This is our second annual Medical Cannabis Round-Up . As time goes by since the passage of Prop 215 by California voters in 1996, each year brings with it new challenges, successes, clarity and confusion. I sometimes feel like we are taking two steps forward and at least one step back ~ and 2011 was no different.

This Tuesday, a national coalition of medical marijuana advocates renewed their demand to the Drug Enforcement Administration to act on an eight-year-old petition to reschedule marijuana for medical use..The rescheduling petition offers a unique opportunity to narrow the ever widening gap between federal and state medical marijuana laws under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), to make it consistent with the now fifteen, state medical marijuana policies and that of its own Department of Justice. "