Canadian Medicinal Marijuana Producers Are Trying To Put Down U.S. Roots The sprawling copper mine that stretches deep below White Pine once employed thousands of people, helping make the remote Michigan town a thriving outpost of the state's northern hinterland. Prices for the metal started to plummet, however, forcing the facility to shut down in 1996 and leaving White Pine a virtual ghost town. Suburban bungalows that once housed copper miners and their families now sell to vacationers for as little as $10,000. [continues 1072 words]
University Enacts Closure After Legal Challenge Fails There's a visible police presence at the University of Colorado this morning as administrators roll out their well-publicized attempt to snuff out the annual 4/20 smoke-out, but, so far, students and employees seem to be coming and going without ID checks. Several students -- and one unauthorized visitor -- told the Camera that they walked onto campus, sometimes past police checkpoints, this morning without being asked for ID, as CU officials had said would be the case today. [continues 571 words]
'Master Growers' Are Cultivating Potent, Smooth and Aromatic Marijuana - the Kind Expected by More Discriminating Buyers. Behind the bolted steel doors of an old brick warehouse, Big Wes meets a nutrient company scientist to see if he can increase his crop yield. Rows of hydroponic marijuana plants soak up solution flowing through plastic troughs and light blazing from high-pressure sodium lamps. Big Wes has spent more than half his life calibrating his system of growing high-grade marijuana to its utmost efficiency. At 50 years old, he harvests a crop of dozens of plants every week from five rented warehouses scattered along the rutted streets and alleys around the docks of Oakland. [continues 1765 words]
Prohibition Costs Illinois Big Bucks As marijuana traffickers go, Jason Alan Spyres was far from the best. He was just 19 when police in Woodford County found a bag of pot in Spyres' car and arrested him for possession. Less than a year later, he was arrested again and charged with cannabis trafficking in Macon County his mother had shipped 38 pounds of pot to him from California via United Parcel Service, with police intercepting the package. While out on bond, he was caught again, this time during a raid that also netted a meth dealer, and received a second trafficking charge. [continues 2848 words]
The sheen emanating from Donnie Clark's emerald vegetable garden is blinding. There are hulking heads of lettuce, spinach and broccoli -- plants that will not land him in federal prison this time around. Myakka City's most famous folk hero now spends his days puttering around in his backyard plot, sun on his cheeks, dirt under his nails, the weight of the past no longer square on his shoulders. His life has been one of wild adventure, unrelenting mischief, lengthy confinement and abnormal forgiveness, and if he had not been born the son of a Manatee County commissioner 70 years ago then surely an imaginative screenwriter would have invented him. [continues 1751 words]
