Given that 39.6% of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, cancers affects nearly everyone. Chances are, someone close to you has battled cancer.

As multiple campaigns to collect signatures necessary to get a measure to legalize the use of recreational marijuana on the 2016 ballot pushes on, the demand for medical marijuana keeps growing.

In 2008, Michigan voters approved making the use of marijuana for medical purposes legal in the state.

Since then many local communities across Michigan have enacted measures that have both lessened the criminalization of the drug, while others have gone in the opposite direction to slow or block the availability of it.

But through all that, the number of patients who have registered to receive marijuana — as well as the number of caregivers licensed to provide — has grown.

THE QUESTION

I work at a big-box retail store as an overnight stocker and am on medical marijuana to relieve severe stomach pain. I am afraid of being terminated for using the marijuana, so I have not informed my employer and do not use it while at work. However, often I have to leave my shift early due to pain, citing sickness. I do not know my legal rights. How would you suggest that my employer should react to my situation, if I reveal the marijuana usage?

THE FIRST ANSWER

Katherine Poirier Partner at Borden Ladner Gervais LLP, Montreal

Faced with an FDA-manufactured opioid painkiller overdose epidemic, the Centers for Disease Control has revised its guidelines to avoid something possibly making the epidemic worse — the routine screening of opioid users for marijuana use.

Today, the CDC instructed doctors to stop routine testing of pain patients for marijuana use. The costly tests have dubious health benefits, high potential legal ramifications for the patient, and could actually increase overdose deaths.

Sports and marijuana have been in the news a lot lately, and not for the reasons that sports and cannabis used to be in the news. For a very long time the only articles you would see in the media about sports and cannabis was an athlete getting caught with marijuana. That was usually accompanied by a full blown freak out session by the same media out, as if cannabis use in sports was the worst thing that could possibly happen.

A $1 billion electric car plant and a futuristic transportation test track are among developments North Las Vegas hopes will pay off and diversify its economy.

There’s another, greener, economic development that officials hope will fatten the city’s wallet.

The city has received more state provisional licenses for growing and producing medical marijuana products than Henderson and Las Vegas combined. The financially ailing city hopes those licenses lead to big bucks.

State law currently limits Clark County to 40 licensed dispensaries, including four in North Las Vegas, but there is no limit on grow houses or production operations.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated their guidelines earlier this month for prescribing opioids to patients. According to the modified guidelines, the CDC advises that doctors stop testing patients for tetrahyrdocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive ingredient found in marijuana.

In the six weeks since nine-year-old Haley Hilt began taking medical marijuana, her mother has already seen improvement.

Haley’s movements have become more purposeful. She’s more mobile. She’s trying to feed herself, and attempting to crawl. She’s able to stretch out her arm and give hugs and kisses, and she’s better at locating objects with the special computer she uses at school.

Most importantly, she’s having fewer seizures — between one and two per week, down from five to seven.

“It’s almost surreal,” Melissa Hilt told me, on a recent visit to their East Schodack home. “It’s like we’ve really gotten to know who she is during the past month. She’s blossomed.”

A Toronto mother of three has opened up a medical marijuana shop on Parkdale’s main strip on Queen Street West and a passer-by wouldn’t even know it.

Nestled between a flower shop and a bar, The Caylx Wellness Centre has no enlarged marijuana leaf emblazoned on the store front, its name isn’t a play on words associated with weed and there’s no neon lights; the go-to marketing designs for dispensaries.

Instead store owner Danielle, who requested to not have her last name published, went a different route and focused on the importance of discretion.

People who want to get into the medical marijuana business in Louisiana are going to need to pay a $5,000 application fee in addition to a $150 licensing fee if they want to become one of 10 marijuana pharmacists in the state. The $5,000 application fee will be non-refundable, and will only be applied to marijuana pharmacies, not regular drug stores.