Prohibitionists have filed a lawsuit to overturn the legalization law passed by South Dakota voters on Election Day! Please make a donation to South Dakotans for Better Marijuana Laws' legal defense fund. Late on Friday, the Superintendent of the South Dakota Highway Patrol and a local County Sheriff filed a lawsuit to overturn Amendment A, the marijuana legalization ballot initiative that was approved by 54% of South Dakota voters on Election Day. Governor Kristi Noem is supporting the lawsuit,…

Northern California defense attorney Joseph Tully has posted some useful tips on how to show support in the courtroom when someone is facing marijuana-related charges. According to Tully, whose website highlights his experience defending medical marijuana cooperatives, collectives, cultivators, and caregivers: Being tried in court for any crime, especially a victimless crime, is a trying process. Not just for the defendants, but for their friends, family, and supporters as well.  When the crime…

On Monday, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty announced his decision to run for President of the United States. This should have been cause for concern for marijuana reformers and medical marijuana patients, and today that concern was justified. Gov. Pawlenty has been no friend to marijuana reform in the past. In 2009, he vetoed a bill that would have allowed only terminally ill Minnesotans to use marijuana to ease their pain in their final days. Even though this bill was narrowly tailored to…

Back in January, this blog mentioned a case in which an anti-marijuana sheriff in Jackson County, Oregon, was trying to deny the renewal of a concealed handgun permit for Cynthia Willis, a licensed medical marijuana patient. The sheriff was so adamant about the case that he took it all the way to the Oregon Supreme Court. His primary argument was that granting a concealed handgun license to a patient (or in his terms, drug user) would be a violation of the Federal Gun Control Act. This law makes…

“Can an employer punish someone for doing something that is constitutionally protected?” That’s the question raised by a pair of articles in Colorado today that lay out the precarious work situation many medical marijuana patients find themselves in. While the constitutional amendment that established medical marijuana in Colorado says that nothing “shall require any employer to accommodate the medical use of marijuana in any work place,” the state also has a “Lawful Off-Duty Activities Statute”…

Yesterday, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that bong water can be considered a controlled substance, and that people caught in possession of said water can be prosecuted for possession of a drug mixture. Note: I am not making this up. The ruling stemmed from a 2007 home search in which authorities seized, among other items, a glass bong containing about two-and-a-half tablespoons of water that tested positive for the presence of methamphetamine. So what does this mean? According to Judge Paul Anderson,…