This year is set to be another big one for drug reform in the United States. Not so in Iowa, where politicians with old-timey views on science and personal freedom insist on preserving strict prohibition.

Take a look at the six states bordering Iowa, ranging from staunchly conservative to moderately liberal, and you can see how embarrassing the situation is. Iowa already has some of the region’s harshest criminal penalties for marijuana possession, and there’s a good chance we will look even worse by comparison at the end of 2020.

As of the New Year, Iowans can go just over the Mississippi River into neighboring Illinois to buy recreational marijuana. Now that sales are legal in the Prairie State, some officials in Iowa are warning residents to be mindful of state law.

Despite the law change in Illinois, it is still illegal to transport the drug across state lines or to drive impaired. 

Sergeant Alex Dinkla of the Iowa State Patrol says officers will likely be keeping an eye out for potentially impaired drivers, especially in the eastern part of the state.

The open comment period for Iowa’s proposed hemp production rules and regulations kicked off last week.

Feedback on the the proposed administrative rules regulating planting, growing and harvesting of commercial hemp in Iowa will be accepted until January 22. On that day, a public hearing will also be held where interested parties can present their views verbally or in writing.

Twice a month, Wendy Shoemaker visits a Windsor Heights shopping center to pick up something she believes has changed her life.

Her destination, a storefront with two-leaf plant images on the windows, is a dispensary that sells medical marijuana products. Next door is a Nepalese and Indian restaurant. Across the street is a B-Bop's burger chain.

Shoemaker, 51, entered the dispensary on a recent November afternoon slowly, with the help of a cane. She sat on minimalist furniture, near computer screens set up to help customers with their purchases. The process, she said, can feel like visiting an Apple store.

Iowa’s Medical Cannabidiol Board will consider changes to the state’s limited medicinal cannabis program on Friday, including petitions to add new medical conditions that qualify patients to participate in it. The board will also consider a proposal to replace a 3% limit on THC in medical marijuana products with a purchase limit on the high-inducing cannabinoid.

The mayor of Jamaica, Iowa, and her husband were arrested in January after a search for a shooting suspect led deputies to the mayor's door, behind which they found pots of marijuana.

LaDonna Kennedy, 51, then the mayor of Jamaica, a central Iowa town with about 220 residents, was sentenced Friday to two years of probation after pleading guilty to manufacturing, delivering or possessing drugs with the intent to manufacture or deliver marijuana and failure to affix a drug tax stamp. 

Iowa’s Medical Cannabidiol Advisory Board has reportedly approved chronic pain as an additional qualifying condition for the state’s medical cannabidiol program. Well, sort of additional.

As the program’s name suggests, Iowa’s focuses on medicines containing cannabidiol (CBD), with THC levels restricted to no more than 3%. Medicines can be administered in oral, topical, nebulized, suppository or vaporized forms – but smoking of products is not permitted.

On Friday, Iowa’s Medical Cannabidiol Board voted to add chronic pain to the list of qualifying conditions for medical marijuana, substituting it for the previously approved condition of “untreatable pain.” The edit is expected to expand access to the program, but many who are involved with the cannabis industry and its patients in the state are getting frustrated with Iowa’s slow evolution of marijuana policy.