Legislature working on housing, cool schools, marijuana
JAMM AQUINO / JAQUINO@STARADVERTISER.COM
Lawmakers are negotiating details on cooling the schools.
Hawaii lawmakers are rushing to reach final agreements on hundreds of bills as the Legislature heads into the final two weeks of the 2016 session.
They’re still working on reaching agreements on housing the homeless and funding affordable housing. They’re also negotiating details on regulating medical marijuana and cooling the schools. A bill that would prevent insurers and health care providers from discriminating against transgender patients is still alive.
A number of proposals have died, including a bill to figure out how much marijuana a driver could safely consume before driving. A bill that would ban gay conversion therapy for minors also died.
The legislative session ends May 7.
17 responses to “Legislature working on housing, cool schools, marijuana”
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That’s why the kids wear shorts, T-shirts, and slippers.
And yet they still sweat all day from the extreme heat.
Hawaii lawmakers are still working on reaching agreements.Come on now, our lawmakers haven’t really worked a day since they got elected. Oh wait, they did extend the rail tax?
I thought they were through regulating medical marijuana. What they real want is increased tax money, while over regulating medical marijuana. A lot of the Legislators are trying to placate the numerous members of the public who have become paranoid about medical marijuana, largely due to rhetoric by law enforcement and other interest groups.
A billion dollar marijuana plantation industry is about to be launched next to which both pine and sugar will look like back yard gardening – –
and the good old boy insiders are scrambling to be first in line with their rice bowls, all in anticipation that the current medical marijuana farce will soon give way to legalizing recreational dope use … just as it was intended to.
And how many young adolescent lives will be destroyed so that the privileged few can rake in a bundle? They don’t know and they don’t care.
We may not have the BEST legislators money can buy, but make no mistake: they and their votes HAVE been bought and paid for by a torrent of under the table mainland cash.
How many adolescent lives will be destroyed if marijuana becomes legal? answer is simply ZERO! Many adolescent lives will be saved as they will not fall into the prison industrial net work that many so called conservatives support. Shame phony conservatives do not support conservative principles.
That is not the case in Colorado where dope use among adolescents is way up.
The fight against marijuana in schools is not without concern for any and all students dealing with medical issues, but about the safety and well-being of all students. “School boards do not lack compassion for students that benefit from medical marijuana,” Jane Urschel, a member of the Colorado Association of School Boards, told the Associated Press. “How do you begin to deal with those difficulties in different venues?”
The federal government, anxious to involve itself in progressive issues like LGBT rights in public schools, backs off when it comes to marijuana in or near schools, pushing it back on individual states.
“Marijuana use, cultivation and possession remain illegal under federal law,” states Pillsburylaw.com. “However, in response to several states’ legalization of medical and recreational marijuana, the DOJ has relaxed its policy on federal prosecution of marijuana crimes.”
“Poor old Colorado; if their schools allow edible marijuana on school grounds, they are simply out of their gourds,” said Carla Lowe, the founder of CALM, Citizens Against Legalizing Marijuana.
Lowe has been fighting legalized pot in her home state of California and the rest of the U.S. for 40 years. “‘If we could just get it accepted as a medicine’ has long been the plea — but that has always been a red herring,” said Lowe. “The potency of the drug has been increasing right alongside the movement to legalize it.”
Lowe is concerned with the uptick of THC in the product, as well as its long-term effects.
“The problem is that cannabis is a complex drug,” she told LifeZette. “There are over 400 chemicals in it. THC, the psychoactive chemical in marijuana, is fat-soluble, so it leaves the bloodstream very quickly. But it then circulates the body until it finds a fatty organ, where it begins to very slowly break down. The brain and the sex organs are the fattiest organs, so they are natural repositories for THC. It takes 25 years for the human brain to be fully developed. Kids are smoking pot, and it’s affecting their developing brains.”
Lowe says the rise in potency is startling. When she began fighting legalizing pot in California years ago, the level of THC in the product was about one-half to one percent. Now, she says, the potency of street pot in California is 18 to 24 percent THC.
LifeZette asked Lowe to weigh in on another pot issue some states are facing — the proximity of pot shops to public schools.
More than two dozen schools in Denver are now closer than 1,000 feet to shops selling medical or recreational marijuana, as the Denver Post has reported.
This has some city council members worried.
“We are making this attractive to kids and young people,” Gina Carbone, a founder of Smart Colorado, which advocates protections for kids against pot, told the Post. “The city should do all it can to keep this away from kids.”
Of Colorado’s proximity quagmire, Lowe said, “It was well-documented that there were more pot shops than Starbucks in California, and Colorado is heading the same way, it seems,” she said. “This is just unconscionable. The problem with the pot shops is that anyone can go in and buy a bag of weed for any reason. Then they sell it to the kids; they cut it and sell it to the kids who are literally [a few] feet away from them.”
// http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/04/18/colorado-is-headed-down-tubes.html?intcmp=ob_article_footer_text&intcmp=obnetwork //
If the classroom reaches a certain ambient temperature send them home. Simple. What’s the problem.
It’s not that simple who will watch them if both parents work?
You are correct and the schools may not release minor children except to a parent or authorized agent (lower grades) or only upon written or verbal permission. (high school)
Insulate the ceilings and put refrlective foil on windows and it will not get so hot.
The legislature is “working”? Really, for the quality of their output I would say you have vastly over stated their value. At this point all they are doing is trading and seeing how much they can take home to their districts so we re-elect this bunch of fools again and again and again.
“A number of proposals have died, including a bill to figure out how much marijuana a driver could safely consume before driving. A bill that would ban gay conversion therapy for minors also died.”
Or have not even made it to the floor to be discussed.
Ruderman introduced the bill — SB 2753 – capping the time a lawmaker can stay in the same office at 12 consecutive years.
SB 2754 would allow voters to get initiatives on the ballot without going through the Legislature.
The Hawaii Legislative Term Limits Amendment may appear on the November 8, 2016 ballot in Hawaii as a legislatively referred
constitutional amendment.
Whether it may or may NOT appear depends on how they ‘feel’ when the time comes……
The best way to make housing more affordable is to stop the demand for housing by stopping all in-migration per emergency decree of the president. No other pacific “paradise” island allows such in-migration.
Do you know how many have come in due to the president’s decree? Look it up and get back to me.
Rushing to do nothing.