The marijuana industry has been practically unstoppable in recent years, with that momentum carrying over into 2019. Through the first three months of the year, the broad-based Horizons Marijuana Life Sciences ETF has risen by approximately 60%.

According to Wall Street investment banks, this is an industry forecast to grow at a double-digit annual pace for years to come, with some analysts pegging annual global sales at between $50 billion and $75 billion by the end of the next decade. Presumably, with growth this robust, it's going to lead to some hefty gains for investors.

The personal health information of about 34,000 medical marijuana patients was accessed in a data breach of an electronic medical record system used by Sunniva Inc.'s Natural Health Services Ltd. subsidiary.

NHS says patients have been informed in the last week of the breach that occurred between Dec. 4, 2018 and Jan. 7.

It says the breach didn't involve any financial, credit card or social insurance number information since those aren't collected from patients.

However, personal injury firm Diamond and Diamond -- which has announced a proposed class-action lawsuit against NHS and Sunniva -- says it did involve diagnostic results, health-care numbers and personal contact information.

As the global pet care market continues it seemingly never-ending rise, year after year all things point to the fact that CBD infused products will be among the winners in the race to revenues. Given the sheer size of this industry, it's no wonder cannabis companies are expecting CBD-for-pets to garner a large share of the market. Here are some background projection numbers for the overall pet care market: Statista.com presents a forecast in pet store revenue in the United States from 2018 to 2023. It is projected that U.S. pet store sales will grow from around 19.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2018 to approximately 22.39 billion U.S.

Cannabis is a family of plants with two primary classifications, Indica and Sativa. Despite the two falling under one cannabis family, they are widely different in their biological makeup and effects. Although marijuana can fall into either family, marijuana is linked to having psychoactive effects on the user because of its tetrahydrocannabinol or THC component-heavy makeup. On the other hand, hemp does not provide psychoactive effects because of its main component, cannabidiol or CBD and while marijuana can contain anywhere from 15% to 40% of THC concentration, hemp normally contains less than 0.3%. In fact, it is the heavy THC concentration within marijuana which caused international organizations to put restrictions on the plant, making it one of the most enforced drugs worldwide.

There's a brick building on the southeast edge of Windsor run by someone who never dreamt she would help people consume cannabis.

Twenty years ago, Lisa Hogan started at Windsor Regional Hospital (WRH), where she worked her way into management at the family birthing centre.

"It was an amazing, very fulfilling career," said Hogan, marking it as a career goal.

But then Hogan's life changed. Her father was diagnosed with cancer and he made a decision that changed her life.

"My father used cannabis at the end of his life, and that's what changed my image and my view on the product," she said, sitting inside the education centre of the Natural Health Services (NHS) medical cannabis clinic that she runs.

One of the new frontiers for cannabis investing may not be the frothy windfall that some companies are expecting, a new report suggests.

The opportunity for cannabidiol – the cannabis compound du jour that’s better known as CBD – in Europe is forecast to grow at a heady clip over the next several years, but the continent is rife with a complex regulatory patchwork that could make the sector difficult to navigate, according to Bethany Gomez, managing director at Brightfield Group, which released a report Tuesday analyzing Europe's legal CBD market. 

"Europe is a very nascent cannabis market," Gomez said in a phone interview with BNN Bloomberg. "It’s just starting to take off but tailwinds are there."

Before Canadian hemp and cannabis growers have even begun to capitalize on new markets, they could have new and novel competition.

University of California synthetic biologists have engineered brewer’s yeast to produce marijuana’s main ingredients — mind-altering THC and non-psychoactive CBD — as well as novel cannabinoids not found in the plant itself. Feeding only on sugar, the yeast is an easy and cheap way to produce pure cannabinoids that today are costly to extract from the buds of the plants.

“For the consumer, the benefits are high-quality, low-cost CBD and THC: you get exactly what you want from yeast,” said Jay Keasling, a UC Berkeley professor. “It is a safer, more environmentally friendly way to produce cannabinoids.”

McMaster University has launched a new "science of cannabis" program — which the school says is one of the first post-secondary programs in Canada that focuses on the science of pot, alongside its benefits, risks and harms.

It's a three-course program offered entirely online through McMaster continuing education, and is available to people working in the health, education, public service, and social and community services sectors across the country. These are people who will deal with marijuana on the front lines, but also be responsible for forging policy change about it.

A recent study using data from more than 230,000 questionnaires by Canadian high school students in grades 9 to 12 found that almost 10 per cent reported having used the drug at least once per week in 2017-18, with a further 18 per cent saying they had used it at least once in the last year.

Both weekly and occasional use reached their lowest points in 2014-15 (9 percent and 15 percent respectively) and have since been rising steadily.

"The problem was developing while legalization was being discussed, but well before concrete steps to change the law were taken," said lead author Alex Zuckermann, a post-doctoral fellow with the Public Health Agency of Canada working in the School of Public Health and Health Systems.

Medical cannabis greatly interests researchers studying symptoms of certain neurological disorders, including epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, and multiple sclerosis (MS).

To date, only a handful of studies have focused on the effects of cannabinoids on symptoms of neurological disorders other than MS. While limited, research has found associations between medical cannabis and the potential improvement of specific symptoms across all three disorders listed above, including a reduction in pain and epileptic seizures.