As attitudes toward marijuana become more lenient and states authorize its use for medicinal — or even recreational — purposes, a long-simmering debate over the efficacy of workplace drug testing has found a new flash point.

Marijuana accounts for more failed workplace drug tests than any other substance, and the new laws have the potential of decreasing or eliminating employer testing for it.

Defenders of drug testing maintain that employees who use drugs, including marijuana, have been found to miss more work, cause more accidents, change jobs more frequently, and ultimately cost employers more money.

Only smoke-free medical marijuana, sold as pills, oils or tinctures, will be available for qualifying patients.

Jessica Blake has been battling a potentially deadly brain tumor for months. The former Esko high school teacher lives in Duluth, where her parents have moved in to help care for her.

It’s been tough lately. Blake can’t keep most medicine down, and the conventional drug she got from her doctor didn’t work.

“It actually gave me hallucinations,” she recalled. “It was terrifying. I don’t ever want to experience that again.” The hallucinations went on for two days.

“When Jessica said that was two lost days, that’s very difficult,” said her mother, Kathleen Blake. “Because she is not sure how much time she has.”

You don't have to be Don Draper to dream up a pitch for pot. In Portland, home to a thriving culture of marijuana use and a fast-growing medical marijuana industry, the product practically sells itself.

But retailers and producers, scrambling for a share of an increasingly crowded market, are taking steps to promote their brands. Competition is likely to intensify as Oregon approaches October, when the state is expected to allow limited cannabis sales to recreational consumers.

"Everybody is doing lots of angles right now," said Andrew Shenker, an owner of Uplift Botanicals, a Northeast Portland dispensary. "That's what it takes in a market this crazy."

Denver’s ABC affiliate KMGH-Channel 7 is on the verge of running what is said to be the first marijuana-related TV commercials. But after confirming the controversial move in The Cannabist, the station on Friday put the ads on hold.

For now, the issue is in the hands of owner E.W. Scripps’ lawyers.

KMGH-Channel 7 is weighing one 15-second spot for The Green Solution, a company with several dispensaries in the state, and another for Neos, a company that sells cannabis-oil-loaded vape pens.

In a decade and a half of practising law, I’ve never come across an industry changing and evolving as rapidly as Canada’s medical cannabis industry.  It’s fascinating, but it’s also time-consuming to stay abreast of everything that’s going on.  So in case you blinked recently, here’s a quick update on my ‘top ten’ list of current issues:

At the Cannabis Club Collective in Tacoma, Wash., Brian Caldwell has installed a top-of-the-line alarm system, motion sensors and a safe, hoping to protect the cash he collects from the 200-plus customers who buy marijuana at his store on an average day.

“We pretty much had to make a bank within our walls,” he said.

And at Auntie Dolores, a marijuana edibles shop in Oakland, Calif., Julianna Carella uses pouches to bag up her cash at the end of the day, then sticks it in her trunk, feeling nervous as she drives away.

“It’s actually a huge headache to have to deal with all that cash. . . . It’s horrible,” she said.

A former WA Liberal MP could become Australia’s first legal “pot king” if Canberra gives the green light to his plan to cultivate medicinal cannabis.

As the arrest of a Perth widow over giving cannabis to her ill son revives the medical marijuana debate, former Federal politician Mal Washer has revealed he is pushing to grow Australia’s first legal crop.

But Dr Washer is being frustrated by the time a Government review is taking into his company’s proposal to grow marijuana on the Australian territory of Norfolk Island.

He argues it would boost the Pacific paradise’s ailing economy.

Dr Washer is chairman of Auscann and a shareholder. In May, Norfolk Island’s Parliament granted it a licence to grow a medicinal strain of cannabis and export it to Canada.

TORONTO - As Canada's burgeoning medical marijuana industry ignites, a number of local pot producers are looking to take their homegrown expertise abroad.

"With the cannabis market across the world expanding and opening up, that's presenting opportunities for Canadian producers," says Neil Closner, the chief executive of Toronto-based MedReleaf Corp.

Analysts say Health Canada's strict quality controls make exporting plants grown in Canada to other jurisdictions a cost-prohibitive proposition. Instead, Canadian producers are looking to take what they have learned at home and set up new corporate entities in other countries.

POSITIVE tests to the drug ice have surged in Mackay workplace drug screenings.

The drug testing service, in Heidi St at Paget, is now seeing more positive tests for methamphetamines than for marijuana  across different professions and age groups.

CQR Health manager Jenny Townley said the toxic and illicit drug didn't discriminate according to profession or age and that many workers in a variety of industries were now turning to the drug to cope with work stresses, long hours and shift work.

Ms Townley said the toxic synthetic substance was both mentally and physically destructive and that all employers, not just the mining industry, had both a legal and moral obligation to their staff to provide a safe working environment.

Just days after Governor Ige signed a bill to allow medical marijuana dispensaries in Hawaii, dozens of businesses are setting up shop at the Hawaii Cannabis Expo in the Hawaii Convention Center.

The three-day event got underway Friday night with a panel discussion involving state lawmakers, attorneys and even pot growers, among others.

With more than a thousand medical marijuana registration cars already being issued each month in Hawaii, an entirely new and large wave of business opportunities is also coming up.