Conventional wisdom says marijuana dispensaries make neighborhoods less safe, but a new study from UC Irvine suggests the conventional wisdom is wrong and that crime increases after cities move to close pot shops. “Given all the pretty strong rhetoric about dispensaries generating or at least attracting crime, it was not the result we expected,” said Mireille Jacobson, a health economics professor at UCI. “But I feel comfortable saying it’s very unlikely that these places are crime magnets.” Dispensaries seem to behave in this respect much like restaurants and other mainstream businesses, Jacobson said, helping to deter vehicle break-ins and other low-level crimes simply by putting more bystanders on the streets.

It's been a five years since Colorado's voters approved Constitutional Amendment 64, legalizing recreational marijuana in the state. Sales commenced four years ago this January. Although the amendment passed by a comfortable 10-point margin, the debate in Colorado has continued since prohibition ended, most recently flaring up with an editorial published in the Colorado Springs Gazette. The Gazette's editorial board referred to what has happened in Colorado as "an embarrassing cautionary tale," presenting a laundry list of the purported ill-effects of the change in the law. However, evidence from Colorado shows that marijuana legalization does not lead to increased teen usage, does not lead to increased homelessness, and does not lead to societal breakdown.

Banning a plant with hundreds of industrial and medical uses was never going to work out well, but 2022 saw marijuana prohibition reach peak absurdity, not to mention peak confusion for consumers and new businesses trying to make sense of it all. At first glance, cannabis reform appears to be humming along smoothly. Maryland, Missouri and Rhode Island approved legalization initiatives in 2022 as states such as New Mexico and New York raced to establish regulations for legal recreational sales. New laws in mostly blue states expunged cannabis arrests from criminal records for thousands of people. President Joe Biden made moves to pardon federal marijuana prisoners and reconsider the federal “scheduling” of marijuana...

More than 40 U.S. states could allow some form of legal marijuana by the end of 2020, including deep red Mississippi and South Dakota — and they’re doing it with the help of some conservatives. State lawmakers are teeing up their bills as legislative sessions kick off around the country, and advocates pushing ballot measures are racing to collect and certify signatures to meet deadlines for getting their questions to voters. Should they succeed, every state could have marijuana laws on the books that deviate from federal law, but people could still be prosecuted if they drive across state lines with their weed, because the total federal ban on marijuana isn’t expected to budge any time soon. (See also: Congress investigates lifting some cannabis restrictions)

Proponents of marijuana prohibition have long alleged that experimentation with pot acts as a “gateway” to the use and eventual abuse of other illicit substances. But the results of a just released national poll finds that most Americans no longer believe this claim to be true. According to survey data compiled by YouGov.com, fewer than one in three US citizens agree with the statement, “the use of marijuana leads to the use of hard drugs.” Among those respondents under the age of 65, fewer than one in four agree.

The New York Police Department, which has been arresting tens of thousands of people a year for low-level marijuana possession, is to stop making such arrests and to issue tickets instead. People found with small amounts of marijuana would be issued court summonses and be allowed to continue on their way without being handcuffed and taken to station houses for fingerprinting. The change would remake the way the police in New York City handle the most common drug offenses to address the effects of the department’s excessive stop-and-frisk practices. (See also: Concerns in criminal justice system as New York City eases marijuana policy)

A plan backed by Silicon Valley billionaire Sean Parker to legalize recreational use of marijuana in California is on the path to the November ballot, potentially bringing more than $1bn a year in tax revenue. The proposal, which would allow for the retail sale of marijuana to adults aged 21 and older, is one of the most highly anticipated initiatives, in no small part because California is the country’s largest economy and the eighth largest in the world. But some industry insiders are unhappy with the proposal and are withholding support. "This skews towards big marijuana," said Hezekiah Allen of the California Growers Association.

The Biden administration’s recommendation last week for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to reschedule cannabis marked one of its most significant steps related to the president’s ambitious campaign promise to decriminalize cannabis use. But advocates and policy experts say rescheduling marijuana under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) does not address the plethora of racial justice issues caused by current cannabis laws. Moving cannabis to Schedule III means that the federal government acknowledges it has medical uses; it doesn’t change its status as a prohibited substance. Many worry that rescheduling could amount to the Biden administration saying, “OK, we did something and now we’re done.”

Rates of adolescent marijuana use and abuse have declined across the US, according to a study that casts doubts on one of the central arguments against legalizing weed. Researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis surveyed 216,852 teenagers from all 50 states and found that the number of adolescents with marijuana-related disorders dropped by 24% from 2002 to 2013. Overall teen pot use also decreased by 10%, despite the fact that more than a dozen states legalized medical marijuana and decriminalized the drug during that time. (See also: No, legal weed is not ‘dumbing down’ the nation’s teens)

American adults are smoking more pot, but increased cannabis use does not appear to be due to wider availability of legal marijuana, a new study shows. Pot consumption among women almost doubled between 1984 and 2015, from 5.5 percent of adults to 10.6 percent; meanwhile, 14.7 percent more men are toking up since 2000, according to the report from the Public Health Institute. But researchers cautioned against assuming that relaxed laws governing recreational and medicinal pot are driving the trend.

This year was a big one for marijuana in the U.S. From a first-ever congressional vote on federally legalizing cannabis to another large state ending its own prohibition law, 2019 saw the marijuana movement make advances on several fronts. In November, the House Judiciary Committee made history by becoming the first congressional panel to approve a bill to end federal marijuana prohibition. The Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, if enacted into law, would remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act and fund programs to begin repairing the harms of the war on drugs, which has been waged disproportionately against communities of color.

En 1961, la Convención Única sobre Estupefacientes de Naciones Unidas dispuso “que la masticación de la hoja de coca quedará prohibida dentro de los 25 años siguientes a la entrada en vigor de la presente Convención”. El politólogo neerlandés Martin Jelsma, una de las mayores autoridades en políticas internacionales con respecto a las drogas, dice que con el retiro y posterior reingreso de Bolivia en la Convención del 61 (con la reserva sobre el masticado de coca), se debatió más la relación entre derechos humanos y de pueblos indígenas y las políticas de drogas.

Many cannabis cultivation workers share common challenges. They frequently lack a living wage, benefits (like health care and retirement plans) or pathways for professional development. Workers and advocates are concerned that the growth of many companies amid the nationwide cannabis boom is coming at the expense of underpaid employees, while corporation heads rake in profits. United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) is the most active union working with cannabis workers, organizing with them since 2013. It now has more than 10,000 members in working laboratories, processing and manufacturing plants, cultivation facilities and medical and adult-use dispensaries. 

A study released by a respected Mexican think tank asserts that proposals to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in Colorado, Oregon and Washington could cut Mexican drug cartels' earnings from traffic to the U.S. by as much as 30 percent. Opponents questioned some of the study's assumptions, saying the proposals could also offer new opportunities for cartels to operate inside the U.S. and replace any profit lost to a drop in international smuggling.

Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrado released a new plan that called for radical reform to the nation’s drug laws and negotiating with the United States to take similar steps. The plan calls for decriminalizing illegal drugs and transferring funding for combating the illicit substances to pay for treatment programs instead. It points to the failure of the decades-long international war on drugs, and calls for negotiating with the international community, and specifically the U.S., to ensure the new strategy’s success. “The ‘war on drugs’ has escalated the public health problem posed by currently banned substances to a public safety crisis,” the policy proposal, which came as part of AMLO’s National Development Plan for 2019-2024, read. Mexico’s current “prohibitionist strategy is unsustainable,” it argued.

Mexico's drug policies could be in for some sweeping changes, and with them the country's relations with the United States. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador announced that his administration would seek to revise the Merida Initiative, the $3 billion US aid package that has largely funded Mexico's war on drugs. In a press conference May 9, Lopez Obrador, widely known in Mexico as AMLO, said his administration does not "want aid for the use of force, we want aid for development." The announcement came shortly after the Mexican government released a National Development Plan for the next five years that proposes decriminalizing all drugs in Mexico.

It was a happy – and seemingly high – new year in Illinois after cannabis sales of more than $3m were made on the first day of the drug being legal for recreational use in the state. Some 37 dispensaries made 77,128 transactions as thousands of residents saw in the start of 2020 by lighting up. "The amazing thing about that is that there's a significant portion of these dollars that go directly into this community reinvestment fund, so we can continue to rebuild communities that have been hardest hit by the war on drugs," said Toi Hutchinson, senior adviser for cannabis control. Illinois is now the 11th US state to legalise the sale of cannabis to adults for recreational purposes.

Since 2012, 19 states, Washington, D.C., and Guam have legalized marijuana for recreational use — something 55% of Texans have said they either support or strongly support, according to a new Dallas Morning News-University of Texas at Tyler poll. And the numbers are even higher for medical use: 72% of those surveyed said they would either support or strongly support the legalization of marijuana to help treat illnesses, a move the Texas Legislature helped bolster last year when it expanded the state’s medical marijuana program to include all forms of post-traumatic stress disorder and cancer. After a May survey with similar results, Gov. Greg Abbott said his position on legalization has not changed beyond what he’s proposed in the past — reducing the criminal penalty for possession to a Class C misdemeanor, but not legalizing the drug.

The National Council of Native American Churches (NCNAC) and the Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative (IPCI) released a statement on March 12, 2020 asking psychedelic plant and fungi decriminalization efforts not to include peyote in their initiatives. “It is extremely important that peyote be preserved for utilization by and for indigenous peoples. Broken treaties in this land, the preciousness of native traditions, ecological threats to the medicine itself, and the importance of spiritual respect in its use makes peyote a tenuous plant to include explicitly in any decriminalization effort,” the statement reads.

More than 155 million Americans will now live in states with legal weed. Maryland and Missouri passed legalization referendums on Tuesday, meaning there are now 21 states where anyone at least 21 years old will be able to legally possess marijuana. That marks a seismic shift since Colorado and Washington became the first states to back full legalization at the ballot box a decade ago. “[It’s] just further evidence that cannabis legalization for adult use is mainstream American public policy,” said John Hudak, an expert on cannabis policy at The Brookings Institution. “That shows you how much progress has happened in American public opinion.”