SAN JOSE -- Just as "America's largest medical marijuana festival" was about to light up the convention center this weekend, it went up in smoke -- and moved to Daly City's Cow Palace.

San Jose officials revoked HempCon's convention center contract last week, saying the marijuana trade show runs afoul of local law.

"Taken together, local law says no sales, transfer, or use is legal at the convention center," explained city spokesman David Vossbrink.

Talk about a bummer. A HempCon organizer who goes only by Contessa T., or "Tess," confirmed in an email that "due to San Jose ordinances we were forced to move the show at the last minute to San Francisco. There will be no event in San Jose."

Sister Kate calls herself an “accidental nun.” At age 16, she tried marijuana for the first time inside a friend’s car during a cold Wisconsin winter. But that was when she was a “good mid-western Catholic girl,” and the drug did nothing for her.

Years later, after her first marriage had come and gone, after she moved to Atlanta to work for General Electric, Kate tried weed again (not to mention cocaine.) This time was different, she wrote on her blog: “I learned that weed goes better with wine, that weed is calming, that weed left me with no side effects. … I gave up the powder and partying, but kept the weed and the wine, in moderation, like medicine.”

Sponsored Content offered by Cannabis Financier Top

Ethan Nadelmann, in addition to his colleagues at the Drug Policy Alliance, has played a critical function in most of the major drug policy reform tally effort projects in the United States, and he will be hosting The Terrific Marijuana Debate sponsored by ProCon.org in San Francisco this March at the California Marijuana Business Expo, produced by MJIC Media and sponsored by The Marijuana Investor Top and CannaFundr.

The video was unsettling.

It showed Adrian Coombs, a 4-year-old with autism, agitated, crying, pacing frantically, his face contorted in anguish.

At various points Adrian would repeatedly punch himself in the head, slap his cheek or wipe his eyes.

Adrian is the son of Nathan and Maria Coombs, founders of The Autism & Compassionate Care Connection, sponsors of the Cannabis for Autism conference in Rancho Cucamonga on Saturday, Jan. 23.

About 40 people, the vast majority family members of an autistic child, attended the event at the Victoria Gardens Cultural Center.

For many in attendance, the images were a little less jarring, because they were part of their everyday lives.

Alchemist 215 & CannaGin 215 add end-to-end harvesting technology for the cannabis industry

SAN DIEGO, Jan. 22, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- GreenBroz, Inc., a San Diego-based manufacturer of harvesting technology, announced an extension of its pioneering 215 automated harvesting line with the launch of a solvent-less extractor – The Alchemist 215 and a destemmer – the CannaGin 215.

The GreenBroz, Inc. mission is simple, to streamline the cannabis harvesting process and save the grower precious time & money while maintaining superior quality.

An investment plan hatched among a group of high-achieving Madison high school and college friends has begun to pay new dividends: federal prison sentences.

That’s because the plan, administered by UW-Madison business students or graduates, involved driving to California at least 19 times with bundles of cash to buy hundreds of pounds of marijuana for sale to customers and “investors” in Madison, according to federal prosecutors.

Seven men were charged in U.S. District Court last spring with conspiring to buy, transport and deliver marijuana in loads varying from 5 to 50 pounds, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert A. Anderson. All pleaded guilty.

“Most of them were business students, smart kids who saw a business they wanted to profit from,” he said.

Here's the latest research on pot and drinking, pot and opiate dependency, pot and IQ, pot and migraines, and pot and obesity.

Scientific discoveries are published almost daily rebuking  the federal government’s contention that cannabis is a highly dangerous substance lacking therapeutic efficacy. But most of these findings are relegated to obscure, peer-reviewed journals and, therefore, often go unnoticed by the major media and the general public. Here are five new cannabis-centric studies that warrant mainstream attention.

Consumers Seldom Combine Marijuana With Alcohol

As marijuana continues to move into the mainstream, dozens of Bay Area startups are banking on big business opportunities in the cannabis industry.

"We are at this precipice: There is a lot of money — real capital — that wants to come into the space," said Ben Larson, who runs Gateway Incubator, a cannabis startup incubator in downtown Oakland.

Eaze delivers medical medical marijuana in plastic containers. The company has released the first compilation of data about its customers.

Many medical cannabis users indulge in the morning, “waking-and-baking,” and Northern Californians prefer trippier kinds of marijuana than folks in Southern California.

Those are among the insights gleaned from the aggregate use patterns of 100,000 clients of Eaze, a medical marijuana delivery service that released information Tuesday about users in the 80 California cities where it operates.

Marijuana Movement

Eaze CEO Keith McCarty hopes that sharing the data will help shape the new medical marijuana regulations being crafted in California.