National data from 2013 show that 70 percent of 10th graders and 81 percent of 12th graders say it would be fairly easy or very easy to obtain marijuana.

SPH study: more time needed to see if rates rise

Since 1996, when California became the first US state to legalize marijuana for medical use, concerns about a possible spike in the number of adolescents using the drug have arisen. Today, 23 states and the District of Columbia have laws legalizing marijuana in some form—five of them, Alaska, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and DC, effectively permit recreational use by adults 21 and older.

Veterans who serve their country “often face insurmountable challenges,” says the founder of Green Soldiers Healers.

Cannabis is said to have medicinal benefits that would otherwise require cocktails of alternative  ingredients. It is hoped that the fundraising event scheduled to take place on 8 November 2015, which is sponsored by Kiva Chocolate, Refined Bud and others, will allow the veterans to find out more about the medicinal uses of the drug.

A downtown marijuana dispensary is fighting City Hall's efforts to shut it down. Toluca Lake Collective opened in 2006 and registered with the city in 2007 before a December deadline to do so, says owner and well-known weed activist Frank Sheftel. The problem with the city arose, he said, because he filed to obtain a Business Tax Registration Certificate at City Hall's Van Nuys annex instead of at City Halldowntown. 

At issue is whether  Toluca Lake Collective, which Sheftel originally opened on Riverside Drive but moved downtown to comply with city regulations, is one of Los Angeles' original pot shops. In 2007 the city enacted a moratorium on collectives, allowing only about 188 that existed to stay open.

Usage of marijuana has been doubled over the past years as laws and attitudes toward the drug dramatically transformed.  Entrepreneurs of marijuana will choose their ambassadors to be users to relate the benefits of their products to customers.

Marijuana consumption increased among all groups studied, but researchers noted certain rise in women, Black or Hispanic individuals living in the South.  These people are older or in their middle ages, according to CBS News.

Mike Ray got the call one afternoon in mid-September, while he was in San Francisco working at Bloom Farms, the medical marijuana company he founded. The Butte Fire, which has been burning in Calaveras County northeast of the Bay Area for over a week, was moving toward his family’s 300-acre farm. The operation, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, had been Ray’s home as a teenager and had a 99-plant marijuana grow that was the main source of his company’s high-cannabidiol (CBD) cannabis oil. There had been close calls with wildfires in the area, but the blazes had always changed directions before reaching the farm.

This one, however, didn’t look like it was going to shift.

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Unless you live in the South, recreational weed is coming to a state near you

1. California made history in 1996, when it became the first state to legalize medical marijuana; next November, it will vote to allow recreational weed, and polls indicate the amendment will likely pass. "Then we will have reached the tipping point," says Angell, of the Marijuana Majority. "And with California having so many members in Congress, it will give a huge boost to our efforts to change federal law."

Nicole Gonzalez spent her teenage summers working in the Dominican Republic and Central America where her grandfather owned tobacco fields. Cigar-making was a male-dominated industry but her strong-willed mother always told Nicole, “You better be big in this world.” That motivation propelled Nicole and her husband Ata, both in their twenties at the time and without college degrees but both entrepreneurs, to move from Florida to California to join the budding marijuana industry in 2009.

WASHINGTON state expects marijuana sales taxes to bring in more than $1 billion over the next four years, according to a budget forecast published by the Office of Financial Management.

In the first year since legalising both medical and recreational cannabis, Washington collected $67.5 million in marijuana-related taxes, directed toward its general fund and health-related services.

This year, the state expects to pull in $154.6 million. As of Sept. 30, three months into the state’s fiscal year, Washington had already collected $37.6 million, said Steve Lerch, executive director and chief economist for the state’s Economic and Revenue Forecast Council.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -

A Eureka man was sentenced Friday to seven years and three months in prison and ordered to pay $17,000 in restitution for conspiring to manufacture and possess with intent to distribute marijuana and for depredation of public lands and resources, United States Attorney Benjamin B. Wagner announced.

According to court documents, Arturo Alcazar-Tapia, 22, and his brother, Isidro Alcazar?Tapia, 26, both of Eureka, conspired to grow more than 20,000 marijuana plants at two sites in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in Trinity County.