One of last times Dr. David Allen was seen in Sacramento, he had a packed waiting room of patients. They were paying $150 each to see the former Mississippi heart surgeon for medical marijuana recommendations, Peter Hecht reports in his “Weed Wars” blog.
To anyone listening, Allen extolled the virtues of a “miracle drug” he said [...]

Reggae music rolled like a cloud across a large room filled with blond wood, and behind the bar at the Arc Healing Center, Hector Gonzalez watched as Chris Braun, 23, entered wearing a green velvet top hat, green sunglasses and a clutch of fake emerald necklaces. It was nearly noon Wednesday, a few hours before [...]

An employee of a Los Angeles cannabis club was robbed of a backpack containing some cash and a jar of marijuana Wednesday night as he returned to his home in Thousand Oaks, according to Ventura County authorities.
The robbery was reported about 8:45 p.m. in the area of Sunset Drive and Los Robles Road in Thousand [...]

Nearly all medical cannabis clubs operating in Redding comply with the city’s new regulations, according to officials.
Police Chief Peter Hansen has inspected all but one of the city’s 20 clubs, the Redding Record-Searchlight reports. The inspections are the first step in a permitting process intended to weed out profit-driven marijuana dealers from legitimate nonprofit collectives.
“From [...]

RED BLUFF – Eight months after it first waded into the choppy waters of medical marijuana regulation, Tehama County has released the draft of a new ordinance that will be up for discussion next month.
“The idea was to give everyone ample opportunity to review the document,” county Board of Supervisors Chairman Ron Warner said Wednesday, [...]

The nation’s main advocacy group for medical marijuana threatened Tuesday to challenge Los Angeles City Attorney Carmen Trutanich’s legal assault on dispensaries, saying it is “unlawful, unconstitutional, and contravenes the spirit and letter of the governing laws.”
The city prosecutor’s office filed three lawsuits last week seeking court injunctions to force Organica in the Venice area [...]

Chris Roberts offers this enjoyably pointed blog post in S.F. Weekly, which provides useful context about the landmark medicinal marijuana report released last week.
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It’s not news that marijuana may have healing qualities: after all, medicinal cannabis has been (sort of) the law of the land since 1996, when California voters passed Proposition 215 . [...]

LOS ANGELES – Three decades ago, Bruce Perlowin was smuggling hundreds of thousands of pounds of Colombian marijuana to California in fishing boats passing beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. His childhood friend, David Tobias, was trafficking dope across turquoise Caribbean waters to Florida and Georgia, the Sacramento Bee’s Peter Hecht writes here.
On Saturday, at a [...]

Once again we look outside the state’s borders for insight, this time in the form of a student editorial from the University of Iowa’s Daily Iowan. (If nothing else, scroll down to the California reference; many of our top cops think the same way.)
It’s encouraging to see good student writing these days; maybe there’s [...]

Medical marijuana is a promising treatment for some specific pain-related medical conditions, researchers from the University of California’s Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research reported Wednesday in this Contra Costa Times story.
State-funded studies conducted over the past decade have found marijuana effective by itself or in combination with other drugs for conditions such as nerve pain [...]