The Marijuana Grow House Eradication Act
January 20th, 2009 by Perry
Alan St. Pierre Norm Kent (of NORML) has written a great post examining Florida’s increasingly harsh penalties aimed at marijuana growers.
One of the major changes was reducing the amount of pot plants needed to receive a second-degree felony from 300 to 25 – regardless of whether they’re seedlings or adults. Second-degree felonies can get you 15 years in federal prison, that’s just crazy.
In a strongly-worded press release, Attorney General Bill McCollum excoriated the grow community for the dangers it poses to “protecting our children and our communities from the devastation of illegal drugs.”
The press release makes a few other apocryphal claims meant more to scare than to inform, like making it sound as though marijuana is frequently traded pound-for-pound for cocaine, and that marijuana has 15 times more potency than it used to.
Unfortunately, no one from the press corps challenged these scare tactic statements or questioned the need for such a drastic change in sentence dispensation. With all its increased potency, marijuana still killed fewer people than bumblebees last year.
Jump over to NORML and read the whole article, it’s a good one, and covers not just the facts about Florida’s law changes but also tells stories about the everyday people that are being hurt by them.
Florida Writer Wants Cops to Quit Raiding Headshops
January 6th, 2009 by Perry
Historic parts of Key West, Florida, famous for an abundance of counter-culture headshops, is losing the element of counter-culture it became famous for, due to scrutiny by federal and local officials.
Norman Kent, writer for DrugReporter, blames the mayor for rolling over to federal pressure, although the shops remain legal under broad interpretation of Florida’s statutory law with the aid of an ambitious local district attorney.
I don’t understand America. They gave me a license in Key West. I paid my taxes. I obeyed the law. Florida said it was OK to sell the things. But now people from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and federal agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration come in and take everything away from me without even a notice to remove it first.
Without getting all preachy, the story is an all-too-common one these days, and the editorial makes for a worthwhile read while putting members of the counter-culture community on notice about the dangers of not becoming active in the local political scene as well as the national one.
[img via Checco]
Boy Arrested for Delivering Fake Drugs
November 13th, 2008 by Perry
In Port St. Lucie, Florida, police arrested a local boy, 15, for pretending to sell marijuana to his friend.
The elder boy said he was going to play a trick on his friend. He said he had a bag of parsley that he was going to make his friend think was marijuana.
The 15-year old boy was arrested on a charge of possession of a counterfeit controlled substance with the intent to deliver, when he was found by police during school hours. Apparently stupidity is no longer a charge on the books in Florida.
