Coventry cannabis farmer launches Appeal Court bid to clear his name

Elijah Clive Stokes, 30, of Banks Road, Radford, was locked up for seven years at Warwick Crown Court in June last year.

A Coventry man, jailed after a huge underground cannabis factory was uncovered, has launched a bid to clear his name.

Elijah Clive Stokes, 30, of Banks Road, Radford, was locked up for seven years at Warwick Crown Court in June last year.

On some of the worst nights, Dana Ulrich lies in bed with 8-year-old Lorelei and waits for her breath to return.

With her ear and hand pressed against her daughter’s chest, she listens hoping the epileptic seizures that often number in the hundreds each day will subside. It has been this way for close to six years, and medications have done little to ebb the tide of symptoms associated with her condition, primary generalized intractable epilepsy.

It's what brought Dana and Lorelei together with family, friends and other advocates to Lions Park along the Bristol waterfront Saturday afternoon for a rally to support the ongoing fight to legalize medical marijuana in Pennsylvania.

PHOENIX (AP) — The Arizona Supreme Court ruled Friday that medical marijuana cardholders don’t have immunity from prosecution under a state DUI law that prohibits drivers from having in their bodies any amount of marijuana or its chemical compound that causes impairment.

But the state high court’s unanimous decision also said cardholders can try to show in court that they didn’t have enough of the compound in their systems to be impaired. An attorney who filed a brief for a defense lawyers group said the ruling was welcome because it overturns a lower court’s ruling that medical marijuana cardholders could be prosecuted for merely driving after using marijuana.

“Now at least they can drive,” said David Euchner, an assistant Pima County public defender.

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) today signed on as a co-sponsor to the Marijuana Businesses Access to Banking Act of 2015 (S.1726), bipartisan legislation originally introduced by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), which would give state-compliant cannabis businesses access to the banking system. Sen. Reid’s support for the banking measure comes as Nevada’s medical marijuana program has begun serving patients around the state.

Regarding Howard Wooldridge’s commentary, there is a middle ground between drug prohibition and blanket legalisation (The lives and trillions of dollars sacrificed on the altar of futile modern prohibition, Comment, November 15). Switzerland's heroin maintenance programme has been shown to reduce disease, death and crime by providing addicts with standardised doses in a clinical setting. Its success has inspired heroin maintenance pilot projects in Canada, Germany, Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands.

CANNABIS CULTURE – We now have a Prime Minister who has promised to legalize marijuana in Canada. But what will legalization look like?

Here are seven things the cannabis community wants to see happen before we consider prohibition to be truly over.

#7. Don’t increase penalties

In some of their campaign literature, the Liberals were promising to create “new, stronger laws, to punish more severely” people who sell cannabis to minors, or to anyone operating outside of their undefined new system.

Considering we already have Harper’s strict mandatory minimums for cannabis offences, we do not need to be punishing anyone “more severely” for anything related to cannabis.

The nation’s capital has become a dramatic tableau for cannabis activists, a perfect venue. Some have come to express displeasure with the Drug Enforcement Administration, citing acting Administrator Chuck Rosenberg, who recently called medical cannabis a “joke.”

Those who use it in one form or another — including a Navy vet with PTSD and parents of ailing children — will deliver a petition Friday to the federal agency, bearing some 90,000 signatures and demanding that Mr. Rosenberg either step down or be fired for his remark. Rep. Earl Blumenauer agrees with them.

The Marijuana Control Board voted to allow consumption of marijuana at retail stores, which, if approved by Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott, would make Alaska the first state to permit a regulated area for marijuana consumption outside of a person’s home or other private spaces.

The change allows for people to buy marijuana at a retail store and consume it in a designated area on the premises. 

The board voted 3-2 in favor of the amendment, with Loren Jones, public health board member, and Peter Mlynarik, the public safety board member, dissenting.

The regulations will go to the Department of Law for a formal review before heading to Mallott's desk.

The board tasked with writing rules for Alaska's recreational marijuana industry voted Friday to allow for people to use pot at certain stores that will sell it, a first among the four states that have legalized the drug.

The 3-2 vote by the Marijuana Control Board also changed the definition of the term "in public" to allow for consumption at some pot shops, none of which are open yet. Colorado, Washington and Oregon have legalized recreational marijuana but ban its public use, including in pot stores.

It goes without saying we all wish to protect the young and vulnerable. Intuitively, current drug laws make sense. Pushing drugs to the fringes of decent society and maintaining a ban through criminalisation has plausibility. But what if we’re causing more harm than good?