Sunday, November 28, 2010

Marijuana

The United States of Amerijuana
By ANDREW FERGUSON / COLORADO SPRINGS Thursday, Nov. 11, 2010


Jeff Riedel for TIME
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I've always been passionate about food," says Jenelise Robinson. "And I've always been passionate about marijuana and the things it can do for the world."
The Denver woman is 35 but looks 20, with heavy loop earrings distending her lobes and an enormous bracelet to match. From her clavicles southward, her body is a riot of tattoos—the usual skulls and anchors as well as a large circle with a squiggle inside it on her right arm. (When a visitor points quizzically to the squiggle, she replies politely, "It's a baby in a brain," though the tone of her voice says, "Like, duh.") We shouldn't be misled by the biker look or the faux-'60s talk of changing the world. Robinson is all business—a consummate tradeswoman. In the past 16 months she has found a way to combine her passions for food and pot and make the combination pay, as founder, owner and head baker of Nancy B's Edible Medicine, one of the most successful start-ups in Colorado's newest "industry": medical marijuana.
(See pictures of Cannabis Culture.)
Robinson's muffins and Rice Krispies squares are getting raves. "I have a very high tolerance," said one food critic in the Denver Chronicle, a medical-marijuana blog, "and a 2-dose lemon bar will put me on my ass." "I loved the buzz, which lasted 8 hours," wrote another. "Very functional and social." The growth of Robinson's business has come with the explosion in the number of Colorado's medical-marijuana dispensaries, or centers. Coloradans who are recommended by a doctor and approved by the state go to the centers to buy their pot, either in traditional bud form or as an "infused product" like Robinson's lemon bars, which are 100% organic and laced with a marijuana concentrate. Her success is reflected in the Mile High Macaroons and Cannabis Cups stacked in the new commissary-style kitchen she's rented in the gentrifying neighborhood of City Park West in Denver.
Even with a decent supply of high-grade pot in her walk-in freezer, Robinson can scarcely keep up with demand. She and her two employees (a third is soon to be hired) work six days a week to refine her menu, revise recipes, taste-test hash oil and manage inventory—and still squeeze in time every day to medicate.
"For my ADD," she says. "And some shoulder pain."
Medicate? The medical-marijuana industry relies heavily on such genteel euphemisms. To medicate is to smoke pot, and no one in the industry calls pot pot anymore; it's medicine now. Dealers are called caregivers, and the people who buy their dope—medicine, medicine—are patients. There's no irony here, no winks or nudges to signal that someone's leg is being pulled. "After work," says a counter clerk, or budtender, at Briargate Wellness Center, an upscale dispensary serving the tony north side of Colorado Springs, "I'll just go home, kick back, take out the bong and medicate."
The euphemisms are an important element in the larger movement to bring marijuana use out from the shadows, as advocates say, so it can take its place innocently on Americans' nearly infinite menu of lifestyle preferences, from yachting to survivalism to macrobiotic cooking. So far, the strategy is working. Colorado and 13 other states, along with the District of Columbia, have legalized medical marijuana in the past 14 years. More than a dozen other states are considering the idea. Overnight, dispensaries have sprung up in hundreds of towns and cities; billboards touting one outlet's pot over its rivals' are plastered all over Los Angeles. In some parts of California—where marijuana is the biggest cash crop, with total sales of $14 billion annually—medical pot has become such an established part of the commercial base that cities are moving toward taxing it.
It's not clear that even political setbacks discourage, much less stop, the mainstreaming of marijuana. Anti-pot forces cheered on Nov. 2 when voters in four states apparently rejected pro-pot ballot initiatives—including California's Prop 19, which would have legalized possession of an ounce (28 g) of pot or less. But by Election Day, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state legislature had already rendered Prop 19 moot. A month earlier, he signed a bill that reduced possession of up to an ounce from a misdemeanor to a civil infraction. By Jan. 1, 2011, jaywalkers may have more to fear from California cops than potheads do.
(See cannabis conventions around the country.)
Medical marijuana has helped make all this possible. In a short time, pot has gone from being a prohibited substance to one that is, in many places, widely available if you have an ache or a pain and the patience to fuss with a few forms. This did not take place by accident. In fact, medical marijuana's emergence has many of the attributes of a product rollout. As with any hot commodity, dope is now accorded the same awed regard in some Colorado retail establishments as fine wine, dark chocolate and artisanal cheese. Only now it takes place under the cover of medical care, wellness and pain management. And so what is emerging in many places is a strange, bipolar set of rules: dope is forbidden for everyone but totally O.K. for anyone who is willing to claim a chronic muscle spasm. Does anyone take such farcical distinctions seriously? And can a backlash be far behind?
Legalization via the Clinic Door
George Soros, the jillionaire currency trader and patron of countless liberal organizations, began funding pro-legalization groups in the early 1990s, with instructions that they redirect their energies toward "winnable" issues like medical marijuana. It was a savvy tactic. Even when polls showed strong resistance to making pot legal, large majorities of Americans supported making it available to patients for pain relief. "If we get medical access, we're going to get legalization eventually," activist Richard Cowan said in 1993. "The cat will be out of the bag." Colorado is a good test of whether that seemingly inexorable trajectory will remain plausible or prove a pipe dream.
Along the regulatory spectrum that stretches from distinctly mellow L.A. to schoolmarmish New Mexico, Colorado sits somewhere near the middle. In 2000, Colorado voters approved an amendment to the state constitution to legalize the possession of marijuana for patients suffering from "debilitating medical conditions": cancer, glaucoma, HIV/AIDS and multiple sclerosis, along with more nebulous symptoms like "severe nausea" and "severe pain." Voters supported Amendment 20, 54% to 46%.
The implementation was based on what is called a caregiver model. Each patient, on the recommendation of a doctor, could designate a friend or neighbor to grow up to six plants for the patient's use, and each of these caregivers could provide for no more than five patients. Both patient and caregiver would register with the state. The idea was to prevent profiteering, and from 2000 to 2007, roughly 2,000 patients signed up. "The system worked pretty well," says Don Quick, state district attorney for two counties in central Colorado. "Nobody really had a problem with it."
But in 2007, a pro-pot group called Sensible Colorado sued the state health department, and a state court ruled the five-patient limit unconstitutional. "That opened the floodgates," says Brian Vicente, the group's executive director. "A caregiver could have 50 patients if they wanted. And if you had 50 patients, why not open a shop?" Over the next two years, more than 1,000 dispensaries sprang up to serve the more than 100,000 Coloradans who had suddenly discovered their need for medicinal marijuana and applied for a patient card. As Jon Stewart noted, what had been considered the healthiest state in the country rapidly became one of the sickest.
And the economics changed overnight. Patients might spend $500 a year growing six plants on their own. By contrast, dispensaries routinely charge $350 to $500 for 1 oz. of pot. With patients limited by law to possession of no more than 2 oz., they could easily drop $5,000 a year on treatment. "A good-size dispensary will have a few hundred regular customers," Quick says. "You can do the math."
One who did the math was Joe DiFabio, who fits the mold of the hardy American entrepreneur—if the hardy American entrepreneur sold pot for a living. Now in his late 20s, DiFabio ran a construction company and worked in sales before a friend suggested he open a dispensary. He is also a patient, for back pain—nearly everyone who works in the industry medicates—and he had become disenchanted with the dispensaries he'd seen: stoned budtenders, sloppy service, subpar medicine. "They just weren't well kept up," he says. "Kind of dirty."
His business plan was to offer an alternative for the well-heeled professionals in northern Colorado Springs. "I wanted to have the very best medicine at the lowest prices in town," he says, in "a safe, discreet, professional environment." Briargate Wellness Center opened earlier this year, and the plan seems to be working. On a recent weekday afternoon, the three cars in Briargate's parking lot were a Jaguar, a Mercedes and a BMW. DiFabio greets customers in a pressed oxford shirt, trim khakis and polished loafers. The place is painted in pale pastels, and back issues of Golf Digest are fanned out on a slate table. The flat-screen TV plays the A&E channel.

Environmental Paradise- Malaysia

Malaysia: A Coal Plant in Paradise
By JENNIFER PINKOWSKI Saturday, Nov. 27, 2010


Peter Andrews / Reuters
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There are worse places to be than in the eco-paradise of Sabah, a state on the northeast tip of Malaysian Borneo. To one side is the Coral Triangle, home to the world's richest ocean diversity; to the other is the Heart of Borneo, a 22-million-hectare rain forest. In the middle is a vast swath of 1,100 palm plantations. Every year hundreds of thousands of tourists visit Sabah to explore its marvels of biodiversity, hiking elephant paths, spotting shy orangutans and scuba diving with hammerhead sharks.

It's hard to imagine a worse place for a brand new 300 MW coal-fired power plant than here. But it will be a real challenge for Sabah to get by otherwise. And there, in a Southern Pacific garden spot, are all the world's eco-tensions writ small.
(See pictures of transforming a coal refinery in South Africa.)

Malaysia has taken clear steps to make environmental health a national priority. In the fall of 2009, Prime Minister Najib Razak pledged at the U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen that his country, already a Kyoto Protocol signatory, would reduce its carbon emissions by 40% by 2020. It is one of the few countries in Southeast Asia with renewable energy standards, despite the fact that it has reliable stores of conventional fuels; its oil, gas and energy sectors accounted for 10% of the country's GDP in 2009.

But Malaysia is also a land of pressing energy needs, and Sabah tells that story better than most places. Officials anticipate a 7.7% annual energy demand increase through 2020, which Sabah Electricity, the state power company, has proposed meeting by adding seven new energy facilities to the 17 already in existence. Most are fueled by natural gas, followed by hydropower and diesel. One of those new facilities, promised by Razak just months before his pledge in Copenhagen, is slated for the Sabah palm plantation region. And this one will be fired by coal — Sabah's first such plant.

Twice before in the last three years, the local electricity utility, a subsidiary of Tenaga Nasional Bhd (TNB), which owns 80% of Malaysia's power generation, had lobbied to build a coal-fired plant. Both times the plans were shot down by the federal Department of Environment (DOE) and local opposition.
This latest plant, however, is different. Not only is it slated for federally owned land, it also has the backing of the prime minister. Sabah's environmental groups formed a coalition to fight the plant, but they kept hearing the same thing over and over again: Ini Najib mau. Najib wants this.

Still, what Najib wants is not necessarily what the rest of his government wants, and in August, the DOE once again stepped in, rejecting a detailed environmental impact assessment for the plant. TNB is expected to submit a revised statement early next year and when the company does, environmentalists fear the jig could be up; this time a coal plant may actually get built.
(See "The End of Cheap Coal?")

It doesn't have to be this way, environmentalists say. Some 60% of Malaysia is rain forest, the vast majority of it found in Sabah and its neighbor state, Sarawak. Though renewables currently account for only 1% of the country's energy production, mostly from hydropower, Sabah's abundant sunshine, geothermal sources, extensive network of strong rivers and a long coastline give it the potential to make Malaysia a regional leader in clean energy.

These resources are underdeveloped, however, and until the renewables sector can get itself ginned up, the threat of a coal-fired plant looms. One stopgap for Sabah would be to build the power plants it needs but fuel them with palm oil production waste. Sabah currently produces about 30% of Malaysia's palm oil, which combined with Indonesia's, constitutes 90% of the world's palm oil exports. A palm waste biomass plant could readily meet the 300-MW target Razak promised, according to one recent energy analysis.

Of course, palm plantations — and their waste — do their own serious environmental damage. In Southeast Asia, slash-and-burn land clearing has destroyed vast forest regions to make way for monocrops like palms, a practice that has been strongly implicated in global warming. That hardly makes this region a good place to do more burning. Still, even greens concede that palm burning is a step up from coal, if only because it provides something to do with the 70 million tons of palm production waste the country generates each year, most of which is dumped in mill ponds or illegally burned in open pits.

Despite these problems, Malaysia still heads into the 2010 climate talks in Cancun on Nov. 29 as one of the world's better-intentioned environmental citizens. But it remains to be seen how these good impulses will play out in Sabah's fragile and beautiful ecosystem.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.