By DAVID DOWNS
At East Bay Express
Activists are worried about a new California Appellate Court ruling over the Thanksgiving break that appears to give cities and counties the okay to ban all medical marijuana cultivation – even a single plant, in a closet, for personal, medical use.
The case revolves around the City of Live Oak, which passed an ordinance in 2011 banning medical marijuana cultivation. Patients there sued and a local judge sided with the city. Patients then appealed and the 3rd District Court of Appeals in Sacramento upheld the ban last week, according to reports, and said state law and previous court decisions “do not pre-empt a city’s police power to prohibit the cultivation of all marijuana within that city.”
There is no “unfettered right to cultivate marijuana for medical purposes,” the appeals court said.
By Carr Smith
At The Associated Press
With the death of Cleveland billionaire and philanthropist Peter B. Lewis, the push for relaxed U.S. marijuana laws lost its most generous supporter. That’s left supporters wondering what comes next.
Lewis, chairman of Progressive Insurance, died Saturday at age 80. Since the 1980s, he had donated an estimated $40 million to $60 million to marijuana law reform — including underwriting ballot campaigns, research, political polling and legal defense efforts.
Largely through Lewis’ efforts, and those of several other billionaires, 20 states since 1996 have passed medical marijuana laws, 17 have decriminalized the drug and two have passed legalization language.
By Linda Williams
At The Willits News
A California Appeals Court ruled Oct. 16 neither the Compassionate Use Act nor the Medical Marijuana Program Act allows retail sale of marijuana to consumers. The judges overruled a San Luis Obispo judge’s pretrial finding which included the premise that “Providing money in exchange for harvested marijuana may, in itself, constitute ‘associating for the purpose of collectively cultivating marijuana.'”
The panel of three judges also stated, “The Legislature did not intend such immunity [under the Compassionate Use Act] to apply where the purchaser simply signs a paper stating she is a member of the seller’s collective or naming the seller as her caregiver.”
The appeals court ruling paves the way for the San Luis Obispo district attorney to again pursue charges against the six defendants in a pot sales case that began in 2010. (more…)
By Solvej Schou
At Takepart.com
The legal marijuana economy isn’t a pipe dream. It’s reality.
More than $1.43 billion worth of legal pot will be sold in 2013, and is estimated to increase by 64 percent next year to a mammoth $2.34 billion, according to new research looking at the ever-expanding legal U.S. cannabis market, including analysis of hundreds of medical marijuana dispensaries nationwide.
That gigantic estimated increase in 2014 is, of course, due in part to Colorado and Washington’s legalization of marijuana sales for adult recreational use. Colorado has also developed packaged marijuana and marijuana products to sell in select stores this January, driving industrialization int he according to ArcView Market Research’s report “The State of Legal Marijuana Markets 2nd Edition.”
“The impact of this is huge,” the report’s editor, Steve Berg, tells TakePart.com. “Plus, the latest Gallup poll shows 58 percent of Americans as supportive of full legalization of marijuana, a 10 point increase from a year ago.”
By CBCnews.ca
CANADA
A range of spinoff companies, many of them located in the United States, are angling to cash in on the Canadian medical marijuana market as the federal government brings in new rules for the industry.
Producers of homegrown marijuana will be abolished under the new system and replaced with industrial facilities overseen by the RCMP and federal health inspectors.
Health Canada has said there’s no limit on the number of producers that will be certified under the new regime, and that the price of the drug will be determined by the market.
So far the department has received more than 180 applications from individuals or companies seeking to become certified producers. But Don Schultz, who runs a medical marijuana education firm called Greenline Academy, estimates the market could eventually sustain 1,000 “cultivators” from coast to coast.
Canadian pot growers eyeing medical marijuana free market
Medicinal pot ‘free market’ may force some users underground