Paul LePage, the governor of Maine, has done nearly everything in his power to sabotage marijuana legalization.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s lied, calling marijuana a gateway drug<\/a>, that also happens to be deadly<\/a>. He\u2019s obfuscated, vetoing a bill to regulate cannabis sales \u2014 which, again, a majority of voters in his state want \u2014 not once<\/a>, but on two occasions<\/a>. He then spread misinformation, again, but this time in a manner that threatened a constitutional crisis.<\/a><\/p>\n And after all that, LePage has lost, marijuana has won. Cannabis will be sold, openly, in retail establishments in Maine, maybe as soon as next year.<\/p>\n Maine was one of the four states where voters approved a marijuana legalization ballot initiative on Election Night 2016, while at the same time approving \u2014 in theory \u2014 taxed and regulated retail sales. In the time since, LePage \u2014 a self-described staunch conservative has behaved as if legal weed signaled the end of the republic, a threat to America and our way of life.<\/p>\n Last week, lawmakers in Maine\u2019s Legislature, most of them Republicans, voted to overturn LePage\u2019s second (and final) veto of a recreational marijuana retail sales regulation bill, as the Portland Press-Herald reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n That vote by itself doesn\u2019t accomplish much, aside from owning LePage. The state now has to hire a consultant \u201cto help the state write more regulatory rules,\u201d according to the newspaper (pro tip: save some money and just copy other states\u2019 rules, as will probably happen already<\/a>), hire some state workers to run a state cannabis regulatory agency \u2014and (almost certainly) deal with more whinging and outright hostility from LePage and a slowly narrowing circle of like-minded legalization opponents, among them state Sen. Scott Cyrway.<\/p>\n Cyrway, a former DARE officer, made an impassioned plea to his colleagues against overturning LePage\u2019s veto, arguing that marijuana legalization would both lead to more kids addicted to drugs \u2014 and more dead sheriff\u2019s deputies.<\/p>\n \u201cThis guy had a drug problem and we are setting ourselves up to have more of them,\u201d said Cyrway, referring to the death of Somerset County Sheriff\u2019s Cpl. Eugene Cole. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to stop it.\u201d<\/p>\n Luckily, Cyrway\u2019s colleagues didn\u2019t pay him any mind. For cannabis advocates, last week\u2019s public ownage of LePage, who has failed in his quest to stop marijuana legalization in Maine is a decided mixed bag.<\/p>\n Cannabis \u201csocial clubs,\u201d where adults are allowed to gather in a public place, with a roof and a door, and smoke marijuana in relative peace and privacy, are banned. And the Legislature reduced the number of plants an adult is allowed to grow at home from six to three, for no perceptible reason other than to throw a bone to legalization opponents. This includes groups like Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), who, while willing to play games with facts in their zeal to halt marijuana legalization, at least enjoy more credibility than LePage, who has said that he lies to journalists so that they\u2019ll print his lies, lose credibility, and then go away, as a way to improve society.<\/a><\/p>\n LePage is scheduled to become unemployed in January, when his term runs out, right about when retail stores in Maine start selling cannabis.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong> does your state have recreational cannabis yet?<\/p>\n The post Maine Moves Towards Recreational Cannabis Marketplace<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Paul LePage, the governor of Maine, has done nearly everything in his power to sabotage marijuana legalization. He\u2019s lied, calling marijuana a gateway drug, that also happens to be deadly. He\u2019s obfuscated, vetoing a bill to regulate cannabis sales \u2014 which, again, a majority of voters in his state wantContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,152,3728,179,1837,81],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25993"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25993"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25994,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25993\/revisions\/25994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nRead More: Maine Moves Towards Recreational Cannabis Marketplace<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"