Few standards apply to quality of marijuana,because the federal government considers all use illegall

Testing pot in a legal vacuum - Few standards apply to quality of marijuana, because the federal government considers all use illegal.

The tech broke the bud of marijuana into small flakes, measuring 200 milligrams into a vial. He had picked up the strain, Ghost, earlier that day from a dispensary in the Valley and guessed by its pungency and visible resin glands that it was potent.

Mark Raber prepares marijuana samples to be analyzed at his brother's lab, one of dozens to open in the last two years. But the labs are as unregulated and vulnerable to prosecution as dispensaries and growers. (Mel Melcon, Los Angeles Times / December 16, 2011)

He could have determined this the old-fashioned way, with a bong and a match. Instead, he began the meticulous process of preparing the sample for the high-pressure liquid chromatograph.

His lab, called The Werc Shop, tests medical cannabis for levels of the psychoactive ingredient known as THC and a few dozen other compounds, as well as for contaminants like molds, bacteria and pesticides that marijuana advocates don't much like to talk about. The strains that pass muster are labeled Certified Cannabaceuticals, a trademarked term.

The commercial lab is one of dozens opening in the last two years, as a rush to build an industry around medical marijuana has produced a desire — by some — to know what exactly is in the medicine.

The idea is that patients don't pop a Vicodin not knowing if the pill has 5 milligrams of hydrocodone or 15. Nor do people make drinks wondering if they are pouring beer or bourbon or Bacardi 151.

"Every pharmaceutical requires quality control and assurance, every diet supplement, every vitamin," said Jeff Raber, the Werc Shop founder and president, who has a PhD in chemistry from USC. "Why not treat this like medicine?"

With testing, pot users can stroll into a high-end store, look at a menu and decide what level of THC they want in their weed. And since dispensaries post their menus on popular directories like weedmaps.com and stickyguide.com, customers can first shop around online for the strongest strain of bud for the dollar.

But is this tidy new glimpse of marijuana retail illusory?

Only some top-end dispensaries test their products, and even they can't be sure the results are reliable. Because all marijuana possession is illegal under federal law — and the Justice Department has been cracking down recently — the nascent labs are as unregulated and vulnerable to prosecution as dispensaries and growers. In Colorado, the one lab that tried to get a license from the Drug Enforcement Administration was promptly raided by that agency.

That very week, Los Angeles passed its marijuana ordinance, which required testing by "independent and certified" labs, without specifying who was supposed to do the certifying. Long Beach followed suit two months later.

Making the situation even woollier: There are no federal standards for pesticides in marijuana.

So, along with the rest of the industry, the businesses operate in a raucous frontier, with drug-lab cowboys pulling up to pot shops with secondhand equipment to offer "lab-tested" results.

The more prominent operations in California — including Steep Hill in Oakland, Halent in Sacramento and The Werc Shop in Los Angeles County — have recently formed the Assn. of California Cannabis Laboratories to set equipment standards and methodology and to give a seal of approval for those who comply. They also hope to advance the science of marijuana, deciphering which compounds do what in a plant that can produce a broad range of psychological and physiological effects.

Donald Land, a UC Davis chemistry professor who co-founded Halent, said labs have no choice but to regulate themselves.

"Labs are popping up in people's vans. People are doing color tests and all kinds of stuff that's not very accurate. And there's people doing plain-old 'dry-labbing' — they take a sample, make a guess, put a number on it and send it out.

"Unfortunately, that's what an unregulated industry has to deal with."

::

When Ean Seeb's prized strain Bio-Diesel won top prize in the Colorado Medical Marijuana Harvest Cup, he decided to see what the numbers were.

Seeb, co-owner of a dispensary called Denver Relief, took it to a nearby lab, which informed him that the THC accounted for 18% of the sample's weight, a solid showing. Then a marijuana review website took samples of the same strain to the same lab and got different results, with one coming in at a stratospheric 29%. ( Los Angeles Times )

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Culinary Center Set in West Lombok

Culinary Center Set in West Lombok - The West Lombok administration in West Nusa Tenggara province will build a culinary center at a street heading to the Lombok International Airport to create new economic knots.

"Traffic around the Lombok International airport is relatively intensive, therefore the people who leave the region may wish for a restaurant or souvenir shop," Head of Industrial and Trade Service of West Lombok Joko Wiratno said in Gerung, West Nusa Tenggara, on Sunday.

He said the aim of the project was to create a new business opportunity for the local community and meet the needs of road users. Wiratno further said that the culinary and souvenir center will be built in two locations, one in Sulin Bridge near the boarder of Central Lombok, and the other near Bangkit Boulevard of West Lombok.

Besides the Lombok International Airport bypass culinary center project, the West Lombok Administration will also build six other such facilities in nine other locations. The locations are in tourist destinations of Kembar Bridge, in front of Tripat Gerung Regional Public Hospital, Batulayar region, Pusuk, Gerimak, and Keru because of its strategic location and already have a culinary and fruit center.

"We will relocate the cadger to create a clean and neat environment, and for doing business comfortably," Wiratno said. Later he said the retribution system arranged based on the cadger, so that the West Lombok administration gain contribution funds.

Lombok is very famous for its beaches and beautiful scenery. Several famous international tourist destinations include Senggigi Beach, Gili Tarawangan Island, Gili Meno Island, and Gili Air Island. The other tourist destinations are Mount Rinjani National Park, the culture of Sasak Tribe with its festival. ( antara )

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Marijuana questions dominate White House online chat -- again

Marijuana questions dominate White House online chat - again -- President Obama's live, online chat slated for Monday afternoon is intended to focus on issues raised during last week's State of the Union address -- but his online audience seems to be much more interested in marijuana policy.

Following Mr. Obama's State of the Union address, the White House invited voters to submit questions to the president via YouTube. The president plans on answering some of those questions during a 45-minute "hangout" session on on Google's social networking site Google Plus. In the "hangout" session, Mr. Obama will chat from the West Wing with some of the voters who submitted questions. The chat will be streamed live on YouTube and WhiteHouse.gov at 5:30 p.m. ET.

According to the White House's YouTube page, 133,216 questions were submitted for the discussion (voting is now closed). YouTube visitors could give the questions a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" rating, and more than 1.6 million votes were cast.

Sorting the questions by popularity reveals that 18 of the 20 most popular questions, according to YouTube, have something to do with marijuana policy, including the legalization of marijuana use, the cost of the war on drugs and other related issues.

Questions about marijuana policy have dominated multiple online engagement efforts from the Obama White House. In fact, the second-most popular question for today's "hangout" comes from a retired police officer with the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) -- just as it did in Mr. Obama's 2011 YouTube chat.

Tom Angell, media relations director for LEAP, says that his organization took simple steps to mobilize support for this year's video question.

"We recorded the video, put it up online... sent the link to our supporters on Faceook and Twitter, and from there people took it into their own hands," Angell told Hotsheet. "All told, the whole thing consisted of three Facebook posts and three tweets -- that's it."

Angell said he's surprised he hasn't witnessed similar mobilization efforts from other advocacy groups.

"It only takes a few thousand votes from supporters to get something to the top in these competitions," he said. "I'm sure PETA has a much bigger email list than we have."

That said, he thinks marijuana policy questions resonate more for a couple of different reasons. For one thing, young people tend to support marijuana legalization more than other age groups and are also more familiar with social media use.

Secondly, drug policy certainly isn't the top issue on voters' minds, Angell said, but it is "the number one concern which is not being addressed at all in any serious way by policy makers."

In the 2011 YouTube discussion, Mr. Obama said he is not in favor of drug legalization. However, acknowledging that the "war on drugs" has not been effective, he said he thinks of drugs as "more of a public health problem." In a 2010 online discussion, he ignored the question. In 2009, Mr. Obama seemed to laugh off the question after stating his opposition to marijuana legalization.

Angell said LEAP was "somewhat pleased" with the president's answer last year. "He basically said legalization is an entirely legitimate topic," Angell said, in what was perhaps the "first time a sitting president has said we can talk about this."

While the president opposes the legalization of marijuana, half of all Americans said it should be made legal in an October Gallup poll while 46 percent said it should stay illegal.

Though most of the popular questions submitted for today's discussion related to marijuana policy, the top question is about copyright infringement -- another hot topic on the Internet. The top question asks the president, "Why are you personally supporting the extradition UK Citizen Richard O'Dwyer for solely linking to copyright infringing works using an Extradition Treaty designed to combat terrorism and to bring terrorists to Judgement in the USA?" ( cbsnews.com )

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Pot Smoking Better for Your Lungs Than Cigarettes

Pot Smoking Better for Your Lungs Than Cigarettes - Pot smokers have been claiming it for years, from the hemp-necklaced throngs at Phish concerts to the vaporizing-intellectuals of the Upper West Side. And now there’s a study to prove it. Smoking pot is better than smoking tobacco—and it might even improve your lung capacity.

Conducted by the University of Alabama Birmingham and U.C.–San Francisco, the study followed more than 5,000 people for 20 years, in part due to a growing interest in medicinal uses for the Schedule 1 drug. Results, now published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggest that FEV and FVC, the amount lungs can draw in and exhale respectively, was not impacted negatively by toking up. In fact, sometimes smoking marijuana improved lung capacity. Reason? NPR lays it out:

“That may be due in part to the stretching involved in the deep tokes typical of marijuana use.”

Deep tokes, folks. But where’s the bad news, you ask? There is some. If you have lived more than 10 “joint years,” aka a joint a day for a decade, and smoked pot more than 20 times a month, your lung capacity decreased. Of course, not smoking anything is no doubt much better for you. But potheads, you can dust off that giant bong now if you want to. ( slate.com )

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Why doesn’t anyone in Washington take marijuana legalization seriously?

Not That Kind of Smoke-Filled Room - Why doesn’t anyone in Washington take marijuana legalization seriously? - Potheads had high hopes for President Obama’s Google+ hangout on Monday. The Web superpower had invited citizens to submit questions for the president via YouTube, and it encouraged people to vote on the questions they’d like Obama to answer in a live video chat. The results: 18 of the 20 most popular questions were about marijuana policy.

The top vote-getter came from retired LAPD officer Stephen Downing, who said he’s come to see the country’s drug policies as “a failure and a complete waste of criminal justice resources.” Pointing to a recent Gallup poll that showed, for the first time, a majority of Americans in support of marijuana legalization, he asked Obama, “What do you say to this growing voter constituency that wants more changes to drug policy than you’ve delivered in your first term?”

Nothing, as it turned out. The question wasn’t among those selected by Google.

That’s a bummer for the weed lobby but par for the course in Washington, where legalization remains a nonstarter despite fast-growing public support. In 1969, 12 percent of Americans thought pot should be legal. That percentage grew to the mid-20s by the late 1970s, passed 30 percent in 2000, and hit 40 percent in 2009, according to Gallup. A surprising October poll showed support at 50 percent, with just 46 percent against.

While voters have mellowed out, their representatives in Congress haven’t. A legalization bill was introduced in Congress last year for the first time, but few expect it to even come up for a vote. Its sponsors are Barney Frank and Ron Paul, legislators who have built their reputations by taking unpopular stands. Those with something to lose—like, say, an election—still won’t touch the issue. When Obama did field a marijuana question in a YouTube chat last year, he laughed at it. “I don’t know what this says about the online audience,” he chortled. Why won’t the president, or anyone else in Washington, take marijuana policy seriously?

Pro-legalization types see it as a mere matter of time before the government catches up to the rest of the country. “The conventional wisdom for decades has been that this is a dangerous issue,” activist Tom Angell told me. “Behind the scenes people will say, ‘I agree, you’re totally right, we need to change these laws, but I’m afraid to say so.’ For some reason it’s still perceived as a political third rail.”

A primary reason for lawmakers’ reticence is that, for decades, the most visible advocates of looser weed laws have been, well, weed smokers—and what serious politician wants to be associated with a bunch of stoners, man? Earlier this decade, wealthy liberals like George Soros and Peter Lewis (once busted for pot-smoking himself) recognized that problem and shifted the debate to medical marijuana, giving the movement a more sympathetic public face: an ailing grandmother rather than a dreadlocked coach potato. Several states have since passed medical marijuana laws, but they don’t address the bigger issue at play here. It’s recreational users, not glaucoma patients, whose money fuels the illicit drug trade that finances criminal gangs.

That’s why Angell’s group, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, has taken a different approach. It enlists cops and ex-cops to testify to the societal impacts of the failed drug war, pushing decriminalization and legalization as prudent policy solutions. It’s an appeal to reason, not compassion. Downing, the former LAPD cop who asked the YouTube question, is a LEAP board member. The support his video got, from the public if not from Google, testifies to his message’s broad appeal.

While the tactic seems to be working in some liberal states, it has yet to make pot legalization safe for lawmakers in Washington. Anti-drug leaders see that as evidence that Angell is wrong when he argues that it’s just a matter of time. Asa Hutchinson, the former Arkansas congressman who led the Drug Enforcement Administration under George W. Bush, told me he doesn’t see a big difference in how the debate is playing out in Washington today as compared to 10 years ago.

That may be partly a function of congressional demographics and partly a matter of incentives. Even if 50 percent of the public supports legalization, a pro-pot bill will never pass the Senate if those people are concentrated on the coasts. There’s also the fact that potheads tend to be less likely to vote than senior citizens, who came of age in the pre-hippie era and have never inhaled. If legalization opponents are willing to back up their conviction at the ballot box, there’s a lot of risk and little reward for a congressman to assume the marijuana mantle.

Hutchinson proposed a different explanation for the perceived disconnect between Washington and public opinion: There’s not actually a disconnect.

Asked by a pollster whether they support legalization, Hutchinson says, voters may shrug and say, “Why not?” But ask them just how legalized marijuana should be regulated, how it should be taxed, and whether it should be sold at the corner store in their neighborhood, and they’ll quickly change their tune. That seemed to happen even in liberal California, where a referendum on legalized marijuana failed in 2010 in part because voters worried about the mechanisms for ensuring proper oversight.

There may be something to that. It’s extremely rational to oppose the excesses of the drug war. Harsh sentences for marijuana possession are a big reason that U.S. prisons are teeming with poor, young blacks (who are far more likely to be arrested for marijuana use than middle-class whites). Decriminalizing possession, or at least lightening sentences, seems to be an idea whose time is coming.

But legalizing marijuana? That may still be further than the average American, upon reflection, wants to go. A 2010 study by the nonprofit RAND Corporation suggested that legalizing marijuana in California would send pot prices plummeting and consumption soaring. The impact on the state budget would likely be a net positive, but not enough to make a big dent in the Golden State’s financial crisis.

And for all the efforts of groups like LEAP, there’s still the Cheech and Chong factor. One of the RAND paper’s authors, psychologist and U.C.–Berkeley law professor Robert MacCoun, argued that pot’s place in pop culture makes it hard for even generally supportive people to take the issue seriously. (As a marijuana policy researcher, MacCoun says, he can’t grab a snack at a party without someone joking about the munchies.) That sets marijuana legalization apart from other socially liberal causes, such as gay marriage, with which an impassioned moral appeal can resonate deeply even with those inclined to oppose it.

All that said, it’s clear time is on the smokers’ side. The pre-baby boom generation—the country’s last to grow up believing that marijuana was more likely to cause rape, insanity, and suicide than it was to promote passing out on the couch—won’t be a political factor much longer. Today’s middle-aged voters came of age in the 1970s, when marijuana use was even more common than it is today. Some may harbor reservations about laws that allow their kids and grandkids to follow their lead as tokers, but they’re far less likely than their parents to lump weed in the same category as more destructive drugs like heroin and cocaine. It won’t happen today, and it won’t happen in the next four years. Eventually, though, we’ll have our first weed-legalization president. ( slate.com )

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We mated with Neanderthals. Can we breed with other animals, too?

We mated with Neanderthals. Can we breed with other animals, too? - Last week, scientists announced that the human gene pool seems to include DNA from Neanderthals. That suggests that humans interbred with their primate cousins at some point before the Neanderthals went extinct about 30,000 years ago. Could we mate with other animals today?

Probably not. Ethical considerations preclude definitive research on the subject, but it's safe to say that human DNA has become so different from that of other animals that interbreeding would likely be impossible. Groups of organisms tend to drift apart genetically when they get separated by geographical barriers—one might leave to find new food sources, or an earthquake could force them apart. When the two groups come back into contact with each other many, many years later, they may each have evolved to the point where they can no longer mate.

In general, two types of changes prevent animals from interbreeding. The first includes all those factors—called "pre-zygotic reproductive isolating mechanisms"—that would make fertilization impossible. After so many generations apart, a pair of animals might look so different from one another that they're not inclined to have sex. (If we're not even trying to mate with monkeys, we'll never have half-human, half-monkey babies. *) If the animals do try to get it on despite changed appearances, incompatible genitalia or sperm motility could pose another problem: A human spermatozoon may not be equipped to navigate the reproductive tract of a chimpanzee, for example.

The second type of barrier includes "post-zygotic reproductive isolating mechanisms," or those factors that would make it impossible for a hybrid animal fetus to grow into a reproductive adult. If a human were indeed inclined and able to impregnate a monkey, post-zygotic mechanisms might result in a miscarriage or sterile offspring. The further apart two animals are in genetic terms, the less likely they are to produce viable offspring. At this point, humans seem to have been separate from other animals for far too long to interbreed. We diverged from our closest extant relative, the chimpanzee, as many as 7 million years ago. (For comparison, our apparent tryst with the Neanderthals occurred less than 700,000 years after we split off from them.)

Researchers haven't pinned down exactly which mechanisms prevent interbreeding under most circumstances. Some closely related species can mate even if they have different numbers of chromosomes. Przewalski's horse, for example, has 33 pairs of chromosomes instead of the 32 most horses have, but it can interbreed with regular equines anyway—the offspring takes the average and ends up with 65 chromosomes.

Neanderthals weren't our ancestors' only dalliance with other primates. "Pre-humans" and "pre-chimpanzees" interbred and gave birth to hybrids millions of years ago. In the 1920s, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin sent an animal-breeding expert to Africa in hopes of creating an army of half-man, half-monkey soldiers. Attempts both to inseminate women with monkey sperm and impregnate female chimpanzees with human sperm failed.

That doesn't mean that tales of humans interbreeding with other animals haven't endured. Rumored animal-human crosses from the past few hundred years have included a man-pig, a monkey-girl, and a porcupine man. ( slate.com )

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A 21-year-old Palestinian woman has told authorities she was locked in a bathroom for the past decade by her father, who let her out only in the dead

A 21-year-old Palestinian woman has told authorities she was locked in a bathroom for the past decade by her father, who let her out only in the dead - A 21-year-old Palestinian woman has told authorities she was locked in a bathroom for the past decade by her father, who let her out only in the dead of night so she could clean their house.

"People are monsters," Baraa Melhem said her father would tell her, according to a social worker dealing with the case.

Palestinian police said Monday they freed Melhem from the small bathroom of a home in the West Bank city of Qalqilya on Saturday after an anonymous tip.

Her father, who holds Israeli citizenship, was arrested and handed over to Israeli authorities. He is due to appear in an Israeli court Wednesday, an Israeli police spokesman said.

Melhem told Voice of Palestine radio that when she was 11, her father confined her to the toilet and did not allow her to go to school or see her mother, whom he had divorced.

She was beaten with a baton and metal wires and given only one blanket to keep her warm, said the social worker, Hala Shreim.

"The bathroom was only 1-1/2 meters big, it was like a cell," Shreim said.

According to a statement issued by Palestinian police, the father, citing a "family dispute," admitted to locking up his daughter and feeding her mainly bread.

Melhem told Voice of Palestine that her father used to shave her hair and her eyebrows, and allowed her to shower only once a month. He would let her out of the bathroom every night at 1 a.m. to clean the house until 4 a.m., she added.

Melhem's father, the social worker said, often encouraged his daughter to commit suicide.

"Her only consolation was a radio which kept her connected to the world," Shreim said.

The young woman has now been reunited with her mother.

"She told me that she loves life and has to live," Shreim quoted Melhem as saying. ( Reuters )

READ MORE - A 21-year-old Palestinian woman has told authorities she was locked in a bathroom for the past decade by her father, who let her out only in the dead