Marijuana

Want to fool merchants with a fake ID? Hack someone's text messages? Or how about tracking where your co-workers are, without their knowing it? There's an app for that. The explosion in smartphone and tablet applications that enable people to check the weather, follow their stocks and play Words With Friends has a dark side: apps that facilitate questionable if not outright illegal behavior. Apple's App Store, for example, offers Drivers License software that promises "unlimited access to realistic-looking licenses" for all 50 states.

Need help getting the marijuana monkey off your back? The widely prescribed anticonvulsant drug gabapentin might be just the ticket, if preliminary clinical trials at the Scripps Research Institute are confirmed. A 12-week trial in 50 marijuana users who wanted to quit showed that gabapentin (sold under a variety of brand names, including Neurontin) reduced withdrawal symptoms and that those who took the drug were more likely to stop smoking maryjane altogether. Many people view marijuana as a relatively benign substance; others regard it as a gateway to use of more powerful recreational drugs.

Santa Clara county authorities are on the lookout for a pot farmer who recycles. Workers at a San Jose recycling center found a large trash bag filled with marijuana plants last week. San Jose police say the plants could have come from anywhere in Santa Clara County. Because marijuana cultivation is illegal under federal law, the plants are evidence and won't be sent to a composting bin, authorities say.

Dude! Today is a day of special significance and the appointed hour is 4:20 p.m. What it all means is on the tip of the tongue. Literally. Welcome to April 20, a day that has come to mean a celebration of marijuana and a protest against the fact that its use, sale and possession are crimes. From the narrow streets of New York's Greenwich Village to the open expanse of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, users will congregate to do their thing. Perhaps the most notorious gathering will be at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where last year 10,000 people smoked at the same time.

A medical malpractice lawsuit filed by the family of an Orange County girl who was revived after doctors allegedly declared her dead went to trial Monday. Mackayla Jespersen was 20 months old when she fell into a swimming pool at her Fullerton home on Nov. 7, 2003. The lawsuit alleges that the girl, now 6, suffered permanent brain damage after doctors at Anaheim Memorial Medical Center wrongly pronounced her dead and disconnected her breathing tube. More than an hour later, a police detective conducting a routine investigation noticed that her chest was moving and summoned doctors, who were able to revive the child.

An initiative to legalize marijuana and allow it to be sold and taxed will appear on the November ballot, state election officials announced Wednesday, triggering what will probably be a much-watched campaign that once again puts California on the forefront of the nation's debate over whether to soften drug laws. The number of valid signatures reported by Los Angeles County, submitted minutes before Wednesday's 5 p.m. deadline, put the measure well beyond the 433,971 it needed to be certified.

Marijuana is the most widely used illicit drug in the country -- an estimated 25 million Americans smoked it within the last year and close to 100 million have smoked it at least once in their life, according to the most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Rates and severity of marijuana addiction pale in comparison to that of legal addictive drugs, alcohol and nicotine, according to the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, a panel of independent experts advising the British government, in a rare head-to-head, scientific comparison.

In 1969, Carol McDonald was 28, married and the mother of two young children, out for an evening of fun with a couple who smoked marijuana. By the end of the evening she was on her way to a 19-year addiction. "Within a few months, I was smoking every day," said McDonald, a retired bookkeeper, now 69. "I had to smoke before going to work. If something was upsetting, I smoked over it. If there was a celebration, I smoked over it. " People like McDonald may be largely overlooked in the statewide debate over legalizing marijuana.

California's cash crop could become dirt cheap if the state legalizes marijuana. Researchers associated with the Rand Corp.'s Drug Policy Research Center said Wednesday that not much is certain about the potential impact of Proposition 19 except that the price of California's choicest weed could plunge more than 80%, down from $300 to $450 per ounce to about $38. "That's a significant drop," said Beau Kilmer, co-director of the center....

The American Medical Assn. on Tuesday urged the federal government to reconsider its classification of marijuana as a dangerous drug with no accepted medical use, a significant shift that puts the prestigious group behind calls for more research. The nation's largest physicians organization, with about 250,000 member doctors, the AMA has maintained since 1997 that marijuana should remain a Schedule I controlled substance, the most restrictive category, which also includes heroin and LSD. In changing its policy, the group said its goal was to clear the way to conduct clinical research, develop cannabis-based medicines and devise alternative ways to deliver the drug.

CARTAGENA, Colombia - President Obama will highlight trade and business opportunities in Latin America at a regional summit in Colombia this weekend, but other leaders may upstage him by pushing to legalize marijuana and other illicit drugs in a bid to stem rampant trafficking. Obama, who opposes decriminalization, is expected to face a rocky reception in this Caribbean resort city, which otherwise forms a friendly backdrop for a U.S. president courting Latino voters in an election year.

When Nguyen Tran emailed to tell me about an extravaganza he was setting up at an acquaintance's house, a special herb dinner in which each of the many courses would involve fresh marijuana, I did not necessarily beg to be included in the feast. The first time I met Tran, on a social-media panel somewhere, he happened to be wearing a banana suit, and he has been known to show up to food events dressed as a tauntaun from "The Empire Strikes Back. " I like his Starry Kitchen, a pan-Asian lunchroom in a downtown office-building food court, and I admire the running pop-up restaurant he mounts with chef Laurent Quenioux.

Richard Lee, whose bid to legalize marijuana in California brought him international attention, plans to give up ownership of his Oakland-based marijuana businesses after a federal raid this week seized many of their assets, including plants, bank accounts, records and computers. "I've been doing this for a long time. Over 20 years.... I kind of feel like I've done my time," Lee said Thursday. "It's time for others to take over. " Lee said he would remain an outspoken marijuana advocate.

Richard Lee has been one of the state's most visible activists for liberalized marijuana laws, having spent $1.5 million of his own money supporting an ill-fated ballot initiative in 2010 to decriminalize recreational use. But Lee is also an entrepreneur in the legally cloudy arena of medical marijuana, and on Monday the Internal Revenue Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration raided his home and his hemp-related ventures, including Oaksterdam University,...

Crackdown on pot Re "Raid on pot college stuns activists," April 3 Oaksterdam University founder Richard Lee's disability notwithstanding, the reason I can't get on board with the indignation everyone else has about the raid on the pot trade school in Oakland is because the medical marijuana debate has been co-opted by just plain old potheads who want to get high and, in a lot of cases, make some money. Instead of getting happy about finding a "doctor" so you can get your card for (pick one)

SAN FRANCISCO — Hundreds of demonstrators gathered at City Hall here Tuesday to demand federal respect for state and local marijuana laws, a day after federal agents raided the state's first pot trade school and a related dispensary across the bay in Oakland. The San Francisco rally and march to a nearby federal building was planned before Monday's raid. But the sweep on businesses owned by prominent marijuana activist Richard Lee emboldened protesters and brought denunciations from local officials and lawmakers in five states with medical cannabis laws.

For months, parents in Diana del Pozo-Mora's Boyle Heights neighborhood had been hearing that children -- some as young as 11 and 12 -- had passed out at school after inhaling "whippets," small canisters of nitrous oxide. Recently, Del Pozo-Mora, the mother of three, was shocked when she saw an older boy buy a whippet canister from an ice cream truck parked outside a local elementary school.

First they noticed a spike in home-based marijuana growing operations. Seattle-area authorities shuttered 450 indoor pot farms in two years. Then they zeroed in on the supply chain, targeting businesses that provide goods and services needed to grow the illegal weed indoors. Then they went after a mortgage loan company they say financed houses in which the plants were grown.

Not one but two federal agencies raided the Oakland medical marijuana businesses run by Richard Lee, one of California's leading advocates of legalization, on Monday. A judge has sealed the affadavits behind the raids of Lee's apartment, dispensary, marijuana museum and medical marijuana trade school, so there's no way of telling yet what led the Internal Revenue Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration to target him. But Lee was unabashedly pushing the edge of the legal envelope in at least one respect: He argued that dispensaries could be run as for-profit businesses, not simply collectives that members joined to share the weed they grew.

OAKLAND — Federal agents struck at the heart of California's medical marijuana movement, raiding the nation's first pot trade school and a popular dispensary, both run by one of the state's most prominent and provocative activists, Richard Lee. The raids in Oakland by the Internal Revenue Service and Drug Enforcement Administration sent a shudder through the medical cannabis trade and angered the plant's devotees, who believe the federal government...