The 2016 Cannabis Business Summit and Expo is expected to draw thousands of entrepreneurs, speakers, and vendors to Oakland in June. The Expo will run from June 20 to 22 at the Oakland Marriott City Center. It’s part networking event, part classroom, and part sales floor, billed as the “ONLY national event where you will have an opportunity to meet ...

A new exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California is bringing the wonders of marijuana to a wider audience, and doing it in artistic style. Altered State: Marijuana in California is easily the biggest – and possibly the first – museum exhibit in America to focus exclusively on cannabis. The exhibit in the museum’s Great Hall starts April 16, runs ...

A California company could be the first to develop a breathalyzer device that measures marijuana intoxication in motorists. Hound Labs Inc., based in Oakland, is working with researchers at the University of California, Berkley to design a workable breathalyzer that could measure THC levels. Hound Labs isn’t the only company racing to produce such a device, but they say they ...

Oakland, long a battleground in California’s war over pot, may soon get a new medical marijuana dispensary. City officials recently gave the go-ahead to a dispensary that would be run by the Tidewater Patients Group, an organization tied to a former aide to an Oakland City Council member. The shop would be located at 3007 Telegraph Ave., in the Pill ...

Oakland’s medical marijuana industry has expanded. With one new dispensary opening its doors, the city now has six in operation. Magnolia Wellness, a retail pot shop in the Acorn Industrial neighborhood, opened to the public Aug. 1. It joins five other dispensaries in the city: Harborside Health Center in East Oakland, Purple Heart Patient Center in the Jack London Square ...

There are many reasons marijuana reformers want to legalize the drug. But maybe the biggest is to cut racial disparities in arrest rates. It’s a big problem. African Americans across California regularly report racial profiling by police, and pot is at the center of it. This leads to massively overcrowded prisons, unnecessary incarceration, and permanent criminal records that have ruined ...

Police in multiple parts of California are rolling out the nation’s first “marijuana breathalyzers” in a unique experiment to gauge how well they pinpoint impaired drivers. Multiple high-quality studies have confirmed that driving while high on cannabis is relatively safe – at least in comparison with alcohol, which dramatically increases the risk of collision, injury, and death. High driving is ...

In what could mark a major development for medical marijuana patients, a Northern California hospital could soon allow patients to openly use pot as medicine. Officials at Marin General Hospital in Kentfield, Cal., are considering a policy change that would make Marin the first mainstream healthcare facility in California to officially allow marijuana use on its campus. Members of the ...

Marijuana users in San Diego could soon be paying more for the drug if voters approve a local tax on the industry. The plan, sponsored by City Council Member Mark Kersey, proposes a sales tax on all cannabis businesses. If Kersey succeeds with his ordinance, voters would decide the issue in a future election. Kersey’s tax would start at 8 ...

The world’s “Biggest Pot Shop,” a Bay Area cultural and political staple, has escaped the claws of the federal government yet again. Federal officials agreed in May to give up their four-year attempt to shutter Harborside Health Center of Oakland, a shop with more than 100,000 patients. Local leaders announced the decision early in the month. The news was music ...