“Someone should have flown to Colorado”

There’s more to it than just warring ideologies. Rural governments are small. They have modest budgets and overworked staffs. A big city like Seattle can pull in experts from half a dozen departments to deal with recreational marijuana. A rural municipality, by contrast, might have a single employee charged with regulating a crop that was, until recently, criminalized. “Keep in mind that no one had a line for marijuana [in their zoning code]”, says Perry Houston, head planner in Okanogan County. When it came to legalization, many rural counties and cities were more or less winging it. That made mistakes all but inevitable.

Law enforcement officials in California for the first time have field-tested a pioneering marijuana breathalyzer, which also has been touted as the first device of its kind to detect edible pot products on drivers' breath.

The announcement was made on Tuesday by Hound Labs Inc, an Oakland-based scientific-device company that was founded in 2014 by Dr Mike Lynn, and emergency room doctor and reserve deputy sheriff with the Alameda County Sheriff's Office.

The company's marijuana detector, dubbed The Hound, promises to give law enforcement immediate measurements for the few hours that tetrahydrocannabinol - the principal ingredient in marijuana - is present in a person's breath.

Marijuana is having its moment in American culture, with recreational pot use now legal in Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. California, Arizona, Nevada, Maine, and Massachusetts vote on recreational use in November. It’s a trend reflected in popular entertainment. Three TV series devoted to the subject air within the next month.

HBO’s New York-set “High Maintenance,” which bows Sept. 16, began as a web series in 2012; both iterations of the show follow an unnamed pot deliveryman (series co-creator Ben Sinclair) as he peddles his product to new clients each week.

MTV’s Los Angeles-set “Mary + Jane,” which launched Sept. 5, follows potrepreneurs Paige (Scout Durwood) and Jordan (Jessica Rothe), creators of a dope-delivery app.

Few individuals have had more of a prominent stature in marijuana culture than rapper Snoop Dogg. And to understand how far pop culture has come in demystifying pot, one has to look at the rapper’s career.

An instructor of photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Co-founder of Asian Americans for Cannabis Education and Founder of StockPot Images, Ophelia Chong offers DOPE Magazine valuable insight into what it means to create and advocate on behalf of cannabis art in 2016. Her diligent advocacy in the realm of art and cannabis aren’t going unnoticed. DOPE Magazine was fortunate enough to discuss the often perplexing and stigmatized relationship between cannabis and art, as our discussion tapped into topics such as race, gender and public perception.

Babs strikes again! While attending an LGBTQ fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in New York on Friday, Barbra Streisand performed a special rendition of “Send in the Clowns” that poked fun at Donald Trump. 

Most presidential hopefuls spend their Septembers in places like Ohio and Florida, hoping to win over a handful of swing voters in battleground states. But Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson is crisscrossing the country in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to boost his national poll numbers and qualify for the presidential debates.

Johnson needs to reach an average of 15 per cent in five national polls that the Commission on Presidential Debates relies upon to decide who qualifies for the first presidential debate on Sept. 26. But even his campaign manager acknowledges reaching that threshold is "unrealistic."

PHARMACEUTICAL EXECUTIVES WHO recently made a major donation to an anti-marijuana legalization campaign claimed they were doing so out of concern for the safety of children — but their investor filings reveal that pot poses a direct threat to their plans to cash in on a synthetic cannabis product they have developed.

On August 31, Insys Therapeutics Inc. donated $500,000 to Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy, becoming the single largest donor to the group leading the charge to defeat a ballot measure in Arizona to legalize marijuana.

Israel’s hospitals, according to health care industry insiders, have pioneered the use of cannabis administration in hospital settings.

“I want to have Marin General be the first hospital in California to openly and transparently allow patients to use medical cannabis,” said Dr. Larry Bedard, who practiced emergency medicine as a former physician at Marin General.

Bedard isn’t some lone-nut calling for bake sessions in sterile hospitals. He wrote the rebuttal to the argument against Proposition 64, appearing on Nov. 8 ballot to legalize recreational marijuana in California for adults ages 21 and older.

Prohibitionists just revealed that a retired professor is bankrolling their efforts to defeat marijuana legalization ballot measures this year to the tune of more than $1.3 million.

SAM Action, the advocacy arm of the nonprofit Smart Approaches to Marijuana, said in campaign finance documents filed Friday in both California and Massachusetts that Julie Schauer, a former art teacher at Northern Virginia Community College, has given the group at least $1,389,000 this year.