PROVIDENCE — Weeks after legalizing the sale of marijuana to sick people, lawmakers have voted to explore how much Rhode Island might collect in revenue if it were to make all sales of marijuana legal and impose a "sin tax" of $35 per ounce.

During the General Assembly's aborted rush to adjournment Friday, the Senate approved a resolution — introduced earlier the same day — to create a nine-member special commission to study a swath of issues surrounding marijuana. Among them: "The experience of individuals and families sentenced for violating marijuana laws ... The experience of states and European countries, such as California, Massachusetts and the Netherlands, which have decriminalized the sale and use of marijuana."

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Rhode Island became the third state in the country Tuesday to allow the sale of marijuana for medical purposes.

The House and Senate easily overrode Governor Carcieri's veto of bills that would permit up to three dispensaries that advocates have dubbed "compassion centers."

In 2006, the General Assembly permanently legalized the use of medical marijuana. Doctors could prescribe it for critically ill patients. But there was no legal way to buy the drug, leaving patients or their caregivers to grow it, or buy it on the street.

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PROVIDENCE -- Republican Governor Carcieri has, as promised, vetoed legislation that would make Rhode Island the second state in the nation to allow state-licensed dispensaries to sell marijuana to the chronically and critically ill.

In his first veto message of the year, Carcieri said: "Although the intent of the legislation is to allow consenting adults to use marijuana only for medicinal purposes based on illness, the increased availability, along with a complacent attitude, will no doubt result in increased usage, and will negatively impact the children of Rhode Island."

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PROVIDENCE -- Nearly a decade after patient advocates first pressed for full-scale legalization of marijuana for medical use, Rhode Island on Tuesday became only the second state to establish state-licensed dispensaries to sell the drug to the critically ill.

Senate lawmakers gave final approval to the House and Senate versions of the legislation, sending it to the governor's desk with enough votes to override a veto, if necessary.

Governor Carcieri, a longtime critic of medical marijuana, confirmed in a brief interview Tuesday that he will "do the same thing I've done with it in the past." A year ago he vetoed a compromise plan to study the concept, saying it would "move Rhode Island further down the path of weakening the laws governing -- and public perception of -- illicit drugs."

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PROVIDENCE - Following the lead of the Senate, the House of Representatives Wednesday approved by a lopsided majority a bill approving the establishment of a non-profit "compassion center" to distribute medical marijuana to authorized patients.

After just over 10 minutes of debate the House voted 63-5 to pass the bill introduced by Providence Rep. Thomas Slater. A companion bill passed in the Senate last month on a 35-2 vote.

Before the measure can become law, the House must pass the Senate version of the bill and/or the Senate must pass the House version of the bill and send it to Gov. Donald Carcieri who, according to his spokeswoman, is "expected to veto it."

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A Growing, But Still Problematic, Remedy

On a recent morning, Kirk Manter, 54, lifts a 3-foot-tall marijuana plant grown in a house on a quiet street in Woonsocket. He shoves the leafy plant ­­ packaged in a tall trash bag ­­ into his Jeep Cherokee and drives it to a man in South County who is battling multiple sclerosis.

A wooden cross dangles from his narrow neck. His white T-shirt features a picture of a caduceus ­ the symbol of the medical profession ­ against a bright green plant.

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PROVIDENCE -- A proposal that would create licensed dispensaries to sell marijuana to those who've been prescribed the drug for medicinal purposes is headed for an official vote on the House floor in the coming weeks, having cleared a final committee Thursday night.

Establishing the so-called "compassion centers" would allow the hundreds of Rhode Islanders legally allowed to use the drug under a relatively new state law to safely and affordably purchase it, supporters say.

Though lawmakers in 2006 legalized use of medical marijuana for those who suffer from certain chronic, debilitating illnesses, they never provided a legal avenue to obtain the drug, drawing concerns about safety and accessibility.

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PROVIDENCE -- For the second year in a row, a state Senate committee has approved a bill to allow licensed dispensaries -- known as "compassion centers" -- to grow and sell marijuana to the estimated 600 patients who currently have the state's blessing to use the drug for medicinal purposes.

The unanimous vote on Wednesday by the Senate Committee on Health & Human Services, chaired by the lead sponsor of the legislation -- Providence Democrat Rhoda Perry -- elicited mixed reactions from the front-row spectators wearing T-shirts that said: "Rhode Island Compassion Club."

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PROVIDENCE -- No one seems to be getting worked up about a bill before the General Assembly that would decriminalize possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, making it a civil violation punishable by fine rather than jail time.

At a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, only three people -- a former New Jersey police detective, a spokesman for a convict assistance agency and a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union -- testified about the bill. All were in favor of it.

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There are children who matter so little that no government agency even bothers to count or keep statistical track of them. They are the children of prisoners. Nationally, the justice systems have no interest in how children or families are affected by an offending parent's imprisonment. The state ensures that the sins of the father are visited upon the son.

The number-one predictor of a child going to prison is having had a parent in prison.

The number-one drag on a child's academic success is family chaos of any kind. And nothing is as chaotic as having a parent yanked out of their lives and branded as a convict.

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IS IT TIME -- yet -- to tax marijuana?

California dodged a budget bullet, and now Massachusetts, New York and other states are under the same gun. As governors and state legislatures scrape for new sources of revenue, has the time come to talk seriously -- really seriously, without winks, puns and smirks -- about regulating and taxing marijuana?

It's hard to avoid the brutal truths, and even harder to admit them. The marijuana market is immense, barely restrained by prohibition laws, while the harm it causes society is minuscule compared with alcohol and tobacco.

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PROVIDENCE - Without committing to bringing the bill out of the House Health Education and Welfare Committee that he chairs, Warwick Rep. Joseph McNamara said he looks more kindly this year toward a bill that would establish state-authorized dispensaries to distribute medical marijuana.

The Senate passed legislation last year to create the "compassion centers," but the House HEW committee, upon McNamara's recommendation, amended the bill to establish a commission to study the issue.

The amended bill passed the House and Senate but was vetoed by Gov. Donald Carcieri.

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WHEN A PIZZERIA closes, the pizzeria down the block usually sees a surge in business. That principle applies to commerce in the larger North American neighborhood. Whenever the United States locks the gate on a plausible economic activity, Canadians move in and profit.

The Bush administration's hostility toward embryonic stem-cell science created opportunity in Canada. Starved of adequate federal support, American labs doing this cutting-edge science shrank or closed down, and many of their researchers moved to Canada. Between 2002 and 2007, the number of American university professors and assistants relocating to Canada jumped 27 percent, according to Canadian immigration officials. Some were stars in stem-cell research.

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PROVIDENCE -- For Bobby Ebert, the legalization of medical marijuana in Rhode Island didn't just bring relief, it brought a slew of unwanted anxieties.

State law allows the Warwick HIV patient to use the drug to alleviate his chronic pain -- but it offers him no place to buy it legally.

So Ebert did what many of Rhode Island's medical marijuana patients do. Frail and in pain, he made his way from his suburban apartment to the streets of Providence in search of a drug dealer. The first time he went, he was robbed.

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For Rhode Islanders suffering from terminal illnesses or chronic pains, medical marijuana can provide badly needed relief.

But getting the marijuana in a safe, legal manner can be problematic for these patients - which is why state legislators have introduced a bill allowing for the creation of up to three nonprofit Compassion Centers to grow and distribute the plant.

The bill was introduced in the state Senate last week by Sen. Rhoda Perry D-Dist. 3 P'91 and will be introduced in the House of Representatives today by Rep. Tom Slater D-Providence. It is a reincarnation of a 2008 bill which failed to pass the House despite winning a 30-5 vote in the Senate.

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A wide array of pundits has been referring to the recent election as "historic" because, for the first time, an African-American was elected president. But for Jeff Morris, a sophomore at Suffolk University in Boston, the election was historic for a different reason.

Morris, who started a chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws at Suffolk this semester, is celebrating the passage of Massachusetts Ballot Question 2, which decriminalizes the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana, making it a civil offense instead of a criminal one.

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Libertarian Favors Legalization

After growing up with "Just Say No" with television commercials imploring them to be "Above the Influence," today's college students have spent their youths grounded in America's so-called "war on drugs." But on Tuesday night, students filled List Auditorium to hear one man's take on exactly why the whole campaign makes no sense.

Jeffrey Miron, Harvard economics professor, outspoken libertarian and staunch advocate of drug legalization, told his audience that since his positions tend to be unpopular, he gets a "weird feeling" when an audience agrees with him.

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CRANSTON, R.I. -- Classic American diners are dinosaurs these days. Many of them, anyway.

Take Sherwood's Diner, once so popular in Worcester, Mass., that patrons who were firefighters rigged a fire bell to ring inside the diner.

Or Hickey's Diner, hooked to a 1954 Chevy truck on the town green in Taunton, Mass.

Or the gigantic Louis' Diner in Concord, N.H., with stained-glass windows, basket-weave tile, and a colorful history, including having an owner who was convicted of rum-running during Prohibition.

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It was one of the good things in a bad year. It was a serious attempt to put some fairness and common sense into a system sadly lacking in either.

It was an attempt to keep people who shouldn't be in prison out of prison. It was hopeful.

And it was shot down by Governor Carcieri, who apparently wants to keep the ACI running at full capacity and then some.

So on Wednesday, people gathered across from the ACI in Cranston to point out how really shortsighted the governor has been.

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PROVIDENCE -- The General Assembly's rush to adjournment took a pause, as legislators in both the Senate and House of Representatives called it a night on Friday and took the unusual step of reconvening on Saturday morning to wrap-up the legislative session.

Here are some of the highlights of the end-of-session lawmaking blitz:

Efforts to establish "compassion centers" where registered medical marijuana users could obtain the drug without dealing on the sometimes dangerous black market failed, but a joint House and Senate resolution was passed to create a study commission that will spend the legislative off-season evaluating the idea.

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