John Morgan just wrote a “big check” to get a second medical marijuana ballot initiative off the ground.

And a big check it was. $150,000.

“I’m going to do whatever it takes to put medical marijuana back to the people of Florida to make it your decision,” Morgan said in a video statement posted on the website for his group, United for Care.

Morgan said it won’t be the last check he writes, but implores supporters to write their own big checks.

The funding will go first toward paying for a massive petition drive to gather enough signatures statewide to force another constitutional amendment in 2016. Once ballot language is finalized campaign funds will pay for key advertisements and educational outreach dispelling messages from critics.

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, CMC – Embattled former FIFA executive and former national security minister, Jack Warner, has claimed that he was involved in a plan to bury the alleged discovery of marijuana at the home of Prime Minister Kamla Persad Bissessar in the Philippines.

Warner, in a statement dated June 6, said he and former deputy commissioner of police Mervyn Richardson planned to bury the drug that was found on April 12, 2013, while the prime minister was in New York.

Warner – the leader of the Independent Liberal Party (ILP) - also named Gary Griffith, then adviser to prime minister and Housing Minister Dr Roodal Moonilal, as being part of the plan to ensure there was no criminal probe into the alleged marijuana discovery.

An expert witness for the defense in a marijuana case testified in court Tuesday that it was impossible for a sheriff’s deputy to have smelled marijuana from duffel bags containing 80 pounds of processed pot in shrink-wrapped packages.

The defendant, Garth Alexander Gryte, has been charged with transportation of marijuana and possession for sale in connection with an Oct. 29, 2013, arrest, after the deputy stopped to help Gryte as he fixed a flat tire.

Lt. Alicia Burget testified in Nevada County Superior Court that she was driving on Highway 49 when she noticed Gryte out of his vehicle near Cement Hill Road; she said he was coming out of a ditch.

hree individuals have been arrested on suspicion of involvement in a large scale marijuana racket in Sellakatharagama, Kataragama.

The three were arrested in a raid carried out by a group of undercover officers from the Narahenpita Excise Drugs Unit.

Two hundred (200) kilogrammes of marijuana and two three-wheelers allegedly used for transporting the Marijuana were taken into police custody.

The suspects will be produced before the Tissamaharama Magistrate Monday, June 15.

Cops in Santa Ana, California, donned ski masks to break and enter into a local medical marijuana dispensary, raiding it with guns drawn in a May 27 police action. They then proceeded to remove surveillance cameras and recording equipment, but they didn't remove it all. Video from a camera they didn't disable also caught the officers eating what appear to be marijuana edibles, then acting in a way to suggest they had become intoxicated, with one officer even joking that she'd love to kick a marijuana activist present at the raid, Marla James, an amputee, in the "nub."

Watch one of the videos, via Orange County Weekly, below:

Michigan would legalize the recreational use of marijuana under two proposed initiatives for which advocates will soon begin collecting voter signatures.

The Board of State Canvassers approved the legalization petition forms Thursday. The advocacy groups need about 253,000 valid signatures each to put the bills before the Republican-led Legislature.

The measures, which would allow the possession or use of marijuana by those 21 and older, would go to a statewide vote in November 2016 if lawmakers did not act.

In New York City, misdemeanor marijuana possession arrests were dramatically lower between January and March 2015 than in the same period of 2014—2,960 compared to 7,110, respectively—but stark racial disparities persist among those arrested, new data obtained by Newsweek indicate. 

During the first quarter of 2015, African-Americans were arrested for misdemeanor marijuana possession 1,494 times: That’s 50.47 percent of the total. Hispanics were arrested 1,130 times, or 38.18 percent, and together these two groups accounted for 88.65 percent of the total. Meanwhile, whites totaled 228 of these arrests (7.70 percent) and 79 (2.67 percent) of the arrestees listed as Asian/Indian, according to the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services.

The House advanced a budget resolution Thursday that says marijuana can't be sold for two more years in Washington, D.C. The vote comes on the heels of several maneuvers in the legislative body to protect medical marijuana laws in the states, including a measure that instructs the Drug Enforcement Administration not to target state medical marijuana dispensaries. 

On Thursday, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down an appeal by the federal government to maintain the nonsensical status quo with regards to medical marijuana. The rules had stipulated that medical marijuana could only be possessed and consumed in its dried form, which meant chronically ill users were essentially restricted to smoking it. This made no sense whatsoever; a terminal lung cancer patient with a license to use medical marijuana, for example, should not be limited to lighting up. Yet under Sections 4 and 5 of the Controlled Drug and Substances Act, the creation and consumption of medical marijuana in alternate forms — in tablets, ointments, in baked goods or extracts — was prohibited.