Marijuana

Marijuana users can go online and see what kind of bargain they’re getting from their marijuana dealer. The site, which has been online since September, compiles averages of marijuana prices for each state. A representative from the website says that the goal of www.priceofweed.com is simply to give marijuana users tools for assessing prices.

Cannabis, or hemp, has been grown in the U.S. since the days of George Washington. KPBS looks at the remarkable history of marijuana in this country, including how it got here, its early reputation for making users violent and insane; and present-day efforts to legalize it. Guests include Richard Bonnie, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and co-author of "The Marihuana Conviction", and Isaac Campos, fellow at the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center at the University of Cinncinnatti.

It was already known as the Wal-Mart of the marijuana world with 15,000 square feet of everything you ever needed to grow or smoke marijuana. Now, iGrow is growing even more, so much, that it changed its name to "weGrow."

Drug prohibition has incentivized Mexican drug trafficking organizations to come to our backyards. Their workers are hidden in crops and hillsides throughout rural Ohio counties.

When GW Pharmaceuticals was given the green light to prescribe their cannabis based medicine Sativex, MS sufferers across the UK breathed a collective sigh of relief. But, a number of Primary Health Care Trusts, the organizations that run the UK's hospitals, apparently passed a memo around explaining they wouldn't be funding any Sativex prescriptions. So while the medicine is now legal, only those that can afford it can have it.

Times are good for marijuana growers of Mexico's western Sierra Madre mountains -- the army eradication squads that once hacked at the illicit marijuana fields have been diverted by the drug war raging elsewhere in Mexico. To the delight of traffickers, marijuana cultivation soared 35 percent last year and is now higher than at any time in nearly two decades.

Yet more evidence that the tired statement made by prohibitionists that "marijuana is a gateway drug" is false. Researchers said the predictors of whether someone uses harder drugs are social factors such as income status, psychological stress levels, employment status/potential, race and ethnicity, etc., not whether they ever smoked pot before. [Of course, more than a decade ago Institute of Medicine research conducted at the behest of Gen. Barry McCaffrey -- then the U.S. drug czar -- concluded "There is no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs", and that marijuana has been mistaken for a gateway drug in the past because "Patterns in progression of drug use from adolescence to adulthood are strikingly regular. Because it is the most widely used illicit drug, marijuana is predictably the first illicit drug most people encounter. Not surprisingly, most users of other illicit drugs have used marijuana first. In fact, most drug users begin with alcohol and nicotine before marijuana -- usually before they are of legal age."]

According to federal Health Department data, across the U.S., cocaine and marijuana use have been static since 2002. But New York is a hot-bed for drugs, and Manhattanites are particularly heavy users. A review of drug-test data compiled by drug testing firm Sterling Infosystems shows that cocaine is losing its favor among investment professionals, and is being replaced by marijuana.

On April 1, the U.S. patent office announced a new trademark: "Processed plant matter for medicinal purposes, namely medical marijuana." The category was killed three months later when the Wall Street Journal asked about it, but in the meantime ganjapreneurs nationwide filed some very interesting pot trademarks -- with some of the most colorful coming from Colorado.

Marijuana prohibition's days are numbered. Only 17% of those polled said that marijuana is the more dangerous than alcohol. A majority of respondents (65 percent) said that they believed that marijuana would be legal in the United States within ten years.