SAN FRANCISCO — The likelihood that California voters will be asked to legalize recreational marijuana next year is prompting lawmakers to make a serious run at reining in the state's vast medical marijuana industry — a job they have deferred for nearly two decades.

A pair of bills pending in the California Legislature would create the first statewide regulations for medical marijuana growers, manufacturers of pot-infused products, and distributors such as storefront dispensaries and delivery services.

California authorized marijuana use for health purposes with a 1996 ballot measure that allows doctors to recommend the drug for any ailment, deliberately leaving the specifics for how it should be produced and sold for another day.

The ban, over an entry about hashish that a court ruled contained illegal information, is lifted just hours after it was enforced.

Russia has cancelled a ban on the Russian-language version of Wikipedia after it caused controversy among internet users in the country.

The Russian communications watchdog told internet providers late on Monday to block access to the site in Russian after a court ruled an entry on hashish contained banned information.

Users across the country then reported they were not able to access the site.

Wikimedia RU, the group that supports the local version of Wikipedia, had earlier decided not to remove the article on charas, a cannabis resin, after a warning from the communications watchdog Roskomnadzor.

Although the deabte over medicinal cannabis debate is currently one of the hot moral and social topics, it misses the real issue. It's part of a wider subject.

It's a question of what we're doing on this planet. We're not here to pay taxes, or to be righteous, or even necessarily to be healthy. We are on this planet to live. To experience this reality and what it has to offer.

We already know that different people like to experience different things. Some people like to spend time with their close family. Some people like to drink alcohol. Some people like to make millions of dollars trading.

It's a big world, and there's room for a lot of different behaviours here.

BUILDING A farmhouse is nothing new, but farmer Nick Voase has raised the bar, by building his new home out of hemp grown entirely on his own farm.

Nick, who lives in Baswick, near Brandesburton started growing hemp in 2002 as an alternative crop and a combination of the severe East Yorkshire floods in 2007 and changing family circumstances led to his visionary building project.

Explaining how it began, Nick said: “We were looking for a break crop and had tried borage and lupins, among other things, then we tried hemp, and it just fitted, growing it bi-annually with wheat.”

Cannabis has “blazed” a trail into the national spotlight thanks to the legalization battle and provocative new studies on its health benefits. Mounds of research and media events like Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s CNN Special Report WEED have shed light on cannabis’s potential to treat cancer, seizures, multiple sclerosis (MS), glaucoma, pain and other ailments.

The Experience of Colorado teaches that we should legalize the herb. Reports of a year and a half from the opening of coffee shops. Health spending is unchanged, crimes decreased and tax revenues increased. An example to follow, it also says it is anti-mafia.

This is a windfall for the state, at least potentially. If Italy liberalizes soft drugs, the public purse could earn up to 8.5 billion euro a year, a huge figure. Almost equivalent, so to speak, what would be needed today for the government of Matteo Renzi to avoid the VAT increase planned starting next year.

Smoking is clearly the popular way to consume marijuana, as demonstrated by the thousands of pounds of marijuana flower legally sold each week. A growing number of consumers seek a more discreet and portable experience that companies continue to develop — anything from coffees to breath sprays to candies.

However, when a suspected marijuana-infused product becomes evidence in a crime, there is no valid way for state labs to test it, making it difficult prove that it's actually marijuana.

When marijuana becomes legal in Oregon, Washington stores may make a big push to sell marijuana-infused products, because they won't be available right away on the other side of the river. 

When photographer Lynn Johnson was working on this month’s National Geographic cover story on marijuana, she was surprised how addictive it became. Not the drug, mind you, but the controversial and convoluted medical world that legalization has spawned. So much so, that even after shooting on-and-off for six months for the magazine assignment, she couldn’t entirely let go of the story.

[Hear Johnson reveal what it was like to shoot the marijuana story in the video above.]

“I wasn’t prepared for the passion and depth of feeling that people associated with this plant,” said Johnson. She has continued photographing families with medically challenged children since finishing her assignment last December.

SEATTLE — It’s an alarming trend — more people involved in deadly crashes are testing positive for marijuana.

“We have seen marijuana involvement in fatal crashes remain steady over the years, and then it just spiked in 2014,” said Dr. Staci Hoff, director of the Washington Transportation Safety Commission’s Data and Research department.

“It’s unfortunate that marijuana is playing a bigger role in deadly crashes in Washington,” said Wilma Comenat of MADD, or Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

That’s why the organization, well known for their fight against drinking and driving, is now turning its attention to what they call drugging and driving.

“Your reflexes are slower … your reflexes are not 100%,” Comenat said.

Marijuana will be legal much sooner than people think.

I am working at updating my references to popular culture in an effort to minimize the number of blank stares I engender from audiences that include many people much younger than myself. This effort seems especially appropriate for the subject of this column: the similarity of marijuana and same-sex marriage as issues of public policy. Temporarily putting aside my admiration for the analytic approach implicit in Henny Youngman’s two liner—“‘How’s your wife?’ ‘Compared to what?’”—I’ll instead invoke Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory, one of the nation’s most popular sitcoms.