Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Pot Shops in Denver Open Door to $578 Million in Sales


Toni Fox plans to open the doors of her Denver marijuana shop at 8 a.m. tomorrow to a line of customers including some who camped overnight to be the first in the U.S. to legally buy pot for recreational use.
Fox has arranged for canopy tents, heaters and a food truck to offer donuts and pastries to patrons waiting for the state-appointed hour. She expects sales at her 3D Cannabis Center, operating since 2010 as a medical-marijuana dispensary near the Denver Coliseum, to surge to at least $250,000 a month from $30,000, she said.
“We’ll have people out the door,” Fox, 42, a Salida resident, said by telephone. “It’s going to be a very festive atmosphere. We all feel like we’re walking on sunshine right now.”
Fox’s shop is among 14 in Denver that got state and local licenses in time to sell marijuana to anyone 21 or older starting Jan. 1, just over a year after Colorado and Washington voters made their states the first to legalize recreational use. Washington’s shops are expected to open later in the year.
Colorado projects $578.1 million a year in combined wholesale and retail marijuana sales to yield $67 million in tax revenue, according to the Legislative Council of the Colorado General Assembly. Wholesale transactions taxed at 15 percent will finance school construction, while the retail levy of 10 percent will fund regulation of the industry.

‘Large Lines’

“There are a lot of people interested to see what these stores are all about,” said Brian Vicente, co-author of Colorado’s recreational-marijuana ballot measure and an attorney with Vicente Sederberg LLC, a Denver-based law firm representing the marijuana industry. “There will be pretty large lines for these facilities.”
Licenses for 136 marijuana stores, a majority in Denver, were mailed Dec. 23, the Colorado Revenue Department said in a statement. Recreational marijuana businesses can open only after receiving both a state and local license, said Julie Postlethwait, a spokeswoman for the Marijuana Enforcement Division.
Only existing medical-marijuana retailers can apply for the licenses until July 1, she said. In Denver, home to the state’s largest number of such dispensaries, that deadline extends through Jan. 1, 2016.
The city’s newly licensed shops feature names such as The Green Solution, The Healing House Denver and The Denver Kush Club, according to a map on the Denver city government’s website.

Ounce Limit

Colorado residents with a photo identification showing they are at least 21 may buy as much as one ounce of pot in a single transaction, while those from out of state can get a quarter ounce, Postlethwait said. Customers can’t consume the product in public, including at the shops.
Medium-quality marijuana sells for an average of $196 an ounce in Colorado and $192 an ounce in Washington, according to the Price of Weed website, where pot buyers can post what they paid.
“It will be an interesting time in Colorado in the next few months,” Postlethwait said. “We’ll have things shake out and settle. That will give us an opportunity to study what the face of the two segments of the marijuana industry will look like.”
Marijuana possession and sale remains illegal under federal law. In August, the U.S. Justice Department said it wouldn’t challenge the legalization laws in Washington and Colorado provided the states prevent out-of-state distribution, access to minors and drugged driving, among other restrictions.

867 Applications

In Washington, retailers will begin selling marijuana around June, according to Brian Smith, a spokesman for the State Liquor Control Board, which is overseeing the industry. The agency, which limits retail licenses to 334 statewide, had received 867 applications as of Dec. 24, he said.
Washington’s pot producers, processors and retailers each must pay the state a 25 percent sales tax, unless they hold both producer and processor licenses, which allows them to pay the levy once.
Washington isn’t including revenue from marijuana growth, processing and sales in its fiscal projections “due to the continued uncertainty over the rules and structure of the market,” according to a November report by the state’s Economic and Revenue Forecast Council.  
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Monday, December 23, 2013


Carlos Santana reunites with ex-bandmate, now homeless

Carlos Santana gestures towards the crowd in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico, Dec. 14, 2013. AP
A news reporter for a San Francisco television station has reunited rock guitarist Carlos Santana with a former bandmate he hadn't seen in decades and who now lives on the streets of Oakland, Calif.
Reporter Stanley Roberts ran into percussionist Marcus "The Magnificent" Malone while working on a story about illegal dumping last week, KRON-TV in San Francisco reports.
Although he initially was skeptical of the homeless man's claim that the Santana Blues Band got its start in his mother's garage in the late 1960s, Roberts checked out the story and confirmed it. And on Friday, he took Santana for a surprise visit to the camper where Malone has been staying.
"You don't know how afraid I am to let you see me," Malone said softly after he and the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer embraced.
"We cherish you," Santana replied. "It's an honor to be in your presence."
Santana has credited Malone with being an important influence on his Afro-Latin sound, according to former Rolling Stone magazine writer Ben Fong-Torres' book "Not Fade Away: A Backstage Ticket to 20 years of Rock & Roll."
Malone played congas on Santana's eponymous first album, but left the band in 1969 shortly before its seminal performance at Woodstock when he was imprisoned for manslaughter, according to Fong-Torres.
The two men told Roberts they had not seen each other since then. During their meeting on Friday, Santana, who was just honored by the Kennedy Center, promised to bring Malone a set of congas and to help him get on his feet.
Since Roberts' story aired, another original member of the Santana Blues Band, percussionist Rod Harper, and producer Bobby Scott also have expressed interest in reuniting with Malone.
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Saturday, December 21, 2013


‘Nymphomaniac’ Will Screen Uncut Version at Berlin Film Festival

The Berlin Film Festival will debut the uncut version of the first installment in Lar von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac.”
The grunting and grimacing epic stars Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jamie Bell, Uma Thurman and Shia Labeouf, and is hotly anticipated both because of von Trier’s controversial status and because its scenes of coitus are expected to be envelop-pushing.
Also read: Lars von Trier’s ‘Nymphomaniac’ Getting Released in Two Parts
The film unfolds with a sex addict (Gainsbourg) recounts her between the sheets past to a charming bachelor who finds her beaten up in an alley. The film will screen out of competition.
“The aesthetic [von Trier] has created in ‘Nymphomaniac’ is impressive and radical,” Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick said in a statement.
See photos: O-Faces Abound in New ‘Nymphomaniac’ Posters: Shia LeBeouf, Uma Thurman, Jamie Bell
The original of “Nymphomaniac” was over five hours long, but has been whittled down in length and will be released in the United States in two parts. A shorter version will open in theaters beginning Dec. 25, 2013, making for a potentially awkward family excursion to the movies.
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Friday, December 20, 2013

Canada high court strikes down all restrictions on prostitution


OTTAWA — The Supreme Court of Canada struck down all current restrictions on prostitution on Friday, including bans on brothels and on street solicitation, declaring the laws were unconstitutional because they violated prostitutes' safety.
The sweeping 9-0 decision will take effect in one year, inviting Parliament to try to come up with some other way to regulate the sex trade if it chooses to do so.
Prostitution is technically legal in Canada but most related activities have been illegal, including living off the avails of someone else's prostitution, but the court found that the provisions were overly broad or grossly disproportionate.
Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin said many prostitutes "have no meaningful choice" but to "engage in the risky economic activity of prostitution," and that the law should not make such lawful activity more dangerous.
"It makes no difference that the conduct of pimps and johns is the immediate source of the harms suffered by prostitutes," she wrote.
"The impugned laws deprive people engaged in a risky, but legal, activity of the means to protect themselves against those risks."
One current prostitute and two former ones, including a dominatrix, had initiated the challenge to Canada's laws, arguing that sex workers would be safer if they were allowed to screen johns and operate in brothels with bodyguards if they chose.
McLachlin dismissed the federal government's argument that it was prostitution itself, not the laws that govern it, that puts prostitutes at risk.
The safety of prostitutes became a high-profile issue in Canada following the trial and 2007 conviction of serial killer Robert Pickton, who preyed on prostitutes and other women in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside neighborhood.
"A law that prevents street prostitutes from resorting to safe havens...while a suspected serial killer prowls the streets, is a law that has lost sight of its purpose," McLachlin wrote.
Prostitution is legal in much of Europe and Latin America, and brothels are legal in numerous countries including the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland. But questions have begun to be raised, partly because of human trafficking. France's lower house of parliament passed a law this month imposing stiff fines on clients.
"How prostitution is regulated is a matter of great public concern, and few countries leave it entirely unregulated," McLachlin wrote in explaining why she suspended the effect of the judgment for a year.
She said her decision "does not mean that Parliament is precluded from imposing limits on where and how prostitution may be conducted," noting that various provisions were intertwined.
"Greater latitude in one measure - for example, permitting prostitutes to obtain the assistance of security personnel - might impact on the constitutionality of another measure - for example, forbidding the nuisances associated with keeping a bawdy house (brothel)."
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Thursday, December 19, 2013

Porn pioneer Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw magazine, dead at 77

AP
Al Goldstein displays some of his reading material upon leaving the federal courthouse in Kansas City, Kan., where his obscenity trial resumed in 1977.
By Hillel Italie, The Associated Press
Al Goldstein, the bearded, bird-flipping publisher of Screw magazine who smashed down legal barriers against pornography and raged against politicians, organized religion and anything that even suggested good taste, died Thursday, according to a friend. He was 77.
Goldstein died at a Brooklyn hospice after a long illness, said the friend, attorney Charles C. DeStefano.
Of all the would-be successors to Hugh Hefner's sexual throne, no one was as out there as Goldstein. Whether publishing nude photographs of Jacqueline Kennedy, or placing an 11-foot-tall sculpture of an extended middle finger outside his Florida home, Goldstein was a one-man, uncensored army of boiling humor, manic attire, numerous divorces and X-rated visions of peace and love.
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"To be angry is to be alive. I'm an angry Jew. I love it. Anger is better than love. I think it is more pure," he said in an interview in 2001. "There's so much to be angry about, because people are ripped off, the election went to the wrong person, the good guys usually lose and society sucks."
Mary Altaffer / AP file
Screw magazine publisher Al Goldstein sits for an interview at a coffee shop in New York in 2003.
Goldstein backed up his attitude where it counted, with his wallet, spending millions of dollars on First Amendment lawsuits, hundreds of thousands running unsuccessfully for sheriff in Florida, and millions more in numerous divorce settlements.
DeStefano remembered Goldstein as an "intellectual who cared about the world and geopolitics." But after a lavish life of mind and body, Goldstein was often broke, and, he feared, harmless.
"I'm old hat," Goldstein told New York magazine in 2010. "I've become a senior citizen. I'm an old Jew."
Goldstein was born in Brooklyn, his childhood branded by a dirty world. He was a stutterer, a bed wetter and a chronic masturbator, and a target for bullies. Before founding Screw, he served in the Army; sold insurance; drove a car for the gossip columnist Walter Winchell; got himself jailed in Cuba for taking unauthorized pictures of Fidel Castro's brother, Raul; and, as a photographer for Pakistan International Airlines, was on hand in 1962 when Kennedy (then the first lady) visited Pakistan.
In his spare time, he watched pornography.
When he and Jim Buckley chipped in $175 apiece and co-founded Screw, in 1968, the sexual revolution was on and the American legal system was caught up in a battle over obscenity. Goldstein's initial cause was himself, to have the right to publish the kinds of materials he liked to look at.
"Screw grew from a combination of many factors, chief of which was my own dissatisfaction with the sex literature of 1968 and my yearning for a publication that reflected my sexual appetites," he wrote in a 1971 Screw anthology.
But Goldstein also felt that the cultural and religious establishment had convinced his generation that sex was wrong and turned them into "a lot of embarrassed people who bought nudie magazines on the sly."
The porn magazine's scathing, scatological editorials targeted church and state for justifying war while imprisoning erotic magazine publishers. Screw sold 140,000 copies a week at its height.
"I may be making a lot of money, but I really believe I'm doing some good by demythologizing a lot about sexuality," he told Playboy in 1974.
But the law was never far away. During the magazine's first three years, Goldstein was arrested 19 times on obscenity charges. Spending millions to defend himself, he ultimately scored a major victory in 1974 when a federal judge threw out an obscenity case brought against him.
After that, the willingness of the government to prosecute such cases waned, ending a period that saw books such as D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterly's Lover" and Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" banned and kept erotic publications under the counter.
But victory left Goldstein with the most dreaded of emotions — boredom.
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"I really need the attention of being arrested, because that means I'm still bugging the establishment, that I'm still gadfly to the state," he told Playboy. "Acceptance of me and Screw would be the kiss of death."
Screw was eventually outporned by Larry Flynt's Hustler magazine and other ultra-explicit publications. Goldstein sought other outlets, and in 1974 launched a cable porn show, "Midnight Blue," which ran for nearly 30 years.
But as Screw faded, Goldstein became depressed and angrier, a danger to himself and to others.
In 2002, he was sentenced after a wild trial to 60 days in jail for harassing a former secretary with threatening phone calls and editorials. The conviction was later overturned when an appeals court ruled prosecutors had used overly inflammatory language at trial. A year later, Goldstein pleaded guilty to harassing one of his four ex-wives with obscene phone messages. He also accused his son, Jordan, of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of watches from him.
"My son made me a broken man," he said.
In late 2003, the magazine folded and Goldstein filed for bankruptcy protection. On the upside, he lost 150 pounds following stomach stapling surgery the same year and married his fifth wife, a woman 40 years his junior. Things fell so far, though, that he was forced, at times, to sleep in a car and live in a Florida homeless shelter.
"Up until a month ago he still had that spark," said DeStefano. "In fact, he gave me the middle finger. As he did it, he smiled at me. I knew he was still Al Goldstein inside this shell of a body." 
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Wednesday, December 18, 2013


James Bond's dirty little spy secret: He's an alcoholic

Daniel Craig as James Bond (Copyright Rex Features Ltd 2012)
(HealthDay News) -- Iconic spy character James Bond drinks so much and so often that in real life he'd be incapable of chasing down villains or wooing sexy vamps, a new study contends.
"The level of functioning as displayed in the books is inconsistent with the physical, mental and indeed sexual functioning expected from someone drinking this much alcohol," wrote a team led by Dr. Patrick Davies, of Nottingham University Hospitals, in England.
His team analyzed the famous spy's alcohol consumption and found that it was more than four times higher than the recommended intake for an adult male.
This puts Bond at high risk for several alcohol-related diseases -- including alcoholic liver disease, cirrhosis, impotence and alcohol-induced tremor. Because of his heavy drinking, the real 007 would have a life expectancy of 56, doctors say.
The alcohol-induced tremor may explain why Bond prefers his martinis "shaken, not stirred," the study authors joked. They added that the alcoholism-induced tremor in his hands means he's unlikely to be able to stir his drinks, even if he wants to.
Davies' group launched the study because they were struck by the fact that the amount of Bond's drinking in the original books seemed rather high. They wondered if he could actually carry out his missions and woo so many women at this level of drinking.
Based on a thorough reading of all of the books, the study authors concluded that Bond's average alcohol consumption was 92 units per week -- over four times the recommended amount. This figure excludes days when Bond was unable to drink.
A unit of alcohol is about 10 milliliters of pure alcohol -- about the same amount found in the average glass of scotch, bourbon or other hard liquor.
The spy's maximum daily alcohol intake was almost 50 units per day and he had only 12.5 alcohol-free days out of the 87.5 days he was able to drink, according to the findings in the Christmas edition of the journal BMJ.
Bond might even be a road hazard, since he frequently drank enough to put him over the legal limit before he climbed into his car.
Many studies have shown that people generally underestimate their alcohol consumption by about 30 percent, which means that Bond's alcohol consumption may be as high as 130 units per week, the study authors said.
It's clear that 007 needs help, the authors said. "We advise an immediate referral for further assessment and treatment [and] a reduction in alcohol consumption to safe levels," they concluded.
They also noted that excessive drinking is a global health problem that causes 2.5 million deaths a year. However, movies and other sources of entertainment often portray drinking in a positive, even glamorous, way.
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