After declaring the U.S. attorney's enforcement of drug-free school zones arbitrary and not based on law, the owner of several medical marijuana dispensaries and recreational pot shops statewide has abandoned a dispensary he was developing near Colorado College, walking away from it just weeks before it was scheduled to open.

Dispensary owner Brian Ruden said Tuesday that he made the decision after federal officials told Side Streets in a March column that Ruden's Tree of Wellness II at 705 N. Nevada Ave. risked being shut down if it opened because of its proximity to two schools north of downtown.

Good Chemistry will open in Aurora next week.(Photo: Courtesy | Good Chemistry)

DENVER BUSINESS JOURNAL - Aurora's newest marijuana dispensary will open next week at 16840 E. Iliff, making it the second location for Denver-based Good Chemistry.

The dispensary will offer recreational marijuana only, while Good Chemistry's original location at 330 E. Colfax Ave. offers both recreational and medical marijuana.

Matt Huron, founder and CEO of Good Chemistry, assembled a team of professionals including a botanist and an investment banker to help grow his company, which he eventually wants to debut on a national scale.

In what might turn out to be the best April Fools’ Day prank, an awkward marijuana sign came up on a college avenue in Arkansas. The sign, surprisingly, announced the future opening of the first marijuana dispensary in Arkansas inside a building that once housed EZ Mart. So far, no one has claimed responsibility for bringing up the sign and the owner of the building has claimed lack of knowledge about who placed the sign there, but what is clear is that marijuana is illegal in Arkansas as it is at the federal level.

Annual marijuana holiday (4/20)

As cops, part of their jobs was to put away drug sellers and users. Now, former law enforcement officials are doing private security work for Illinois’ now-legal medical marijuana industry.

Billed as being the “World’s Largest Legal Cannabis Celebration,” the annual World Cannabis Week will be returning to Denver this coming April. The event, which will be the third one so far, will run from April 16 through April 20 in Denver, Colorado, and tickets and packages are now on sale.

World Cannabis Week is quickly becoming one of the foremost cannabis trade shows and conventions in the industry. It is a much-anticipated convention by both purveyors of marijuana and cannabis-related products and by people who enjoy partaking in the recreational use of pot, or who are prescribed the drug for medical reasons.

Momma bears, it’s taking the momma bears to end the reefer madness.

Paige Figley, Holley Moseley and Dawn Wein are among a group of women who worked the Florida Capitol the past year persuading, pressuring and pleading with lawmakers to lift a prohibition on medical marijuana and authorize the use of cannabis products they believe will ease their children’s suffering and, in some cases, potentially save lives.

When they showed up at the Capitol it was to put an exclamation point on the generation-long shift in how Americans view marijuana – since the 1990s twenty-three states have authorized its use as medicine.

 THE LOBBYIST

Guam is the first U.S. territory to legalize medicinal marijuana, joining 23 states. Legal marijuana will be limited to medicinal uses only.

The new law has the potential to help patients with debilitating diseases. For some, medical marijuana has alleviated pain associated with multiple sclerosis. For cancer patients, it can help reduce extreme nausea caused by chemotherapy and stimulate appetite.

Guam's Department of Public Health and Social Services will hold its first informational meeting next week to discuss the rules and regulations for the island's new medical marijuana law. It will be held at Sen. Tina Muña Barnes's office at 2 p.m. next Friday, said Public Health Director James Gillan.

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About 20 marijuana plants sit on a table Wednesday, April 1, 2015, at Puff-n-Stuff on Grand River Avenue in Lansing. The dispensory sells plants, harvested marijuana, edibles and other products.(Photo: Dave Wasinger/Lansing State Journal)Buy Photo

LANSING – Mayor Virg Bernero's planned speech Saturday at Hash Bash in Ann Arbor is expected to get plenty of attention, but it's unclear if words will lead to any action that makes Lansing's policy on the drug easier to understand and enforce.

The city already allows limited use of marijuana beyond medicinal purposes. Bernero is expected to help drive the effort for a possible 2016 ballot initiative that would make recreational use of the drug legal in Michigan.

Dr James Linden spoke to Sean Moncrieff about how patients and researchers are caught in a legal grey area

It was an Irish doctor, one William Brooke O'Shaughnessy, who first pioneered using cannabis for medical relief. In 1839, the Limerick-born physician published one of the world’s first research paper on the drug’s medicinal qualities, having used Indian hemp – then known as gunjah – to treat tetanus and other diseases.

Now, 176 years later, and another Irish doctor is hoping to explore the medical qualities of marijuana, and saying it’s high time that the Irish authorities changed the law to offer relief to thousands of people suffering from Multiple Sclerosis.

The lawmakers behind a recent congressional amendment protecting medical marijuana operations in states where the drug is legal strongly rebuked the Department of Justice for trying to continue to crack down on some medical marijuana businesses.