Never mind Clinton vs. Trump: Millions of Americans can expect to wake up Wednesday and indulge in a soothing palliative to take the edge off the results of a contentious presidential election.

On Tuesday, five states will decide whether to join Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Washington, DC, in legalizing marijuana for “adult recreational“ use.

Polling in California, Nevada, Arizona, Massachusetts and Maine shows that, while legalization is slightly favored by voters, the margins are very close.

Taken together, a successful outcome for these ballot measures could add $4.2 billion to legal marijuana retail revenues by 2018, on top of the $6.5 billion projected for the current year, according to Matt Karnes of GreenWave Advisors.

Before Chanda Macias drops her 6-year-old son off at school, she spritzes some Febreze on herself. If anyone sniffs a trace of marijuana on her, the mother of four worries she would be labelled an unfit parent — or at least a mother unfit to host play dates.

Macias, a former cell biology specialist at Howard University, left her job last year to foray into Washington, D.C.’s nascent pot industry and open a medical marijuana dispensary. Her business is legal, but the stigma has her questioning how to discuss her profession with her children.

In the male-dominated industry, there are few mothers she can turn to. Macias connected with other moms in the local marijuana business, forming a support group to navigate child-rearing in the murky age of legalization.

Californians are expected to pass a ballot measure on Election Day legalizing recreational marijuana, and the prospect has cities and counties seeing dollar signs.

Proposition 64 would impose state taxes on the cultivation and sale of marijuana. But it also allows local jurisdictions to add taxes of their own, something many cities and counties said they plan to do.

Economists warn that burdensome taxes and fees on the nascent industry could backfire, fueling the black market and pushing marijuana businesses to decamp for towns where it’s cheaper to operate. For many city and county officials across California, however, the promise of new revenue to fill budget gaps and fund services is too alluring to pass up.

No government on earth had ever created a for-profit marijuana market – until voters decided to do so in the United States.

Now the fall of marijuana prohibition – not yet federally, but state-by-state – may feel inevitable. A record 61 percent of Americans support legal adult use, according to Gallup. That certainly sounds like the end of the conversation. But hold on a minute.

Voters in five states will decide next week whether to legalize recreational marijuana. If all those measures pass, nearly a quarter of Americans...

Amidst the current political debate over marijuana legalization in Massachusetts (Question 4 on this year’s ballot), state Representative Hank Naughton, chairman of the Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee, recently argued: “Marijuana is a gateway drug to the problems of the opioid crisis that we’re having today. It’s not just a business and it’s not like a six pack of beer. There’s a lot more to it.”

There are countless nicknames tossed around for America’s most widely used recreational drug. There’s marijuana, pot, weed, herb, even reefer. But as the argument for legalization becomes more and more widespread, and as more and more companies sprout up to meet consumer demand, you might notice that the word cannabis is being placed at the forefront. 

That choice of terminology is far from accidental. For companies in the rapidly growing business, there’s a very deliberate reasoning behind it.

“We at Privateer decided that we were going to use the C word six years ago. And we’ve stuck to it,” explains Privateer Holdings CEO Brendan Kennedy in the new CBSN Originals documentary, “Big Pot: The Commercial Takeover.”

Legalizing the recreational use of marijuana is a big step, and it’s natural that some Nevada voters would be concerned about taking it.

But it’s a move that makes sense when marijuana is placed in the same context as alcohol.

Like marijuana, alcohol has been subject to a ban. But Prohibition didn’t work, so Americans undid it with the 21st Amendment in 1933 and began regulating alcohol again.

Eight decades later, the War on Drugs has been as ineffective at eradicating marijuana as Prohibition was for alcohol. Surveys and studies show that at least 30 million Americans use the drug, and the percentage of adults users has only grown in the last decade.

The state has issued its second "health alert" for marijuana contaminated with pesticides or pesticide ingredients, in this case three strains of marijuana flowers sold from dispensaries in Salem, Eugene and North Bend. 

The Oregon Health Authority is advising anyone who bought the strains to either return them to the dispensaries or dispose of them.

It's not clear how the tainted marijuana ended up on store shelves after apparently failing lab tests. Health authority officials are investigating why that happened. Producers are supposed to destroy the strains that fail pesticide tests.

The state is withholding the names of the growers, saying it's confidential information.

Medicinal Genomics, which registers marijuana strains on the blockchain, has set off a race among growers to sequence and register their strains, according to Motherboard.

Medicinal Genomics’ goal is to standardize strain nomenclature so that customers can know what they’re getting when they buy medical marijuana, while also defending the intellectual property rights of those who breed new cannabis strains.