MMJ's Australian distribution partner has received import licence.

MMJ PhytoTech’s (ASX:MMJ) Australian distribution partner, HL Pharma, has received approval for a medicinal cannabis importation licence from the Department of Health, Australia.

This is an important development for MMJ as it enables the direct supply to Australian pharmacies through its strategic partnership with Melbourne-based HL Pharma.

Snoop Dogg isn't the only rapper that's made a foray into the cannabis industry. In fact, it seems to be a spreading trend that has caught on with other big names in hip-hop, including Wiz Khalifa, Cypress Hill's B-Real and Wu-Tang Clan's Ghostface Killah.

Last year, The Game became the first celebrity to own a marijuana dispensary. This led him to develop branded strains of cannabis flowers and concentrates, which are now sold at the Santa Ana, California location.

When it comes to Cannabis, the industry as a whole is expected to be one the biggest, outperformers of our lifetime. It is the end of marijuana prohibition after-all.

Some stats: 13% of U.S. adults admit to currently smoking pot on a regular basis, while 43% say they have at least tried it, according to a Gallup poll from 2016.

I would put money on these stat figures being largely incorrect, people tend to not like admitting certain things to strangers on the phone. You could probably safely double those numbers, which sounds more realistic to me.

Online sales could be one way recreational marijuana is sold after legalization.

Canada's biggest publicly traded marijuana company is readying a new online store to hawk its wares, in a move that hints at how legal marijuana sales might soon look.

Canopy Growth Corp., which owns the Tweed, Mettrum, and Bedrocan brands of medical marijuana, will launch the Tweed Main Street store in the first half of April.

Between them, the three brands have more than 50,000 registered clients, according to Canopy. Right now, those customers have to shop for their products separately, on each brand's individual website.

Syndros, a liquid marijuana substitute that contains a synthetic version of the marijuana ingredient that makes users feel high (THC), has been assigned a less restrictive drug category than real weed.

The liquid is developed by Arizona-based pharmaceutical company InSys Therapeutics, the company behind synthetic opioid Fentanyl, which is around 100 times more powerful than morphine.

“Battling the opioid epidemic will require a multi-pronged approach and a good deal of creativity.”

In states that legalized medical marijuana, U.S. hospitals failed to see a predicted influx of pot smokers, but in an unexpected twist, they treated far fewer opioid users, a new study shows.

Hospitalization rates for opioid painkiller dependence and abuse dropped on average 23 percent in states after marijuana was permitted for medicinal purposes, the analysis found. Hospitalization rates for opioid overdoses dropped 13 percent on average.

At the same time, fears that legalization of medical marijuana would lead to an uptick in cannabis-related hospitalizations proved unfounded, according to the report in Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

A region of the Keystone State impoverished by industrial decline and ravaged by opioid addiction sees a future in medical cannabis.

The promise of big profits and job creation continues to draw communities to the legal marijuana industry, particularly in places where the economy has long suffered.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in southwestern Pennsylvania. City leaders in Braddock, located east of Pittsburgh, have submitted an application with the state in hopes to land a license that will allow for a new cannabis cultivation facility. The goal is for legal medical marijuana to bring back jobs lost over the past decades by the decline in the steel industry.

The man considered the world’s foremost marijuana researcher began studying cannabis scientifically in the 1960s. He was not a hippie.

Dr. Raphael Mechoulam, 86, is now a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and an advisor to the Israeli government’s medical marijuana program. He has never smoked a joint. But he’s been deeply curious about cannabis for nearly his whole professional life—starting as a young researcher in Israel, when almost nothing was known about the plant and its medicinal potential.

Fund will track medical marijuana companies.

Roughly two weeks before April 20, investors with a craving for marijuana exposure will have a new instrument with which to get it in their portfolios.

The first exchange-traded fund with a marijuana focus, the Horizons Medical Marijuana Life Sciences ETF, has been conditionally approved for listing by the Toronto Stock Exchange. It is scheduled to debut on April 5 under the ticker symbol HMMJ. According to Horizon ETF Management, it will be the first ETF “that offers direct exposure to North American-listed stocks that are involved with medical marijuana bioengineering and production.”

Two ex-executives from Minnesota Medical Solutions are being charged for sending $500,000 worth of cannabis oil across state lines, and could be bringing the entire company down with them.

With a limited medical marijuana system already in place, Minnesota has become a dim beacon of hope in a region of the country that has typically turned their nose up at cannabis use in any way, shape, or form. With two recreational bills sitting in front of lawmakers, the state is inching ever closer to a more progressive stance on marijuana.