The nation’s largest marijuana policy organization, the Marijuana Policy Project, has launched a voter guide to the 2016 presidential race, detailing the candidates’ positions on marijuana policy and assigning them grades based on where they stand.

The voter guide can be viewed online at http://mpp.org/president.

“Most Americans recognize that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol and they think it should be made legal for adults,” said MPP Communications Director Mason Tvert. “Voters should know which candidates support rolling back prohibition and which ones are fighting to maintain it. People are becoming increasingly wary of the federal government’s role in our nation’s marijuana policies.”

My friend Shona is a single mother who uses medical cannabis to treat her Crohn's disease, a chronic inflammatory condition of the gastrointestinal tract that is incredibly painful. Now she's fighting to keep custody of her son after the state of Kansas took him from her because she is a medical marijuana patient in a state where it isn't legal.

It all started last month when her 10-year-old son spoke out in school about the benefits of medical marijuana, explaining that it had saved his mom's life. Officials at the school called police who then searched her house and found medical marijuana and cannabis oil. She hasn't been charged with a crime, but authorities took her son away and put him in protective state custody.

A software company recently launched a medicinal marijuana delivery smartphone app a few weeks ago in an effort to bring the pot farmers closer to dispensaries and dispensaries closer to patients.

Joshua Artman, founder and CEO of the Green Exchange, called its free app, Loud Cannabis, a distribution model to streamline the distribution of cannabis from farm to table.

“It’s really learning how it was grown and where it was grown and the quality,” Artman said, calling the current statewide distribution system inefficient and sometimes dangerous.

It is dangerous because sometimes marijuana farmers have to go to dispensaries across the state two to three times before they can get paid for their product, Artman said.

ROGERS, N.D. — Tammy and John Sadek raise cattle on the green slopes above Lake Ashtabula. On their ranch, early summer days bring the hard work of cutting hay, a job their 20-year-old son, Andrew, used to help with.

"He was my right hand as far as getting chores done," John Sadek said. "He was a good worker. Real good."

It's this memory of a son, who planned to carry the tradition of a ranch kept in the family since the 1930s, that makes this time of year hard to bear, despite crisp prairie skies and sun glittering on the dark blue lake.

There will be no baggies of pot awaiting patients next week, when Minnesota joins 21 other states in offering medical marijuana. No glass pipes, no plants to tend at home. Instead, the nation’s latest medical marijuana programme is a world of pill bottles and vials of marijuana-infused oil.

For the qualifying patients seeking relief from pain, medical marijuana advocates and some lawmakers, Wednesday isn’t the finish line, but the first step. The state’s restrictive approach, unseen in the industry, is likely to mean high costs, long drives and reluctant doctors.

It's being called the second immaculate conception.

Come Wednesday, adults 21 and older will legally be allowed to possess and use recreational marijuana in Oregon.

But complicating this new, hard-fought-for freedom is one niggling detail: Potential users must receive their marijuana as a gift or get it on the illegal black market because there are still no licensed retail stores in Oregon where law-abiding residents can buy it.

Simply put, residents can smoke and inhale pot, eat brownies baked with it or rub lotions containing the oils into their skin; there's just no legal way to purchase it.

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) - The Legislature on Saturday passed a measure that that makes several changes to Washington state’s new recreational marijuana law, ranging from revising the market’s tax structure to zoning rules.

One of the main changes to the current system would be the elimination of the three-tier tax structure and its replacement with a single excise tax of 37 percent at the point of sale.

House Bill 2136 passed the Senate on a bipartisan 36-7 vote and now heads to the governor’s desk. The House passed the measure Friday on a 59-38 vote.

An amendment that passed Friday in the House removed language from the original bill that would have required local bans on licensed marijuana businesses to be approved by the jurisdiction’s voters.

New entrepreneurs of marijuana in the US dream of Wall Street. "We want to be the Marlboro marijuana," said Jeffrey Britz Reforma, one of the founders of Blackout, a company dedicated to the production of vaporizers for the industry.

Britz and its partners, Travis Belcher and Danny Davis, plan to develop their brand of vaporizers along with another brand, JuJu Royal, for which they closed a deal with Julian Marley, son of reggae legend Bob Marley.

They, like other cannabis investors are novices: just received their licenses last October. Like others, they want their share of the business of marijuana, valued at about 50 billion dollars annually.

The plan is clear: to develop a brand and once the industry is out of the shadows, sell.

An effort to legalize some forms of medical marijuana in Pennsylvania remains underway as lawmakers attempt to pass a state budget by June 30. There are 23 states and Washington, D.C., that have legalized medical marijuana.

While the movement on the issue last week in Harrisburg wasn't tectonic, below is all you need to know from a busy couple of days.

1 Senate Bill 3 is no longer in Rep. Matt Baker's hands

The Medical Cannabis Act was removed from the House Health Committee by a unanimous vote Friday.

Rep. Matt Baker, Health Committee chair, said he would not bring S.B. 3 to a vote.

The bill, which cleared the Senate by a 40-7 margin in May, is now in the House Rules Committee, which is chaired by House Majority Leader Dave Reed.

Celebrated crime writer Don Winslow continues his secret history of the War on Drugs in his disturbing and important new novel, 'The Cartel'