The regional arm of a fledgling political party campaigning for the decriminalisation of cannabis has been fined for breaches of electoral regulations.

CISTA – Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol – was fined £3250 by the Electoral Commission for failing to provide any financial returns.

The party ran four candidates in Northern Ireland in May’s general election.

According to the electoral watchdog, CISTA failed to submit quarterly donations and loans reports, before and after the election, along with campaign expenditure returns.

Bob Posner of the Electoral Commission said: "Political parties have a legal responsibility to submit their financial returns.

On Friday the 11^th of December 2015 John Sinclair was invited for a poetry reading, including a Q&A, in De Vrijplaats (the Sanctuary) in Leiden, the Netherlands. One day earlier it was exactly 44 years ago that John Lennon and Yoko Ono performed Lennon’s eponymous song about John Sinclair’s unjust imprisonment during a Freedom Rally, organized in response to the incarceration of Sinclair for possession and supplying of cannabis. Three days later he was freed from prison.

Sensi Seeds would like to reflect on this special moment in counterculture and cannabis activism history by bringing the following to your attention.

AT A former Hershey’s chocolate factory just outside Ottawa a company called Tweed now produces a rather different confection: marijuana for Canada’s tightly regulated medical market. Under the gaze of surveillance cameras, scientists in lab coats concoct new cannabis-based blends in near-sterile conditions. A repurposed candy mixer does the blending. Only in the growing rooms does the spirit of Cheech and Chong, a stoned comedy duo, seem to preside: the plants have names like Black Widow, Deep Purple, Chem Dawg and Bubba Kush.

Pot advocates are sputtering in the fight to legalize marijuana.

Lawmakers extended protections for medical marijuana patients, but declined to adopt any further pot measures as part of a $1.9 trillion government spending bill for 2016, unveiled early Wednesday.

The Justice Department would be prohibited from prosecuting people who are following their state medical marijuana and hemp research laws. These provisions were first included in this year’s government funding bill.

However, provisions failed that would have granted pot shops access to banks and allowed doctors at the Department of Veterans Affairs to recommend medical marijuana to soldiers.

Furthermore, lawmakers will continue to block Washington, D.C., from regulating pot.

America's high school students are using drugs and alcohol at or near the lowest levels on record

America's high school students are using drugs and alcohol at or near the lowest levels on record, according to federal data released Wednesday. The 2015 Monitoring the Future Survey, conducted by the University of Michigan and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) since 1975, found that past-year use of alcohol and illicit drugs other than marijuana continued their two-decade-long decline among America's 8th-, 10th- and 12th-graders.

Illegal pot dispensaries, and the politicians who refuse to crack down on them, will make it very difficult for Ottawa to impose order on the industry.

On Monday Premier Kathleen Wynne declared that, should the new federal government make good on its promise to legalize marijuana, it “makes sense” for the LCBO to be the distribution mechanism for the sale of non-medical cannabis.

While the merits of that idea are open to debate, the conversation may be irrelevant as the federal government’s window of opportunity to properly regulate non-medical cannabis is rapidly closing.

WASHINGTON, DC — U.S. Solicitor General, Donald Verrilli Jr., issued a statement Wednesday advising the Supreme Court not to hear a lawsuit Nebraska and Oklahoma filed against Colorado’s marijuana legalization law last December.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite its opposition to making marijuana use legal, the Obama administration is urging the Supreme Court to reject a lawsuit from Nebraska and Oklahoma that seeks to declare Colorado's pot legalization unconstitutional.

The Justice Department's top courtroom lawyer said in a brief filed Wednesday that the interstate dispute over a measure approved by Colorado voters in 2012 does not belong at the high court.

Nebraska and Oklahoma filed their lawsuit directly with the Supreme Court in December 2014, arguing that Colorado's law allowing recreational marijuana use by adults runs afoul of federal anti-drug laws. States can sue each other in the Supreme Court, a rare instance in which the justices are not hearing appeals of lower court rulings.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday to throw out a lawsuit filed by Oklahoma and Nebraska seeking to block Colorado's voter-approved law legalizing recreational marijuana use by adults.

In their challenge to Colorado's law, filed in December 2014, Nebraska and Oklahoma said marijuana is being smuggled across their borders and that drugs threaten the health and safety of children.

Nebraska and Oklahoma noted that marijuana remains illegal under federal law and said Colorado has created "a dangerous gap" in the federal drug control system.

America's high school students are using drugs and alcohol at or near the lowest levels on record, according to federal data released Wednesday. The 2015 Monitoring the Future Survey, conducted by the University of Michigan and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) since 1975, found that past-year use of alcohol and illicit drugs other than marijuana continued their two-decade-long decline among America's 8th- , 10th- and 12th-graders.

Teen marijuana use has fallen slightly over the past five years, at a time when four states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana and 23 others allow medical use.