recreational cannabis businesses in about a year.

Missouri Mingles With Medical Marijuana

Meanwhile in Missouri voters got jiggy for Amendment 2, one of three medical marijuana measures on their ballot. Unlike the other two, this amendment had no constricting list of conditions. Doctors can issue medical marijuana recommendation card for any ailment they see fit. The measure passed with 66 percent of the vote, as reported by Forbes.

The bill will allow patients to grow as many as six plants of their own or buy as much as four ounces of cannabis in a month. They will also pay a pretty small sales tax compared to those in some other states, only 4 percent, which will be prioritized for spending on military veterans.

Utah Bill Unfortunately Useless

Hooray! Utah voters approved a bill to legalize medical marijuana. Boo! It’s kind of useless.

State lawmakers agreed last month to implement their own limited medical marijuana program which will override that outlined in Proposition 2, the voter-approved measure, according to Leafly.

While Prop 2 would have permitted one dispensary for every 150,000 residents, and actually required one for every county, the politicians’ hatched out scheme will only allow for six across for the entire state, with the possibility of growing to ten at a later date. Prop 2 also would have allowed for cannabis flower, edibles, and concentrates more or less equally. Bizarrely, the lawmakers’ program favors extracts, with flowers being sold only in one gram portions in blister packs, and edibles being ruled out completely.

Photo via Flickr user Dank Depot

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The 2018 election, like the 2016 election before it, was on the whole a big win for cannabis measures on the ballot. Recreational weed went legal in Michigan while Missouri and Utah voters both approved medical marijuana bills. But in North Dakota, things did not go so smoothly.

Measure 3 could have been a dream come true for your most libertarian of potheads. The bill would have legalized cannabis for adults 21 and over with virtually no regulation of how it was sold. There was no limitation on quanitites to be bought or sold and no framework for how to license commercial production and retail facilities. It also would have expunged past criminal histories of cannabis offenses and precluded criminal prosecution for nonviolent cannabis offenses.

One poll in mid-October had Measure 3 winning by a nose with 51 percent of voters giving it the big thumbs up. But something must have happened between then and November 6, because by the times the real votes were counted Measure 3 was dying on the ballot: 59 percent opposed and 41 percent in favor, as reported by Forbes.

So what went so awry for the North Dakotan measure? The state surprised the country two years ago by approving medical marijuana on the ballot with 64 percent of the vote, so there’s obviously cannabis support there.

One problem might have been the loose-goosey nature of the proposition, which left quite a bit to be decided by local lawmakers. Even voters in favor of legal cannabis wouldn’t really know what system they were approving, since regulators would have to create a brand new structure almost from scratch once legalization became the law.

Also, there was the money question. Opposition to the bill outspent advocates more than three to one, according to Ballotpedia via Leafly. But it was exactly the small time do-it-yourself aspect of the campaign that still gives some cannabis advocates hope.

“This was a very impressive showing given it was a truly grassroots effort and the first time legalization had appeared on the ballot in a very conservative state,” Mason Tvert, a spokesperson for the Marijuana Policy Project, told Forbes. “The ball is now rolling in North Dakota, and we hope the state’s passionate local activist community will keep that momentum going. It is worth noting the first legalization initiative we ran in Colorado in 2006 received about 41 percent, and it wasn’t much longer before we crossed the goal line.”

Photo via Flickr user Lindsey G.

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Cops and racially profiled stoners are both presumably enjoying some more free time as low-level cannabis possession arrests have plummeted 90 percent in just one year. According to a press release from the Drug Policy Alliance, just 151 people were arrested for small possession in all of New York City in September. That’s less than 10 percent of the more than 1,500 cannabis possession arrests in the same month last year.

The DPA warns, however, that even though arrests have gone way, way down, the underlying problem of racial discrimination in cannabis arrests hasn’t gone anywhere. Black and Latinx people still make up roughly 80 percent of marijuana summonses, the organization said.

The sharp decrease in cannabis arrests comes after some dramatic changes to the NYPD’s policies on cannabis. In May, the department announced a directive to stop arresting people for small time marijuana possession and instead hand out a simple summons, as reported by Leafly.

Even though the policy didn’t officially go into effect until September, arrests dropped almost immediately after the announcement. In May there were only 500 arrests. By September that number had more than halved.

City prosecutors were also directed not to prosecute such cases. In addition, Manhattan D.A.’s have dismissed most of their pending cannabis cases.

The height of cannabis persecution in New York was in 2010. In September of that year, more than 4,300 cannabis arrests took place. As of this year, that number had dropped more than 97 percent.

But the fight is far from over, according to the DPA. “The 90% drop in marijuana arrests in New York City is a positive development that will have a profound impact in the lives of New Yorkers,” wrote Kassandra Frederique, New York State Director of the Drug Policy Alliance.

“But this is not enough. There are still racial disparities in the 1,000-plus summons that were handed out in September for marijuana possession, which can turn into open warrants and have harmful impacts, which advocates and City Council will continue to examine.”

Frederique also urged Governor Cuomo and other New York Democrats to lead the way toward legalization in the state. As of July of this year, 60 percent of state voters were in favor of legalizing recreational cannabis.

Photo via Flickr user Roberto Bosi

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We guess the federal government can’t do one good deed without doing a bad one to even things out. Only a little more than a month ago the Food and Drug Administration approved, for the first time ever, a marijuana-derived medicine. The law was even changed to allow for the drug Epidiolex to be classified as a Schedule II drug, making it the first cannabis drug in decades to be legal at the federal level.

So seemingly as the result of some pact with the devil, the FDA has also approved a synthetic opioid even more potent than Fentanyl, the drug which has rightfully become a boogeyman in the opioid crisis that claimed more than 72,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States last year alone.

Dsuvia is a tablet which dissolves under the tongue to release opioids in an emergency setting. It is, incredibly, ten times as potent as fentanyl, a drug which has caused overdoses in part because it was already 50 times stronger than heroin.

In a statement released after Dsuvia was approved, FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb offered the agency’s reasoning behind the controversial move. Gottlieb acknowledged the opioid crisis and the need for caution in releasing new drugs into the market, writing, “Looking beyond this particular drug approval, I believe that we should consider whether we should be doing more to evaluate each candidate opioid, not just as an independent review decision, but rather also to consider each novel opioid drug in the context of the overall therapeutic armamentarium that’s available to patients and providers.”

However, in Gottlieb’s opinion Dsuvia is a “novel” drug which meets medical needs to currently being addressed by available pharmaceuticals. “The medicine is restricted to use in certified medically-supervised health care settings ‒ such as hospitals, surgical centers and emergency departments,” he wrote, adding that the Dsuvia “has some unique features in that the drug is delivered in a stable form that makes it ideally suited for certain special circumstances where patients may not be able to swallow oral medication, and where access to intravenous pain relief is not possible. This includes potential uses on the battlefield.”

Many critics are not as enthusiastic about the release of a new uber-powerful opioid on the market. As reported by the Huffington Post, the chairman of the FDA advisory committee that approved the new drug, Dr. Raeford Brown, wrote a letter to Gottlieb in October warning of the dangers of the new opioid. Dsuvia, he said, was an “extremely divertible drug” which could easily end up mixed in with street drugs such as heroin.

“I predict that we will encounter diversion, abuse, and death within the early months of its availability on the market,” Brown wrote.

“There is no need for another opioid on the market, particularly one as potentially lethal as Dsuvia,” Dr. Anna Lembke, chief of the Stanford University Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic, told the Huffington Post.

“There is no need for another opioid on the market, particularly one as potentially lethal as Dsuvia,” Lembke said.  “In the midst of the worst opioid epidemic in U.S. history, the FDA seems to be operating in a vacuum, without regard for optics or public health.”

Cannabis has been shown to be a useful alternative to opioids in many cases, though Epidiolex, the only medical marijuana product currently legal under federal law, is prescribed only for certain forms of epilepsy, not for pain.

Photo via Flickr user U.S. Department of Agriculture

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There’s only one thing worse than facing the death penalty for passing a joint. Actually, there are two things. One, obviously, would be actual execution. The other would be facing the death penalty for passing a joint when you got framed.

Such was the case with Matthew Fellows, a 23 year-old U.S. citizen who returned Monday from China. Fellows spent eight months in prison based on a false accusation. Someone tipped off Chinese authorities that Fellows had committed an apparently insanely serious crime: he “shared” marijuana. Not dealt, “shared.” Specifically, Fellows allegedly lit a joint and passed it around the room.

For this, Fellows was arrested and faced four counts of drug trafficking. More than two counts is grounds for the death penalty in China.

The American spent his prison internment “confined in an 18x11ft cell with 15 other men, forced to sleep on the floor with just a blanket and his only meal was a bowl of rice and watery porridge,” according to The Daily Mail.

Here’s how Fellows ended up in this situation: he travelled to China to teach English to schoolchildren, then became a student himself at a local university. There he started dating a Russian model named Victoria. A jealous romantic rival for Victoria’s affections wanted Fellows out of the picture so he told authorities that Fellows was passing around some doobage.

Fellows’ parents apparently think that envy was a big problem for the guy. The Mail reports that his mom and dad “say that as a tall, handsome Westerner, some in his college group may have harbored jealousy and resentment towards him,” which is cute because it means his mom called him handsome.

The Mail also notes that Fellows was “nicknamed Thor due to his long blond hair and 6ft 2in athletic frame.” So Thor spent eight months sleeping on the floor of a Chinese prison because someone was jealous of his Russian girlfriend. He should get a magic hammer for that.

Not surprisingly, after this ordeal Fellows is glad to be back, though still getting used to life on the outside. During his trip home, he posted on his Facebook page, writing, “I haven’t worn shoes in 8 months let alone walking for more than three minutes. My feet hurt and so do all the muscles associated foot movement in my lower legs. I’ll get the hang of strolling around on my feet after a few days.” Could someone pass this dude a joint?

Photo via Facebook

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Of all the pains involved in operating a legal cash business, one of the more unpleasant may be hauling loads of cash to a government building to pay your taxes. As a result of extremely stringent limitations and fees placed on cannabis businesses who use banks, many just choose to go it alone and operate an all cash business. In fact, about 70 percent of cannabis businesses don’t use a bank at all, according to a recent report.

There are many reasons why it sucks to operate without the benefit of a bank: the time it takes to count and recount all your cash, the lack of free pens, and also, not least importantly, the fact that you are much more likely to get robbed.

Last year the Associated Press detailed the nail-biting experience of having to transport tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to a government building in order to make a tax payment. “I find myself looking in my rear-view mirror hundreds of more times than I usually would in just normal traffic, making sure that I’m not being followed,” said one dispensary manager about his routine cash deliveries to City Hall.

Given all that, it’s pretty obvious that many cannabis businesses would be happy to find a new way to do business. And, it turns out, so would the IRS.

As reported by High Times, the government agency is “overwhelmed” by cash payments from cannabis businesses. In order to process the many billions of dollars in cash from the industry, the IRS has had to contract out the actual counting a consulting firm. The firm’s fees in turn eat up $1.7 million in cannabis tax revenue a year.

Beside the counting, there’s the fact that cash businesses can’t electronically file their taxes. The IRS states that processing tax filings on paper costs nine times as much as processing those filed electronically.

So it kind of seems like everybody could use an easier solution. Things actually have gotten a little better in recent years. Up until 2014, the IRS placed an additional 10 percent penalty fee on cannabis businesses who paid in cash, which they’ve since withdrawn. Maybe soon they’ll go the extra mile and create a system where cannabis businesses don’t have to be afraid of being shot every time they pay taxes.

Photo via Flickr user Hloom Templates

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In the California cannabis business, there’s a dynamic of white market vs black market right now. Even after the state went legal at the beginning of the year, illegal cannabis operations have continued to thrive, with reports that 60% of weed sold in state is from the black market.

And maybe consumers are right to trust outlaw weed dealers over “legit” cannabusiness people. Because some of them, it turns out, are murderous idiots.

Three business people involved in the medical marijuana industry in San Diego have been charged with conspiring to kidnap and murder a fourth associate, according to a news release from the Department of Justice.

Salam Razuki, Sylvia Gonzales and Elizabeth Juarez allegedly made an arrangement with an FBI informant to kill an associate referred to only as N.M. in the government release. Apparently, the trio’s beef with N.M. arose out of a real estate dispute regarding investment properties leased to marijuana dispensaries.

The report, it has to be said, paints these three would-be murderers as a pretty colorful bunch. They apparently came up with some creative code, asking that their hitman “put the turkey up to roast before Thanksgiving.” They also suggested that he “shoot [N.M.] in the face” or maybe just “take him to Mexico and have him whacked.”

They also come off not too bright and incredibly stingy.

Their payment for murder, a crime which could put the perpetrator in prison for life, was $2,000. They paid $1,000 of that up front, all of which seemed to come from one of their dispensary properties, the Goldn Bloom.

The murder was viewed as a necessity by these alleged assailants, who were in the middle of a civil lawsuit with N.M. “You need to get rid of this asshole. He’s costing me too much money,” Gonzales said during one of his meetings with the faux hitman.

Razuki, Gonzales, and Juarez have all denied their intention to kidnap or murder N.M.

Photo via Flickr user Greta Ceresini

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Cannabis is making some very powerful friends. On Monday, the leading Canadian marijuana company Cronos Group Inc. confirmed that it was in talks with mega-conglomerate Altria Group Inc. about a possible investment in cannabis products.

While Altria isn’t itself a household name, their most popular product Marlboro Cigarettes is. In fact Altria is one of the world’s largest producers of tobacco. The corporation owns Philip Morris USA, which in turn owns Marlboro and a handful of other big tobacco brands.

As of Tuesday, Altria had neither confirmed nor denied its potential involvement in cannabis, according to the Associated Press.

Needless to say, the involvement of Altria could be a game-changer for the cannabis industry. But not only for the reasons everyone thinks about, like packs of pre-rolled Marlboro joint in every 7-11. The more monumental change brought about by such a deal would be legislative.

Altria is a major player in government lobbying. At one point the company was the second largest funder of lobbying in the United States. Now it averages about $10 million in government spending per year. The company also sits on the board of the American Legislative Exchange Group (ALEC), an uber-powerful special interest group in Washington.

Many people believe that Altria’s lobbying was behind the 2009 Tobacco Control Act, a piece of legislation which put tobacco regulation under the supervision of the FDA. While the bill was supported by many health advocates including the American Cancer Society, it was also criticized for regulations which actually diminished some forms of oversight and favored already established brands such as Marlboro over other companies. That’s how the bill earned its nickname the “Marlboro Protection Act.”

All that is to say that Altria has some deep pockets and even deeper connections in Washington. And if they stood to make a profit from the legalization of cannabis, it would be out of character not to talk to their friends in Washington about it. And by “talk,” we mean give them millions of dollars.

It could be even more persuasive than previous attempts to legalize cannabis in Washington, like throwing a giant weed party on the White House lawn, but probably less funny.

Photo via Flickr user Sarah Johnson   (https://www.blacknote.com)

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