Marijuana News Roundup: How Trump’s Supreme Court Pick Views Pot
Paul Ausick
Judge Neil Gorsuch was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals by President George W. Bush in 2006. A Colorado native, Gorsuch might be expected to have a strong opinion on legal marijuana. After all recreational marijuana has been legal in his home state since 2012.
His record is fairly consistent, at least according to a report in the International Business Times. In the cases the IBT reviewed, marijuana was involved in three and in all three Judge Gorsuch based his stand on both the letter and, later, the spirit, of federal law.
In 2010 Judge Gorsuch ruled against a couple being tried on charges of conspiracy and possession with intent to distribute marijuana. The couple sought a dismissal of the charges on religious grounds. Gorsuch would have none of it, saying the couple's beliefs were "not religious but secular."
In a second case in 2013, Gorsuch ruled that a police officer accused of fatally tasering a man resisting an arrest on marijuana charges had acted properly.
In a his most recent decision, in 2015, Judge Gorsuch ruled that owners of a Colorado dispensary must turn over tax data to the IRS despite the owners' fears of incriminating themselves because federal law continues to make marijuana illegal. He agreed with the IRS that because the Department of Justice did not generally prosecute cases such as this, the owners should provide the IRS with the requested information.
How that last ruling might play out in a Justice Department run by marijuana foe Jeff Sessions is a matter of speculation. If Sessions is ultimately confirmed as the U.S. Attorney General and rescinds the department's current "look the other way" policy, dispensary owners in a similar situation may be incriminating themselves. Of course, it is also possible that under Sessions there would be no legal dispensaries, medical or otherwise, in the United States, so the issue would be moot.
Colorado Data: Fresh Report Looks at Cannabis Health Effects, Trends Monitoring potential public-health outcomes was a top priority for state health officials after Colorado implemented its recreational marijuana law in 2014.
Three years into regulated sales of recreational cannabis, the Retail Marijuana Public Health Advisory Committee says calls to poison control and marijuana-related emergency room visits are down, even though overall consumption of pot remains steady — signs that existing policy and education efforts may be working.
"I think that speaks to a learning effect," Mike Van Dyke, chief of Colorado's Environmental Epidemiology, Occupational Health and Toxicology branch, said referring to the decline in ER visits and poison center calls. "The public is really learning the message, if not from us, from their own experience."
Van Dyke is chairman of the 14-member committee, which on Tuesday released its second batch of data around the public health effects of marijuana in Colorado. The first report, released in January 2015 by a panel of doctors, scientists and public health officials, contained what state officials described as "baseline data."
"We are doing our best to study this closely and monitor what's going on," he said. "While maybe not apparent from this report, we are taking this evidence base that we're developing, and we are using it to develop prevention campaigns, education campaigns. We are doing our best to implement an evidence-based policy.
Read more at The Cannabist.
"Burying the Lede": Heavy Cannabis Use in Colorado "Burying the lede" is what journalism teachers call it when the key fact in a story doesn't make it to the first ("lede") paragraph but instead gets "buried" somewhere down in the story.
Of course, scientists can make the same mistake: breathlessly reporting routine findings while ignoring what's surprising or important. Consider, for example, this week’s report from the Colorado Retail Marijuana Public Health Advisory Committee. The authors report relatively encouraging news about the public-health impacts of legalization: cannabis use among adults and minors is high relative to other states, but there's no observable increase after the opening of retail adult-use stores. The spike of emergency department visits due to edibles seems to have come back to earth.
But neither the report itself, nor the news stories I've seen about it, makes much of a fuss about what looks to me like the headline finding (from p. 4 of the report):
In 2015, 6% of adults reported using marijuana daily or near-daily. This was lower than daily or near-daily alcohol (22%) or tobacco use (16%). Of 18- to 25-year old marijuana users, 50% report using daily or near-daily (13% of all 18- to 25-year olds). Among adult past-month marijuana users, 79% smoke, 30% "vape" and 33% use edibles. Respondents could report using more than one method, which 50% of users did. Finally, approximately 2% of adults drove a vehicle in the past 30 days after using marijuana.
Read more at The Reality-Based Community.
Marijuana Legalization Begins Moving Through NM House Supporters of a proposal to legalize recreational marijuana say it could generate about $60 million a year in tax revenue for New Mexico schools, health programs and other efforts.
The House Consumer and Public Affairs Committee heard that estimate during a hearing on Saturday, just before voting 3-1 to allow the proposal, House Bill 89, to keep moving through the House. The committee made no recommendation on whether the bill ought to be passed or rejected.
The measure, sponsored by House Democrats Bill McCamley of Mesilla Park and Javier Martinez of Albuquerque, must go through two more committees before reaching the House floor.
"This is the one thing we can do this year that will instantly inject a massive amount of money into our economy and create jobs right away," McCamley said.
Opponents said New Mexico should move cautiously, especially given that marijuana is still illegal under federal law.
Read more at the Albuquerque Journal.
Marijuana Is Still Illegal, as Far as Maine's Colleges and Universities Are Concerned Colleges and marijuana may be linked in the public consciousness, but the two still don't go together in Maine – not officially, at least – despite the drug's legalization earlier this week.
Colleges and universities throughout Maine have been reminding students that marijuana is still prohibited on their campuses, regardless of pot's new legal status elsewhere for those 21 and older. It's a textbook case of political irony, given that many of those colleges are located in towns that tilted heavily for legalization last November in a campaign where the statewide margin of victory was just 4,000 votes.
"The federal law and the state law are in conflict with one another and our perspective is – like many of our fellow institutions of higher education – that we will continue to follow federal law," said Joshua McIntosh, Bates College's vice president for student affairs and dean of students. "Our approach to it and our policies toward it remain unchanged and will likely remain unchanged until that conflict between the state and federal governments gets worked out."
