WHY SHOULD LEGISLATORS FAVOR LEGAL POT BUSINESSES?

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 25, 2025, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“WHY SHOULD LEGISLATORS FAVOR LEGAL POT BUSINESSES?”

 

The ill effects of cannabis use have been well known for generations: spaced out behavior, impaired judgment, clouded or heightened senses depending on your personal biology, a distorted sense of time, slowed reactions, lower motor skills, reduced inhibitions, less mental focus and memory.

 

That’s only part of the list, which some claim is balanced by the relaxing effects of marijuana and its partially proven ability to ease the pain caused by some medical treatments.

 

Despite all the harms of marijuana, state legislators have steadily pushed increases in its use ever since recreational pot sales became legal via a 2016 ballot initiative.

 

Now the state Assembly has passed yet another measure to ease life for pot shops. If passed by the state Senate, this one, known as AB 564 and sponsored by Democratic Assemblyman Matt Haney of San Francisco, would lower the state excise tax on legal pot from the 19 percent it automatically reached on July 1 back to 15 percent at least until 2030, squashing a potential future increase to 25 percent.

 

This measure is designed to protect legal pot prices from being undercut by untaxed illegal growers whose product is widely available informally. It comes just one year after legislators also tried to help legal pot use by allowing Amsterdam-style lounges that could serve food and drinks along with varieties of the weed.

 

The real question here is what legalized pot has done to deserve the most-favored-business status informally bestowed upon it by lawmakers. No one has produced any information to refute the long list of harmful pot effects.

 

And two new studies originating in Northern California raise new questions about continued recreational sales of the weed.

 

One, co-authored by researchers from the Kaiser Permanente health care service and Oakland’s regional Public Health Institute, found that teenagers living in areas with more cannabis stores experience significantly higher rates of mental health issues.

 

The study used data from nearly 96,000 insured adolescents, finding that those in cities or counties without pot stores are significantly less likely to have been diagnosed with psychotic disorders. Greater retail activity and availability – regardless of laws prohibiting sales to anyone under 18 – translated to higher rates of diagnosed psychotic, depressive and anxiety disorders.

 

“This study reinforces the importance of where and how cannabis is sold in protecting adolescent mental health,” said Lynn Silver MD, a program director at the Public Health Institute.

 

Almost simultaneously, a UC San Francisco study determined that long-term cannabis use is linked to a greater likelihood of developing heart disease. The risk stems from reduced blood vessel function, said the study, published in the American Medical Association’s journal Cardiology.

 

The study involved 55 “outwardly healthy persons between 18 and 50.” It revealed that eating edible marijuana products like gummies has the same impact on heart health as smoking pot. Study subjects had been consuming marijuana in one form or another at least three times weekly for a year or more.

 

All of these regular users were found to have “decreased vascular function,” comparable to regular smokers. Their blood vessel capacity was roughly half as high as among non-cannabis users.

 

We already knew marijuana use was harmful for bunches of reasons, but direct proof of significant long-term physical harm has been hard to locate.

 

The findings reinforce a year-old study from the American Psychiatric Assn. warning that individuals who want to remain mentally sharp in old age (defined as 65 and older) should not smoke pot regularly, nor eat pot-laced products from chocolates to layer cakes.

 

The real question here is not whether marijuana use is harmful. That’s been known for at least a century, even if some details are only now emerging.

 

The real question is why California legislators are so supportive of this harmful industry, treating it with kid gloves even as other drugs get harsh treatment.

 

Yes, campaign contributions by pot-linked labor unions like the United Food and Commercial Workers no doubt play a role in bringing near-unanimous votes on laws this industry wants passed. So do tax receipts. But legislators should be able to resist those pressures.

 

Which leads to another question: What drug are legislators using when they give sustained favored status to an industry that does much more harm than good?

 

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Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com

DEMOS IGNORE STARTLING POLL RESULT

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 25, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
        “DEMOS IGNORE STARTLING POLL RESULT”

 

        The results of the latest polling of the ongoing race for the U.S. Senate seat now occupied by veteran Democrat Dianne Feinstein were startling – but eminently predictable.

 

        As early as mid-May, this column forecast that the entry of even one Republican into the contest would throw Democratic thinking about the race into a trash can. It has.

 

        Yes, UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies surveys often deviate somewhat from the actual election results, but they provide a general idea of what’s going on.

 

        And so, even as the three Democratic Congress members seeking to replace Feinstein campaigned with happy faces at their party’s springtime state convention in Los Angeles, the poll was demolishing one of their cherished presumptions – the notion that the primary election set for early next March would reduce the field from three Democrats to two, and no Republican need apply.

 

        Now it may be time for one or two of those congresspeople – Adam Schiff of Burbank, Katie Porter of Irvine and Barbara Lee of Oakland – to swallow some pride and rethink their prospects.

 

        For the latest Berkeley IGS polling actually had the first Republican into the field, Eric Early, in the lead. This was before retired baseball star Steve Garvey, 74, indicated interest in a GOP bid.

 

        Early drew support from 19 percent of likely California voters in the poll to 18 for Porter, 14 for Schiff and 9 for Lee.

 

        The three Democrats represent diverse constituencies in the Democratic Party, but all look quite similar when compared to Early, a Donald Trump supporter who lost handily to Schiff in a 2020 congressional contest, or the longtime conservative Garvey.

 

        It’s not that Early has any more appeal among Californians now than he did in his several previous futile campaigns. But his entry into this race gave loyal Republicans someone to vote for other than a Democrat, which few wanted to do.

 

        Now, if the three Democrats want to assure a Democrat-on-Democrat race for the Senate, like the ones California saw in 2016 and 2018, they may have to make sure Garvey runs and fractures the GOP vote.

 

        That would lessen the total for either Republican, much as Democrats are now splintered among their three choices. Which means there still is a chance at an all-Democratic runoff election in November 2024.

 

        If there should be just one GOP entrant, the primary becomes a dead serious battle between the three Democrats for what could be only remaining one slot on the general election ballot, rather than the two they’ve expected.

 

        Would that leave Schiff – even more of a Democratic hero now that Republicans in Congress censured him than when he was merely prominent for ramrodding two Trump impeachments through the House of Representatives –  the lone Democrat? His impeachment work won support from many Democrats and the undying enmity of Trump’s base, which remains loyal to the ex-president through his many legal troubles, including a jury finding him financially liable for sexually manhandling a woman in a department store changing room and defaming her afterward.

 

        Would it be Porter, who won reelection last year by a narrow margin after redistricting made her Orange County district less friendly than before to Democrats? Porter will get support from many of the women who make up the majority of Democratic voters and want the seat to go to a youthful liberal female who might serve for decades.

 

        Would it be Lee, who could give California a Black woman senator to essentially replace Vice President Kamala Harris, who gave up her Senate seat when she won national office? Lee, best known for her steadfast opposition to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, would likely not serve very long, as at 76, she is just 14 years younger than the apparently age-ravaged Feinstein.

 

        This picture could change not only if Garvey sticks around, but also if Feinstein steps down before her term ends and Gov. Gavin Newsom, as promised, names a Black woman – Lee or someone else – to replace her.

 

        The essence is that Early’s entry and relatively strong initial showing changed things considerably for the three major Democratic candidates, putting a question mark after one of their most cherished scenarios and proving again the folly of being guided by any kind of political assumption.

 

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Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com

STATE VOTING BOSS RIGHT TO RESIST FEDERAL DEMANDS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 25, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
    “STATE VOTING BOSS RIGHT TO RESIST FEDERAL DEMANDS”

Hand over all the information you have on every voter in your state, went the demand from President Trump’s newly appointed Advisory Commission on Electoral Integrity. That included a list of all registered voters’ names, birth dates, party identification and voting histories, plus the last four digits of all voters’ Social Security numbers.

So much for the old-fashioned secret ballot.

So sweeping was the demand that even the commission’s vice chairman and de facto chief – the man who signed the order – said his own state of Kansas would refuse to turn over Social Security numbers to his own commission.

What would the federal government do with all this information, if it were turned in? The commission and that vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, won’t say. But it’s common knowledge that should the data get into demonstrably hackable federal computers, it would be fair game for almost anyone from corporations to foreign powers like Russia, which already has an alleged history of stealing electoral data bases.

This was the second major assault by Trump’s administration on citizen privacy, the first coming when his appointees to the Federal Communications Commission announced in May they plan to rescind previous “net neutrality” rules that prohibit commercial use of customer information held by Internet service providers.

California was the first state to react to the voter information demands, with Secretary of State Alex Padilla announcing the day the demands arrived that he would fill none of them. Within a week, he was joined by the top voting officials of 43 other states, including many considered rock-ribbed Republican red, like Kentucky, Indiana and Mississippi.

Said Padilla, “I will not provide sensitive voter information to a commission that has already inaccurately passed judgment that millions of Californians voted illegally (in 2016). California’s participation would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud made by the President, the vice president and Mr. Kobach.”

His GOP counterpart in Mississippi was more colorful. “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from,” said Delbert Hosemann. Louisiana Republican Tom Schedler added that “The commission has quickly politicized its work by asking for an incredible amount of voter data that I have (always) refused to release.”

Fortunately for voters who could be at risk for identity theft if Padilla and his colleagues complied with commission demands, Kobach’s group (formally headed by Vice President Mike Pence) has no subpoena powers and there is no known penalty for not cooperating. Maybe that’s why Kobach is refusing one of his own demands. It is also true that the Constitution gives each state the power to conduct its own elections.

          But Padilla was probably correct, too, in guessing that Kobach & Co. have already decided what their report (due in mid-2018) will say. He’s the one who spurred Trump to claim that his loss of the popular vote to Hillary Clinton last year was solely because of illegal immigrant voters.

          Neither Trump nor Kobach ever presented evidence for the claim of massive illegal voting, a charge Kobach has made for at least 10 years, since his days as a lawyer for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, long classed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law center.

          As secretary of state, Kobach has tried for years to ferret out illegal aliens voting in Kansas. Wikipedia reports that as of last spring, he had found six cases of illegal voting in his six-plus years in office; all involved double voting, none by undocumented persons.

          As Padilla noted, there is no basis for or proof of claims that massive illegal immigrant voting occurs or ever has. Republicans first made the claim when Democrat Loretta Sanchez in 1996 ousted longtime Orange County GOP Congressman Robert Dornan, one of the biggest upsets ever in California politics. The GOP majority in the House investigated then for electoral irregularities, but found so few even it had to admit the phenomenon was insignificant.

          The bottom line: This is one more form of California resistance to Trump administration attempts at actions that are political anathema here. Resistance has never been more justified than in this case.

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     Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com

RANCHERS COMING AROUND ON GLOBAL WARMING

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 25, 2014, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “RANCHERS COMING AROUND ON GLOBAL WARMING”

          The chorus of global warming deniers has not shrunk. Outcries claiming the entire issue is fraudulent are not going away.

          But realism is also slowly setting in among some California groups that long tried to wish away the issue by claiming any warming that’s happening is strictly a cyclical natural phenomenon.

          California ranchers are now among the first interest groups to realize that like it or not, global warming can no longer be denied with any semblance of accuracy. For very gradually, ranchers are seeing the grasslands they depend upon to feed their cattle begin to shrink and convert naturally to shrub land.

    What’s the difference? Shrubs have a greater ability to withstand wildfires, but cattle don’t like to eat them. This means the more grasslands gradually shift to chaparral-like shrubbery, the more ranchers must spend on hay.

          For consumers, that means more expensive beef, from filet mignon to hamburger.

          It’s not that grassland is disappearing quickly or that the loss is inevitable. But there has already been some acreage lost, mostly in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains and a 2013 study from Duke University and the Environmental Defense Fund concluded that if global warming continues its present trends, it will hike California ranchers’ spending on hay by upwards of $235 million a year within the next half century.

          That time frame is similar to predictions made two years ago by the state Natural Resources Agency, which concluded that if current trends continue (sea level along the California coast having risen eight inches since 1910), as many as 500,000 persons living near beaches and marshes will be threatened with flooding by the end of this century.

          Climate change denial tends to run stronger among political conservatives than others, so an interesting contradiction is arising. For these are usually the same folks who oppose increasing national debt levels for fear of fobbing large burdens onto generations to come. Why, if they don’t want to impose financial burdens on their descendants, do they not mind hitting those same generations with an environmental calamity?

          Maybe because they don’t believe there’s anything humans can do about global warming, which many conservative politicians and writers ascribe to nature. They ignore, though, the hundreds of academic studies that have found increased atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) are associated with higher ambient temperatures.

          Maybe, also, they don’t think a degree or two of difference in average temperatures makes much difference. The once-large and permanent icefields visible from Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park offer some evidence to the contrary: Photographed a century ago at midsummer by the legendary Ansel Adams and others, they are now all but gone. There was barely a glimmer of ice visible from the point last July and there’s less each year. It’s the same at Glacier National Park in Montana, which may now be a misnomer.

          So even if the warming visible on rangelands and high mountain peaks were mostly from natural causes, it is helped along by human activity that produces CO2. Which means today’s adults have an obligation to their children to do whatever they can to contain it.

          True, some other countries and much of America are doing little or nothing about all this. Does that excuse Californians from our responsibility? Meanwhile, plenty of other countries have acted similarly to this state’s cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gases.

          One officerof the California Cattlemen’s Assn., which just over two years ago issued a statement opposing all cap-and-trade legislation, later said in a rangeland conference at UC Davis that climate change (natural or not) is “certainly going to impact all the other natural resources that we’ve worked to steward for so many years.”

          This change of attitude toward climate change from an organization that’s anything but politically liberal was remarkable.

          Whether it presages movement among other interest groups that have consistently fought climate change legislation is an open question. But it demonstrates that ideology can sometimes go out the window when confronted with hard reality.

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        Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net