[420 Girl]

With promises of "celebrity patients medicating," an "enticing vapor lounge" and "hash and kief smoking bars," the International Cannabis & Hemp Expo comes to the Cow Palace in San Francisco this weekend.

The Saturday-Sunday event is just the latest in California marijuana trade shows that underscore the state's growing pot movement and its entrepreneurial sizzle. This time, the event is billed as "the largest media blitz for public awareness" of marijuana issues undertaken in the Bay Area.

Months after a medical pot conference drew thousands of people to the Los Angeles Convention Center, this weekend's expo will offer a first-ever on-site convention smoking and sampling room for medical pot patients.

The "patient medicating tent" will be a visual signature for a conference focusing on the medical marijuana industry, the hemp trade and the political push for a November ballot measure to legalize marijuana for all adults over 21.

Speakers will include Dennis Peron, an advocate for AIDS and HIV patients who was an architect of Proposition 215, which legalized medical marijuana use in California in 1996.

And there will be Richard Lee, president and horticulture professor at Oakland's renowned marijuana trade school, Oaksterdam University. Lee's pot enterprises donated nearly $1.3 million to the petition drive that qualified the 2010 initiative that seeks to legalize, tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol.

http://www.420magazine.com/forums/in...dia-blitz.html