Let’s not get too smug about polls that suggest California voters are poised to legalize marijuana. Even if the Tax Cannabis initiative passes by a landslide, you can bet cops, prosecutors and elected officials will undermine the law in every way possible. After all, they’ve had plenty of practice with medipot.
While it’s too soon for [...]

The Sacramento Bee has added a new online feature: a marijuana blog called “Weed Wars.”
Go ahead and giggle (that’s been a common reaction). You can even supply your own joke, Bee editor Melanie Sill writes here.
But this blog is driven by news, not whimsy – news about California’s burgeoning medical marijuana industry and our [...]

The Santa Rosa Press-Democrat urges tighter regulation of medipot in this editorial, but its proposed solutions are every bit as vague as the law itself. Strangely absent is any mention of legalization, perhaps the most useful tool available to cure what ails the medipot industry. Guess I’ll have to write my own editorial…
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Anecdotal evidence of [...]

Democratic candidates for state attorney general yesterday took varying positions on the merits of legalizing marijuana, but agreed that medical marijuana needs to be much more heavily regulated than it is now.
Assemblyman Ted Lieu of Torrance said he opposes legalization, reports the San Diego Union-Tribune. Assemblyman Alberto Torrico of Fremont and Chris Kelly, chief privacy [...]

As the era of medical marijuana in California moves through its 14th year, laws on the matter have only grown increasingly murky, the Chico Enterprise-Record opines in this editorial.
It truly seems the people drafting these measures were stoned at the time, embracing ideas that might have seemed really cool under a THC fog, but that [...]

San Jose Mercury News columnist Scott Herhold offers his take on the city of Gilroy’s opposition to a new medical marijuana dispensary. His advice — drop it — is worth heeding in Gilroy and many other communities.
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Tucked away in the corner of a strip mall on Gilroy’s west side, near a dance studio and a [...]

As supporters of a proposed ballot initiative to fully legalize pot turned in their signatures last week, a spokesman for San Francisco’s Tom Ammiano said the assemblyman would also reintroduce his own decriminalization bill in the state Legislature.
“We are planning on reintroducing the bill in early or mid-February,” Ammiano’s spokesman, Quintin Mecke, told L.A. [...]

Proponents of the marijuana legalization ballot measure said they submitted far more than enough petition signatures Thursday to get it on November’s ballot, and said they hoped to raise and spend about $10 million to get it passed.
Proponent Richard Lee, the president of Oaksterdam University and owner of several related “canna-businesses” in Oakland, said the [...]

This Monterey County Herald editorial is evidence that newspapers can and do speak up as institutionalized voices of reason. The writer’s gentle pot humor helps deliver the message that some questions are worth pondering.
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If we’re going to legalize marijuana — and it appears that we will, sooner rather than later — we all might want [...]

The OC Weekly of Orange County offers this well-written, well-sourced and well-linked article on the rising cultural tide that could soon legalize pot in California. It was written by Dave Ferrell with a fine editing touch by Senior Editor R. Scott Moxley. The full article spans five Web pages on OC Weekly; an excerpt appears [...]