Oakland voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved the nation’s first ever business tax on retail marijuana sales.

According to preliminary election results, approximately 80 percent of Oakland voters approved the new tax (which appeared on the ballot as Measure F), which imposes an additional tax for “cannabis businesses” of $18 for every $1,000 of gross receipts beginning January 1, 2010.

Presently, Oakland’s medical cannabis dispensaries are taxed at the same rate as other retail sales businesses ($60 per year for the $50,000 of gross receipts, plus $1.20 for each additional $100,000).

Four dispensaries are licensed by the Oakland City Council to sell and dispense medical marijuana.

According to a financial analysis by the Oakland City Auditor, Oakland’s new cannabis business tax will generate an estimated $300,000 in additional annual tax revenue.

And you must see this one too.

As an aside, one of my favorite Franken quotes from his talk show days, during the run-up to the Iraq war Franken suggested the UN go up to the space station and drop acid together. His co-host replied, "How do you know they haven't?"

Not long ago, I was talking with a couple of friends who are about a decade younger than I am. We got onto the subject of recreational drugs and how my friends had recently sworn off Ecstasy. "I know a guy who used to love it, and he's quitting, too," one of them explained. "He's learned a lot about it and says it's just too hard on your body." I remarked that since Ecstasy is the sort of drug most people take only very occasionally, it probably wasn't as dangerous as something like cocaine, which can be addictive, expensive and lethal. "Oh, cocaine's not that bad," said my friend, looking puzzled and leaving me surprised. Hadn't he ever worked for someone who'd gotten so tweaked on coke that he burned out his septum, emptied his bank account and triggered a heart attack? Hasn't every journalist worked with someone like that?

Ryan Grim would understand this disconnect perfectly. One of the theses of his new book, "This is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America" -- a cornucopia of unconventional wisdom about our relationship to mind-altering substances -- is that the popularity of drugs waxes and wanes according to a complex sum of factors. One of those factors is the "perceived risk" of using a particular chemical, which also fluctuates. There's a tendency to idealize new drugs, as the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal did with a recently isolated narcotic in 1900. "There's no danger of acquiring a habit," it assured its readers about the drug that had just emerged from the labs of the aspirin manufacturer, Bayer. They named it heroin.

Even when we ought to know better, we don't. "It takes about seven years," Grim writes, "for folks to realize what's wrong with any given drug. It slips away, only to return again as if it were new." I came of age professionally at a time when older journalists and editors were wrecking themselves on cocaine right and left; as a result, I still think of the drug as equal parts perilous and pathetic, as well as hopelessly uncool. My friend, no doubt, came up during a coke lull.

A political reporter who currently works at the Huffington Post, Grim wrote a 2004 article for Slate inspired by a curious observation: LSD, which had been "a fixture of my social scene since the early '90s," seemed to have vanished from that scene. No one he knew was taking it or selling it, and when he approached a drugs-policy researcher for some hard data, they discovered that according to several metrics, acid use was at "an historic low: 3.5 percent." By 2003, it was down to 1.9 percent. Why?

Read Full Post »

Over the last several years, without many people realizing it, the U.S. government has changed the focus of its anti-drug efforts, deemphasizing marijuana in favor of prescription drugs.

A CBS News survey of government and nonprofit anti-drug groups has found a retreat from anti-marijuana campaigns over the past several years as prescription and over the counter drug abuse has grown amongst teens.

Any law disobeyed by more than 100 million Americans, the number who’ve tried marijuana at least once, is bad public policy. As a 34-year police veteran, I’ve seen how marijuana prohibition breeds disrespect for the law, and contempt for those who enforce it.

Yup.

Watch video here

[Via Hug The Monkey, the world's best - if not the world's only - blog devoted to oxytocin, "the hormone of love"]

Calvin Wallace must have some very expensive pork chops.

When he was arrested early today and charged with drug trafficking for allegedly having 54.3 grams of MDMA, used to make the drug ecstasy, he told officers it was "flour for my porkchops."

Although, to be fair, pork chops are delicious. Also, memo to Sun-Sentinel: MDMA is not "used to make the drug ecstasy". Admittedly, it is not used to make pork chops either, but still.

BARNEY FRANK: Announcing that the government should mind its own business on marijuana is really not that hard. There's not a lot of complexity here. We should stop treating people as criminals because they smoke marijuana. The problem is the political will.

ESQ: That's my second question. There's already been a lot of change in the country. Thirteen states have decriminalized pot. What's holding up Congress?

BF: This is a case where there's cultural lag on the part of my colleagues. If you ask them privately, they don't think it's a terrible thing. But they're afraid of being portrayed as soft on drugs. And by the way, the argument is, nobody ever gets arrested for it. But we have this outrageous case in New York where a cop jammed a baton up a guy's ass when he caught him smoking marijuana.

ESQ: You're kidding.

BF: Actually, I've just been corrected by my partner – it was a radio he jammed up the guy's ass, not his baton.