Dales, book a holiday in Colorado

[Gob]

DENVER (AP) — Marijuana tourism is on the way to Colorado, under a recommendation made Tuesday by a state task force to regulate the drug made legal by voters last year.

But Colorado should erect signs in airports and borders telling visitors they can't take pot home, the task force recommended.

Colorado's marijuana task force was assembled to suggest regulations for pot after voters chose to flout federal drug law and allow its use without a doctor's recommendation. Made up of lawmakers, law enforcement authorities and marijuana activists, the task force agreed Tuesday that the constitutional amendment on marijuana simply says that adults over 21 can use the drug, not just Colorado residents. If lawmakers agree with the recommendation, tourists would be free to buy and smoke marijuana.

"Imposing a residency requirement would almost certainly create a black market for recreational marijuana in the state," said Rep. Dan Pabon, a Denver Democrat who sits on the task force.

Tourists could see purchasing caps though, possibly as low as an eighth of an ounce per transaction.

Afraid that marijuana tourism could open the door for traffickers to load up and take it across state borders for illegal sale, task force members agreed that non-residents should be able to buy only limited amounts, though a specific amount wasn't set.

"Marijuana purchased in Colorado must stay in Colorado," Pabon warned.

"We could attract greater federal scrutiny and displeasure of our neighbors," if marijuana flows across state lines, he said.

Task force members were less successful agreeing to recommendations on marijuana growing and public use. Colorado's marijuana law allows home growing but requires plants to be in a locked, secure location out of public view. The task force couldn't agree whether a "locked" and "secure" location would mean a backyard surrounded by a fence, or whether an enclosure such as a shed or greenhouse should be mandatory.

One of the task force's most vocal marijuana critics, Greenwood Village Police Chief John Jackson, worried that backyard pot gardens would need more than a chain-link fence to keep kids out.

Not all task force members agreed. User advocate Meg Sanders said the covering requirement wouldn't be fair to rural Coloradans.

"I think it goes too far in restricting what people can do on their own private property," Sanders said.

Public use also prompted a dispute that wasn't resolved Tuesday. Jackson and others wanted to ban marijuana use on publicly visible patios, porches and backyard. Marijuana activists chafed.

"So I can drink a beer on my porch? But I can't smoke a joint?" asked marijuana advocate Christian Sederberg.

State Sen. Cheri Jahn, D-Wheat Ridge, said lawmakers would hesitate to regulate something legal people do on private property. What about backyard grills that send the smell of hamburgers into the nose of a neighbor who's vegetarian?, she asked.

"I don't know how far we want to go telling people what they can't do on their own porches," she said.

The porch marijuana question was left unsettled. Task force members also put off a decision on proposals from Jackson to exempt law enforcement from maintaining marijuana and marijuana plants seized during criminal investigations.

Potency and labeling recommendations for commercial marijuana will also be discussed later.

The task force has until Feb. 28 to recommend marijuana regulations, which will ultimately be set by the state Legislature and the Department of Revenue, the agency which oversees gambling and alcohol and will also regulate recreational pot.

Kristen Wyatt can be found on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/APkristenwyatt

[oldr_n_wsr]

If lawmakers agree with the recommendation, tourists would be free to buy and smoke marijuana.

What happens if you go to Colorado, smoke pot, then return home and have to take a piss test for your job? A previous employer of mine had random piss tests on employees. What about people working in Colorado?

[Joe Guy]

If you smoke, you take your chances. It's no different than alcohol. Just because it's legal doesn't mean you can now be stoned while you drive for a living, etc.

[Guinevere]

... "free to buy and smoke marijuana" under Colorado law only. The feds can still decide to swoop in and prosecute, at any time.

And yes, if you're an out of town-er and you smoke and then test positive in your home state, you likely have no defense to that positive test and will be subject to the consequences.

[Long Run]

Of course, with ready access to "medical" marijuana in California, Oregon and Washington, why bother going all the way to Colorado, unless you are looking for a Rocky Mountain High?

[Guinevere]

I can't speak to how it works in practice, but in theory there are some fairly strict restrictions on how one obtains a medical marijuana card, including a limited number of conditions for which a physician can sign off on a card.

[oldr_n_wsr]

If you smoke, you take your chances. It's no different than alcohol. Just because it's legal doesn't mean you can now be stoned while you drive for a living, etc.

I understand that, but pot stays in your system (or at least can be detected in your system, much longer than alcohol). Last time I (was) checked the alcohol test was good for 80 previous hours.

I guess one takes their chances. But if you live and are employed in Colorado, it's legal to smoke pot (not on the job but in your off time) so I wonder how the companies will handle this.

[dales]

I can't speak to how it works in practice, but in theory there are some fairly strict restrictions on how one obtains a medical marijuana card, including a limited number of conditions for which a physician can sign off on a card.

Not here in CA, anyone can get one as there are enough shady MD's which will issue one.

[Long Run]

I can't speak to how it works in practice, but in theory there are some fairly strict restrictions on how one obtains a medical marijuana card, including a limited number of conditions for which a physician can sign off on a card.

The Oregonian's examination of high-volume marijuana doctors -- including interviews with physicians and clinic operators as well as a review of state documents, medical licensing reports, court records and caseload data -- paints a picture of a highly specialized industry. Among the newspaper's findings:

Nine doctors approved half the 56,531 medical marijuana patients and pending applicants in Oregon;

About 75 percent of Oregon medical marijuana patients are seen by doctors with large caseloads;

Physicians cite "severe pain" as the patient's sole qualifying condition in 57 percent of their cases, list cancer as a condition for 4 percent of patients and HIV/AIDS for 1 percent ;

None of the nine doctors topping the state list specializes in addiction treatment or pain management, even though several said that patients use marijuana as an "exit drug" to wean themselves from addiction to narcotic painkillers;

One of the top doctors on the list, Dr. Stephen Caughron, said he saw 40 to 80 patients a day -- a schedule he described as "absolutely asinine" -- and left the practice this year.

http://www.oregonlive.com/health/index. ... igh-v.html

[oldr_n_wsr]

None of the nine doctors topping the state list specializes in addiction treatment or pain management, even though several said that patients use marijuana as an "exit drug" to wean themselves from addiction to narcotic painkillers;

Yeah, that will work.

[Joe Guy]

I guess one takes their chances. But if you live and are employed in Colorado, it's legal to smoke pot (not on the job but in your off time) so I wonder how the companies will handle this.

Drug testing for marijuana seems to be unfair wherever you live. The government needs to establish a legal limit that takes into consideration that you could have not smoked pot for over a week and still test positive. If you’re pulled over while driving, it’s okay to do a sobriety test if they think you’re under the influence of any substance, but random testing at work should be more fair.

Of course an argument can be made that if you want to keep your job and you can’t give up marijuana in order to do that, you’ve got a problem that an employer might not want to deal with.

[oldr_n_wsr]

But the occasional joint, like the occasional drink, should not be under the employers control in order to keep ones job now that pot is legal to consume.
Better (more precise) testing is needed. And it can be done. They took alcohol testing from 12 hours previous to 80 hours previous. They can take pot from 30 days previous to 12 hours previous. Just need $$$ to do so.

[Gob]

Washington nice this time of year?

I was part-way through an interview with a defence lawyer and an AIDS activist when a warm sensation stole over me.



I had been in the activist's illegal grow-house, inspecting a little stainless steel mixing bowl full of capsules of intensely concentrated cannabis oil he had extracted the night before from two garbage bags full of buds. Their skin was greasy and they glowed a dull green when I held them up to the light.

Half an hour later we were discussing medical uses of pot when their voices seemed to fade and I found myself gazing happily at a door.

''Can those things make you stoned just by touching them?'' I asked the activist. ''Ah, shit,'' he said. ''Sorry.'' He added unhelpfully: ''Jesus. Look at your eyes.''

I had come to Washington state to write about how the authorities had legalised marijuana after a referendum in the November presidential election, a move that shocked the rest of the nation.

Washington - like Colorado, which passed different measures to similar effect - did not take the baby step of decriminalising use of the drug, nor did it legalise by stealth by broadening a medical marijuana program.

Instead, voters chose to legalise and regulate the growth, processing, sale and possession of marijuana for recreational purposes.

This, says the former Washington State Bar Association president Salvador Mungia, one of the reform's champions, is how alcohol prohibition ended 80 years ago. First states stopped enforcing federal laws. Then they stopped enforcing the mirroring state laws the federal government had demanded they introduce. Then they began repealing their own laws, dismantling the legal foundations of prohibition.

Perhaps. Either way, getting to know your way around Washington state's hazy pot politics can be a little jarring. Proponents of the new laws tend to look like Mungia, who as he sits in a suit at the conference table of an upmarket law office preparing for a deposition, tells me he has never smoked pot, let alone inhaled.

Among the fiercest opponents of the drug laws is Sensible Washington, a pro-pot advocacy group that has been fighting for the repeal of laws against marijuana for years.

From the window in his corner office in the fifth floor of the glassy Seattle State House, the City Attorney, Pete Holmes, looks out at three stolid public buildings, all linked by a forbidding overhead bridge that casts shadows over two of Seattle's main streets.

It is an enclosed tunnel through which felons are escorted high above two of the city's main avenues from a jail, over an administration building and into the courthouse. But the bleak windowless shaft looks more industrial than pedestrian.

''It's ugly as hell,'' says Holmes as he looks at the skyline. He is talking about the architectural blight, but once you've spoken to him for a while you realise he could be talking about the pointless machinery of arrest, incarceration and release.

Holmes became the Seattle City Attorney in 2010 after a campaign in which he argued against the building of a planned new jail. He said as the city's chief prosecutor he could bring down the number of prison beds needed by targeting prosecutions more carefully, particularly by abiding by a citizens' initiative in 2003 decreeing that Seattle police should consider the marijuana possession laws as their lowest priority.

Shortly after he was elected, Holmes announced he would no longer prosecute people for marijuana possession. The police made their feelings known by baiting him with increased arrests.

Meanwhile another group was putting together different reforms that would have strengthened the protections for medical marijuana users. At the time, under Washington state law people with doctors' certificates were not protected from arrest, although they had a strong defence if arrested. Finally, the state's governor, concerned that passing such a law would force state employees to break federal laws, vetoed the bill.

''That was the last straw for me,'' says Holmes. He was sure prohibition had failed. The state was awash with ''BC bud'' - cannabis that flowed south from British Columbia across the border in Canada, as well as the marijuana, crystal meth and heroin that followed the smuggling lines up from Mexico. A study showed it was easier for a 14-year-old to buy pot than a six-pack of beer. And despite his own moratorium on prosecutions in Seattle, people were flowing through the prison system across the state after being convicted on small possession charges.

Holmes had moral concerns, too. ''Prohibition has been implemented in a racially disproportionate manner,'' he says. ''It has made us the No. 1 jailer nation on the planet, both in absolute and relative terms, and it has made criminal enterprises incredibly wealthy.

''One statistic from the US Justice Department that appears to be pretty solid shows that of the Mexican drug trade, 60 per cent is marijuana … That means 60 per cent of the 50,000 murders [in the Mexican drug war], 60 per cent of the lawlessness.''

He began discussing what real marijuana reform would look like with Alison Holcomb, the American Civil Liberties Union drug policy director in Washington. They decided reforms should recognise the efficacy of medical marijuana for some patients, while dismantling the farce that for a time had led to the existence of more pot dispensaries in Seattle than Starbucks outlets.

Reforms should replace the black market with a legal market and generate tax revenue for the state.

As the two bounced drafts of a bill back and forth, Holcombe built a political campaign. By the time what became known as Initiative 502, or I-502, was passed, $US6 million ($5.8 million) would be raised and spent on the campaign and its associated polling and focus group testing. Those backing the bill wanted to know not so much what marijuana users wanted from the law, but what the rest of society did not want. Then they set about allaying those fears.

Driving under the influence would be banned and strictly policed, and possession would be illegal for anyone under 21. Using pot would be legal, but only in private - Seattle would not become a new Amsterdam.

In 2011, Holmes went public with an opinion piece in the conservative Seattle Times advocating an end to marijuana prohibition. He was stunned a couple of days later when the paper endorsed his position in its editorial. So was the left-leaning weekly publican The Stranger, which wrote: ''You could've knocked our stoned, tax-and-spending asses over with a feather when the Times editorial board wrote on February 18: 'Marijuana should be legalised, regulated and taxed.'''

The Stranger reported that former and serving police and judiciary backed the reform, as did the entire city council. And many state politicians were on-side.

After a generation of failure by the pro-pot activists, Holcomb and Holmes saw their reform pass easily on presidential election night last November. Suddenly marijuana possession was legal in Washington, and the state's Liquor Control Board found itself having to quickly build a regulatory system.

Under that system, by the end of the year it is expected the state will begin issuing three types of licence for the growth, processing and sale of pot.

No one person or company will be allowed to own two licences. Growers will sell to processors, who will package marijuana products and produce foodstuffs and drinks to be sold by retailers.

At each step along the way, the state will put out its hand for 25 per cent tax.

The state budge office predicts the cost of legal marijuana will be comparable to the black-market price of about $US13 a gram.

People will legally be able to buy one ounce (28 grams) of smokable marijuana, 16 ounces of edible products or 72 ounces of THC-infused liquids.

Approved retailers will be allowed to sell marijuana products only, and they must not be established within 1000 feet (about 330 metres) of schools. However, growing crops of pot will remain illegal.

A few blocks down the hill from Holmes's office, Doug Hiatt of Sensible Washington shares some battered old rooms with a few other defence lawyers, and from there he leads an angry campaign against the reforms.

He wears his greying hair in a ponytail and is prone to T-shirts with anti-drug war slogans. He has been fighting to legalise pot since he first defended a jailed AIDS patient 20 years ago. His problem is not that I-502 liberalises the drug laws, but that they did not go far enough and make further reform harder. He speaks in long, loud frenetic bursts of language laden with detail and obscenity. After a 20-minute blast shortly after we met, I tell him: ''Mate, you're going to have a heart attack.'' ''I'm not going to have a heart attack,'' he bellows back. ''I'm going to f---ing kill somebody.''

One of Hiatt's main concerns is the new driving-under-the-influence laws - now known as ''green DUI''. As part the campaign to win mainstream support, those backing 1-502 made the laws against green DUI tougher than those against alcohol. Those caught with more than five nanograms of active marijuana per millilitre of blood face prosecution. For those under the age of 21, there is no legal level of pot in the system.

The impact on young people and medical marijuana patients could be catastrophic, Hiatt says .

''You try and get a student loan with a green DUI on your record. Try and get insurance.''

That night we drive out through the Seattle suburbs to a grow-house being constructed by Dale Rogers. Rogers was found to be HIV-positive in 1987, when he was 18, though he is in good health today.

Pot's anti-nausea properties have helped him keep down the mountains of pills he needs to take. It has stimulated his appetite and helped him gain weight. It has decreased his stress and improved his sleep. And it was the only drug that effectively treated his crippling neuropathy.

As an activist and member of a medical marijuana collective, Rogers has made no secret of the fact he has broken the medical marijuana laws, but he has never been arrested - partly, he and Hiatt believe, because of his high profile.

Now Rogers worries he might fall foul of the new laws. While he can own an ounce of pot, he can't grow the drug in bulk, nor share it among other patients - the point of his collective. Nor does not want to buy pot from the newly licensed stores, because, like many medical marijuana users, he has built relationships with specialist growers.

Rogers shows me the equipment he used the night before to refine his marijuana concentrate, then hands me the capsules I naively pick up to inspect. Soon I start fading out.

Hiatt is on a rhetorical role. He believes only the complete repeal of all anti-marijuana laws, coupled with minimal regulation, will kill the black market.

''The only thing that competes with the black market is a free market,'' he says. ''If you ain't got a free market, you ain't going to solve the problem - I don't care if it's marijuana or peanut butter.

''Goddammit, Nick, if I outlawed peanut butter tomorrow, there's going to be a f---ing black-market in peanut butter three days later.''

Holmes disagrees. ''People don't make gin in their bathtubs any more,'' he says. ''It's easier to buy it in a shop.''

As for prohibition, since the new law was passed, Holmes has taken calls from officials in many other states asking how it was overturned.

Now they all have to wait to see if the federal government will step in to preserve prohibition from above.

[rubato]

I'm surprised at how clumsy and lurching this whole process of liberalizing marijuana laws is. The real answer is that it needs to be addressed at the national level so we can get away from having to cope with two sets of laws everywhere.

yrs,
rubato