California, Marijuana | featured news

California police confiscated a mammoth joint during a 4/20 pot rally on Saturday, reports the Los Angeles Times. As the paper notes, hundreds of UC Santa Cruz students gather each year for the event, and each year campus police confiscate things like bongs and dime bags. But Gennady Tsarinsky took things to a whole new level: what police say was a four-foot-long, two-pound joint.

About 2,000 pounds of marijuana worth an estimated $4 million was scattered in bales on a beach near Santa Barbara, Calif., on Sunday after a drug smuggling boat washed ashore.

If a California company has its way, recreational marijuana users in Colorado and Washington state will one day be able to get their pot out of vending machines.

A South Dakota Highway Patrol trooper who stopped a speeding SUV towing a trailer discovered two box-spring mattresses stuffed with 89 pounds of marijuana.

A City Council committee moved forward with a ban on medical marijuana dispensaries Tuesday, approving a recommendation to outlaw storefront pot shops in Los Angeles while allowing small groups of patients and their primary caregivers to grow the drug on their own.

On a suburban block with six family homes, palm trees and views of the surrounding green hills, nothing at 110 Windsor Court stood out. Its occupants, who had moved into the foreclosed house a few years earlier, were quiet types. Until the noise from falling roof tiles alerted neighbors to a fire there one recent morning, and Stephen Snowden, who lived nearby, banged on the front door. Nobody was inside, but firefighters discovered that the house had been converted into a type of illegal business found increasingly in suburbia: a marijuana grow house.

Los Angeles must be the smartest place in the country. Because we're certainly its medical marijuana dispensary capital. And a new study out of the U.K. indicates that people who start out life with high IQs tend to end up experimenting with drugs, marijuana chief among them.

Medical marijuana's days may be numbered. With a true double whammy, the IRS and federal prosecutors are both using weed killer. California's federal prosecutors announced an aggressive statewide effort to shut down dozens of pot dispensaries. If that's not enough, then there's the IRS.

Marijuana has been approved by California, many other states and the nation's capital to treat a range of illnesses, but in a decision announced Friday the federal government ruled that it has no accepted medical use and should remain classified as a dangerous drug like heroin.

Many newspapers are scaling back staff and trying to turn to other sources of revenue, but one Sacramento newspaper is expanding its business by tapping into an unconventional advertising source.