Reformed Nazi Twin Singers Renounce Racism; Credit Marijuana

Photo: Polaris

Lamb and Lynx Gaede, formerly of the white supremacist rock group Prussian Blue.

​It’s only mid-afternoon, but I’m confident this is the strangest story that’s going to cross my desk all day. A pair of twins who caused a media frenzy a few years ago by presenting themselves as the cute faces of white supremacist racism have renounced their former hatred, saying that medical marijuana has helped them see the error of their ways.

Lamb and Lynx Gaede, whose band Prussian Blue was popular back in 2005 among those inclined to like such things, ascribed their unsavory past to having been “home schooled country bumpkins” heavily influenced by their domineering white supremacist mother, reports Neurobonkers.

Photo: Play Guitar 24/7

The twins back when they were little 13-year-old Nazis about six years ago

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Since then the twins, who turned 19 on June 30, have moved to Montana to attend high school, where in her first year Lynx was diagnosed with both cancer (which led to removal of a tumor) and cyclic vomiting syndrome (CVS). Lamb developed scoloiosis and back pain, “as well as lack of appetite and intense emotional stress.”

Both of the girls, who sort of became the white supremacist equivalent of the Olsen Twins, began using marijuana after Lynx had a bad reaction to the harsh pharmaceutical narcotics Oxycontin and morphine, which a doctor had prescribed to treat her pain.

“I have to say, marijuana saved my life,” Lynx said. “I would probably be dead if I didn’t have it.”

Lynx became one of the first five minors in Montana to get a medical marijuana card, and Lamb now has one, too. One can only wonder what will become of the girls now that Montana’s conservative Republican-controlled Legislature has all but repealed the state’s compassionate medical marijuana law, approved by 62 percent voters in 2004.

Apparently, the marijuana didn’t just ease the physical pain, but also quelled the psychological hatred that had been inculcated in the girls by their racist upbringing.

Photo: Alaska Pride

Cute? Yeah, until you listened to their lyrics.

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“I’m not a white nationalist anymore,” Lamb told The Daily in the twins’ first interview in five years, reports Aaron Gell. “My sister and I are pretty liberal now.”

“Personally, I love diversity,” Lynx said. “I’m stoked that we have so many different cultures. I think it’s amazing and it makes me proud of humanity every day that we have so many different places and people. We just want to come from a place of love and light.”

“I think we’re meant do do something more — we’re healers,” Lamb said. “We just want to exert the most love and positivity we can.”

The twins now spend their time painting artworks and refurbishing furniture. They plan to enroll in college and said they hope to help legalize marijuana in all 50 states.

Lynx lives in northwest Montana with her mother, her stepfather and her half-sister, Dresden. Lamb, who works as a hotel chambermaid, lives a short drive away.

Both daughters now openly question their mother, April’s fixation with the fate of the white race, as well as her encouragement of their bizarre Nazi-inflected musical career.

“I’m glad we were in the band, but I think we should have been pushed toward something a little more mainstream and easier for us to handle than being frontmen for a belief system that we didn’t even completely understand at the time,” Lynx said. “We were little kids.”

Read More Here:  http://www.tokeofthetown.com/2011/07/reformed_nazi_twin_singers_renounce_racism_credit.php

No One Is Outside Federal Marijuana Laws, U.S. Says

A memo from the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington says state laws allowing medical marijuana opened the door to abuses and calls for legally targeting “large-scale, privately operated industrial marijuana cultivation centers” as well as distribution operations known as dispensaries.

The memo — which arrived June 29 in the email inboxes of U.S. attorneys nationwide, — says that no patient or other user is shielded from federal prosecution by state laws. The memo comes after Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette unleashed a salvo last week, saying there was widespread lawbreaking linked to medical marijuana in Michigan.

The federal memo has medical marijuana advocates feeling betrayed by the Obama administration, which had been linked with hopes for leniency in the war on drugs.

“The $64,000 question is, are the U.S. district attorneys in offices across the country really going to go after these dispensaries and grow operations? We’ll have to see,” said Art Cotter, chairman of the medical marijuana committee for the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan.

U.S. pushes for strict pot law enforcement

Just when medical marijuana users are protesting plans for tighter restrictions on the drug in Michigan, a memo from federal authorities in Washington is asking for tougher enforcement.

The memo, sent from the U.S. Department of Justice to U.S. attorneys and being circulated this week among Michigan’s county prosecutors and sheriffs, is exactly what many in Michigan law enforcement said they were waiting for — a green light to stamp out what they say is proliferating drug abuse and lawbreaking under the cover of medical marijuana.

According to Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, the memo shows that the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act — passed by 63 percent of voters in 2008 — is entirely pre-empted by federal drug law.

Defense attorneys, operators of medical marijuana facilities, such as compassion clubs, and medical marijuana users decried the memo as a step backward.

“This is an attack on the patient community,” said Kristen Ford, field director for the nonprofit Americans for Safe Access, based in Washington, D.C.

State law no shield

The Justice Department memo says, without naming specific states, that “planned facilities have revenue projections of millions of dollars, based on the cultivation of tens of thousands of cannabis plants.”

Such large-scale operators must be stopped, and even smaller-scale users and distributors are not shielded from federal prosecution, “even where those activities purport to comply with state law,” says the memo signed by U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Cole. Some say the memo makes clear that the Obama administration, contrary to the sense of a 2009 memo, opposes giving leniency to medical marijuana users.

“There was this feeling that the local police and prosecutors were on their own” for enforcing drug laws against people claiming a medical need for pot, Macomb County Prosecutor Eric Smith said Thursday.

“Now, I think we’re all going to see that the abuses have to stop at all levels. When this law passed in Michigan, every person who voted for it had good intentions. But what we’ve seen is that for every one person who uses medical marijuana responsibly, someone else is abusing it and profiting from it,” Smith said.

Federal authorities are not changing their policy but instead are trying to correct a misreading of their stance, Berrien County Prosecutor Art Cotter said. Law enforcers and marijuana users alike misinterpreted an October 2009 memo from the Justice Department that “seemed to suggest, ‘Don’t go after medical marijuana patients,’ ” Cotter said. He chairs the medical marijuana committee for the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan.

“People read into that the idea that, as long as something complied with state law, the feds would not get involved. Now, this new memo is saying, no, dispensaries and large grow operations are not immune from our prosecution,” he said.

ABC-

Montana Cops Want Caregivers To Turn In Marijuana By July 1

Photo: Wikiality

Montana caregivers are supposed to turn over their plants to the cops by July 1.

​Montana’s medical marijuana caregivers officially have less than two weeks to turn in their cannabis plants to the police to be destroyed, but one advocate says that’s not likely to happen.

On July 1, medical marijuana providers are out of business in the state, thanks to the new law, SB 423, passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, reports Matt Leach at NBC Montana. The law supposed “takes the profit out of the industry” (actually, it only drives it underground — and removes the tax benefits to local governments) and forces caregivers to turn over any marijuana they might have on hand.

It’s not gonna go down like that, according to Tayln Lang of the Montana Medical Growers Association.

Photo: NBC Montana

Tayln Lang, Montana Medical Growers Association: “This is a law that is basically based on fear and intimidation”

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“I believe that all that cannabis that’s been produced by caregivers up until this point is going to make its way to the black market,” Lang said.

Under the old medical marijuana law, approved in 2000 by an overwhelming 63 percent of Montana voters, caregivers could help as many patients as they wanted. Now they are limited to providing for only three patients, and they’re not allowed to make a profit.

The new law also places strict new conditions for qualifying for medical cannabis, and strict rules on the doctors who certify medicinal marijuana patients, reports Matt Volz of the Associated Press.

Medical marijuana advocates are fighting back through the legal system. Montana Cannabis Industry Association attorney James Goetz asked Helena District Judge James Reynolds to approve a preliminary injunction that would keep the law from taking effect on July 1.

Some patients and their families content the new law will just force them to make illegal purchases by shutting down legitimate means of supply.

“The more I read about it the more absurd it is,” said 79-year-old Charlie Hamp. “They’re just trying to eliminate marijuana in Montana.”

Hamp testified that his wife Shirley, 78, stirs a medical marijuana tincture into her morning coffee at home in Bozeman to alleviate the pain after her esophagus was removed and replaced with the lining of her stomach.

He isn’t sure if his wife will still be able to get that tincture from her provider after July 1, or even whether the provider will be in business at all. Neither one of them knows how to make the tincture, nor do they want to ask their daughter and son-in-law to do it for them.

“This is a law that is basically based on fear and intimidation, and we don’t think that is fair to either patients or caregivers,” Lang said.

The new law specifies that caregivers will have to give up all their marijuana so that law enforcement can destroy it (probably one joint at the time). No caregivers have yet turned in their crops, as far he knows, Lang said.

“If you say, for example, that there are 30,000 patients in the state, and for each one of those 30,000 patients, six plants can be grown, that is a significant amount of cannabis,” Lang said.

But that cannabis won’t go to the cops, according to Lang, but instead will likely hit the black market.

That’s exactly where Lang expects patients who have been legally using marijuana to turn if they can’t qualify under the new, stricter patient guidelines.

“Of course that is the only place that patients are going to be able to get their cannabis from, so it makes sense that caregivers, folks that have been growing and producing it up into this point, are just going to leak that medicine into the black market,” Lang said.

3 grams of medical marijuana shared = life sentence in Montana

Did You Realize that in Montana – a Gram of Marijuana can get you a LIFE SENTENCEOtto was convicted of sharing a bowl of his medical marijuana with two friends in a car traveling down Reserve Street, where the trio passed a Missoula County Sheriff’s detective on his way home from work last November.

there is no mention of any penalty for the two friends who Mr Otto shared his prescription with. actually this is the heat of the problem – he shared.

Yeah,  he let them hit his pipe while they were driving him home from work in their vehicle.

Testimony from the two people with Otto that day made it murkier. they said they couldn’t remember who or where the weed came from. yeah right – when he was stopped and had the medical marijuana certification card, and the medical marijuana prescription on him.

Sounds almost like a case of Frienemies…

Samantha and Jordan Lambert, who was driving the car, originally told Missoula County Sheriff’s Detective Jon Gunter that they’d gotten the marijuana from Otto, according to court papers. Wednesday, they testified they didn’t remember who lit the bowl or where the marijuana in it came from.

Daly repeatedly pointed out that neither of the Lamberts was charged with possessing or distributing marijuana, even though the bowl was shared among the trio.

“The detective told me if I was honest with him about taking a hit off the pipe, I would not be in trouble,” Jordan Lambert testified.

Gunter testified that as a narcotics investigator, he felt it was more important to home in on the source of the drug.

Sheriff’s Deputy Bill Burt, who questioned Otto while Gunter was talking with the Lamberts, videotaped that encounter.

On the tape, Otto told Burt that he had a medical marijuana card and that he used cannabis for back and knee pain.

“I’ve got all kinds of pain from carrying all this equipment,” Burt replied. “… My point is, you’re doing it for the recreation.”

The point, Paul said after the trial, was that Otto’s legal marijuana became illegal the minute he gave it to someone else.

Otto faces a maximum penalty of life in prison and a $50,000 fine.

this is a part of the legacy of anslinger and hearst – the paper barons.  Montana grows trees so this is one area where the old laws will live on until they are challenged and a new generation of voters comes into the picture.

Read this and remember Weed Is ILLEGAL IN MONTANA. so tokers, avoid it.

Montana jury convicts man for sharing 3 grams of medical marijuanaAs Montana lawmakers debated the fallout of Montana’s medical marijuana law Wednesday, some of the same points were playing out in a Missoula County courtroom.

There, an eight-woman, four-man jury found Matthew Otto, 27, guilty of a single charge of criminal distribution of dangerous drugs – in this case, 3 grams (well under an ounce) of marijuana.

Otto faces a maximum penalty of life in prison and a $50,000 fine.

Otto stood accused of sharing a bowl of his medical marijuana with two friends in a car traveling down Reserve Street, where the trio passed a Missoula County Sheriff’s detective on his way home from work last November.

As Otto’s trial began Wednesday, Public Defender Chris Daly told potential jurors that “a central issue to today’s case (involves) views of medical marijuana.”

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Daly summed up the case against Otto as nothing more than “a puff of smoke.”

“Keep in mind that this is not benign smoke,” Deputy Missoula County Attorney Andrew Paul said in response. “It’s marijuana smoke.

“It’s still controlled, people,” he said. “It’s not just free-form. It has not been legalized.” (The last medical marijuana reform bill stalled in the Montana Senate, and the chamber will focus on repealing the law.)