Free Republic

A resident of Mexico has been charged for conspiracy to grow marijuana with the intent to distribute it and damage to public lands and natural resources, according to federal prosecutors. Everado Cuadro Campos, 49, who is from Michoacan, Mexico, was arrested July 17 at a “marijuana garden” in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in Shasta County, according to a news release by the United States Department of Justice. U.S. Forest Service and California Department of Fish and Wildlife agents found a marijuana cultivation site near Rock Creek, according to a Department of Justice criminal complaint, and entered through a “well-worn” path....

Javonnie McCoy was growing marijuana when the cops came to his Middle Georgia home. He was caught red-handed with it. Almost a pound of it, in fact. He admitted it to police, and later he looked jurors in the eye and said, yep, it was mine. I used it as medicine. The jurors let him go. He was minding his own business and wasn’t hurting anybody, they reasoned. He just doesn’t belong in prison. The jury’s decision earlier this month in Dublin, Ga., may have been due to a muddled prosecution of a muddy case. Or it may have been...

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. voters back legalizing marijuana, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday. Support for legalization hit 63 percent in the survey — the highest level of support recorded by a Quinnipiac poll. A third of American voters still oppose legalization, the poll found. Support for medical marijuana is even higher, at 93 percent. Only about 5 percent of respondents opposed it. The poll also found little support for Attorney General Jeff Sessions's decision earlier this year to rescind an Obama-era policy that paved the way for individual states to legalize marijuana without federal interference. Seventy percent...

Quitting finance to focus on marijuana sounds like it’s something that involves finding yourself by surfing and living in a beach hut in California. But with momentum building for the legalization of cannabis in the U.S. – 29 states and the District of Columbia have laws legalized marijuana in some form – finance professionals are increasingly viewing it as a big business opportunity. The number of jobs that the cannabis industry is creating continues to increase. New Frontier Data, a research and analytics firm, projects that the legal cannabis market will create more than 250m jobs by 2020 – more...