2015 was a big year for weed in Australia, with medicinal use and bizarre sloth-starring anti-drug campaigns taking centre stage.

If you didn't know, cannabis still stands as the most widely used drug in the country, with 35% of Australians over the age of 14 reporting they had consumed it at least once, according to theAustralian National Drugs Strategy Household Survey in 2013, but that doesn't mean it's anywhere near legal.

The velocity and breadth of growth in the marijuana industry will, for the most part, be determined by the pace of state and, eventually, national legalization.

Eventual rescheduling or de-listing of marijuana as a federally prohibited drug will hopefully lead to consistent and uniform national regulation and taxing authorizations that will ultimately change the structural and economic landscape of the Cannabis Industry.

A statistical analysis of current sales trends is a useful tool to understand a newly liberated consumer base and allows us to make certain reasonable projections for subsequent growth rates. But such analysis, in a holistic sense, is somewhat contingent upon the direction of future political and legal reforms.

2016 could bring major changes to the way Michigan treats marijuana.

There are three campaigns hoping to put legalization of recreational marijuana on the November ballot. Two of those groups – who appear to be raising significant money and have been collecting signatures for months – would tax and regulate marijuana for personal use for people 21 and older.

A state elections board recently gave the go-ahead for a third group to start circulating petitions. That campaign, Abrogate Prohibition Michigan 2016, would fully decriminalize marijuana use for any purpose for people 18 and older.

In addition to those efforts, supporters of bills to overhaul Michigan’s medical marijuana system are pushing for votes in the state Legislature.

Number one: Canada elects a marijuana-legalizing prime minister.

The global anti-drug regime has been in place for more than a half century now, but the prohibitionist consensus has been crumbling for at least 20 years, and the decomposition continued apace this year.

The international treaties that make up the legal backbone of international drug prohibition still stand, but they are under increasing attack at the United Nations, which will take them up again next year. They are increasingly being breached (especially by marijuana legalization at the national and sub-national level) and nibbled away at around the edges by moves like drug decriminalization and some harm reduction measures such as supervised injection facilities.

Contrary to what you may have heard, the federal ban has not been lifted.

"Federal Ban Lifted on Medical Marijuana," says the headline over an Inquisitr article that I came across last week. At first I dismissed it as one overenthusiastic reaction to a spending rider that Congress enacted this month, but it turns out this misconception is fairly common. In my latest column, I explain how it was born and why it's wrong:

While the federal government appears to be loosening up on medicinal marijuana, not all states are following suit. Oklahoma is one of the most conservative states in America, and no group has even been able to gather enough signatures to get medical marijuana on the ballot. The most recent attempt to get medical marijuana up for a vote in the Sooner State was made by Green the Vote.

Signal Hill Patients Access PAC today unveiled amended ballot measure language to permit medical cannabis in the heart of Long Beach by regulating medical cannabis with new sections featuring a labor peace agreement provision and onsite consumption of medical cannabis permission. In addition, the amended ballot measure language also includes sections for “Energy Offsets encouraged” and a residential permission provision that permits cultivation by right in the city with no need for any type of official permit from the municipal government. The measure or the law is file number two attached. The initiative will create new revenue for the Signal Hill general fund, police department, and schools.

The Eureka City Council is scheduled to enact a temporary citywide ban on commercial cultivation of medical marijuana at its next meeting, Tuesday night. The agenda item is on the consent calendar, meaning it’s not scheduled to be debated but rather simply passed. It would amend the city’s municipal code to outlaw commercial growing while still allowing qualified patients to grow their own.

California’s new medical marijuana laws were supposed to provide more structure and clarity for the state’s loosely regulated, billion-dollar industry, but in the past few weeks, dozens of municipalities have ignored that intention by moving quickly to ban delivery and other activities codified by the legislation.

Advocates and legislators hope the bans are only a minor setback in the effort to show federal regulators and voters that California — the first state to legalize medical marijuana two decades ago — can provide order to a medical weed sector that has been haphazardly regulated.

For legalization advocates, 2015 has been a historic year.

Marijuana was pushed further into the mainstream than ever before, and new policies passed at the state level seem to confirm that the public and lawmakers are ready to have a rational conversation about the future of pot in America.