"My concerns are the law has to be followed," said Police Chief Val Gross. As if weed smokers are felons who often break the law (well, unjust laws are made to be broken...). But of course all laws will be followed. People with medical marijuana certificates and doctors notes will probably be lighting up, following the law. The police will of course be following their own law and arresting them anyway, because they think they are the law and that Pontiac is the Wild West.

He also went on to say, funnily, that he is "always concerned about what type of crowd does it bring." Then he admits: "I don't know."

Well let's educate him a little bit. Quotes from The Benefits of Marijuana, by Joan Bello.

"The simultaneous opposing action of marijuana is akin to balancing our entire system." Weed balances our bodies. If we are depressed, it livens us up. If we are agitated or hyperactive, it will calm us down. "The net effect is a highly functioning, yet relaxed, system with better fuel." These sure sound like descriptions of "the crowd" the police chief is thinking of.

"Since marijuana works on both sides of the brain, the most noticeable effect, in our fast-paced mind set, is one of slowing down..." A person who is constantly slowed down is not the type of person who is going to rob a bank, mug a jogger or murder. We all know that smoking makes you mellow and relaxed. It makes you forget conflict and love your neighbor. Folks, here's a little secret. If we all love each other and get on happily because we're high all the time, they can't steal your money to pay for wars to steal poor people's oil and then sell it to you while taxing you again.

To further prove this, "Marijuana resolves conflict by de-emphasizing extreme aggressiveness." A person who cannot be extremely aggressive will also not be able to drop bombs or shoot other people. This is precisely why the anti-war protests since Vietnam have often been associated with hippies and pot-heads. They're terrified of us. They're terrified that we'll conquer all their hate, empire and slavery with love.

"Participants ofen become quieter, since internal silence predominates." The book also says. "Do not speak- unless it improves on silence.", goes a Buddhist saying. Imagine a society made up only of the constantly stoned. Always silent, peaceful, calm, broad and expanded mental capacities. Everyone would like weed so much they'd all be growing it in their small houses or farms. Soon they'd realize that they don't really need to go shopping any more because they can grow their own fruits, vegetables and herbs. Soon, they'd realize meat was way too expensive anyway and start eating only hazelnuts, walnuts and peanuts from their gardens instead. Their heightened state of love would make them love every human being, animal and plant on this planet. We'd all return to a farming lifestyle in small communities, have no need of some massive government besides the elders of our local communities. We'd be content and happy with where we are and build up and honor this ancient, beautiful blue sapphire in the bleakness of the void with our diligence, integrity and humanity. Imagine this and now you know why they are against us.

That's why, with the Internet, it's very important that we provide access to and talk about information regarding alternative medicine as much as possible. Alternative remedies are under fire. Corporations can't patent herbs yet (though there is a disturbing trend in some places of this actually happening - for instance, Tamiflu's active ingredient is an extract from a plant called star anise, grown mostly in China and India; the Swiss pharma now has full distribution and patent rights and it is increasingly difficult to find this plant for sale at herb shops in Europe; it must be smuggled in from neighboring countries), so they choose the other alternative - destroy the competition. You've heard the stories, now do the research. Herbs can cure cancer, AIDs and other chronic illnesses such as Chron's disease and degenerative colitis. I'm still not sure why we don't hear about this as much as we should, but my guess is that pharmas control the medical educational institutions with their lobbies and funding and because of this the heads (who are often execs in these pharmas as well) of departments use profit as their basic approach. They need to sell their drugs so they are biased towards them and readily jump on the bandwagon of "untested non-scientific medicine", but never stop to think for a second that if they would actually test it, they might really find cures for illnesses that they can market successfully.

Well, though they try, information can't be censored and people will do their studies anyway, with or without the financial backing of institutions. One repository of an amazing amount of scientific studies done on marijuana can be found at Mariujuana Saves Lives. The founders of this website - a husband and wife - went through a lot of pain and suffering to found this site. She had Chron's disease at 23 and for four years could not retain any food, so was slowly wasting away and dying. None of her doctors were able to do anything for her, the highly toxic cocktail of chemicals they were keeping her on were completely worthless. Marijuana milk came as a blessing and salvation into her life and her boyfriend, now husband, stayed with her the whole time doing the research, nursing her, weathering the storm. Now they are 30 and happily married and her disease is gone. Check out their website, educate yourself on the reality of the amazing properties of marijuana and ask your local representatives why the herb isn't fully legalized yet, basing your arguments on the scientific studies and articles you read. With time, nature will win.

These herbs have been with us since the dawn of our intellectual and cognitive capabilities and it's unlikely that a few white and black suits in 2010 are going to make them go away.

McKenna grew up in Colorado, but lived and studied in many different places. He eventually made his home in Hawaii, where he died of cancer at age 53.

His philosophy and writings are simply astounding and prolific. Faced with death when told that he had but a few months to live, his response was joy and happiness, that he had been blessed with being able to enjoy life to it's richest and fullest, rather than dying surprisingly in a car accident for example.

Some of the most interesting and challenging views that McKenna touted used the theory of evolution as its basis; we humans had evolved from a common ancestor with the apes, but the human descendants were those that began experimenting with naturally occurring psychedelic drugs and that was the cause of the development of higher thinking and by extrapolation religion as well. According to McKenna, these "stoned apes" became Homo sapiens, with our faculty to think, our faculty for belief in higher powers and our questioning of the universe. He hypothesized that ecstatic hallucinations and even religious manifestations such as "speaking in tongues", were caused by of the ingestion of these substances. McKenna's most fascinating observation though, perhaps, was that he suggested the ingestion of these hallucinogenic substances was the cause of synesthesia (the blurring of the boundaries between the senses), which might have given rise to the development of spoken languages.

McKenna had so many more interesting ideas, so why not dive into some of his books? A good place to start would probably be Food of the Gods: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution or The Invisible Landscape.

They've been charged with trafficking offenses mostly, but I bet the prosecution will throw the book at him. As we all know, churches are tax exempt, so they'll probably attempt to do him for tax evasion as well. Using this, they could put him away for a very long time, as we all know that tax evasion and weed offenses are often 25-life in jail while murder and rape can get you a few years of summer camp.

So "evil" were Christie's crimes that now he is being held without bail in a maximum security facility, with the law regarding him "a danger to the community... no conditions/combination of conditions could assure the safety of the community". Does it strike anyone else that this is a bit overboard for a smiling, happy-go-lucky hippie surfer living in Hawaii? I mean, with that kind of description he may as well change his name to "Adolf" or "Joseph". I can just see this guy saying "Heidi-ho, neighborino!" He really does look like Ned Flanders without the mustache.

So let's get right to the point.. how many constitutional rights have the Feds violated here? Freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom of lifestyle choice, right to trial and just about every other freedom that George Washington (a hemp grower!) and the other founding fathers of this great country fought and died for.

That's why our stainless steel kitchen grade or slightly less expensive plastic version bottle openers are so handy and practical - they're designed to do one thing and one thing only. Open bottles.

They're specialized in opening bottles. Many cheap bottle openers that you can buy from dollar stores end up breaking after a couple of uses as they are made of a cheap plastic. Or even worse, the "engineers" that designed them failed to take into account that metal and plastic together will break easily and many bottle openers as a result have certain "stress points" that will bend and break after a few uses.

Our bottle openers are much more practical than that! The rubber base on both the stainless steel and plastic versions fits smoothly with the top part of the bottle opener, so the two don't come apart. In addition to this, the strength of the stainless or plastic and the gripping properties of the rubber hold tightly to your bottle cap to pull it off the bottle in one easy twist.

To further make this a great deal, we offer customization of all our bottle openers! You can get any image or logo you want printed on there. These are great to use as marketing or promotional tools for your company or dispensary. They can be given away to regular customers, offered as prizes for promotions or even given away on the street with a flier encouraging people to come into your store. The possibilities are endless!

The greatest thing about our custom beach towels is that we can put any image you want on them. You find an image, and we will put it on the towel. If you're having trouble finding images, then we can also help you find suitable artwork according to your ideas.

We can get you each towels that are available in different thicknesses, anywhere between 270 to 450 grams per square meter. The size of the towel is also your choice, it can be a standard size or customized just for your business.

All our towels are made at one of the largest weaving mills overseas to give you the best quality and service and are delivered straight to your home in the USA.

One potential use you could have for these towels is to run some sort of competition at your dispensary. Towels are a great prize, especially if they are customized with something extremely catchy, like a pot leaf, a pipe, a slogan such as "Legalize it!" or any combination of the above. You'd be making a statement every time you went to the beach or the pool, even without saying a word!

Well, we have the perfect answer to this problem: a fully customizable art clock. Great for your home, the dispensary, clubs or any other locale, you choose the image and we customize the clock for you. There is a massive range of sizes for the clock (both for the face size and the depth size) and the entire face of the clock is printable, not just the center part or the edges. You can customize the numbers, make a special border for the clock, a background, you can choose which font to use, you can even have a graphic on the background. The possibilities are endless!

One of our clients, Steve, uses his clock in his kitchen. Steve really likes to cook and so has picked a design that represents his favorite ingredients in food. A pot plant, some eggs, a loaf of bread and a couple of tomatoes, celery sticks, apples and pears. The basic necessities of life, I guess, according to Steve! Another satisfied customer has installed clocks with the logo of his business in 15 franchises across the country. They immediately catch the customer's eye. Most people think they would have to go to the end of the world and fork over a fortune in cash to get custom clocks like this, but it's really so simple.

We offer these clocks in a 500 piece minimum set in a large range of sizes. Anything can be printed on the clock, on the entire face.

The article presents various dispensary owners in the precarious situations that they really are in and relates some of the logistical and legal problems and hurdles they must encounter to do their work and as is often the case, their calling. For example, Ravi Respeto, manager of the Farmacy, a dispensary that offers exotic strains of weed for up to $16 a gram recounts some of these issues and problems. One of the first is the culture shock weed growers are faced with when they are given checks and asked to give receipts. It's hard to believe that something which carried outrageously disproportionate criminal penalties just a few years ago is now legal and taxable according to the government today. Then there are all the legal by-laws and hurdles - for medical marijuana dispensaries are legal, but the amount of regulations is a nightmare legal battle to navigate through and really does put a lot of potential locales out of business well before they even start.

While President Obama announces that federal law officials won't bother users and suppliers as long as they comply with state laws, many are still wary of the feds. More than 80,000 people in Colorado now have medical marijuana certificates, which are in essence just like a prescription and entitle them to buy and use marijuana from legal dispensaries. Some often wonder though why the government needs to issue certificates for something which is supposedly legal for medical use now. I mean, the notion in itself is nonsense and just another invasion of privacy. If you are prescribed Valium for insomnia, you do not need a certificate for the right to use Valium! The registry is in the mind of many just another way to control and limit the rights of people. In a way, it's more like the controls that come with the use of a drug such as Methadone, which is prescribed to opium and heroin addicts to control their intake of the drug. The registry simply classes medical marijuana users into a group that the government can deal with easily if it needs to. The registry should be questioned, challenged and purged from sight. It is a violation of human rights in the same way that Japanese Americans' human rights were violated when they were required to register with the government and police during World War II.

For more information, check out the article here. It's really quite a good one!

Of course, the other scenario that could happen is that November comes and the legislation passes and we all rejoice and move to California. But then what is the purpose of this new law? It's almost as if they were ensconcing in letter the only option - the law not passing in November. It sounds like they're telling us they're so confident that pot won't be legalized in November, that they're already updating laws about it that respond to possession as a crime. It really is just a carrot being dangled in front of a horse. The government taking away with its right hand what it has given with its left.

Of course, the Feds still don't understand the concept of the States as they continue to raid legal pot dispensaries across the country.

Also related to scientific studies - apparently the whiz kids in the lab coats are just catching onto something every pothead has known for decades... pot doesn't affect driving performance. Duh! One explanation the scientists offered was that pot smokers tend to 'slow down' when they light up, which makes them safer drivers. Of course, don't expect that you can use this as a cover story for when Robocop pulls you over on the highway and asks you to step out of the car. In the dictatorial regime we live in, it's better to follow Chris Rock's advice for dealing with police. Right, well that was a bit funny, then here's a bit more of a serious one. There's actually good advice for you in that clip which sometimes still works - nothing works as well as a videocamera on a cell phone though. A federally commissioned study suggested that "THC is not a profoundly impairing drug... It apparently affects controlled information processing in a variety of laboratory tests, but not to the extent which is beyond the individual's ability to control... in driving". And this is the Feds saying this. Ironic.

And then a major California labor union is organizing medical marijuana workers in Oakland. All this in light of the fact that state voters will see if they allow RECREATIONAL marijuana use by adults. The merry season is almost here! A wave of common sense will start out in California and spread to the rest of the United States, till the White House, Senate and Congress are the only places left where weed is illegal. And they'll still be raiding!

But Seattle took the cake last week as they wanted the biggest Xmas present of all - the nude beach and legal marijuana, or better yet, both at the same time.