LAST YEAR, Oakland became the first U.S. city to create a specific tax on medicinal marijuana providers. Measure F raised the tax on dispensaries from $1.20 per $1,000 in business sales to $18 per $1,000. The increase on more than $17 million in gross receipts was expected to bring in an extra $294,000 per year to the city's cash-starved general fund.

Now Oakland city officials are asking voters for permission to nearly triple the tax on medical cannabis businesses to $50 per $1,000 in sales. Richmond and Berkeley are attempting to follow in Oakland's footsteps rushing to cash in on the booming medicinal marijuana business with pot ballot tax measures of their own in November.

insidebayarea.com

A bill headed to the House floor today has drug law reformers in a tizzy. Critics of the ominously named Drug Trafficking Safe Harbor Elimination Act of 2010 argue that passage of the bill could require American citizens to cancel their drug-fueled visits to Amsterdam, and perhaps prevent them from sampling the rich oily hashish of Northern Morocco.

“[This bill] seeks to authorize U.S. criminal prosecution of anyone in the U.S. suspected of conspiring with one or more persons, or aiding or abetting one or more persons, to commit at any place outside the United States an act that would constitute a violation of the U.S. Controlled Substances Act if committed within the United States,” the Drug Policy Alliance wrote on its Facebook page. “These penalties apply even if the controlled substance is legal under some circumstances in the other country.”

dailycaller.com

Bei der WM 2002 hatte er ganz Italien schockiert. Jetzt wurde der frühere FIFA-Schiedsrichter Byron Moreno verhaftet.

Der Ekuadorianer wurde am Montagabend auf dem New Yorker Kennedy-Flughafen mit sechs Kilogramm Heroin erwischt. Moreno ist damit einmal mehr in die negativen Schlagzeilen gerückt. Bei der WM 2002 in Japan und Südkorea hatte der Schiedsrichter für einen Skandal gesorgt, als er Italien in den Achtelfinals einen regulären Treffer aberkannte und Superstar Francesco Totti wegen einer angeblichen Schwalbe vom Platz gestellt hatte. Die Italiener waren damals gegen den bevorteilten Gastgeber aus dem Turnier ausgeschieden und Moreno in Italien zur «persona non grata» erklärt worden.

news.ch
mz-web.de

A British man is accused of running a drug trafficking network from his prison cell in Sevilla. National Police have collaborated with the SOCA serious crimes unit of the British Police in the operation.

The network was based on the Costa del Sol, and the police operation has resulted in the impounding of a Catamaran found to be carrying 3,200 kilos of hashish, just hours after a yacht escorted into Cádiz was found to be carrying 1,500 kilos of cocaine.

typicallyspanish.com
1,515 kilos of cocaine found on British yacht off Cádiz

Thoughts on the Open Letter by El Diario of Juárez to Narco-Traffickers

Not being a narco-trafficker, the recent open letter from the Diario de Juárez wasn’t addressed to me. Still, as a colleague in journalism who has long reported on the drug war, I would like to offer some thoughts, both for the editors that wrote it, and the rest of our colleagues in the media professions and especially for the general public.

Narco News today translates El Diario’s open letter, titled, “What Do You Want from Us?” which is addressed “To the leaders of the different organizations that are fighting for control of Ciudad Juarez.” It comes from a newspaper that has already lost two reporters to assassination and that lives under daily and nightly fear. The first human reactions to such a situation are sympathy and empathy. But in this case, as with most tragedies, caring is not enough.

narcosphere.narconews.com

Over the past four decades, Dr. Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin has created more than 200 psychedelic drug compounds, many involving MDMA—better known by its street name, ecstasy. The Northern California–bred scientist is the subject of a new documentary, Dirty Pictures—so named for the sketches of chemical compounds on the vials in Shulgin’s lab—though he is hardly a hedonist. Although the gray-bearded, tremulous-voiced Shulgin looks every bit the wizardly counter-cultural alchemist, the film depicts him as a serious researcher intent on expanding the frontiers of the mind; to him, psychoactive drugs are a gateway to true self-understanding and a potential salve for depression.

psychointegrator.com

There are any number of wives who believe that fishing and mental illness go hand in hand, and now it turns out that, in a manner of speaking, they are right. Howard Loeb, senior aquatic biologist at the New York State Conservation Department Fish Laboratory in Livingston Manor, is feeding fish LSD-25 and other hallucinogenic drugs ordinarily used in treatment of the mentally disturbed, and if the experiments work out successfully—which they show promise of doing—their application will have a wholly revolutionary effect not only on angling but on commercial fishing as well.

sportsillustrated.cnn.com

The bird said ‘Run, run or the cat will get you’ when it spotted police officers, tipping off the gang who fled their Barranquilla warehouse containing £100,000 of cocaine.

metro.co.uk