Marijuana has come a long way in the United States since California launched its first-in-the-nation medical program 19 years ago. Today, 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized cannabis to some degree, and public perception of the plant is clearly shifting. Medical marijuana is being used in treatment of a variety of illnesses including several types of seizures, cancer and post-traumatic stress disorder.

New polls by Gallup, Beyond the Beltway, and General Social Survey all show that for the first time since its prohibition, a majority of Americans support legalization of the plant. Change is coming to the American cannabis industry, and it’s time to prepare for it in earnest.

Dutch laws governing marijuana use are so liberal that even the US pop star Miley Cyrus failed to spark too much controversy when she lit a joint on stage in Amsterdam last year.

Now, 35 mayors are urging the government to take it a step further and let them grow cannabis too, as a global shift in favour of legalisation is leaving the once forward-thinking Netherlands lagging behind.

In a manifesto signed last week, the mayors of cities including Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht argue that the current laws allowing the sale but banning the cultivation of marijuana mean the nation’s cannabis cafés have to turn to illegal gangs for their supply, encouraging organised crime and wasting valuable police time dismantling unlawful plantations.

Many hydroponic users like this grower stick to legal produce but drugs gangs are involved elsewhere. Picture: Getty DAVID O’LEARY

COMPANIES selling equipment for cultivating plants without soil and with artificial light have revealed a huge sales boost due to the continued growth of the ­“urban homegrown market”.

Police have claimed the rise is linked to the cannabis industry as growing operations are uncovered all across Scotland with on average one farm a day being raided by ­officers.

However, industry leaders have disputed this claim, stating instead that increased public awareness of food security and people’s interest in harvesting their own fruit and vegetables are responsible for the growth in sales.

AKRON – Two graduate students have invented a device that would allow law enforcement officers to determine how much THC — the active ingredient in marijuana — is in a motorist's system during traffic stops.

The Plain Dealer reports that two biomedical engineering graduate students at the University of Akron hope to market their roadside testing device to states where marijuana use has been legalized.

Mariam Crow and Kathleen Stitzlein's device tests saliva to determine the concentration of pot's active chemical in the bloodstream. Police must now wait weeks to get results from blood tests for marijuana use.

Marijuana has been smokin’ hot lately, with Wall Street trying to tap into the reefer madness with all sorts of funds aimed at businesses in Colorado and Washington state.

That being said, legalizing or decriminalizing cannabis is not the same as making it good business.

Federal law still considers marijuana a Class I drug (with no redeeming medical value), effectively denying marijuana entrepreneurs access to banking and other financial services and forcing them to operate using large sums of cash.

Some 23 states (and the District of Columbia) have passed measures allowing for some degree of legal recreational and/or medicinal cannabis consumption.

Legalized marijuana sales are booming in the U.S., with the industry growing by a whopping 74% last year. Even so, total sales came in less than $3 billion in 2014, according to a report from the ArcView Group, showing that the drug remains in its infancy in terms of its economic potential. 

Source: Wikimedia.

The interesting part from an investing viewpoint, though, is that although the medical marijuana market is expected to grow to over $10 billion by 2018, that figure still pales in comparison to other rapidly growing healthcare segments, such as treatments for severe pain.

Source: Wikimedia.

It’s no secret that the tech industry likes marijuana. On HBO’s true-to-life comedy “Silicon Valley,” Erlich Bachman, the blowhard entrepreneur, has a marijuana home-grow in his garage, a bong in the dining room and “get kush” on his to-do list.

Most of the money during the Gold Rush was made from ancillary businesses, then technology is one of the most important ancillary sectors to look at in the Green Rush. The technology panelists at the Marijuana Investor Summit in Denver had plenty of experience among them, but as the panel moderator Michael Mayes pointed out, the bulk of the experience was in technology and software. The panelists had experience with many companies spanning a number of industries.

The faded sign off a West Quebec road still points to an old garden centre.

But the greenhouses at the end of the peninsula in the Masson-Angers neighbourhood of Gatineau no longer grows the types of plants your average gardener buys in spring.

The former Botanix-Aux Jardins de La Pointe now houses the Hydropothecary, a small-but-growing medical marijuana production plant. It’s the first of its kind in Quebec.

``We get at least two or three cars showing up a day, saying, where do we get our flowers?” said Adam Miron, who co-founded the company with his brother-in-law Sébastien St-Louis.

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — Nearly two decades after voters passed a medical marijuana law that often left police, prosecutors and even patients confused about what was allowed, Gov. Jay Inslee signed a bill Friday attempting to clean up that largely unregulated system and harmonize it with Washington's new market for recreational pot.

Among the law's many provisions, it creates a voluntary registry of patients and, beginning next year, eliminates what have become in some cases large, legally dubious "collective gardens" providing cannabis to thousands of people.