WASHINGTON –  A California lawmaker is pushing to get rid of the Drug Enforcement Administration's pot eradication program, arguing it's fiscally irresponsible to spend millions burning up marijuana plants at a time when several states are legalizing the drug. 

Rep. Ted Lieu, a Democrat, proposed an amendment to a fiscal 2016 spending bill that would cut the DEA's $18 million budget for the program in half. It would redirect $9 million to fund programs that help children who are victims of domestic and sexual abuse.

“Next year, I will bring another amendment to eliminate the program completely,” Lieu said in a written statement. 

South Dakotans might get a chance to decide whether medical marijuana should be allowed.

The Attorney General's Office said Tuesday that an explanation for an initiated measure to legalize marijuana has been filed with the Secretary of State's Office.

Melissa Mentele, the founder of an advocacy organization that has helped two families relocate to Colorado, authored the measure. Despite past failure to legalize medical marijuana use in the state, she feels confident this latest measure will garner strong support.

"Personally I think it's a slam dunk," she said. "I think there is so much science out there that people can't dispute it."

Their advice, when they’re actually asked for it, is consistently ignored in favour of doing the exact opposite, so why don’t we stop pretending to care about evidence and just scrap the ACMD altogether?

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs was established in 1971, at the same time the Misuse of Drugs Act came into being, as a supposedly independent body which would advise the government on drug policy. To quote the Wiki entry on the Council, their job is supposedly to:

Without a clear, crowd-pleasing conservative position on issues like marijuana and same-sex marriage, the safe spot for GOP politicians is in invoking federalism.

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina has been spouting off this week about marijuana. While she doesn't personally endorse legalizing the "complex chemical substance," Fiorina told Fox & Friends Tuesday that she supports the right of states such as Colorado to "make that choice." 

Peers debated the main principles of the government's Psychoactive Substances Bill in the House of Lords yesterday and seemed to be in agreement on one thing: its hopelessly vague.

The bill, designed to take aim at legal highs, defined a psychoactive substance as any substance that can affect a person's 'mental functioning or emotional state', with many critics pointing out that this effectively bans everything.

Lib Dem lord Brian Paddick told the House that the "dangers in the bill as drafted are to make the drug laws even more of a laughing stock than they are currently."

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -

The city has taken steps to make sure it will have a say in where legal medical marijuana could be sold in Jacksonville.

Starting next month, the state will start taking applications from businesses that want to start growing and distributing marijuana. Only five locations will be selected, one for each section of the state. If one of those chosen businesses is in Jacksonville, the city wants the right to say where it could go.

City leaders just passed an ordinance that puts a 180-day moratorium on any plan to locate a marijuana distributor or store in Jacksonville, until the City Council and the zoning office and city lawyers come up with a plan to say where it could be located.

Depenalisation, decriminalisation and legalisation. There is no universal agreement on these terms, but it is helpful to explore the different ideas that lie behind them if we are to understand better what they mean when they are used in the debate on different approaches to controlling the supply and use of drugs. 

Kansas mother Shona Banda is unable to see her child and faces decades in prison after authorities confiscated marijuana from her Garden City home in March.

On Friday, the state of Kansas charged Banda with “five felony counts of possession of marijuana with the intent to distribute, manufacturing Tetrahydrocannabinol, an oil extracted from marijuana, two counts of possession of drug paraphernalia and one count of child endangerment,” the Washington Post reports.

Legalizing marijuana Several proposals are in the works to legalize marijuana in Ohio. Check here for an update on the status of those efforts.

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Two groups vying to legalize marijuana will not make the ballot in November, group leaders said, clearing the field for one marijuana ballot issue this year.

Better for Ohio and Ohio Rights Group will not have the more than 305,591 signatures of Ohio voters required by July 1 to qualify for the November ballot, group leaders said. Both groups plan to continue collecting signatures for 2016.