It was cannabis Wednesday in Congress, where lawmakers gave the strongest support yet for ending the country's laws prohibiting marijuana use.

In the strongest sign yet that deciders in Washington may soon be ready to undo federal marijuana prohibition, both Democrats and Republicans voted to approve three pro-cannabis budget amendments — and came very close to approving a fourth in support of recreational marijuana.

Bipartisan votes approved amendments forbidding Justice Department officials from interfering in state-legal medical cannabis operations, industrial hemp programs, and laws that allow citizens to access products high in less-psychoactive cannabis compound CBD (cannabidiol).

ISIS couldn’t have invented a more disabling weapon.

Sunday–Last Day of May
Rancho Mirage. It is so unbelievably hot here it’s well, it’s unbelievable. That’s how hot it is. 106 degrees with no breeze at all.

I am not at all sure why we are even here, but the son of a close relative is visiting and he had expressed an interest in playing golf. We have a super course here at the Club at Morningside and we might have played a few holes but it’s far too hot now. It is heat stroke, sunstroke weather. Cruel.

Depending on who's talking, a 20-acre hemp farm about 10 miles south of Grants Pass is either the harbinger of a new industry that could help save rural Oregon – or an existential threat to local marijuana farmers just as they're anticipating boom times.

Hemp, the non-intoxicating version of cannabis sativa, has long been a big part of the marijuana culture, celebrated for its wide variety of uses and status as a fellow victim of federal prohibition.

But now that both hemp and marijuana are coming out of the legal shadows in Oregon, they're suddenly in conflict – and state legislators may be about to side with the much more well-established marijuana industry.

True to their word, a group of young advocates for local liberalization of marijuana possession laws rolled into City Hall for Tuesday’s meeting of the Athens-Clarke County Commission, once again arguing for a “parallel ordinance” allowing police officers the discretion to determine whether someone found in possession of marijuana should simply be cited and fined, or arrested and taken to jail.

“We’re not going to give up,” one of the young people told commissioners Tuesday. Since March, the group, affiliated with the Athens Campaign for Access, Reform and Education — part of Georgia C.A.R.E., a group working to “end marijuana prohibition in Georgia” — has been a regular presence at the commission’s monthly voting meeting.

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh is leading a fight against legalizing marijuana.

As if Mayor Marty Walsh wasn’t already busy enough boosting the Olympics. Now he says he’d be willing to spend more precious time and political capital leading a fight against legalizing marijuana, too.

Let’s leave aside, for now, concerns over how thinly that would spread a mayor who already has plenty demanding his focus. Purely from a policy perspective, it’s the wrong fight to take on.

Expansion of Medicaid hasn’t had the financial impact that was anticipated.

The health law’s expansion of Medicaid in many states hasn’t benefited nonprofit hospitals in those states as expected, according to a new report by Moody’s Investors Service.

Hospitals in the mostly blue states that expanded Medicaid were largely expected to benefit from fewer unpaid bills and more paying customers, but that hasn’t generally translated into better operating margins or cash flow, Moody’s found.

Performance improved across the board—including in the mostly Republican-led states that opted out of the law’s Medicaid expansion—as the economy gained steam last year and unemployment declined.

Amherst, N.Y. -  

Dent Neurologic Institute in Amherst is partnering with a Lewiston business to become a clinical research center for the use of medical marijuana.

Dent and Herbal Agriculture will be working together to develop treatment and protocol for treating neurological disorders with marijuana.

A controversial cannabis treatment helps boy break his nine-year silence. Could it benefit others, too?

The Short of It

Kalel Santiago, who lives in Puerto Rico, was diagnosed with cancer at 10 months old, and after he was cancer-free at 3 years old, he was diagnosed with severe, non-verbal autism. At age 9, he hadn't spoken his first word—until his parents tried a controversial treatment: Hemp Health, a hemp oil that includes a form of cannabis. Two days later, he was speaking.

The Lowdown

Kalel's parents sprayed the compound cannabidiol (CBD) in the boy's mouth twice per day, and they say the results were astounding.

Although Alaska voted in favor of legalizing marijuana in November, it was still up to individual towns to decide whether or not possession of cannabis for any adult at least 21 years old would be legal.

Monday night, the North Pole city council met to decide the fate of marijuana in Santa Claus's hometown. And Santa himself showed up to weigh in.

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a 2016 presidential candidate on the Democratic side, says he has smoked marijuana two times but that it “didn’t quite work” for him.

“I coughed a lot,” he said in an interview with Yahoo News’ Katie Couric. “I smoked marijuana twice — didn’t quite work for me.”

“It’s not my thing, but it is the thing of a whole lot of people,” he said. “And if you want to make the argument that maybe marijuana is less harmful to health than tobacco, I think you’d probably be making a correct argument. Some may disagree, but I think it’s probably true.”