The city of Oakland, in California, is bidding to become the Silicon Valley of marijuana cultivation, following a council vote to approve four huge cannabis factories, taxed and regulated by the authorities.

The contentious measure passed 5-2, despite the protests of small-scale growers, who argue that industrialisation will drive family farms operating at the margins of the law out of business.

Oakland, the impoverished sister city of San Francisco, has long been at the forefront of the legalisation movement. It already taxes the sale, at dispensaries, of marijuana for medical purposes with an annual turnover of $28million. With a state-wide referendum on legalising possession for recreational use due in November, Oakland is positioning itself to take full advantage of the increased tax revenues from this growth industry.

The coalition seeking to relax laws governing the sale of cannabis is essentially unchanged since the 1960s. Libertarians find common ground with left-wing pot smokers, while civil rights campaigners argue that because of disproportionate arrest rates for young black men, current drug statutes perpetuate racial inequality.

Rocker Bret Michaels  ran into a little trouble Wednesday night (Jul 21) when cops found marijuana and other controlled drugs on his tour bus during a traffic stop in Northeast Indiana.

No arrests were made during the stop, however citations were handed out and the evidence was passed on to the DeKalb County prosecutor to make a decision on issuing any charges. Michael’s representative sent out a statement regarding the incident:

“Officers on the scene claimed there were no trailer tag lights. No arrests were made. Mr. Michaels allowed an open search of the buses and everything was handled in a professional manner.”

What’s up with all these celebrities getting pulled over with drugs? It’s starting to seem a little petty…

KALAMAZOO TOWNSHIP — Last August, Salman Ali was away on a work trip. But when he returned to his rented Kalamazoo Township home, he was greeted by an unpleasant surprise.

Township police and members of the Southwest Michigan Enforcement Team, a multi-jurisdictional drug enforcement unit, had raided his home on East Main Street.

Ali, a registered medical marijuana patient and caregiver for one patient at the time, had 12 of his marijuana plants — all enclosed in a locked facility, as required by law — confiscated by authorities.

But now nearly a year later, he has never been charged with a crime and his plants — if anything remains of them — are still in police custody.

SAN FRANCISCO—A new study says legalizing the recreational use of marijuana in California could sharply drive down prices for the drug and possibly undercut the tax windfall that supporters have touted.

The study published Wednesday by the RAND Drug Policy Research Center says "considerable uncertainty" surrounds the state ballot initiative. It would allow adults, 21 and over, to possess an ounce of marijuana and cities and counties to license and tax commercial pot sales.

The authors predict that retail marijuana prices could drop from $375 an ounce under the state's current medical marijuana law to as low as $38 per ounce.

According to the RAND analysis, consumers would pay more than that—about $91 an ounce—once taxes imposed by local governments are figured in.

Evergreen Collective, one of many advertising at this year's THC Exposé in LA, promoting their $45 / 4-gram eighth ounce "specials".

Yesterday on our daily webcast for NORML we interviewed Dale Sky Clare, a spokesperson for Proposition 19, the initiative that will ask Californians to vote on a very limited form of marijuana legalization. We discussed the latest polling on the initiative from SurveyUSA, showing a 50%-to-40% lead for the measure.

We dug through the demographics to find that older and more conservative people are the only groups more likely to oppose the measure (no, really?), support is greatest among the young and in the Bay Area (who knew?), and support among comedians named “Cheech” or “Chong” is approaching 100% (OK, I made the last one up.)
But there is one growing demographic group that no poll has begun to track: medical marijuana dispensary owners.