The Maryland Cannabis Commission announced Monday it will hire a consultant to review what steps — if any — it could take to improve diversity in the state's nascent medical marijuana industry.

The consultant will determine if it is feasible to conduct a study of whether minorities have been unfairly excluded from the industry, among other tasks. Such a determination would allow Maryland to consider race when awarding licenses to grow, process or distribute marijuana for medical use.

The announcement follows the filing of a lawsuit alleging the commission improperly ignored race when evaluating applicants for licenses, and calls by African-American lawmakers to halt the licensing process.

Seantrel Henderson, a third-year offensive lineman for the Buffalo Bills, is facing his second suspension of the season for violating the NFL’s substance-abuse rules. But Henderson’s case is unusual because it raises fresh questions about the approach to pain management and changing attitudes about the legalization of marijuana.

Weed is winning in the polls, with a solid majority of Americans saying marijuana should be legal. But does that mean the federal government will let dozens of state pot experiments play out? Not by a long shot.

Cannabis is very much in the news at the moment. This week a cross party group of MPs have called for cannabis to be legalised in Britain, in the US almost 25% of Americans can now access medical cannabis after several more states passed its use in the recent elections, and in the Republic of Ireland, the mother of a seriously ill child decided to walk to Dublin to demand a change in the country’s legal position on the use of medical cannabis for children. 

In 2014, the New England Journal of Medicine ran a propaganda piece by Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) titled Adverse Health Effects of Marijuana Use. The article is occasionally referenced by neo-prohibitionists to demonstrate the position of the federal government that cannabis has no known medical use in the United States. This position is beyond absurd, it is dangerous to both public health and the role of science in the public square. Medical cannabis is legal in over half of the states in the union.

On election day, voters in eight states approved new legal cannabis initiatives. Arkansas, Florida, Montana and North Dakota all supported new medical marijuana initiatives, while voters in California, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada all moved to legalize recreational adult use.

Marijuana barbecue sauce, anyone?

As Alaska's cannabis cultivators and marijuana stores slowly come online, dozens of marijuana products — from brownies to lotion to high-potency concentrates — are being developed for the Alaska market.

Five businesses have been approved to make edibles and concentrates so far. Three of them — Frozen Budz in Fairbanks, Einstein Labs in Anchorage and Top Hat Concentrates in Juneau — can make edibles, concentrates, tinctures and other products like salves and lotions with their product-manufacturing license approved by the Marijuana Control Board.

The other two, Babylon Company and R.C. Tinderbox, both in Anchorage, have  licenses limiting them to production of marijuana concentrates only.

Rich and Kim Muszynski know when their 5-year-old daughter, Abby, is about to have a grand mal seizure because her pupils enlarge, and she'll seem to fixate at something in the distance that only she can see.

Then it starts. Abby's extremities shake. She gasps for air. 

By the time she turned 3, Abby had tried about eight different anti-seizure medications. None of them worked very well. Panicked to see their daughter getting worse and worse, the Muszynskis drove three hours to Orlando to see Dr. Ngoc Minh Le, a board certified pediatric neurologist and epileptologist.

The cannabis industry has grown (pun intended) drastically over the past five years; in 2016 revenue is expected to hit $6.7 billion.  By 2021, the weed industry is expected to have nearly 14,000 companies generating $27 billion, according to consumer market research firm IBISWorld.

The time is green for businesses to jump in and take a hit of those profits. A new startup, cannabis health and wellness company hmbldt, plans to do just that.

Based in California, hmbldt has created a cutting-edge vape pen that delivers a specific dose and formula of the chemicals compounds found in marijuana tailored to suit the individual needs of the user.

President-elect Donald Trump was far from the most pro marijuana candidate running for President this past year, and now that he's won the White House, cannabis advocates are worrying that his appointment of anti-marijuana supporter Jeff Sessions to Attorney General could derail recent advances. Is Sessions going to put a kibosh on marijuana's momentum?

Ahead of the November elections, four states had already passed recreational marijuana laws and 25 states had already passed medical marijuana laws. After the election, four more states now have recreational marijuana laws (California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada) on the books, and another four states have legalized medical marijuana, including Florida.