Recreational marijuana has been legalized in four states, but that doesn't mean it's a tested consumer product. Some of those potent buds are covered in fungus while others contain traces of butane, according to an analysis of marijuana in Colorado.

Last May, after people began getting sick from edible marijuana products, the state of Colorado began requiring all products to be tested. Washington has mandated testing too, with a detailed checklist of items to analyze, including potency, contaminants, moisture and microbiology.

When it comes to overhauling pot policy in the U.S. Senate, the young pols are running headfirst into the old guard.

A high-wattage trio of junior senators — Democrats Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand plus GOP presidential contender Rand Paul — is mounting an ambitious effort to have the federal government bless the use of marijuana in the 24 jurisdictions (23 states and the District of Columbia) that have voted to legalize the drug for medical purposes. Their legislation would also allow banks to handle transactions involving marijuana and force the federal government to recognize that marijuana has a medical use, rather than lumping it in with heroin and LSD.

Across the country, there’s a growing trend toward the legalization of marijuana. Four states — Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Alaska — have voted to allow people to possess limited amounts of marijuana use for personal use and also to let producers apply for licenses to produce and sell it. D.C. also just voted to allow personal possession. All of this is on top of the 23 states that allow it for medical reasons.

The state's marijuana overseers issued their first annual report

Colorado just got its first year-long batch of data on the state’s grand experiment with legal marijuana. In the first annual report on supply and demand, Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Division disclosed on Friday that 4.8 million edible marijuana products and nearly 150,000 lbs. of marijuana flowers were sold in 2014.

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Just when marijuana supporters thought things couldn't get any better, last week brought incredible news.

On Tuesday, March 10, three Senate members introduced a bill that would make medical marijuana legal on a federal level and free legal medical marijuana users from the potential for federal prosecution.

Australian-owned medical marijuana company Phytotech has merged with MMJ Bioscience in an effort to expand from cultivating cannabis to developing and distributing it in pill form.

Phytotech will acquire 100% of the issued capital of Canadian company MMJ Bioscience Inc with the aim of bringing marijuana-based pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products to a global market.

The deal is structured on Phytotech’s scrip share value (based on a pre-deal share price of $0.305 per share) of $15.5 million upfront and an additional $5.185 million in performance shares when certain milestones are achieved.

Higher Standards

Weedmaps seek to educate and encourage our industry toward a higher standard of service, where potency testing, standardized dosage, and Quality Assurance testing (pesticides/fungicides and microbiological contamination) become the accepted and acknowledged industry standard.

Microbiological testing allows dispensaries to identify known human pathogens, determine potential shelf life of medicine, and actively seek to provide patients with the highest quality medicinal Cannabis available.

Safety

All Medicines as well as any alcoholic beverages have information regarding the strength or dosage of the product, it should be no different with Medical Cannabis.

BELLEVILLE, Ill. (AP) - Illinois health officials say about 2,500 residents have applied for medical marijuana cards, even as the four-year pilot program remains stalled in some parts of the state.
 
Department of Health spokeswoman Melaney Arnold tells the Belleville News Democrat (http://bit.ly/1HnY0cb ) that 1,600 of those applicants have received approval letters.
 
She could not say where the applicants live.
 
A series of legal challenges over cultivation centers are playing out in several areas of the state.
 
That means some patients entitled to apply for medical cannabis cards are waiting.
 

Lawmaker: Misinformation about issue creating 'frenzy'

Washington’s unregulated medical marijuana market has repeatedly been described as the wild, wild West.

Well, the gunslinging has started.

One activist Photoshopped a portrait of Sen. Ann Rivers, R-La Center, a key lawmaker pushing the Cannabis Patient Protection Act, adding fangs and devilish red eyes to the photo.

A medical marijuana user said Rivers’ measure, which has gained momentum in the state Legislature, would be so detrimental to patients, he has a hard time picturing her as anything other than an “evil person.”

Rivers, for her part, said she’s been miscast, and is empathetic to those who, as her dying father once did, rely on medical marijuana to ease the pain.

­Dr. Mark Ware, with a marijuana leaf image projected on his hand, is the director of the Canadian Consortium for the Investigation of Cannabinoids. March 23, 2015 Claudia Dreifus A CONVERSATION WITH

Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana, but scientific research into its appropriate uses has lagged. Dr. Mark Ware would like to change that.

Dr. Ware, 50, is the director of the Canadian Consortium for the Investigation of Cannabinoids and the director of clinical research of the Alan Edwards Pain Management Unit of McGill University Health Center. Medical marijuana has been legal in Canada for 16 years, and Dr. Ware, a practicing physician, studies how his patients take the drug and under what conditions it is effective.