By Reid Cherner, USA TODAY

The lawyers for Jeremy Lin have a message for those dealing “Linsanity’ medical marijuana: you are one toke over the line.

“Their enthusiasm for Jeremy Lin got ahead of their understanding of the law,” Pamela Deese of the Washington, D.C., firm Arent Fox, told Huffington Post.

Several California dispensaries have gotten cease-and-desist letters and are also being asked for letters of apologies.

The news of the marijuana first surfaced in tweets by entertainment stars Rick Ross and Stalley. The product was going for $60 for an eighth of an ounce.

“You can’t file a trademark when there’s a clear connection to someone else’s name,” Deese said. “In this case, Jeremy Lin has the right to his name and related names and marks, as well as his signature, voice and likeness. That’s all part of his intellectual property.”

By Peter Hecht, phecht@sacbee.com
Published: Monday, Mar. 26, 2012 – 12:00 am | Page 1A
Last Modified: Tuesday, Mar. 27, 2012 – 9:29 am

OAKLAND – For the school renowned as the Princeton of Pot and the Harvard of Hemp, the high times have wafted into a downer.

Enrollment has plummeted at Oaksterdam University, the Oakland college that since 2007 has attracted 15,000 students to study cannabis cultivation and related careers, while boosting commerce in one of America’s most pot-friendly cities.

The pilgrimage for pot scholarship in Oakland is waning as California’s four U.S. attorneys wage a crackdown on medical cannabis dispensaries. And yet, at Oaksterdam and elsewhere in the city, neither fewer students nor heightened federal scrutiny of the cannabis business seems to be killing Oakland’s vibe for promoting the possibilities of pot.

Despite the closing of hundreds of dispensaries elsewhere in California, Oakland is doubling down. It is seeking to license four new marijuana stores and attract new local pot tax revenue on top of the $1.7 million it gets from its four current dispensaries.

And Oaksterdam University – with its leafy green “CAN-NA-BIS crest mimicking Harvard’s crimson VE-RI-TAS seal – was drawing students last week from California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Florida, Washington, Puerto Rico and even Japan.

The mere prize of an Oaksterdam diploma was enough for Aats Otoina, 33, a rice and spinach farmer from Chiba, Japan. His country imposes strict penalties for pot possession. Yet Otoina wants to use his status as an Oaksterdam grad to lecture on Japan’s cannabis traditions under the ancient Shinto religion.

“You can’t talk about the Japanese spirit without talking about marijuana,” he said.

Puerto Rican-born Jose Alberto Irizarry enrolled in Oaksterdam’s $300 weekend seminar in cannabis law, cooking and horticulture, convinced that marijuana jobs will survive despite federal property seizures of California pot outlets.

Irizarry moved to Oakland two weeks ago from Florida. He got a California physician’s recommendation for cannabis for anxiety and sleeplessness, and applied on Craigslist for a job delivering marijuana to medical users.

“I’m tenacious,” he said. “Where I come from, it is totally illegal. I wouldn’t be able to get an education like this and a job on a regular basis.”

Skittish about exposure, many students who enrolled in the recent Oaksterdam seminars would not divulge their full names.

Maya, a Bay Area property manager, said she went to Oaksterdam to plot a career producing gourmet cannabis products. She listened raptly as professor Sandy Moriarity, acclaimed for “Aunt Sandy’s Medical Marijuana Cookbook,” taught how to prepare savory chicken and breaded sole with cannabis flour or butter with just a pinch of hash.

While federal actions target California, Maya said jobs may arise in other states that have legalized medical marijuana. “I’m willing to take a calculated risk,” she said.

Oaksterdam’s enrollment began falling as some California cities seemed oversaturated with cannabis businesses and competing marijuana schools opened. The number of students dropped sharply last fall when U.S. attorneys began sending seizure notices to dispensary landlords and threatening cultivators. The prosecutors claimed California’s marijuana industry – supposedly nonprofit – had been “hijacked by profiteers” operating in violation of both state and federal law.
Oaksterdam once ran seven semester-long classes, each with 70 students paying $700 to $800. Now, it has one semester class of 50, plus specialized sessions in indoor and outdoor growing and cannabis products. Introductory two-day weekend programs and advanced seminars in how to run dispensaries draw about half the peak attendance of 120 students.

Some students who do sign up want to hear whether they can even contemplate cannabis careers in the current climate.

“Hell yes, it freaks me out,” said Michael Lewis, 53, referring to the federal crackdown. The former U.S. Marine and firefighter at the Alameda Naval Air Station, who said he suffers from post-traumatic stress and rheumatoid arthritis, helped start a dispensary in Placerville in 2005.

Lewis wants to open a Bay Area medical marijuana delivery service. But he wasn’t getting the assurances he wanted, even as faculty members touted the medicinal benefits of cannabis, advocated for its legalization and taught how to grow plants glistening with potent psychoactive crystals.

James Silva, an Oakland trial lawyer specializing in medical marijuana cases, started his Saturday seminar telling his students not to talk freely about what they do. “Please don’t raise your hands and say I’m growing 500 plants in Mendocino,” he said.

Lewis winced as Silva said California’s 1996 medical marijuana law can provide a legal defense to prosecution but won’t necessarily keep someone from being arrested or convicted for selling pot. Silva added: “There is no medical marijuana defense under federal law. Is that clear to everyone?”

“This is very, very stressful,” Lewis said.

Richard Lee, who founded Oaksterdam and bankrolled the unsuccessful 2010 ballot measure to legalize pot for adult recreational use in California, characterized down times for his school and livelihood as a mere passage in history.

The landlord for Lee’s Coffeeshop Blue Sky dispensary got a letter from San Francisco-based U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag, threatening to seize the building unless its marijuana sales ceased within 1,000 feet of a charter school that had opened years later.

Lee closed his famous downtown Bulldog Coffee Shop, a popular haven for marijuana smokers under liberal Oakland laws making pot the lowest priority for police. The place had stopped operating as a dispensary in 2004, but Lee shut it down anyway when a U.S. forfeiture notice scared the building owner.

He moved his one dispensary – now called Oaksterdam Blue Sky – to a former college site that now houses a cannabis museum. It features hemp product exhibits and a display of turn-of-the century cannabis medicine bottles called “Marijuana Before the Drug War.”

“I think this thing is just going to be a blip in the overall drug war,” Lee said of the current battle. “The big thing now is legalization is almost here.”

His attitude reflects a city where Mayor Jean Quan last week hailed Oakland for being in “the forefront of the compassionate-use movement” for seeking to license four new dispensaries, even after federal threats forced it to junk earlier plans for massive marijuana cultivation centers.

But, notably, Oaksterdam’s lowest-attended seminars last week were on running marijuana dispensaries.

In his “Patients Relations” class, Dave McCullick of the Sonoma Patient Group dispensary in Santa Rosa told students to learn enough about marijuana varieties to satisfy the “bud snobs.” He urged them to comfort first-time customers and guide them to less potent pot. He also said this isn’t the time to give up on dispensary careers.

“I would encourage people to go ahead and open them,” McCullick said. “We have to keep taking the fight. Revolutions do not go backwards.”

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/03/26/4366045/feds-crackdown-is-a-bummer-for.html#storylink=cpy

By Maia Szalavitz | @maiasz | March 27, 2012

A news report claims that the 17-year-old Florida boy’s killer thought he looked looked “drugged out and suspicious.” Why enduring stigma of drug use in this country is becoming increasingly deadly.

The family of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old boy who was killed last month in Florida by a neighborhood watch volunteer, confirmed on Monday that he had been suspended from school for possession of a trace amount of marijuana. In a news conference, Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, accused authorities of leaking the information, along with details of the shooting, in order to demonize her son’s memory.

“They’ve killed my son and now they’re trying to kill his reputation,” said Fulton.

Can it be long now before the boy’s possible history of drug use is cited as justification for the self-defense claim put forth by the killer, George Zimmerman? According to Zimmerman’s account of the shooting, Martin, who was unarmed, violently attacked him from behind, leading Zimmerman to cry out for help before shooting his aggressor.

But Martin’s possible experimentation with pot should be no threat to his reputation. The research on marijuana and violence shows clearly that the drug either reduces aggression or has no effect — findings that fall in line with pop culture’s mellow image of stoners. The idea that marijuana makes people dangerous is as absurd as the claim that wearing a hoodie is suspicious.

Despite its widespread use — nearly two-thirds of the adult population aged 21 to 54 has tried marijuana at least once — more than eight decades of reefer-madness propaganda have served to obscure the facts about the substance and who uses it. Indeed, most antidrug campaigns have stigmatized not only drugs, but their users as well.

Here, it’s useful to remember that the nation’s vehement antidrug rhetoric is rooted in explicit racism. For example, the first state laws banning cocaine were passed in response to media reports about how the drug made black men homicidal, prone to raping white women and, worst of all to the police, impervious to bullets. An article about the issue in the New York Times in 1914 was headlined “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are a New Southern Menace.”

Similarly, the first state legislation banning opium was linked to fears of Chinese men allegedly using the drug to seduce white women.

The campaign for national marijuana prohibition, which came in the 1930s, involved racism against both African Americans and Mexicans. One advocate of banning the drug wrote in the Times in 1935: “Marijuana, perhaps now the most insidious of our narcotics, is a direct by-product of unrestricted Mexican immigration. … Mexican peddlers have been caught distributing sample marijuana cigarets to school children.”

Sound familiar?

These days, the racism surrounding drugs is less obvious, but no less real. I experienced a vivid illustration of this myself in the late 1990s, when I appeared on Oprah to discuss Bill Moyers’ PBS series on addiction; I was a guest on Oprah’s show, as well as an associate producer of the PBS series. The first hour of Moyers’ documentary included a montage of clips from interviews with nine people with addiction, a group I’d booked with an eye to diversity of race, class and recovery experience. Moyers decided to include me as one of the interviewees.

On Oprah’s show, her other guests included Bill Moyers, his son William who is a recovering addict, along with another white female addict who appeared in the documentary. To open the show, Oprah displayed photos of everyone I’d included in the original documentary and asked the audience to see if they could pick out those who suffered from addiction. The audience overwhelmingly selected the black men — and, remember, this was Oprah’s audience, not one likely to be selected for its overt racial biases.

It still surprises people to learn that in the U.S., African Americans and whites take drugs at about the same rate, but black youth are twice as likely to be arrested for it and more than five times more likely to be prosecuted as an adult for drug crimes. In New York City, 87% of residents arrested under the police department’s “stop and frisk” policy are black or Hispanic. As Michelle Alexander writes in her bestselling book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness:

In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.
The drug war and the stigma it imparts on users are key weapons here. America’s cultural images of drug-related danger continue to be racially charged and the resulting stereotypes appear to be becoming increasingly deadly. Martin’s is not the only case in recent months to involve an unarmed boy and marijuana: three weeks before the Florida teen was killed, another unarmed black teen was shot to death by police, who chased him into his Bronx home. The young man was found in possession of a small amount of marijuana.

Attempting to address the problem is difficult. Recently in the U.K., a drug policy reform group stirred controversy when it launched a campaign to reduce the stigma of drug use. “Nice people take drugs,” was the slogan the group used in its ads, but even in a country that is much less punitive than the U.S. toward drug users, the posters were pulled from buses not long after the effort was launched, in 2009. The phrase was seen as potentially encouraging drug misuse by youth.

There’s no denying, however, that being nice doesn’t preclude drug-taking. Probably all of us can name someone we respect or admire who has taken illegal drugs. And most drug users — even those who favor cocaine, methamphetamine or heroin — are not violent. Indeed, the drug most likely to lead to violent behavior is not illegal: it’s alcohol.

If we want to avoid tragedies like the Martin case, we must confront the racism and class prejudice that infect our ideas about drug users and warp our view of how drugs work. We need to admit that drug use itself doesn’t make people evil. Perhaps if we weren’t so quick to let these biases demonize drug users, Trayvon Martin might still be with us.

If Martin’s school had not suspended the boy under its “zero tolerance” policy for drug use — one that punishes students for possession of an empty plastic baggie with trace amounts of marijuana as severely as for possession of heroin or a gun — he probably would never even have crossed paths with the man who shot him. Martin was serving his suspension on Feb. 26, when he was killed.

Such school policies have not been shown to reduce drug problems, but they, too, have been found to be applied more often to black youth. A recent analysis showed that black children are 3.5 times more likely than whites to be suspended from school for drugs and that 70% of all youth referred by school authorities to police for prosecution are black, even though they make up only 18% of the school population in the U.S.

Marijuana smoking certainly doesn’t warrant expulsion from school — never mind death. A general principle of drug policy is that the punishment should not do more harm than the drug itself. If we rewrote drug policy with an eye to marijuana’s actual danger, it would not warrant the loss of kids’ educational opportunities nor criminal penalties for possession, let alone suggest a rationale for being gunned down while walking home.

Maia Szalavitz is a health writer for TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland‘s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/27/did-marijuana-use-sentence-trayvon-martin-to-death/#ixzz1qX3I6Nhn