Medical Marijuana Business Attracts Hedge Funds, Venture Capitalists

Marijuana has been a cash crop for many years in this country. The only problem is that most of that crop had been grown illegally. Now, that medical marijuana is legal in 15 states and the District of Columbia, legalized marijuana has quickly become so popular it is attracting attention from hedge fund managers and [...]

Move over, Big Pharma and Big Oil, Big Marijuana is here

Legalization ‘looking inevitable,’ spokesman says If there’s one group of people who get their way in Washington, it’s lobbyists. Now, advocates of marijuana legalization may have a reason to cheer that political reality: They’re getting their own marijuana lobby group. And just Big Pharma and Big Oil lobby for greater leeway for their businesses, so [...]

Banned marijuana dispensary reopens in Wildomar

A medical marijuana collective engaged in a legal battle against Wildomar re-opened its storefront location Monday in defiance of a citywide ban on dispensaries. The move by the Wildomar Patients Compassionate Group comes a week after the collective filed a legal petition seeking to block the city from enforcing its ban. General Manager William Sump [...]

San Jose union begins organizing pot workers

A major California labor union is organizing medical cannabis workers in Oakland, a move that analysts say will help efforts to legalize marijuana and open the door for the union to organize thousands more workers if state voters pass a measure in November to allow recreational marijuana use by adults. The 26,000-member United Food and [...]

Oakland Lab Creates ‘Low Anxiety’ Pot

One of the nation’s most sophisticated cannabis testing labs has yielded powerful results this spring, isolating a “low-anxiety” strain of the plant by closely tracking the potency of local crops. The strain of medical marijuana from Oakland’s Harborside Health Center is based on findings from the dispensary’s new Steep Hill laboratory. The strain is a [...]

Medical marijuana stores firebombed in Montana

The Billings, Montana, City Council will take up the issue of regulating medical marijuana on Monday night in a meeting expected to be intense in the wake of the firebombings of two of the city’s medical marijuana storefronts in the last two days. The southern Montana city’s dispensaries legally provide marijuana to medical patients who [...]

California To Collect $100 million in Cannabis Taxes This Year

While the State of California begins to debate the consequences of taxing and regulating cannabis for personal use, it’s important to note the state is already taxing and regulating the agricultural product used by 2.9 million Californians monthly. California Board of Equalization official Anita Gore told the Express this week that the board estimates it [...]

Wildomar moves to allow medical marijuana in its city

Once drafted, and if passed by council member vote, the new ordinance would establish Wildomar as the only Southwest Riverside city to allow medical marijuana within its borders. In front of a standing-room-only audience, and after more than two hours of discussion and heated debate, the Wildomar City Council passed a motion during its council [...]

San Bernardino Deputy District Attorney Bruce Brown with marijuana activists

A little brain food for the perpetually Recovering City of Big Bear Lake Council and other prostitutes of the Prison-Industrial Complex

Big Bear’s Out, Aspen’s in Cannabis competition coming to Aspen this spring aims to find out

[ Don't waste your time in the Recovering Big Bear, where the Nazi Republican pigs are stinking, business sucks and attitudes offend visitors.  Big Bear is now devoted to AA and urine samples.  Let's head for Aspen! ] ASPEN, Colo. (AP) — It’s like a beer competition for marijuana. A cannabis festival in Aspen, Colorado, [...]

California Supreme Court rejects medical marijuana limits

The California Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously struck down state limits — and, most likely, local limits, too — on how much marijuana a patient or caregiver can possess or grow for medical purposes. But the state’s highest court revived another part of state law that a lower court had ordered voided, protecting the state’s [...]

Just a reminder to the pig-sucking, brain-dead, flacid, perpetually-Recovering City of Big Bear Lake Council

Paul Chabot would love this commercial: Teens Too Smart To Buy Anti-Drug Ads A kid of about 13 wanders through a house party.  He goes outside where there are a quartet of pot smokers who offer him a joint. He thinks for a moment, then there are all these quick flashes of him with pills, [...]

Lines drawn for legalization of pot

The stakes could rise considerably in 2010 in the argument over marijuana use – and not just for medical purposes. Officials from a group campaigning to put a marijuana-legalization measure before California voters said they have enough signatures to qualify for the 2010 ballot. The possibility of marijuana being legalized in the state has riled [...]

A video to warm the heart of Big Bear’s new “appointed” shill, “Doc” Harris

Another win for Big Alcohol: The Recovering City of Big Bear Lake Council bows to the prison-industrial complex

[ BBOP Comment: There's a related post at Cactus Thorns. Liz, didn't you and your deceased husband once feed yourselves by brokering jailhouse meals?  Still in the business? Greg, enough with the deceitful propaganda.  Your boss, like Assembly candidate Paul Chabot, is developmentally disabled from childhood trauma due, significantly, to the war on drugs.  Direct [...]

63rd District: You need to know Paul Chabot

Paul Chabot,  who is running for California’s 63rd State Assembly District, recently participated in a debate over drug legalization, which included former judge James “Jim” P. Gray of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance. Chabot was damaged in childhood by incompetent parenting and by the war on drugs. While [...]

Czechs Allow 5 Cannabis Plants For Personal Use From 2010

The interim government of the Czech Republic, led  by chief statistician-turned-Prime Minister Jan Fischer, Monday took another step towards making casual marijuana smoking a worry-free affair. Fischer’s cabinet defined what constitutes “small amounts” of cannabis for personal use, clarifying the country’s new penal code that from next year decriminalizes cultivation and possession of the plant [...]

At This School, It’s Marijuana in Every Class

SOUTHFIELD, Mich. — At most colleges, marijuana is very much an extracurricular matter. But at Med Grow Cannabis College, marijuana is the curriculum: the history, the horticulture and the legal how-to’s of Michigan’s new medical marijuana program. “This state needs jobs, and we think medical marijuana can stimulate the state economy with hundreds of jobs [...]

Los Angeles DA Joins Ranks of Drug Cartel Bitches Against Medical Marijuana

It was a petulant fit of pique, certainly entertaining, and potentially hilarious — if safe access for so many medical marijuana patients weren’t hanging in the balance. After things didn’t go his way at Monday’s Los Angeles City Council joint committee meeting, District Attorney Stephen Lawrence (“Steve”) Cooley pronounced Tuesday that he’d keep prosecuting medical [...]

George Will: US ‘probably in the process’ of legalizing marijuana

In the chronicle of America’s war against its marijuana users, conservative columnist George Will may have just earned credit for his own Walter Cronkite moment. Appearing on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, the Pulitzer-winning journalist and longtime icon of America’s political right declared that with President Barack Obama’s new policy which respects [...]

Tim Lynch discusses legalizing medical marijuana on CNN

Medical Marijuana: California Judge Issues Injunction Blocking LA Dispensary Moratorium

A California Superior Court judge ruled Monday that the City of Los Angeles’s moratorium on new medical marijuana dispensaries is invalid and granted a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the ban. The Green Oasis dispensary and a number of other collectives sued the city last month seeking to overturn the moratorium. They argued that the [...]

Feds issue new medical marijuana policy (to Good Ol’ Boy Hoops)

WASHINGTON – Pot-smoking patients or their sanctioned suppliers should not be targeted for federal prosecution in states that allow medical marijuana, prosecutors were told Monday in a new policy memo issued by the Justice Department. Under the policy spelled out in a three-page legal memo, federal prosecutors are being told it is not a good [...]

Pot Dispensaries Sue L.A. Over Moratorium

Medical Marijuana Collectives’ Suit Comes As the City Struggles to Write a New Ordinance. A newly formed association of Los Angeles medical marijuana collectives has challenged the city’s efforts to control dispensaries, claiming in a lawsuit that the 2-year-old moratorium is unconstitutionally vague and that the City Council violated state law when it extended the [...]

5 Things the Corporate Media Don’t Want You to Know About Cannabis

Writing in the journal Science nearly four decades ago, State University of New York sociologist Erich Goode documented the media’s complicity in maintaining cannabis prohibition. He observed: “[T]ests and experiments purporting to demonstrate the ravages of marijuana consumption receive enormous attention from the media, and their findings become accepted as fact by the public.  But [...]

Lawsuit challenges marijuana nuisance ordinance

A civil lawsuit filed September 11 in Ukiah against the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors and Sheriff Tom Allman challenges the nuisance ordinance limiting parcels to no more than 25 marijuana plants. The suit contends the 25 plant per parcel rule contradicts state law, which places no limit on the number of plants a qualified [...]

The Marijuana Ads That ABC, FOX, and CBS Refused to Show You

A look inside a medical cannabis dispensary

Mitzelfelt to reject pot dispensaries

SAN BERNARDINO • County supervisors Tuesday extended the moratorium on medical marijuana dispensaries for up to 10 months while county staff evaluates possible permitting options. No matter the staff recommendation, 1st District Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt said he will reject all proposed dispensaries in unincorporated areas. “County staff are right now studying the land use implications [...]

Medical marijuana plans in motion

Next month, San Bernardino County will begin accepting applications from residents seeking medical marijuana cards. On Tuesday, county supervisors formally adopted an ordinance to distribute cards, which is expected to begin Aug. 14. The county plans to charge patients a $166 annual fee to cover the costs of running the program. Medi-Cal patients will pay [...]

Oakland finds peace with its pot clubs

It is a warm weekday afternoon in uptown Oakland, and all’s quiet on 17th Street, save for the steady revolution of customers in and out of the Coffeeshop Blue Sky. “Just imagine,” said Richard Lee, nodding at the familiar scene, “if you had four liquor outlets in all of Oakland. It’s ridiculous.” Blue Sky is [...]

Medical Pot Users, Growers Can Sue Over Raids

Medical marijuana patients and growers can sue police for illegally raiding their property and destroying their plants, a state appeals court ruled Wednesday. The 2-1 decision by the Third District Court of Appeal in Sacramento was the first in the state to allow a patient or grower to sue claiming that their rights to cultivate [...]

A Call for “A Conversation About the War on Drugs” From Solano County

Solano County Supervisor Barbara Kondylis is quoted today as follows in an article about Solano County’s plans to begin issuing medical marijuana ID cards: “This is too long in coming. (Marijuana) does nothing compared to the harm alcohol causes. It’s time in this country we start having a conversation about the war on drugs.“

Some Reports from the Congressional Research Service

“Mexico’s Drug-Related Violence,” May 27, 2009. “The 2009 Influenza A(H1N1) ‘Swine Flu’ Outbreak: U.S. Responses to Global Human Cases,” May 26, 2009. “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11,” updated May 15, 2009. “USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives After 15 Years: Issues for Congress,” May 27, 2009. “Airport [...]

Comment: Get real, drug czars

ELEVEN years ago, the United Nations pledged to win the war on drugs within a decade. It has failed. At this year’s meeting of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs, held in Vienna in March, there was a two-day session to evaluate the progress since 1998. In his opening remarks, the head of the UN [...]

Under the radar: US Democrats overseas pass marijuana resolution

The Democratic Party Committee Abroad, otherwise known as Democrats Abroad, passed a resolution on April 25 recommending the legalization of marijuana in all 50 states. The news appears to have gone completely unnoticed by all mainstream outlets. The Democrats Abroad are considered a state party by the Democratic National Committee, which affords them eight elected, [...]

Supervisors to discuss next step in medical marijuana law controversy in CLOSED session

The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors will meet in closed session June 2 to discuss its next plan of action following the U.S. Supreme Court‘s refusal to hear its joint lawsuit challenging California’s medical marijuana law.”I assume the board, in its judicious manner, will issue a decision forthwith,” said Burt Southard, spokesman for Board [...]

Josie Gonzales, county supervisor, says she supports medical marijuana program

A day after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the state’s medical marijuana law, a San Bernardino County supervisor indicated Tuesday that she is ready to support the policy. The Board of Supervisors is not scheduled to discuss its next step until June 2, but Supervisor Josie Gonzales told about 40 medical marijuana advocates it would [...]

Michigan Medical Marihuana Program ID Card Applications Now Accepted

(CA) Medical Marijuana No Longer Grounds for License Suspension

The use of medical marijuana can no longer be the sole grounds for losing driving privileges. In a policy revision — or clarification, depending upon who you speak with — the state Department of Motor Vehicles has determined, in writing, that the use of medical marijuana prescribed by a physician is to be treated the [...]