Nashville’s Metro Council made history Tuesday by approving the city’s first measure to allow lesser civil penalties for people caught with small amounts of marijuana, but it may set the stage for a confrontation with the state.

Meanwhile, some Nashville judges are now raising concerns that moving minor marijuana possession cases from criminal to civil court may give people fewer options to later erase those encounters from the public record.

Nearly half of the US has already legalized marijuana for either medical or recreational use. This November, nine states could continue the trend.

Of those nine states, five have ballot initiatives that could result in legal recreational use. Most significantly, California could legalize recreational use — thus making the entire West Coast a legal enclave for recreational cannabis.

All the initiatives below will be voted on this November, alongside the presidential election. Here's everything we know:

Flying a bit under the radar in August, the federal National Institute on Drug Abuse wrote an explainer to a significant longitudinal study involving young twins and marijuana pointing out that marijuana did not cause a decrease in IQ.

In the explainer titled "Study Questions Role for Marijuana in Teen Users' IQ Decline," the agency wrote:

Cigarette and alcohol use among 15- and 16-year-olds is declining across Europe but the numbers using cannabis are growing, an EU survey shows.

The Espad report for 2015 includes most EU countries, but not Germany or the UK, and data for Spain is incomplete. 

In 2015 "current smokers" accounted for 21% of those surveyed, and the highest total was in Italy (37%). 

In 1995-2015 those using alcohol in the past 30 days fell from 56% to 47%. Top in cannabis use were the Czechs (37%).

That figure for Czech teenagers reporting a lifetime experience of cannabis was higher than the level in the US - 31% in comparable surveys. 

If you’ve ever welcomed a dealer into your home to replenish your stash, chances are you’ve wondered where they’re coming from, or where they’re headed next.

Who really is this relative stranger with whom you’ve become weirdly intimate over time? Who else do they interact with in the run of a night? Are those other clients anything like you? What’s their relationship like?

HBO’s new version of the hit web series, High Maintenance – which made its cable debut on Friday night – feeds our collective curiosity around such questions like never before.

Oddly, the latest scientific survey and subsequent figures on the use of marijuana in the United States comes from an analysis documented in a UK journal called The Lancet, in which 596,500 Americans over the age of 18 took part in the survey. The survey was conducted over a two years period from 2012 through 2014, in which the Psychiatry division of the journal looked at why marijuana use is on the rise, and if the growing rate of ‘acceptance’ is due to the legalization in certain large states or if it is due to the growing perception of the relative safety of this substance. Some of the criteria and results are discussed below.

Cannabis is coming out of the shadows in Italy. In Rome, Carlo Monaco and Luigi Mantuano recently opened a patient-operated cannabis café run in the citadel of San Lorenzo, a few blocks south of the city’s central rail station. And in Bologna, Luca Maria Cauterucci and his partners at Foglie d’Erba, or Leaves of Grass, have launched an unusual new shop of their own.

Just days before Lift Cannabis Expo took place this past weekend in Vancouver, the event's primary sponsor lost its Instagram account and 11,000 followers along with it.

Lift Cannabis is a news and review site for medical cannabis that only does strain reviews for legal weed available through licensed producers. According to Lift, none of the photos posted to its Instagram feed depict recreational or black market weed.

Still, near the beginning of September, Lift communications director David Brown said he attempted to log into the company's Instagram account and found that the page had been deleted.

"When I logged in in the morning and opened up my Instagram account it just said 'this page is no longer available.'"

Two years ago, the city of Adelanto, a crumbling outpost in California’s Mojave desert, was facing a bleak future as it teetered on the brink of bankruptcy and struggled with double-digit unemployment.

“We were about to vanish, to be incorporated into another city,” says councilman John “Bug” Woodard Jr. “The place was dying and in total despair.”

Today, however, the once-desolate town is firmly back on the map, having joined a handful of communities in California in embracing large-scale commercial cannabis cultivation—a move that smells of success as the state prepares to vote in November on legalizing the use of recreational marijuana.

Whether you smoke, vape or eat it as a cookie, a well-documented side effect of marijuana use is increased hunger.

Also known as "the munchies", the phenomenon is so common it has seeped its way from many a dark, smoky bedroom through to the big screen — inspiring scenes in everything from the films of Cheech and Chong to the Ted series starring Mark Wahlberg.

But despite the humorous depiction of the munchies on film, hunger can be a serious and powerful side effect of cannabis use.

The term "munchies" is said to have been first noted in the famous study on 'being stoned' by Charles T Tart in 1971, in which the mental state of 150 marijuana users was observed.

More recently though, research has focused on the neurological processes behind the munchies.