The Sûreté du Québec raided two large marijuana grow-ops on the South Shore Friday morning.

One was in the town of Pierreville, and the other one was in Saint-François-du-Lac. Both were used to grow the plants so that they could be re-transplanted outdoors.

Nearly 20,000 pot plants and cuttings, in different stages of growth, were seized.

The Pierreville grow-op had multiple rooms which housed plants, cuttings and mini-greenhouses.

The raid was part of Operation Cisailles (shears), that has been ongoing for several years.

Contrary to previous raids, where the police would search for outdoor pot plantations, the new approach is aimed at stopping the illegal activity before planting occurs, and arrests are possible.

In a ruling described as “historic” by one lawyer, a Quebec judge has ordered three major cigarette companies to pay $15 billion to smokers in what is believed to be the biggest class-action lawsuit ever seen in Canada.

“These three companies lied to their customers for 50 years and hurt their right to life,” Andre Lesperance, one of the lawyers involved in the case, said Monday.

“It’s a great victory for victims as well as for society in general.”

For Lise Blais, the judgment was bittersweet.

One of the two lawsuits that eventually merged into one was filed by her husband, Jean-Yves Blais, shortly before he died of lung cancer in September 2012 at the age of 68.

Researchers in Quebec have launched a registry of medicinal cannabis users to determine the safety of the drug and its effectiveness in treating a variety of diseases and conditions.

The Quebec Cannabis Registry will be used to compile and store clinical data collected directly from about 3,000 medical marijuana users in the province, who will be enrolled through their primary-care doctors over a 10-year period.

“The registry is now basically open for business,” said principal investigator Dr. Mark Ware, a family doctor and McGill researcher who specializes in pain management.

MONTREAL — The Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre launched the groundbreaking Quebec Cannabis Registry on Monday.

The province-wide program is a world first and it will track patients who use medical marijuana for research purposes. But one prominent pot activist calls it a form of extortion since it is now the only way Quebec patients can have access to legal marijuana.RELATED

“When you say registry right away the first thing that comes to mind is sex registry or offender, so you have this stigma,” said Marc-Boris St-Maurice, director of the Montreal Compassion Club.

Often, cannabis is associated with its recreational activity and its many adherents. In the past year, PhytoChemia has made a full review of literature on the properties of boreal resources for Agroboréal. This scientific review is available on the site web of this company in french version only (http://agroboreal.com/revue-litterature-les-proprietes-ressources-boreales). For this post, I took the full card description of Cannabis sativa (L.) and translated it in english to put it in our blog. This information card lists the biological activities, commercial and medicinal potential and other scientific knowledge on the plant.

Medical marijuana users in Quebec can now help shed light on the drug's long-term safety and effectiveness through a new registry at McGill University in Montreal. 

McGill says its medical marijuana registry, which launched on Monday, is the first research database of its kind in the world. 

The registry meets a requirement of Quebec's college of physicians, which considers cannabis an experimental therapy. Under provincial regulation, cannabis can only be prescribed as part of a formal study.

Health Canada estimates over 40,000 Canadians legally consume cannabis to relieve symptoms from diseases including multiple sclerosis, HIV, cancer or epilepsy.

Curled on the floor retching, Tzvetanka Chiderova yelled for her mother to get the water pipe. Within minutes, the Montreal web-designer stopped gagging. The waves of nausea disappeared, she said.

“It was instantaneous,” said Chiderova, who turned to marijuana for medicinal purposes as a last resort while being treated for stomach cancer. Without it, she says, she could not have continued with life-saving chemotherapy.

In what’s being hailed as a world first, two groups, including the McGill University Health Centre, have launched a registry of medical cannabis users.

The new research database is aimed at collecting information on how cannabis is used and monitoring patient safety.

“Hopefully the database itself will provide enough meat for other researchers in Quebec and elsewhere to be able to ask questions of their own about effects on certain symptoms and side effect profiles,” said principal researcher Dr. Mark Ware, director of clinical research at the MUHC and associate professor at McGill University.

The idea is for researchers to be able to paint a better picture of who is using cannabis, why, and how much they are using, Ware said.

Quebec's Human Rights Tribunal has ruled the Public Security Ministry discriminated against a man who was facing a criminal charge, and has awarded him $13,000 for lost wages and other damages.

In 2009, the man was forbidden from working at a construction site at the Percé prison in the Gaspésie region because he was deemed a security risk.

The prison, which is an institution for people who have committed sexual crimes, was closed for renovations at the time.

A couple from St-Anselme, Que., is suing Quebec provincial police for $65,000 for mistaking fruit experiments for a marijuana grow-op.

Jean-François Pinault and Liv Larsen filed court documents earlier this week in provincial court. 

They say police executed a search warrant and raided the couple's home on Feb. 19, 2014, while the two were away.

Pinault and Larsen were growing melons, strawberries and giant ground-cherries in their basement.

Police obtained the warrant after seeing Pinault, who has a master's degree in organic chemistry, at a store specializing in hydroponics.

Officers had arrested several people from the store, called Hydrobec, alleging they supplied seeds and gave advice about growing marijuana at home.