A new poll is fuelling uncertainty about how Californians will vote come November concerning Proposition 64.   

The poll, released by the Southern California News Group and KABC/Eyewitness News on Monday, found that voters are likely to approve the proposal to legalize the recreational use of marijuana – but only by 52 percent. Forty per cent of those polled stated that they would vote No on Proposition 64, while eight percent stated that they were undecided. Zero per cent stated that they would not be voting at all.

Past polls on the question of Proposition 64 have come up with mixed results.

Business leaders have estimated sales in Ontario for recreational marijuana will range between $1 billion to $2 billion by 2024 should it be legalized by the federal government.

So, the economic stakes are high — both locally and across the nation — should pot be legalized as planned.

That is why the Windsor-Essex Regional Chamber is among groups pushing the provincial government to get going on what needs to be done to ease the transition toward marijuana legalization.

“Whether you agree with the decision or not, the federal government is proceeding on this,” said local chamber CEO Matt Marchand. “That’s already been decided.

Maryland’s black state lawmakers are weighing options to ensure that the state’s nascent medical marijuana industry includes its fair share of minority-owned businesses.

The Legislative Black Caucus, which comprises 45 of the General Assembly’s 188 members, has criticized the lack of racial diversity in an independent commission’s licensing of 15 companies to grow and 15 businesses to process the drug. Only one grower license and one processor license were awarded last month to businesses with some sort of minority leadership.

“Someone should have flown to Colorado”

There’s more to it than just warring ideologies. Rural governments are small. They have modest budgets and overworked staffs. A big city like Seattle can pull in experts from half a dozen departments to deal with recreational marijuana. A rural municipality, by contrast, might have a single employee charged with regulating a crop that was, until recently, criminalized. “Keep in mind that no one had a line for marijuana [in their zoning code]”, says Perry Houston, head planner in Okanogan County. When it came to legalization, many rural counties and cities were more or less winging it. That made mistakes all but inevitable.

Hopeful news, if you're one of the estimated 1 million medicinal cannabis users in the UK: a group of MPs and peers is campaigning for medicinal weed to be made legal in the UK, allowing people who suffer from chronic pain and symptoms such as anxiety to grow a small amount of weed and have access to doctor-prescribed bud without the risk of being charged for possession.

If the campaign is successful, it would put the UK among 11 European countries and 24 US states where cannabis has been decriminalised for prescribed consumption.

Law enforcement officials in California for the first time have field-tested a pioneering marijuana breathalyzer, which also has been touted as the first device of its kind to detect edible pot products on drivers' breath.

The announcement was made on Tuesday by Hound Labs Inc, an Oakland-based scientific-device company that was founded in 2014 by Dr Mike Lynn, and emergency room doctor and reserve deputy sheriff with the Alameda County Sheriff's Office.

The company's marijuana detector, dubbed The Hound, promises to give law enforcement immediate measurements for the few hours that tetrahydrocannabinol - the principal ingredient in marijuana - is present in a person's breath.

The mayor of Tilburg, the sixth-largest city in the Netherlands, has indicated that authorities will allow residents who rely on medicinal cannabis to grow up to five plants for personal use without fear of prosecution. The move is a clean break with existing policy, under which medical growers face evictions and seizure of their plants.

Mayor Peter Noordanus announced the news in a letter to local patient organization PGMCG (Patients Group Medicinal Cannabis Users). Marian Hutten, chairwoman of the group, called the official permission an “excellent, cool step of the mayor.”

Australian Sex Party MP Fiona Patten has introduced a motion to Victoria's Upper House calling for the legalisation of cannabis for personal use.

Ms Patten argued for the legalisation of the drug to reduce the burden on the courts and generate income through regulation.

She told Parliament about a third of Victorians admit to using, or having used, the drug and in some age groups there were more people smoking marijuana than tobacco.

"I'm probably the only leader of a political party in Victoria who's admitting to occasionally smoking marijuana for personal use," she said.

"I'm kind of guessing that probably about a third of people in this chamber may have at one stage, maybe not inhaled, but may have at one stage tried some cannabis."

An instructor of photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Co-founder of Asian Americans for Cannabis Education and Founder of StockPot Images, Ophelia Chong offers DOPE Magazine valuable insight into what it means to create and advocate on behalf of cannabis art in 2016. Her diligent advocacy in the realm of art and cannabis aren’t going unnoticed. DOPE Magazine was fortunate enough to discuss the often perplexing and stigmatized relationship between cannabis and art, as our discussion tapped into topics such as race, gender and public perception.

Most presidential hopefuls spend their Septembers in places like Ohio and Florida, hoping to win over a handful of swing voters in battleground states. But Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson is crisscrossing the country in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to boost his national poll numbers and qualify for the presidential debates.

Johnson needs to reach an average of 15 per cent in five national polls that the Commission on Presidential Debates relies upon to decide who qualifies for the first presidential debate on Sept. 26. But even his campaign manager acknowledges reaching that threshold is "unrealistic."