Oakland residents overwhelmingly voted Tuesday to approve a first-of-its kind tax on medical marijuana sold at the city’s four cannabis dispensaries.

Preliminary election results showed the measure passing with 80 percent of the vote, according to the Alameda County Registrar of Voters.

The dispensary tax was one of four measures in a vote-by-mail special election aimed at raising money for the cash-strapped city. All four measures won, but Measure F had the highest level of support.

Scheduled to take effect on New Year’s Day, the measure created a special business tax rate for the pot clubs, which now pay the same $1.20 for every $1,000 in gross sales applied to all retail businesses. The new rate will be $18.

Oakland’s auditor estimates that based on annual sales of $17.5 million for the four clubs, it will generate an estimated $294,000 for city coffers in its first year.

Pot club owners, who openly sell pot over the counter under the 1996 state ballot measure that legalized medical marijuana use in California, proposed Measure F as a way to further legitimize their establishments.

“It’s good business and good for the community,” said Richard Lee, who owns the Coffee Shop SR-71 dispensary and Oaksterdam University, a trade school for budding dispensary workers.

The measure had no formal opposition; in November 2004, a ballot initiative that required Oakland police to make arresting adults using marijuana for personal use their lowest priority passed with 63 percent of the vote.

Support for Measure F was expected to be just as strong. As a result and given the mail-in nature of the election, there was little campaign activity, according to Lee.

“We put out signs, but outside of that it’s been pretty low-key,” said Lee, who hosted a victory party at Oaksterdam University’s Student Union building in downtown Oakland.

Although California’s 800 or so pot clubs also are expected to pay state sales tax, Oakland is the first city in the country to create a special tax on marijuana sales.

Advocates of legalizing pot for recreational use hope to use Oakland’s experience with Measure F to persuade California voters next year to approve a measure that would legalize and regulate marijuana like alcohol.

           

1. Free The Weed,, Its a simple thought. The Hemp plant can be used for so many things. Fuel being the main use. But we as a people have the responsibility to use with caution. It takes baby steps, so please decriminalize weed first, then make your laws and taxes. Ive been smoking for 20 years and im not alone. There are millions of us everywhere. Free the Weed. thank you Dewbeesnacks

2.Cannabis should be legalized first and foremost because its prohibition represents an unfair restraint of trade, and an unfair preference by Congress for certain industrial and agricultural interests over others. Historically, cannabis prohibition was enacted after a very successful lobbying and fear campaign waged by these interests, who saw cannabis (”hemp”) as a significant competitor. Theseinterests included petrochemical, pharmaceutical, logging and paper processing, cotton and other big economic players.

In order to prohibit cannabis, these economic interests had to borrow a foreign slang word for this popular, beneficial plant (”marijuana”) and disguise its everyday identity as hemp. Hemp was a part of America’s success and economic independence from the very beginning. For a while after Independence, it was mandatory for farmers to grow a certain amount of hemp, so that the US Navy and merchant ships would have enough hemp rope and other products for their growing
needs.

With the Industrial Revolution, hemp began to fall behind. The cotton gin made cotton easier and faster to harvest, while hemp still required difficult hand harvesting and retting. But in the early 1930s, the invention of a new hemp harvester threatened to bring hemp back to its rightful place as America’s “moral fiber”. That’s when the competing economic interests struck, using the most blatant lies and fear-mongering to convince elected representatives that cannabis represented a new and vicious threat to the nation’s youth.

In addition to a readily-renewable source of fibers that now require the wholesale destruction of our slow-growing forests or chemically-intensive cotton monoculture to produce, the prohibition of cannabis has cost us an inexpensive, readily-renewable, clean fuel; a biodegradeable substitute for virtually everything, including plastics, now made from petrochemicals; and, most shockingly, the first food crop ever cultivated by human beings, rich in protein and essential fatty acids, that will grow in any type of soil and enrich it in the process.

This has been done in the name of protecting American citizens from themselves, and a moralistic protectionism that presumes to decide what a person may think, eat, smoke, drink, or rub on their bodies like catnip.

Prohibition has also deprived us of a medicine so useful that today even the pharmaceutical companies that once lobbied to ban it now seek to market patented products made from one or more of cannabis’ constituents, while still denying to sick and dying people the whole plant and the benefits it confers, physical, mental, and spiritual.

The enforcement of prohibition has itself become a very great evil, in which corruption, informants, set-ups, planted and stolen evidence are the norms. Forfeiture laws skew law enforcement priorities. Court dockets are crowded with non-violent possession or minor dealing cases while “big fish”, as in any criminal enterprise, can pay for protection. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of otherwise law-abiding Americans have been tainted with criminal records for
choosing one type of relaxation or medicine over another.

In America today, prison guard is a fast-growing field. Giving urine for
pre-employment analysis has become an acceptable practice. And yet another generation of kids is learning that the government can’t be trusted, and that the way to survive is by hiding and lying.

Can a change be made?

YES, WE CANNABIS! - http://www.CannabisResource.com

           

President Obama recently responded in the negative to a query on whether it’s time to legalize marijuana. Being a smart, rational guy, I guess he knew better than to rock his political boat by giving credence to such an outside-the-box solution as the decriminalization of marijuana.

By anyone’s standards though, our supposed war on drugs is a massive failure, a colossal waste of taxpayer money, and is actually escalating drug violence on our Mexican border with American guns and money flowing south while drugs come flooding north.

For this very reason, even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently had the good sense to admit that the U.S. bears some responsibility for the escalating drug violence in Mexico. She also admitted that the war on drugs has not been successful. But instead of taking the high road on the issue of her countrymen getting high, she instead offered nothing more than basically more of the same.

Her so-called solution is the very definition of insanity, whereby you keep doing the same thing over and over, hoping for a different result.

She should have noted her predecessor’s philosophy of knowing when to hold them or fold them. Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice related the story of how she wanted to be a major concert pianist and how she studied piano from the tender age of three, even majoring in music for a while. When she went off to a music festival and met 12-year-olds who could play from sight, that had taken her years to learn,  she came to grips with the reality that, although she might play at Nordstroms, she’d never play Carnegie Hall.

Why are Americans so averse to changing course regarding a new approach to our drug problem? Why not entertain the idea of slowly dismantling our archaic drug laws – perhaps as a trial run for a few years – and just see what happens?

We put a man on the moon. Can’t we come up with a safe and sensible way of responsibly selling marijuana? We sell alcohol and cigarettes, two deadly killers, and yet we seem comfortable with their distribution methods, even though it’s easier for kids to buy a six pack or a carton than it is for them to get their hands on Sudafed.

Why are we falling for the fallacy-filled excuse that we don’t want our pilots or bus drivers under the influence of marijuana? Of course we don’t. And we also don’t want them under the influence of legalized drugs either, which have proven deadly when operating a vehicle.

Dangers lurk everywhere in life, but we can be sensible about coping with them. Marijuana is not nearly as scary as violent drug dealers who create mayhem on our streets, who deal with megabucks that further fuel their purchase of more deadly guns. We need to stop and think — really think – about how best to de-escalate the myriad problems that have been created - not solved - by our current war on drugs.

If adults choose to abuse the use of marijuana, we need to allow them the freedom to do so, just as we already do with their freedom to abuse alcohol and tobacco.

We also should be less naive about our children. They are already quite savvy in getting whatever they want whenever they want. But they are getting it in unsavory places from unsavory people, paying outrageous prices. How long would those pushers stay in business if they knew that the dope they sell could be legally undersold at a fraction of their price?

We need to look in another direction if we are to have any hope of addressing drug use in our country. If a non-user grandmother like myself can entertain the possibility of legalizing marijuana, maybe you can too. We just need to be brave in taking the first step toward imagining a world where draconian laws, incarceration, fear and ridicule may not be the only answers out there.

Jill Chapin

Fog City Journal

           

Editor’s note: There are millions of regular pot smokers in America and millions more infrequent smokers. Smoking pot clearly has far fewer dangerous and hazardous effects on society than legal drugs such as alcohol. Here is High Times’s top 10 reasons that marijuana should be legal, part of its 420 Campaign legalization strategy.

10. Prohibition has failed to control the use and domestic production of marijuana. The government has tried to use criminal penalties to prevent marijuana use for over 75 years and yet: marijuana is now used by over 25 million people annually, cannabis is currently the largest cash crop in the United States, and marijuana is grown all over the planet. Claims that marijuana prohibition is a successful policy are ludicrous and unsupported by the facts, and the idea that marijuana will soon be eliminated from America and the rest of the world is a ridiculous fantasy.

9. Arrests for marijuana possession disproportionately affect blacks and Hispanics and reinforce the perception that law enforcement is biased and prejudiced against minorities. African-Americans account for approximately 13% of the population of the United States and about 13.5% of annual marijuana users, however, blacks also account for 26% of all marijuana arrests. Recent studies have demonstrated that blacks and Hispanics account for the majority of marijuana possession arrests in New York City, primarily for smoking marijuana in public view. Law enforcement has failed to demonstrate that marijuana laws can be enforced fairly without regard to race; far too often minorities are arrested for marijuana use while white/non-Hispanic Americans face a much lower risk of arrest.

8. A regulated, legal market in marijuana would reduce marijuana sales and use among teenagers, as well as reduce their exposure to other drugs in the illegal market. The illegality of marijuana makes it more valuable than if it were legal, providing opportunities for teenagers to make easy money selling it to their friends. If the excessive profits for marijuana sales were ended through legalization there would be less incentive for teens to sell it to one another. Teenage use of alcohol and tobacco remain serious public health problems even though those drugs are legal for adults, however, the availability of alcohol and tobacco is not made even more widespread by providing kids with economic incentives to sell either one to their friends and peers.

7. Legalized marijuana would reduce the flow of money from the American economy to international criminal gangs. Marijuana’s illegality makes foreign cultivation and smuggling to the United States extremely profitable, sending billions of dollars overseas in an underground economy while diverting funds from productive economic development.

6. Marijuana’s legalization would simplify the development of hemp as a valuable and diverse agricultural crop in the United States, including its development as a new bio-fuel to reduce carbon emissions. Canada and European countries have managed to support legal hemp cultivation without legalizing marijuana, but in the United States opposition to legal marijuana remains the biggest obstacle to development of industrial hemp as a valuable agricultural commodity. As US energy policy continues to embrace and promote the development of bio-fuels as an alternative to oil dependency and a way to reduce carbon emissions, it is all the more important to develop industrial hemp as a bio-fuel source - especially since use of hemp stalks as a fuel source will not increase demand and prices for food, such as corn. Legalization of marijuana will greatly simplify the regulatory burden on prospective hemp cultivation in the United States.

5. Prohibition is based on lies and disinformation. Justification of marijuana’s illegality increasingly requires distortions and selective uses of the scientific record, causing harm to the credibility of teachers, law enforcement officials, and scientists throughout the country. The dangers of marijuana use have been exaggerated for almost a century and the modern scientific record does not support the reefer madness predictions of the past and present. Many claims of marijuana’s danger are based on old 20th century prejudices that originated in a time when science was uncertain how marijuana produced its characteristic effects. Since the cannabinoid receptor system was discovered in the late 1980s these hysterical concerns about marijuana’s dangerousness have not been confirmed with modern research. Everyone agrees that marijuana, or any other drug use such as alcohol or tobacco use, is not for children. Nonetheless, adults have demonstrated over the last several decades that marijuana can be used moderately without harmful impacts to the individual or society.

4. Marijuana is not a lethal drug and is safer than alcohol. It is established scientific fact that marijuana is not toxic to humans; marijuana overdoses are nearly impossible, and marijuana is not nearly as addictive as alcohol or tobacco. It is unfair and unjust to treat marijuana users more harshly under the law than the users of alcohol or tobacco.

3. Marijuana is too expensive for our justice system and should instead be taxed to support beneficial government programs. Law enforcement has more important responsibilities than arresting 750,000 individuals a year for marijuana possession, especially given the additional justice costs of disposing of each of these cases. Marijuana arrests make justice more expensive and less efficient in the United States, wasting jail space, clogging up court systems, and diverting time of police, attorneys, judges, and corrections officials away from violent crime, the sexual abuse of children, and terrorism. Furthermore, taxation of marijuana can provide needed and generous funding of many important criminal justice and social programs.

2. Marijuana use has positive attributes, such as its medical value and use as a recreational drug with relatively mild side effects. Many people use marijuana because they have made an informed decision that it is good for them, especially Americans suffering from a variety of serious ailments. Marijuana provides relief from pain, nausea, spasticity, and other symptoms for many individuals who have not been treated successfully with conventional medications. Many American adults prefer marijuana to the use of alcohol as a mild and moderate way to relax. Americans use marijuana because they choose to, and one of the reasons for that choice is their personal observation that the drug has a relatively low dependence liability and easy-to-manage side effects. Most marijuana users develop tolerance to many of marijuana’s side effects, and those who do not, choose to stop using the drug. Marijuana use is the result of informed consent in which individuals have decided that the benefits of use outweigh the risks, especially since, for most Americans, the greatest risk of using marijuana is the relatively low risk of arrest.

1. Marijuana users are determined to stand up to the injustice of marijuana probation and accomplish legalization, no matter how long or what it takes to succeed. Despite the threat of arrests and a variety of other punishments and sanctions marijuana users have persisted in their support for legalization for over a generation. They refuse to give up their long quest for justice because they believe in the fundamental values of American society. Prohibition has failed to silence marijuana users despite its best attempts over the last generation. The issue of marijuana’s legalization is a persistent issue that, like marijuana, will simply not go away. Marijuana will be legalized because marijuana users will continue to fight for it until they succeed.

Alternet.com

           

When the president opened his first Internet town hall Thursday, what he got, amid questions about the economy, health care and education, was a host of queries that could have come from Sean Penn’s pothead-philosopher in the movie ”Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”

Several marijuana legalization questions, including a suggestion from 2007 Quakertown High School grad Ryan McLaughlin, ranked among the most popular submitted to the White House Web site for the live ”Open for Questions” Webcast.

They got so much online support that Obama was forced to acknowledge the budding interest in the topic.