Florida

There’s a lot going on in Tallahassee as Sunshine State legislators forge the regulatory framework for Florida’s medical marijuana program.

Senators appear poised to advance legislation (SB 406) to welcome five new cannabis dispensaries to Florida by October. At least one would be minority-owned. Friday’s measure also requires four additional dispensaries within “six months after each instance of the registration of 75,000 qualifying patients with the compassionate use registry.”

That 75,000 figure is dramatically less than the previous threshold of 250,000.

Will Kleidon, a loquacious 27-year-old, and I were sitting in a restaurant called Food Harmonics here on Ojai’s main drag the other day, sipping $5 mushroom coffee with shots of CBD elixir.

It was delicious, if slightly expensive.

If you have been paying attention to what’s going on in the cannabis “space” (a perfect word for this industry, really), you have probably heard of CBD — cannabidiol — or wondered what it is.

CBD is one of two important compounds in cannabis.

In the race to meet California's demand for newly legalized recreational marijuana, the Coachella Valley is blooming fast as the industry's new farming hub. Trouble is, the region also suffers severe groundwater depletion, a problem that could be worsened by the popular crop.

California voters approved Proposition 64 in November 2016, allowing the retail sale of marijuana to adults for recreational purposes from Jan. 1, 2018. Since then, several cities in the Coachella Valley have moved to embrace industrial-scale marijuana growing.

Ted Dobson and other small farmers like him are hoping to be growers for Massachusetts’ recreational marijuana program. Do they stand a chance?

In a win for supporters of commercial medical marijuana in Calaveras County, a judge has ordered county officials to yank a May ballot measure that, if passed, would have banned the industry altogether.

Judge Richard D. Meyer, a visiting judge from Alpine County, found that the language of the initiative was illegal.

Rather than stating clearly that it was a citizen’s initiative, Measure B invoked the county’s Board of Supervisors, implying that voters were being asked to approve an action that already had been taken by local elected officials.

This “undermines the integrity of the initiative process,” the judge found.

A recent survey suggests that one-in-five tourists are more interested in visiting an American state if it has legalized cannabis.

More than three years ago, Noah Stokes was running a security company in Oregon when a nervous medical marijuana grower approached him. "Hey, you guys do security, right," the grower asked Stokes. The man's grow had been robbed. Someone had cut a hole in the ceiling, opened a door and loaded a truck with the harvest of several thousand square feet of grow space.

The “Amazon” for Dispensaries secured funding from Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Casa Verde Capital and others.

The passage of California's Adult Use of Marijuana Act in November left a 14-month gap before businesses could begin selling marijuana to recreational users.

For residents eager to purchase and use cannabis, that may have seemed like a long time. But that period is almost half over — and for the state, which has been tasked with regulating the sprawling cannabis industry, there's a lot more to do.

"In order to start issuing licenses on Jan. 1 or Jan. 2, we need people in place and we need them to be up to speed," said Alex Traverso, chief of communications at California's Bureau of Medical Cannabis Regulation, or BMCR. "From everything we've seen and heard, there's an amazing amount of interest. We expect to be busy on that Jan. 2 date."

At the edge of an industrial park in this suburb south of Boston, past a used-car auction lot and a defunct cheese factory, is an unmarked warehouse bristling with security cameras and bustling with activity. Until recently, the cinder-block structure was home to a wholesale florist, a granite cutter and a screen printer. Today, it is home to just one tenant: a medical marijuana operation called Ermont.

Legalized marijuana has already upset societal norms, created a large legal gray area and generated a lucrative source of tax revenue. Now it is upending the real estate market, too.