With a 5-0 vote at their Feb. 21 meeting, town councilors approved moving forward with an ordinance aimed at welcoming entrepreneurs interested in growing and selling marijuana for recreational use.

“This town has been struggling for years,” Councilor Sue Waite-York said. “We’re not in a position to let this opportunity slip by.”

 Bills have been introduced in both the House and Senate to legalized marijuana for medicinal use in West Virginia.

SB 386 and House Bill 2071 would authorize the use of pharmaceutical cannabis to treat certain medical conditions. In the Senate, Patricia Rucker, R-Jefferson, is one of 12 senators sponsoring the bill. In the House, three delegates have sponsored the bill.

The bill in the House states medicinal marijuana would be an appropriate medical treatment for a person diagnosed with cancer or a disease, disorder or condition in which use of the cannabis based pharmaceutical product alleviates symptoms such as seizures, severe and persistent muscle spasm, and no other satisfactory alternative treatment option exists for the patient.

Small town America is disappearing. Less people are living in small towns and more people are flocking to urban areas and suburban areas where jobs are more common. It’s something that has been going on for decades. Small towns have fragile economies, often revolving around one or two major businesses. When those business, or the industries they are in, go under the towns usually go with them.

No matter how slow politicians are to game, medical marijuana is becoming a thing in Malta – Sativex spray, containing tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD), has already been licensed, and at the end of this month the Minister for Social Dialogue, Consumer Affairs and Civil Liberties Helena Dalli will be discussing whether Bedrocan should be made available in Malta. 

Fake news is unfortunately rampant in our age of mass communication, and the marijuana industry is not immune. There are sites reporting that the Trump Administration is planning on raiding legal dispensaries in various states, and after investigating these reports, 420 Intel concludes that these claims are unfounded. We cannot find any evidence to support them, and we are warning cannabis busineses to be wary of speculative articles like this one (note the clickbaity title):

Trump's administration intend to raid legal marijuana dispensaries

Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, no stranger to shocking the political establishment, has set his sights on cannabis legalization, recently penning the book, Jesse Ventura’s Marijuana Manifesto.

When Proposition 64 passed in California, legalizing recreational marijuana use, many people imagined that UC Davis might get into the pot business. With the No. 1 agricultural school in the nation, as well as a top plant biology program, UCD seems poised to become a cannabis research leader.

Not so fast, says Chief Campus Counsel Jacob Appelsmith.

“Under federal law, (marijuana) is a Schedule 1 drug,” Appelsmith said, as are heroin and LSD. Even as states are legalizing cannabis for both medical and recreational uses, the feds are not moving forward at the same pace.

A Republican Minot senator raised concerns about the price of medical marijuana at a town hall meeting over the weekend -- making note that he asked for a fee of only $25 to get an authorization card instead of the $200 fee proposed so far in the Senate bill.

Medical marijuana would be expensive in North Dakota under a legislative bill that passed 40-6 in Senate and now is before the House, he said.

Sen. Oley Larsen, R-Minot, cited costs that could run from $300 to $700 a month for those who smoke medical marijuana to $1,200 to $1,700 a month for those who use the oil.

New Frontier Data, the authority in business intelligence for the cannabis industry, has been following the Administration’s recent positioning on marijuana policy in the U.S. Attorney General Jeff Session’s echoed White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s recent comments that the administration may crack down on adult use markets. Our analysts found a number of interesting insights that may be of use in this policy discussion going forward.