Garfield Mahood has spent 30 years fighting for the Canadian government to require plain packaging for cigarettes.

So, the long-time non-smokers' rights activist says he doesn't have much faith in the government's ability to regulate and restrict the marketing of marijuana.

"They identified tobacco products as a cause of disease back in the 1950s," said Mahood, president of the Campaign for Justice on Tobacco Fraud. "They've never been able to bring this epidemic close to a conclusion.

"What would give you faith that health departments are going to effectively regulate any health problems related to these other drugs?"

Australian GPs are sending sick and dying patients to black market suppliers of medicinal cannabis because prescribing it legally falls into the too hard basket, Nine.com.au has learned.

There are hundreds of "compassionate suppliers" dotted around Australia - most covert, but some openly – giving cannabis oil away for free, Craig Goodwin told Nine.com.au.

Goodwin, aged 52, a father-of-four and a deacon at his local church on the central NSW coast, has been arrested three times and spent 10 months in a maximum security prison for supplying cannabis oil to people dying of cancer, including young children with brain tumours.

 A bill introduced in the Nevada Assembly on Friday would mandate a blood test to check for driving under the influence of marijuana.

Assembly Judiciary Chairman Steve Yeager, D-Las Vegas, said Assembly Bill 135 is necessary because urine tests that check for marijuana metabolites are unreliable.

The levels of metabolite to determine impairment — two nanograms per milliliter of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol and five grams of 11-OH-tetrahydrocannabinol — would not change under the legislation.

But the bill does specify the specific metabolites that must be tested to determine impairment. The named metabolites are considered to be those that contribute to impairment, Yeager said.

Despite new figures that show Colorado’s marijuana sales topped $1 billion for the first time ever last year, there is some concern in the state over what could happen to the burgeoning business under new U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Sessions is on record in the past saying that “Good people don’t smoke marijuana” and that “marijuana is not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized” and that it is “a very real danger.”

On Wednesday, the U.S. Congress voted to confirm Senator Jeff Sessions to the head of the Department of Justice. The Alabama Republican was a very controversial pick by President Donald Trump, as lawmakers and the public accused the politician of racism, sexism, and bigotry.

“I can’t express how appreciative I am for those of you who stood by me during this difficult time”, said Sessions, “By your vote tonight I have been given a real challenge. I’ll do my best to be worthy of it.”

As the new head of the Justice Department, Attorney General Jeff Sessions will have sweeping power over how the federal government approaches marijuana under President Donald Trump's administration. 

Marijuana currently exists in a legal gray area at the federal level. 

The federal government classifies marijuana, which is illegal nationally, as a schedule I drug, meaning that it considers the plant to have no acceptable medical use and a high potential for abuse.

Two Minnesota state lawmakers are introducing legislation to legalize the recreational use of marijuana.

If made law, Minnesota would join eight other states that allow the legal sale and use of marijuana.

The author of the one of the measures introduced Wednesday, Rep. Jon Applebaum of Minnetonka, says that, to millennials, legalizing marijuana is not controversial. The second-term lawmaker says support for legal marijuana is growing in states across the country, including Minnesota.

“Eventually this is going to happen,” he said. “And it would be in Minnesota’s best interest if we start talking about it now.”

The regulatory and taxing system that will be needed to govern California’s newly legalized marijuana industry may not be in place by a key deadline next year, imperiling the state’s rush to oversee a booming $7 billion cannabis economy. 

Multiple state agencies, including the Bureau of Medical Cannabis Regulation, are scrambling to develop rules for licensing and taxing cannabis cultivators and other businesses in the industry.

But State Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg is among those concerned that the legal framework will not be in place by the Jan. 1 deadline set by Proposition 64, the marijuana legalization measure approved by voters three months ago.

It’s been 15 years since Craig Cesal was sentenced to life in prison without parole for a non-violent marijuana conspiracy offense, and still he hears one question more than any other: “Who did [you] kill?”

“Every institution I go to, I get questioned by a bunch of officers who ask me if it’s true that I’m serving life for marijuana. Even the people who run the federal prisons are surprised by that,” Cesal, a first-time offender, told Civilized during a 15-minute phone call from the federal correctional institution in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Is it legal to mail marijuana across state lines?

Short answer: no.

Longer answer: absolutely not.

Mailing pot across state lines is an incredibly bad idea, according to Erik Altieri, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. “There is no situation, whether from a legal state to a nonlegal state or a legal state to another legal state, in which mailing marijuana is legal,” Altieri wrote in an email to Mic.