By Jim Hightower
Four years ago, Michelle Obama picked up a shovel to make a powerful symbolic statement about America’s food and farm future: She turned a patch of White House lawn into a working organic garden.
I’m guessing that now, as she begins another four years in the people’s mansion, the First Lady is asking herself: “What’s next? What can I do this time around to plant a crop of common sense in our country’s political soil that will link America’s farmers, consumers, environment, and grassroots economy into one big harvest of common good?”
If she’s asking this question, I’m happy to offer a one-word answer: Hemp. How about planting a good healthy stand of industrial hemp next to your organic garden?
 
Full Article:
http://www.registercitizen.com/articles/2013/02/06/opinion/doc511321f73cc2b410509666.txt
 

by JointBloggers

In what could turn out to be a groundbreaking study, a group from Neuroscience Research Australia has been examining if cannabidiol – one of the main ingredients in cannabis – could reverse some of the symptoms of dementia, specifically Alzheimer’s disease.
Early research for the study has found that it does.
 
Full Article:
http://thejointblog.com/new-study-shows-cannabis-may-reverse-symptoms-of-dementia/#.URdbUx3LdMJ
 
 

by Phillip Smith
 
New York City has earned itself the sobriquet of Marijuana Arrest Capital of the World, with tens of thousands of minor pot possession arrests every year — mostly of young men of color — generated in good part by the city’s equally infamous stop-and-frisk policing, again aimed primarily at the city’s young and non-white residents. There’s a man running an outsider campaign for the mayor’s office there this year who wants to end all that.
 

Randy Credico during 2010 Senate campaign

Veteran Big Apple civil rights, social justice, Occupy Wall Street (OWS), and drug reform activist Randy Credico, who also doubles as a professional comedian, is mounting an insurgent campaign for the Democratic Party mayoral nomination, and he wants to end the city’s drug war and a whole lot more, and he wants to do it now.
The inventively funny, yet deadly serious, agitprop artist has an ambitious 17-point program for his first day in office, with promises that range from going after “the biggest criminals in our city” — the Wall Street bankers — and reforming the city’s tax code to favor the poor to rolling back privatization of city schools and reforming various city agencies.
But just beneath banksters and taxes is a vow to begin reining in the NYPD by firing Police Commissioner Ray Kelly (to be replaced with Frank Serpico) and “abolishing the NYPD’s unconstitutional policies of racial profiling, stop and frisk, domestic spying, entrapment, and its infamous (albeit unadmitted) ‘quota system.'”
Central to that policing reform plank, Credico says, is reclassifying the smoking and carrying of marijuana as no longer an arrestable offense. He also vows to fire any officer who lies or perjures himself on the stand, and to bar the use of “no-knock” warrants and stun grenades “except in the case of legitimate terrorist attack.”
And he wants to replace the city’s Special Narcotics Office with a Harm Reduction Office, whose leadership he has offered to Drug Policy Alliance head Ethan Nadelmann. He also vows to shut down the Rikers Island prison and turn it into a treatment center and education facility with a state of the art library, and to nominate law professor Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color-blindness, to run it.
That’s quite a tall order for a first day in office, but Credico says he’s up for it.
“I plan to stay up for 24 hours and get all that stuff done,” he told the Chronicle.
 
Full Article:
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2013/feb/05/look_out_new_york_its_credico_ma

Today, several U.S. representatives will introduce new legislation that would reform federal marijuana laws. Urge your legislators to end federal marijuana prohibition.
Go to this link: 
https://secure2.convio.net/dpa/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=927

Marijuana stocks could be absolutely huge in 2013, as efforts to legalize the drug in more states continue. Already, marijuana possession and recreational use has been made legal in two states (Colorado and Washington) since the beginning of November 2012, and numerous senators, organizations and voters in many other states are also strongly in favor of the legalization of marijuana. In this article I’ll highlight a few marijuana-related stocks that have already made big moves, and could be set for huge bull runs in future.

 
Full Article:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1156521-5-marijuana-stocks-going-crazy-and-this-could-be-just-the-beginning?source=google_news

BY BOB DORAN

 
How can you tell when a stoner has been at your house?
He’s still there.
 
Full Article:
http://www.northcoastjournal.com/blogthing/2013/02/04/cannabis-comedy/
 

 
Michelle Aldrich, 66, has been working for marijuana legalization —which she defines as “the right to grow it for free in your backyard”— for most of her life. She and her husband Michael live in a comfortable old apartment near the San Francisco Marina which they moved into 40 years ago. The following is adapted from a talk Michelle gave in July to the Women’s Visionary Congress.
I had smoked cannabis since 1967 but early in 2011 I kept saying I could not get high. I was smoking a lot. I now believe that THC was going to the tumor and lymph nodes, which is why the cancer did not spread more than it had.
 
Full Article:
http://www.beyondthc.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Michelle-Healing-20-22.pdf

Kelly Anderson

 
All3Media America has been tapped to produce Weed Country, a six-part series going inside marijuana farms, set to debut on the Discovery Channel on February 20.
The series follows farmers working on the land deep in the border of Northern California and Oregon, known as the Emerald Triangle, who grow marijuana despite the risks involved – risks that can include up to 40 years in prison. The series also explores the issues concerning growing the plant for medicinal purposes, and the conflicting views regarding medical marijuana.
Full Article:
http://realscreen.com/2013/02/04/discovery-channel-enters-weed-country/

HONOLULU (AP) — Two Hawaii state Senate committees have given initial approval to allow privately-funded industrial hemp research.
The approvals Monday afternoon come after a House committee passed a measure last week to establish a pilot program using industrial hemp to get rid of toxins in soil.
 
Full Article:
http://thegardenisland.com/news/state-and-regional/hi-legislative-committees-approves-hemp-research/article_03cecb7d-b0b9-5382-97b4-3d61a7e2624a.html