Today, April 20, or 4/20, is a cultural landmark for marijuana in U.S. society. Fueled by the legend of California high school students who in 1971 got high at 4:20 p.m. each day, “420” is a marketing term for pot doctors and retail marijuana stores stocked with designer bud strains that glisten in showcases like emeralds, says the Sacramento Bee. In many states, pot culture is becoming a feature of Americana akin to Budweiser or the backyard barbecue. State-regulated recreational marijuana sales are thriving in Colorado and Washington. Voters in 2014 approved legalization in Oregon, Washington and the District of Columbia. Twenty years after California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana with Proposition 215, activists are vying to qualify a measure for 2016 to legalize recreational pot and regulate a state-sanctioned marijuana industry in the Golden State
The political and legal status of marijuana in California remains murky. The state has the nation's largest marijuana marketplace with medical marijuana alone, producing $1.3 billion in taxable sales of pot. As many as 1.4 million people have doctors' approval for medical marijuana. Yet the massive retail-style pot industry operates largely without rules. It survives on the legal threads of nebulous 2003 state legislation allowing patients with physicians' recommendations to collectively cultivate and share marijuana. Yesterday, President Obama told CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta he accepted medical marijuana despite the federal law that bans marijuana as a dangerous narcotic with no accepted medical use. “The more we treat some of these issues related to drug abuse from a public health model and not just from an incarceration model, the better off we're going to be,” he said.”