DdC

CNBC Marijuana Inc. Lifts The Lid on Weed Business
Posted by CN Staff on January 22, 2009 at 05:16:51 PT
By David Hinckley Source: Daily News USA

Don't worry that you're having a weed-induced flashback, dude, if you think there's something familiar about Trish Regan's CNBC report Thursday night on the American marijuana industry. Lisa Ling reported the same story about two months ago on the National Geographic channel.

But a certain amount of overlap doesn't diminish Regan's solid feature, which focuses on Mendocino County, Calif, where entrepreneurs grow marijuana the way Washington, D.C., grows cherry trees.
cannabisnews.com: CNBC Marijuana Inc. Lifts The Lid on Weed Business

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OldMan&TheWeed

Thanks for the reminder.

I'm curious to see their angle. From the previews it looks as if their focus will be much narrower than was NatGeo's.



CNBC Originals-CNBC Originals - Marijuana Inc: Inside America's Pot Industry - AOL Video

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Nintey-three percent of what I say is brilliant, factual information and seven percent is complete bullshit. Have fun deciding which is which.

OldMan&TheWeed

They are about to have a live debate between a legalization advocate and a former head of the DEA.

Let's see how good the legalization advocate is, or will he be a straw man?

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Nintey-three percent of what I say is brilliant, factual information and seven percent is complete bullshit. Have fun deciding which is which.

OldMan&TheWeed

It's on NOW!

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Nintey-three percent of what I say is brilliant, factual information and seven percent is complete bullshit. Have fun deciding which is which.

OldMan&TheWeed

The CNBC site has a poll asking viewers if they favor the decriminalization of marijuana use.

Cast your vote here:

Marijuana Inc: Inside America?s Pot Industry, Poll, Legal, Legislation, Decriminalization, Usage, International, Business, Government, Drug, Medicine - CNBC.com

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Nintey-three percent of what I say is brilliant, factual information and seven percent is complete bullshit. Have fun deciding which is which.

OldMan&TheWeed

A Review I found at MPP:

CNBC’S Marijuana Blind Spots

by Bruce Mirken

Last night, CNBC aired its much-touted documentary, “Marijuana Inc.” It was a decidedly mixed bag.

It was a portrait of an industry that is huge and thriving, despite the energetic efforts of assorted law enforcement agencies to “eradicate” it. No sane person could watch the program and come away thinking that present government efforts to curb marijuana production or use are working. With California’s Mendocino County as the focus, the crashing failure of the war on marijuana was on vivid display.

What was missing was context. Marijuana consumers, for example, were conspicuously absent. It’s hard to imagine any business channel devoting an hour to, say, Apple Computer, without spending at least a few minutes on why so many consumers are fiercely loyal to their iMacs and iPods, and what needs they fill that other products don’t. Instead we got lingering, almost pornographic shots of marijuana edibles at an Oakland dispensary but no sense of who the patients are who purchase these products — much less of the vast volume of research showing marijuana’s medicinal benefits. Bear in mind that much of that research was conducted just 20 minutes from where they were filming.

Another missing piece of context: Mendocino is a world-renowned producer of not one but two psychoactive drugs. Literally right alongside the illicit marijuana industry is a licensed, legal, regulated wine industry. And it’s a large industry: The county tourism site lists 64 wineries in a county with just 88,000 people.

These wineries produce a drug that, compared to marijuana, is more addictive, massively more toxic, and orders of magnitude more likely to make users violent or aggressive. Yet this industry has virtually none of the problems — violence, environmental damage, etc. — that the show ascribed to the illegal marijuana trade. The producers literally had to drive by vineyards to reach some of the locations where they shot, so failure to acknowledge this essential piece of context seems to have required a conscious effort to look the other way.

CNBC’S Marijuana Blind Spots — MPP Blog

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Nintey-three percent of what I say is brilliant, factual information and seven percent is complete bullshit. Have fun deciding which is which.

OldMan&TheWeed

If you missed it you can view it here:

Hulu - CNBC Originals: Marijuana Inc. - Watch the full episode now.

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Nintey-three percent of what I say is brilliant, factual information and seven percent is complete bullshit. Have fun deciding which is which.

Hedons

President Obama hears you loud and clear... but still isn't looking promising in the least... see underlined section.

-Hedons



Privacy, Potheads Challenge Obama Tech Team

Reuters
Tuesday, January 27, 2009 8:25 AM

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama plans to use cutting-edge Internet tools to make the U.S. government more responsive but he'll have to overcome creaky equipment, cumbersome regulations and potential embarrassment.

Just ask Colleen Graffy, the Bush administration official whose Twitter posts about duty-free shopping and rented swimsuits during a State Department trip to Iceland drew widespread ridicule last month.

"This is why diplomats stay off the record and boring," Graffy said in a later Twitter post.

Chatty diplomats will be only one of worries Obama's administration as it tries to drag the massive federal bureaucracy into the 21st century.

Along with clunky computers and outdated rules, there is the obvious challenge of maintaining presidential dignity in the face of an often unruly online discourse.

Obama's first week in the White House gave a taste of the difficulties to come.

The administration unveiled a sleek new website the moment Obama became president, then failed to update it for days.

Staffers settling in to the White House found their Web browsers filtered and their online chat software disabled. Even Obama himself battled to hold on to his beloved Blackberry e-mail device because of hacking concerns.

On Monday, White House e-mail went down.

David Almacy can understand. The former White House Internet director arrived in 2005 with a long list of upgrades for the Bush administration's staid online presence.

"Everybody's looking at me and smirking," Almacy said of his first meeting. "They said, 'It would be great, but we can't do any of that.'"

White House staff, accustomed during the campaign to using the latest communications tools to rally supporters, are likely to find their hands tied by the same regulations, experts say. Among them:

# Administrators who delete inappropriate comments on government websites might run afoul of the First Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech.

# Federal contracting rules designed to ensure fairness could delay software upgrades and other improvements.

# Online video could be hampered by a 1973 law that requires the government to provide real-time access, such as closed captioning, for disabled users.

# A 2000 privacy rule that prohibits government websites from collecting and saving users' personal information limits their ability to customize content for individual visitors.

# A 1978 law requires most White House communications to be archived, leading the Obama White House to block Instant Messaging rather than worry about any embarrassments that might come from freewheeling online chats.

# That law also requires Web pages to be archived every time they are changed.

# Government websites must link to outside sites carefully, to prevent the appearance of an endorsement.

# For these reasons, the White House may shy away from setting up a presence on popular outside sites like Facebook, which played a large role in the campaign.

NO PLANS FOR FACEBOOK

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said there are no immediate plans to set up a Facebook page.

But the administration has managed to take some innovative technological steps.

On Saturday, the White House posted Obama's weekly video address on YouTube, accompanied by a transcript.

Because the video was not hosted on government servers, viewers were able to leave comments and moderate those left by others. Irrelevant and critical comments were shunted to the bottom of the pile.

Obama has also invited citizens to comment on pending legislation before he signs it into law.

That approach can deliver unexpected results. Before Obama took office, visitors to the transition website were asked to submit suggestions for a "Citizen's Briefing Book" that Obama would read once he settled in to the Oval Office.

The most popular item, with 92,000 votes: "Ending marijuana prohibition." The third most popular? "Stop using federal resources to undermine states' medicinal marijuana laws."

Pro-pot people may have gotten the president's attention, but in the end that may not matter.

"President Obama does not support the legalization of marijuana," spokeswoman Psaki said.

© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved

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New and improved! Now with flushable applicator.

OldMan&TheWeed

The Country Needs A Bong Break:

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Nintey-three percent of what I say is brilliant, factual information and seven percent is complete bullshit. Have fun deciding which is which.

Dandaweedman

Thanks for the link

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Roach

some things never change.

Dan from Florida says:
I am shocked at the amount of people affiliated with this Federally illegal drug! Why is the DEA not really putting up a stand? I'm hoping for our young people, of whom may glamorize this drug,that they too will not be subjected to the harm that marijuana causes mentally and physically. How can some of the residents of this community think that marijuana is harmless?


Barb from Missouri says:
I pray that this is never legalized. It would cause even more problems than we have already. To leagalize this would be like legalizing a narcotic drug. We already have enough problems with people abusing all kinds of drugs.

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לזיין את הקופים

kameelyun

"How fortunate for leaders, that the masses do not think." - Adolf Hitler

Then again, I think that "Dan from FL" and "Barb from Missouri" hold a minority view, if the polls/initiatives at change.org and change.gov are any sort of indicator at all. And didn't CNBC have an online poll in which 98% voted in favor of legalization?

Still, it's sad that some people are so brainwashed into being so anti-freedom and "the DEA is there to protect us..."

I go to bed every night with such a warm and fuzzy feeling that the DEA is looking out for my health and well-being...

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"The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off." - Gloria Steinem

kameelyun

I can't even watch it now, seeing a gang of armed agents with their guns cocked, searching a house for cannabis, fills my whole body for such a rage and hatred for American authority...

THIS is the country to whose flag I pledged allegiance every fucking school day from K - 12 ???

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"The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off." - Gloria Steinem

patriot

Me too.

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A true patriot is always ready to stand up against his own government.

We can't be using plants that come from the Lord for beneficial purposes. Now hurry up, or we'll be late for church.

The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.-Adolf Hitler

Legalizing marijuana won't grow our economy-Barack Hussein Obama 2009

Man in Black

I watched it, from what I remember it wasn't terrible. Of course I think Trish Regan is hot though. I thought it was funny when they had her smelling the different strains and she said that one smelled better than the other. Makes me think she might have had a few tokes back during her journalism school days

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When I was arrested I was dressed in black.