Slow burn: New Maine marijuana rules will take time to implement
Dec 15, 2009 Online Issue
A task force has until the end of the month to recommend how Maine should implement its new medical marijuana law, which calls for a patient registry and dispensaries.
Maine Gov. John Baldacci convened the 14-member group to “implement the will of the people” after nearly 60 percent of voters backed Question 5 in November. He said the group will ensure there are “appropriate safeguards in place to protect the public health and safety.”
As soon as the votes were counted, state officials started hearing from people “interested in getting or growing marijuana,” said Lucky Hollander, director of legislative relations at the Department of Health and Human Services.
The group’s recommendations are due by Dec. 31, and then the Legislature will begin its review. Final rules are expected to be in place in the spring.Baldacci’s executive order forming the task force directs members to consider what’s taken place in 13 other states that allow medical marijuana, including the four — Rhode Island, New Mexico, Colorado and California — that are dispensary states.
By supporting the change, voters backed a citizen initiative that resuscitated a bill state lawmakers had rejected. The new law permits people with “debilitating medical conditions,” as diagnosed by a physician licensed in Maine, to use medical marijuana if they get written certification from the physician vouching for the drug’s therapeutic benefits.
Why Obama Really Might Decriminalize Marijuana
Jul 15, 2009 Online Issue
The stoner community is clamoring to say it: “Yes we cannabis!” Turns out, with several drug-war veterans close to the president-elect’s ear, insiders think reform could come in Obama’s second term — or sooner.
Famously,Franklin Delano Roosevelt saved the United States banking system during the first seven days of his first term.
And what did he do on the eighth day? “I think this would be a good time for beer,” he said.
Congress had already repealed Prohibition, pending ratification from the states. But the people needed a lift, and legalizing beer would create a million jobs. And lo,booze was back. Two days after the bill passed, Milwaukee brewers hired six hundred people and paid their first $10 million in taxes. Soon the auto industry was tooling up the first $12 million worth of delivery trucks, and brewers were pouring tens of millions into new plants.
“Roosevelt’s move to legalize beer had the effect he intended,” says Adam Cohen, author ofNothing To Fear, a thrilling new history of FDR’s first hundred days. “It was, one journalist observed, ‘like a stick of dynamite into a log jam.’”
Many in the marijuana world are now hoping for something similar from Barack Obama. After all, the president-elect said in 2004 that the war on drugs had been “an utter failure” and that America should decriminalize pot:
Tags: decriminalize marijuana, Obama
