SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 16, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- eCann Media unveils the lineup for its inaugural "Cannabis Investor Summit", a new platform for investors looking to get into the legal cannabis industry. The Summit will showcase the best investment opportunities and benefits of investing in the Cannabis industry, with an emphasis on the transparency of a cloud-based environment.

The 15 leading Republican candidates for president have arrived in California just as the state closes in on a fully legal regime for medical marijuana.

Californians have been buying marijuana with medical exception cards since it was legalized by a 1996 ballot measure, but only this month has the state's Democratic legislature passed comprehensive bills to regulate the industry. The state's Department of Food and Agriculture would oversee cultivation; the Department of Public Health would monitor quality. Come Election Day 2016, it's highly likely that Californians will vote on whether to legalize the drug, full stop.

The controversial political action group California Cannabis Voice-Humboldt (CCVH) has been adorning their newsletters and press releases with “#SameTeam” for months now, and you’d be forgiven for dismissing the hashtag as yet more sunny propaganda from a groupprone to overstatement and declarations of its own historical import.

Nearly 20 years after voters legalized medical marijuana, California lawmakers have finally passed legislation to regulate the growth and distribution of cannabis for patients' use. In the final hours of their session last week, legislators passed three bills that together establish a system to license, test and track medical marijuana from "seed to sale." Gov. Jerry Brown, who helped craft the deal, should not only sign the bills into law, but he should stay focused on ensuring their smooth, effective implementation.

The history of medical cannabis is long and turbulent, encompassing almost every corner of the globe and spanning over 6,000 years. Here, we set out what we believe are the most significant milestones on the long march to gain recognition of cannabis as a powerful, effective, and safe medicine.

Publication of the Sanskrit Ayurvedic texts

Unlike the dates of many early Chinese texts, the Ancient Indians were fairly proactive when it came to dating their historical records, and as a result modern scholars are fairly confident that the first known references to cannabis appear in the Atharvaveda, written in around 1,400 BCE.

A flight over Mendocino County puts California's drought into stark perspective. You soar over arid hills, browning trees and bone-dry riverbeds. As the state continues to battle the drought and its effects, its leaders are considering every possible means to cut water usage, but there's an obvious culprit that could merit a closer look: marijuana. Fully legalizing marijuana production for all uses — rather than only permitting people to grow up to six plants for private medical use — would allow the state to regulate the drug more closely, and that would include a serious crackdown on water usage.

She says smoking doesn't violate her probation because of her “sincerely held” religious beliefs. 

A Golden Valley woman is asking the courts to allow her to smoke marijuana for religious reasons — because she belongs to the First Church of Cannabis.

Through her lawyer, 31-year-old Ashley Firnschild is arguing to the Hennepin County District Court that the weed’s illegality places an “undue burden” on her “sincerely held” religious beliefs as a member of the Indiana-based church established earlier this year. The case is coming before the court because Firnschild is alleged to have smoked the weed in violation of a condition of her probation for a drug charge.

Five new cannabis-centric studies warrant major attention

Scientific discoveries are published almost daily in regard to the healing properties of the cannabis.

But most of these findings appear solely in subscription-only peer-reviewed journals and, therefore, go largely unreported by the mainstream media and by the public.

Here are five just-published cannabis-centric studies that warrant attention.

Men Who Smoke Pot Possess a Reduced Risk of Bladder Cancer

Is cannabis use protective against the development of certain types of cancer?

The findings of a just released study in the journal Urology imply that it might be.