Sonoma County police seized more than $400,000 and 328 pounds of marijuana during a fall campaign to stop drug traffickers on Highway 101 during the outdoor marijuana harvest.

North Coast marijuana advocates are buzzing about the historic elections in Colorado and Washington where voters legalized marijuana for recreational purposes.

Robert Jacob, founder and executive director of two medical marijuana dispensaries, is running for the City Council in Sebastopol, where a pot business hardly raises an eyebrow. Running the dispensaries might even be a positive, Jacob said.

At least six of the eight Democrats and the two independents running in a new the North Coast congressional district want marijuana — a crop worth an estimated $14 billion a year in California — approved for recreational use by adults. The two Republicans are opposed to legalization, but one of them says pot penalties are excessive.

A Cotati medical marijuana dispensary is asking the city to lift customer caps that were put in place when it opened in 2010.

More people are coming to the realization that marijuana growing is no longer something that concerns remote areas of Mendocino County. It’s something that has moved into the neighborhoods. And it’s not going away.

California doesn’t tax medicine. So what’s with taxing pot? For cities and counties, it’s cash, of course. For the dealers, er, pharmacists, it has a faint odor of the Prohibition era.

If North Coast Rep. Mike Thompson gets his way, the nation’s spymaster will join the fight against Mexican drug traffickers and others who use federal land in California and elsewhere to grow marijuana. A bill authored by Thompson calls on Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to report on how intelligence agencies can help park rangers, fish and wildlife wardens and other U.S. land managers weed out pot gardens operated by foreign drug traffickers.

The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday agreed on the need to revise the county’s 2006 medical marijuana ordinance, but they differed sharply over the details of a proposed cap on the number of medical pot dispensaries operating outside city limits. The board ultimately endorsed a tentative cap of nine shops, two more than proposed.

Sonoma County supervisors are set to consider a sweeping overhaul of rules governing medical marijuana. They say the changes are needed to halt the spread of legal pot retailers and illegal pot gardens across the region and halt a wave of violent crime they claim is linked to the drug. Among the proposals: a limit on the number of dispensaries and new fees to cover the cost of patrolling and overseeing medical marijuana operations.