Law enforcement around the country report that illegal marijuana growers are turning to solar panels to power indoor lights. New Mexico state police recently busted a marijuana operation around the Four Corners region that used solar panels to pump water, according to the Associated Press, and authorities in California have stepped up enforcement against solar panel thefts from vineyards that they believe were headed to illegal growers.

On the North Coast, however, authorities say that solar-powered pot grows wouldn't make sense.

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Documents Put City One Step Closer To Legal Medical Use

This time, there will be plants. Fifteen years after voters gave the green light to a medical marijuana program in the nation's capital, a pair of locations approved to grow or sell the drug have cleared regulatory hurdles and will set up shop a few months into the new year, according to city officials.

A cultivation site in the Northeast quadrant of the city obtained its certificate of occupancy this month, meaning it can grow marijuana once the D.C. Department of Health completes a final inspection. It is one of six sites approved to grow the drug for medical purposes before it is sold at one of five dispensaries scattered across the city. One such dispensary, located just a mile north of the Capitol, also obtained its occupancy documents.

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Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery is alleging that an attorney who represents a proposed medical-marijuana dispensary violated ethics rules by attempting to dissuade the Board of Supervisors, Montgomery's client, from taking his advice.

Acting on that advice, the Board of Supervisors declined to follow the state's medical-marijuana law and has disallowed medical-marijuana dispensaries or cultivation sites within the county's jurisdiction. Montgomery had warned the board that county employees who carry out the state law may be subject to federal prosecution because marijuana is not a federally approved drug.

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New York Yankees baseball legend Mickey Mantle was my boyhood hero. I collected all of his baseball cards and memorized every statistic about his performance. I couldn't wait for my Uncle Tony to finish reading the Sporting News so I could cut out articles about the greatest baseball player of my generation, which I then carefully stored in a shoebox beneath my bed.

It wasn't until I was much older that I realized that my boyhood idol was an alcoholic who began drinking at age 20 after the death of his father from Hodgkin's disease.

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AMONG the results of last month's elections was a startling cultural development: Two states, Colorado and Washington, became the first to legalize the sale of marijuana for any purpose to adults over 21.

This coincides with national polls that show increasing support for marijuana legalization. Yet on this issue, conservatives and liberals alike have balked at defending individual rights and states' rights.

Since 1996, when California allowed the medicinal use of marijuana, 17 more states and the District of Columbia have followed suit. A Washington PostABC News poll three years ago found overwhelming support for legalizing medical marijuana use: 81 percent were in favor. More recent CBS News and Quinnipiac polls have shown Americans almost evenly split on legalizing recreational sale of marijuana to adults, with supporters ahead by 3 to 4 percentage points. In 1969, only 16 percent favored legalization.

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Investigators Find It Difficult to Trace Marijuana Growth on National Forest Land to Mexican Cartels.

WELDON, Calif. - A few minutes after 4 a.m., agents in camouflage cluster in a dusty field in Kern County. "Movement needs to be slow, deliberate and quiet," the team leader whispers. "Lock and load now."

They check their ammunition and assault rifles, not exactly sure whom they might meet in the dark: heavily armed Mexican drug traffickers, or just poorly paid field workers camping miserably in the brush.

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Scientists at California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute have found that a non-psychotropic compound in marijuana - called cannabidiol - that has decreased metastatic breast cancer in early tests has also shown promise in treating a deadly brain cancer.

The research, which was done in mice, builds upon previous findings in cancers that express high levels of a protein called ID-1.

The study, which was published this month in the medical journal Cancer Research, focused on glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer that expresses high levels of ID-1.

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It is a grand irony that on the front page of the Helena Independent Record was an article on Montana medical marijuana caregiver Chris Williams facing years in federal prison for growing and selling the substance.

Meanwhile, on the back page of the sports section, a story ran about how some of the biggest banks in the world laundered billions of dollars for drug cartels and will get off with out anyone going to jail.

Why is it so hard for our government and justice system to understand if marijuana were legalized, controlled and taxed, this country could begin to solve so many of our drug crime problems.

This would put the drug cartels out of business, and put border patrol and drug crime agents into real jobs building roads and bridges. And maybe begin to pay off part of our $16 trillion debt.

Nancy Marks

[street address redacted]

Townsend

[end]

Regarding Richard M. Evans' Dec. 16 oped ("Marijuana: What next?"), the voters of Colorado and Washington state have made it clear the federal government can no longer get away with confusing the drug war's collateral damage with a comparatively harmless plant. If the goal of marijuana prohibition is to subsidize violent drug cartels, prohibition is a success. The drug war distorts supply and demand dynamics so that big money grows on little trees.

If the goal of marijuana prohibition is to deter use, prohibition is a failure. The United States has double the rate of marijuana use as the Netherlands, where marijuana is legal. The criminalization of Americans who prefer marijuana to martinis has no basis in science. The war on marijuana consumers is a failed cultural inquisition, not an evidence-based public health campaign. It's time to stop the arrests and instead tax legal marijuana.

Common Sense for Drug Policy

Washington, DC

[end]

County Becomes First in State to Bar Such Operations After Passage of Amendment 64

Just because marijuana is now legal in Colorado doesn't mean you'll be able to buy it everywhere.

Communities are taking action against commerical marijuana operations a year before it will likely be available to adults.

Douglas County is the first county in the state to place an all-out ban on commercial pot operations. That ban takes effect Thursday. Weld County is also on pace to have a ban against them next month. Other communities, such as Englewood, have issued moratoriums on the opening of recreational-marijuana businesses.

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Let's do some math.

In the 1970s, people smoked marijuana with a THC content of 1-2 percent. With today's growing process, the THC content is easily between 8-10 percent, or roughly 10 times stronger.

To me, this says a person only needs to smoke about a 10th of what they used to. An ounce will produce 20-25 cigarettes (joints), or roughly 400 joints per pound. Each plant can produce 1-2 pounds of usable product.

Yuba County is now allowing either 18 or 99 plants, depending on where you live.

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Supporters Argue Financial, Medical Benefits of Halting Prohibition

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Legislation to legalize marijuana use, especially for medical purposes, is being discussed again in West Virginia.

Today, sale of medical marijuana is legal in 18 states and Washington, D.C. Today, 30 percent of Americans live in states where marijuana is legal in some form.

On Nov. 6, popular votes in Colorado and Washington state legalized the recreational use of marijuana.

Supporters of marijuana legislation in West Virginia back various reform laws they say could offer people medical help, create new state tax revenues, cut prison costs and enhance an industry already booming underground.

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For Joe Stevens and Julio Valentin, the struggle to open New Jersey's first medical marijuana dispensary often seemed like chasing a mirage.

While starting any business is a tall order, try getting into selling medical marijuana just as skittish state officials are making rules under the glare of a governor determined to make sure New Jersey has the toughest restrictions in the nation.

Over the span of 21 months, opening the doors to the Greenleaf Compassion Center in Montclair took dozens of meetings and conference calls, hundreds of pages of paperwork that included everything from background checks and financial disclosure forms to how to collect taxes on pot - and long battles for permits to grow at a secret location and then sell to chronically ill patients.

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It's been nearly a week since the first medical marijuana dispensary opened its doors in New Jersey. So far, there has been no sign of reefer madness on the streets of Montclair where the Greenleaf Compassion Center has set up its innocuous storefront.

More importantly, the first patients are finding relief from their chronic pain with the low-grade strains of marijuana approved by the state.

One of those initial patients is Susan Sturner of Lawrence who devoted most of a day last week to the 100- mile round trip to the distribution center in Essex County. Sturner, who suffers from glaucoma and its side effects of intense headache and nausea, returned with a half-ounce of pot to ingest by smoking and brewing tea.

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As states increasingly adopt laws allowing medical marijuana, fewer teens see occasional marijuana use as harmful, the largest national survey of youth drug use has found.

Nearly 80% of high school seniors don't consider occasional marijuana use harmful -- the highest rate since 1983 -- and one in 15 smoke nearly every day, according to the annual survey of eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders made public Wednesday.

More than one in five high school seniors said they smoked marijuana in the month before the survey, and 36% did during the previous year, according to Monitoring the Future's survey of 45,449 students from 395 public and private schools.

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It turns out that last weekend's big Oakland-San Francisco gun buyback - which took more than 600 firearms off the streets - was bankrolled in large part by a $100,000 donation from a medical pot club.

"It's part of the philosophy we practice called capitalism with a conscience," said Keith Stephenson, the low-key executive director of Oakland's Purple Heart Patient Center.

The unique blending of pot and policing began one afternoon outside Oakland police headquarters a few weeks back when Stephenson bumped into Capt. Ersie Joyner.

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The results of an internal affairs investigation on Mendocino County Sheriff's Office Capt. Randy Johnson regarding a federal marijuana raid on property associated with his relatives were released Thursday.

Sheriff Tom Allman announced in mid-October that an outside agency would conduct the investigation after the federal Drug Enforcement Administration served a search warrant on property associated with Johnson's relatives. The Sonoma County Sheriff's Office did the investigation and gave Allman the 80-page report Dec. 13, finding that Johnson didn't know about any illegal activity and didn't participate in it.

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Last month Colorado voters resoundingly passed Amendment 64 into the state constitution, legalizing both recreational marijuana and industrial hemp. So far, realizing the will of the voters is on track, but implementation risks threaten to undermine the intentions behind Amendment 64. Policy makers are contending with thriving black markets and gray markets (goods or services that while legal, are still traded outside of any tax or regulatory regime), so it is in their best interests to get this right-even if they didn't support the initiative in the first place.

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Once again this year, in the final days of the outgoing General Assembly before Jan. 9, a coalition of advocates and patients is seeking to legalize medical marijuana in Illinois. We are very close to success, but the last votes are always the hardest to get.

Sometimes when I tell friends what I am working on - medical marijuana - - I am a little defensive. They might see this as a fringe issue. They might wonder why I am spending so much time on it. Whatever the reason, I feel the need to explain.

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Seventeen states have legalized medical use, and two states have legalized adult recreational use, of the non-narcotic, controlled substance marijuana. Nevada could benefit by adopting Colorado and Washington laws.

The greedy pharmaceutical companies will no doubt protest as the drop in sales of drugs will eat into their multibillion-dollar profits.

They fail to tell you that misuse of nearly every narcotic and controlled substance that they sell via prescription can kill you, except nonaddictive marijuana.

The deadliest "controlled substances" in our country are alcohol and tobacco, which kill more people than all diseases combined. But the government says that's OK because the multibillion-dollar alcohol and tobacco conglomerates pay taxes.

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