Mt. Angel voters will decide next year whether marijuana businesses will be allowed or banned in town.

The ban on both medical and recreational marijuana facilities was referred to voters by a pair of unanimous decisions by the Mt. Angel City Council on Dec. 8. Voters will make the final decision next November.

Because a large enough majority of Mt. Angel voters panned Measure 91’s statewide bid to legalize recreational marijuana last fall, council members could have adopted an outright ban on commercial enterprises. House Bill 3400 allows communities that voted “no” by 55 percent or more to enact a ban without gathering additional voter input.

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.

PETALING JAYA, Dec 11 — The National Anti-Drugs Agency is not prepared to handle the possible trend of ganja abuse through vape. 

Its director, Datuk Suhaimi Abdullah, admitted yesterday more research had to be done to determine if consuming ganja through e-liquid posed a bigger health threat compared to conventional means.

To do this, he said, it must first be able to detect the target group through urine tests. 

“Currently, we are unaware if ganja consumed through vapes will cause someone to fail a urine drug test, hence the need for more research and information,” he said.

Suhaimi said the agency was not able to clamp down on errant vape users as vaping was beyond its jurisdiction. 

Members of Congress concerned about America’s survival have shied away from impeaching President Obama on national security grounds. They either think impeachment would take too long or that the political process of impeaching the first black Democratic President would be too polarizing. There is an alternative: removing Obama from office because of cognitive impairment.

If a movement opposed to decriminalizing marijuana in Pittsburgh exists, its followers did not choose to speak at a public forum Tuesday afternoon in City Council chambers.

Instead, about 40 citizens told council members why they should vote to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana, citing concerns about racial disparity in arrests, complications of having a criminal record and the right to self-medicate.

“I'm a homeowner. I'm a taxpayer. I've also been a criminal for about 40 years,” said Michael Keenan, 58, of Spring Hill. “I am tired of being a criminal over a plant.”

Santa Barbara’s proposed medical marijuana ordinance will allow people to grow marijuana at their homes for their own personal medical use, but if they buy the drug at a dispensary, it must come from outside of Santa Barbara.

That’s one of the ironies of the city’s new effort to regulate growth and distribution of marijuana in the city — Santa Barbara won’t allow people who grow marijuana for personal use to then sell it to a dispensary in the city. 

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- If one state lawmaker has his way, marijuana stores in Kentucky could become a reality. There's a new attempt to legalize "grass" in the Bluegrass state.

Sen. Perry Clark of Louisville has been trying for years -- unsuccessfully -- to legalize medical marijuana. Now, he's going a step further, with a bill that would allow Kentuckians to light up recreationally.

"It's time for us to leap boldly into the future," Clark told WDRB News.

Sen. Clark's bill would decriminalize and regulate the possession, cultivation and sale of marijuana.

"It is not a hard drug. It is senseless that you have cannabis as a Schedule 1 drug with heroin and LSD," he said.

LANSING, MI — An evolving proposal to allow regulated medical marijuana dispensaries and related businesses is unlikely to move this year in the Michigan Senate despite an ongoing push from supporters.

Sen. Rick Jones, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, does not have the votes to advance the bills from committee and is instead asking Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof to discharge them to the floor by early 2016.

"That's entirely up to him," Jones, R-Grand Ledge, said Tuesday. "I would hope that it would be this week, but I realize this week is taken up by some very pressing issues."

Opponents of marijuana legalization often cite the "skyrocketing" number of people seeking treatment for marijuana addiction in their arguments. Project SAM, the nation's leading anti-legalization group, notes with some alarm that "data from the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that in 1993, marijuana comprised approximately 8 percent of ALL treatment admissions, but by 2009 that number had increased to 18 percent."

On Tuesday, the country woke up to newspaper headlines about a cabinet minister calling for the legalisation of dagga – a widely grown plant in the country.

That minister is the otherwise reserved Phiwayinkhosi Mabuza, the Mhlambanyatsi Member of Parliament and Minister of Housing and Urban Development.

The minister’s submission before the august House stunned many, mainly because of his restrained manner and mostly because Prime Minister Sibusiso Barnabas Dlamini had appeared to indicate that legalising dagga was currently out of the question because the issue still needed to be extensively debated.

Without dismissing the minister, as some prominent individuals have done, it would be prudent to probe if his submission holds any water.