BUSINESS
August 20, 2011 | By Donna Jones
Want to buy organic carrots? No problem. Organic strawberries? Widely available. Organic honey? Try your local grocery store. But organic medical marijuana? Doesn't exist — at least not in an official sense. Organic crops and products are certified by private agencies through the U.S. Department of Agriculture — a program developed after decades of advocacy by organic farmers and their allies. Pot — medicinal or otherwise — need not apply. "What the USDA doesn't recognize as a legal crop, we can't certify because we're certifying to their standards," said Jane Wade, development specialist at Santa Cruz-based California Certified Organic Farmers, the largest organic certification agency in the country.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
October 7, 2011 | By John Hoeffel, Los Angeles Times
Federal prosecutors are threatening to shut down medical marijuana dispensaries throughout California, sending letters that warn landlords to stop sales of the drug within 45 days or face the possibility that their property will be seized and they will be charged with a crime. The stepped-up enforcement escalates the Obama administration's efforts to rein in the spread of pot stores, which accelerated after the attorney general announced in 2009 that federal prosecutors would not target people using medical marijuana in states that allow it. "It's coming out of left field as far as we're concerned," said Joe Elford, the chief counsel for Americans for Safe Access, which advocates for medical marijuana use. "I really don't know what inspired this.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
April 3, 2012 | By Lee Romney, Joe Mozingo and John Hoeffel, Los Angeles Times
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...
HEALTH
July 20, 2009 | Judy Foreman
Marcy Duda, a former home health aide with four children and two granddaughters, never dreamed she'd be publicly touting the medical benefits of pot. But marijuana, says the 48-year-old Ware, Mass., resident, is the only thing that even begins to control the migraine headaches that plague her nine days a month, which she describes as feeling like "hot, hot ice picks in the left side of my head." Duda has always had migraines.
OPINION
January 28, 2010 | By Skip Miller
The City Council's vote Tuesday to shut hundreds of so-called medical marijuana dispensaries across Los Angeles was a welcome move, but the larger battle over pot has just begun. Across the country, lawmakers and residents of cash-strapped states are edging ever closer to legalizing -- and taxing -- marijuana. In California, the first state in the nation to pass a medical marijuana law, backers of an initiative to legalize the drug expect to gather enough signatures to qualify the measure for the November ballot.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
October 15, 2011 | By Anthony York, Los Angeles Times
The state's largest doctor group is calling for legalization of marijuana, even as it pronounces cannabis to be of questionable medical value. Trustees of the California Medical Assn., which represents more than 35,000 physicians statewide, adopted the position at their annual meeting in Anaheim late Friday. It is the first major medical association in the nation to urge legalization of the drug, according to a group spokeswoman, who said the larger membership was notified Saturday.