This morning, I was surprised to read about Seattle, my original hometown, in the Mail Online. Even more surprising was the reason for the story: a public cannabis farmer's market.

A quick look around the internet unearthed a new documentary produced and aired by MontanaPBS, a non-profit publicly-supported broadcasting television service in the United States. Their programme, Clearing the Smoke, investigates the science of marijuana, investigating how cannabis acts on the brain and in the body in medically beneficial ways to treat nausea, pain, epilepsy and possibly even cancer. This programme includes extensive interviews with patients, doctors, researchers and skeptics detail the promises and the limitations of medicinal cannabis.

After the first 20 minutes of this video, you will be redirected to another window to watch the rest of the show (for a total of 57 minutes). Even though it is longer than the 2.0-3.5 minute videos that I typically embed in the morning, I think this show is well worth watching.

Even though the video has an American perspective, marijuana use is illegal throughout many countries of the world for reasons that are not clear. This video is important because it mainly investigates the scientific basis underlying the medical benefits of marijuana use instead of focusing on the social, political and legal hysteria that have been attached to it.

The paper mentioned in this video, Marihuana Reconsidered, was published in book form and can be purchased from Amazon [Amazon UK; Amazon US]. The author, Dr Grinspoon, is the world's leading authority on marijuana. In this book, Dr Grinspoon examines -- and debunks -- many of the common misconceptions about marijuana.