Chaos in San Diego's Medical Marijuana Community (tags)
A report on conflicts within San Diego's medical marijuana community between the grass-roots Americans for Safe Access (ASA) and the dispensaries' trade group, Patients' Care Association (PCA) — and conflicts within the PCA between locals and an out-of-town organizer they accuse of trying to take over.
A Few Minutes with the Real Andy Rooney (tags)
Zenger's Newsmagazine associate editor Leo E. Laurence recalls his meeting with the late Andy Rooney, longtime commentator for the CBS news show "60 Minutes." They encountered each other at the 1996 Republican Convention in San Diego and Rooney personally apologized for his infamous on-air homophobic slur six years earlier.
Queer-Oriented Obelisk Store Shut Down by Hellish Fire (tags)
Obelisk Bookstore, a major Queer-oriented business on University Avenue in Hillcrest, burned on Wednesday, July 6. Three other businesses in the building were burned out, as were 15 apartments on the second and third floors. Miraculously, none of the residents were injured because none of them were home at the time. Leo E. Laurence, J.D., associate editor of Zenger's Newsmagazine and a former volunteer firefighter in Tijuana, got photos of firefighters containing the blaze (they weren't able to save the Obelisk building but WERE miraculously able to keep the fire from spreading to the rest of the block), the true extent of the damage (visible only from the alley behind the building) and the condition of Obelisk's stock after the fire.
Hemp Music Festival in Balboa Park (tags)
While music festivals supporting medical marijuana are common in southern California, it was rare when longtime cannabis (marijuana) activist James Dean Stacy produced an event focused on hemp in Balboa Park on July 9. ?Hemp is the cousin of cannabis that has no THC in it,? explained Stacy.
Handicapped Senior Citizen Bicycles Cross-Country … on Oxygen (tags)
Mark Junge of Cheyenne has white hair, but on August 12 he appeared as fit as a teenager in San Diego’s Embarcadero Park behind the Convention Center with his specially equipped $6,000 bicycle. Junge had just completed a 650-mile ride from San Francisco to the Tijuana border, clocking nearly 7,200 miles on four, long-distance trips in four years despite needing oxygen, which he gets from a specially built piece of equipment.