Japan¡¯s media coverage of Canada¡¯s Oct. 17 announcement that possession and use of marijuana would be legalized ¡ª subject to certain restrictions ¡ª has been mostly brief and low-key.

To access the best source about marijuana in Japanese, I suggest you buy a subscription to the Japan Medical Abstracts Society, which operates Ichushi Web. Enter marifana (marijuana) into the search window and you¡¯ll get 562 hits for research studies and academic papers in which the wacky weed figures.

To avoid the outlay, I managed to cajole a professor at the Kobe University School of Medicine to summarize what he found in the database.