A former Surgeon General of the United States of America says he wants to sell medical marijuana.

Among the list of applicants for Hawaii’s new medical marijuana dispensary system is a team of business professional including former Surgeon General, Kenneth Moritsugu. He’s not the only former top doc of the nation to support the medicinal use of one of mankind’s oldest cultivated plant species.

Former Surgeon General under President Bill Clinton, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, gave a keynote speech at the recent International Cannabis Business Conference in San Francisco on February 15. Dr. Elders was dismissed by Clinton in 1994 after disclosing her opinion that marijuana has medicinal uses.

A New Hampshire family is hopeful that a drug derived from cannabis that is being tested at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center will help treat a rare form of epilepsy.

Colton Schools, 11, has Dravet syndrome, a form of epilepsy that has ravaged his body almost since he was born.

"If I had to describe it in one word -- horrible," said his mother, Janice Taglieri. "It started for us with Colton at a very young age. So we've been dealing with this since he was about 3 months old."

Dr. Richard Morse has been treating Colton since infancy. When Colton was 3 or 4, Morse diagnosed him with Dravet syndrome.

New Zealand could miss the boat as an exporter of medicinal cannabis, horticulture expert Dr Mike Nichols said.

Nichols, writing in the latest issue of the horticulture magazine, NZGrower, said New Zealand could miss out in much the same way as it did with the opium poppy trade, which is now dominated by Tasmania.

"The potential to grow medicinal cannabis in New Zealand at this point in time as an export crop would appear to be excellent," Nichols said.

"The value of a kilogram of medicinal cannabis compared with a kilogram of Pinus radiata is a clear example showing that New Zealand should be producing, and exporting, high value and low volume products," Nichols said.

The only group actively collecting signatures to put a marijuana legalization measure on the Ohio ballot this year has paused its campaign. 

Instead, the Legalize Ohio 2016 campaign will work with Marijuana Policy Project on its medical marijuana measure and with marijuana activists trying to reduce criminal penalties for marijuana possession.

If you really need it, and nothing else is available, medical marijuana probably does not need kashrut certification, confirms Rabbi Moshe Elefant, chief operating officer of the Orthodox Union's Kashruth Department.

This January, the OU gained the distinction of becoming the first kashruth organization to certify medical marijuana, produced by the company Vireo Health, causing some eyebrows to rise, on a number of grounds.

One is that medicine shouldn't require kashrut certification, should it? Asking this question led to a moment of pilpul-lite on the definition of "medicine."

Cannabis won’t make you a nervous, miserable wreck. That’s the conclusion of a study published Thursday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry that failed to find a connection between mood disorders and cannabis use in adults. Researchers looked at about 35,000 U.S. adults, examining their cannabis use and, three years later, looking at their rates of mental illness. The conclusion: “Cannabis use was not associated with increased risk for developing mood or anxiety disorders.” Case closed? Not quite.

A Langley medicinal marijuana advocate is worried he may not be able to travel abroad safely after he was abruptly ejected from Mexico.

Randy Caine worries that local controversy and opposition to his medical marijuana activism in Langley led to his being labelled a drug dealer by Mexican federal police.

Caine and his wife, Maureen, were on a trip to Puerto Vallarta in March of last year. When they landed, Caine was taken aside by Mexican federal police to an interrogation room, and asked about criminal activities, and if he had ever been arrested.

"They said I had been identified as a drug trafficker and a security threat," Caine said.

Caine was put on the same plane to return to Canada. Maureen had to arrange another flight to follow him.

Some Nova Scotia doctors are concerned young people are receiving prescriptions to smoke medical marijuana, despite the effects marijuana has on the developing brain.

Currently, there are no laws in Canada regarding the age at which people can receive prescriptions for marijuana and different organizations have different recommendations.

The College of Family Physicians of Canada says cannabis is not appropriate for anyone under the age of 25, while the Canadian Paediatric Society and Health Canada both recommend cannabis not be consumed by anyone under the age of 18.

Risks of youth cannabis use

The brain isn't fully developed until 25 and frequent cannabis use can have serious consequences for youth.

New research published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry found that using marijuana as an adult is not associated with a variety of mood and anxiety disorders, including depression and bipolar disorder.

This is a challenge to some previous research that has shown that marijuana use is associated with depression and anxiety.

The researchers examined the records of nearly 35,000 U.S. adults who participated in the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. They examined the prevalence of marijuana use among the study participants in 2001 and 2002, then checked on the participants’ rates of mental-health problems three years later in 2004 and 2005.