WASHINGTON -- Daniel Porras’ doctor told him that of all of his patients, he was the only one who asked for fewer pain pills.

Porras damaged his ankle and Achilles tendon and suffered severe nerve damage in his left leg as a result of a motorcycle accident a decade ago. He originally took morphine because the pain was so bad. But it knocked him out to the point where he could barely function.

His objection to more pills was not that his discomfort was beginning to ease. Medical marijuana just worked better.

“If you can drop pain pills out of your life, you have a better life,” said the 61-year-old Army veteran from Sultan, Washington.

Medical marijuana “has given me a full life,” Porras said. “It’s a true medicine.”

On Dec. 4, 2015, Bloomberg’s Britton Staniar and Peter Robison interviewed Brendan Kennedy, CEO of Privateer Holdings, a private equity firm focused on the legal cannabis industry, in Seattle to discuss Privateer’s investments in cannabis-related businesses.

Brendan Kennedy, Michael Blue and Christian Groh founded Privateer Holdings in 2010. Kennedy told Bloomberg, “We put together Privateer Holdings because we saw this huge opportunity to build a private equity firm in this industry that was making investments in medical cannabis companies.”

Tomorrow afternoon, the Board of Supervisors will take its first look at the commercial cannabis cultivation ordinance passed by the Planning Commission last week. When they do, the principal thing they’ll be looking at is questions of land use — what sizes of commercial grows will be allowed where, with which sorts of permits. 

Why will the Board of Supervisors be looking at these questions? Why has the county been crafting this ordinance?

The Hawaii State Department of Health (DOH) has posted interim administrative rules for the medical marijuana dispensary licensing program. View them online here.

The interim rules are effective immediately and will remain in effect until July 1, 2018, or until rules are adopted pursuant to Chapter 91 of the Hawaii Revised Statutes (HRS).

Extended restriction on recreational market and new ban on medical marijuana applications are seen as "transition phase"

In this Aug. 25, 2014 photo, marijuana store Denver Relief co-owner Kayvan Khalatbari, right, talks with his employee Jeff Botkin. (Brennan Linsley, Associated Press)

A shortened four-month expanded moratorium on new players in Denver's legal marijuana markets won easy approval Monday night from the City Council.

After longer discussions in a committee late last month, the council passed the ordinance changes quietly as part of a block vote.

Rockie Eggebrecht is a hard-working farmer, but not the kind who wears overalls, labors in the soil and grows broccoli. He wears street clothes, works indoors and plants exclusively in pea gravel.

He grows recreational marijuana, and he loves his job.

Eggebrecht, 50, has been producing and processing pot lawfully since April. His business, north of Oak Harbor, is called Rock Garden, a play on his name and an allusion both to his hydroponic method and to the act of getting stoned.

“I’m damn proud of what I do,” Eggebrecht said during a recent visit to his growing operation. “I won’t put out a product that doesn’t meet my standards.”

“I want to supply gourmet marijuana to the market.”

Michael Render, aka Killer Mike, is a hip-hop lifer. He's been releasing his own records for the past 15 years, and guesting on tracks from the likes of Outkast and Jay-Z. But his biggest success to date has been as a member of Run the Jewels. Mike's not wasting his time on the spotlight: he's opened a chain of barbershops, lectured on race relations at New York University and MIT, and passionately endorsed presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders.

The nation's top drug official went on War on Drugs a failure. Michael Botticelli, who serves as the director of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, also said he wants to reform and refocus U.S. drug policy.

It’s a formidable challenge to develop a syllabus for a college-level pharmacology course focused entirely on a drug that’s illegal to possess, use and even research under federal law. That’s the task that Wolfgang Dostmann, PhD, and Karen Lounsbury, PhD, have undertaken as they plan the University of Vermont’s first medical cannabis course in the College of Medicine’s Department of Pharmacology, scheduled for the spring 2016 semester. It’s possibly the first academic program of its kind nationwide, but clearly needed as acceptance of marijuana for medical and recreational use continues to gain legal backing in more states and physicians and scientists seek more information about how it acts in the body.

A batch of studies further confirms medical cannabis patients are right to try cannabidiol-rich marijuana products to treat intractable seizure disorders.

Three studies presented at the American Epilepsy Society’s 69th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia Dec. 7th found a marijuana-derived extract slashed pediatric seizures in half, and completely stopped seizures in nine percent of cases.

Sixteen clinics in the U.S. — including one in San Francisco — are giving a marijuana extract rich in the molecule cannabidiol (called Epidiolex) to a total of 261 people — mostly children with incurable epilepsy, a sometimes deadly seizure disorder.