HAMILTON, Bermuda (CMC) — A former policeman who said financial pressures had "backed him into a corner" has been jailed for four years after he was caught trying to smuggle more than US$200,000 worth of cannabis into Bermuda from Canada.

Owen Simons, a 43-year-old Bermudian, hid the drugs inside 35 small black packages that were folded into two new air beds before boarding a flight from Toronto to Bermuda in July last year, the Supreme Court was told.

Simons, who was living in Canada at the time, was stopped at Bermuda's L F Wade International Airport as he picked up his luggage.

As customs officers searched his bags and found the packages wrapped in carbon paper they asked Simons what they contained, to which he replied: "Weed."

With drug laws changing all the time, it’s hard for police sniffer dogs to keep up with what they’re supposed to find and what they aren’t. That’s why police forces are turning to insects to sniff out narcotics.

An odd scientific paper in PLoS One today details the very first attempts to get insects to become drug sniffers. The researchers tested three insects — the grapevine moth, the hissing cockroach and the western honeybee — just to assess how well they could differentiate the smell of one substance from another. The bees won, because their antennae make great “biosensors”, the researchers report.

Listen to Rona Ambrose, Canada’s Health Minister, or Nora Volkow, America’s Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and you will soon conclude that cannabis prohibition today rests on a single, nearly unassailable platform: it is bad for youth.  As expressed today, this claim is based on research published in the Journal of Neuroscience in April 2014.  Researchers looked at brain differences in 40 young people:  20 who had, and 20 had not been ‘smoking marijuana.’   The scans in the first group showed ‘abnormalities’ in the amygdala and nucleus accumbens, brain areas associated with emotion, memory, decision-making and motivation.  Scans are not self-interpreting, and scientific interpreters have yet to determine what these particular results mean.  Meanwhile the articles have

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — A bill to allow Chileans to grow small amounts of marijuana for medical, recreational or spiritual use won approval Tuesday in the country's lower house of Congress.

The measure, which would allow each Chilean home to grow up to six marijuana plants, passed a vote of 68 to 39, with five abstentions. It still must go before a health commission and be approved by the Senate.

"We're celebrating the overwhelming approval of this project," said Ana Maria Gazmurri, president of the Daya Foundation, a nonprofit group that sponsors pain-relieving therapies, including the recent planting and harvesting of Chile's first government-approved medical marijuana.

DENVER >> Presidential candidates are talking about marijuana in ways unimaginable not long ago.

White House hopefuls in both parties are taking donations from people in the new marijuana industry, which is investing heavily in political activism as a route to expanded legalization and landed its first major candidate, Rand Paul, at a trade show last month.

Several Republicans, like Democrats, are saying they won’t interfere with states that are legalizing a drug still forbidden under federal law. And at conservative policy gatherings, Republicans are discussing whether drug sentences should be eased.

This is Sam. He’s my son. His epilepsy caused him to have up to 100 seizures a day. After seven years we were out of options. Our last hope: an untested, unproven treatment. The only problem? It was illegal.

The hospital pharmacist slid three bottles of pills across the counter, gave my wife a form to sign, and reminded her that this was not the corner drugstore. The pharmacy knew how many pills had been dispensed, he said; it would know how many had been consumed; and it would expect her to return the unused pills before she left the country. The pharmacist made it clear that he was not only in touch with our doctor but with the company supplying the medication. They would know if she broke the rules.

Is this how the war on weed ends?

Harborside Health Center in Oakland, California, is the largest medical marijuana dispensary in the world, serving nearly 200,000 patients and distributing $25 million in cannabis per year. It does so out in the open, under the auspices of California law and Oakland’s regulatory regime. Federal prosecutors, however, maintain an unfriendly stance on state-legal medical marijuana: it’s still illegal under federal law, and must be stopped.

As the Conservative government’s champion in the war on pot, Health Minister Rona Ambrose has taken some heavy blows and faces the prospect of more.

Ms. Ambrose was “outraged” in early June when the Supreme Court ruled that legal medical-marijuana users would be permitted to eat the drug as well as smoke it. She was “deeply disappointed” last week when Vancouver said it would regulate marijuana dispensaries, most of which obtain their supply from unauthorized sources.

Her government’s efforts a year ago to end the right of medical-pot users to legally grow cannabis in their homes have been temporarily thwarted by a court challenge and could ultimately be struck down as a violation of civil rights.

The Executive Director of Tema based anti-narcotics organisation Creg Afful Foundation, Michael Creg Afful has charged Ghanaians, especially religious leaders to reject calls by some persons in the entertainment industry advocating for marijuana to be legalised in the country.

According to him, such a call is borne out of an evil agenda aimed to devastate the country’shuman resources,adding that it is also intended to putstrings on financial fortunesof prospective wee or marijuana smokers.

Controversial radio presenterand reggae musician Blakk Rasta and a popularhiplife artiste Kwaw Kesse aka “abodam” have proposed that it was about time that “wee” or “marijuana” was legalised in the countrydue to its economic benefits.

MARKHAM, Ont. – From the outside, MedReleaf’s production facility in Markham, Ont., doesn’t look like much. It’s a large rectangular building about three stories tall, shorter but wider than a football field, and camouflaged by an unassuming white exterior with few windows. There are no signs or company logos to tempt inquiring minds or mischief-minded passers-by.

That’s partly by design, CEO Neil Closner said.

“We’re very low-key,” he said. “We don’t want people knowing who we are, what we do, where we do it.

“The product we have inside the building is quite valuable.”

The product: Medical marijuana.