phoenix new times

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Arizona: Legal-marijuana Advocates Urge Foes To Return Funding From Liquor Group

Wed, 05/25/2016 - 20:07 - derrickstanley
Arizona weed.jpg

By Derrick Stanley
Hemp News

Marijuana legalization advocates in Arizona have asked a rival campaign to return $10,000 in funding from the local alcohol industry.

Carlos Alfonso, a spokesman for the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol (CRMLA), told reporters Tuesday that Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy (ARDP), an organization opposing marijuana legalization, should reject a contribution from a state liquor group.

Arizonans will vote on legalizing marijuana in the election this November. As of earlier this month, the CRMLA had raised nearly $1 million from local dispensaries to help finance its efforts, the Phoenix New Times reported.

After the New Times revealed that the Arizona Wine and Spirits Wholesale Association had donated $10,000 in April to the anti-marijuana group, advocates fighting to legalize marijuana for recreational use said the ARDP should return the money.

“They’re hypocrites because they are trying to use alcohol profits to try and punish those adults that choose a less harmful substance,” Mr. Alfonso told a local CBS News affiliate.

But anti-marijuana advocates say the source of the money should not matter.

Arizona: Marijuana Legalization Backers Outraged By Erroneous Op-Ed On Tax Revenue

Mon, 08/24/2015 - 20:45 - steveelliott
ArizonaCampaignToRegulateLikeMarijuanaLikeAlcohol40Million[RaySternPhoenixNewTimes]

By Steve Elliott
Hemp News

Backers of a plan to legalize marijuana in Arizona are outraged over an unsigned editorial in the Arizona Republic published on August 21 using inaccurate tax revenue figures to back its claim that campaign leaders are lying.

After being notified of the error by the Phoenix New Times, the Republic later issued a correction, reports Ray Stern.

The op-ed was responding to a claim made by the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol's message from August 19 at the state Capitol that its planned November 2016 ballot measure, if passed, could bring in $40 million or more annually to Arizona public schools.

The measure in question would create a system of retail cannabis stores where adults 21 and older would pay a 15 percent tax on marijuana sales. After taking the money needed to run a new bureaucracy to oversee that system, 80 percent of the remaining tax revenue would go to funding kindgartens and public schools.

The unsigned editorial claims the legalization campaign's figure is a "lie," suggesting that backers of the measure might be so high on weed that they'd try to deposit the fake check they used for a prop.

Study: Daily Marijuana Use Doesn't Change Brains Of Teens Or Adults

Tue, 02/03/2015 - 22:12 - steveelliott
Marijuana&TheBrain

By Steve Elliott
Hemp News

It's a repeating pattern. Last year, the mainstream press gave lots of attention to a study suggesting that daily marijuana use could cause abnormalities in the brain. But now that new research, using better techniques, indicates that claim simply isn't true, it doesn't get nearly as much coverage.

The authors of the new study, "Daily Marijuana Use Is Not Associated with Brain Morphometric Measures in Adolescents or Adults," which was published in the latest issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, suggest that alcohol use was actually responsible for the brain changes found in previous studies, reports Ray Stern at Phoenix New Times.

An abstract of the study describes how scientists could not replicate recent research that claimed cannabis use "is associated with volumetric and shape differences in subcortical structures."

The MRI brain-scan reports of 29 adults and 50 adolescents who use cannabis daily were compared with MRI scans of the same numbers of adult and teen non-users of cannabis.

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