Two years ago, the city of Adelanto, a crumbling outpost in California's Mojave desert, was facing a bleak future as it teetered on the brink of bankruptcy and struggled with double-digit unemployment.

'We were about to vanish, to be incorporated into another city,' says councilman John 'Bug' Woodard Jr. 'The place was dying and in total despair.'

Today, however, the once-desolate town is firmly back on the map, having joined a handful of communities in California in embracing large-scale commercial cannabis cultivation -- a move that smells of success as the state prepares to vote in November on legalizing the use of recreational marijuana.

Many of our clients that are raising money ask us to draft or review private placement memorandums (“PPMs“) for private securities offerings in their cannabis companies and/or ancillary cannabis companies. The goal of a PPM is to describe the company raising the money, its management, how much money is being raised, how the money received will be used, and the risks involved in the investment.

More and more people are purchasing cannabis in Germany. The country, which only allows the use of medical marijuana for people suffering with chronic illnesses, saw a spike in weed sales in the first half of 2016 compared with the amount of marijuana purchased by patients in the first six months of 2015, according to a statement released by the Federal Ministry of Health, The Local reported Friday.

This comes as Left Party marijuana advocates are  pushing the German parliament, known as the Bundestag, to approve a new law Health Minister Hermann Gröhe proposed in May that would legalize medical marijuana for all medicinal purposes, chronic or not. 

It’s a new kind of pot bust.

The Justice Department and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed criminal and civil charges against two Colorado men who allegedly reaped more than $12 million from selling bogus stock linked to a hydroponic marijuana firm.

The men, William Sears and Scott Dittman, used false financial filings and bogus letters from a lawyer to prop up FusionPharm Inc., inflating sales of refurbished shipping containers called PharmPods that are designed for growing pot indoors, the SEC said in a statement on Friday.

Yes, tourists are coming to Colorado for the weed — but just not as many as you might think. In fact, according to a state-subsidized survey, only 12 percent of visitors to this state visit a dispensary.

When night falls on this south-central Colombian town, the hills above light up like a Christmas tree. Clusters of white lights glow in the darkness, marking the crops that have made Corinto synonymous with Colombian marijuana.

Half of all Colombia’s cannabis production is concentrated in the northern part of Cauca province, and 50% of that is grown in Corinto alone. Police estimate 100 hectares of land in the municipality are dedicated to growing weed; local farmers reckon the real number could be twice that.

"Cam," my mother said, "the G6 flower is still our top seller, but the brownies and cookies are going like crazy!"

Two years ago, hearing my mom talk about different kinds of marijuana would have been empirically weird, but today it is completely common. In November 2015, she, two business partners and I opened Harbory — a medical cannabis dispensary in Marion, Ill., two hours from my hometown of St. Louis.

Red wine goes with steak. White wine is paired with chicken. So what strain of weed goes with fish?

Organizations such as the Trichome Institute are now offering courses to teach people how to answer that and other important weed-paring questions by better understanding the complexities of the marijuana plant. The the institute has trademarked a term for the skill: “interpening,” for interpreting marijuana terpenes, the organic in the plant’s essential oils.

The cannabis industry is currently filled with thinly-traded public companies with shaky revenue projections and questionable cash flow, but it’s expected to grow over 400% over the next 7 years. Already, a handful of companies with growing patent portfolios are carving out large and profitable niches. Todd Hagopian, and Jason Spatafora, told us in July that some of these companies would be acquisition targets. Since then the market has proven them right as GW Pharma has emerged as a buyout candidate.

If voters legalise marijuana in California on 8th November the cannabis industry can expect sales to increase to $6.5 billion by 2020, a new cannabis industry marketing report predicts.

Cannabis investors can expect 18.5 per cent sales growth a year in California if Proposition 64 passes, according to The State of Legal Marijuana Markets, published by New Frontier Data and ArcView Group. The 2016 report says: ‘Legalisation of cannabis is one of greatest business opportunities of our time and it’s still early enough to see huge growth.’

In 2015, medical marijuana sales in California were $2.7 billion, the study noted.