An American Indian tribe that planned to open the nation’s first marijuana resort is destroying its crop and suspending the project until it gets legal guidance from the U.S. government. Pictured: Sioux Indians, whose ancestral land is located in South Dakota's Black Hills, perform a ceremony in 1997 at Brompton Cemetery in London.

Former secretary of state wants Schedule II classification for marijuana

Hillary Clinton’s stance on marijuana legalization could cost the budding industry.

The former secretary of state and the front-runner in the Democratic presidential race told a town hall in South Carolina on Saturday that she supports reclassifying cannabis from a Schedule I to a Schedule II substance. Schedule I drugs have high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use, while a Schedule II classification means a drug has a high potential for abuse, but also an accepted medical use, like morphine and cocaine.

Illinois' medical marijuana dispensaries opened their doors Monday and have begun processing patients who will receive the first batches of the drug under the state's four-year pilot programs.

At EarthMed, a dispensary in Addison, the first patient to legally purchase pot, Chris Favela, 19, emerged with a small, opaque canister of a strain called Grape God. He paid $180 for about nine grams of the marijuana.

"I think it's fantastic," Favela, of Itasca, said of the program. "It's going to help patients that are suffering. I take a lot of medication and if this reduces it … I'm a fan."

Favela hopes the drug will relieve muscle spasms he has as a result of multiple sclerosis.

For over almost a year now the DEA and the DOJ were banned from using federal funds to go after legitimate marijuana businesses in states that have a legal framework in place. While the bill that banned the DEA from doing this action was pretty clear in terms of their limitations, the DEA felt that it had some “wiggle room” to break thus said law and still went after cannabis dispensaries and providers claiming that the bill merely “protected States and not the individuals or businesses within the State”.

Fortunately, a Federal Judge made it clear to the DOJ that interfering with State run Medical Marijuana programs, whether the actual state or the legal players within the program, is illegal!

You wouldn't know it from the outside, but a Queens warehouse has been turned into a marijuana farm.

Contractors are still building the facility, but behind these walls, thousands of plants are already growing across two floors for use as medical marijuana beginning in January.

Owner Bloomfield Industries gave us a first look at renderings. When completed, the plant will have 230,000 square feet of space, the equivalent of four football fields.

"It will be five floors," said Colette Bellefleur, chief operating officer of Bloomfield Industries. "Four will be grow, and one floor will be manufacturing and production."

New York is the 23rd state to legalize medical marijuana. The first crop in Queens was planted this fall and will be harvested in a few weeks.

Since recreational use of the marijuana has became legal in several states, authorities report a major jump in the number of pot-filled packages being sent through the mail.

Mailing marijuana is a federal crime - even if it originates from a state where the drug is legal. Marijuana by mail has nothing to do with Illinois medical marijuana, which started Monday.

This is the story of illegal marijuana delivered to the doorstep, and experts said most of the marijuana stashed inside mail goes undetected.

The U.S. Postal service handles more than 155 billion pieces of mail a year and more than a billion of that in Chicago. Forty thousand pounds of pot were seized nationwide from the mail last year.

As of Saturday, every Democrat running for president promises to, if elected, take marijuana off the list of Schedule 1 drugs — a move that doesn't require approval from Congress. At a Democratic candidate's forum at Clafin University — a traditionally African-American college in Orangeburg, South Carolina — on Friday, Hillary Clinton backed demoting marijuana to a Schedule 2 drug, a new position for her. Clinton said she supports the use of medical marijuana,explaining: "There is a lot of anecdotal evidence about how well it works for certain conditions. But we haven't done any research. Why? Because it is considered that is called a Schedule 1 drug and you can't even do research in it."

Medical marijuana became legal in Illinois on Monday, but qualified Metro East patients will have to travel at least two hours to pick up their prescriptions.

Illinois approved nine locations for the first day of dispensation. More sites are expected to open in the weeks ahead, but a spokesman for a state regulatory agency said he’s not allowed to say if any applications are pending for the Metro East or anywhere else.

Meanwhile, the nearest dispensaries are the Harbory, in Marion, 120 miles to the southeast, or Herbal Remedies, in Quincy, 140 miles north.

The second and third patients in line when the doors of the Harbory opened Monday were Trever Oliver, 25, and Drew Perkinson, 24, both of Godfrey. They got there at 7 a.m., Oliver said.

Pot activists can’t agree on how the drug should be regulated. Now some fear that picking sides could split the vote and not result in any legalization at all.

Amid the haze of pot smoke that floated above Boston Common as college-aged kids casually passed around blunts, Steve Epstein took to the stage and grabbed a microphone.

“We knew this day would come, when our Freedom Rally would be the initiative petition kickoff!” Epstein bellowed to the pot enthusiasts gathered at September’s annual marijuana festival.

An amateur tournament is taking place today in southern Oregon, and even if the greens and fairways aren’t perfect, we can guarantee the grass is good.

Billed as a celebration of marijuana legalization in the Pacific Northwest, the second annual Fore Twenty Harvest Tournament at Cougar Canyon Golf Course is expected to draw scores of business owners and employees from the growing cannabis industry for a day of schmoozing on the links.

Aside from offering a chance to hobnob, the event also aims to dispel the widespread image of marijuana users as Spicoli-like slackers whose ambitions revolve largely around late-night snacks.