Marijuana is poised to be one of the fastest-growing industries on the planet over the next decade. Worldwide sales have more than tripled to $10.9 billion over the last four years, and they could grow as much as 18-fold over the next decade, if investment bank Stifel's global sales estimate comes to fruition.

The second great Canadian cannabis rush is nearing the starting line, with pot entrepreneurs looking to stand out amid an onslaught of soon-to-be-legal edibles on the market.

Legal cannabis edibles and other derivatives are expected to grow Canada’s cannabis market by three million consumers, or 65 per cent, according to a poll commissioned earlier this year by a leading industry data collector.

The survey, conducted with 3,000 respondents last May by Lift & Co. and Ernst and Young, suggests the country’s 4.6 million adult cannabis users will grow to about 7.6 million after a wider variety of non-smokable licensed products go on store shelves at year’s end.

Ontario said its government-owned cannabis business lost $42 million in the last fiscal year, while the province collected barely half the amount of excise taxes it estimated it would generate, in the latest symptoms of a shaky start to legalizing recreational pot in Canada’s most populous province.

The Ontario Cannabis Retail Corporation, a crown corporation that operates the Ontario Cannabis Store’s online retail business and sells wholesale cannabis to the province's private retail stores, generated $64 million in the fiscal 2018-2019 year, according to public accounts released on Friday.

Purdue Pharma, the company that made billions selling the prescription painkiller OxyContin, filed for bankruptcy in White Plains, New York, days after reaching a tentative settlement with many of the state and local governments suing it over the toll of opioids.

The filing was anticipated before and after the tentative deal, which could be worth up to $12 billion over time, was struck.

As health professionals try to understand how vaping products might trigger severe lung injuries, there are new calls for a ban on thousands of candy and dessert-like e-cigarette flavours that attract young people.

It's something Josh Halpern understands. He started vaping several years ago and his favourite flavour is lime.

"They just taste good, they don't taste like a cigarette, you know?" the 33-year-old Winnipegger said.

"If there was no flavours or nothing that tasted good, I'm sure kids wouldn't want to do it in the first place."

A 2015 study found more than 80 per cent of underage teens who use e-cigarettes started with flavoured vape juice.

A potential ban on flavoured e-cigarettes in the U.S. is a welcome step towards greater regulation of vaping products, says the Windsor-Essex County Health Unit.

“It’s encouraging to see federal governments start to have those types of conversations,” said Eric Nadalin, a manager in the WECHU’s health promotion department.

“Certainly, the concern with flavoured e-cigarettes is their attractiveness to youths. It’s something that we do want to acknowledge and develop protections against.”

On Wednesday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a proposal for new enforcement policies by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that would effectively remove flavoured e-cigarettes from the U.S. vaping market.

The launch of the next wave of cannabis stores set to open in Ontario this October will be delayed after a provincial judge suspended the province’s regulator from issuing any new pot shop licences for two weeks.

Justice David Corbett said he will rule on Sept. 25 whether 11 disqualified cannabis retail lottery winners should resume the application process for a coveted pot shop licence in Ontario or let people on a waiting list take their place.

In an effort to avoid complicating the tangled nature of the lottery winner and waiting list process, all licences will be on hold until he can make a final ruling, the judge ruled. 

How has legal pot changed your life? Has it, at all? As a country, legalization catalyzed some shifts that could end up being the start of trends that shape the industry in days to come.

A hazy rollout of new rules surrounding the promotion of cannabis products has left some Edmonton-area retailers feeling perplexed.

Starting on Oct. 17, any public advertisement for cannabis products or retailers can legally have a surface area no larger than 300 square centimetres — though it remains unclear what exactly this restriction applies to.

For reference, the surface area of a standard piece of printer paper is just over 600 sq. cm.

When Canopy Growth Corp. announced a plan to acquire cannabis researcher Ebbu Inc. for US$330 million last October, it touted the company’s intellectual property as the primary reason for the deal, mentioning it five times in the short press release.

A year later, Canopy is struggling to turn that intellectual property into patents. One of Ebbu’s first applications was rejected twice by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. When it was then narrowed significantly in a renewed attempt at approval, it was rejected a third time.