VIDEO: Medical Cannabis and the California Crisis (Ahimsa International)

AHIMSA INTERNATIONAL Presents: Medical Cannabis and the California Crisis. A medical marijuana documentary from Northern California.

Ahimsa International: http://ahimsainternational.org/

Proposal for a Medical Cannabis Safety Program: http://ahimsainternational.org/programs/mcsp/about/index.php

NEWS: Lawmaker's Daughter Battling Melanoma Recurrence with Medical Marijuana

SAN DIEGO -- A local congressman's daughter is battling a recurrence of the deadly skin cancer melanoma.

Briana Bilbray wants to get the word out during Melanoma/Skin Cancer Detection and Prevention month. Bilbray is just 25 years old but has already endured a lifetime of cancer treatments. Her latest surgery was about three weeks ago.

"Anything to where the melanoma could be hiding, they went in there and took it all out," she said.

That comes after the melanoma returned twice since early last year when she noticed a changing freckle on her leg. Intensive, debilitating chemo followed.
"The nausea is just completely unbearable… all you want to do is go take care of it, but you can't," said Bilbray.

After seeing her unable to sleep or eat and losing weight, her friends suggested medical marijuana.

"I kind of brushed it off at first being like that's just how they're trying to legitimize the dispensaries out here," she said.

However, she finally tried it.

"The medicinal marijuana worked instantly," she said. "Not only was the nausea gone, I was hungry."

Thus, an advocate was born. Bilbray wants bans on dispensaries lifted -- as she told the Imperial Beach City Council last July -- saying they were "punishing" the people who need it by keeping the ban in place.

Her father, Rep. Brian Bilbray, a Republican, opposes medical marijuana. In November 2011, Bilbray was quoted as saying, "Dad will come around."

"He was intrigued and wanted to look into it," she said. "He recognizes that there could be some benefit for chemo patients."

While Rep. Bilbray is not fully convinced, his youngest daughter says her experience has made him more open to it.

"It's good when politicians have family to keep them in check," she said with a laugh.

She said her father is about to introduce a bill that would tax tanning beds with the money going toward melanoma research.

Bilbray will begin 12 weeks of immune therapy next month. Her goal is to keep the melanoma from coming back.

Source: 10News.com

NEWS: NJWeedman goes to trial

Twenty-five months after he was arrested with a pound of high-grade pot in his car, his doctor will testify today that marijuana is the right presecription to alleviate the pain and shrink the bone tumors in NJWeedman’s right leg.

Robert Forchion’s highly publicized trial began May 1 and could lead to sweeping changes in Jersey’s medicinal marijuana laws, or, he could be convicted and face serious prison time stemming from his arrest near Willingboro on April 1, 2010, about four months after Jon Corzine signed the state’s Compassionate Use Act into law as one of his final acts as governor. But the law did not go into effect until July of 2010, and implementation continues to lag during Gov. Chris Christie’s administration, so in the eyes of the state NJWeedman was, and still is, a dope fiend who had a pound of Cali bud in his car.

NJWeedman will appear on Trentonian TV at 7:30 this morning before he drives his Weedmobile back down to Burlington County Superior Court in Mount Holly. Watch the live interview HERE.

“One of the reasons I came to Los Angeles was because when I’m in Los Angeles I’m treated like a medical marijuana patient, not a criminal like I am in New Jersey,” NJWeedman says in one of his many YouTube videos that hit the air in the weeks leading up to his trial in Mount Holly. He held up a medicinal marijuana card issued by Kaisser-Permanente and then held up X-rays of his right leg that he says show the C-cell bone tumors low on his right femur near the knee.

The Burlington County native with dredlocks is acting as his own attorney and argues that he should be found innocent because of jury nullification, meaning he believes Jersey’s marijuana laws are unjust, not his actions. Yesterday he told The Trentonian that Judge Charles Delehey barred him from telling the jury of 7 women and 5 men — 11 whites, one black — that the state’s Compassionate Use Act was signed before his arrest but didn’t go into effect until a few months after. Two of the jurors are nurses.

The judge ruled in January that determining the state’s pot laws is “not the jury’s function.”

But NJWeedman still tells The Trentonian that “the law is wrong, not me.”

For months NJWeedman has said he needs just one juror to understand his pain, his plight, his need to smoke pot as a viable treatment against the bone tumors that Dr. Steven Fenichel is set to talk about today. NJWeedman said he thinks he’s struck a nerve in at least a few “sympathetic” jurors. He said he would appeal a guilty verdict.

“I’ve had this happen to me before when I was in New Jersey, in prison,” NJWeedman said in a video. “It took eight months to get taken care of, under horrible conditions. In California, I not only use medical marijuana, but it’s been shown time and time again to shrink the size of my tumors, reduce the size of their growth, and doctors here have no issues with me using medical marijuana.”

New Jersey’s Compassionate Care Act does not list tumors as one of the reasons to be eligible for medicinal pot. “There is a listing for cancer,” NJWeedman said, “but my condition, luckily for me, has been benign. Each time I’ve been tested (the tumors) have been benign, but they have to be removed, and medical marijuana does work.”

During the trial, NJWeedman said the prosecution has called him “a charlatain” whose use of bone tumor X-rays are part of his “gimmick.”

But the defendant said the part that hurts most is exposing his kids to the cancer Dr. Fenichel will say continues to ravage his right leg.

“At the end of the day I’m Ed Forchion,” he said. “I talk to my kids as Ed Forchion, and I’m in this trial as Ed Forchion. ... It’s tough to bring my kids to court to hear I have cancer. They’ve heard me refer to them as tumors and lumps.”

Source: The Trentonian

NEWS: California Appeals Courts Rule on Dispensaries

Recent federal raids have drawn official rebuke from local and state officials across the country. Those raids—including one on Oaksterdam University, a professional training center for medical cannabis providers and patients in California—have brought condemnation from lawmakers in five states and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, as well as San Francisco's mayor and the Democratic Party Committees in San Francisco and Alameda counties.

The state lawmakers representing California, Colorado, Maine, New Mexico and Washington sent a bipartisan letter to the White House urging President Obama to respect state laws.

"States with medical marijuana laws have chosen to embrace an approach that is based on science, reason, and compassion," say the state officials in their letter. "Our state medical marijuana laws differ from one another in their details... Each of our laws, however, is motivated by a desire to protect seriously ill patients from criminal penalties under state law."

The letter states the Department of Justice’s new aggressive policy "makes no sense" and is "not a good use of our resources," echoing what President Obama said as a candidate, Eric Holder has said as Attorney General, and the DOJ 2009 memo on medical cannabis enforcement.

The five-state letter was signed by Assemblymembers Tom Ammiano (D-Calif.) and Chris Norby (R-Calif.), Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles (D-Wash.), Rep. Antonio Maestas (D-N.M.), Sen. Cisco McSorley (D-N.M.), Rep. Deborah Sanderson (R-Maine) and Sen. Pat Steadman (D-Colo.).

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) issued a statement May 2 condemning federal interference with the state-sanctioned medical cannabis distribution she says she strongly supports. Speaker Pelosi says she will continue to "advocate federal policies that recognize the scientific evidence and clinical research demonstrating the medical benefits of medicinal marijuana, that respects the wishes of the states in providing relief to ill individuals, and that prevents the federal government from acting to harm the safe access of medicinal marijuana provided under state law."

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee issued a statement in early April denouncing "recent federal actions targeting duly permitted Medicinal Cannabis Dispensaries...that aim to limit our citizens’ ability to have safe access to the medicine they need." That statement followed a rally of more than 500 patient advocates and a press conference in which several San Francisco supervisors and California state officials denounced the Obama Administration's aggressive tactics.

The Democratic Party Committees of both San Francisco and Alameda counties have also adopted resolutions asking federal agencies to cease interference.

Since the beginning of the year, five San Francisco dispensaries have been forced to shut down due to threats from federal prosecutors, and in early April federal agents raided city-compliant medical cannabis businesses in Oakland, including one of the state's oldest distribution facilities and Oaksterdam University.

Source: Americans for Safe Access

VIDEO: The Obama Administration’s New Drug Control Strategy

Forty years after President Richard Nixon first declared that drug abuse was "public enemy number one," the Obama administration has announced an end to the so-called "war on drugs" approach to drug policy. Recognizing that America will never be able to arrest its way out of the drug problem, the administration's newly announced drug policy strategy shifts away from a law enforcement only approach to a drug policy recognizing that America's drug problem is a public health issue—not just a criminal one. It outlines significant reforms aimed at treating drug addiction as a chronic disease instead of a “moral” failure.

Even though overall drug use is down, and the U.S. prison population declined for the first time in 40 years, more than 7 million people remain under the supervision of the criminal justice system. Of these, more than 2 million are behind bars. Making matters worse, drug-induced deaths now claim more lives than gun violence, and prescription drug abuse has been declared an epidemic. Will these reforms really break the vicious cycle of drug use, crime, incarceration, and rearrest in America?

Source: Center for American Progress

NEWS: Following Culver City Case, Court Of Appeal Clarifies Laws Over Medical Marijuana Dispensaries

Jeffery K. Joseph was convicted of illegally operating Organica on the Culver City/Los Angeles border.

Following the case regarding Jeffrey K. Joseph, the Court of Appeal recently issued an opinion that clarifies the operational parameters of medical marijuana collectives, cooperatives and dispensaries.

The move came following Jeffrey K. Joseph’s conviction, after he established Organica in 2007 - a storefront business that straddled the Culver City/Los Angeles border.

Between 2009 and 2011, undercover law enforcement officers purchased marijuana from Organica in 13 separate transactions and also saw Joseph selling to other customers. He also openly listed the varieties of marijuana for sale and their prices.

After obtaining warrants to search the premises, officers undertook three separate searches. Among them was one by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, assisted by the Culver City Police Department, which uncovered 48 kilograms of marijuana, hashish, hash oil, numerous beverages and edible products that contained marijuana, and $16,379 in cash.

Customer records recovered by the DEA document 1,772 Organica “patients,” but only 601 of those patients gave addresses that were in the vicinity of Organica, according to a release by KMTG Legal.

Both Los Angeles and Culver City filed an action against Joseph for violations of the Narcotics Abatement Law, the Public Nuisance Law, and the Unfair Competition Law. The trial court found that Joseph and Organica had no defense under either the Compassion Use Act (“CUA”) or the Medical Marijuana Program Act (“MMPA) and the court granted a permanent injunction and entered judgment against Joseph for civil penalties, attorney fees, investigative costs, and court fees.

According to KMTG, the Fourth District Court of Appeal recently determined that in order for a medical marijuana dispensary to be lawful under the MMPA, the operators must cultivate the marijuana on-site.

The court also clarified that any “reasonable compensation” under Health and Safety Code section 11362.765 to be paid for services by a qualified patient or other person authorized to use marijuana “may only be given to a ‘primary caregiver.’” Joseph, however, did not meet the statutory definition of a primary caregiver because there is no evidence the patrons of Organica designated him as their primary caregiver or that he assumed responsibility for the patrons’ “housing, health, or safety.” Also, Organica was not a licensed health care or residential care facility, clinic or hospice.

Source: Culver City Patch

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