State News

It looks like Californians will have to take a pass on legalizing marijuana until at least 2016. The biggest player in the effort to make weed legal this year is bowing out, saying the funding for a major ballot campaign just isn’t there. That leaves two or three smaller initiatives with little chance of becoming law. The Drug Policy Alliance, ...

California is in the middle of the drought of a century, and water is running low everywhere. The situation is especially bad in the Emerald Triangle, the famed pot-growing region on the North Coast, where marijuana farmers are draining creeks and rivers dry. The local officials who deal with these cultivators have tried to regulate their water use before. But ...

Californians are increasingly ready to legalize weed, yet observers say it’s looking increasingly unlikely that will happen this year. Four petitions are in the works to put legalization on the ballot in the 2014 elections. But the door may be closing on all four of them – and on legalization – for this election cycle. Why? There are a couple ...

Dope lovers by the thousands followed the smell of ganja to the Inland Empire in February, where they gathered for the first of five events around the world sponsored by High Times. The first leg of the 27th annual Cannabis Cup, one of the biggest competitions in the marijuana world, was held Feb. 8-9 in San Bernardino. Competitions pitted cultivators ...

The list of initiatives vying to put legal weed on the state ballot in November continues to grow. This month the office of the California secretary of state announced it had cleared backers of a third petition to begin gathering signatures. The Drug Policy Alliance, which is behind a proposal known as the Control, Regulate and Tax Marijuana Act, was ...

One of four campaigns to legalize weed in California was formally cleared to begin collecting signatures for the 2014 election. The Marijuana Control, Legalization and Revenue Act was given initial approval late last year, but California Secretary of State Debra Bowen made it official Feb. 3. Proponents of the initiative now have until June 30 to collect about 500,000 signatures ...

Marijuana fever may be sweeping the nation, but there’s one place it still hasn’t caught on, and probably won’t, at least not any time soon: the halls of law enforcement. There are police groups that back legalization – most notably LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition). But most mainstream police groups, especially the big, powerful ones, have made it their mission ...

An investigation into illegal trafficking led to the seizure of more than 400 pounds of marijuana along the Arizona border at the end of January, police said. The weed was taken while sheriff’s deputies from San Bernardino County served search warrants in the Mojave Desert in California and Arizona as part of an investigation into illegal drug sales at California ...

A long effort to drive one of California’s medical marijuana pioneers into destitution has apparently worked. Lynette Shaw, who opened the state’s first legal MMJ dispensary shortly after voters approved medical weed in 1996, says she’s broke, shut down three years ago by federal prosecutors and hounded by the IRS into insolvency. She’s millions of dollars in debt with no ...

The U.S. attorney general recently said the federal government would find a way for banks and other financial institutions to work with marijuana providers in states where the drug is legal. It remains to be seen whether he can be taken at his word; the memory of past events in California don’t offer much hope. But it also remains to ...