Growing up on a cotton farm in Missouri in the 1950s, Bill Richardson didn’t know a thing about marijuana. Nobody talked about it, he never saw it and he certainly never smoked it.

“I didn’t inhale,” Richardson, LSU’s 71-year-old vice president for agriculture and dean of the College of Agriculture, said with a smile in a recent interview.

Richardson has become the unlikely leader of an effort to get LSU into the pot business.

Cannabis researchers in the United States are forced to conduct their studies using weed grown by the federal government. And many of them have said that Uncle Sam isn’t giving them what they need. If a scientist in the U.S. wants to do an official study of cannabis the only way to legally get the weed they need is to get it from the federal government’s supply.

Since 1968 the U.S. government has contracted with the University of Mississippi to grow for cannabis researchers.

Voters in 20 U.S. states could potentially legalize some form of cannabis use in the November 2016 election — part of a historic backlash to the century-old war on marijuana.

According to Ballotpedia, the encyclopedia of American politics, activists have submitted ballot measures for public vote in: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

Pot is becoming more potent, a new study suggests.

In the study, the researchers looked at more than 38,600 samples of illegal marijuana seized by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration over 20 years. They found that the level of THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol— marijuana's main psychoactive ingredient — in the marijuana samples rose from about 4 percent in 1995 to about 12 percent in 2014.

Conversely, the level of CBD, or cannabidiol — an ingredient sometimes touted for its potential health benefits — fell from about 0.28 percent in 2001 to less than 0.15 percent in 2014.

The State of Mississippi recently announced that MPP, arguably the nation’s largest organization focused on ending marijuana prohibition, would not be granted non-profit status and would not be allowed to raise funds in the state. Their reasoning? Because Rob Kampia, MPP’s Executive Director, was arrested and convicted of growing marijuana while he was in college 26 years ago. “After I was convicted for growing my own marijuana while in college, I co-founded MPP in order to repeal marijuana prohibition in all 50 states — something we can no longer do in Mississippi. This is a ‘circular double screw'” said Kampia.

Advocates pushing to reform marijuana laws in Mississippi say they can no longer raise any funds within the state because their top executive is a convicted felon.

The Washington, DC-based Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), advocating for marijuana reform in all 50 states, say the recent announcement by the Mississippi government barring them from fundraising within the state could hamper efforts at marijuana reform there and throughout the South.

In an email sent to supporters on Monday, MPP’s Executive Director Rob Kampia explains:

The Mississippi government is saying that MPP is prohibited from raising money in that state because I’m a convicted felon.

Alaska

Qualifying conditions to become a medical marijuana patient in Alaska include:

• Cancer
• Glaucoma
• HIV/AIDS
• Cachexia (wasting syndrome)
• Nausea
• Muscle spasms
• Multiple sclerosis
• Pain
• Seizures

For a complete list of qualifying conditions and guidelines, please refer to Alaska’s application for medical marijuana registry

Arizona

Qualifying conditions to become a medical marijuana patient in Arizona include:

Mississippi already decriminalized marijuana last year. They are the first state in the deep south to do so. The Louisiana state legislature only created a simple possession charge last week, and the penalty is still pretty serious. In Alabama, there is no simple possession law and one gram of cannabis has a maximum penalty of $6,000 and 30 days in jail.

Louisiana also just passed a limited medical cannabis law. Alabama and South Carolina are expected to pass full medical cannabis laws in the 2016 session.

Everything from antacids to frozen veggies has a label detailing nutritional values and active ingredients, but when it comes to cannabis that information has been sorely lacking. How does one know how much to ingest or inhale if potency information is lacking?

Sage Analytics has an answer. The company, one of 162 exhibitors at last week's Marijuana Business Conference and Expo in Chicago, wants to bring pharmaceutical-level testing to the cannabis industry with the Luminary Profiler, a black box that measures potency on-site within seconds. Marijuana leaves are sprinkled or extracts are dripped onto a lens that uses spectroscopy "to instantly measure the potency of cannabis products on the molecular level," the company's literature says.

A Florida advocate of legalizing marijuana says a threat prompted him to withdraw his offer to pay supporters of Mississippi's petition drive to gather signatures on petitions for a statewide election.

Jeremy Bufford of Medical Marijuana United in Tampa, Florida, offered in April to pay $1 to $2 for each certified signature.

The Commercial Appeal reports that Bufford says in an email to Mississippi supporters that he decided to withdraw after consulting with law enforcement and attorneys. He did not describe the threat.

He did not immediately respond to an email Sunday from The Associated Press; the newspaper said he did not return its phone call.