Busts

Although many believe it to be a long shot, a group of lawmakers in Wisconsin are working toward a statewide policy change that would eliminate the criminal penalties associated with small time marijuana possession.

Earlier this week, Democratic Senator Fred Risser, along with Representatives Evan Goyke, Jonathan Brostoffand, and Republican Representative Adam Jarchow dragged a piece of legislation up to the steps of the Capitol designed to decriminalize the possession of up to 10 grams of marijuana.

Instead of jamming petty pot offenders up in the criminal justice system, the proposal would simply force those busted for this offense to

The implementation of Canada’s Cannabis Act is deep into the implementation process.  After watching this process in Oregon, I can only imagine how long the roll out might take in entire country (as opposed to one state).  One piece of the Cannabis Act that has not been given much attention so far is the fact that the country would allow anyone 18 and older to use cannabis.

In this photo taken Thursday, May 11, 2017, Andre Shavers, who runs a marijuana delivery business, walks up a street in Oakland, Calif. The City of Oakland is prodding cannabis businesses to pair with minority applicants if they want a license to sell, manufacture, cultivate or distribute weed in 2018 as part of California's massive expansion of legal cannabis.

Despite claims that legal marijuana states are causing trouble for neighboring areas of prohibition, a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds the majority of the trials and tribulations reported in these areas are mostly exaggerated.

Researchers from the School of Economic Sciences at Washington State University have released a preliminary study entitled “The Cross-Border Spillover Effects of Recreational Marijuana Legalization,” which shows that the only perilous outcome from conflicting state marijuana laws is “a sharp increase in marijuana possession arrests” in border counties.

The report indicates that, “if a county shares a physical border

In a historic move for the nation of Israel and the ongoing global reform of cannabis, the country has officially implemented its decriminalized marijuana legislation. The new laws took hold 86 days after the Israeli government voted to end pot possession arrests.
Israel banned all things cannabis on February 1st, 1919, and since that time, the Middle Eastern country had not seriously considered any major change in the policy.

Racial disparities and other social justice issues are a big part of the reason I have advocated both personally and professionally for cannabis policy reform.  I grew up in St. Louis and had many black friends from the city, as I was in the throws of desegregation at the time.

Ohio’s Republican governor John Kasich made waves last year when he signed an expansive medical marijuana bill and brought the typically conservative Buckeye State into the world of legal weed.

Police officers in North Carolina got a little more than they bargained for this week, when they tracked down what they thought was a rural cannabis cultivation site, but instead uncovered a half-acre field full of poppy plants ready to be turned into opium, the base form of heroin.

According to CNN, Catawba County Sheriffs went to the rural home of 37 year-old Cody Xiong, who they suspected of growing marijuana.

This week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech to an audience of federal, state, and local law-enforcement officials at the U.S. District Courthouse in Memphis, Tennessee. The Attorney General reiterated his earlier promises to renew the country's “war on crime” with tough sentencing policies, promising to use “every lawful tool” of the Justice Department to "take the most violent offenders off our streets." 



Sessions brought up the current opioid abuse epidemic and explained that the DoJ would attempt to control it by”securing our border” and cracking down on gangs and cartels.

Due to ongoing global marijuana reform, there are a number of places where people might feel comfortable traveling with cannabis seeds. The United Arab Emirates shouldn’t be one of those places.
In December of last year, an unnamed 34-year-old Austrian man was arrested at the Dubai International Airport after law enforcement found 960 grams of cannabis seeds in his luggage.