Lunch Lady Busted for Dishing Out Free Chicken Pot Pie (Minus the Chicken and the Pie)

She did this out of a trailer home too, if you can believe such a thing.



Via the Wall Street Journal. More at the Denver Post. Cross-posted.

'This Country is Definitely in Need of a Homegrown Industry, and This Could Be It'

Magic Ellingson, who goes by Henry Hemp, smells a marijuana plant at the International Cannabis & Hemp Expo on Saturday, April 17, 2010,
in Daly City, Calif. (AP)

Well, we certainly do need more homegrown industry, but I'm not sure this is quite what people are looking for, especially guys walking around with giant marijuana leaves on their heads.

– Medical marijuana users near San Francisco lit up Saturday at the opening of the two-day International Cannabis and Hemp Expo, where vendors displayed bongs, vaporizers, hash brownies and other marijuana-related products.

Organizers of the event at the Cow Palace said they insisted on having an onsite medicating area before holding the expo. Under a white-canopied courtyard, young adults in baggy jeans and baseball caps smoked alongside aging hippies.

Adrian Hernandez said marijuana use helps him deal with chronic knee pain.

"Everybody needs their medication when they need it," said Hernandez, who is in his 30s. "We'd have to step out and go hide in our cars."

In 1996, California voters approved a measure that allowed sick people to use marijuana if they have doctor referrals and an identification card.

But marijuana advocates want to take it a step further. In November, voters will consider a ballot measure on whether to legalize and tax pot in California.

They may as well just legalize it since so many folks there are using it, but good luck squeezing tax revenue out of the large scale growers.

The expo, and others like it, will help develop the multibillion dollar pot industry, said Bucky Fisher, national sales manager for Medical Marijuana Inc., which sells hemp-related products and provides services to ensure marijuana dispensaries follow the law.

"It makes the industry more of a community, more visible, more powerful," he said. "This country is definitely in need of a homegrown industry, and this could be it."

Meanwhile, it looks like some heavy duty ingesting was going on there yesterday.

Mike Ush smokes vaporized marijuana from a large balloon during the International Cannabis & Hemp Expo on Saturday, April 17, 2010, in Daly City, Calif. (AP)

Good News: Some Baby Boomers Still Stoned Out of Their Minds

We're four decades past the 1960s and many baby boomers are grandparents. Still, that doesn't stop some of them from lighting up the sweet, stinky weed.

Party on, pops.

Millions of baby boomers still get high.

Some 5% of Americans over age 50 admit to abusing drugs, according to a new government study.

Marijuana is the drug of choice, but many boomers can't stop popping prescription meds, forcing more and more of them into rehab.

"This new data has profound implications for the health and well being of older adults who continue to abuse substances," said Pamela Hyde, head of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the federal agency that conducted the study.

The problem is that some baby boomers never stopped using drugs as they matured into adulthood, the study says, and pill popping was an easy habit for the Woodstock generation to pick up.

Researchers believe the number of people born between 1946 and 1964 who seek drug abuse treatment will double by 2020, straining an under-prepared system.

No need to sweat it, man, Obama will hook you old dogs up with some primo health care.

Of the roughly 5 million drug users over age 50, 45% identified themselves in a survey as pot smokers, 33% as prescription drug users and the rest as users of other illicit drugs.

On the upside, while probably numbering into the millions, it's supposedly only 5% still sparking up.

A Journalist's Dream Job?

Considering what passes for journalism these days, you may as well get stoned on the job.

A Denver alternative newspaper recently posted an ad for what some consider the sweetest job in journalism — a reviewer of the state’s marijuana dispensaries and their products.

Medical marijuana users can also look to dozens of review Web sites, even mainstream rating sites such as Yelp or Citysearch, to find their high. At least five iPhone applications allow weed fans to find the closest place to legally buy bud in the 14 states that allow some sort of medical marijuana.

The Denver paper, Westword, has already has gotten more than 120 applicants, many of them offering to do the reviews for free. When the newspaper settles on a permanent critic for its new “Mile Highs and Lows” column, industry watchers say, it will be the first professional newspaper critic of medical marijuana in the country.

There’s one condition: The critic has to have a medical ailment that allows them to legally enter a dispensary, and buy and use marijuana.

“More and more people are having the opportunity to use marijuana for whatever illness they have. Se we want to be a place they can come to find out which place is the best, the cleanest, the closest, that kind of stuff,” said Joe Tone, Web editor at Westword.

I wonder what kind of expense and munchies budget this gig offers?

A Real Pothead

Stupid human tricks, Friday edition.

Police in central Pennsylvania say they've nabbed a real pot head.

Twenty-nine-year-old Cesar Lopez is charged with drug possession after police say an officer saw him with a bag of marijuana stuck to his forehead.

Investigators say an officer saw Lopez looking at the inside of his baseball cap in a convenience store early Saturday morning in Lebanon, about 75 miles northwest of Philadelphia. When Lopez looked up, the officer spotted a small plastic bag appearing to contain marijuana stuck to his forehead.

Police say the officer peeled the bag off Lopez's forehead and placed him under arrest.

In related news, Australian researchers have discovered marijuana use could cause some sexual health issues.

Australian research finds that men who regularly smoke pot are more likely to suffer sexual problems than men who don't, the Australian Associated Press reported Thursday.

Men who smoke pot daily are four times more likely to have trouble climaxing than men who don't light up, according to the La Trobe University study.

The study also found that men who smoke pot are more likely to experience premature ejaculation than other men.

Professor Anthony Smith said despite the effect pot-smoking has on men's sex lives, smokers did not always consider the issues to be "sexual health problems."

I wonder if they used any kind of stimulus money for this study?

Researchers also found men named Cesar who have bags of weed taped to their foreheads are likely not having sex of any kind.

Must Be Trig Palin's Fault

Hey, look who got busted for toting around a bag of weed up on Cape Cod. We suspect it may have been too many bong hits that made the kook obsess over Sarah Palin's womb for the past year.

Although it's curious why this non-citizen is getting such preferential treatment.

Political commentator, author and writer for The Atlantic magazine Andrew M. Sullivan won’t have to face charges stemming from a recent pot bust at the Cape Cod National Seashore — but a federal judge isn’t happy about it.

U. S. Magistrate Judge Robert B. Collings says in his decision that the case is an example of how sometimes “small cases raise issues of fundamental importance in our system of justice.”

While marijuana possession may have been decriminalized, Sullivan, who owns a home in Provincetown, made the mistake of being caught by a park ranger with a controlled substance on National Park Service lands, a federal misdemeanor.

The ranger issued Sullivan a citation, which required him either to appear in U.S. District Court or, in essence, pay a $125 fine.

But the U.S. Attorney’s Office sought to dismiss the case. Both the federal prosecutor and Sullivan’s attorney said it would have resulted in an “adverse effect” on an unspecified “immigration status” that Sullivan, a British citizen, is applying for.

Sounds like grounds for deportation to me. Otherwise people may get the impression there are two Americas. One for us regular folk and another for whacked-out conspiratorial bloggers.

More here.

'They're All Stoned on Marijuana'

Living in California and somehow can't get your hands on some weed? Why, just go on Twitter.

Some California pot sellers are living the high life this summer — because high-tech social-networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter are allowing them to legally swap street corners for the Internet.

"Just in! Baby Crunch, Spy Diesel and Critical Mass! Buy a quarter, get a gram," read the "tweets" listing the strains of pot available from the Los Angeles-based non-profit medical-marijuana dispensary Artists Collective, which also promises "free delivery."

Artists Collective has the biggest online presence, with a snazzy Web site, Facebook and MySpace pages and the Twitter feed. San Francisco's more staid The Green Cross has a MySpace page, but like Artists Collective lists its latest arrivals on its own Web site.

"We've been open for six months, and I've been doing this project for 18 [months], and only in the last two weeks with a Twitter account has anybody started paying attention to us," says Dann Halem, director of Artists Collective. "That sends a message — an important one — and it really has been, strangely enough, the fact that we're using Twitter that has opened the door."

Not everyone thinks the open sale of marijuana is a good thing.

"The whole state [of California] seems to be saturated with marijuana farms, and it's a marijuana economy, so if they want to do it, it doesn't bother me," says New Jersey personal-injury lawyer Nicholas Kowalchyn. "It's probably out of control already. That's why the state is in the predicaments it's in. They're all stoned on marijuana."
...
"I don't think medical marijuana serves any medical purpose," he says. "I think it's a scam. I don't think it has any therapeutic effects. I don't think it has much in the way of painkilling effects. I mean, it's just an excuse for people to smoke marijuana. If they want to smoke marijuana then they should just smoke marijuana and not go through a charade of passing some law that permits them to do it on some bogus therapeutic basis. That's just my opinion."

Grandma's Got the Sweet Sticky Weed

The old gal is just showing some initiative.

Every day she would snack on a few bits of the hemp blossoms to help against the pain in her legs and arms. She sold the rest. In the city, the going price for a gram of marijuana is about €7.50 ($11.63). She told her only customers, three young men, not to ring her doorbell after 6 p.m., because she wanted her peace and quiet. Her life as a pot dealer remained relatively unchanged for about five years.

Her customers sold the marijuana to others and told stories about the cannabis grandmother. The stories got around, and smoking "Oma's" grass eventually came to be considered cool in Karlsruhe. The rumors also helped police track her down. After a two-week investigation, eight officers raided her apartment -- but deliberately on a day when "Oma" wasn't home.

It's not like she was selling in large quantities, so I imagine a slap on the wrist is in order.

Newsflash: Woman Blows Doobies Every Day for a Month, Gets Injected With THC, Gains Weight, Acts Stupid

Nice to see the BBC putting all that British taxpayer money to good use. Have a woman leave her kids for a month, bone up excessively around the clock, watch her get fat because (duh!) she had the munchies and act like a blithering idiot because she's consuming excessive amounts of skunk weed.

What, they couldn't just find some other slackers on the dole to do this with?

Real groundbreaking television.

Superskunk me: What happened when one woman smoked dope daily for a month for a BBC documentary

Just a few puffs on a rolled-up cigarette containing "skunk" - a strong form of cannabis - was all it took to strip Nicky Taylor of all her capabilities and to induce a terrifying combination of paranoia, fear and anxiety.

As the drug took effect, she was rendered incapable of doing anything save look anxiously around her and try to calm her trembling hands.

But Nicky is not just another of the millions of Britons who smoke cannabis regularly. She chose to experiment with the drug as part of a BBC documentary in which she investigated just how damaging smoking different forms of the drug can be - with herself as a guinea pig.

"I felt absolutely terrified," recalls Nicky, a divorced mother-of-three, thinking back to her first experience just over a month ago.

"Paranoia set in, and I felt as if I was having a panic attack. At one point, I was simply too frightened to get out of my chair.

"I had a feeling the drug had unlocked some sort of paranoia in my head that would never go away again - I suddenly felt everyone hated me. Without doubt, that was one of the worst moments of my life."

Well, just so people don't get the wrong idea, this didn't just happen from smoking some joints.

She actually had herself inject with pure THC!

Controversially, she also allowed herself to be injected with pure THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the active ingredient in cannabis.

Her aim was to discover the true effect cannabis had on her mind and body - and conversely on the millions of Britons who now smoke it regularly.

While some will question Nicky's wisdom in committing herself to such an experiment when she is a mother of three young children, there is little doubt that her experiences are both enlightening and cautionary to anyone who might think cannabis is harmless.

At one point during her investigation, scientific tests proved that, thanks to the drug, she had developed a level of psychosis well above that seen in individuals with schizophrenia.

Certainly not advocating excessive marijuana use here, but is it any wonder somebody gets whacked out when they're injected with THC?

How stupid is this woman?