But new figures show number of people caught cultivating cannabis plants is falling across west London as a whole

Hounslow is west London's cannabis growing hot spot, but the numbers being caught cultivating the drug are falling elsewhere in the area.

Police in west London recorded 147 production of cannabis offences in 2014/15, 34 of which were in Hounslow, according to statistics revealed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The total number of such offences in the area was down from 205 last year but in Hounslow it rose slightly from 32 in 2013/14.

PORTLAND, Ore. -- National nonprofit organization 'Grow for Vets' is raising money and support for veterans suffering from PTSD and other medical conditions, as well as handing out free marijuana. 

The organization hosted a free cannabis giveaway and rally at Refuge PDX in Portland on Saturday. Both Veterans and non-veterans received gift bags containing information about Grow for Vets and free pot-related products. 

The rally aimed to raise veterans' awareness about alternative treatment options, and to highlight the frequency of prescription drug abuse and suicide. 

In the early Spring of 2015, a historic federal medical marijuana bill was introduced into Congress. The Compassionate Access, Research Expansion, and Respect States Act of 2015 or the CARERS Act of 2015, was introduced in March of 2015. The bill was introduced by Senator Cory Booker, and as of today, carries 15 co-sponsors. Below is the summary of the bill, via Congress’ website:

MPs are now wise to what they call ‘campaign emails’. The large number of campaigns by groups such as 38 Degrees have really swamped MPs with repetitive correspondence. It doesn’t work to send what is clearly a template or automatically generated email and unfortunately you will just be ignored. Many MPs have started to and actually warn against this now on their website.

Here is some advice from our friends at CLEAR:

Find out who your MP is by entering your postcode on this website: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/

When we last signed off on the petition to ‘make the production, sale, and use of cannabis legal’, back in July, we left it on a still-rising total of 116,893 signatures. Well, we’re stumbling our way through September and the petition currently stands at 215,308 signatures and rising. The number of signatures required on a petition for it to be considered for a government debate is 100,000. As you’ll note, that’s a total that had already been surpassed when we previously discussed it(alongside the legalisation debate as a whole). In fact, that total had been cleared in the petition’s first five days of going live.

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – The BC Compassion Club Society is looking for some more details after the federal government threatened to call in the RCMP unless it and 12 other marijuana dispensaries close.

John Conroy is the Compassion Club’s lawyer and says they’ve written back to Health Canada. “[We are] asking them to comply with the duty to act fairly that falls upon all administrators when they are going to take action that could adversely affect anyone.”

A petition was started calling for the UK Parliament to debate cannabis legalization. The petition needed 100,000 signers to initiative the debate. As of this date, the petition has received 215,769 signatures. As such, a debate has been planned for next month. Per High Times:

In response to a public petition demanding that the United Kingdom repeal prohibition, Parliament has announced that it will put the issue of marijuana legalization up for debate at the beginning of next month.

The past decade has witnessed a remarkable transformation in the global debate over drug policy. As recently as the mid-2000s, drug legalization or even decriminalization was a fringe idea, something almost no politician would get near. That’s all changed. That the War on Drugs is a fundamental failure is a widely accepted fact among experts and even policymakers. Multiple nations no longer treat personal drug usage as a criminal problem but rather as one of public health. Many of them are actively considering following Portugal’s successful example of decriminalizing all drugs. The global trend is clearly toward abandoning prohibitionist policies.

Gov. Bruce Rauner's administration issued a broad rejection Thursday of expanding the list of diseases that can be treated with medical marijuana in Illinois, refusing to add osteoarthritis, migraine, post-traumatic stress disorder and eight other health problems.

Separately, the governor vetoed a bill that would have added PTSD via a legislative route.

The moves were a stern rebuke of recommendations from an expert advisory board appointed by Rauner's predecessor, Democrat Pat Quinn.

Adding conditions would have expanded the potential base of patients. So far, only 3,000 Illinois patients have been approved to use marijuana for conditions listed in the original law such as cancer, HIV and multiple sclerosis.

I have met Steve DeAngelo on several occasions. The first was at the 2012 Students for Sensible Drug Policy in Denver, Colorado. Steve had just walked off stage from giving a keynote speech, and since The Weed Blog booth was right by the auditorium, he walked right past Jay Smoker and I. We flagged him down, told him how big of fans we were of his work, and had a long conversation about the future of cannabis. It was a very timely conversation, because later that year Colorado and Washington voted to legalize recreational cannabis, which was something that we talked about that day, about eight months before Election Day 2012.