Marijuana Blog

Even though medical marijuana businesses are legal at the state level, they still are illegal under federal law. And while this raises the spectre of federal law enforcement coming down on Colorado businesses, the bigger concern revolves around banking. Since banks are monitored federally, they do not like to do business with enterprises that are not legal on the federal level. This means that the millions of dollars coming in from the marijuana industry in this state are usually coming through cash transactions.

 

Senator Pat Steadman proposed a bill last year in the Colorado Legislature aimed at correcting this growing problem, but it met with no success. And there's been no proposal at all on the federal level -- until now.

 

U.S. Representatives Ed Perlmutter (who represents Colorado's seventh district) and Denny Heck (Washington), along with a bipartisan group of sixteen other Republicans and Democrats (a complete list is at the bottom of this post), submitted a bill this morning to update federal banking rules.

 

"We need to address the public safety, crime and lost tax revenue associated when these legal and regulated businesses are operating in a cash-only system," Perlmutter said in a release. "We also need to provide financial institutions assurance that they can make their own business decisions related to legal, financial transactions without fear of regulatory penalties or criminal prosecution."

 

Read more: http://blogs.westword.com

The founder of the British Columbia Marijuana Party, Marc Emery, now serving a prison sentence in Mississippi, has been approved by United States authorities for transfer to a prison back home in Canada.

 

Emery was busted in 2005 for selling cannabis seeds, by catalog order,  across the 49th parallel into the U.S.  After fighting extradition, he was sentenced in 2009 to five years in prison and has been serving his sentence at a medium-security prison in Yazoo City, Miss.

 

In a province where marijuana use is illegal — but usually winked at — Emery blew smoke at authorities both south of the border and in the Great White North.

 

He founded the Marc Emery Direct Marijuana Seeds business in the early 1990s, edited the Cannabis Culture Magazine and opened the Cannabis Cafe in Vancouver’s Gastown.  The pot entrepreneur found himself featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.  Not amused, Vancouver’s stuffy then-Mayor Philip Owen once predicted that Emery’s operation soon would be “toast.”

 

Emery ran for Canada’s House of Commons — as a Libertarian — and later for the B.C. Legislature as a B.C. Marijuana Party nominee. The Marijuana Party substituted its own leaf for Canada’s national maple leaf.

 

U.S. drug authorities have long thundered against the drug culture of a province oft-nicknamed Canada’s “Lotus Land.”  Ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani inveighed against it, and in 2002 the director of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, John Walters, journeyed north to speak at the Vancouver Board of Trade.

 

Emery bought a table at the Walters luncheon and heckled the DEA chief.

 

Ultimately, after prospering through brief local busts, Emery was arrested in 2005 by Vancouver police at the request of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

 

The DEA crowed over his capture.  Its boss, Karen Tandy, claimed, without producing a scintilla of evidence:  “Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery’s illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canada.”

 

Read more: http://blog.seattlepi.com

An Army veteran who retired after 20 years of service is fighting to win back his Second Amendment rights after learning during a gun permit application process that he can’t own one — he’s got a decades-old misdemeanor for marijuana.

 

That was back in high school, said Ron Kelly of his 1971 minor pot charge. And he had forgotten all about it when he tried to buy a .22-caliber rifle at a Tomball, Texas, Wal-Mart. The clerk informed him he didn’t pass the computerized background check, the Houston Chronicle reported.

 

Federal law guiding the National Instant Criminal Background Check System says that any person who is convicted of a crime — even a misdemeanor — that carries the potential for two years in jail can be denied gun ownership, The Blaze reported.

 

Mr. Kelly said he had served a night in jail and a year of probation. He didn’t know of his loss of Second Amendment rights — and meanwhile, he estimated he fired more than 100,000 rounds while serving in the Army infantry.

“I am ashamed of the way my government has treated me,” he said in the Chronicle.

 

He’s since contacted his congressman and senator, asking for help to get back his gun ownership rights, The Blaze said.

 

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com