Tagged: NORML

August 22, 2014

For Pot Delivery Apps, Making Green Means Wading Into Legal Gray Area

A fresh crop of pot entrepreneurs wants to provide a new way to get a buzz from your smartphone: marijuana delivered on demand.

Brand-new companies including Eaze and Canary aim to make pot delivery as easy as the tap of a few buttons. Upload ID proving you’re an eligible medical marijuana patient, select the strain of your choice and wait for the goods to arrive at your door.

The potential business opportunity is massive: the on-demand craze popularized by Uber and Netflix, combined with a budding industry built on more states legalizing marijuana use.

But these startups must wade through a complex patchwork of laws that vary by state and even by city.

“All of these folks are operating in a gray area, going to bed each night knowing that their business model might collapse under the politics that gird all of this,” Allen St. Pierre, the executive director of marijuana legalization lobbying group NORML, told NBC News. “‘Is this commerce legal?’ is a hard place to get your business started.”

January 28, 2014

Legalization Measure to be Introduced in Arizona

State Representative Ruben Gallego intends to introduce legislation this session that would legalize the possession, cultivation, and retail sale of cannabis for adults.

Under present law, minor marijuana possession offenses are classified as felonies. Arizona is the only state that classifies minor marijuana offenses so severely.

“The whole goal of this bill is to regulate and tax this to the point where we no longer have these powerful cartels as powerful as they are now,” Representative Gallego stated, “One of the things I saw in Colorado is long lines and that’s a good thing because what that shows you every time you see one person buying marijuana from a legal site, that’s one person not buying marijuana from the cartels or from the black market.”

A 2013 poll from Behavior Research Center reports that 56 percent of Arizona voters support legalization.

January 26, 2014

Medical marijuana in the NFL: “We will consider that,” says commissioner

The National Football League would “consider” allowing athletes to use medical marijuana if doctors said it would help treat head injuries, league commissioner Roger Goodell said Thursday.

The NFL, which has been heavily criticized in recent years for players’ concussions brought on by season after season of hard knocks, has a strict anti-drug policy that includes marijuana. Multiple marquee players have been suspended for marijuana use, including Von Miller of the Super Bowl-bound Denver Broncos, who was suspended the first six games of the regular season for violating its drug policy.

Goodell, speaking at a Head Health Challenge event where the league and its partners were awarding innovators in “protecting the brain from traumatic injuries,” was likely responding to criticism over the league’s policy on marijuana — part of which is being led by marijuana reform group NORML, which just announced a Super Bowl bet between its agencies in Colorado and Washington to protest the league’s stance.

“I’m not a medical expert,” Goodell stated. “We will obviously follow signs. We will follow medicine, and if they determine this could be a proper usage in any context, we will consider that.