State News

If police are acting like this now, just imagine the tactics they’ll employ once California legalizes marijuana completely. Voters in the Golden State approved medical marijuana 18 years ago when they passed Proposition 215, but don’t tell that to most police officers. As far as they’re concerned, no such law has ever existed. That’s why the California Narcotics Officers’ Association, ...

What does 2014 hold for weed in the great state of California? As with all things political, it depends. At the outset, it looks to be a big year for marijuana reform in the Golden State. Four petitions are in the works to legalize recreational cannabis. On the other side of the coin, municipalities and federal prosecutors continue to crack ...

America’s top law enforcement official promised the federal government will soon issue rules allowing marijuana businesses to work with banks and other financial institutions. The announcement could have important implications for medical pot in California. Attorney General Eric Holder said Jan. 23 that the regulations would deal with problems faced by providers now selling recreational weed in Colorado and medical ...

President Obama made news this month when he declared pot to be less dangerous than alcohol and called the experiments with legal weed in Washington and Colorado “important.” His statements, captured in an interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker, carry great weight in plenty of places, from those two states to the 19 others where medical marijuana is ...

With legal marijuana rolling along in Washington and Colorado, new states are expected to legalize over the next few years. California is near the top of the list, and it could happen here as early as the fall. But even as the state’s cannabis advocates push their proposals for the November ballot, the questions linger: Are they moving too fast? ...

Who would you rather have behind the wheel? A teetotaler, a stoner or a drunk? Pretty much everyone would pick the sober driver, pretty much every time. But take that person out of the question and who would you choose? If you know anything about highway fatalities and impaired driving, you’d pick the pothead – again, every time. That’s because ...

Marijuana seems to be growing on people, so to speak, at least in most parts of the country. That’s especially true in California, where polls show voters want to see it legalized. But not everyone feels quite so up on the plant, or at least on what it’s doing to the local fauna. In Northern California, in the Emerald Triangle, ...

An appellate court ruled California’s medical marijuana law doesn’t protect dispensaries from raids or prosecution by the federal government. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, located in San Francisco, ruled Jan. 15 that medical pot shops in the state are subject to criminal charges, raids and lawsuits by the government despite California’s MMJ law. The decision was no surprise. ...

Two men who killed a Los Angeles dispensary worker four years ago were sentenced to life in prison without parole Jan. 10. Daniel Deshawn Hinton, 35, and Raymond Lemone Easter, 31, were each found guilty in November of one count of first-degree murder, with a special circumstance allegation of murder during a robbery. The two men were responsible for shooting ...

California already has some of the least restrictive marijuana laws in the country, and they’re likely to become more so in the near future. But don’t expect the state’s famously liberal governor to help fight for legal weed. In an interview with The Washington Post in January, Gov. Jerry Brown said he wouldn’t push for legalization, even as marijuana advocates ...