Legalize all drugs yes or no

boozeman

28 Years And Counting...
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BipolarFuk

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Californians line up to legally buy recreational pot

Californians line up to legally buy recreational pot

California began selling recreational marijuana today in what's seen as a milestone in the mainstreaming of the weed, and hundreds lined up to buy it.

Lines formed outside stores licensed to sell the drug long before opening hours, and store owners said they had stocked up in expectation of huge demand.

"It is probably our busiest day in our seven-year history," said Matt Lucero, the owner of Buddy's, a dispenser of medical-use marijuana in San Jose that holds the first license issued by California to also sell recreational marijuana. "We have folks outside; every chair in the building is filled right now."

At Harborside Dispensary in Oakland, hundreds lined up to be the first to buy the legal weed, CNN affiliate KGO reported.

Speaking with CNN, Lucerno said he expected a 30% bump in sales overnight, but "it looks, in looking around this room, more like 50 to 60%."

California is the sixth state to allow sales of recreational marijuana, and as the nation's most populous state, it's widely seen as a tremendous boost to mainstreaming marijuana.

"Cannabis is now legal in the most populous state in the country," New Frontier Data, which tracks the cannabis industry, wrote in its 2017 Annual Report, "dramatically increasing the total potential size of the industry while establishing legal adult use markets across the entire US Pacific Coast given the legalized states of Washington and Oregon."

Pot remains illegal in the eyes of the federal government, and it is illegal to take marijuana across state lines, bring it on a plane or mail it.

The California industry is forecast to reach $7 billion in a few years, more than the $6.6 billion of the entire legal cannabis market in the United States in 2016, according to New Frontier Data.

Legalizing it will mean a lot of people may try it who had shied away from pot until now, Lucero said.

"By having the state come in with a regulatory program really helps legitimatize it," he said. "And I think we're going to be seeing a lot of folks who otherwise are a little hesitant to shop at dispensaries. "

California adults 21 and older can possess as much as an ounce and grow up to six plants at home as of Monday.

Monday was a muted rollout, though, because the licensing procedure is not in place in many cities. No recreational marijuana could be bought legally Monday in Los Angeles or San Francisco, the state's biggest cities.

Buddy's had "stocked up tons because we've seen other states, once they go recreational, how most of the dispensaries sell out on the first or second day," Lucero said.

State and local taxes add a hefty chunk to the price, and depending where it's bought, taxes can add as much as 45% to the cost.

Customers at Buddy's could pick up half an ounce of Homemade Cherry Pie for about $260. Blue Dream is about half that price. Many customers pick up an eighth of an ounce for anywhere between $25 to $60.

Massachusetts will begin selling retail marijuana on July 1. Maine has approved it, but there is no set date to begin sales.

Other states that allow the sale of recreational marijuana are Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Nevada.

More retail shops are certain to open soon in California. The Bureau of Cannabis Control, which issues licenses from the state, had handed out about 200 by the end of last week, spokesman Alex Traverso said in an email.

As far as he's concerned, the first day has been a success, since he hasn't been besieged with calls and emails.

"That's huge, because I'm certain we'd be getting tons of calls if things weren't working," he wrote. "So far so good!"
__________________________

I can see the steam coming out of Jeff Sessions' big fucking cunt ears from here. :lol

States rights!!! Except for things like this, I guess.....
 

Cowboysrock55

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Messages
52,734
California began selling recreational marijuana today in what's seen as a milestone in the mainstreaming of the weed, and hundreds lined up to buy it.

Lines formed outside stores licensed to sell the drug long before opening hours, and store owners said they had stocked up in expectation of huge demand.

"It is probably our busiest day in our seven-year history," said Matt Lucero, the owner of Buddy's, a dispenser of medical-use marijuana in San Jose that holds the first license issued by California to also sell recreational marijuana. "We have folks outside; every chair in the building is filled right now."

At Harborside Dispensary in Oakland, hundreds lined up to be the first to buy the legal weed, CNN affiliate KGO reported.

Speaking with CNN, Lucerno said he expected a 30% bump in sales overnight, but "it looks, in looking around this room, more like 50 to 60%."

California is the sixth state to allow sales of recreational marijuana, and as the nation's most populous state, it's widely seen as a tremendous boost to mainstreaming marijuana.

"Cannabis is now legal in the most populous state in the country," New Frontier Data, which tracks the cannabis industry, wrote in its 2017 Annual Report, "dramatically increasing the total potential size of the industry while establishing legal adult use markets across the entire US Pacific Coast given the legalized states of Washington and Oregon."

Pot remains illegal in the eyes of the federal government, and it is illegal to take marijuana across state lines, bring it on a plane or mail it.

The California industry is forecast to reach $7 billion in a few years, more than the $6.6 billion of the entire legal cannabis market in the United States in 2016, according to New Frontier Data.

Legalizing it will mean a lot of people may try it who had shied away from pot until now, Lucero said.

"By having the state come in with a regulatory program really helps legitimatize it," he said. "And I think we're going to be seeing a lot of folks who otherwise are a little hesitant to shop at dispensaries. "

California adults 21 and older can possess as much as an ounce and grow up to six plants at home as of Monday.

Monday was a muted rollout, though, because the licensing procedure is not in place in many cities. No recreational marijuana could be bought legally Monday in Los Angeles or San Francisco, the state's biggest cities.

Buddy's had "stocked up tons because we've seen other states, once they go recreational, how most of the dispensaries sell out on the first or second day," Lucero said.

State and local taxes add a hefty chunk to the price, and depending where it's bought, taxes can add as much as 45% to the cost.

Customers at Buddy's could pick up half an ounce of Homemade Cherry Pie for about $260. Blue Dream is about half that price. Many customers pick up an eighth of an ounce for anywhere between $25 to $60.

Massachusetts will begin selling retail marijuana on July 1. Maine has approved it, but there is no set date to begin sales.

Other states that allow the sale of recreational marijuana are Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Nevada.

More retail shops are certain to open soon in California. The Bureau of Cannabis Control, which issues licenses from the state, had handed out about 200 by the end of last week, spokesman Alex Traverso said in an email.

As far as he's concerned, the first day has been a success, since he hasn't been besieged with calls and emails.

"That's huge, because I'm certain we'd be getting tons of calls if things weren't working," he wrote. "So far so good!"
__________________________

I can see the steam coming out of Jeff Sessions' big fucking cunt ears from here. :lol

States rights!!! Except for things like this, I guess.....
It's nothing but good news if you ask me.
 

2233boys

Not So New Member
Joined
Apr 7, 2013
Messages
2,793
:lol

My thought exactly. Unless they aren't including weed as an illicit drug or most the people responding to the survey are just terrified to answer truthfully.
What I found was talking about alcohol and other drugs but the percentage was 7.2% of the population is addicted 23.5 million
 

BipolarFuk

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Messages
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Marijuana legalization could help offset opioid epidemic, studies find

Marijuana legalization could help offset opioid epidemic, studies find

Experts have proposed using medical marijuana to help Americans struggling with opioid addiction. Now, two studies suggest that there is merit to that strategy.

The studies, published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, compared opioid prescription patterns in states that have enacted medical cannabis laws with those that have not. One of the studies looked at opioid prescriptions covered by Medicare Part D between 2010 and 2015, while the other looked at opioid prescriptions covered by Medicaid between 2011 and 2016.

The researchers found that states that allow the use of cannabis for medical purposes had 2.21 million fewer daily doses of opioids prescribed per year under Medicare Part D, compared with those states without medical cannabis laws. Opioid prescriptions under Medicaid also dropped by 5.88% in states with medical cannabis laws compared with states without such laws, according to the studies.

"This study adds one more brick in the wall in the argument that cannabis clearly has medical applications," said David Bradford, professor of public administration and policy at the University of Georgia and a lead author of the Medicare study.
"And for pain patients in particular, our work adds to the argument that cannabis can be effective."

Medicare Part D, the optional prescription drug benefit plan for those enrolled in Medicare, covers more than 42 million Americans, including those 65 or older. Medicaid provides health coverage to more than 73 million low-income individuals in the US, according to the program's website.

"Medicare and Medicaid publishes this data, and we're free to use it, and anyone who's interested can download the data," Bradford said. "But that means that we don't know what's going on with the privately insured and the uninsured population, and for that, I'm afraid the data sets are proprietary and expensive."

'This crisis is very real'

The new research comes as the United States remains entangled in the worst opioid epidemic the world has ever seen. Opioid overdose has risen dramatically over the past 15 years and has been implicated in over 500,000 deaths since 2000 -- more than the number of Americans killed in World War II.

"As somebody who treats patients with opioid use disorders, this crisis is very real. These patients die every day, and it's quite shocking in many ways," said Dr. Kevin Hill, an addiction psychiatrist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the new studies.

"We have had overuse of certain prescription opioids over the years, and it's certainly contributed to the opioid crisis that we're feeling," he added. "I don't think that's the only reason, but certainly, it was too easy at many points to get prescriptions for opioids."
Today, more than 90 Americans a day die from opioid overdose, resulting in more than 42,000 deaths per year, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Opioid overdose recently overtook vehicular accidents and shooting deaths as the most common cause of accidental death in the United States, the CDC says.

Like opioids, marijuana has been shown to be effective in treating chronic pain as well as other conditions such as seizures, multiple sclerosis and certain mental disorders, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Research suggests that the cannabinoid and opioid receptor systems rely on common signaling pathways in the brain, including the dopamine reward system that is central to drug tolerance, dependence and addiction.

"All drugs of abuse operate using some shared pathways. For example, cannabinoid receptors and opioid receptors coincidentally happen to be located very close by in many places in the brain," Hill said. "So it stands to reason that a medication that affects one system might affect the other."

But unlike opioids, marijuana has little addiction potential, and virtually no deaths from marijuana overdose have been reported in the United States, according to Bradford.

"No one has ever died of cannabis, so it has many safety advantages over opiates," Bradford said. "And to the extent that we're trying to manage the opiate crisis, cannabis is a potential tool."

Comparing states with and without medical marijuana laws

In order to evaluate whether medical marijuana could function as an effective and safe alternative to opioids, the two teams of researchers looked at whether opioid prescriptions were lower in states that had active medical cannabis laws and whether those states that enacted these laws during the study period saw reductions in opioid prescriptions.

Both teams, in fact, did find that opioid prescriptions were significantly lower in states that had enacted medical cannabis laws. The team that looked at Medicaid patients also found that the four states that switched from medical use only to recreational use -- Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington -- saw further reductions in opioid prescriptions, according to Hefei Wen, assistant professor of health management and policy at the University of Kentucky and a lead author on the Medicaid study.

"We saw a 9% or 10% reduction (in opioid prescriptions) in Colorado and Oregon," Wen said. "And in Alaska and Washington, the magnitude was a little bit smaller but still significant."

The first state in the United States to legalize marijuana for medicinal use was California, in 1996. Since then, 29 states and the District of Columbia have approved some form of legalized cannabis. All of these states include chronic pain -- either directly or indirectly -- in the list of approved medical conditions for marijuana use, according to Bradford.

The details of the medical cannabis laws were found to have a significant impact on opioid prescription patterns, the researchers found. States that permitted recreational use, for example, saw an additional 6.38% reduction in opioid prescriptions under Medicaid compared with those states that permitted marijuana only for medical use, according to Wen.

The method of procurement also had a significant impact on opioid prescription patterns. States that permitted medical dispensaries -- regulated shops that people can visit to purchase cannabis products -- had 3.742 million fewer opioid prescriptions filled per year under Medicare Part D, while those that allowed only home cultivation had 1.792 million fewer opioid prescriptions per year.

"We found that there was about a 14.5% reduction in any opiate use when dispensaries were turned on -- and that was statistically significant -- and about a 7% reduction in any opiate use when home cultivation only was turned on," Bradford said. "So dispensaries are much more powerful in terms of shifting people away from the use of opiates."

The impact of these laws also differed based on the class of opioid prescribed. Specifically, states with medical cannabis laws saw 20.7% fewer morphine prescriptions and 17.4% fewer hydrocodone prescriptions compared with states that did not have these laws, according to Bradford.

Fentanyl prescriptions under Medicare Part D also dropped by 8.5% in states that had enacted medical cannabis laws, though the difference was not statistically significant, Bradford said. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid, like heroin, that can be prescribed legally by physicians. It is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, and even a small amount can be fatal, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

"I know that many people, including the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, are skeptical of cannabis," Bradford said. "But, you know, the attorney general needs to be terrified of fentanyl."

'A call to action'

This is not the first time researchers have found a link between marijuana legalization and decreased opioid use. A 2014 study showed that states with medical cannabis laws had 24.8% fewer opioid overdose deaths between 1999 and 2010. A study in 2017 also found that the legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado in 2012 reversed the state's upward trend in opioid-related deaths.

"There is a growing body of scientific literature suggesting that legal access to marijuana can reduce the use of opioids as well as opioid-related overdose deaths," said Melissa Moore, New York deputy state director for the Drug Policy Alliance. "In states with medical marijuana laws, we have already seen decreased admissions for opioid-related treatment and dramatically reduced rates of opioid overdoses."

Some skeptics, though, argue that marijuana legalization could actually worsen the opioid epidemic. Another 2017 study, for example, showed a positive association between illicit cannabis use and opioid use disorders in the United States. But there may be an important difference between illicit cannabis use and legalized cannabis use, according to Hill.

"As we have all of these states implementing these policies, it's imperative that we do more research," Hill said. "We need to study the effects of these policies, and we really haven't done it to the degree that we should."

The two recent studies looked only at patients enrolled in Medicaid and Medicare Part D, meaning the results may not be generalizable to the entire US population.

But both Hill and Moore agree that as more states debate the merits of legalizing marijuana in the coming months and years, more research will be needed to create consistency between cannabis science and cannabis policy.

"There is a great deal of movement in the Northeast, with New Hampshire and New Jersey being well-positioned to legalize adult use," Moore said. "I believe there are also ballot measures to legalize marijuana in Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Nebraska and South Dakota as well that voters will decide on in Fall 2018."

Hill called the new research "a call to action" and added, "we should be studying these policies. But unfortunately, the policies have far outpaced the science at this point."
 

jsmith6919

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:art
 

BipolarFuk

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Schumer to introduce marijuana decriminalization legislation

Schumer to introduce marijuana decriminalization legislation

Sen. Chuck Schumer plans to propose legislation decriminalizing marijuana, Vice News reported Thursday.

"I'll be introducing legislation to decriminalize marijuana at the federal level from one end of the country to the other," the New York Democrat told Vice News. "The legislation is long overdue."

Schumer, the Senate minority leader, told Vice that he had "seen too many people's lives ruined because they had small amounts of marijuana and served time in jail much too long."

He added that it was "the right thing to do."

According to Vice News, the legislation will be introduced in the next week, and it will include taking marijuana off the Drug Enforcement Administration's controlled substance list.

Schumer also told Vice News the legislation will "maintain federal authority to regulate marijuana advertising in the same way it does alcohol and tobacco."
_________________________________________

Nope, nuh uh!!

Comes from a guy on the blue team.
 

boozeman

28 Years And Counting...
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BipolarFuk

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Schumer introduces bill to federally decriminalize marijuana

Schumer introduces bill to federally decriminalize marijuana

Sen. Chuck Schumer has introduced a new bill to decriminalize and regulate marijuana at the federal level.

The legislation, which the New York Democrat announced back in April, would remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act, where it is classified among drugs such as heroin and LSD.

By striking marijuana from the act, Schumer's office said in a news release Wednesday, the bill would effectively decriminalize the drug at the federal level. The measure would still allow states to determine their own marijuana laws while maintaining federal law enforcement against trafficking to states where it is illegal.

Several states allow recreational sales of marijuana, including California, Oregon and Massachusetts.

Schumer's bill would direct a specific amount of tax revenue to a Treasury trust fund for the "small business concerns" of women and "socially and economically disadvantaged" individuals working in the marijuana industry.

Under the bill, advertising for marijuana and related products would be restricted for youths, should joint research conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration determine that doing so would be "appropriate for the protection" of the health of those 18 and younger.

In a press statement, Schumer said this legislation is "simply the right thing to do" and that he is hopeful its "balanced approach" will earn bipartisan support in Congress. The bill is co-sponsored by independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine of Virginia and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois.

A similar measure aimed at loosening federal guidelines on marijuana and giving states more flexibility in determining their own laws was introduced earlier this month by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, and Cory Gardner, R-Colorado.

In April, President Donald Trump told Gardner he will support efforts to protect states that have legalized marijuana, according to a statement from the senator. The deal, which was first reported by The Washington Post, came after Gardner said he'd block all Justice Department nominees after Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded guidance from the Obama administration, known as the Cole memo, that had adopted a policy of non-interference with marijuana-friendly state laws.
___________________________

Wonder how many Red votes this will get?

Fucking relics everywhere rush to find their 8mm projectors and hang up a fucking sheet to watch Reefer Madness!!!
 

skidadl

El Presidente'
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The Texas Republican Party endorsed the idea of decriminalizeing weed recently.
 
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