Tony Machado is on good terms with his new neighbours — a pot dispensary that's opened two doors down from his supermarket in Little Portugal.

It’s even brought new clientele to the neighbourhood where Machado’s been doing business for 20 years. But, with another dispensary located one block east and yet another preparing to open soon across the street, he has concerns. 

But, politicians and bureaucrats say their hands are tied, and they can’t effectively manage the marijuana dispensary boom that’s hit Toronto since Justin Trudeau’s Liberals were elected.

Between the party’s promise to legalize marijuana and the time its taken them to do anything substantive on the file, Toronto has been left without options for managing the industry.

High Speed Delivery charges customers in Washington, D.C., $11 for 15 ounces of orange juice, which seems like a lot even if it’s delivered to your door within 20 minutes. But for another $44, you canexpect an eighth-ounce of marijuana along with your juice, which is not bad for a city where it’s still illegal to sell the stuff.

You could do better in Denver, but D.C. is not Denver. Unlike Colorado’s Amendment 64, the 2012 ballot measure that legalized commercial production and distribution of recreational marijuana, the District’s Initiative 71, passed in 2014, legalized only home cultivation, possession, and sharing “without remuneration.”

If California is the land of reinvention, the small desert city of Adelanto fits the bill.

Roughly a two-hour drive east from Los Angeles, Adelanto was founded in 1915 by an inventor who wanted to sell land to World War I veterans. His dream never materialized and the region was taken over by orchard farms, then poultry ranches. The nearby George Air Force Base opened and eventually closed in the early 1990s. The city more recently made a solar play, but the energy market fizzled. City unemployment hovers at 14 percent, well above the national unemployment rate of under 5 percent. And the big employers in town include prisons and the local school district.

Call it the business of bud for the Beemer set. From marketing gurus to wheelers and dealers with ties to Bay Street investment firms who know a good thing when they smell it, medical cannabis is going corporate in a very big way. Those lucky enough to own a coveted licence to produce weed are already planting the seeds for market domination in anticipation of the explosion of demand that's sure to come when the Trudeau government delivers on its pledge to legalize it. The long, strange trip to end pot prohibition just got trippier.

I no longer have any idea where I am. I start to have 80s flashbacks of Harry Stinson's Mad Hatter, the insane birthday party destination where kids behaved like savages in an empty warehouse between hot dogs and cake fights. 

A beefed-up odor-control ordinance that would require marijuana grow houses to reduce the smells they emit won approval Tuesday from a Denver City Council committee.

The proposal fits into a larger council discussion about ways to limit the industry’s impact on neighborhoods that are saturated with marijuana businesses. About 1 a.m. Tuesday, the full council deadlocked 6-6 on a proposal to set location caps for pot shops and cultivation facilities. That licensing measure could be reintroduced for more discussion next Monday.

While council members have struggled to find consensus on licensing, the odor measure was advanced easily at the afternoon Safety & Well-being Committee meeting.

Using marijuana remains illegal for most people, despite the Liberal federal government’s push to legalize it. Even if marijuana use is legalized, employers still have the right to prohibit it in their workplaces and to create policies that allow them to fire employees who come to work intoxicated, subject to the same rules that apply to alcohol use.

However, that is not the case with prescribed medical marijuana. Since the passing of legislation in 2014, the number of employees alleging that their use of marijuana is related to chronic pain, cancer, sleeping disorders, and so on, has grown.

Clarus Securities analyst Noel Atkinson says comments yesterday from Canada’s Minister of Public Safety Ralph Goodale are a sign that marijuana legalization is closer to becoming a reality than previously thought, a development he thinks is very good news for Licensed Producers (LPs).

In a research update to clients this morning, Atkinson notes that in an interview with the CBC’s “On The Coast” host Stephen Quinn, Goodale said the government was moving forward with is goal of legalizing recreational marijuana in Canada and that a legalization task force of representatives from the federal, provincial and municipal governments would soon be appointed.

On April 12, 2016, Economist Beau Whitney and cannabis industry consultant Sam Chapman announced the release of their new cannabis industry report, “Oregon Cannabis Jobs Report: Retail Sales and Job Creation in Oregon’s Burgeoning Cannabis Sector.”

From Dec. 9, 2015, until Jan. 16, 2016, the Oregon Cannabis Jobs Report surveyed state cannabis dispensaries registered with the Oregon Health Authority, with the data anonymized and collected confidentially.

Each medical marijuana company in New York is allowed to produce up to five different strains of the drug. The oils, tinctures and capsules are generally labeled by different colors or brand names, and, in some cases, both.

Vireo Health of New York, for instance, uses a red, yellow and green traffic-signal-like system for three of its strains. Below is some information about the broad spectrum of marijuana-based drugs based on that traffic signal system:

DENVER — A first-of-its-kind license for marijuana couriers is nearing approval in Colorado.

The state House gave preliminary approval Tuesday to creating a new "marijuana transporter" license under the pot-regulating agency.

Colorado already has 12 marijuana courier companies, which fill out shipping manifests to move pot from growing warehouses to store shelves. The couriers are currently classified as marijuana "vendors," a broad category which includes other ancillary services.

The new license would give those couriers additional powers, such as temporarily storing pot if an unexpected snowstorm closes a highway. Currently the pot couriers must return to the site of origin if they cannot deliver the marijuana within a designated window.