Though the US Drug Enforcement Agency hasn’t reclassified marijuana, easier availability of the drug for study has the potential to unearth new medical uses.

Companies that make prescription painkillers and their allies have contributed more than $366,000 to Mississippi candidates and hired an average of 18 lobbyists yearly in the state since 2006 to push their policies.

The spending comes as Mississippi's use of opioids reached the fifth-highest in the country last year.

A joint investigation by The Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity found the organizations spent $880 million nationwide and hired an annual average of 1,350 lobbyists in state capitals around the country from 2006 through 2015. By comparison, groups seeking limits on opioid prescribing spent about $4 million.
 

Wanted: Someone to grow marijuana for the federal government. Benefits: A contract likely worth millions and the chance to enable medical research. Requirements: Ability to deal with the costs and regulations that come with growing an illegal drug for the federal government.

More questions than answers from a new study out of The Netherlands.

Recent studies suggest that there could be differences in brain thickness between children who are exposed to cannabis and those who aren’t — but do these studies tell the whole story?

Across the pond, an hour south from Amsterdam, Dr. Hanan El Marroun, of Erasmus University Medical Center in The Netherlands has dedicated his work to researching one of the most overlooked aspects of cannabis use: consuming while pregnant. 

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.