LIBERTARIAN PARTY OF COLORADO BLOG

Tom Lucero advocating a "crackdown" at Boulders 4/20 protest

A University of Colorado regent says the Boulder campus should do a better job cracking down on pot smokers who gather for the unsanctioned 4/20 smoke-out.

Last year, roughly 10,000 people gathered on the Norlin Quad to smoke marijuana -- or witness the event -- during the public protest. Over the years, police have largely turned a blind eye to drug use at the event, issuing only a few tickets spurred by other illegal activities. Campus officials this year say pot smokers will be ticketed if they're caught with marijuana walking to or from the event.

Republican regent Tom Lucero said the gathering perpetuates a party-culture image at CU, and it's been a perennial concern for the Board of Regents.

Read more: http://www.dailycamera.com/ci_14899054

Tom Lucero just doesn't get it. He thinks the 4/20 protests make Boulder look like a “party town”, so his solution is to advocate for fines and violence against peaceful people advocating the end to the use of fines and violence against peaceful people who simply want to use a drug that that makes them feel better, some for medical reasons and others for recreational reasons, and there is no reason why they should not have this option.

Marijuana legalization protests for 4/20

4/20: International Cannabis Day
 
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
 
4/20 is International Cannabis Day, celebrated by millions of people throughout the world. Every year on 4/20 at 4:20 pm, citizens worldwide gather together to celebrate their favorite plant.
 
420 Celebrations often include traditional "smoke-outs", where participants commit civil disobedience by consuming cannabis in public. In Colorado, possession of less than one ounce of cannabis is a petty offense.
 
Attorney Robert J. Corry, Jr. has just released his annual offer to give free legal representation to anyone who receives a ticket for petty offenses at this year's 420 free speech events. See Rob's letter dated
April 19 to Alex Douglas of NORML@CU: "Pro Bono Legal Representation for 420 Free Speech Event"

http://www.cannabistherapyinstitute.com/news/cu.420.corry.let.pdf
 
Enjoy International Cannabis Day in several locations, including Denver and Boulder.
 
*Denver*
23rd Annual 420 Celebration
Civic Center Park
9am til 6pm
Music, speakers, vendors, prizes, fun!
Sponsored by Mile High NORML
This is a permitted event and is free and open to the public.
For a list of speakers and performers, see:
http://www.myspace.com/420rally
 
*Boulder*
Traditional 420 Smoke-Out on the Norlin Library Quad on the CU Campus in Boulder at 4:20pm
(This is a non-permitted, protected by the First Amendment right to freedom of assembly.)

Unemployment insurance premiums going up

Colorado employers that laid off workers during the recession are facing steep hikes in their first-quarter unemployment-insurance taxes.

But about half of Colorado employers — those who didn't engage in layoffs — are seeing rates stay flat or even decline, according to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.

The average rate or premium that employers will pay on the first $10,000 of wages has risen from 1.77 percent in 2009 to 2.48 percent percent for 2010, the department estimates. Next year and beyond, however, employers across the board can expect heftier rates to replenish an insolvent state-unemployment insurance trust fund.

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_14903257

So companies doing poorly enough that they had to lay people off are now going to see higher unemployment insurance premiums, this sounds like a sure fire way to ensure that many of those companies will cease to exist.

David Williams at the "Tea Party"

Medical Marijuana Bills Will Harm Patients

Sent in by the Cannabis Therapy Institute, this is very disturbing. In an effort to keep people who the bureaucrats do not feel need marijuana from getting their hands on it legally, they are looking to punish patients who truly need it. You would never hear them propose these regulations to pharmacies dispensing truly dangerous drugs.

Medical Marijuana Bills Will Harm Patients
 
Colorado Medical Marijuana Licensing to be Run by "Auditors with Guns"
 
State Licenses Will Cost $50,000/year
 
Contact: Cannabis Therapy Institute
877-420-4205
 
{Denver} -- There are now two law enforcement bills working their way through the Colorado state legislature that would seriously harm medical marijuana patients and their caregivers in Colorado. Both of these bills have seen strong support from legislators, both Democrats and Republicans.
 
Law enforcement bill #1 (SB109) would destroy the confidentiality of the Registry by allowing the government to use patient records to determine "suspicious" activity by physicians. It allocates over $1 million of patient registration fees to prosecute these "suspicious" physicians.
 
The bill's sponsor, Senator Chris Romer (D-Denver), promised the Cannabis Therapy Institute repeatedly that he would use patient registration fees to create 24/7 access for law enforcement to the Registry so that police could confirm whether a patient was legal after business hours and on weekends. This has been the #1 patient concern for years and would prevent many patients from being arrested and taken to jail simply because the Registry offices were closed. Instead, Romer wants to use patient fees to prosecute
those patients' physicians, allowing unprecedented access to the formerly confidential Registry.
 
Law enforcement bill #2 (HB 1284) is a 49-page regulatory monstrosity that seeks to eliminate 95% of existing dispensaries. It creates a state medical marijuana licensing board run by the Department of Revenue. Dispensaries would have to get a state license, a local license, and a cultivation license. Dispensaries would be subject to warrantless searches of their premises. Law enforcement would be able to come in as often as they wanted to count and weigh a dispensary's cannabis and search through patient
records to make sure the dispensary didn't have "too much.". Law enforcement would be able to track patients as well, to make sure they weren't purchasing "too much" medicine. HB1284 would create a new class of law enforcement official, the "medical marijuana enforcement investigator" that would be in charge of these warrantless searches. HB1284 would also require caregivers to give up their 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination, leaving them open to possible federal criminal charges.
 
Senator Romer, one of the co-sponsors of HB1284, discussed the bills at a meeting of the Medical Marijuana Business Alliance on April 15, 2010 at the Loews Hotel in Denver. His comments were shocking to the audience.
 
Romer described the new regulatory regime. "The Department of Revenue will regulate it with guns," he said. "Auditors with guns will be in your dispensary every 5 to 7 days" to count and weigh your medicine. Since you will be seeing so much of your auditor, Sen. Romer said, "Your auditor will be your best friend. Yes, he will have a gun, but that will be OK." Romer repeated the phrase "auditors with guns" dozens of times in his 20 minute speech, almost seeming gleeful at the thought. Romer also said that the progress on HB1284 has been stalled because "we're trying to figure out exactly how many auditors with guns we will need."
 
The big bombshell fell when Romer was asked how much a state dispensary license would cost. He replied that the fee would probably be around $50,000 a year, maybe more. Yes, that's not a typo, fifty thousand dollars each year.
 
This is the future of medical marijuana: the Law Enforcement Model to Medicine. Readers in other states should be wary as well. Law enforcement all over the country will be using Colorado's regulatory regime as a model for their own state's regulations down the road.
 
TAKE ACTION NOW!
 
1) Call or email your local House and Senate Members and ask them to:
VOTE NO ON HB1284 and SB109
 
House Offices: (303) 866-2904
Senate Offices: (303) 866-2316
 
 
Click here for a full list of emails and other contact info.
http://www.cannabistherapyinstitute.com/advocacy/contact.colorado.state.legislature.html
 
Send us copies of any emails you send.
 
Go to the General Assembly Home Page for the most current copies of the
bills:
http://www.leg.state.co.us/
 
2) Copy and print this PDF version of this Action Alert and bring copies everywhere. Let's get the phones ringing down there.
http://www.cannabistherapyinstitute.com/bills/hb1284.action5.pdf
 
******* PLEASE FORWARD AND REPOST THIS ACTION ALERT!!!! ******
 
---
Provided as a Public Service by the:
Cannabis Therapy Institute
P.O. Box 19084, Boulder, CO 80308
Phone: 877-420-4205
Web: http://www.cannabistherapyinstitute.com
Email: [email protected]
 

NCAR admits that its tools are not adequate to measure the earths temperatures

Today's observational tools are not adequate enough to track all the heat that has been trapped by greenhouse gases the past couple of years, according to researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

About half of the total amount of heat entering the atmosphere is unaccounted for, according to Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo, who published a study this week in the journal Science.

Satellite instruments indicate that increased greenhouse gases are trapping more heat from the sun, but scientists have been unable to track where all the captured heat is ending up using instruments on the land and in the oceans.

Read more: http://www.dailycamera.com/news/ci_14893003

Okay so everybody must change their lives and pay the government twice as much in taxes to stop a crisis that there really is no proof that it even exists, and if it does the scientists do not currently have the tools to prove it, even though they have claimed otherwise for years.

Pants on the ground force evacuation of city building

Police say a pair of discarded inmate pants found at a city building near the Webb Building and the City and County Building, across the street from the Denver Mint, forced an evacuation and closure on Tuesday.

http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=136725&catid=339

Funny that a pair of pants on a bathroom floor can get people so worked up and afraid. The government has traded safety for sanity.

Treehouse not up to city code

GOLDEN, Colo. (CBS4) ― The construction of an elaborate treehouse in Golden remains incomplete following a stop order by city officials in Golden last fall.

Then, in August, the city ordered him to stop because the treehouse didn't meet building codes.

http://cbs4denver.com/local/treehouse.golden.permit.2.1616001.html

These bureaucrats think that it is their responsibility to keep everyone safe from themselves, but it isn't. The city needs to butt out of peoples business. There is not a tree-house that would meet building codes and be built in a tree as a traditional tree-house.

I had a tree house as a kid that was basically a platform in a tree and yet I survived and even if I had hurt myself, it would not have been the responsibility of the local bureaucrats. I would climb the same tree prior to the tree-house being built by my father and the tree-house made the tree a safer refuge than the tree had been prior to the tree-house being built.

Students tasered at career day

LAKE COUNTY, Colo. -- Approximately 30 students were shocked with tasers at a career fair in Lake County on Thursday.

According to Lake County spokeswoman Betty Benson, a deputy used a Taser on students at a career fair at Lake County High School.

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/23095217/detail.html

What kind of career does being tasered prepare you for? A career as a victim of police abuse? The students apparently volunteered for the tasering, but I think it shows a lack of judgment on the officers part. When the police were initially given tasers, they were intended to ONLY be used in situations where a suspect was acting in a violent fashion and the police had to subdue them.

Marijuana related emergency room admissions on the rise?

In discussing his war on medical marijuana, state senator Chris Romer said “Numbers from Denver Health and other emergency rooms are really starting to tick up.”.

I am not sure I understand what he means. I have never heard of an overdose from someone smoking marijuana. He did not elaborate. I would like to see his numbers and what the people are actually being admitted to the hospital for, because it sounds like BS to me. He was using this as justification for requiring people under the age of 21 to get 2 doctors recommendations for medical marijuana. I don't think you help your case if you use made up statistics.

Chris Romer, I challenge you to prove your your statement. Comments are welcomed. Post a link to the study or statistics you were referring to.