California, Pot | featured news

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 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.

Police in California say two children were hospitalized after eating a marijuana cookie they found on a kitchen counter, and their mother was arrested on suspicion of child endangerment.

California voters rejected Prop. 19, but a post-election poll found that they still lean toward legalizing marijuana for recreational use and, if young voters had turned out as heavily on Tuesday as they do for presidential elections, the result would have been a close call.

The city of Oakland, California on Tuesday legalized large-scale marijuana cultivation for medical use and will issue up to four permits for "industrial" cultivation starting next year.

A California woman traveling with a bodyguard on a private jet was arrested at an Ohio airport with 506 pounds of marijuana stashed in 13 suitcases, federal authorities said ...

With 48% opposed, legalization effort faces a difficult challenge, pollster says. Californians likely to vote in November are evenly split over whether to legalize marijuana, with only a small percentage of the electorate still undecided about the controversial issue, according to a poll conducted last week by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

A California voter initiative that would legalize possession and sale of marijuana has qualified for the November ballot, state election officials said on Wednesday, in what supporters called a "watershed moment" for their cause.

Marijuana advocates are gathering signatures to get as many as three pot-legalization measures on the ballot in 2010 in California, setting up what could be a groundbreaking clash with the federal government over U.S. drug policy.

At least one poll shows voters would support lifting the pot prohibition, which would make the state of more than 38 million the first in the nation to legalize marijuana.