Can a private employer stop employees from bringing doctor-prescribed marijuana to work?

Sorry, human resources managers, the answer just isn't as clear as you'd hope. That's according to Jim Reidy, an attorney tackling employer questions regarding drugs at the Society for Human Resource Management conference in Washington on Tuesday.

"It's evolving. That's why this topic is really hot for employers right now," Reidy said.

While employers may have federal law and even local smoking bans on their side, the legal answer to that question hasn't been completely resolved if an employer allows other prescriptions to be taken at the workplace, Reidy said.

DENVER — Colorado may give up on one of its toughest marijuana problems to emerge in the new market — making sure that edible pot products can’t be confused with regular foods.

A bill up for its first vote Wednesday would repeal a 2014 Colorado requirement requiring pot foods to have a distinct look when out of the packaging. The bill strikes a requirement that edible pot be “clearly identifiable … with a standard symbol indicating that it contains marijuana and is not for consumption by children.”

The sponsor of the measure, Republican Sen. Owen Hill of Colorado Springs, said he’ll suggest an amendment Wednesday to revive the requirement, but not for all foods.

AUGUSTA, Maine - The group that launched successful efforts to legalize recreational marijuana in Colorado and Alaska is officially taking steps to do the same in Maine.

Today supporters of the Marijuana Policy Project submitted a draft initiative that they hope to qualify for the 2016 statewide ballot.

This is the second citizens' initiative to propose legalizing pot next year. Both measures have some similarities and some big differences. Both plans would legalize recreational marijuana for adults 21 and over and also allow adults to grow small amounts for personal use. Both also call for a tax.

Recreational marijuana has been legalized in four states, but that doesn't mean it's a tested consumer product. Some of those potent buds are covered in fungus while others contain traces of butane, according to an analysis of marijuana in Colorado.

Last May, after people began getting sick from edible marijuana products, the state of Colorado began requiring all products to be tested. Washington has mandated testing too, with a detailed checklist of items to analyze, including potency, contaminants, moisture and microbiology.

Just when marijuana supporters thought things couldn't get any better, last week brought incredible news.

On Tuesday, March 10, three Senate members introduced a bill that would make medical marijuana legal on a federal level and free legal medical marijuana users from the potential for federal prosecution.

Australian-owned medical marijuana company Phytotech has merged with MMJ Bioscience in an effort to expand from cultivating cannabis to developing and distributing it in pill form.

Phytotech will acquire 100% of the issued capital of Canadian company MMJ Bioscience Inc with the aim of bringing marijuana-based pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products to a global market.

The deal is structured on Phytotech’s scrip share value (based on a pre-deal share price of $0.305 per share) of $15.5 million upfront and an additional $5.185 million in performance shares when certain milestones are achieved.

The article in the DailyMail states that a man died after suffering heart problems as a result of a decade-long addiction to cannabis, an inquest heard.

“John O’Brien, 53, from Salford, began smoking cannabis to cope with life-changing brain injuries sustained in a car crash.

But over a ten-year period, the Class B drug took its toll on his body and caused his heart to stop working.

A coroner at Bolton Coroner’s Court ruled in December 2014 that Mr O’Brien died from cannabis cardiotoxicity, a little known condition in which smoking cannabis triggers heart problems.”

A request from at least one Glenwood Springs retail marijuana shop to extend the allowed business hours for recreational pot sales in the city beyond 7 p.m. has prompted City Council to consider doing just that.

Currently, business hours for both recreational and medical marijuana sales are limited to between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m., seven days a week.

While the hours for medical sales are governed by state statute, municipalities have the flexibility to establish their own hours of operation until as late as midnight for recreational sales, which became legal in Colorado last year.

Initially, when the city wrote its regulations to allow establishments to sell both medical and retail recreational marijuana, the hours were kept the same.

Local business stakeholders say legalizing marijuana could further impact a workplace already marred by an inability to find workers who can pass a drug test.

As several issues promoting marijuana legalization in Ohio move forward in an effort to be placed on November’s ballot, a major concern is how employers would deal with workforce safety and drug testing.

“We don’t really support legalizing marijuana as an employer,” said Robert Toews, chief financial officer for Kaivac Inc., adding that having workers able to smoke cannabis, even off the job, could create confusion in the workplace.

In the business world, the word synergy gets thrown around a lot. Synergy is the interaction between two or more elements that, when combined, form something greater than the sum of the individual parts. Synergy is often used to describe when two great companies come together, but in the context of today’s discussion, it describes the partnership between two great conferences.