Sweet success

Well I'm back on the road tomorrow afternoon, heading back to Noho after a short but successful trip. I found a lovely house here for less than I'm paying up north for a tiny apartment and a quick check of the local scene appears promising. The new town is pretty small but it feels sort of like Noho in the old days. It has an amazing amount of cultural offerings for such a tiny population and the town seems to support an wide range of businesses including an extraordinary number of lawyers. Most importantly for me, I'm only a block away from a pretty nice river. I never feel quite right if I'm not near a body of water.

Posting should be back to normal by tomorrow night but meanwhile I have a lot to do tomorrow morning so I leave you with this story on Chronic Candy, a marijuana-flavored lollipop and gumdrop line that claims "every lick is like taking a hit," that has NYC lawmakers in a snit.

Councilwoman Margarita Lopez, chairwoman of the Substance Abuse Committee said of the sweets, "To produce this kind of candy is sickening. This is targeted to children." She promised to sponsor a council resolution condemning the confection.

The candy, although its marketing scheme mimics the cannabis market, doesn't actually contain any psychoactive ingredients. It's a hemp based product and the only buzz it produces comes from sugar. However that doesn't stop the politicians from taking a hard line.

Councilman Bill Perkins (D-Harlem) was quoted as saying that the candies are "clearly perpetuating a culture that is unhealthy. It is unacceptable and needs to be taken off the market."

Maybe someone should tell him the courts recently ruled that hemp food is a legal product and it seems a bit disingenuous to be railing about their marketing in light of sales campaigns using sex to sell everything from cars to sneakers to toothpaste, fast food promotions for really unhealthy food and of course the ads that glamorize cigarette and alcohol consumption.