Poll: Marijuana legalization leading in CO

It's close, but it's still ahead. If not this year, eventually Colorado voters will approve this. We really need to quit wasting money on this useless "war on drugs" and corporate prisons and focus somewhere else.

Denver Post:

The poll found that the measure, Amendment 64, has the support of 51 percent of likely voters surveyed, compared with 40 percent opposed. Men favor the measure more than women, a common gender split on the issue. But 49 percent of women polled said they support the measure, compared with 39 percent who said they are opposed.

Across every income bracket and in every age group except those 65 and older, more voters told pollsters they support the measure than oppose it, though some of the leads fall within the 4-percentage-point margin of error. Voters younger than 35 support the measure by a margin of 30 percentage points, 61 percent to 31 percent, according to the poll.

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Feds go after "world's largest" medical marijuana dispensary

Wow, we're all safe now. Aren't we lucky that the Feds are cracking down on this rather than prosecuting Wall Street for creating the Great Recession that now may be a depression?

Federal prosecutors have filed civil forfeiture actions against an Oakland medical marijuana dispensary that bills itself as the world's largest, as part of a crackdown by U.S. authorities on California's massive cannabis trade.

The lawsuits, filed on Monday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, seek forfeiture of two properties where Harborside Health Center operates, said Melinda Haag, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California.

Harborside says it is the largest medical marijuana dispensary in the world, serving more than 100,000 patients in a "beautiful waterfront location," and is subject of the Discovery Channel reality TV show "Weed Wars."

There's only so much bandwidth at the federal government level and this should be a low priority. The last time I checked, it wasn't the medical marijuana industry that destroyed the economy. Read the rest of this post...

Oregon set to vote on legalizing marijuana in November

It's time to recognize that the "war on drugs" has been an expensive waste of time. It's also been an enormous failure that has done nothing to slow down the sale of drugs. The political class is lagging far behind public opinion and facts on this issue.

Oregon will soon qualify as the third U.S. state to ask voters in November to legalize marijuana for recreational use in a move that could put the state on a collision course with the federal government, proponents said on Friday.

Backers of the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act said they have collected 165,000 signatures on petitions seeking to put the measure on the ballot, nearly double the 87,000 they were required to submit by Friday's deadline to qualify.

"We believe we're going to make it easily," said Paul Stanford, the chief petitioner and founder of the Hemp and Cannabis Foundation, which runs medical marijuana clinics in several states.

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It's always 4:20 in Montevideo. Uruguay to legalize pot to stop drug violence.

There are a number of good reasons to legalize marijuana and this is one of them. The war on drugs has been a lost cause since the beginning and after decades of fighting this supposed war, we are still spending massive amounts of money and the violence continues to get worse each year.

Besides the obvious tax receipt benefits, this is a smart move by Uruguay. Who needs to create a police state that is out-gunned and out-manned? It only escalates the violence and leaves innocent people dead for no good reason. More from the BBC:

Uruguay has unveiled a plan to allow state-controlled sales of marijuana to fight a rise in drug-related crime.

Under the bill, only the government would be allowed to sell marijuana to adults registered on a database.

Defence Minister Eleuterio Fernandez Huidobro said this was part of a plan to remove profits from drug dealers and divert users from harder drugs.

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New York to decriminalize pot?

It sounds like a change is coming. Government at all levels is wasting too much money on a non-issue like marijuana. One can only hope that the federal government will get its act together sometime soon and stop the decades long failure known as the War on Drugs.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo will ask legislators to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana that are in public view, according to an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The measure is aimed at reducing the number of people arrested for possessing pot when they’re stopped by police, according to the official, who said he isn’t authorized to speak about the governor’s plans publicly. Cuomo, a 54-year-old Democrat, will announce the move today at a 1 p.m. press conference, the person said.

Cuomo’s initiative would put New York among more than a dozen states that have taken similar action, including California and Connecticut. A bill that would decriminalize possession of 15 grams (0.5 ounces) or less of marijuana was approved by a New Jersey Assembly committee last month.

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