If you recently applied to obtain a medical marijuana card, bad news: It could take months for the state to process your application.

The good news is, by Oct. 1, state officials should be back to rubber stamping applications in 30 days.

“It’s going to get nothing but better as we regroup and plan for the future,” said Pam Graber, of the Nevada Medical Marijuana Program. “We found ourselves with (an unusually) high volume of applications, but we are catching up.”

Starting in late spring, the Nevada Medical Marijuana Program received a rush of applications, which Graber attributed to the opening of a brick-and-mortar dispensary in Northern Nevada. The Las Vegas area’s only dispensary, Euphoria Wellness, opened Aug. 26. Two dispensaries operate in Washoe County.

What is not to like about medical marijuana? It treats pain, vomiting, fatigue, anxiety, depression, insomnia, seizures, muscle spasms, Crohn’s disease and allows many cancer patients to resume remarkably normal lives. It is not addictive. It does not interact with other medicines. It acts quickly and is easy to adjust. It can be consumed in numerous ways. It is safer than essentially any other drug: 1,500 Tylenol deaths in the USA in the last ten years; overdoses from marijuana in the entire world literature? None.

To that list, I add another: Compared to other medicines, it is down right cheap.

A brain and mental health researcher is strongly arguing that there is no link between cannabis use and developing schizophrenia.

Matthew Hill, PhD of the University of Calgary's (Canada) Hotchkiss Brain Institute, writing in Nature, notes that there is no concrete evidence of a connection between cannabis and schizophrenia. As he points out, the incidence of schizophrenia has not gone up since the 1960s, when marijuana use became popular in the U.S. and Europe. In addition, countries in which a large segment of the population uses cannabis do not have higher schizophrenia rates.

Banned doctor and cannabis oil producer Andrew Katelaris is definitely not a crowd-pleaser.

Katelaris, who was de-registered in 2005 for supplying medicinal cannabis to his patients, has dedicated his life to advocating the medical benefits of the plant.

"My signature method is using a specific type of cannabis called cannabidiol or CBD that is believed to have very superior anti-convulsion properties to treat children with epilepsy and patients with chronic pain," Katelaris told Neos Kosmos.

With desperate families turning to him when traditional treatments fail, the controversial physician says children with intractable diseases have benefited from his alternative prescriptions.

Georgia for the first time this year approved a limited medical marijuana law to help some of the state’s most dire patients — many of them children. It only allows families to possess cannabis oil, making no attempt to address the oil’s manufacture or how to buy or obtain it.

Now, parents and advocates want lawmakers to go one step further: Allow growers to harvest and distribute cannabis oil in-state.

The newly formed Georgians for Freedom in Healthcare vowed Tuesday to lobby full force at the state Capitol once lawmakers convene again in January —echoing advocacy efforts from years past that finally won passage of Georgia’s landmark law.

What is not to like about medical marijuana? It treats pain, vomiting, fatigue, anxiety, depression, insomnia, seizures, muscle spasms, Crohn’s disease and allows many cancer patients to resume remarkably normal lives. It is not addictive. It does not interact with other medicines. It acts quickly and is easy to adjust. It can be consumed in numerous ways. It is safer than essentially any other drug: 1,500 Tylenol deaths in the USA in the last ten years; overdoses from marijuana in the entire world literature? None.

To that list, I add another: Compared to other medicines, it is down right cheap.

TORONTO—A benchmark study has found that patients who use medical marijuana to treat chronic pain don’t have more serious side-effects than sufferers who don’t use the herb.

Dr. Mark Ware, the Montreal pain specialist who led the national study, says medical cannabis appears to have a reasonable safety profile when taken by patients who are experienced users.

The four-year study followed 215 adults with chronic non-cancer pain who used medical cannabis and compared them to a control group of 216 chronic pain sufferers who were not marijuana users.

The cannabis group was given access to herbal cannabis containing 12.5 per cent of the active ingredient THC from a licensed cannabis producer.

TORONTO -- A benchmark study has found that patients who use medical marijuana to treat chronic pain don't have more serious side-effects than sufferers who don't use the herb.

Dr. Mark Ware, the Montreal pain specialist who led the national study, says medical cannabis appears to have a reasonable safety profile when taken by patients who are experienced users.

The four-year study followed 215 adults with chronic non-cancer pain who used medical cannabis and compared them to a control group of 216 chronic pain sufferers who were not marijuana users.

The cannabis group was given access to herbal cannabis containing 12.5 per cent of the active ingredient THC from a licensed cannabis producer.

“IT’S bizarre that in the 21st Century we have to hide the production of life saving medicine,” says Dr Andrew Katelaris as he opens the panel to his secret makeshift laboratory hidden inside a bedroom wardrobe.

For more than a decade Dr Katelaris has been brewing his therapeutic cannabis oil in the shadows, away from the watchful eyes of the main medical establishment who have shunned his zealot-like approach to medical marijuana.

Dr Katelaris was struck off the medical register in 2005 for conducting research into the drug. He has been arrested dozens of times and charged for a range of drug offences.

A new study, Cannabis for the Management of Pain: Assessment of Safety Study (COMPASS), is being published in the Journal of Pain and found that patients who used marijuana daily for one-year reported reduced discomfort and increased quality of life.

The study also found that patients do not experience an increased risk of serious side effects, and that patients who used marijuana had a reduced sense of pain when compared to a control group, as well as reduced anxiety, depression, and fatigue.