ReeferSmoke – A Marijuana Blog

The International Cannabis & Hemp Expo 2010
April 17 & 18 in San Francisco, California at The Cow Palace
The International Cannabis & Hemp Expo 2010 is a public education event, offering a forum for awareness, education and advancement of the hemp industry and medical cannabis community. The objective of the expo is to educate the public on the differences between industrial hemp, medical cannabis and recreational cannabis, and to show the public the benefits of each.

• 100,000 sq ft of exhibition space
• A Patient Consumption Area and VIP Lounge with approved onsite consumption
• 2 Full Days of Speakers for exhibitors / speakers / community leaders / activists
• Guest Celebrities, Experts, Politicians, Etc.
• Hundreds of vendors from a cross section of industries

The Connoisseurs Cup is an important part of the International Cannabis & Hemp Expo, be assured that to the growers that enter cannabis strains in the Connoisseurs Cup, this is the most important event of the year and attracts the best growers in the world.
For ticket information and anything else you need to know, please visit the official website: www.intche.org

In the defense of pot, there has never been a more sound reason, for decriminalization of weed, than the justification defined in this excellent article by David Sirota from Salon. This is the best, short and sweet, summation of an indefensible denial argument.
Title: Making the case for marijuana
This article is such an important point of view, one that I share wholeheartedly ~ Our laws related to marijuana are doing more harm than good. David Sirota adds this poignant point to drive home the message:

Last week, students at 80 colleges asked their schools to reduce penalties for marijuana possession so that they are no greater than penalties for alcohol possession. It’s a request with safety in mind: According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, alcohol use by college kids contributes to roughly 1,700 deaths, 600,000 injuries and 97,000 sexual assaults every year. By contrast, “The use of marijuana itself has not been found to contribute to any deaths, there has never been a single fatal marijuana overdose in history (and) all objective research on marijuana has also concluded that it does not contribute to injuries, assaults, sexual abuse, or violent or aggressive behavior,” as the group Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recreation notes.

“It’s time we stop driving students to drink and let them make the rational, safer choice to use marijuana,” said one student.

Please read, bookmark and social network: Making the case for marijuana

For over two years Reefer Poker have been one of the top performing poker rooms on the Merge Network and were amongst the first brands to build a poker community featuring the popular Merge poker room management system. Around 40,000 players have registered to play Merge through Reefer Poker and from the beginning the relationship has been super-symbiotic, as the two teams collaborated on the development of versions 2 through versions 4. The evolution of a brilliant poker platform has been realized, and now the stakes are about to be raised, in a major way, since the network is preparing to welcome it’s 40th poker brand, and this time the communities and player base of that brand, is larger by far than the original sum of the previous 36 brands.
Merge Network, Reefer Poker and every other brand on the system is about to experience a quantum leap forward in player activity, player registration, and an overall increase in the amount of money played, with more higher limit cash games and way more variety of cash tournaments.
The level of excitement at Reefer Poker is palpable as the group have planned some very exciting announcements as we approach 4/20. We promise to continue trying to blow people’s minds with our strategic marketing.
To date our most new players in a single month was approximately 5,000, which unto itself may be a record considering the low amount of money spent to win those players from our competitors, in a very tough market during competitive times, reeferpoker.com wins hands down in it’s word of mouth, social/guerilla marketing.
After more than 2 years building the Reefer Poker brand our community has reached a steady maturity and earned a great reputation for fairness and honesty with our partners and customers. At the end of the day it’s been a great steady stream of fun poker but the best part has been the sub-niche “reefer”, a very unique and loyal affinity group. We are the poker room for pot heads, there’s no other game online for weed smokers and the sheer number of poker playing weed smokers, just in California alone, let alone the entire web population, is staggering! It’s a huge niche inside a 100 million player market but it’s also the most well established sub-culture, super hip society (this moment), due to positive portrayals in movies, pop culture icons, athletes and celebrities who smoke weed, caused the overall sentiment surrounding reefer to shift, at a time of great legal change in the U.S. market, at a time with medical marijuana in 15 states and California voting to legalize altogether. So the reality is, for the purpose of developing a massive online community, that the cannabis culture demographic is the most ideal group on the planet.
Reefer Poker has reached a size where it is self-sustainable due to the loyalty amongst our members. We love our poker community, love playing poker with you, and love being part of the Merge Network.
Smoke the Competition!
www.reeferpoker.com

Humboldt County along with Mendocino and Trinity Counties make up the “Emerald Triangle” famous for the cultivation of awesome weed. In an article by David Samuels of The New Yorker called “Dr. Kush ~ How medical marijuana is transforming the pot industry,” he described Humboldt County as:

“the heartland of high-grade marijuana farming in California”.

A 2009 report estimates that $35.8 billion of pot was grown in the United States in 2006, with California being the top producing state. The same report said California produced $13.6 billion in marijuana in 2006. It has been estimated that 30,000 residents in Humboldt County are involved in some aspect of the marijuana industry. Prohibition has been the key financial factor in the success of cannabis cultivation in the Emerald triangle, due to more lenient law enforcement and a symbiotic relationship between the citizen/growers and the governing establishment. For decades this was the best place in America for marijuana growers to learn and practice their vocation, this is where the great hybrid cannabis strains were first born and bred, and this knowledge has transferred to all corners of the earth.
In a post financial crisis economy where jobs and good opportunities are increasingly difficult to find, it makes perfect sense that cannabis cultivation will become a growth industry in California. Once it becomes legal there could be an explosion of grass growers all over the state of California. Consider this year’s opening of iGrow in Oakland the 15,000-square-foot Costco of grow stores; it has everything you could possibly need for medical marijuana cultivation under one roof, even things you did not know you needed, like bat fertilizer. Members of the “Grow Squad” are there to help and the only membership card required is a pot card which is easier to get than a library card.

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“Hemp is of first necessity to the wealth & protection of the country.”
-Thomas Jefferson
In today’s world there’s less and less excuse for ignorance, due to the proliferation of information, ease of access to research and the amount of specific data freely available. So how could any elected official defend prohibiting a plant which can’t be stopped, doesn’t cause harm to anyone and does not create any adverse affect on society? How could anyone allow law enforcement to continue causing harm to innocent people and create an enormous burden on our society? Consider all the criminals being created by enforcement of laws that can’t be upheld? The key word in this travesty is “en-force-ment” and it’s the same word that makes the very idea fascist because you can’t force people to stop enjoying a natural herb that causes no harm to anyone.
Perhaps one of the more important aspects to the marijuana debate is the topic of Hemp. In some ways it’s unfortunate that this plant species is incriminated in the same prohibition as cannabis but possibly the fear is that farmers allowed to grow one could easily grow the other and say that they weren’t aware that the seeds were mixed. Or maybe it’s a conspiracy like so many people suspect. Whatever the case, it’s high time to liberate marijuana and to help us do that let’s put Hemp on the stand to tell her side of the story. Following is a compilation of data provided by Pat McGrowen of Kentucky, from the TPM Cafe Blog in which he published an excellent paper titled:
The Recreational and Industrial Benefits of Cannabis
With the initiative on the ballot in California regarding the legalization of marijuana. I hope that it would also include the legalization of hemp as well. There are many beneficial aspects to legalizing marijuana such as decrease in crime, increase in tax revenue, and reduction in state spending and a huge boom to tourism just to name a few. There are also enormous benefits to hemp.

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