Minnesota lawmakers want to crack down on one of the state's medical marijuana companies whose former executives have been charged with illegally shipping $500,000 of marijuana oils to New York, pushing legislation allowing regulators to revoke the manufacturer's license and levy a huge fine.

Startups don’t have big budgets to go wild with digital marketing.

Every penny matters. There is little room for experimentation.

The best approach is to go for the best practices.

Plan

Do you have a digital marketing plan?

Is it documented?

Statistics show that 84 per cent of businesses have a digital marketing strategy while only 16 per cent of businesses do it without a proper plan.

Holden Jagger - a California based chef/

Israel, a leader in marijuana research and health technology, is attracting international investment as it tries to position itself as a cutting-edge exporter in the rapidly-growing market for medical-grade cannabis.

With estimates that the global market for medical marijuana could reach $50 billion by 2025, the Israeli government is set to allow the local industry to start exporting and projects annual revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Medical cannabis is a relatively new field with no universal clinical standard. Israel aims to fill the void by combining its expertise in agriculture, technology and cannabis-based medicine, said Yuval Landschaft, head of the health ministry's medical cannabis unit (IMCA).

The Oregon Liquor Control Commission issued its first recall of recreational marijuana after samples of a type of cannabis were found to contain a level of pesticide residue above the state limit.

The Blue Magoo marijuana was sold at Buds 4 U in Mapleton, a community 45 miles west of Eugene, The Capital Press reported. The commission, which oversees retail sales of recreational cannabis, said people who bought the product should return it to the retailer or throw it out.

The retailer notified the agency immediately after spotting the failed pesticide reading in the state’s cannabis tracking system, commission spokesman Mark Pettinger said. The shop sold the brand to 31 customers March 8-10.

Recreational marijuana will not be legally sold in Massachusetts until July of 2018, but by 2020, the state could collect as much as $172-million each year just from sales taxes.

The Department of Revenue calculated this number, assuming marijuana is taxed a total of 12%, according to the ballot law voters approved in November. It adds a 3.75% excise tax to the state’s 6.25% sales tax, and another 2% cities and towns can add if they host a pot shop.

Those who support the ballot law caution lawmakers not to set the tax rate too high, or else it could drive some buyers to go to the black market.

If the excise tax bumps up to 5%, the state could collect $11 million more. Lawmakers still haven’t finalized how much pot will be taxed in the state.

In 1992, a discussion about buying marijuana was pretty straightforward. Back then, it was illegal and socially stigmatized. Walking into a storefront to buy it was pretty much out of the question — unless you happened to be connecting thru Amsterdam. Most transactions occurred on street corners or back alleys, and payment was in cash.

Four years later, in 1996, the situation regarding marijuana legislatively changed dramatically, when California passed Proposition 215 and legalized marijuana for medical patients. Over the next two decades, 28 states have also legalized marijuana for medical use (apart from a handful of early adopters, the bulk of the medical states have legalized in the last ten years).

Jodie Emery has returned to Vancouver after being arrested for running recreational marijuana stores in Ontario, and says she thinks the charges she's facing are politically motivated.

The self-described activist called her and her husband Marc's arrests the latest salvo in a battle between what she calls the grassroots industry and government licenced producers.

"In the future, it would be great to see cannabis normalized and easily available," said Emery on her motivation for opening a chain of recreational weed shops across the country.

"That’s why we were demonstrating what legalization should look like: storefronts where adults can walk in and access cannabis."

Entrepreneurs have high hopes for cannabis in Switzerland, where business has suddenly taken off in recent months, six years after the country legalised low-potency "marijuana-light".

Switzerland changed its laws in 2011 to let adults buy and use cannabis with up to 1 percent THC, the chemical compound that produces a high. But its money-making potential seems only to have been discovered late last year, officials said.

"It started gradually last year, and then suddenly things went crazy in December 2016 and in 2017," said a spokesman for Switzerland's Customs Agency in Berne, which taxes the trade.

The number of retailers registered to sell low-THC cannabis has risen to 140 from just a handful last year, the agency says.