Fort Collins' budding marijuana industry started the year with two new retail stores.

Kind Care of Colorado and Natural Alternatives for Health both recently expanded beyond medical marijuana. The stores bring the number of retail pot shops in Fort Collins to eight.

The number of licensed marijuana retailers operating in the city doubled during the second half of 2015.

Natural Alternatives started selling marijuana for recreational use on Dec. 29 after submitting an application for a retail license in May. The company hopes an expansion of its 1,500-square-foot growing facility will follow.

TALLASSEE, Fla. (NSF) - Florida health officials are holding to a deadline next month for the state's first medical marijuana businesses to seek permission to begin growing non-euphoric cannabis, even with hearings in license challenges stacked up through mid-summer.

Department of Health spokeswoman Mara Gambineri said Monday that five dispensing organizations --- selected by a three-member panel last year to grow, process and distribute low-THC marijuana --- must submit requests for cultivation authorization by Feb. 7, the first deadline in a process more than a year behind schedule due to previous legal wrangling.

BOSTON, Jan. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- GW Pharmaceuticals plc ("GW Pharma" or the "Company") (NASDAQ:  GWPH) has dropped precipitously in early trading.  It was down as much as 10% after a Sunday Times report referred to weakness in the Company's accounting practices.  GW Pharma had stated in its annual report that it "had a material weakness in our internal control over financial reporting for the year ended September 30, 2015."

The Company further stated that its:

As Ottawa prepares to legalize recreational marijuana, the 27 companies licensed to grow and sell medical pot in Canada are getting ready to cash in.

Ontario grower Tweed is among those planning to expand. The company grows about one-quarter of all medical marijuana sold in Canada, on the site of a former chocolate factory in Smiths Falls, Ont.

“This facility is ready to expand to meet a growing market,” President Mark Zekulin told CTV’s Richard Madan, while offering a tour of the facility Friday.

Zekulin said he expects Canada to take “a slower, more prudent approach” than the U.S. state of Colorado, which legalized the drug in 2012 and immediately allowed it to be sold in many retail locations.

As momentum spreads for national marijuana legalization in 2016, access to cannabis is becoming more and more convenient. One state where weed is legal for recreational use may be allowing a convenience never seen before in the United States.

Florida-based BiotrackTHC has been selected to implement Hawaii's first medical marijuana seed-to-sale tracking system, the state health department confirmed Wednesday.

And … about-face

After 40+ years of promoting a world-class disaster via the War on Drugs, and brainwashing school-aged kids into believing that marijuana use leads to a life of impending doom, educators in Auburn, Maine, will now be allowed to provide access to marijuana’s beneficial cannabinoids for students who have obtained a doctor’s recommendation.

Absolved and available

Nicholas Vita and Michael Abbott aren’t just opening New York City’s first medical marijuana dispensary, they are trying to steer the industry to a more data-focused way of matching patients with the strains of medical marijuana to help their specific conditions.

Located near Union Square in New York City, Columbia Care is collaborating with its famous neighbor, Mount Sinai Hospital, analyzing de-identified patient registry data that Columbia Care has collected from more than 100,000 interactions with patients in the states where it operates.   While the first step is a retrospective analysis of this data, in time they hope to work together on clinical studies

In 2001, Portugal decriminalized heroin, cocaine and cannabis. It remains a crime to profit from the sale or distribution of illegal drugs, but the user was not criminalized for possession. If a person is found with less than a 10-day supply, they must meet a three-person Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction, usually made up of a lawyer, a doctor and a social worker. The commission will recommend treatment, a minor fine or, as in most cases, no penalty at all.  

In 1990, one per cent of the Portuguese population was addicted to heroin. Portugal now has the lowest addiction rate of illegal drugs in all of Europe. After 14 decriminalized years, overall rates of drug use, drug addiction, drug overdose, HIV and accidental death have all gone down.