Want to end the war on drugs? Lobby your local police department. They’ve quietly had the power to end the whole thing this entire time—and some are doing just that.

This week, sick of an opioid overdose crisis that had killed four people in his town of 30,000 since the first of January, Gloucester, Massachusetts Police Chief Leonard Campanello wanted to make certain he didn’t have to investigate another one.

“We are poised to make revolutionary changes in the way we treat this DISEASE,” he wrote in a Facebook post. He wasn’t kidding.

Canna Care Docs in Dennis holds an open house Saturday, May 2, to give free services to veterans wanting to obtain a medical marijuana card.

YARMOUTH - Michele Olem, a substance abuse counselor in Wellfleet, traveled to the Mid-Cape Saturday with her husband with two stops in mind.

First they went to Canna Care Docs on Route 134 in South Dennis, which was having an open house for veterans, offering free medical marijuana qualifying paperwork.

Next they traveled one town away to the Cape’s first Cannibis Convention, which was held at the Colonial Inn on Route 6A in Yarmouthport.

Olem’s husband, a Vietnam veteran, has cancer.

“He lost 30 pounds in one month. He couldn’t stand the sight of food,” Olem said.

A judge has ordered state regulators to allow a company previously headed by former congressman William Delahunt to move forward with plans to open medical marijuana dispensaries in Mashpee and Plymouth, ruling it was improperly denied licenses last year.

In a 22-page ruling Monday, a Suffolk Superior Court judge found that the Department of Public Health failed to follow its own regulations in June when it rejected a bid by Medical Marijuana of Massachusetts to open three dispensaries, after initially approving it.

The denial came five months after the company scored the highest among 100 applicants and was among 20 selected to move onto the inspection phase. It also paid a $50,000 registration fee for each of its three proposed dispensaries.

How much longer does Father Joe Quinn have to wait?

Sometimes, when the Franciscan friar says Mass at St. Anthony’s Shrine downtown, he is in so much pain that tears roll down his face. He has Ogilvie’s syndrome, a rare gastrointestinal disorder that has put him in the hospital for months at a time, required multiple operations, and left him dependent on a feeding tube. It hurts, all day every day, the agony an 8 or 9 on a 10-point scale.

“After a while, the pain becomes unredemptive,” he said, his eyes welling. “It doesn’t serve any purpose, except to be in pain.”

BOSTON - The state's medical marijuana program is projected to run a $1.17 million deficit in fiscal year 2015 despite a state law requiring the program to pay for itself, according to the program's annual report.

Nichole Snow, deputy director of Massachusetts Patient Advocacy Alliance, a medical marijuana patient advocacy group, said the deficit "shows that the people who were in charge originally really didn't put enough thought into it."

Scott Zoback, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, said, "The administration is in the process of revamping a poorly functioning medical marijuana program it inherited in order to best serve patients safely and ensure the system is living up to the law passed by Massachusetts voters."

We know the end is coming, but pot prohibition is going to have to be undone state by state. Here are the ones least likely to jump on the bandwagon.

Marijuana prohibition in the US is dying, but it isn't going to vanish in one fell swoop. Even if Congress were to repeal federal pot prohibition, state laws criminalizing the plant and its users would still be in effect—at least in some states.

And it's probably a pretty safe bet that Congress isn’t going to act until a good number of states, maybe more than half, have already legalized it. That process is already underway and is likely to gather real momentum by the time election day 2016 is over.

High Times magazine’s New York-rooted editor-in-chief Dan Skye has spent plenty of time in Colorado researching and photographing the state’s medical and recreational systems, but his current, pre-Cannabis Cup trip to the state has been uncommonly eye-opening.

“The Colorado cannabis industry is an economic miracle,” Skye said Monday from a stop in Pueblo, where he’s meeting cannabis business owners and reporting on the state’s first-of-its-kind legalization. “Everyone in the United States is following Colorado’s lead.”

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health announced changes to the Commonwealth’s Medical Marijuana Dispensary program in a Wednesday press release, including the requirement for all patients to obtain an electronic certification from a physician and register for the Medical Use of Marijuana Program.

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health announced changes to the state’s Medical Marijuana Dispensary program Wednesday, which will license Registered Marijuana Dispensaries similar to the licensing of other healthcare facilities. 

Additionally, the release stated, this new process will grant licenses to registered marijuana dispensaries similarly to the way in which they grant licenses to pharmacies.

A marijuana institute in Natick is trying to attract a new crop of students by offering them scholarship funds to cover a portion of their tuition fees.

From now until April 20 — or 4/20 — any new students who enroll at the Northeastern Institute of Cannabis will not only qualify for a $420 scholarship, they will also be entered into a drawing for a chance to win a full ride at the marijuana-centric learning center.

The initial deposit to take classes at the school is also being scaled back, from $700 to $420, in celebration of the number that bears symbolic meaning for marijuana users. The usual total cost of the program is $1,500.

The popular explanation for medical marijuana dispensaries that have popped up in states from Washington to New York is that marijuana is a wonder drug — treating not just nausea and lack of appetite, but also pain, anxiety, epileptic seizures, and the symptoms of multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia.

The federal government refuses to allow people to use it, proponents say. 

The story, however, isn’t quite so simple.