Free Republic

California may be going to pot - literally. Marijuana would be grown and sold openly to adults 21 and older under legislation introduced this morning by a San Francisco lawmaker. Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, said the cash-starved state could generate more than a billion dollars by taxing pot growers and sellers. Ammiano predicted that the public would support loosening marijuana laws that require substantial public funds to enforce. "I think there's a mentality throughout the state and the country that this isn't the highest priority," he said. "And that maybe we should start to reassess." Before California could legalize...

It used to be that marijuana came to the Bay Area from the legendary back country of Humboldt County or the desert fields beyond Tijuana. Now the fields are in the Bay Area, and everywhere else in the state. Marijuana is one of the top cash crops in California, NBC Bay Area's Mike Luery reported. Many of the fields are located next to popular trails and in the middle of state parks. A fierce battle is being waged in our own back yard to remove the pot groves. They are hidden in brush so thick that specially trained officers must...

According to federal drug czar John Walters, the marijuana available in the United States is better than ever. Well, that's not quite the way he put it, but it's closer to the truth. Last week, as part of its ongoing effort to convince baby boomers that today's "Pot 2.0" is much more dangerous than the stuff they smoked when they were young, Walters' Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) announced that "levels of THC—the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana—have reached the highest-ever amounts since scientific analysis of the drug began in the late 1970s." The University of Mississippi's Potency Monitoring...

Canada's laws prohibiting possession and trafficking of drugs were struck down as unconstitutional Tuesday by the B.C. Supreme Court, in a case focusing on the plague of drug addiction in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. But Justice Ian Pitfield gave Ottawa until June 30, 2009, to fix the law and bring it in line with the Constitutional principle of fundamental justice. The ruling, in a case challenging the federal government's jurisdiction over Vancouver's controversial safe-injection site, goes well beyond the site itself. The case was launched by the non-profit organization that runs Insite and a group of addicts, who argued the site...

LOS ANGELES — The city that popularized the fast food drive-thru has a new innovation: 24-hour medical marijuana vending machines. Patients suffering from chronic pain, loss of appetite and other ailments that marijuana is said to alleviate can get their pot with a dose of convenience at the Herbal Nutrition Center, where a large machine will dole out the drug around the clock. "Convenient access, lower prices, safety, anonymity," inventor and owner Vincent Mehdizadeh said, extolling the benefits of the machine. But federal drug agents say the invention may need unplugging. "Somebody owns (it), it's on a property and somebody...