Showing posts with label cannabis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cannabis. Show all posts

January 5, 2023

Idaho, where pot is illegal , is next to pot friendly Oregon


 Idaho, where pot is illegal, is next to pot friendly Oregon 
By Hal Brown

The author is not a lawyer and any legal references here are based on Internet research. The advice about travel with marijuana is meant to be common sense and not an endorsement of doing this.

Cannabis is totally illegal in Idaho. Here's the most recent summary of the law in the state.
I thought of this when I read this article in the website of a local TV station:
You might intuit that the county with the most pot sales in Oregon would be one near Portland. It wasn't. Rather it was in Masher County which borders on Idaho.

Excerpts:

Idaho is one of a dozen states where neither recreational nor medical cannabis is legal. Ten weed sellers in the Malheur County city of Ontario, right on the state line with Idaho, make hay selling mainly to folks from the nearby Boise-area population center. 

Ten weed sellers in the Malheur County city of Ontario, right on the state line with Idaho, make hay selling mainly to folks from the nearby Boise-area population center.  

Below you can see that most of them are clustered around the exits from thetwo highways that cross the Snake River border between the two states.

What prompted me to write this blog is the fact that I have a friend who lives in Idaho who has a medical condition and would find relief in cannabis. It would take him about five hours to drive to a town in Oregon with a pot store since he lives in the central part of the state. His medical condition makes driving himself problematic so he'd need a friend to help him out.

The biggest risk for him and anybody else driving into Oregon to purchase pot for medicinal or recreational use in of course getting arrested. Possession of any amount of marijuana for any reason is a misdemeanor if the amount is 3 ounces or less. The maximum penalty is 1 year in jail and $1,000 in fines. If the amount is between 3 ounces and 1 pound, the offense is a felony and the top penalty is 5 years in prison and $10,000 in fines.

When I visited him years ago he warned me that I had to slow down when I got off highway and approach his town line because there was a radar trap. Indeed, as I drove past the 25mph sign there was a town constable with a radar gun.

I can imagine how Idaho police may be incentivized to make marijuana arrests for the revenue. All they would have to watch border crossing roads and look for cars with Idaho plates and find a reason to stop them. 

Police can only search a car without permission with probable cause.

The Fourth Amendment to the American Constitution protects citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents. For a stop and search to be reasonable, the stopping officer must have reasonable suspicion that the driver has broken or is about to break the law.

Therefore common sense dictates that even if someone isn't doing anything illegal it is prudent to assure you don't get stopped by the police in a state with so many far-right residents. A mere Biden sticker on your car, or just having Oregon license plates on your car, may prompt some police officers to look for a reason to stop you. 

Before you leave for any trip that might end up in a police stop it is prudent to check you car with someone inside to make sure all of your lights are operating properly including your license plate light if the car has one. This includes turn signals and brake lights. If you want to be super-cautious you could take pictures of your taillights to show that none of the lenses are broken.

From what I can tell, while sobriety checkpoints are illegal in Idaho, police may still be using them. If you have to go though one you must take a sobriety test, although you can contest it later if you are arrest.

If they ask you if they can search your car you can legally decline. This is where K9's trained to sniff out marijuana would come in. While in some states with legal pot K9's have to be trained to ignore marijuana so they can sniff out hard drugs. 

If a K9 indicates marijuana the police office can ask you where it is and you have to make the decision whether it is in your best interest to comply. If all you face is a fine you can write this off as nothing ventured nothing gained. On the other hand you could take the chance that the dog or officer won't be able to find where you hid the marijuana. 

I rather doubt the state wants to incarcerate a large number of people as it would most likely cost them more to put them behind bars than it was worth it, plus I doubt they have the jail cells to put them in. Not only that if too many of them decided to plead their cases in court it would likely overwhelm their court system.

I do not advise breaking the law of any state. This goes for any law, even if you believe it is wrong. Thus if you want to use marijuana, or get an abortion, I recommend going to a state where these things are legal.

As a reporter here I recognize that there are people who will want to bring marijuana into Idaho and avoid being arrested. The common sense way for someone who decides to break the law and bring marijuana into Idaho from Oregon by car is not to get pulled over by the police.

There are numerous websites readily located with a simple web search which have links to websites which assist them in finding ways to make it less likely a sniffer K9 will indicate to the officer there is pot in the car:

Click above to enlarge image


Since the Speaker of the House election is still going on I am continuing to update this blog as I think of new illustrations to make.








December 3, 2022

Pot and psilocybin mushrooms in Oregon

 Pot and psilocybin mushrooms in Oregon
by Hal Brown

Two slightly related stories caught my eye on the website of a local Portland area TV station. Once I started writing about them my mind wandered far afield to cover other subjects.

Former employee reveals details about Shroom House’s operation




The use of psilocybin mushrooms will be legal in Oregon next year but apparently they are available now - the article concludes:

“I’ve never even seen this stuff before. So I’m trying,” said Scott Yon, a customer at Shroom House. “I understand it may not be legally up yet, but in Portland, it doesn’t seem like people get arrested for anything.”

Even though the Oregon Health Authority and police say this is not legal, the long lines seen outside the store show the simple economics of supply and demand.

I've considered trying psilocybin mushrooms once the clinics, where someone trained to help you navigate the experience will help you, to see what unexplored part of my mind was opened to my consciousness. 

Since the psychedelic era there were two groups (not mutually exclusive) of people who used LSD and similar substances. Some belonged to the "turn on, tune in, drop out" group, a term popularized by Timothy Leary, and the others wanted to discover more about themselves. Some eventually followers of Richard Alpert who was Leary's partner, who became Baba Ram Das, and led a movement aimed at spiritual enlightenment.

When I was in college during the height of hippie and counterculture psychedelic times (1963-1967) I knew lots of people in the former group. There was a people's park I often walked through at Michigan State where students camped out and got stoned. Reference. 



I have concluded that I don't want to take the risk of using psilocybin. I am leery of any substance that leads me to be out of control of where my mind goes. Once a psychoactive drug is in your brain there's no "off" switch. You have to ride out the experience.

I like to be able to embark on unstructured  mental journeys to see where my unconscious leads me, but I want to be able to exert some conscious control.

I have friends who meditate using one or another technique. Almost everyday I spend time just letting my mind wander freely. I am not sure whether this would be considered mediation but I like the experience.

Since my mid-teens I paid a lot attention to my dreams, what Freud called "the royal road to the unconscious" and in fact read two paperback books by Freud when I was in my teens. One was his "Introduction of Psychoanalysis" and the other was "The Interpretation of Dreams."
Karl Jung agreed and wrote that “the dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the psyche.”

These readings led me to understand that there was much more to people, including myself, than they were aware of. This understanding always informed the kind of therapy I practiced for 40 years. I feel the crucial way therapy helps is the relationship between client and therapist, but that there are times with certain clients when it is helpful to facilitate insight into why they are distressed. 

The following article should be both cautionary and reassuring to those using cannabis, which is legal for recreational use in Oregon:

While I've tried high in CBD cannabis edibles to help sleep through the night I find that I don't like the effect that even the amount of THC, usually about a third, has on me. I makes my mind race and causes near hallucinatory images. I don't use any cannabis at all now, but I live in a senior community where many friends and acquaintances use it. If you visit any of the  560 + Oregon pot stores you will see customers ranging in age from 21 to 91 or older.  You will see hipsters looking for a better high to elders with bad hips relying on budmasters, the pot store version of your pharmacist, suggest varieties to help with different ailments.

It should be reassuring to cannabis users that the state is testing the products, but it seems to be common sense that anyone trying a new variety realize that the testing takes time to find contaminants so they need to make changes with caution.

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