A special marijuana task force appointed by the Canadian government presented on Tuesday a clear path for full recreational legalization. The bold recommendations include an age restriction of 18 and a possession limit of 30 grams.
The committee, appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in June, laid out its comprehensive proposal after five months of study.
“Now is the time to move away from a system that has, for decades, been focused on the prohibition of cannabis into a regulated legal market,” said Anne McLellan, a chair of the task force.
“I think we’re all aware of the challenges and societal problems that the existing system has created,” she said.
When Trudeau won his election in 2015, marijuana reform was one of the pillars of his campaign. But the issue remained on the back burner until the announcement.
Among the task force recommendations:
Minimum age to purchase recreational marijuana should be 18 years, but province’s should have the right to alter the age restrictions
Distribution and sale of recreational marijuana should largely be regulated by the provinces and territories
Marijuana should be sold via mail order and in storefronts
Marijuana should not be sold in the same locations where alcohol is sold
Limits should be placed on the amount of marijuana a person is allowed to carry and cultivate
Existing smoking bans applied against cigarettes should also apply to the consumption of marijuana
Edibles and oils should be legal, but those products must not be attractive to minors
The Canadian Medical Association had urged setting the age limit at 21, but the task force disagreed. The older age limit, the committee felt, would keep younger users in the black market.
Before the Industrial Revolution, women ruled the beer industry. The act of brewing, primarily associated with the kitchen, was necessary for the nuclear family. Beer provided much needed sustenance (the concoction provides lots of calories) and clean water (the boiling hot water needed to make beer purified otherwise diseased English drinking water – remember this is the country that brought us the plague). And it mellowed tensions from hard, pre-internet living.
With the women’s expertise, beer soon moved from the family kitchens to the community at large. Surplus beer was shared with townspeople in the squares and at parties and community gatherings. Soon, though, women began opening alehouses and making ends meet off their suds. But this paved the way for big business and soon, men realized the financial power of beer and pushed women out of the industry. Until recently.
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Over the past couple of decades, women have been pushing back into the industry, opening breweries and bars with spouses or on their own. Mari Kemper, co-owner of Chuckanut Brewing in Bellingham, WA, says many women do everything for the brewery — from selling the beer to customers to handling finances in the offices — except the actual brewing.
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Others, like Seattle’s Stoup Brewing co-owner, Robyn Schumacher, do it all. She’s an owner, brewer, taproom manager and, since passing the test in 2012, a certified cicerone — the first-ever female cicerone in Washington state.
My main thing is that I want women to understand we’ve been forgotten. There’s really no difference in our enjoyment of beer.
Schumacher’s sentiment also underlies the work of Teri Fahrendorf, founder of the Pink Boots Society, which came about in 2007 when Fahrendorf realized there was a small but growing network of women in the beer industry that needed to be connected.
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The mission of the Pink Boots Society, which has chapters all over the world, is to “empower women beer professionals,” says Fahrendorf, a longtime brewer who quit her job in the mid-2000’s to drive across country to visit breweries and meet women professionals.
“I kept hearing, ‘I thought I was the only one!’” she says.
Later, Fahrendorf brought 16 women brewers together in a single room (with no men) and came up with the society’s mission. “We didn’t know what it would feel like. Men wanted to come, but I said no.”
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Today, the Pink Boots Society serves people all over the world, aiming to educate women interested in brewing (for example: Is it safe for a pregnant woman to brew with certain chemicals?), and it also provides scholarships and apprenticeships for hopeful and established women brewers. In the Society’s nine years, the membership has grown from 60 to about 2,000.
“Over my career I’d seen a few women come in [to the industry] and quit,” Fahrendorf sighs. “If those women had the support, maybe they would have stayed in it, too.”
And thanks to her work, more and more women are entering the industry, women like Seattle’s Lindsey Scully, a former beertender at Stoup Brewing and a current employee for the Emerald City startup beer brewing company, PicoBrew. Scully, inspired by both Fahrendorf and Schumacher, recently studied and passed the Certified Cicerone program, becoming an official beer expert.
Brewing is still considered a gentleman’s industry. Being a lady trying to break in, I wanted to have that extra hand up.
And it worked. Scully is one of a growing number of women returning to a profession that was once dominated by them. It’s a happy occurrence, notes Fahrendorf, who continues her work with the Pink Boots Society, hoping to egg on yet another generation of women brewers and beer professionals.
Paul McCartney did it flawlessly. Four-year-olds did it SO well. People have been arrested for doing it, which is a real bummer. But we’re talking about a totally different kind of Mannequin Challenge today, with higher risks and more material rewards than viral video fame.
Thieves posing as store mannequins got away with around $12,666 worth of merchandise, Metro in the UK reports. These evil geniuses stood so, so still in a Beales department store until the staff left for the day and closed the store. The alarm only went off once they tried to leave through the fire escape. It’s still not known how they got into the store in the first place.
An anonymous store assistant shared:
“It was only triggered when they left the store – it was a very well-orchestrated crime. They must have secreted themselves and pretended to be mannequins. They probably dressed in clothes identical to those worn by the mannequins and stood there, not moving a muscle till the shop shut and everyone went home. They took oilskin jackets, high-end designer clothes and the like. It showed incredible nerve – the store is equipped from top to bottom with sensor alarms and cameras. They must have stood there with the mannequins not daring to move a muscle – imagine if they wanted to sneeze or had an itch they couldn’t scratch.”
So far, these evil geniuses are still at large, but police are calling for any leads. At this point, who could even be mad. It’s impressive.
The first female mannequins, made of papier-mâché, were made in France in the mid-19th century. Mannequins were later made of wax to produce a more lifelike appearance. In the 1920s, wax was supplanted by a more durable composite made with plaster.
I prepared a simple vegan meal for a vegan family of eight the other day. I am a chef, so simple is not a fair word perhaps. They were also coming up on their one-year anniversary of their family-wide veganism, so they were newbies.
As they watched me prepare their dishes for the evening — creamy salad dressing, mushroom steaks, ‘cheesecake,’ you know, basic vegan menu 101 — they were floored by the complexity. Not one of these vegans could recognize a single dish on their vegan menu that evening. “What in the world have you all been eating for the past year!” I asked. They shrugged, hungrily, and explained, hungrily, that they just thought, hungrily, that salads and such were all that was left in the cards for them as vegans…..I died. Suffering through only salads for a year….I can’t.
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If you are maintaining a vegan diet and you have taste buds, you must turn yourself into somewhat of a cook (or move to Portland. Either Portland. Lots of options in either Portland).
You will not only starve if you do not get a few staple vegan dishes under your apron, but what will actually kill you is the pure boredom of leafy salads day in and day out.
And, hey, if you are a vegan that only eats salads, this is also not a healthful, or a balanced diet to maintain.
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If you’ve ever checked out my Instagram account, at first glance, you may think I’m vegan. But I am not. Nor am I a double agent trying to sneak a “live vegan” tee shirt into my wardrobe in order appear a part of the health-conscious community. I will get to why plant-based diets are best, but hear me out first.
There are so many ways to eat healthful and so many ways to achieve a balanced and nutrient rich diet, and there have not always been many options in the past. We now have resources of clean and hormone-free animal proteins, chickens producing happier offspring than Gwyneth Paltrow, small batch dairy farms with integrity.
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Unless you are maintaining a vegan lifestyle for any reason other than medical, spiritual, or ethical ones, you might be missing the whole point.
I gotta tell you, eating clean lies in how your food is grown, what is used to grow it and the health of the soil that it is grown in; nothing do with being a vegan, per se.
I have never been full-on vegan, but remain to ache for that cute tee that dubs me so. Community is powerful. My X-Man (cuter name for the ex-boyfriends you don’t hate, yes?) told me once that the hardest thing about not being a vegan anymore (he was one for 12 years) was not his conscious being destroyed with every mouthful of is 13-hour smoked pork shoulder, but not actually getting to BE A VEGAN anymore. I get that. Being a part of a community is powerful stuff.
I eat like a vegan, but I am not one.
I want to eat everything, travel, and enjoy being a guest in another country, someone’s home, or at Costco! To me, a conscientious cook and health nut, this means having a plant-based diet, not a vegan one. I promote not cutting entire food groups out of your meal plan, rather adding all the good stuff in!
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This whole Meatless Monday thing is out of control with everyone just eating pizza and Alfredo pasta and patting themselves on their temporarily vegetarian backs. Totes missing the point me thinks.
The not eating meat on Mondays intention should perhaps be more geared towards a habit of eating better, meaning fresh foods, greens, vegetables, etc. not just being without flesh in your mouth, and Alfredo in it.
There is a lot of food out there, lots of options to be had if you educate yourself. Try new things. Try vegan things. But do not be hypnotized by the V word and rest. Just because something is vegan does not necessarily mean that it is nutrient rich. If you want a balanced and healthy diet, eat clean, and lots of plants.
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If you really want to be plant based, start with plants! The standard American diet could use a huge shift from overeating meat and dairy into the world of roughage, greens, sea vegetables, non-gmo grains, roots, herbs, seeds, nuts, cold pressed fats and fruits.
At first I thought I was going to give you a really “wow” recipe that will challenge both your inner and/or actual vegan souls, but instead, thanks to this vegan family of eight, I will give you the gift of shifting into plant-based cuisine: cashew cream.
Use on its own, make sweet or savory, thicken things, makes sauces, make dressings, make desserts, make coffee creamer…..this recipe is so helpful! Dairy is delicious, I know. Do you eat a lot of it? Try shaking up your regular dairy intake and try this non-dairy recipe on to promote balance in your diet and enhance your vegetable and meat dishes!
Photo courtesy of Ryan Ross
As a non-vegan and a plant-based eater, my day may look like raw, grass-fed dairy cream in my tea or coffee, but a creamy cashew salad dressing on my sprouted grain kale Caesar salad wrap that afternoon before my roasted cauliflower soup made with bone-broth — to me, this is a balanced and healthful way to turn my meat and dairy intake into the supporting roles of my diet, as condiments, and not the lead characters of my dishes. As far as I know ,there is not a tee-shirt for this community yet, so I just pick one that I own already and feel great anyways.
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Cashew Cream
1 cup organic, raw cashews
¾ – 1 cup water, depending on desired consistency
Soak cashews over night, strain and rinse. Add to a high powered blender with ¾ cup of water, streaming in more as you go. Blend until smooth, smooth , smooth.
For savory: Add lemon juice and salt. Feel free to experiment, with herbs, vinegars, spices, etc.
For sweet: Add lemon, less salt than the savory version, and maple syrup. Feel free to experiment with warm spices, vanilla, fruits, honey, etc.
My favorite ‘cheesecake’ filling, and it’s vegan: Fill a springform pan with your preferred crust, I like making a pecan and almond crust with honey, and press into pan to form an even layer.
Take two cups of your sweetened cashew cream and add ½ cup of of coconut oil, the kind that gets solid when cold, and 1 cup of fresh or frozen blueberries to a high powered blender. Blend until smooth and pour into spring form. Chill over night. If you are making to take to a party, keep in freezer before the car ride….it will thaw to perfection by the time you arrive. Probably.
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Chef Ryan Ross is a private chef who also runs Supper Corps, the name of her dinner party series that is hosted in uncommon spaces. She grew up in her mother’s organic health food store in Virginia, got her culinary degree from The Natural Gourmet Institute of NYC, and currently resides with her husband in the Skagit Valley of Washington.She is a recipe writer, product developer and has consulted for plant-based restaurants all over the world. She also won the “Light Makes Right” episode of Choppedon the Food Network.
Target really does have all your shopping needs. Even for a special delivery, this orangutan’s baby registry includes Zootopia and Dolly CDs.
Two orangutans from the Cameron Park Zoo in Waco, Texas are soon expecting a baby. So much excitement revolves around the parents Mei and KJ newborn that the zoo is hosting a baby shower for the expecting couple. Cake will be served for human guests. But that’s not all: there will even be a gift registry for the new baby orangutan.
Turns out Target carries what a baby orangutan needs. Reading the list, you probably couldn’t differentiate between an orangutan and human baby’s needs: a Dolly Parton CD, stuffed animals, a Spongebob Squarepants bubble bath, books, and the movie Zootopia.
“When Mei first got here, she was young, 10 years, she loved the movie Jungle Book,” Zoo curator of exhibits and programs Terri Cox told the Associated Press. “That was the one thing that would bring her up to the front until she got used to her surroundings.”
The registry includes gifts that are considered enrichment items to stimulate the new arrival as well as new animals in the zoo. They help track the mental and physical progression of animals within the confines of a zoo environment.
Mei is due in late January and considering the endangerment of wild orangutans, the zoo staff will be on 24-hour watch starting in mid-January to help deliver the animal. Their goal is to help save the species from extinction, though they won’t reveal the animal’s gender until birth.
“These are magnificent animals. To encourage people to develop a connection to them, that’s the role of zoos,” Cox said. “In a perfect zoo we’d love for everything to live in their natural habitat. But in order to save the species, we have specific survival plans.”
It took just 1o months for Colorado to hit $1 billion in legal marijuana sales this year.
Data released by the Colorado Department of Revenue show Colorado cannabis retailers sold $720.7 million of recreational marijuana and $371.4 million of medical marijuana through October, totalling about $1.1 billion.
If you take a billion $1 dollar bills and put them in a stack, your pile would measure 67.9 miles high.
If you laid the $1 bills end to end, the money trail would be 96,900 miles long.
Industry experts are projecting $1.3 billion in sales for the year. Colorado’s state coffers will receive roughly $150 million in sales taxes, $40 million of which will go to school construction projects. The rest of the revenue will go to the public school fund, substance abuse treatment and prevention programs and health care.
ArcView Group, a leading cannabis industry research firm, estimates that the legal U.S. marijuana industry could reach nearly $22 billion in total annual sales by 2020.
Christian Sederberg, an attorney specializing in the cannabis industry, told the Denver Post:
“We think we’ll see $1.3 billion in sales revenue this year, and so the economic impact of this industry — if we’re using the same multiplier from the Marijuana Policy Group’s recent report, which is totally reasonable — it suddenly eclipses a $3 billion economic impact for 2016.”
It is numbers like this that is driving more and more states to consider legalizing marijuana. In November, four more states legalized adult use and four states voted to allow medical marijuana programs. Currently, eight states (plus Washington D.C.) have full legalization and 29 states have medical marijuana.
When pigs fly? This one gets pretty close. Meet LiLou, the newest addition to San Francisco International Airport.
She’s a therapy pig, part of the airport’s Wag Brigade, according to Mercury News, alongside 300 cats, dogs and rabbits that make flying less stressful for travelers passing through. They’re certified Assisted Therapy animals, trained to be super-soothing and sweet, and given signs that say “Pet me!” What a great gig.
They’re documenting LiLou’s adventures at the airport on SFO’s Twitter account, showing her doing tricks for the crowd and owning the place in her blue tutu. Pigs are super smart and are social animals. With a little training, the role is a natural fit.
— San Francisco International Airport (SFO) ✈️ (@flySFO) December 5, 2016
LiLou is the first therapy pig, however, and causing a minor controversy: Animal rights activists are demanding that the airport restaurants stop serving pork. PETA’s plea to SFO states:
“Like LiLou, pigs are extremely good-natured, playful, affectionate, sensitive, social, and smart. Yet the ones used for food are confined to filthy warehouses, their tails are chopped off, their teeth are cut with pliers, and males are castrated—often without any painkillers. At slaughterhouses, they scream as they’re hung upside down and bled to death, often while they’re still conscious.”
They’re planning to urge travelers against eating meat with new ads places around the airport. LiLou, in her blue tutu and painted nails, didn’t intend to become a poster pig for going vegan, but it’s a targeted advertising campaign that’s likely to land close to home.
Although legal marijuana will officially be a thing in Massachusetts later this week, it is still going to be at least another year and half before the average adult citizen can just walk into a local pot shop and purchase cannabis products in a manner similar to beer.
This means unless a person is a medical marijuana patient registered with the state, there is not going to be any legitimate opportunities to buy marijuana until the state launches the recreational sector sometime in 2018.
Legal Marijuana
However, as of Thursday, Massachusetts residents 21 and over will have the freedom to carry up to an ounce of marijuana on them outside the home without fear of a law enforcement shakedown. Those same people will also be permitted to keep up to 10 ounces of weed inside the home and discreetly cultivate up to 12 plants per private household.
Unfortunately, renters will be challenged in both smoking and growing marijuana because most rental agreements do not permit those activities.
In order to prevent the marijuana masses from shoving money into the mouth of the black market, the new law comes with a “gift” provision, which makes it perfectly acceptable for an adult to transfer up to an ounce of weed to another adult consumer. But this act must be a cash free transaction, as paying for weed in Massachusetts until the retail pot shops are up and running is still considered a criminal offense.
At the same time, while the people of Massachusetts are almost certainly gearing up for the first weekend of legal weed, it is important to understand that the system is not rooted in anarchist principles and it does come with a rather extensive list of common sense rules that have been modeled in the image of the state’s alcohol and tobacco laws.
The new law does not give people permission to smoke marijuana on the street, nor does it change anything with respect to the laws against drugged driving. So, while the police will no longer be able to drag a person to jail for simply having pot in the vehicle (locked in the trunk or glove compartment only), there is nothing stopping them from conducting roadside sobriety tests in an attempt to bust a motorist for driving high.
Perhaps one of the most important aspects of Massachusetts’s new marijuana law is that it does not allow people to transport legal pot products across state lines. This is because marijuana remains highly illegal in the eyes of the federal government, which makes traveling from, say, Massachusetts to New York with marijuana a crime known as drug trafficking – a felony offense that carries the potential for some serious prison time.
Other legal states, like Colorado and Washington, went through similar grey periods with respect to legal weed. But some of the confusion will start to clear up as soon as the state gets the regulatory affairs of the cannabis industry worked out and the herb is finally available for sale to the public.
You know how parents say money doesn’t grow on trees? Well they’re still right, but they never said anything about condoms. And in Austin, Texas, condoms do grow on trees.
Austin Health and Human Services employees have been hanging condoms in the trees of Walnut Creek Park for a month. The initiative aimed to promote safe sex, though it was unknown to the HHS director and the city Parks and Recreation Department, according to the Austin American Statesman.
HHS Director Shannon Jones reminded his staff that there is a department “vetting process,” but was vocal in his support of the initiative. The bags hanging from the trees contained not only condoms, but also lube and safe sex information.
“The rates of HIV in our community are high,” Jones said. “We need to use traditional and nontraditional efforts to reduce the spread of disease.”
Employees targeted Walnut Creek Park because their public bathrooms “have always been known as a meeting place for sex,” according to Walnut Creek Neighborhood Association President Robert Meadows.
However, park employees unaware of the initiative took down the bags, considering them litter. While crediting the creativity Austin Parks and Recreation Department Director Sara Hensley wasn’t fully sold on the idea.
“Plastic bags, of course, can fall into the creek and hurt critters,” she said. “Then we found out it was an effort to educate the public about safe sex, which we absolutely support, but I’m not sure hanging something from a tree is the best way to get the message across.”
The decision to continue pursuing this awareness will be made soon, said Hensley. Consider it a lesson that everything you need comes from nature, including condoms.
On Saturday, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos used his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize to criticize the war on drugs and call for alternative strategies. In front of a distinguished audience in Oslo, Norway, President Santos lamented that Colombia had “paid the highest cost in deaths and sacrifices” in the war on drugs and said that it was “time to change our strategy.”
“We’ve had no better ally among sitting presidents than Juan Manuel Santos,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “His advocacy for alternative strategies is all the more striking given the extent to which he was understandably focused on achieving the peace agreement for which he won the Nobel Prize.”
President Santos was awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize for his work toward a historic peace deal between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) of Colombia. The decades-long conflict with the FARC has resulted in over 220,000 deaths and the internal displacement of five million people. The peace accords themselves include challenges to the war on drugs, including the provision of alternative livelihoods for coca farmers, the decriminalization of drug consumption, and a focus on health and evidence-based approaches to drug use.
During his acceptance speech, President Santos said: “We have moral authority to state that, after decades of fighting against drug trafficking, the world has still been unable to control this scourge that fuels violence and corruption throughout our global community. […] It makes no sense to imprison a peasant who grows marijuana, when nowadays, for example, its cultivation and use are legal in eight states of the United States. […] The manner in which this war against drugs is being waged is equally or perhaps even more harmful than all the wars the world is fighting today, combined.”
The war on drugs has brought devastation to Colombia and Latin America. The militarized drug war in Mexico has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, disappearances, and internal displacements and has corroded rule of law and due process. Illegal drug trafficking, and the associated violence, have made Central America home to some of the most deadly cities in the world. Aerial fumigation of illicit crops have destroyed livelihoods and the environment in the Andes. And yet, despite decades of the drug war, drug production and consumption have not decreased.
However, in recent years, debate and political will for drug policy reform has gained unprecedented global momentum. In recent years, Kofi Annan, George Shultz, Paul Volcker and Richard Branson joined former presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brazil), César Gaviria (Colombia) and Ernesto Zedillo (Mexico) and other distinguished members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy in saying the time had come to “break the taboo” on exploring alternatives to the failed war on drugs – and to “encourage experimentation by governments with models of legal regulation of drugs,” especially marijuana.
In April, on the eve of the 2016 United Nations General Assembly Special Session on the World Drug Problem, world leaders and activists signed a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urging him to set the stage “for real reform of global drug control policy.” The unprecedented list of signatories includes a range of people from Senators Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Richard Durbin and Bernie Sanders, to former President Jimmy Carter, to former Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and George Shultz, businessmen Warren Buffett, George Soros, Richard Branson and Mo Ibrahim, actors Michael Douglas and Gael Garcia Bernal, Super Bowl champion Tom Brady, singers Annie Lennox and Sting, activists Gloria Steinem and Michelle Alexander, as well as distinguished legislators, cabinet ministers, and former UN officials.
In the past few years, drug policy reforms have taken place across the Americas. Uruguay became the first country in the world to legally regulate marijuana in 2013. In 2015, Jamaica approved a broad marijuana reform measure, decriminalizing the use of marijuana for religious, scientific and medical purposes. Colombia and Puerto Rico issued Executive Orders legalizing medical marijuana, and Chile is already cultivating marijuana for hundreds of oncology patients. And just last year, the Mexican Supreme Court ruled that prohibiting the consumption, possession and cultivation for personal use of marijuana was a violation of human rights.
