Colorado’s top marijuana regulators are starting a private consulting business.

The marijuana coordinator for Gov. John Hickenlooper and the head of the state’s Marijuana Enforcement Division say they are leaving state government to offer their services to other clients.

Andrew Freedman was tapped by Hickenlooper to coordinate administrative agencies that oversee marijuana, from the state Health Department to the Department of Agriculture.

Lewis Koski (COSS-kee) is head of the Marijuana Enforcement Division, which collects pot taxes and regulates companies that grow and sell it.

What happened

Following a string of successful trials of its anti-epileptic Epidiolex, shares in marijuana medicine maker GW Pharmaceuticals plc (NASDAQ: GWPH)  surged 60.9% higher in 2016, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence .

So what

Marijuana advocates have been cheering the surging adoption of medical marijuana laws; however, despite growing demand for medical marijuana at dispensaries, there has been limited scientific proof of marijuana's benefit, and that's crimped its adoption.

California was known as a major marijuana-producing state before it legalized recreational use. Just how big of a producer may surprise you. Take a look at this detailed infographic developed by our partners at the Orange County Register. Read more about what they found below.

(Graphic by The Orange County Register)

Donald Trump will be inaugurated this month, and a wide range of companies, from pharmaceuticals to health insurers to industrial manufacturers, are wondering what kind of impact the Trump administration will have on their business. In most cases, they have little to go on, since Trump has never held political office. And so they’re left to weigh scattered comments he has made on television and Twitter against his general policy views.

After conducting that sort of analysis, a leading marijuana business publication believes there’s a good chance Trump will be friendly toward the tide of marijuana legalization, or at least not stand in its way. But the same cannot be said of Trump’s choice of attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions.

Cannabis culture has moved in a few short years from an illicit black market to a legal industry in 29 states and the District of Columbia. Earlier this year the data analysis firm New Frontier pronounced recreational cannabis the fastest-growing industry sector in the United States, outpacing electric vehicles, LED bulbs, solar installations and big data.

Legal cannabis sales reached nearly $7 billion in 2016, up from more than $5 billion last year. Many expect sales in excess of $20 billion by 2020, even without federal legalization.

As marijuana shops sprout in states that have legalized the drug, they face a critical stumbling block — lack of access to the kind of routine banking services other businesses take for granted.

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, is leading an effort to make sure vendors working with legal marijuana businesses, from chemists who test marijuana for harmful substances to firms that provide security, don’t have their banking services taken away.

It’s part of a wider effort by Warren and others to bring the burgeoning $7 billion marijuana industry in from a fiscal limbo she said forces many shops to rely solely on cash, making them tempting targets for criminals.

The cannabis industry got a lot more complicated on Dec. 14, when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration announced that it would now consider cannabidiol—known as CBD, a Schedule 1 controlled substance with no confirmed medicinal benefits. To put that in perspective, heroin is listed in the same category. Moreover, CBD is the non-psychoactive component of cannabis—it does not get you high like tetrahydrocannabinol, known as THC, which is one of the main elements in recreational marijuana smoking.

Top Houston area law and order officials are taking a softer tone when it comes to marijuana. It marks a dramatic shift in the way marijuana laws could be enforced locally.

New Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg beat out Devon Anderson on a platform that included marijuana and drug law reform.

"I never felt it was fair to put users in jails with murderers," said Ogg.

Ogg now vows to follow through on her campaign promises to ensure misdemeanor marijuana possession suspects don't end up in jail. And she's not alone.

New Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez has expressed support for the plan and just last week HPD's new chief Art Acevedo also voiced support for marijuana law reform in a radio interview with advocate Dean Becker.

European cannabis consumers, patients, and activists are watching with a bit of envy as legalization in the United States moves beyond Colorado and Washington to other states, from California in the west to Massachusetts in the east. Mainstream media in Europe now routinely report that hundreds of millions of dollars are being collected annually in each state in “weed taxes” and how legalization has created jobs, reduced prison occupancy, and led to capital improvements at schools, parks, and community centers.

It's tough to find a doctor in New York who will recommend medical marijuana.

At the one-year anniversary of the drug being legally available in the state, more than 800 physicians are registered to certify patients to purchase medical cannabis in 19 dispensaries, including three in Albany County.

But over the past year, patients and advocates have consistently complained that finding a registered doctor can be a huge challenge, on top of having a debilitating condition that qualifies them to try the medicine in the first place. A key problem is there's no way for patients to look up a list of registered doctors. Only other doctors can do that.