Marijuana is Essential

Tom Angell points out one of those incredible “how far we’ve come” indicators…

Coronavirus Crisis Shows Marijuana Is ‘Essential’ And Mainstream

In state after state, governors and public health officials are deeming cannabis businesses “essential” operations that can stay open amid coronavirus-related forced closures and stay-at-home mandates. People might not be able to go bowling or see a movie in theaters, but they can still stock up on marijuana.

It wasn’t long ago that anyone growing and selling marijuana faced the risk of being arrested, prosecuted and jailed. But now, in the era of expanding legalization, cannabis providers in many states are held up as vital members of the community who are providing a valuable service on par with picking up prescription drugs at a pharmacy or filling up your car at a gas station.

Could any of us even have imagined that 15-20 years ago?

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20 Responses to Marijuana is Essential

  1. NorCalNative says:

    Cool. If you’re not High, you’re Low.

  2. darkcycle says:

    Incredible. What we accomplished is truly amazing. Guys….that wall…we’ve made a bloody mess of it. It is falling now under it’s own weight. Harm reduction is next, and we are already making that discussion happen. It ain’t over, but I believe I hear the fat lady beginning her aria.

  3. DdC says:

    Confirmed coronavirus cases approach 500,000 worldwide; new U.S. jobless claims shatter decades-old record
    ☛ Live updates:

    ☛ Cannabis Is America’s Fastest-Growing Sector, 15% growth in 2019
    Legal Marijuana Industry Employs Over 240,000 Full-Time Workers

    ☛ Ganja Jobs,jpg indeed.com

    ☛ Colorado marijuana sales hit a record $1.75 billion in 2019
    $7.79 billion in the 6 years since legalization

    ☛ Here’s how much marijuana businesses pay in taxes
    The US government collected an estimated $4.7 billion in taxes from cannabis companies in 2017 on nearly $13 billion in revenue. Although marijuana is illegal under federal law, cannabis businesses in the United States still pay federal taxes on gross income. They are not allowed any deductions or credits for business expenses, by law, which can mean an effective federal tax rate as high as 90%.

  4. DdC says:

    Low-interest loans up to $2 million offered by the Small Business Administration amidst the coronavirus outbreak will not extend to state-legal cannabis businesses.
    ☛ Cannabis Operators Excluded from SBA’s Disaster Assistance During COVID-19 Pandemic
    In a series of new tweets, the federal Small Business Administration confirmed that marijuana companies are not eligible for coronavirus-related disaster relief funds.

    ☛ Hospitals Deny Patients Organ Transplants for Smoking Weed

    ☛ A Lie College Students Might Want To Tell
    House bill an amendment denying federal financial aid for college to anyone who had been convicted of either selling or possessing drugs. No congressional committee voted on the amendment. But it passed as part of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, first enacted in 1965 to create federal financial aid for college students.

    ☛ Collateral Damage.jpg

    ☛ Veterans Health @VeteransHealth
    While VA follows all federal laws regarding marijuana, Veteran participation in state marijuana programs does not affect eligibility for VA care and services. VA providers can discuss marijuana use with Veterans as part of comprehensive care planning.

    ☛ Machine invented by Stoner to treat whole neighborhoods with symptoms of Cv19

  5. Boris Johnson's Stash says:

    Of course Britain is still in the dark ages on cannabis reform:
    “…the Independent Review of Drugs and Crime has highlighted that legal reform in this area is firmly not on the agenda.”
    https://www.thelawyerportal.com/blog/how-close-is-the-uk-to-legalising-cannabis/

  6. Matte Blk says:

    No, dear, Mary Jane isnt essential.
    Two pointz: MJ is of the world (he
    who loves the world more than Me
    cannot be My disciple) and MJ gets
    you all dazedNconfused – notta lotta
    with-it dudes who smoke MJ.
    Turn or Bernie, babe.

    • primus says:

      You are correct; marijuana is of the world. It is real. Reality is defined as that which can be perceived with the senses. That which cannot be perceived with the senses is not real. Remember that god is whatever you imagine him to be. Please stick to the real, rather than the imagined.

    • Servetus says:

      The real is really important. Minus any reality, how would a citizen go about stopping the drug war? Especially when drug enforcement continues as it’s currently being used by Donald Trump and Attorney General William Pelham Barr—a CIA employee from 1973-7, a prominent multi-millionaire and anti-secularist—to carry out coups against foreign political rivals?

  7. Pinkman/Blue Meth says:

    @Servetus

    Demonizing drug users is fundamental to Christian Imperialist Land grabbers.

    Secularists don’t buy into the authoritarian B.S. like religionists do and that makes us secularists the enemy of the deep state.

    But, here’s my question. With known fatalities linked to fentanyl-laced cocaine, who is willing to take the risk?

    You’re out drinking and buy some coke to keep the party going, but it has fentanyl and now you’re dead. Not much fun being dead.

    For this silly old man, street drugs are not worth the gamble.

    • Daniel Williams says:

      To answer your question: More than a few.

      And back when I had my cocaine romance (which ended friendly in ’84), I just shook my head at the dumbass dudes that kept snorting coke to keep drinking booze. Admittedly, I’m a teetotaler. But some of the dumbest shit I ever witnessed was done by the coke/booze boys.

      As I’m another silly old man, I agree with you on street drugs. I’ve stayed as high as I wanna be for at least the last 25 years without doing any.

      We didn’t get this old being stupid, right?

    • Servetus says:

      Yeah, street drugs suck because the government wants them to suck. It’s eliminationism on a grand scale, the easy way.

      Being a science nerd since age four, I ultimately avoided the street-drug scene. Before taking something I checked it out in the scientific literature, thus avoiding the government’s BS and its impromptu death penalties staged by inducing ignorance on the part of its drug war victims.

      I don’t tolerate caffeine. It causes me to sweat from nervousness and to piss too much. I tried tobacco long ago with no positive effect. For some, like soldiers on a battlefield, tobacco is reputed to alleviate the two banes of a soldier’s life, boredom punctuated by abject fear. It didn’t do that for me. Well enough, as I ended up being 259 on the draft lottery list and was never inducted.

      Stimulants in general don’t suit me. There was cocaine. The last line I snorted was in 1981. I appreciated coke’s ability to shut down a Quaalude, which always fascinated me from a scientific viewpoint, but it still wasn’t enough to make me pay too much money for something that only lasted 20 minutes and added nothing beyond its euphoriant capabilities than an ego boost. Meth I’ve never taken. Adding a stimulant to the mix always seemed like a way of speeding up the body’s chemistry—the end product of which might be a reduced life span.

      Heroin I never touched because I knew I’d like it too much, and because I had a friend who became addicted while stationed in Thailand during the war. He was later a trusted source of information about the experience. He quit with the aid of a military rehab program set up by none other than President Richard Nixon to deal with the consequences of the CIA’s black ops. I experimented with opioid pain pills for a while in the early 70s, but dropped them as soon as I recognized a tolerance building to the drug, more pills for the same effect, saying goodbye forever to their ability to quash emotional pain.

      The rest of the pharmacopeia, the experimentation with acid and other psychedelics in the early 70s, provided me with the necessary ammunition to take on the modern age and its drug war. No one, not even the anti-secularists, are going to beat Mother Nature when it comes to offering really great chemicals. At 67, the few drugs I trust or take in moderation include craft ales, cannabinoids, and the occasional psychedelic.

  8. NorCalNative says:

    Marijuana is essential, but Schedule-I remains sacred to the feds and so no federal help will be forthcoming to the emerging cannabis industry.

    Like others on this site, I believe cannabis may help if/when I contact COVID. I recently purchased several one-gram syringes of a 3:1 CBD to THC RSO.

    In the event I begin experiencing symptoms of the virus I’ll switch from smoking to oral use of the full extract cannabis oil.

    Cannabinoids and their anti-inflammatory actions may have the potential to reduce the severity of symptoms. Many here have experienced a reduction in colds and flu severity as a result of cannabis use.

    The ability to manage respiratory inflammation with cannabis should help reduce the severity of viral disease. There is no solid evidence to suggest or support the idea cannabis use would increase or worsen symptoms so I’m of the opinion it’s worth trying.

    In a few years after a vaccine is available, perhaps we’ll see how cannabis users did compared to straights.

  9. primus says:

    Here in Canada, Ontario has ruled that cannabis stores are not essential and are to close due to the plague. I’m not sure about other provinces.

  10. How Marijuana Criminalization Undermines The Coronavirus Response (Op-Ed) –
    https://www.marijuanamoment.net/how-marijuana-criminalization-undermines-the-coronavirus-response-op-ed/

    … “As we all take time to re-evaluate our nation’s public policy priorities, cannabis and criminal justice should be important parts of the conversation. Policymakers, including state legislators, governors and members of Congress, should take advantage of this opportunity to acknowledge that cannabis prohibition does not protect public health and safety, and they should support enacting reasonable policy alternatives on both a temporary and permanent basis.”

    “There will be many policy lessons that emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. One should be that we can achieve better health, safety, and economic outcomes if we replace cannabis prohibition with a thoughtfully regulated system of sales to adults and take other steps to reduce the number of low-risk offenders who become entrapped in our criminal justice system.”
    – By Steve Hawkins, Marijuana Policy Project executive director

  11. I’ve been on the move…

    … I had to leave my near-idyllic spot in the Sierra Nevada foothills (I don’t handle those w/ anger mgmt issues well). Besides, I couldn’t grow in that county (which is stupid ’cause the heat and sunlight makes for great growing). In Jan after a year and a quarter of San Joaquin Valley life I went and spent a month in San Bernardino w/ an old friend from my USAF days that – in his county – can and does grow his herb legally. Both places I carried me weed everywhere, legally. I then spent Feb and Mar in Arizona. In AZ I was a felon for possessing any quantity of cannabis.

    Headed north and drove thru Nevada where I was again legal, into Oregon (legal) and on into Washington (legal). Here I walk down to the grocery store about 3 times a week (about 3 miles round-trip) and across from the store is a dispensary (Kush21). Because cannabis dispensaries are an essential part of life in COVID-19 protocol (and a direct cash infusion for the state) I can buy a few groceries and then buy myself a pre-rolled for $5 or so and smoke it on my walk home (over half the walk is along a stretch of the city’s bike path).

    I certainly appreciate the easy availability of legal cannabis on the west coast but damn I miss living in Oregon and growing my own! The economics of cannabis self-sufficiency are for a poor old geezer like me, a bottom line – I can grow a 1/4lb (at minimum) for what a joint costs me and mine will be organic and top shelf.

    I’d sure like to know how many of the 100,000 folks that have died thus far here in the U.S. in the pandemic have had cannabis in their system…

    • darkcycle says:

      You in my neck-o-the woods? Sea-Tac ain’t far to ride….send me a message on FB…I’ll ride down, we can get lunch sometime.

  12. NCN says:

    Carry a gun, you might get shot. Carry weed and you might get high.

    I admit to some slight amazement at the fact that in almost every place cannabis has a medical or legal foothold, it has been considered essential when religious services are not.

    Didn’t see that coming.

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