America’s marijuana industry isn't sure where President Trump and his attorney general stand on marijuana, but it is forging ahead with expansion plans anyway.

Cannabis businesses are hiring new workers, leasing new space and pushing across state borders. And regulators are drafting rules that will give access to legal recreational pot to tens of millions of adults.

The stakes are high: This is a job-generating industry that cannabis data firm New Frontier Data estimates may be worth $2.3 billion in taxes within three years.

“Far from the punchline of a joke, these are real people and real lives,” said Colorado Rep. Jared Polis, a Boulder Democrat who recently co-founded the pro-legalization Congressional Cannabis Caucus.

States with legalized marijuana are enjoying new tax revenues and decreased crime as customers move from back-alleys to well-lit shops. But conflict looms as Attorney General Jeff Sessions signals stronger anti-marijuana law enforcement.

Donald Trump wants to be a jobs president, so lawmakers in states where marijuana is legal, are trying to show that decriminalized, regulated, controlled cannabis does create jobs. And the economic impact is significant -- legalization pioneers Washington state and Colorado each saw $1 billion in marijuana sales in 2016, accompanied by hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue.

Police struck at the heart of a large Canadian chain of illegal marijuana shops Thursday, raiding Cannabis Culture locations in Ottawa and three other cities.

And it wasn’t just store clerks who were caught up in the sweep. Marc and Jodie Emery, known as Canada’s Prince and Princess of Pot, were arrested at the Toronto airport Wednesday night on the eve of the raids.

The Emerys created Cannabis Culture and have been opening franchises across the country. Now they are in a Toronto jail, facing charges of conspiracy, trafficking and possessing the proceeds of crime. They were to appear for a bail hearing Friday.

Plans are moving forward to convert a portion of an historic house first built more than 200 years ago in Harvard Square into a place for registered patients to purchase medical marijuana products.

The Cambridge Planning Board on Feb. 28 voted in favor of a special permit for Healthy Pharms Inc., to operate a dispensary at The Red House, a restaurant packed tightly among other businesses along pedestrian-friendly Winthrop Street.

The plan was opposed by a smattering of neighbors during a recent public hearing, with some worrying that the dispensary could fast become a place to purchase the drug for recreational use and others claiming it would cause “irreparable” harm to abutters.

The revenue touted by marijuana vending machine company Medbox was about as substantial as smoke, the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged late Thursday.

Instead of selling their $50,000 vending machines that were supposed to dispense marijuana on the basis of biometric identification, Medbox executives and consultants created phony press releases with false revenue figures, the SEC said. In fact nearly 90% of the company's revenue reported in the first quarter of 2014 was actually false, the SEC claims.

The Sacramento City Council has advanced an ambitious commercial marijuana cultivation program by finalizing local licensing fees for an anticipated 200 cannabis grow rooms expected to flourish in mostly light industrial zones in the capital city.

As a result of council action Tuesday night, city staff is to begin accepting permit applications for the businesses in early April, triggering a process – expected to last several months – for licenses to be approved.

With the medical-marijuana industry caught in a tainted-cannabis scare that Health Canada has yet to fully confront, one company has struck out on its own to devise a solution to the controversy – and hopes the rest of the sector will voluntarily follow suit.

Some federally licensed companies in Canada’s medical-marijuana sector test for contaminants, but don’t make the data available for consumers to see. Others don’t test at all for substances such as dangerous pesticides, because Health Canada does not require it.

If you look closely, the US government doesn’t seem as intent on thwarting marijuana development as the rhetoric espoused by some politicians would have you believe. In fact, cannabis seems to be slowly but surely gaining legitimacy, even in federal government circles, despite its Drug Enforcement Administration classification as a schedule 1 substance with no medical use.

Pot will regulated in the city of Los Angeles.

That’s because Measure M was approved Tuesday by voters.

With all precincts reporting, 192,054 voters voted for the measure, giving it 79.36 percent of the total. The measure garnered 49,964 “no” votes for 20.64 percent, according to the L.A. County Registrar’s Office.

At stake was regulation of the pot business in L.A., where there is perhaps 1,000 retail shops, with untold numbers of cultivators, delivery services, testing labs, edibles bakers and concentrate makers operating in the city.

Supporters of the measure were touting it as groundbreaking.