Two years ago, the BC Pain Society’s marijuana dispensary at Commercial Drive and West 13th Avenue became an online sensation after it installed Canada’s first vending machine for pot.

Now, the organization’s owner is saying it will fight to keep the location open, despite an order to close by the city.

“They are saying they’re going to start some sort of enforcement on Saturday. I’m ready, I’ve been talking to a number of lawyers, and I’m looking at my options,” says Chuck Varabioff, owner of the BC Pain Society.

“I don’t agree with it. I don’t agree with it at all. We’re providing a service here for sick people.”

Beneath a purple glow, in a warehouse sharing the street with two indistinguishable strip malls, Kevin Biernacki is growing around 100 pounds of medical marijuana. The purpose of this facility, owned by The Grove, is no different than that of 39 other cultivation sites approved in Clark County. Yet, the roughly 480 industrial lamps suspended over clusters of cannabis set this place apart.

Those energy-efficient lights allowed The Grove to slash its power bill. The decision to use LED lamps might seem unsexy at first, simply a marginal deduction on a complicated balance sheet. But it’s not. It is the type of business decision many experts believe can offer huge benefits in a growing market.

“In the long run, I think it will be an advantage,” Biernacki said.

Eaze is a technology company that helps patients get medical cannabis deliveries on demand.

Anyone paying attention knows that the cannabis industry is rapidly becoming a multi-billion dollar industry—in spite of existing limitations and regulations. To learn more about the companies fueling this growth, we’re doing a series of profiles on the biggest names in cannabis.

That includes Eaze, a leading medical cannabis technology company, which connects verified patients with compliant dispensaries to get their medical marijuana delivered on demand. It is currently in operation in almost 100 cities in California.

iPhone scanners are helping legal cannabis growers track product and stay compliant with state regulations.

Before corporate shine and the smell of success, there was a counterculture aura and a whiff of weed. Pot and the dreams of some industrious guys shared a garage where the personal computing revolution incubated under the Apple brand.

So what would the late Steve Jobs think if he could see Apple’s iPhone used to keep the growing and selling of cannabis legal? Jobs, who said he smoked it early on because it made him feel more creative, might smile and say, cool!

Montreal researchers have found a new role for cannabinoids. The active ingredient in marijuana — which is also naturally present in the human body — seems to improve night vision in vertebrates.

The study by a multidisciplinary team including researchers from the Montreal Neurological Institute looked at changes in tadpole retinas after exposure to cannabinoids.

“We didn’t believe what we were seeing — exactly the opposite of what we expected,” said neurologist Ed Ruthazer, of the Montreal Neurological Institute of McGill University, and the paper’s senior author. 

“There’s more than one way to skin a cat” is a weirdly morbid saying, but the phrase’ core concept rings true – there are a lot of ways to accomplish the same task. This has never been more true for cannabidiol (CBD). With the rising demand for CBD products, there are a plethora of different ways to get your daily dose. They range from sublingual sprays, to vaping CBD oils, to smoking good old-fashioned joints.

Millions of consumers treat Weedmaps like the Yelp for pot, relying on the Irvine company as their definitive guide to marijuana dispensaries, varieties and doctors.

But a key feature — user reviews of pot businesses — may be tainted by thousands of potentially fraudulent comments, a flaw in the company’s software revealed.

Reviews on the site are pseudonymous, and visitors reasonably expect that each is written by a unique customer. But data that Weedmaps mistakenly leaked suggests a large proportion of a glowing remarks come from individual users leaving multiple reviews of a single business.

Of 598 businesses examined by the Los Angeles Times and a software developer, 70% had at least one batch of reviews originating from the same IP address.

I receive the question all the time: can Bitcoin bring something to the table when it comes to cannabis transactions? While many technologists claim this is a very real possibility, the current answer to this is a very strong ‘no.’ This might change in coming months and years, but, for now, that’s the verdict in my opinion, and here’s why.

After the Liberal government announced plans to legalize recreational pot use next spring, what started out as initial excitement turned into confusion as marijuana dispensaries started popping up across Toronto under the guise of providing more options for medical marijuana users.

While police shut down many of them, for medical marijuana patients, dispensaries were a welcome change from the inconvenient way they used to obtain their prescription.

Imagine a marijuana grow-op in a greenhouse the size of ten Canadian football fields.

That’s what Vancouver-based Aurora Cannabis Inc. is aiming to build in central Alberta, a 600,000-sq.-ft. facility with the capacity to produce up to an estimated 70,000 kg. of cannabis once it begins production, expected by the summer of 2018.

It could become the country’s largest producer, though Ontario-based Aphria Inc. recently bought a swath of land capable of holding a million sq.-ft. of production space, for $6.5 million.

Aurora, currently Alberta’s only licensed producer of medical marijuana, already operates a sprawling 55,200 sq.-ft. facility in Cremona, northwest of Calgary.