Marijuana Blog

California Lieutenant Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) will lead a blue ribbon panel of expert to chart a path toward marijuana legalization, the ACLU of California announced Thursday. At the same time, the group released polling results showing that two-thirds of California voters are ready to support regulated legal marijuana commerce that contributes to state tax coffers.

 

“The prohibition of marijuana has had an enormous human and financial cost in communities across this state,” said Newsom, the highest ranking elected official in California to publicly endorse taxing and regulating marijuana for adults. “It is far past time for Californians take a serious look at smarter approaches to marijuana, and it is imperative that happen before any marijuana ballot initiative gets underway.”

 

The panel will consist of academic, legal, and policy experts and “will engage in a two-year research effort,” the ACLU said. That is a clear signal that organizers are aiming at 2016 — not 2014 — as the time to put the matter before voters, even though at least two separate 2014 marijuana legalization initiative efforts are already underway in the state.

 

“The panel’s work will be designed to help voters and policy makers evaluate proposals for a strict tax and regulation system that will enable California to benefit from billions of dollars of new revenue while ensuring safe communities and protecting against underage use,” the ACLU said.

 

Among those named to the panel are Keith Humphreys, a Stanford Health Policy Associate who was a senior policy analyst at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy in 2009-2010; Erwin Chemerinsky, constitutional law expert and dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law; two past presidents of the California Society of Addiction Medicine; Dr. Seth Ammerman, a Stanford University professor and member of the American Academy of Pediatrics; Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith; and Sam Kamin, a Denver University law professor who has been appointed to the Colorado governor’s task force for implementing that state’s marijuana legalization initiative.

 

Read more: http://www.theweedblog.com

A real life version of the famed "weed mom" on the ever popular show Weeds has appeared in the form of a Scarsdale, NY woman named Andrea Sanderlin, mother of three. According to the article on CNBC.com, Sanderlin has been operating a huge marijuana grow operation in a warehouse building in Queens. The operation has been producing marijuana for about four years now, starting back in 2009. The warehouse contained at least 1,000 plants, which she was selling and profiting from.

 

By claiming that the warehouse space was a classy fashion design firm, Sanderlin lived in luxury, just like Nancy Botwin. But the pot mom's luck fizzled out back in May, when the FBI and DEA followed her to the grow operation warehouse in Queens. The case was incredibly famous when the mom was originally arrested because of the eerie resemblance to the show Weeds. You have to admit that the similarities are insane.

 

Originally, Sanderlin pled not guilty to the change of marijuana cultivation. The case is back in the news because she recently changed her plea to guilty. The 45-year-old mother faces 10 years in prison when she is sentenced and is currently out on $500,000 bail. She is charged with the cultivation of thousands of marijuana plants from 2009 to 2013.

There's different ways of cooking with weed. Some people prefer to make the cannabis butter that they use as they use it, while others prefer to always have a container of cannabis butter in their house. There's two different ways to make the cannabis butter. If you're only using it per baking session, my recommendation is the following method:

 

Get a coffee grinder and grind your weed up very well. To the point where it genuinely just looks like kief, rather than bud. At this point, add it to butter that you have melted on the stove. When doing this method, I usually replace the oil that the recipe calls for with the butter. I personally don't strain the butter when I use this method. Since the marijuana is ground up in such a fine way before hand, there is no need to really filter it.

 

However, if you're going to make a good amount of cannabis butter to store, there is a different way to make it. This way is slightly more complicated but I believe that it produces a much better result in the end. It just takes more time to do this. Also, I recommend that if you make a large amount of butter, use it! Don't let it go to waste. I don't cook with cannabis a lot, hence why I don't have blocks of cannabis butter in my refrigerator. The second way to make the butter is as follows;

 

What You'll Need:

4 grams of butter (Not margarine)

2 grams of weed (This amount is your choice... The amount shown is a rough estimate for a medium high)

 

Place a pan on your stove at low heat, adding your 4g of butter to the pan. Let it melt into a liquid. Once the butter has melted, you can add your finely ground marijuana to the butter. When you grind up the weed, make sure that it's as finely ground as you can possibly get it. A coffee grinder works best but if you don't have one, just keep regrinding your weed until it's very fine. The marijuana that you use should be fairly dry. Once the bud has been added to the butter, be sure to stir is occasionally over the course of 10-15 minutes. Stirring is very important, as it releases more THC in to the butter. When the butter turns to a dark green/almond color, it's done. Strain the butter through a coffee filter to make sure that there is no plant matter left. Squeeze the coffee filter as much as possible to make sure that you've extracted all of the butter from the plant matter.

 

Now, put the butter in the refrigerator until it hardens. The final product can be put in drinks as well as food. You can make it as strong or as weak as you want. It is recommended that you work up to the higher doses of cannabis butter, rather than throwing an entire quarter in to a single cup of cannabis tea and end up passing out for three days straight. While there are stoners out there that can ingest that much weed in a single dose, not everyone is there right away.