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Dan Mitchell on May 12, 2021
One day in the late ’90s, I stood awestruck inside the El Cerrito Natural Grocery, where I did most of my food shopping. There in the aisle was a display of what was the most ludicrous food product I’d ever seen: potato chips laced with St. John’s wort, an herb that supposedly relieved the symptoms of depression.
Fast forward to 2014, when an outfit named Lipsmack briefly tried to market powdered booze, which it called Palcohol, until the feds told the company to get real and the product was pulled from the market.
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by
Dan Mitchell on May 5, 2021
The “stoner” stereotype might be best represented by a guy sitting in front of a TV, watching Warner Bros. cartoons while surrounded by Yoo-Hoo empties and crumpled Funyuns bags.
And being an idle, vacant slob (occasionally) is one perfectly valid mode of being stoned. It’s just another version of vegging out, which we all do. But there are plenty of others, including, perhaps counter-intuitively, the athletic mode. For many people, cannabis use and exercise go hand-in-hand.
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Aaron Carnes on May 5, 2021
It was June 28, 1992, and my friends and I were at the nightclub One Step Beyond in Santa Clara, where the foul odor of booze and vomit wafted through the muggy, pressure-cooked air. We’d danced through four bands already, including a young, awkward, and poorly dressed Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. Now it was time for the headliner. We stood by the stage, sweaty and shaking, willing the heavy theatre curtains to open.
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by
Dan Mitchell on April 28, 2021
When events occur in increments, even fast increments, it’s sometimes a challenge to step back and appreciate them.
Such is the case with the movement to legalize cannabis nationwide, which for so many decades was considered to be a lost cause, but started making huge gains about 15 years ago. Suddenly, legalization has become almost a foregone conclusion.
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Dan Mitchell on April 21, 2021
The popular discourse surrounding cannabis has devolved to the point that people now anticipate the responses they’ll get whenever they say anything remotely “negative” about weed.
Last week, cannabis-business veteran Kristen Yoder, a self-described “BS detector” known for ridiculing myths, platitudes and bad corporate behavior in the cannabis industry, posted a story on LinkedIn about dealing with cannabis withdrawal. “Before you leave a comment, let me get them for you,” she wrote, heading off the responses she was sure would follow, including: “It’s not like withdrawing from heroin or pharmaceuticals!” and “Not everyone goes through that, I never did!”
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Dan Mitchell on April 14, 2021
It’s hard to know anymore what to make of “4/20.” What was once an underground reference (sometimes employed ironically) has now been largely subsumed into the commercial culture of legal weed.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, that’s what legal weed means: it means capitalism, marketing and commodification. It means taking weed out of the underground entirely. Now that accountants in Castro Valley and soccer moms in San Mateo openly use cannabis it has also lost much of its rebellious cool.
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Mike Huguenor on April 7, 2021
At the outset of “Soldiers,” the title track from the second album by South Bay jazz trio Murray/Sato/Weeks, a single note appears like a figure on the horizon.
For 10 seconds, saxophonist Tom Weeks and bassist Kazuto Sato hold the note together, while drummer Kevin Murray makes a skittering wash of cymbals beneath—like rain against a window. Then, forty seconds in, sudden and unexpected, it is revealed that the note they have been holding is the first of “Taps,” the funeral signal of the U.S. military.
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Dan Mitchell on April 7, 2021
After the vaping-illness outbreak that started in 2019, when people were sent to emergency rooms in droves and several dozen of them died, sales of cannabis vaping products ground to a near-halt. Sales have picked up again since, and reports of vaping-related illnesses have slowed way down—but they haven’t stopped.
Meanwhile, many people seem to think we know exactly what happened to cause those health issues, but we really don’t. Not only that, but we still don’t even know for sure how safe the safest vaping products are, including the ones that are tested and approved for sale in cannabis dispensaries.
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Dan Mitchell on March 31, 2021
As the federal government tip-toes around making cannabis legal, it’s making what could be a simple and well-regulated cash cow of a business into a complex industry ripe for abuse.
One example of that is the gaping loophole the federal government, presumably unwittingly, offered in its 2018 Farm Bill that not only makes certain cannabis products legal, but allows underage kids to get their hands on the substance without any regulation.
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Mike Huguenor on March 31, 2021
Heraclitus said that no one steps into the same waters twice, but when Saoirse Alesandro stepped back into San Jose last spring after four years in Los Angeles, she and three of her closest friends dove right in and started a band.
“She got back in May, and we started band practice in June,” says Star 99 guitarist Cole Calvo.
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