Dozens of people attended the Awaken America Cannabis Conference in Sacramento.

The event focused on the use of medical marijuana, specifically for seniors and cancer patients. Many attendees shared their stories.

"I vomited for 15 straight months and lost 53 pounds," user Sioux Colombe said.

"I had a lump on my breast, and they said it was a pre cancerous breast lesion," user, Linda Amelia said.

"I was diagnosed with metastatic cancer," Dr. Marian Fry said.

While these women suffered from different ailments, one thing brought them together. All of them said they have been saved, thanks for medical marijuana.

"It worked overnight. I stopped throwing up, it was amazing," Colombe said.

Grace can finally sleep through the night without being awakened by one of her epileptic crises since the eight-year-old Mexican girl started taking cannabis-based medicine a month ago.

Her parents have seen a marked improvement in their daughter's conditions since she became the first person authorized to take medicinal marijuana in October.

"Her reaction has been very good. Since she took the medicine, we noticed that she could sleep all night," her father, Raul Elizalde, said from the family's home in an upper-class neighborhood of the northern industrial hub of Monterrey.

As California prepares to bring in the $1 billion medical marijuana industry from the legal shadows, growers and marketers on the pot-rich North Coast are waiting to see how much the massive regulatory structure will cost them and whether to stick instead with the prosperous but risky outlaw status they have lived with for nearly two decades.

The regulatory scheme, which will cost up to $50 million, must be funded entirely by license fees paid by the industry, while new taxes on the cannabis trade — which some advocates say is one of Sonoma County’s major industries — offer the prospect of millions of dollars to help pay for paving roads, hiring police and other public services.

TUCSON – An Arizona Supreme Court ruling gives medical marijuana card holders a new defense in DUI cases, according to DUI attorney James Nesci.

“But the defense is kind of screwy because you have to prove that you were not impaired,” Nesci said. “How do you prove you're not impaired?”

Crime labs test for a chemical called THC, which can stay in a person’s blood long after they use marijuana.

“There are no studies that show how much THC impairs a person. That's the first thing,” Nesci said. “Second thing we also know is this, tolerance plays a big deal in that.”

Nesci believes the new ruling may be unconstitutional, but it could be the law for years.

Many doctors reluctant to use treatment that lacks federal OK

KANSAS CITY, Mo. —Efforts to make cannabis oil available to Missourians with a severe type of epilepsy are off to a slow start, mostly because neurologists are reluctant to certify patients to try a treatment that does not have federal approval.

In 2014, the Missouri Legislature legalized cannabis oil to treat an intractable type of epilepsy that can't be controlled by medications. Darla Templeton, director of the Epilepsy Foundation of Missouri and Kansas, estimates 18,000 Missourians could be eligible for the treatment.

The passage of the Illinois Compassionate Use of Medical Cannabis Pilot Program Act, which legalizes cannabis use by sufferers of certain debilitating medical conditions, has created concerns among health care providers, hospitals, health systems, pharmacies, nursing homes and other members of the health care community. Now, with some medical cannabis dispensaries expected to begin operations in the coming weeks, questions regarding the impact on providers have grown more pressing by the day. 

To help health care providers better understand their roles and responsibilities under the new Illinois law, we answer some of the most relevant questions below. 

Is it better for women to smoke marijuana when they're pregnant? Probably not, but a study conducted in New Zealand shows that children who were born from mothers who imbibed in cannabis when carrying scored better in an area of brain development, as opposed to those who didn't smoke weed.

The test from Auckland University took 165 children aged four and younger and asked them to watch multiple moving dots on a screen. They were then asked to identify the main direction that the dots moved in to help the researchers assess the youngsters' global motion perception.

TORONTO:  Children exposed to marijuana in the womb show a significant improvement in their ability to track moving objects at age four, says a new study, warning that the results do not mean marijuana has a benefical effect on foetal development.

"We were surprised with this initial finding," said Ben Thompson, professor at University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

A study of children exposed to recreational drugs in the womb has turned up the surprising result that marijuana can improve how they see moving things.

Children exposed to marijuana were 50 percent better at the global motion task - detecting movement of signal dots against the background "noise" of other dots - than children who weren't exposed, University of Auckland scientists say.

Their study, which looked at 145 four-and-a-half year olds who were exposed to different combinations of methamphetamine, alcohol, nicotine and marijuana before birth, was published in Nature: Scientific Reports this week.