‘You can’t rebuild if you try to fight this fire and die,’ says one NorCal grower who nearly lost his life last week.

The post ‘It rained fire’: A California cannabis grower’s hellish wildfire fight appeared first on Leafly.

Should We Legalize Something That Causes 300K ER Visits Every Year?

There is something that caused 6,323 hospital admissions in 2017 with a mean age of 6.63 years. And it’s not drugs.

The post Should We Legalize Something That Causes 300K ER Visits Every Year? appeared first on The Fresh Toast.

Because they are a sovereign nation, the tribe will determine their own cannabis laws, independent from the state of Minnesota.

Advocates for psychedelic research and mental health are pushing for real and necessary progress.

Which Sports Fans Smoke The Most Weed? (Hint: It’s Not Baseball Or Basketball)

According to a recent poll, baseball fans were the least likely to consume marijuana among all major sports.

The post Which Sports Fans Smoke The Most Weed? (Hint: It’s Not Baseball Or Basketball) appeared first on The Fresh Toast.

Earlier this year, Washington legislators passed a bill requiring the state to create a Marijuana Odor Task Force in response to complaints over weed odors emanating from grow ops and processing plants. But after evaluating the difficulties involved with creating what may well be the country’s first weed odor task force, state regulators decided to outsource the work to an independent contractor.

The Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board came to the conclusion that because it “is not a scientific agency, nor does the agency possess odors and emissions training, equipment, or expertise,” it would hire a private contractor to conduct a “thorough and robust review of these issues,” Marijuana Moment reports.

The agency began accepting bids for this position earlier in August. Applicants will need to demonstrate their ability to “research and report on the availability and appropriateness of addressing marijuana odors and emissions, and the potentially harmful impact of marijuana odors and emissions on people who live, work, or are located in close proximity to marijuana production or processing facilities.”

The winning contractor will be asked to devise new ways to detect, research, and report on the odors produced by any state-legal cannabis business. The contractor must then figure out ways for offending companies to mitigate, mask, or conceal these odors from their neighbors. In addition to masking the smell, contractors are also being asked to research whether cannabis odors or emissions pose any health risks to employees or close neighbors of a processing or growing facility.

If these odors are found to cause any potential health concerns, the task force must also design ways to protect people from breathing these fumes. These protections could include air filtration symptoms, natural odor masking or concealing mechanisms, or any other bright ideas the contractor might come up with. If these simpler methods fail, the task force can suggest that the state’s cannabis laws and regulations be changed to better protect people from pot odors.

Applicants wishing to apply for this position must already have a license to do business in Washington, and must demonstrate “either an advanced education degree or substantial experience in a similarly related field.” Eligible contractors must also have at least four years of related business experience and must already possess all of the equipment required to do the work.

Applications are due by the end of the day today, and regulators expect to announce the winner by September 4th. The winning applicant will be contracted until next March.

Cannabis odors have caused a number of issues in states and countries where weed is legal, and now that hemp is legal, people are complaining about that, too. Vermont legislators tried to pass a bill allowing towns to classify weed odor as a “public nuisance,” and at least one Canadian town has tried to ban the smell of weed entirely. Denver officials will ticket weed businesses that do not comply with their odor control rules, and a small Michigan town has even invested in a $3,000 odor testing machine in order to get its pot smell issues under control.

Denver health officials have refused to give the owner of a local head shop a free package of personal protective equipment (PPE) just because the store sells legal CBD products.

As part of a nationwide relief program to help small businesses survive the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Denver received 4,500 PPE kits including disinfectant, thermometers, hand sanitizer, and surgical masks. City officials are redistributing these packages to small businesses that have been hit hard by the virus and associated quarantine measures.

Damon Miller, owner of the Meadowlark 64 head shop, was one of many small business owners to apply for one of these packages. Miller’s application was denied, however, because his store sells legal CBD products. The city claims that they cannot offer federally-funded assistance to businesses that handle cannabis – and that apparently includes legal hemp products.

“A business such as myself that does not dispense THC, but we do happen to dispense CBD,” Miller told local news outlet KDVR, has been “denied our PPE package just because of those parameters, apparently.” Miller added that he has seen his business drop by 20 percent since the pandemic began, and was hoping that free PPE would help encourage more customers to visit the store.

“A customer is a customer, a life is a life, and in this day and age, anything we can do to help those folks out while they’re navigating this uncertain time, you know, that’s what we were expecting to get from the City of Denver,” Miller said.

“We can’t use federal dollars to support certain industries, sadly,” explained Susan Liehe, marketing director for the city’s Office of Economic Development and Opportunity, to KDVR. “For folks who are in the cannabis industry, the fact that they are caught sideways between local and federal governments is not exactly news, right? This is by no means the first time they’ve heard this and regrettably probably not the last.”

It is indeed a well-established fact that the federal prohibition of cannabis imposes serious limitations on state-legal weed businesses. Any business that handles weed is prohibited from opening a bank account, getting a bank loan, or receiving any form of government assistance. People have even been denied home loans or insurance due to their involvement in the cannabis industry.

None of these prohibitions should really even apply to businesses dealing in hemp or CBD, though, because the 2018 Farm Bill explicitly legalizes the sale of hemp and all of its byproducts, including CBD. But regardless, many hemp and CBD businesses and users still experience discrimination. Pretty much every federal agency and military service bans its members from using CBD, customs officials at the Dallas airport have been seizing legal CBD products from travelers, and cops still pull people over for transporting legal hemp.

Trump Fears States Legalizing Marijuana Could Lose Him The Election

The President fears including marijuana reform measures in key swing states could drive voter turnout that boosts Democratic candidates.

The post Trump Fears States Legalizing Marijuana Could Lose Him The Election appeared first on The Fresh Toast.

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Drivers at the corner of Nevada and Bridge streets in Spokane, Washington, briefly got to enjoy a pot-positive prank last week after someone placed a cardboard cutout of a marijuana leaf onto a green light. City officials, unlike everyone else, were not amused. 

After authorities dispatched workers to trim the glowing ganja, Marlene Feist, Spokane’s Director of Public Works, advised citizens to be on the lookout for any other traffic light weed leaves.

“Our biggest concern would be for the safety of the installer and the motorists using the street,” Feist said. “Nevada is one of our busiest north-south arterials.”

Five years ago, an even more detailed green-light enlightenment happened in Serbia. In that case, a prankster painted each light a different shape — the red light was a heart, the yellow light was the sun, and the green light was a pot leaf.

At that time, Serbian police said they wouldn’t bother investigating. Local resident Andjelka Stojkovic stated, “Although I am middle-aged, all this looks sweet.”

While highly amusing, these traffic light gags pale in scope next to another public pot prank from January 1, 2017 — when someone altered L.A.’s iconic Hollywood sign to read, “Hollyweed.”

In that case, the bud-loving vandal used tarps to turn the sign’s two o’s into e’s. Eight days later, Zachary Cole Fernandez, a 30-year-old Los Angeles artist, turned himself into police and got booked on misdemeanor trespassing.

Fernandez said he had read about a previous “Hollyweed” sign alteration in the 1970s and mounted his own to “bring positivity into the world.” For his efforts, weed guru supreme Tommy Chong tweeted, “I gave Zach, the Hollyweed guy, a pound of weed as a gift.”

The prior incident occurred in 1971, when art student Danny Finegood similarly used fabric to convert the o’s into e’s. The same thing happened again in 1983, as part of the opening scene of the party-hearty raunch comedy Hollywood Hot Tubs (1984) — ask a Gen X stoner how many times they passed a bong around with buds while guffawing over that one on late-night cable TV.

Why The DEA’s Interim Rule On Hemp-Derived Cannabinoids Is Bad For The Industry

The regulatory gap that skips over hemp processing is relevant to understand the danger of the DEA’s interim rule and how it is inconsistent with the 2018 Farm Bill.

The post Why The DEA’s Interim Rule On Hemp-Derived Cannabinoids Is Bad For The Industry appeared first on The Fresh Toast.