The campaign working against legalizing medical marijuana has provoked the anger of hundreds of people who say Drug Free Florida called them in the middle of the night advising them to say "no" to Amendment 2. 

Drug Free Florida began calling voters after midnight and into the early hours of Sunday morning, with some receiving calls at 4 a.m. while others’ phones rang at 6:30 a.m. 

Sunshine State News received an email about the calls on Sunday, and readers were not happy about the rude awakening from the campaign to squash medical pot. 

Judy Druener from Pensacola told SSN she and her husband woke up to the phone ringing at 4:38 a.m. Sunday morning. 

Given the timing, they feared the worst -- Druener said her first thought was a family emergency.

Although the sale of marijuana is a federal crime, the number of U.S. banks working with pot businesses, now sanctioned in many states, is growing, up 45 percent in the last year alone.

Still, marijuana merchants say there are not nearly enough banks willing to take their cash. So many dispensaries resort to stashing cash in storage units, back offices and armored vans.

Proponents believe the Nov. 8 election could tip the balance in favor of liberalizing federal marijuana laws, a move seen as key to getting risk-averse banks off the sidelines.

Nearly 60 million Americans may wake up Nov. 9 to find voters in their states have abolished long-standing marijuana prohibitions, a three-fold expansion for legal cannabis across the country.

Another 24 million Americans could find themselves in states with newly legal medical marijuana use, a smaller but still significant expansion of legalized pot around the United States. Already, half of the states permit some form of medical marijuana use, and more than half of all Americans live in a state that has approved medical marijuana.

Congress continues to resist decriminalizing marijuana even as a popular crusade to legalize its use state by state may soon mean almost a quarter of Americans can smoke up at will, not including the many more who can use the drug medicinally.

This has resulted in a patchwork of state laws alongside federal ones that have put the nascent industry in legal and financial limbo.

This year’s presidential election has revealed how divided most Americans are on many issues. However, there is one area where supporters of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton agree: marijuana policy.

WA doctors will be able to legally prescribe medicinal cannabis from Tuesday after the state government threw its support behind changes to new Commonwealth laws.

Health Minister John Day on Friday welcomed the new legislation, which will class medicinal cannabis as a controlled prescription drug from November 1.

Dr Andrew Katelaris is one of Australia's biggest medicinal cannabis suppliers.  Photo: Rohan Thomson

"Like all controlled drugs, medicinal cannabis will be prescription only, with strict rules around prescribing," he said.

"Medical practitioners will be at the centre of all treatment decisions and patients will need to discuss their situation with their treating doctor.

The new Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulation (ACMPR), which came into force on August 24, 2016, has changed how patients with prescriptions for medical marijuana can get their medicine. The ACMPR came to be, in part, as a response to a Federal Court ruling that the former Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations (MMPR) violated the Charter because it prohibited personal production of medical cannabis. For many medicinal cannabis users, the cost of accessing through the channels allowed under the MMPR were simply unaffordable.

Cannabis has been part of human culture for millennia, and is still an important part of the day-to-day life of millions of people worldwide. However, in much of the world, a century-old stigma has established a harsh legal and social climate for the recreational and medical use of the substance. The current legal status of marijuana is extremely complex; in most countries it is illegal to grow, sell and carry the plant and consumption can carry the confusing label of ‘illegal but decriminalised’. Despite these barriers, in recent years a handful of countries have taken decisive steps to become marijuana-friendly territories. Cannabis legalisation advocates have pushed this agenda for decades, but it seems like it has gained institutional acceptance only in recent years.

Laura Costa’s son and husband moved quickly with pruning shears as they harvested the family’s fall marijuana crop, racing along with several workers to cut the plants and drop them in plastic bins ahead of an impending storm.

The farm, hidden along a winding mountain road in a remote redwood forest, is just one of many illegal "grows" that make up Northern California’s famous Emerald Triangle, a marijuana−producing mecca at the intersection of Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties.

The Arkansas Supreme Court has disqualified a medical marijuana proposal from the November ballot less than two weeks before the election and with thousands of votes already cast, but voters will still be able to consider a competing plan.

In a 5−2 ruling Thursday, the court sided with opponents of the proposed initiated act - known as Issue 7 - that would have allowed patients with certain medical conditions and a doctor’s recommendation to purchase marijuana from dispensaries. The proposal was one of two medical marijuana proposals on the ballot, and justices earlier this month rejected a challenge to a competing measure.