During a secondary inspection, officers discovered 37 packages of marijuana, weighing 67 pounds, hidden inside the white 1999 white Dodge Dakota. (Courtesy of U.S. Customs and Border Protection)

Officers arrested a 21-year-old Harlingen woman at the Gateway International Bridge on Tuesday after finding nearly 70 pounds of marijuana hidden in her pickup truck.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers encountered the woman at the Gateway International Bridge in Brownsville, where she applied for entry into the country, according to an agency news release.

During a secondary inspection, officers discovered 37 packages of marijuana, weighing 67 pounds, hidden inside the white 1999 white Dodge Dakota.

The deadline to turn in your signed Florida medical marijuana petition is rapidly approaching. I received the following reminder from the Florida campaign. If you haven’t signed the petition yet and made sure the campaign has it, please do so asap:

THIS IS IMPORTANT:

If you do not mail in your 2016 signed medical marijuana petition to the campaign by Monday, we can’t guarantee it will be processed in time to help us.

Whether you realize it or not, marijuana is on track to possibly be one of the deciding factors in the 2016 presidential election. As marijuana's approval rating has soared in national polls over the last decade, it's forced politicians who'd previously tiptoed the issue to take a stance.

Facing a state deadline of March 1, the Chino planning commission voted 7-0 Monday to recommend the City of Chino adopt an ordinance to prohibit cultivation, delivery or dispensing of marijuana within the city limits.

Cities that do not adopt their own regulations by the deadline will be subject to regulation by the state under the recently signed Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act, senior planner Michael Hitz told the commission. The state will permit the marijuana activities that the ordinance would ban, he said.

Those Canadians charged or convicted with possession of marijuana before the drug is legalized should not be given amnesty. PABLO PORCIUNCULA / AFP/Getty Images

When someone is charged with a crime, the laws in place at the time of the offence dictate how that individual will be punished if convicted. The exception is outlined in Section 11(i) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which states: “Any person charged with an offence has the right . . . if found guilty of the offence and if the punishment for the offence has been varied between the time of commission and the time of sentencing to the benefit of the lesser punishment.”

Re: Legal weed would lead to more use, poll says, Dec. 22

Re: A threat to Ottawa’s pot plan, Opinion Dec. 16

Legal weed would lead to more use, poll says, Dec. 22

About the only good thing about the legalization of marijuana will be a possible reduction in the criminal element attached to its sale. Unfortunately, as in the case of tobacco, there will still be those who sell/buy it illegally to avoid paying government-levied taxes.

While it probably makes sense to sell it through the LCBO if/when it’s legalized, I fear this will somehow endow it with a legitimacy it doesn’t deserve, so marketing of it must be strictly prohibited.

A half-dozen proposed law changes are gaining steam, upping the potential for the biggest slate of ballot questions in 15 years next November and a possible deluge of advertisements on everything from marijuana legalization to farm animals.

The six petitions still eligible to go before voters next year each cleared a key 64,750-signature hurdle this month, and now sit before the Legislature, with a more modest 10,792-signature requirement awaiting — if lawmakers don’t act on them — to make it to the ballot.

Should they all survive, it would mark the most questions to appear on a statewide ballot since 2000, when voters weighed eight proposals.

What have you been up to now?  Banning medical marijuana in Coronado?  Have you no souls, no decency, no sense of compassion?  As as cancer victim, I could not use medical marijuana if I had wanted to because it wasn’t legalized until after my cancer.  If my cancer recurs, I want to be able to avail myself of the law that passed in 1996.  Prop. 215, the Compassionate Use Act of 1996, has brought relief to many, many cancer victims, AIDS patients, the injured, the burned and the dying.  I can tell you I’d have tried it in 1995.  I hear it beats puking in a bucket all day.

The federal government quietly ended its prohibition of medical marijuana last Friday as President Obama signed a $1.1 trillion spending bill passed earlier in the day by Congress.
Section 538 of 1,603-page document states that none of the funds made available for the Department of Justice may be used to prevent states from implementing their own state laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession or cultivation of medical marijuana.

By 1971, marijuana’s scent hung over most of Canada. Some 1.5 million folks had taken at least one drag on a joint. Hundreds of thousands were regularly firing up, grooving to Three Dog Night and learning from the leaked Pentagon Papers that the U.S. administration had lied about the Vietnam War.

Convictions for simple pot possession exploded: from 431 in 1967 to 5,399 in 1970 and 8,389 in 1971. More than half were against otherwise law-abiding baby boomers under 21 who would now carry criminal records along with their university degrees.