Ron's Log

Medical Marijuana Delivery in L.A. County

A Fox News article about the Artist Collective marijuana collective in Hollywood. They deliver, but we don't get many details on that. They've got a very nice website with a highly descriptive menu. But what may be most unusual is that they Twitter (at http://twitter.com/artistscollctve - note the spelling difference) with little notes like this one: "Now in... A plethora of medicated cookies and brownies...Also Blackberry Kush half gram joints. Proceeds go toward art opportunity grants."

Oakland To Vote On Local Tax

Oakland is holding a special mail-in vote that ends July 21. One item on the ballot, Measure F, would raise an estimated $294,000 in tax revenue, which one city councilmember says is enough for five or six police officers. Measure F would impose a 1.8% levy on gross receipts of medical marijuana dispensaries. The measure seems to have broad support, even among the operators of the dispensaries. The text of Measure F can be found in this PDF on the website of the City of Oakland.

Some people are saying that the marijuana coops are "recession proof," but here's an article that says otherwise. Bay Area Safe Alternatives says sales are down 60% this summer. Green Cross says "sales are down 25 percent in the past 40 days, and dropped 45 percent in the past two weeks."

Green Cross in San Francisco delivers marijuana, just like THC Take Out in Orange County. This article includes reassuring information that is missing from THC Take Out's website. The Green Cross deliveries arrive in Smart Cars and carry your marijuana in a plain white paper bag. The driver doesn't wear a uniform and the article doesn't say if they carry special ID, but they must if they're driving around with a car load of marijuana. Customer patients write on Yelp that the drivers carry debit card readers, so you don't have to have big piles of cash on hand.

The Green Cross website.

DHS Senior Center Health Fair

Desert Hot Springs Senior Center Health Fair!

For more information, please call 760-329-0222

Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Desert Hot Springs Senior Center, 11-777 West Drive, Desert Hot Springs CA
Event begings at 9:00 am

• Free Mammograms Call Desert Women for Equality @ 760-325-4701 for an appointment.
• World Gym
• Arthritis Foundation
• Inter Valley Health Plan
• Ease Utility Assistance Program
• Free Bone Density Testing (by MD Health Care)
• Social Service (Provided by JFS)
• Chair Massage
• Desert AIDS Project
• Alzheimer's Association
• Safe House of the Desert
• Braille Institute
• Secure Horizon Health Plan
• Blood Pressure and much more!

Don't miss your chance to stay healthy and informed!

Israeli Medical Marijuana Policies

The history of medical marijuana in Israel is fascinatingly strange, making even Rhode Island's look sensible. Haaretz has this longish article about the road medical marijuana has traveled in Israel and where they expect it to go in the future.

Medical marijuana was legalized in Israel in 1999, but only for limited uses. The article describes it differently in three places. Either it was initially restricted to "serious symptoms such as pain, nausea and loss of appetite;" or "only in order to ease pain directly stemming from their disease," or only "for terminal cancer and AIDS patients." The restrictions (whatever they were) were maintained by the fact that only one doctor in Israel was authorized to write prescriptions: Dr. Yehuda Baruch, the head of a psychiatric hospital. Since none of those original justifications for medical marijuana are necessarily psychiatric, I assume he's just a doctor who's got two jobs: by day a mild-mannered head of a lovely psychiatric hosptial, by night the writer of marijuana scrips.

That night job didn't put too much of a strain on him, as he wrote only 10 prescriptions from 1999 through 2005. The population of Israel is about 7,411,000. Ten patients is, then, 0.00013% of the population. In the United States that's the equivalent of only 395 medical marijuana patients. I would guess that the average citizen of Israel is healthier than the average American, but not that much healthier!

Initially, the law in Israel was like that in Rhode Island, in that there was no legal way for a medical marijuana patient to buy his medication. He had to grow it himself. This was in spite of the fact that all of the initial patients were terminally ill. The patient could cultivate up to ten plants and possess 200 grams (about 7 ounces) of processed marijuana. The result was the same as in Rhode Island: the patients bought it from illegal street dealers. The very first patient to receive a prescription for marijuana was nabbed while buying from a street dealer and taken to court in 2001.

Then, around 2005, an anonymous (and illegal) grower approached the Health Ministry and offered to supply marijuana from his grow houses. The Health Ministry agreed, but still with great restrictions. Distribution is made only from one small apartment in Tel Aviv. Only the anonymous grower was allowed to handle the marijuana and roll cigarettes. And, get this, THE MARIJUANA WAS FREE! The state didn't pay for it. The patients didn't pay for it. All of it was grown, processed and distributed completely at the expense of that one anonymous grower.

A big difference between this Tel Aviv distribution point and the collectives in California (and, I think it is safe to assume, distribution centers in any other American state) is that the patients can smoke it at the distribution point! They can even go out in the yard and light up!

There are now 700 patients and Dr. Baruch says the average prescription is for 100 grams per month (about 3.5 ounces). That's more than 154 pounds of marijuana - a lot of healing!

This, obviously, cannot continue. The one doctor writes only 40 new prescriptions per month and is becoming a bottle neck. The whole State of Israel can't continue to depend on one grower to provide all of the medication for free. Besides the problem of his financial losses, his grow site could be lost due to disease or fire, and the article doesn't mention that his generosity is being subsidized by illegal sales of the stuff.

Here Yohai Golan-Gild enters the story. Some sort of illegal party drug supplier in Israel, he went bankrupt and moved to California in 1990s and became the owner of three grow houses. Now Israel has called him home to become the first of 4 or 5 additional, legal growers of marijuana.

"There are 160 varieties of Cannabis in the world and each one has its own side effects," said Golan-Gild, adding, with pleasure, "I can suit each patient with his or her type - one that will cause exhaustion, one that will turn you into a ball of energy in the morning and one that will cause a diagonal erection."

Baruch sees "the potential market in Israel reaching tens of thousands of medicinal Cannabis users, with each one paying NIS 5 or 10 per gram of the drug, or NIS 5,000 to NIS 10,000 per person per year."

"NIS" is an Israeli shekel which today is worth a shade more than 25¢. Mr. Golan-Gild says it costs NIS 15 to grow a gram of medical marijuana, so the difference will have to be subsidized either by the Health Ministry or by each patient's HMO.

Baruch will have three distribution centers (Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Ra'anana) where patients will, in addition to smoking their marijuana, be able to participate in yoga and Pilates classes.

Right To Your Door

I hadn't seen this before. THC Take Out is all set up to deliver medical marijuana right to you in Orange County, California. They make it possible to join the collective and arrange for free deliveries (minimum 1/8 ounce) via the internet. This is a great benefit to the marijuana patient who has mobility impairments...or simply no car. It also eliminates one of the boogey men cited by opponents of safe, legal distribution: that patients might get mugged as they leave the collective with their medication.

On their page with more info about deliveries they do have a couple of rules:

1. "Use of street slang terms in emails or phone conversations may result in denial of services." If a potential patient thinks he may have trouble with this rule, he can simply send his proposed message to ME, and I will (for no charge at all) translate it into safe, standard English and send it back.
2. "Drivers DO NOT carry cash or extra meds. Please make sure to have correct change. Thank you!"

That second one makes me a bit uneasy. There's nothing on the site about credit cards. Does this mean they accept only fresh, clean, real Ben Franklins? So poor old widow Smith with disabling pain is sitting at home with $500 in cash, waiting for a stranger to come to her door. What could go wrong?

The site does NOT reassure the customer about the discretion of their delivery vehicle. I imagine a lot of potential collective members would like to know that a Cheech & Chong hippie wagon with a bad muffler (or whatever the current equivalent stereotype of a pothead vehicle is) will NOT roll up in front of their house. There is also nothing about the delivery driver happily showing you his official ID card before you open the door.

And the elephant in the room no one is talking about: tipping. Do you tip? Does one usually tip a delivery driver who brings your ordinary pharmaceuticals from your ordinary pharmacy?

More Product Satisfaction

Living in New England I was pretty adept at avoiding poison ivy, but that's not saying much. It almost always grows in areas where people have cleared back other foliage, like along roadways, trails and bikepaths. You wouldn't encounter it deep in the woods, for example. Out here in California, though, poison oak seems to be a bit more wily. It will grow mixed in with other bushy plants, and it's got those almost innocent looking oak-like leaves.

Fortunately, out here in the desert we don't have the stuff. But once a year, when I'd go camping in the hills of Malibu, I'd come home with poison oak rash around my ankles. My remedy was the traditional not very effective treatment of washing it well with soap and applying calamine lotion. It would take days to weeks to disappear, often leaving behind some scars.

Sometime in the last year or so I had read about Zanfel and was impressed by what people had to say. Went to my local Walgreens to stock up on some and saw that they retail it for $40 for a small tube. They have a Walgreens equivalent called just "Poison Ivy Wash" for only $25 per tube. I went with the cheap version.

It rested in my bathroom cabinet for quite some time. And then there was that Memorial Day camping trip to Nelson Cove, where they actually have some poison oak trees. Even when I was very attentive to the shrubberies around my feet, I was blind to an 8-feet tall poison oak tree. I came home with poison oak rashes around my ankles, on one thigh and on my right shoulder and upper arm.

The instructions on the Poison Ivy Wash tell you to get in the shower, work up a lather with about an inch of the stuff, and then begin to scrub it in to the rash. They explicitly tell you to keep scrubbing until the itch stops, which becomes a wonderful thing because the wash contains some kind of grit so it gives you the most heavenly scratch. On the Zanfel site they estimate that itching would stop within 15 seconds. Mine never quit that fast. They also suggest that a single washing may do the trick for you. I had to repeat mine several times over a couple of days, but maybe that was because it just felt so damn good to scratch the rash.

The end result was that in about 2 days, the rash was completely gone, leaving behind some redness and dry skin where I had ripped the hell out of myself. Since then I've felt the slight itching of new skin growing back, which is nothing compared to the possible weeks of itching and ugliness I used to experience.

Zanfel (and its imitator) are not new. Their website has recommendations dating back to 1999. So you readers who live where poison ivy, oak and sumac are abundant should already be familiar with it.

Rhode Island Rationalizes Its Medical Marijuana Law

Rhode Island legalized medical marijuana in 2006, but incredibly provided no legal way to obtain it. That left patients with the choice of either growing it themselves (not always possible in that chilly New England state), or taking to the streets and buying it illegally from illegal dealers. Now in an overwhelming veto override (68-0/35-3) the Rhode Island legislature has authorized the licensing of three dispensaries to grow and distribute marijuana. Governor Carcieri had vetoed the bill and then announced his backward thinking on the issue by explaining that patients visiting the dispensaries could be mugged as they left (when we all know that it is perfectly safe to buy marijuana from a street dealer), that the dispensaries will create the image that Rhode Island is complacent on illegal drugs (by all means, image overrides all other concerns, including health and pain relief), and that the law will complicate the jobs of law enforcement officers (so I suppose the Governor will also seek to ban all pain-relieving prescription drugs because it complicates the job of law enforcement officers to determine if a person possessing the drugs has a prescription or not).

A Safe Sex Lesson

Philippe Padieu of Frisco, Texas, has been convicted of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for having unprotected sex with six women and infecting them with HIV. There were no charges of rape. All of the women consented to have unprotected sex.

In considering whether a condom or a man's word is better protection against STD infection, here are the guidelines I follow:

• Men lie.

For that small minority of men who tell the truth, there is this rule:

• Men are often mistaken.

Now, a discussion of STDs and other health issues is an important part of any good relationship, but on a first date you don't need to ask the question, because your behavior is going to be the same regardless of the answer, right? A condom, or a good ol' handjob, or just skip it.

Relay For Life Goal Achieved!

I've continued to receive donations for walking in our Desert Hot Springs Relay For Life and they have finally reached my goal of $1,000. In fact, I've gotten a total of $1,100 in donations.

Donations, which go to benefit the American Cancer Society, can still be made!

U.S. Supreme Court Allows Prop 215 To Stand

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to the legality of California Proposition 215 (which allows medical marijuana use) filed by San Diego and San Bernardino counties. Therefore, medical marijuana remains legal at the state level, but no precedent is established.