Poo-pooing Pot Ads

The National Guard has been called in to assist a massive bust on Yurok Tribal lands.

Seventy marijuana grows are being targeted for “eradication,” according to a press release from the tribe, in response to concerns about widespread environmental and cultural damage caused by the grows.

A Los Angeles Times reporter has been following the raids from Weitchpec, and noted that four of 43 search warrants obtained for the raid were served Monday. The multiagency effort seized nearly 4,000 plants, with an estimated 100,000 total plants expected to be found.

The operation has been in the planning stage since April.

The tribe has a zero-tolerance policy for drugs, meaning that even medical marijuana grown in accordance with California law is illegal on the reservation.

According to the LA Times, Yurok Tribal Chairman Thomas O’Rourke told officers gathered pre-raid, “We can’t … make it into our dance places, our women and children can’t leave the road to gather. We can’t hunt. We can’t live the life we’ve lived for thousands of years.”

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Washington City Paper is offering to pay the $25 fine for anyone caught smoking pot in Washington, D.C. The capital’s city council essentially decriminalized marijuana, reducing the sentence for being caught in possession of bud from six months and $1,000 to just a $25 citation.

The alt-weekly, curious to discover how the citations will be issued in a city that overwhelmingly arrests black people on marijuana charges (91 percent of marijuana arrests in 2007), has told the public it will pay citations in exchange for details about how the citation was issued.

The decriminalization itself has been the subject of some controversy. As D.C. is the seat of our national government (which forbids just about everything regarding marijuana), some think it’s unconscionable that possessing weed there should be considered so benign. A Maryland congressman amended a House budget bill to stop the district from funding enforcement of decriminalization (wrap your head around that), but, according to Newsweek, the law is unlikely to pass the Senate. Also, the prez told Congress not to pick on D.C.

There’s also the risk of wandering onto federal land in D.C. (there’s lots of it around there). Showing up at the Lincoln Memorial with a joint in your pocket can get you six months and a $5,000 fine, and some are worried that people will not be able to tell the difference between city and federal jurisdictions, putting possessors at risk.

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Pot shops in Colorado and Washington are running into a uniquely modern problem: Social media sites — Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. — are refusing to advertise their products.

In an article last month, Chronicle writer Joe Garofoli spoke with several weed-marketing insiders who lamented the difficulty in getting today’s Internet-savvy eyeballs on dispensaries and products.

Those three major social media sites have policies against advertising drug- and tobacco-related products. That limits entrepreneurs to direct mailers and print advertising (wink), Garofoli writes, although Colorado’s legalization prohibits pot shops from print advertising in publications whose readership is more than 30 percent under the legal pot-smoking age of 21. •

This article appears in Fighter Down.