Michigan Medical Marijuana Conference coming to Ann Arbor this weekend

The Michigan Medical Marijuana Conference this weekend will include workshops for marijuana growers and panel discussions on the impact of the substance on society. Ryan J. Stanton | AnnArbor.com Things are going to get a little hazy on the west side of Ann Arbor this weekend. It may not have the instant name recognition of the Hash Bash in AnnArbor, but The Michigan Medical Marijuana Report is bringing the fifth Michigan Medical Marijuana Conference to the Clarion Hotel on Jackson Avenue in Ann Arbor. The magazine has held one conference in Grand Rapids and is planning an event in Traverse City in September, but is returning to Ann Arbor for the third time. Ann Arbor is one of the bigger medical marijuana communities in the state, editor and conference director Ed Gorski said. There always seems to be demand to know whats new with the laws and what is upcoming. People want to stay ahead of the curve. The annual conference involves a combination of speakers, panel discussions and classes for medical marijuana growers and activists. The event kicks off Friday night with a panel that includes State Representative Mike Callton (R-Nashville) and Michigan Medical Marijuana Report owner Ben Horner. The panel will discuss current medical marijuana legislation and marijuana impact on society. Last fall, citizens in Washington and Colorado voted that marijuana should be legalized , adding to the traction that the movement has been gaining over the past few years. Gorski said that Saturday at the conference is more geared towards growers. The event is free to the public, but a $25 fee is required to participate in full day of activities. There are classes throughout the day and then we bring all the teachers together at the end and have a panel where you can ask them questions, he said. Then after that we have the cooking class. Throughout the conference, a vendor hall will be open to the public and will include displays from local dispensaries and a variety of other ganja-centric companies and organizations. A big part of the conference is all of the vendors who come, he said. Marijuana Inc. will have a booth. they are the only marijuana company listed on a stock exchange. There is also a trimming company, a number of non-profit booths and live music to keep everyone entertained. In addition to the booths, doctors will be on hand at the hotel diagnosing patients and issuing medical marijuana certifications for $69. They mostly diagnose for chronic pain, thats kind of the average, Gorski said. We do see a lot of that, but you see illnesses from every end of the spectrum. We have people come in with multiple sclerosis and cancer. Our doctors deal with all varieties of sick people. The final event of the conference on Sunday is the declaration of the second annual Caregiver Cup awards, given to the best marijuana strains in four different categories. According to an entry form, the strains are judged on cannibinoid percentage, medical potency, flavor and appearance. The last cup we had 147 entries, so its quite a long process to determine the winner, Gorski said. Gorski said that about 500 people attended each of the past two Ann Arbor conferences, and hes expecting about that many people again this year.

Michigan Medical Marijuana Conference coming to Ann Arbor this weekend

Weed Arrests Down in NYC

Pot busts in New York City are finally on the decline, but it’s not safe for users to exhale just yet. Carrying a small amount of weed is still the most common reason for arrest in the city, and more people are busted for it here than almost anywhere else.

According to the Associated Press, arrests for simple possession dropped by 22 percent between 2011 and 2012 – from more than 50,000 to about 40,000. New York State decriminalized possession of small amounts of pot more than 30 years ago, but quirks in the law still make it possible for police to harass medicinal and other marijuana users.

Possession of Marijuana in NYC

Possessing less than 25 grams (slightly less than an ounce) isn’t considered a crime, as long as it’s kept out of public view and police don’t see it burning. This is the equivalent of a traffic ticket, and the most serious penalty is a $100 fine.

But weed arrests have often been made during so-called “stop and frisks,” a tactic of the New York Police Department that can force marijuana into public view and turn simple possession into a crime. The department has cut back on those arrests and promised to change how marijuana possession is treated during them, but pot busts are still up eighteen-fold over their levels in the late 1990s.

Stop and Frisks Law and Marijuana

The stop and frisk is a constitutional gray area. Police are allowed to stop a person on the street without probable cause as long as they have “reasonable suspicion” to believe the person is involved in a crime. They cannot arrest the person without probable cause, however, and they cannot search the person – unless they reasonably suspect the person is carrying a weapon.

The problem arises in that many police use these searches to uncover additional items a person may be carrying, including marijuana, and then use that to make an arrest. The frisk is supposed to focus only on potential weapons, but anything else police find along the way is fair game.

In many of these cases, police have blurred the line even further by asking the people who are stopped to empty their pockets voluntarily. When they do, the weed is in “public view” and they’re subject to arrest, fines and jail time. At the least, they’re likely to get a mark on their criminal records.

City officials promised last year to reduce the number of stop and frisks, and they dropped by more than 20 percent last year.  New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly also vowed to stop charging people who openly exposed their pot at the request or order of the police, and the NYPD agreed to stop holding arrestees overnight for low-level possession.

But New York has a very long way to go. It still has one of the highest marijuana arrest rates in the world.

According to numbers released by the Drug Policy Alliance, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is the king of marijuana enforcers. The police under his administration have made more marijuana busts than the last three mayors combined – 227,093 in the four years between 2007 and 2011, compared to 226,861 in the 23 years between 1978 and 2001.

Weed Arrests Down in NYC

Lorum Ipsum

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, com

Lorum Ipsum