State & Local Executive Branches

San Diego may be a gleaming, coastal California city, but when it comes to medical marijuana, it's more like Fresno-by-the-Sea. The latest round of dispensary raids has patients and advocates fuming and looking for ways to extract political revenge and gain a little justice.

And then there were two: Pennsylvania's Board of Pharmacy has issued new regulations allowing pharmacies to sell syringes without a prescription. That leaves Delaware and New Jersey as the only states that don't.

Minneapolis has become the largest US city without a drug squad after the chief axed it as part of an effort to reduce a $5 million budget gap.

Anti-medical marijuana zealot San Diego DA Bonnie Dumanis has struck again. A series of raids yesterday resulted in 31 arrests and 14 dispensaries shuttered. The DEA was there, too.

Medical marijuana patient Will Foster's nightmarish odyssey in the American gulag continues. Now the one-time poster boy for sentencing reform is back behind bars in Oklahoma, where parole officials are using some funny numbers to try to extend his sentence.

Who has the lowest marijuana possession fine in the nation? Denver is poised to take that honor.

Largely impelled by tireless medical marijuana advocate Carl Olsen, the Iowa Pharmacy Board Wednesday held the first in a series of public hearings about possibly rescheduling marijuana so it could be used as a medicine under state law.

North Carolina is about to join the ranks of states and localities that have banned salvia divinorum. A bill has passed the legislature and awaits the governor's signature.

Talk of marijuana legalization is definitely in the air in California, but none of the announced major party gubernatorial candidates want to add to it. Yet.

Oregon has become the latest state to pass legislation enabling the farming of industrial hemp and, like North Dakota, they don't need no stinking federal licenses. But the DEA tends to disagree about that.