Montana Cannabis Industry Association president Chris Lindsey said Monday that the organization has no plans to drop the case, and there is enough money to see it through a Supreme Court hearing later this month. But the advocacy group needs medical marijuana providers to increase their support, he said.

“We wanted to emphasize to the folks benefiting from the lawsuit that there is no free lunch,” Lindsey said. “Those who remain, who we support 100 percent, there is a price tag associated with keeping them operating.”

The Montana Cannabis Industry Association is challenging the 2011 law that forbids the commercial sale of medical marijuana, makes it tougher to register as a user and imposes more regulations over doctors who recommend patients for the state registry.

The Republican-led Legislature passed the restrictions after Gov. Brian Schweitzer vetoed an outright repeal of the 2004 voter-approved medical marijuana law. Supporters of the new law say it was meant to rein an out-of-control industry.

A state judge has blocked portions of the law from taking effect, including the ban on profits from marijuana sales, and the Montana Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on that injunction on May 30.

Earlier this month, the MTCIA posted a notice on its website that says the organization can’t continue with the lawsuit at the rate that donations are flowing in. The organization estimates that it has already spent about $150,000 and the cost of keeping the suit going could run another $100,000.

SOURCE: THEREPUBLIC

The closure of hundreds of marijuana dispensaries across California and a federal crackdown on licensing programs for medical pot cultivation are leaving growers in the North Coast redwoods with harvested stashes many can’t sell.

Purportedly legal medical cultivators are fleeing to the black market. So much cheap weed is getting dumped in the college town of Arcata, some local dispensaries say business is down 75 percent.

Even the region’s itinerant and colorful bud trimmers are going broke.

By the scores, people have long trekked into the marijuana fields and indoor greenhouses of Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties. Workers used to earn as much as $200 a pound meticulously cutting leaves from marijuana buds, prepping them for display at dispensaries or for sale in a purely illicit market.

These days, a 47-year-old man called Mover, a dreadlocked migrant from Ohio who is a fixture in downtown Arcata, says the tedious work isn’t worth his trouble as the per-pound pay rate has dropped to $100 or often just a few nuggets of pot.

“I got paid in weed,” Mover, who refused to give his real name, said of his last trimming job. “It’s worthless here. You can’t give it away. And I’m not going to transport anything. I’m too old, and I don’t want to go to jail.”

The region’s pot pilgrimage had accelerated in recent years as people were drawn by local cannabis traditions and dreams of cashing in on the medical marijuana market. They planted marijuana in the backwoods and in rewired houses with high-intensity grow lights.

But the saturation of pot growers set off a price tumble by 2010, as a pound of prime Emerald weed slipped from $5,000 to the $3,000 range for marijuana grown indoors to the $2,000 range for product grown outdoors. Lately, prices are in free fall.

“Last I heard, a pound of marijuana is $800 for outdoor grown,” said Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman in Ukiah. “That’s plummeting. You might do better with tomatoes.”

The marijuana meltdown could have major regional effects. In Humboldt County, a recent study by a local banker estimated marijuana accounts for more than one-fourth of the county’s $1.6 billion economy.

In recent years, many locals already thought the influx of pot growers exceeded demand in the state’s sanctioned medical pot market. When U.S. authorities in October announced a crackdown on medical marijuana businesses they contended were profiteering in violation of federal and state laws, it darkened their fears.

Lelehnia Du Bois, 41, was one who thought she had found a safe niche. A former fashion model in Southern California, Du Bois started growing marijuana indoors in Eureka after rupturing her spinal cord. She supplied her unused home-grown “Sweet God” to a Eureka dispensary, earning $5,000 a year on top of her disability income, she said.

Du Bois had spent her childhood in Trinity County and remembers growers having “a big pot-luck” meal after the outdoor marijuana harvest. She said the weed culture changed markedly as indoor growers in Arcata and Eureka competed for access to the medical market – and many went into illegal trafficking.

As indoor pot prices dropped as low as $1,800 a pound, “People started taking risks. All of a sudden, people were not farmers. They were drug dealers,” Du Bois said.

Last year, months before federal prosecutors began targeting California dispensaries for closure, Du Bois got out of the pot business and moved out of Humboldt County. She now lives in Utah.

At Arcata’s Humboldt Patient Resource Center, a dispensary that grows its marijuana on site, cultivator Kevin Jodry said fewer people are coming to buy seedlings for this year’s outdoor marijuana crop or quarterly indoor yields.

“Many people distributing in the medical marijuana market didn’t get into it for the risk situation,” he said. “The people who were formerly in the black market were able to stay functioning. People who were not criminals can’t move their product.”

Pressures on growers intensified after Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided a marijuana farm that had been licensed by Mendocino County and was considered a model for establishing local compliance rules for medical cultivation.

The raid prompted Mendocino County supervisors in January to rescind a program that allowed the sheriff to enforce a 99-plant limit on pot farms by attaching $50 zip ties to each plant and inspecting the gardens of nearly 100 growers who provided documentation to show they were serving medical pot users.

The program, which also offered cheaper tags for smaller quantity growers, brought in $630,000 in county fees in two years.

Sheriff Allman said it allowed his department – which spends 30 percent of its $23 million budget on pot enforcement – to target major cultivators he says are illegally growing thousands of plants, diverting water and fouling the environment.

Humboldt County had sought to put a similar program in place last summer as District Attorney Paul Gallegos called for licensing to ensure “sustainable and responsible cultivation.” After the federal government launched its crackdown, supervisors tabled work on the plan, and Eureka and Arcata placed moratoriums on new dispensaries.

Among the most worried cultivators are the outdoor growers who increasingly struggle to compete with the exotic strains produced in climate-controlled indoor grow rooms.

Alison Sterling Nichols, executive director of the Emerald Growers Association, which seeks to protect the Emerald Triangle’s sun-grown pot traditions, said outdoor growers were most directly affected by the collapse of local licensing programs. The group backs legislation to regulate medical marijuana statewide as long as it would preserve growers’ ability to supply dispensaries.

“People shouldn’t have to sleep with one eye open,” Sterling Nichols said. “People should be able to move from the black market into the light. We haven’t been able to bridge that gap. We have hills of healthy outdoor product we can’t take to the market.”

Meanwhile, many worry the Emerald Triangle will go back to being the hub of California’s illegal marijuana trade.

Last month, authorities in Pennsylvania arrested the former operator of a Humboldt dispensary for allegedly shipping more than 25 pounds of pot in heat-sealed packets to a home he was visiting. State officers in Nebraska also stopped a Mendocino County man and a companion with 62 pounds of weed stuffed in duffle bags.

In consecutive days in late February, Humboldt authorities conducted two separate raids on growers suspected of criminal distribution, seizing nearly $700,000 in cash and 7,000 plants.

In Mendocino, Allman said his officers last year eradicated 642,000 plants, some loosely tied to Mexican trafficking networks but most involving Californians or residents from other states who secretly grew on public lands and private property.

With a federal crackdown and a shrinking market, Allman said, many out-of-towners may leave and “everything is going to go underground.”

SOURCE: MIAMI HERALD

Berkeley Patients Group served thousands of medical marijuana patients in the Berkeley area for 12 years. It was an industry leader and a model of compassion and legal integrity. It was in strict compliance with state and local law, and has long worked with the City of Berkeley and the local community to provide a safe and responsible service to patients in need. As a small business, it employed 75 people and was one of the top sales tax generators in the city.

Ms. Haag has claimed that one of her concerns about dispensaries that are in close proximity to schools and parks and playgrounds is the possibility they could be the target of violence or armed robbery. Banks and pharmacies are also targets of armed robberies and there are a number of them located in West Berkeley. Like Berkeley Patients Group, they have security. There is no evidence to suggest, and I have never felt, that it is dangerous to send my children to a school that happened to be near a bank, or a pharmacy.

West Berkeley is not crime-free. There have been a number of shootings in the blocks surrounding my children’s elementary school in past several years. There is also significant illicit drug traffic in the neighborhood. The two are likely connected. But thus far, Ms. Haag and the federal government have devoted few, if any, resources to protecting children from gun violence or other crime in West Berkeley.

Instead, Ms. Haag has chosen to use her presumably limited resources to deprive the thousands of patients who frequent Berkeley Patients Group a legal, regulated, secure place to purchase desperately needed medicine. Of course, the closure of Berkeley Patients Group does not mean that these thousands of people will stop buying and using medical marijuana. They are sick, in pain, and are allowed to purchase and consume marijuana under settled California law (a law that was approved by voters overwhelmingly). Ms. Haag says that she is not going after medical marijuana patients. But she must understand that patients will now simply have to find marijuana elsewhere, from the streets, and near schools and parks. Ms. Haag has not made these areas safer; she has simply increased the demand for an illegal and dangerous drug market.

Ms. Haag also claims that her crackdown on dispensaries is necessary because of problematic marijuana use by high school students. The reality is that between 1996 (when California passed its medical marijuana law) and 2008 there was an overall decrease in teens’ marijuana use. An analysis commissioned by the California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs found “no evidence” to support the claim that legalization of medical marijuana in California increased marijuana use during this period. Providing thousands of new customers to illegal drug sellers on the street might increase access to marijuana by teenagers. The existence of Berkeley Patients Group, and other well-regulated small businesses across the state, does not.

Most offensive is the notion that legal access to medical marijuana sends the wrong message to kids. I find the existence of legal medical marijuana very easy to explain to my children. This is what I tell them: Research and science matter. The opinions of medical professionals matter. We should have compassion for those who are very sick, and even for those who are just a little sick; for those suffering the effects of chemotherapy or for returning veterans suffering from PTSD; that we should help meet people’s needs and ease pain as best we can (even if it goes against the conventional wisdom or drug war ideology). I tell my children that it is better for people to buy marijuana from a safe, well-regulated source, than on the street.

I tell my children that the lives of children in Mexico matter too, where United States drug policy has led to the narcotics-related murders of nearly 50,000 people over the last five years, including thousands of children. That is the harm to children caused by marijuana prohibition, and a drug market that Ms. Haag’s actions directly fuel. The “threat” posed by Berkeley Patients Group, and other dispensaries like it, pales in comparison.

SOURCE: HUFFINGTONPOST

SOURCE: JOURNALINQUIRER

“I think it’s bad politics and bad policy,” he told The Hill in an interview Friday. “I’m very disappointed. I think it’s a grave mistake.” He added that he had brought the criticism to the president.

Frank has introduced the Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act, which would prohibit federal actions in state medical marijuana programs. He also doesn’t smoke marijuana, once telling an interviewer, “Do you think I’ve ever had an abortion? I don’t play poker on the Internet, either.”

The administration’s crackdown on marijuana dispensaries has drawn criticism from other lawmakers. Nine House members — eight Democrats and one Republican — signed a letter in October calling on the Justice Department to end its targeting of cannabis dispensaries.

Comedians have taken notice too. Jimmy Kimmel, speaking at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner Saturday, quipped, “What is with the marijuana crackdown? Seriously, what is the concern? We will deplete the nation’s Funyun supply?” He continued, “Pot smokers vote too. Sometimes a week after the election, but they vote.”

The Justice Department has conducted over 170 SWAT-style raids in 9 medical marijuana states, according to Americans For Safe Access, a pro-medical marijuana group.

DEA and IRS agents raided Oaksterdam University, an Oakland, Calif.-based trade school known as the ‘Princeton of Pot,’ earlier in April. Oaksterdam’s founder, Richard Lee, decried the crackdown in an interview with HuffPost. “This is one battle of a big war,” he said, “and here’s thousands of battles going on all over.”

During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama was asked about medical marijuana by a Southern Oregon newspaper. “I’m not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue,” he said.

Obama was asked about his stance on medical marijuana recently by Rolling Stone, and he clarified that during the campaign he had said that he would not prioritize prosecuting people using medical marijuana. “I never made a commitment that somehow we were going to give carte blanche to large-scale producers and operators of marijuana — and the reason is, because it’s against federal law,” he said.

SOURCE: HUFFINGTONPOST

Deidra Michelle Hanna and Paul Shane Hanna were arrested Sunday at their home in Port Charlotte. They face several charges including cultivation of marijuana and tampering with evidence. They’re being held on $9,500 bond each.

A sheriff’s office statement says deputies found items outside the home that were “consistent with a marijuana growing operation.” Officials later noticed smoke billowing from the home and a strong smell of marijuana. Fire rescue officials were called to the scene and detectives went inside. They found a barrel in the garage that was used to burn marijuana.

With a signed search warrant, detectives also found the garage fully equipped to grow hydroponic marijuana.

SOURCE: NEWS4JAX

In a Democratic primary where the candidates agree on many things, their differences over marijuana stand out.

It’s anyone’s guess whether the pot vote will be enough to tip the scales. But no Republicans are seeking the job, so Democrats alone will choose the state’s top lawyer the May 15 primary.

Former federal prosecutor Dwight Holton has called Oregon’s marijuana law a “train wreck,” and he was the U.S. Attorney for Oregon when federal agents raided marijuana farms that were legal under state law.

His rival, retired Court of Appeals judge Ellen Rosenblum, has staked out a mellower view, saying she’ll make marijuana enforcement a low priority.

“I would welcome a conversation about how to do this better, how to meet the will of the voters better,” Holton said. “But I’ll gladly enforce the law.”

He slams Rosenblum for telling marijuana advocates she’ll make pot enforcement a low priority.

The tough talk aside, Rosenblum, like Holton, sees deficiencies in the law. She described it as “an adolescent with growing pains.” Rather than a train wreck, it’s “a bumpy ride,” she said, and the law could use a look at improving the way patients get access to their marijuana.

She said she can’t recall if she voted for the 1998 ballot measure that legalized medical marijuana, or for a 2010 initiative funded by pro-marijuana groups that would have allowed marijuana dispensaries.

“We have a lot of pioneering laws in this state. And this is one of them,” Rosenblum said, citing Oregon’s first-in-the-nation assisted-suicide law and a bottle-recycling program that’s been replicated globally.

Holton, 46, was a federal prosecutor for 15 years, first in Brooklyn before transferring to Portland in 2004 and, later, running the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Oregon on an interim basis for nearly two years. Before becoming a lawyer, he worked on presidential campaigns — Michael Dukakis’ in 1988 and Bill Clinton’s in 1992 — and in the Clinton White House.

Holton’s father, Linwood Holton, was a Republican governor of Virginia, elected in 1969, and his brother-in-law, Tim Kaine, is a former Democratic governor of Virginia and chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Rosenblum, 61, has emphasized her Oregon roots and portrayed Holton as an outsider, pointing out that he joined the Oregon State Bar just three years ago. She joined in 1975.

She was a federal prosecutor in Eugene and Portland for nine years before she was appointed a trial-court judge in 1989. She became an Oregon Court of Appeals judge in 2005 and stepped down from the bench earlier this year.

She’s hammered Holton over the issue with the help of a political action committee that wants to legalize the drug.

“Mr. Holton is out of step with his own party on this issue,” said Bob Wolfe, director of Citizens for Sensible Law Enforcement. “He’s trying to climb the career ladder on the backs of medical marijuana patients, and I don’t find that acceptable.”

Wolfe’s committee was fined last week for allegedly violating initiative laws while gathering signatures for a ballot measure to legalize marijuana. He disputes the allegation.

There are 55,000 registered medical marijuana users in Oregon, and countless others who smoke weed illegally.

Holton has established himself as a tough-on-crime supporter of law enforcement, and touts endorsements from most of Oregon’s sheriffs and district attorneys. He’s long complained that Oregon’s lax marijuana regulations make it too easy to get a card and give traffickers cover to grow marijuana that ultimately ends up on the black market.

Oregon allows medical marijuana patients to grow their own pot or to designate someone to grow it for them. Unlike many other medical marijuana states, Oregon doesn’t allow dispensaries that distribute weed.

SOURCE: STATESMANJOURNAL.COM

The cooperative has bounced among five financial institutions, and four others rejected the cooperative outright, said CCC’s president, Nate Chrysler. In one case, a bank closed the account without notice.

“They froze our funds, and we didn’t know it until the checks started bouncing,” Chrysler said.

The medical-marijuana industry in Washington, after two years of wild growth, is struggling to move out of the gray market and into business legitimacy. Already on shaky legal footing because of conflict between state and federal law, dispensaries are now bogged down by troubles with banking and federal taxes.

In some cases, dispensaries — unable to find a willing bank — are operating solely with cash. That complicates everything from payroll to tax preparation while heightening the risk of robbery.

Some dispensary owners say they’ve resorted to euphemisms — such as a “holistic healing center” — when trying to open a bank account.

That’s in part because federal authorities have warned banks that handling receipts from marijuana sales remains illegal under federal law and could violate money-laundering laws.

The conflict is not isolated to Washington, one of 16 states — plus the District of Columbia — to allow therapeutic use of marijuana for certain patients.

Aaron Smith, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based National Cannabis Industry Association, estimates that half of dispensaries nationwide lack a bank account, which he blames on pressure from federal banking regulators.

“It is a widespread problem that threatens the entire industry,” he said.

Advocacy groups are lobbying Congress for changes to banking law and the IRS code that acknowledge the legitimacy of an industry estimated at $1.7 billion.

Despite President Obama’s indication during his campaign that he would be more laissez-faire, his administration has been more aggressive in targeting the booming industry than previous administrations. In an interview with Rolling Stone published last week, Obama reiterated that his administration would not prosecute patients, but gave no assurance to businesses.

“I never made a commitment that somehow we were going to give carte blanche to large-scale producers and operators of marijuana — and the reason is because it’s against federal law,” Obama said. “I can’t nullify congressional law.”

Dispensaries as

“collective gardens”

Washington voters approved medical marijuana in 1998, but it has developed into an industry — from storefront dispensaries to mobile THC testing labs to cannabis-infused sodas — only in recent years.

Industry advocates failed in the past two years in Olympia to get clear protection for dispensaries.

Instead, most dispensaries operate under a broad — some prosecutors would say mistaken — interpretation of state law that allows groups of up to 10 patients to grow 45 plants in a “collective garden,” and to share the costs. Dispensaries run those gardens, and patients join just long enough to obtain marijuana.

The state does not license or regulate dispensaries — leaving that to cities — but does want them to pay taxes. The Department of Revenue collected $755,764 in sales and business taxes in 2011 from 50 dispensaries.

With an estimated 135 or more dispensaries statewide, many medical-marijuana providers aren’t paying. Seattle, the state’s marijuana mothership, has issued 79 business licenses to medical-marijuana organizations, according to a Seattle Times analysis of city data.

The state has begun taking a closer look, auditing two dispensaries, said Revenue spokesman Mike Gowrylow.

Banks avoiding

“unknown risk”

Green Hope, a nonprofit patient network in Shoreline, has been without a bank account since last fall, when Walla Walla-based Banner Bank dropped them, said co-founder Laura Healy.

She now pays employees in cash, and uses cashier’s checks or prepaid Visa cards to purchase supplies. She said she’s tried “every bank in town” since then, but all refuse to open an account when she describes Green Hope. Other cash-only dispensaries opt to put ATMs in the lobby.

“I have a business license and federal tax ID number, but not a bank account,” Healy said. “They on one hand treat me like a normal businesses, then on the other hand treat me like a criminal.”

Of the five banks contacted for this story, only BECU answered questions about medical-marijuana accounts. Banner Bank, which dispensaries once saw as welcoming, did not respond to repeated inquiries.

BECU spokesman Todd Pietzsch said those accounts often involve large cash deposits, which require heightened scrutiny and reporting under federal banking and money-laundering laws.

“We took a look and found there’s a lot of unknown risk and uncertainty in this business,” he said. “At this point in time, it’s probably not in the best interests of our membership” to bank with medical-marijuana businesses.

Money-laundering violation?

Federal bank regulations do not specifically prohibit doing business with the medical-marijuana industry, and Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress in December that the Justice Department would not make it a priority to go after bankers who did.

But in June, Holder deputy James Cole issued a memo warning that “those who engage in transactions involving the proceeds” of marijuana sales “may be in violation of federal money-laundering statutes and other financial laws.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle has not contacted banks regarding medical-marijuana accounts, said Emily Langlie, spokeswoman for Seattle-based U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan.

The Cole memo sent a chill through the banking industry, said Sam Kamin, a University of Denver law professor who has written about marijuana regulation. “It’s a great threat because it allows the federal government to do what it wants without using scarce resources.”

Months after the Cole memo, Colorado Springs State Bank, which marketed itself to Colorado’s huge medical-marijuana industry, closed an estimated 300 accounts.

Lance Ott, executive director of Guardian Data Systems, a Vancouver-based financial consulting firm, said he knows of no financial institution in Washington that openly banks the industry. Most of the major credit-card processors, as well as PayPal, also refuse medical-marijuana accounts.

“That doesn’t mean there aren’t people who don’t have a friend willing to work with them. A lot of it is behind the scenes,” said Ott. “The banks need to show liquidity on the balance sheets.”

Doing taxes with

“room full of attorneys”

Squeezed between federal regulators, reluctant banks and an ambitious industry, some medical-marijuana operators have looked into forming their own bank. Chrysler, of Conscious Care Cooperative, said he and business partner Trek Hollnagel investigated starting a credit union last year, but opted not to.

Colorado lawmakers this year debated launching a credit union as well, but the plan died, in part out of fear of a federal backlash.

In Congress, several lawmakers, including Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., introduced bills to ease banking access and to amend an IRS provision that restricts business deductions for medical-marijuana operations.

A campaign to change the tax law, run in part out of Seattle, started when an Oakland, Calif., dispensary, Harborside Health Services, was hit with a $2.5 million bill in October for back taxes. That bill hinged on an interpretation of IRS section 280e, which prohibits business deductions for drug traffickers.

The Harborside audit has reverberated through the industry. The director of one Seattle dispensary, speaking anonymously for fear of drawing federal attention, said he prepared his 2012 taxes with “a room full of attorneys.”

“They’re really making it very difficult to try to do business,” said Oscar Velasco-Schmitz, an ex-Microsoft software engineer who runs medical-marijuana Dockside Cooperative in Fremont. “It’s trying to run a business with a handicap, a government-imposed handicap. These are growing pains.”

He, like Chrysler, declined to name their current bank. After going through five bank accounts, Chrysler said, “Best not to say.”

SOURCE: NWSOURCE

Marijuana use was never an NFL career killer but it was viewed as a possible omen of potential problems to come. A positive pot test meant possible injured draft stock. That was then. Now, pot use in college has grown so much, scouts and others say, NFL teams are scrambling to re-evaluate players who fail those tests, and in some cases, significantly downplaying its importance.

Some executives maintain the number of college football players that use marijuana has doubled in recent years alone, and some team officials estimate maybe as high as four in 10 draft-eligible players from this draft have failed at least one school administered drug test, and two in 10 multiple drug tests.

The end result of the perceived increased usage, some executives say, is that teams are totally rethinking how they view players that test positive for marijuana. While a positive test result still raises a red flag, some teams believe that franchises are now almost forced to ignore those test results, or at least dramatically de-emphasize them during the evaluation process, because they have become so numerous.

Thus as more college players use pot, there are fewer mechanisms for NFL teams to differentiate between the casual user, and the regular one, since now pot smoking is viewed by college football players as normal behavior.

One NFL scout tells a story that exemplifies the changing college football culture and the challenges it presents to the NFL. He was interviewing a prospect that will likely be drafted in the first three rounds. The scout wanted to understand why marijuana use was growing so quickly. He asked the prospect. The player responded: “We see marijuana the way you older guys see beer.”

The issue isn’t that there’s marijuana usage among college football players. Pot smoking has been happening since there was football and pot.

What NFL team officials believe is an increasing problem is that so many college football players are using marijuana so routinely that the drug becomes a regular part of their lives and upon reaching the NFL, where players are randomly drug tested, they leave themselves more vulnerable to being caught.

A handful of teams have always devalued positive marijuana tests but most believed such a result demonstrated a lack of discipline. That mindset is changing as NFL executives believe that pot is becoming as normal a part of college football life as jockstraps and pop quizzes.

This view was exemplified by the blunt comments of Detroit Lions general manager Martin Mayhew, who recently said that marijuana use in college was no longer a draft deal-breaker.

“The league has really changed over the years,” Mayhew said. “If you go back 10, 15 years ago, and a guy had a positive test, that was a big deal. That was something to be very concerned about. It still is, but not at the level it was years ago. There are certain things we want to hear from guys. There are certain things we don’t want to hear from guys. It doesn’t help us to tell you [media] what those things are.”

But those around the sport say Mayhew is only half right. It’s not the league that has changed, it’s that college football has.

“Basically because use in college football has increased, the NFL has been forced to alter its views on marijuana,” said a scout. “We’re bending because we have to, not because we want to.”

Team executives point to the Lions as an example of the dangers of bending these beliefs. Lions running back Mikel Leshoure, defensive lineman Nick Fairley, and offensive lineman Johnny Culbreath were all arrested this offseason for marijuana-related offenses. The Lions picked all three players in last year’s draft.

It is highly unusual for three players just out of college, all on one NFL team, to be arrested in a single offseason for marijuana use. This, scouts say, is proof large numbers of players become casual about their collegiate marijuana use and carry that casual attitude into the pros where the chances of being caught either by law enforcement or testing increase.

Across college football there is a great deal of evidence that marijuana use among football players has grown beyond the occasional smoke at a party and into an entirely new stratosphere. Stories of mass marijuana use among football players have appeared in connection with some of the nation’s top programs including LSU, Auburn, Georgia, Oregon and TCU, among others.

Tony Barnhart, CBSSports.com college football columnist, reports that an athletic director at a BCS school told him “the marijuana situation is the worst I’ve ever seen it.”

Barnhart writes one of the main problems is there is no single testing policy across college football. Some colleges don’t even bother to test due to the financial cost or state laws prohibit that kind of testing. Some schools that do test require an absurd number of tests to be kicked off the team. CBSSports.com’s Brett McMurphy says that Oregon, which reportedly had a widespread marijuana problem among its football team, requires four positive drug tests for dismissal.

Just this past season Heisman finalist Tyrann Mathieu was among three LSU players suspended for a game. ESPN reported he had tested positive for synthetic marijuana. Two Georgia players have been connected to the drug, and former Auburn running back Michael Dyer has stated that he smoked synthetic marijuana on a regular basis.

Four TCU football players were arrested in February as part of a six-month police sting. Police say TCU players sold marijuana to undercover officers after class or around the practice facility, and most of the team failed a surprise drug test given just several weeks before the bust.

It’s been reported a handful of prospects have failed scouting combine drug tests (which happens every year), but team executives say combine drug failures haven’t increased dramatically and that either the extremely addicted or undeniably stupid fail those since they have months of notice about an impending test.

While school-administered drug tests are supposed to remain private, NFL teams find out this information easily. League and team investigators get this information sometimes from coaches on the college teams and occasionally players admit failed college tests during combine interviews.

When Barnhart asked Georgia athletic director Greg McGarity if there should be a uniform testing policy across the NCAA, or at least within the same conference, McGarity said no, and added that testing policies should be left up to the institution. Thus with many players having no fear of testing or the repercussions of testing, the use of marijuana among college football players, already possibly extremely large, could continue to grow, and cause ripples in the pros despite NFL teams possessing a more laid back approach to the drug.

That’s because the NFL’s drug testing policies, while having some gaps, is still formidable. In the NFL, during the season, players are picked randomly to test for illicit drugs. If the NFL has probable cause, rookies can be put into the drug program immediately upon signing with a team, where chances of getting caught become even higher.

The real issue is use on campus is not just the increasing use but what team officials think is the potential double whammy of more pot smoking and more failed drug tests once those players enter the league.

Both might become the new normal in the NFL.

SOURCE: CBSSPORTS.COM

A nurse at the Yakima County Jail is now an inmate after her arrest in a marijuana investigation.

The jail director says Michelle Warnick was arrested Friday when she arrived for work.

The Yakima Herald-Republic reports ( http://is.gd/ROab7Z) sheriff’s detectives and Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided her Yakima home Friday and arrested her boyfriend, Bradley Marvin, and seized 117 marijuana plants. Warnick and Marvin appeared before a federal magistrate and were ordered held without bail for another hearing Wednesday.

Court documents say Warnick is a medical marijuana provider and Marvin is a patient.

The nurse came to the attention of investigators after her 9-year-old daughter was taken to an emergency room after unknowingly eating a marijuana brownie and feeling dizzy.

SOURCE: NWSOURCE.COM