MANCHACA, Texas -- When California rings in the new year with the sale of recreational pot for the first time, Texas will be tiptoeing into its own marijuana milestone: a medical cannabis program so restrictive that doubts swirl over who will even use it.

Texas is the last big state to allow some form of medical marijuana, albeit an oil extract so low in the psychoactive component, THC, that it couldn't get a person high. Though it might seem that Texas policymakers have softened their attitude toward the drug, bringing them more in line with the U.S. population as a whole, they have not. A joint could still land you in jail in Texas, and the state's embrace of medical marijuana comes with a heavy dose of caution.

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Within weeks an estimated 150,000 Texas patients suffering from untreatable epilepsy will have a new means of relief.

Cannabidiol (CBD), a form of medical marijuana, will finally be delivered to patients who qualify under the state's very strict guidelines. The CBD reduces or halts convulsive epileptic seizures but doesn't get the patients stoned.

Right now, the treatment will be available only for certain epilepsy patients, and it's highly controlled.

We believe availability should be expanded for treatment of other conditions when there's evidence those patients can be helped. We urge state lawmakers to begin work through the political and medical hurdles now so they can make that happen when they meet in 13 months.

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In just a few weeks, medical marijuana will legally be sold in Texas.

The plants are nearly finished growing in South-Central Texas, which means workers will soon harvest and cultivate them, drying them out and preparing to extract low-level cannibidiol.

Once that medicine is in a liquid form, and packaged in drops, the first sales of medical marijuana -- geared to help Texans with intractable epilepsy -- will occur before the end of this year.

"It's very, very exciting," said Jose Hidalgo, chief executive officer of Cansortium Holdings, the Florida-based parent company of Cansortium Texas. "Nothing in life ever goes as planned.

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Any day now, medical marijuana will legally start to grow in the state of Texas.

It will be planted, grown and processed on a 10-acre parcel of land in Schulenburg, a small community east of San Antonio, now that the company that owns the property -- Cansortium Texas -- has received the state's first license to do so.

The low-level cannabidiol will be sold, under a 2015 law, to help Texans with intractable epilepsy if federally approved medication hasn't helped.

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In 2015, Gov. Greg Abbott signed the first bill allowing any growing or sale of marijuana in Texas. The Texas Compassionate Use Act legalized the selling of a specific kind of cannabis oil derived from marijuana plants for a very small group of customers: epilepsy patients whose symptoms have not responded to federally approved medication.

Two years later, Texans still can't legally buy cannabis oil, but a handful of companies believe they are weeks away from receiving the official go-ahead to become the state's first sellers.

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A Texas girl whose family moved to Colorado to use medical marijuana to treat her intractable epilepsy is among those suing Attorney General Jeff Sessions over the federal cannabis prohibition.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions says the federal government should be able to prosecute marijuana use and distribution in states that have declared it legal.

An 11-year-old Texas cannabis "refugee" has joined a retired NFL football player, an Iraq War veteran and two others in a lawsuit challenging beleaguered Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the federal government's stance on medical marijuana.

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Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy has received a $3 million donation to endow a fellow in drug policy to provide objective scientific research in the highly charged political arena of drug addiction, university officials announced Wednesday.

Katharine Neill Harris, who currently holds a post-doctoral fellowship in drug policy at the Baker Institute, will become the Alfred C. Glassell III Fellow in Drug Policy.

The money to fund her new position comes from the Glassell Family Foundation led by Houston philanthropist Alfred C. Glassell III.

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A 13-year-old girl found dead over the weekend in Texas was abducted as ransom for stolen marijuana, according to authorities.

Police said Shavon Randle was kidnapped Wednesday from a Lancaster home after the boyfriend of one of her relatives stole about 22 pounds of pot, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.

Soon after she was abducted, suspects allegedly called a relative from a private number and told them, "Give us our sh-t back or we are going to kill her."

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With battering rams and flash-bang grenades, SWAT teams fuel the risk of violence as they forcibly enter suspects' homes. Five months and 85 miles apart, two cases took starkly divergent legal paths.

SOMERVILLE, Tex. - Joshua Aaron Hall had been a resident of the Burleson County Jail for about a week when he requested a meeting with Gene Hermes, the sheriff's investigator who had locked him up for violating probation. The stocky lawman arrived in the featureless interview room on the morning of Dec. 13, 2013, placed his soda cup on the table and apologized for not getting there sooner. He asked in his gravelly drawl if they would be talking about Mr. Hall's own case.

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President Barack Obama on Thursday commuted the 20-year prison sentenced imposed on Richard Ruiz Montes, convicted in 2008 for his role in the Modesto's pot-dealing California Healthcare Collective.

In one of his final presidential acts, Obama used his executive authority to cut Montes' sentence by more than half. Now held at a federal facility in Atwater, according to the Bureau of Prisons' inmate locator, the 36-year-old Montes will be released May 19.

He is identified as Richard by the White House and Bureau of Prisons, but has also been known as Ricardo. The White House listed his hometown as Escalon.

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A Pew Research Center survey of nearly 8,000 police officers finds that more than two-thirds of them say that marijuana use should be legal for either personal or medical use.

The nationally representative survey of law enforcement, one of the largest of its kind, found that 32 percent of police officers said marijuana should be legal for medical and recreational use, while 37 percent said it should be legal for medical use only. Another 30 percent said that marijuana should not be legal at all.

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An Arlington police officer is popular on social media Thursday because of a video that shows he gave a teenager caught smoking marijuana in a movie theater parking lot an unorthodox alternative to being arrested: pushups.

Officer Eric Ball was working off-duty Monday night at the theater in Arlington when someone told him that a teenager was smoking marijuana outside, WFAA-TV reported. Ball went outside to find the teen finishing a cigarette and discarding it, and Ball smelled marijuana when he approached him.

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An unclassified document from the Drug Enforcement Agency shows the areas of influence generated by Mexico's major criminal organizations.

The "intelligence report," dated July 2015, includes three maps that show the various DEA offices around the country and the cartel-related cases they deal with; potential markets that drug cartels will exploit due to population density; and heroin deaths by state.

In Texas, the many offices appear to have their time spent dealing with cases involving the Sinaloa, Gulf, Juarez, the Knights Templar, Beltran-Levya, Jalisco and the Zetas.

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