Each step toward a viable medical marijuana program brings with it numerous unforeseen obstacles, and it’s been that way in Maryland since 2013. Two years ago lawmakers in Annapolis passed the state’s first medical marijuana program only to see zero institutions take them up on the offer. The legislature thought…
The last couple of months have been quiet on the medical marijuana front, and as a result it did not take much of a pot story to produce headlines at a variety of Maryland news outlets. Last Friday a town planner for the Talbot County seat of Easton announced that…
Toward the end of the 2015 legislative session the General Assembly convincingly passed a modification of the marijuana decriminalization law. The modification served to cure an inherent defect in the 2014 decriminalization law by removing the possession of marijuana paraphernalia from the catalog of CDS criminal offenses. It was a…
State lawmakers have officially closed the books on the 2015 legislative session, and there will be a host of new criminal and traffic bills reaching the governor’s desk in the next few weeks. Some have progressed through both chambers with little fanfare, and others have attracted media attention from the…
When the legislature decriminalized small amounts of marijuana last year the celebration drowned out many of the law’s shortcomings. In last spring’s rush to push decriminalization to the governor’s desk, the legislature neglected to address certain collateral consequences of the new law. One of these consequences was the illogical relationship…
One of the major flaws of last year’s marijuana decriminalization bill was that it failed to address drug paraphernalia. For the past six months possessing less than 10 grams of pot in Maryland has been punishable only by a civil citation. These citations are not available for public inspection and…
The road to marijuana legalization did not come easy for Colorado and Washington State. Both endured negative publicity from the national media and propaganda campaigns from various lobbyist groups (alcohol being a major one). And even in the face of increased tax revenues and dropping crime rates, and lower teenage…
A school offering a marijuana business class will hardly make headlines in a few years when pot is legalized for recreational use. Considering the market potential for legal marijuana, as much as 10 billion dollars per year by some estimates, it would be a disservice for an academic institution to…
The 2015 legislative session is officially underway, which means our focus will shift slightly from reporting Blog worthy criminal incidents to updating readers with the progress of new potential criminal laws. Last year was quite eventful from a criminal law standpoint; simple possession of marijuana was transformed from an offense…
Over the last few decades mail became one of the preferred methods of transporting marijuana across state lines. The carrier was irrelevant, as dealers and smokers would typically use FedEx, UPS, and the postal service to transport their stash across the country. Law enforcement eventually caught on, and began targeting…