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Proposition 64 (2016) directed our office to submit a report to the Legislature by January 1, 2020, with recommendations for adjustments to the state's cannabis tax rate to achieve three goals: (1) undercutting illicit market prices, (2) ensuring sufficient revenues are generated to fund the types of programs designated by the measure, and (3) discouraging youth use.... While this report focuses on cannabis taxes, nontax policy changes also could affect these goals.

Turns out cannabis stocks were a pretty lousy investment, Ciara Linnane reports for Market Watch.

More than three-quarters of people who have developed severe lung illness after vaping reported using THC-containing products, a new report found, as officials continue to piece together a picture of the mysterious disease.

Progressive political activists allege that tech companies have inflated housing costs and forced middle-class people onto the streets. Declaring that "no two people living on Skid Row . . . ended up there for the same reasons," Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, for his part, blames a housing shortage, stagnant wages, cuts to mental health services, domestic and sexual abuse, shortcomings in criminal justice, and a lack of resources for veterans. These factors may all have played a role, but the most pervasive cause of West Coast homelessness is clear: heroin, fentanyl, and synthetic opioids.

It takes lots of marijuana to make 1 billion joints, but that's how much pot Oregon has on hand right now--enough to supply the state's marijuana "needs" for six years, even if production stopped right now. The vast oversupply is causing worries that growers, who have made huge investments in their business ever since Oregon legalized recreational marijuana use five years ago, will turn to the black market to dispose of inventory. That, state authorities fear, could lead to new federal enforcement in Oregon--prosecutors busted a black-market ring there last year. To stem the excess, Oregon is moving to deny new licenses to growers, but the state will likely have to take away some current licenses, too, or watch some growers go bust, before the problem disappears.

Even before announcing that he would seek the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden was busy apologizing. At a Martin Luther King Day speech to Al Sharpton's National Action Network, Mr. Biden said "I haven't always been right" about criminal justice and "white America has to admit there's still a systematic racism and it goes almost unnoticed by so many of us."

Not long ago Mr. Biden publicly defended his role in shaping the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which funded the hiring of more cops and encouraged more "truth in sentencing" by requiring that prisoners actually serve the majority of their sentences before becoming eligible for parole. That law, Barack Obama's vice president said in 2016, "restored American cities." Mr. Biden, who was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1994, reiterated that view in his 2017 memoir.

To anyone who figured the path of legalizing recreational marijuana use ran along blue state-red state lines, a sudden setback for pot advocates in New Jersey may show the issue isn't so black-and-white.

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"It's a good illustration that even in a state that's entirely Democratically controlled, it's not obvious that it would be passed -- or that it would be easy," says Daniel Mallinson, a Penn State Harrisburg professor who studies how marijuana legalization and other policies spread among states.

Rafael Mangual writes in the National Review:

The notion that America's criminal-justice system regularly locks up otherwise harmless people for minor drug crimes -- and does so largely because of thinly veiled racism -- has become a central article of progressive faith. It was thus not surprising to hear Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren invoke the notion at the liberal We the People Summit earlier this week. What's breathtaking, however, is the scope of Warren's error. In response to a loaded question from the audience about how the system "criminalize[s] poverty and communities of color," Warren replied:

[Criminal-justice reform] starts on the front end, with the activities we criminalize -- for example, low-level drug offenses. More people [are] locked up for low-level offenses on marijuana than for all violent crimes in this country. That makes no sense at all. No sense at all. [Emphasis added.]

She's right, it doesn't make sense -- because it's not true. In fact, it's so at odds with the publicly available data that one can only conclude that Warren is either totally unlettered on the subject or was willfully deceiving the audience.

Sens. Cory Gardner and Elizabeth Warren have introduced a bill to legalize marijuana at the federal level in the name of "states' rights." In reality, it would give birth to Big Tobacco's successor.

This dangerous proposal would allow the marijuana industry to market high-potency pot candies, gummies and 99% pure extracts (compare that with 5% potent Woodstock weed). With 70% of today's illicit drug users having started with marijuana, not prescription drugs, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, this is exactly the wrong time to legalize pot.

Public-health data from states that have legalized strongly indicate that it is a failed experiment, resulting in more fatalities from driving while stoned, more emergency-room visits and poison-control calls, and more worker accidents and absenteeism.

Juaquin Garcia Soto was drunk and high on methamphetamine when he kicked in Israel Ramirez's apartment door and stabbed him to death in front of his girlfriend and young son.  Soto was charged with first degree murder and first degree burglary.

In California, a murder conviction requires a finding of express or implied malice.  Express malice requires intent to kill "unlawfully," while implied does not.  California Penal Code section 29.4 permits evidence of voluntary intoxication on the issue of whether a defendant "harbored express malice."

At trial, Soto claimed "imperfect" self-defense, which is the actual, but unreasonable, belief that acting in self-defense was necessary.  A successful imperfect self-defense claim will result in voluntary manslaughter because "one who holds an honest but unreasonable belief in the necessity to defend against imminent peril to life or great bodily injury does not harbor malice and commits no greater offense than manslaughter."

Peter Loftus reports for the WSJ:

An advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration recommended the agency approve what could become the first prescription drug in the U.S. derived from the marijuana plant, as a treatment for people with rare forms of epilepsy.

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The FDA is expected to decide by the end of June whether to approve the drug for sale. The agency isn't required to follow the advice of its advisory committees but usually does. GW Pharmaceuticals proposes to call the drug by the brand name Epidiolex.

Is removal of marijuana from Schedule I likely to happen this year?

"When you look at the number of people in our state and federal penitentiaries, who are there for possession of small amounts of cannabis, you begin to really scratch your head. We have literally filled up our jails with people who are nonviolent and frankly do not belong there."

--Former House speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), in an interview with Bloomberg News, April 11, 2018

WaPo Fact Checker Glenn Kessler awards the former Speaker the maximum Four Pinocchios for this claim.  That's a "whopper," and not a hamburger.

So what do we find? In the state correctional institutions, only 3.4 percent of prisoners were in jail for all types of drug possession as of Dec. 31, 2015, according to the Justice Department. While Boehner claimed that the prisons have been filled with nonviolent prisoners, the data show that 54.5 percent are in prison for violent crimes such as murder, rape and robbery and 18 percent involve property crimes; another 11.6 percent are in prison for public order offenses.

There has been considerable speculation recently whether the Administration would ask Congress to expand the federal death penalty statute as applied to drug dealers.  No, it will not.  Louise Radnofsky reports for the WSJ:

President Donald Trump on Monday will call for new steps to combat the opioid epidemic, including a push to reduce opioid prescriptions by a third over three years, asking the Justice Department to seek more death-penalty cases against drug traffickers under current law, and for federal support to expand the availability of overdose-reversal medication.

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Other elements of the strategy, the White House said, would include a fresh public-awareness campaign about drug abuse, a research-and-development partnership between the National Institutes of Health and pharmaceutical companies into opioid prescription alternatives, tougher sentences for fentanyl traffickers, and screening of all prison inmates for opioid addiction.

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"The Department of Justice will seek the death penalty against drug traffickers when it's appropriate under current law," said Andrew Bremberg, the president's top domestic-policy adviser.

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