Marijuana, Illegal Drugs | featured news

A team of smokejumpers parachuting into a fire in the mountains of Southern Oregon landed in an illegal marijuana garden being prepared for growing season. The six smokejumpers from a base in Redmond found the site Monday evening, when there was a rash of lightning strikes. Jackson County sheriff's spokeswoman Andrea Carlson says the smokejumpers notified authorities, who hiked into the remote site in the Rogue River-Siskiyou (SIS'-kee-yoo) National Forest. They seized two guns and more than 1,000 little pot plants.

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.

As more states legalize marijuana for medical use, one of the lesser-known repercussions is that sick children now often have access to it too, and the responsibility for deciding when it’s appropriate, the dosage and the monitoring is usually left solely with a parent.

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.

An 87-year-old man was charged with growing more than 400 marijuana plants at his Colorado home.

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.

Four current and former Transportation Security Administration screeners have been arrested and face charges of taking bribes and looking the other way while suitcases filled with cocaine, methamphetamine or marijuana passed through X-ray machines at Los Angeles International Airport, federal authorities announced Wednesday.

U.S. troops are increasingly using an easy-to-get herbal mix called "Spice," which mimics a marijuana high and can bring on hallucinations that last for days. The abuse of the drug has so alarmed military officials that they've launched an aggressive testing program that this year has led to the investigation of more than 1,100 suspected users, according to military figures.

Candy shaped like marijuana that's showing up on store shelves around the country won't get kids high, but aghast city leaders and anti-drug activists say the product and grocers carrying it represent a new low....