“We’re here, we’re high and we aren’t going away.”

With those words, pot-purveyor Bruce Myers explains the sudden emergence of a marijuana dispensary operating like an old-fashioned fruit stand on the southeast corner of Renfrew and Hastings streets in East Vancouver.

Myers, 55, of Surrey said the pop-up pot tent and table complete with scales, bongs, pipes, grinders, papers and blow torches was first moved onto the City of Vancouver-owned property in August to coincide with the PNE. They plan on keeping the pot stand running 24-7 right through until the Fright Night Halloween attraction is over across the street at the PNE.

In an historic moment in the Legislative Assembly on Monday afternoon, all members of the parliament backed the government’s amendment to the drugs law to pave the way for the use medicinal cannabis oil. Premier Alden McLaughlin, who is also the health minister, presented the bill on Friday but the debate began this afternoon, and in a show of unity all of the legislators backed the change. There are still hurdles ahead for those suffering from conditions where the oil may help with pain or even offer a cure, as sourcing it could still prove difficult.

Some makers of marijuana concentrates, extracts and edibles are sounding dire alarms about how the state's new testing rules are holding back their products from the market and jeopardizing their businesses.

They complain that the state lacks approved labs to carry out all of the required tests, causing long delays, forcing them to mull layoffs and generally leaving them out of the state's new recreational marijuana program that opened this month.

The state has 18 accredited and approved labs for marijuana; only four are approved to test for pesticides, a hallmark of Oregon's marijuana regulation.

When Carey S. Clark sent out a public letter last month expressing her support for Maine’s cannabis legalization initiative, she received a lot of supportive responses. She also heard from a few critics. One nurse told her “you should be ashamed of yourself.” Others questioned her professional standing and her employment. Clark is a highly respected nurse, researcher, and associate professor of nursing at the University of Maine. She responded to her critics “with kindness,” she said, and encouraged them to further explore the issue.

It was a typical response from a medical professional with 22 years of experience, who has been working intensively around cannabis issues for the last two years.

The MHRA's assessment could 'provide ground-breaking results' in leading to reform over cannabis' medicinal use in the UK.

The government’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has found that Cannabidiol (CBD) has a “restoring, correcting or modifying” effect on “physiological functions” when administered to humans, in a potential milestone in the campaign to legalise cannabis and bring about evidence-based laws regarding drugs.

Master horticulturalist Francoise Levesque tends to the thousands of marijuana plants at Tilray, one of 35 federally licensed producers of medicinal marijuana that have brought pot growing “from the basement into the light.”

“We are pioneering, in a way, how to do things,” says Levesque, who was growing tomatoes before joining the Vancouver Island company.

But pioneering is rarely easy work.

Tilray won a coveted licence in 2014 for the previous Conservative government’s mail-order medical pot system, but, like many of the licensed producers, has since endured a boom-and-bust cycle.

Exemption even surprised the premier's office. 'Can anyone explain?' aide asked.

Ontario's Liberal government defended allowing medical marijuana users to vaporize anywhere by saying they had consulted "very broadly" – but emails show those consultations involved the input of just two people, The Canadian Press has learned.

Ultimately, the associate health minister had to defend the policy for just one day after the government backtracked on the policy within 24 hours. The emails, obtained through freedom-of-information legislation, show the premier's top staff members were both unaware of the new rule and confused by it.

A marijuana chemical known as cannabinoid cannabidiol (CBD) helps cracks recuperate quicker and even make the bones more grounded than they were some time recently, as indicated by a study led by analysts from Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University and distributed in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research.

CBD has no psychotropic impacts.

“We observed that CBD alone makes bones more grounded amid recuperating, improving the development of the collagenous framework, which gives the premise to new mineralization of bone tissue,” analyst Yankel Gabet said. “In the wake of being treated with CBD, the mended bone will be harder to soften up what’s to come.”

BONES CONTAIN CANNABINOID RECEPTORS

The Transvaal pharmacy in The Hague, the seat of Dutch government, is the only place in the Netherlands where patients can buy whole plant cannabis oil of guaranteed quality. Pharmacist Armin Ramcharan distills the oil from three different varieties of cannabis grown by Bedrocan, a medical cannabis producer. Patients from as far afield as Italy travel to The Hague to buy it.

Hash oil is considered a hard drug under Dutch law, in the same category as heroin or cocaine. This is why Bedrocan, the country’s only legal medical cannabis grower, cannot produce oil. The company’s license is limited to cultivating cannabis flower.

With nine states poised to legalize cannabis next month, an increasing number of my firm’s clients are seeking help on taking their cannabis business national. They want to know what it will take to cross states with their cannabis cultivation centers, their cannabis retail storefronts, or even just with their brand names. If you, too, are looking to present your cannabis business on a national stage, you need to consider the following seven things:

1.  Federal enforcement policies versus federal law.