Marijuana

What do some people call cocaine? Try Bolivian marching powder. What is alien sex fiend? PCP combined with heroin, at least according to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s report on drug slang.

Florida and marijuana are already a well-matched couple. Jimmy Buffett, the state’s de facto songwriter-in-chief, supported himself as a weed smuggler and wrote odes to mary jane. The tropical climate is perfect for growing herb. And finally given the chance on a statewide ballot, more than seven in ten voters hopped on the medical-marijuana train in 2016.

Florida medical marijuana seems hopelessly mired in bureaucratic gridlock. Monday morning in Tallahassee, legislators on an oversight committee vented their frustration with the Department of Health’s Office of Medical Marijuana Use and the man appointed to run it, Christian Bax.

The people have spoken: They want to smoke weed. In a recent nationwide Gallup Poll, 64 percent of respondents said the use of marijuana should be legalized. That’s the highest response rate in favor of legalization Gallup has recorded since 1969. And do you know how many people smoked pot in…

Medical marijuana is not at all like other prescribed drugs. It’s a living, cultivated product. Whereas most pharmaceuticals are mass-produced according to recipes that result from chemical testing and engineering, cannabis is a crop. And just like tomatoes or soybeans, there’s no real guarantee that one harvest will be the same as another.

When Florida’s anti-pot lobby, the Drug Free Florida Committee, tried to scare Floridians away from legalizing medical marijuana for cancer and AIDS patients, the group warned that pot patients would be forced to buy their weed from unshowered “budtenders” with Bob Marley tattoos.

A pudgy man in a white lab coat, protective goggles, and a white hardhat ambles down several long rows of potted marijuana plants. An industrial A/C unit cranks frigid air into the capacious grow room, located inside a 300,000-square-foot warehouse just outside Tallahassee, while an array of high-pressure sodium lights…

Last Wednesday, Florida megalawyer and possible gubernatorial candidate John Morgan formally announced a new partnership with onetime Trump adviser and dirty trickster Roger Stone, saying the two were launching a bipartisan effort to push the president toward marijuana reform.

More than seven months after Florida voters overwhelmingly supported an amendment legalizing medical marijuana, Gov. Rick Scott finally signed off on the law late last month. But critics have pounced on the law’s shortcomings. Megalawyer John Morgan, who sponsored the amendment, is now suing the state because it doesn’t allow patients to smoke their medicine.

When Florida overwhelmingly voted to approve medical marijuana last November, it’s a fair bet most of the millions of voters who checked yes on Amendment 2 imagined a future in which sick patients would be free to roll up a joint to smoke away their pain in peace.

Most sensible Americans these days believe in ending the War on Drugs. The facts are clear that low-level drug arrests ruin lives and tear families apart. Some day, selling weed in Florida will no longer feed thousands of new prisoners into the state’s broken criminal justice system.

In 2017, legalizing medical marijuana is not a crazy fringe position. To date, 29 states plus Washington, D.C., have all allowed sick people access to the drug. In November, an overwhelming majority of Florida voters agreed that the Sunshine State should also write legal medical pot into the state constitution…

Three days after state lawmakers failed to pass a bill establishing rules for medical marijuana, Miami Springs Vice Mayor Bob Best shook his head at a council meeting Monday night as the city attorney explained it was time to extend the city’s moratorium on dispensaries.

Remember when 72 percent of Floridians voted to usher in a new era of open access to medical marijuana? That triumphant moment for medical weed was just in November, but for Florida patients this morning, it feels like a lifetime ago.

Up in Tallahassee, state legislators are doing everything they can to undermine medical marijuana in Florida. Voters backed medical pot by more than 70 percent in November, and yet legislators responded by inviting the same guy who spent millions trying to defeat the measure to help the new rules. But…

Miami’s spring break 2017 was one for the books. It began with a bikini-clad tourist twerking on a cop, continued with a gravity-defying feat of twerking atop a car on the MacArthur Causeway, and ended with a clubgoer twerking on the bumper of a car stopped in traffic near Ocean Drive after last call.

If we’re going to legalize, we ought to expunge the criminal record of every person ever convicted of a marijuana crime. For years, white people bought their weed from the brothers. Even the white guy who sold the stuff got it from an African-American. Yet a disproportionate number of blacks have spent years in jail for trafficking and possession.