Tag Archives: Access
Washington Town To Ban Safe Access to Medical Cannabis
“We’re getting dozens and dozens of phone calls and emails and most are from medical marijuana patients…. The number in favor [of the ban] I can count on one finger.”
The vote is scheduled for Tuesday, June 5, and the ban is seen as a sure thing: The vote is planned to fall at 4-3, according to Higgins in the same interview.
In a perfect world, or even just a common sense world, one if not all of these four would realize that what they’re planning to do is unethical, illegal and has no reasonable explanation.
The reasons to vote against this ban are clear:
• This ban would be blatantly ignoring the will of our state’s voters
• A ban would only decrease public safety by forcing these patients into the black-market, which often benefits local criminals and criminal organizations
• A ban would put local employees and business owners out of work, regardless if they are legitimately following state law
• A ban would lack compassion by denying safe and local access to a medicine that is proven effective for a variety of debilitating ailments
A few have attempted a full ban on safe access.
This goes for every city. The movement must be proactive in the present, and whether you’re a resident of Kent or not (I am not), this is an issue we must clearly put our efforts towards. If Kent were to pass this ban, and get away with it (no legal challenge or political repercussion), you can be assured it will have a negative effect on other cities throughout the state whose politicians may be considering a ban, but not yet moving forward with it.
As of right now, one of the most obvious and simplest actions you can take before the vote on June 5 is to email and call those who plan to vote for this ban, pointing out clearly and respectfully why such a ban is a move backwards.
Despite all of this, as we in the cannabis movement so painfully know, the council may very well ignore our call and continue forward with their plan to pass this ban. In this instance, there’s two approaches that we can take, and as a community, we take them both.
We can hope that the courts will rule in our favor, and the legal reality points to the fact that they will. The precedent that would be set from a victory here would be lasting, as well as far-reaching.
But this doesn’t excuse those who voted for the ban.
If it passes, as a community we must take notice. We must refuse to forget, and we must do what we can with our time and finances to take out of office those who would so clearly ignore the law and their constituents.
This is true with any other similar attempt throughout the state and nation.
The more we fight for candidates who support cannabis law reform, and against those who don’t, the more those running for office will stand with us.
Or, at the very least, fear the political repercussions of standing against us.
Safety 1st Toilet and Cabinet Locks Recalled Due to Lock Failure; Children Can Gain Unintended Access to Water and Dangerous Items
More than 800,000 Safety 1st cabinet and toilet locks recalled. These are in addition to different cabinet locks recalled in March.
US Consumer Product Safety Commission – Recent Recalls and Product Safety News
Americans For Safe Access Reacts To Federal Oaksterdam Raids
Joe | Apr 02, 2012 | Comments 0
The folks at the medical marijuana advocacy group Americans for Safe Access have reacted quickly to today’s federal raids in the Oaksterdam area of Oakland, CA. Below is an excerpt from an email they just sent out.
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) raided a legally-permitted medical cannabis collective, a school, and at least two homes in Oakland this morning. As I am writing this, the DEA is still confiscating medicine and plants and detaining legal patients. This is a grave injustice against local patients and a slap in the face for a city that has led the state in sensible regulations for medical cannabis. Americans for Safe Access (ASA) helped to mobilize protesters this morning, and is working to frame this story in the media right now. We wish we did not need an Emergency Response Campaign, but today’s events show that we still do.
ASA has organized strategic responses to DEA raids since 2002, and our work has helped to shine a national media spotlight on federal interference and intimidation. We need your help to keep doing this important work.Can you make a special contribution to support ASA today?
ASA Executive Director Steph Sherer was one of many patients and advocates who responded to ASA’s early-morning call to action. She is in downtown Oakland right now with other protesters – supporting the victims of today’s raids, talking to the media, and holding the federal agents accountable. We know that our Emergency Response Campaign helps to support victims, influence media, and keep law enforcement in check. Your support and participation make that happen.
And more action is planned, including a protest and press conference tomorrow.
I hope you will plan to join us tomorrow in San Francisco for a press conference and rally against federal interference in local medical cannabis programs. The press conference will begin at 11:00 AM on Tuesday, April 3, on the steps of City Hall located at 1 Dr. Carlton B Goodlett Place in San Francisco.
More details on the raids are sure to come I’m sure, but right now these raids fit perfectly into the pattern began last October when the feds decided to crackdown on medical marijuana statewide in CA.
The decimation of MMJ in California continues.
Filed Under: Activism • Exclusive Web Content • Medical Marijuana News • Politics • The War On Drugs
1 in 5 Pharmacies Hinders Teens’ Access to ‘Morning-After’ Pill: Study
MONDAY March 26, 2012 — Nearly one in five U.S. pharmacies gave out misinformation to researchers posing as 17-year-old girls seeking emergency contraception, often saying that it was “impossible” for girls to get the pill, a new study finds.
About 3 percent of researchers posing as physicians also received wrong information about the availability of emergency contraception, also known as the “morning-after” pill.
The findings show that 17-year-olds in need of emergency contraception to prevent unintended pregnancy face significant barriers in accessing it, the study authors said. According to U.S. federal regulations, girls 17 and older can buy emergency contraception without a prescription if they show proof of age, while girls 16 and younger need a doctor’s prescription.
“What we found was that emergency contraception was pretty available, in that 80 percent had it on the shelf that day,” said lead study author Dr. Tracey Wilkinson, a general pediatrics fellow at Boston University School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center. “However, when teenagers asked if they could get the medicine, they were [sometimes] told they couldn’t get it at all, not with a prescription, not over-the-counter, just simply based on their age.”
The study, published online March 26, appears in the April print issue of Pediatrics.
In the study, researchers called all the commercial pharmacies in five major U.S. cities: Austin, Texas; Cleveland; Nashville, Tenn.; Philadelphia; and Portland, Ore. Each of the 943 pharmacies got called twice, once by a “17-year-old girl” and once by a “physician.” Researchers spoke to pharmacists, pharmacy technicians or unidentified pharmacy staff.
Four in five callers were told the pharmacy had emergency contraception in stock. However, 19 percent of 17-year-old callers were told that they could not obtain emergency contraception under any circumstances, while 3 percent of physicians were told their 17-year-old patient could not obtain it.
“Not just the callers posing as 17-year-olds, but the physicians were given wrong information by the pharmacy workers about over-the-counter access to emergency contraception,” said Dr. Deborah Nucatola, an ob-gyn and senior director of medical services for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “This kind of misinformation can result in preventable, unintended pregnancy.”
About 85 percent of the roughly 750,000 teenage pregnancies in the United States each year are unintentional, the researchers noted.
Slightly more than half of workers in pharmacies that didn’t have emergency contraception on hand said they could order the medication, but about one-third offered no additional information about how girls or doctors could get it. Also, the teen callers were put on hold more often than doctors and talked less often to pharmacists, the study found.
Researchers do not know if any pharmacy workers intentionally misled the girls, or if they simply don’t know the law.
In 2011, the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended that younger teens be permitted to obtain emergency contraception without a prescription, but that was overruled by the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Emergency contraception is a high dose of progestin that prevents pregnancy by delaying ovulation (when the egg leaves the ovary and travels into the fallopian tube where it’s available for fertilization by sperm). Some research suggests emergency contraception may make it more difficult for sperm to get past the cervix and into the uterus, and may make the uterus less hospitable to sperm.
Although the drug can be taken up to five days after unprotected sex, it becomes less effective the longer women wait. For every 12-hour delay in taking the first dose, the odds of pregnancy increase by 50 percent, according to background information in the study.
Emergency contraception is not an “abortive” drug, Wilkinson said. It does not affect an existing pregnancy or slow the transport of a fertilized egg from the fallopian tubes into the uterus, she said.
The average cost for emergency contraception was $ 45, ranging from $ 15 to $ 70.
Wilkinson added that emergency contraception should not be confused with RU-486 (mifepristone), which is used to terminate early pregnancies and is given by physicians under supervision.
To clear up the confusion, Wilkinson urged more education of pharmacy staff and said pediatricians and other health care workers must make sure that adolescents know their rights.
“Clinicians might help prepare their patients for this by writing a prescription as a backup to make sure they can access it when they need it,” she said.
More information
Princeton University has more on emergency contraception.
Posted: March 2012
Safe Access: If A Cannabis Patient Is Cut Down Mid-Disease, Does Anyone Hear It?
Verb: 1. Produce or be filled with a deep, full, reverberating sound.
2. Evoke or suggest images, memories, and emotions.
Picture the State of California in your mind. Now imagine the Attorney General taking a pair of Federal scissors and cutting along the dotted line below and above California’s largest city, leaving Los Angeles as an island. Not content to stop there, Cali’s Top Law Dog is now on a serrated blood trail with Federal Fiskars in hand.
She continues undercutting the will of the People by lopping off areas of California like a mad child decapitating paper dolls. Soon, if she has her way, all of California’s dispensaries will be gone.
?From San Diego north to that big burg of unregulated trouble that is Los Gangeles, dispensaries are being closed. The northern sector of the state has been under siege since the end of last year. The rumors are now it is the Central Valley’s turn. And who cares?
Right now if you were to ask our politicians, our civic leaders, those elected officials who supposedly represent our voice, what is happening with medical cannabis, you’d get nothing. Zilch. Bupkiss. There aren’t any politicians besides Tom Ammiano and Mark Leno who are standing up to this unconstitutional March of Destruction.
As each of these clubs close, so does access for so many patients that do not have the mobility to procure their medicines from far-reaching collectives. We’re talking about people in wheelchairs and hooked up to machines or having just finished a round of chemo; so many are alone, without financial and emotional resources.
The conservative estimate is that there around 30,000 to 40,000 medical cannabis patients in San Francisco. Because there isn’t a master list anywhere with accurate totals, you can assume that Southern California has a few more patients than that.
?Where do they go when they can’t get their medicine?
And again, who cares?
Not the “Liberal Media.” Not Keith Obermann or Rachel Maddow, who have never covered a story once to my knowledge concerning the chokehold that the Feds are doing to the Will of the People.
Imagine for second that a bill that passes saying it is now legal for U.S. citizens to carry concealed weapons on Amtrak or in state parks and for some reason, our Justice Department decided that they didn’t like that law and busted other-wise law-abiding citizens for carrying out their new rights.
Could you imagine America remaining closed-mouth if, God Forbid, a gun right that was passed as law wasn’t allowed to flourish? Of course the NRA is never silent, except when Medical Cannabis users were denied their Second Amendment rights.
They speak up for mentally-challenged gun owners and for felons, but war veterans who want to take cannabis for relief from PTSD and have a rifle for protection from wolves and bears? Not a peep from the Hestonites.
?Is there ever a possibility that a gun law could be enacted and not enforced? No way.
Oh yeah, by the way, the crazy who shot Representative Gifford in Tucson and killed six other people? He is being forcibly medicated in the hopes that some of the crazy will leave him, he’ll get back to his normal and Arizona Law will have a better chance of convicting him.
So it is okay that he gets drugs while the patients in the Grand Canyon State have to wait for their medication until Groovy Govy Jan decides if she wants the Medical Cannabis law to go on the books. Don’t hold your breath on this one. Just inhale.
Slowly and methodically, access to medical cannabis is being silenced in the Golden State. It is my belief that besides for San Francisco and Los Angeles, which the Feds are saving for last, the plan is to shut down all dispensaries one by one. Once the hinterlands are contained, they’ll go after Tinsel Town and Baghdad by the Bay for complete closure.
Through it all, there isn’t one shout or reaction from our media or politicians about the pogrom against patients and Medical Cannabis. Not one.
?The good governor from Rhode Island and law enforcement officials in Mendocino County are appealing to the Feds for clarification on their policies, but as the Feds are not forthcoming with any information on why they are reversing the legislation that the voters passed, where is the outcry!
Somehow cannabis became a joke. The perception is that pot is for stoners and cannabis is a made-up word invented for the media. That would be true except everyday another person, who doesn’t consider themselves a cannabis patient, is diagnosed with some affliction and needs treatment. If you have a loved one that isn’t eating or experiencing the pain of their nerve endings disintegrating, then you know the relief that cannabis provides.
Sadly, those who have the power, like our president and congress, only seem to mock us. They believe Medical Cannabis is a sham and should be regulated the same as heroin. Hence, the smokescreen goes on.
Somehow, cannabis isn’t taken seriously.
Just like women. How sad it is when a law student comes before our congress to testify as a good America, doing her civic duty, testifying for a friend mind you, because of that friend’s fear of the wrath of media.
That kind of bravery needs to be squashed.
?True to its ideals, America lost it. Ms. Sandra Fluke, for her gallantry in testifying before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee on the importance of contraceptive coverage for students and employees at religious-affiliated institutions, she was called a slut and whore.
For five days, Ms. Fluke was held up to ridicule in the sights of transmitting ogres and beasts without conscience because she had the gall to ask. She became a target and her character was then attacked. Politicians who previously had no qualms when leaving their comatose first wives were suddenly speculating piously about Ms. Fluke’s sexuality. Why else would women ask for health care unless there is something wrong with them sexually?
We’re gonna need pictures of her doing the dirty before we can proceed, so said the Republican Voice of the Land.
This country doesn’t have the maturity to deal with sex and medical cannabis. It is too easy to giggle about. Old, fat white guys can’t handle the straight talk.
?In the eyes of the people who listen to Rush Limbaugh, contraception is a sham. That these pills and morning-after abortion remedies are another way for women to be promiscuous and have us pay for their medicine and sex at the same time.
See, women are whores and men are providers.
I would like to support our President. I think he has made great inroads in changing the way we do business, and he will be honored for that in the future.
Because of his reversal and crackdown on medical cannabis, I can’t vote for him in 2012. But I can say he is the first president in my lifetime, since Jimmy Carter, that has spoken to us as a nation of adults.
Obama broached the subject of state-sponsored birth control. Oh My God! You would think he was talking about dismantling NASCAR. Those twice and thrice-married senators and congressmen freaked, almost canceling their nooners at the Watergate, at the thought of Catholic hospitals and the like having to provide health care for their workers. That’s crazy talk.
Give women reproductive rights and next thing you know, they’re going to want to have their own orgasm.
?While the politicians gang up on Obama for raising the issue that the government should help out on the cost of women’s coverage, not one of the members of the Sausage Factory mentioned that the very health care plan that doesn’t allow for women to have access to medical care, supplies the same Catholic workers with Viagra.
That’s because when a white man has a problem, he’s heard.
Every day in California, it seems, another dispensary is given walking papers. You can figure for every clinic that closes, some 1,500 patients that without medications are doomed to live the rest of their days in pain.
Who cares?
Marijuana’s a joke. Didja hear about that wacky religion in Hawaii that wants to incorporate cannabis as part of their ceremonies? Get this; they wanted to smoke it as part of their culture and history. Scam, jokers, phonies and fakers, all of them.
Oh yeah, by the end of Prohibition, because of the demand by Northern California Catholic Diocese for their ceremonies and rituals, Beaulieu Vineyards, expanded their selections of wines by nine new varieties. This is when alcohol was illegal.
?But that was different; it was for religious ceremonies. Hey, wait a sec.
Once again, all people are born equal, it just that some are born more equal.
We are entering that miasma of converging values and a love for blatant hypocrisy. In Washington state, judges have excused pharmacists from dispensing the so-called abortion pill-Plan B — because of religious reasons. Basically, if someone objects to HIV medication or some other controversial treatment, that guy in the white smock with that gross arm hair has the right to tell you No.
Why? Because he said so!
At the same time, while Howard Sprague is putting his foot down and just saying “No!” The kids at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania can get the same “morning-after” pill by sliding $ 25 into a vending machine.
That’s right. What is verboten on the West Coast is available 24/7 in the land of the Amish. That is the consistency that keeps this great country of ours knee-deep in the muck.
It is about the ability to resonate, or being heard.
Women should consider themselves lucky that they have a voice in medicine. It wasn’t until the 70s that the FDA allowed for women to be tested along men for possible bad reactions discovered during clinical trials. In 1993, it became a law that any new drug also had to be tested on women. 1993!
The fix is in. It goes like this: Get elected. Serve your people for a little while. Then go into lobbying or the Federal Drug Administration. That way, everything stays the same. Translation: The money stays in the same pockets without any down time.
?Medical cannabis was working. The Sheriff’s program in Mendocino was perfect proof of that. That’s why the Federal Government had to shut it down.
And who is there to complain? The people they call “potheads?” That’s the same as those whores who want free screenings for breast cancer and some relief for birthing all of those babies.
Why don’t we say only Democrats get abortions? Can we agree on that if women are requesting information about birth control or some form of contraception, they must be a whore or slut? That if you are wanting access to medical cannabis, you’re nothing but a pothead?
There is a total of 535 Congresspeople and Senators who control our lives. Again, there about 45,000 patients in San Francisco who want access to our medicine and we want it now.
What do we need to do in order to be heard? What is that we have to do to ensure resonance with our message? How do we deal with the immaturity of old, white men that cannot have an adult conversion about women’s needs without turning it into a letter to Penthouse magazine?
Here’s the deal: I suspect that Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona smokes weed. We live in that kind of hypocrisy. Do you really think that Republicans do not smoke cannabis?
If it wasn’t for Toke of the Town, I wouldn’t have known that Vice President Biden was involved with a drug summit in Mexico. It wasn’t news in any of the majors like the N.Y.Times or the Journal. South of the Border, America’s Second-in-Charge reiterated the US’s policy of making sure that only the cartels or Big Pharma shall control the drug trade.
The Vice President reassured the Mexican government that even with 16 American states and Washington, D.C., voting for medical cannabis, the United States Federales will turn over laws, bust heads and take property if needed to make sure the American people understand who dispenses the medicine and when.
Jumping Joe reaffirmed American’s commitment to the Drug War. It is the United States three-prong goal that A) we keep our prisons filled with first-time offenders, B) those of skins to be darker than white to always be a suspect and C) to ensure that the Black Market thrives so that the usual suspects keep their PayPal accounts full and everything stays the same.
There is very little difference in my mind on how women are being treated and the perception of the medical cannabis movement. Neither is being taken seriously when push comes to shove.
The real truth is the rich and powerful has access to whatever they need or want.
We need to realize that it isn’t only Democrats and wanton women who need contraception coverage and want to keep abortion legal and available, that it is not only stoners who use weed for relief and that safe access should be our right as humans, not just for a fat, white few.
