More pot shops than Starbucks?

Denver Colorado has welcomed medical pot shops more than many places where you can legally buy medical pot.
Now it is claimed that their are more pot shops than Starbucks.
Can you believe that there are as many qualified medical pot users in the city of Denver as there are Starbucks customers?
There are about 100 Starbucks in the Denver area and each averages about 400 customers per day.
That is 40,000 customers per day buying medical marijuana if the traffic is equal and the pot dispensaries about the same in number.
It is said that there are about 125,000 people with medical pot cards, so abut 30% of them are buying pot every day.
Of course NONE of them sell or give pot to third parties.
None of them drive stoned.
None of them perform work that involves safety risks, like operating heavy equipment or providing health care.

I see this pot shop overload coming to the People's Republik of Kalifornia and it ain't going to be pretty.

The way it should be?

Potential jurors in a Montana court "mutinied" according to the Deputy DA.
When asked during jury selection if they would have a problem convicting someone for possessing a few buds of marijuana, most said they would not vote for conviction.
The judge called a recess and a deal was worked out between the DA's office and the defendant.
The jury was dismissed.
What the jurors did not hear was that the defendant had been arrested for the MJ because it was the only hard evidence they had for arrest.
They did not hear that the defendant was suspected of dealing drugs out of his home and arranging deals for other dealers.
Maybe this guy deserved to go to jail, but I like the idea of the jury being able to decide if someone should be punished instead of just decriminalizing drugs.

Mexican Army finds 100+ tons of pot in Tijuana

Army raids on a number of houses in the border city of Tijuana netted 15 tons of marijuana destined for American distributors.
As huge as the score is, the reality is likely that this is less than a tenth of what could be found.
Tijuana is a handy staging area for goods being smuggled into the US from Mexico and any border town would yield quite a lot of drugs if there were a house-to-house search.
If the Mexican government declared a state of emergency (not a big stretch these days), they could perform search and seizure missions in the border towns where they keep the properties used for smuggling and either place their people in the homes, sell them, or destroy them as an example.

Timely Pot News From the Kiwis

I have been frustrated by the lack of available research into the potential negative health effects of smoking pot and, just in time for the California pot vote, there is a study out of New Zealand.
It states that smoking one joint is the equivalent of multiple cigarettes and that negative effects on lung function are beyond that which can be attributed to just the smoke component.
So, will we hear that pot is a double whammy on your health form our media?
At least KCRA in Sacramento has reported on this story although the story is not on their site yet.
They do have a story that claims "many" medical pot users do not want to get high and that they can use a new strain of pot that has very little THC and more of the compound that helps with pain and slows cancer growth (and here I thought medical pot users had to get high or wouldn't be helped.)
Hopefully the New Zealand study will get more play before we vote.