Along North-east Sandy Boulevard in Portland, Oregon, there’s a stretch known as the “Green Mile”. Here, medical marijuana dispensaries are budding. Almost two years ago, when Matt Walstaller opened Pure Green in the area, there was only one competitor. Today there’s close to 10.

In the beginning business was booming, recalled Walstaller. But last autumn, Pure Green’s traffic started to slow.

“Then we looked at the numbers. There was a couple thousand new medical cardholders, but two or three times as many stores as there had been the year before,” said Walstaller.

An article earlier this week in the Sacramento Bee grapples with the new issues facing cannabis farmers now that state laws have finally been passed to regulate the marijuana market. While the current laws only deal with medical cannabis, it is no secret they are intended to be in place to help California transition out of the medical marijuana only model. (2016 is widely expected to be the year the Golden State legalizes recreational cannabis.)

With high-profile investors taking interest in legal cannabis businesses, it’s an exciting time to be an entrepreneur. HerbFront, the nation’s first real estate exchange platform for the legal cannabis industry, offers clients the tools they need to take advantage of new opportunities in their states.

Celebrities like Seth Rogen, Nick Lachey, Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson have been in the news recently for their forays into the industry. If HerbFront had been around in 2011 when talk-show host Montel Williams opened his California dispensary, he would have had all the real estate options he needed at his fingertips.

Worried too few consumers know about pot recalls, Denver officials require companies use social media to flag the public

Denver health officials are requiring marijuana companies that recall products tainted with unapproved pesticides to use websites and social media accounts to alert consumers.

The move comes amid concerns that few customers are learning about nine recalls the city has announced affecting tens of thousands of items across dozens of product names.

Just three of the companies involved told their customers directly, a Denver Post check of their social media accounts showed.

Joan Lebow, Carl Rowley, and Fred Roth of Thompson Coburn's cannabis practice attended Marijuana Business Media’s 2015 Marijuana Business Conference at the Rio Hotel, Las Vegas,  where more than 5,500 attendees attended daylong sessions on the industry and were able to meet with more than 230 exhibitors. 

As a group, they were impressed by the quality of the attendees and their seriousness regarding the industry, its ongoing success and dedication to delivering high-quality product for patients and customers.

After attending the event last week, the team came away with several major takeaways:

Industry participants disagree on how to regulate cannabis

States laws may prevent black farmers from growing medical marijuana

Oakland, CA, November 22, 2015 --(PR.com)-- Gateway Incubator, LLC California’s first cannabis company incubator is opening its doors in Oakland. Backed by MJIC, Inc., the cannabis industry's premier holding company structured to capitalize on the end of marijuana prohibition, in partnership with Ben Larson and Carter Laren, the firm will host a VIP open house on Dec. 4, followed by a Start-Up Showcase for the public on Dec. 5.

Located near Oakland’s Jack London Square in the unconventional Leviathan Building, Gateway's mission is to bring the expertise of Silicon Valley technology entrepreneurship to the burgeoning industry of legal cannabis companies.

Lynette Shaw, the self-proclaimed "godmother of marijuana dispensaries," is thrilled that tech is helping bring cannabis into the mainstream.

"It's fabulous. I'm honored to see my godchildren creating all of this," the 61-year-old said here Friday at the inaugural New West Summit, a two-day conference on the budding billion-dollar convergence of pot with technology, business and media.

Shaw, who in 1997 opened one of the first legal cannabis dispensaries in the US, received a lifetime achievement award at the confab, for her work as an activist in legalizing medical marijuana. And her "godchildren" were well represented at the summit, which wrapped up this weekend.

WILLITS — Except for traffic passing through on Highway 101, this northern Mendocino County city is relatively quiet much of the year. But for three months in the fall, it gets an influx of world travelers lured by marijuana-trimming jobs, temporarily swelling the town’s population of under 5,000 and instilling it with an international flavor.

For the week ended Friday, November 20, the spot price index for a pound of cannabis decreased by $26 (about 1%) from $1,755 in the prior week to $1,729. The simple (non-volume-weighted) average price for a gram remained unchanged at $4.70.

About two-thirds of the past week’s transactions occurred in a range of $1,655 to $2,605 per pound, according to the analysts at Cannabis Benchmarks. The volume-weighted average price in Colorado fell about 1%, from $1,933 on November 13 to $1,907 a pound last week.The futures price for December remained flat at $1,615. For the month of January 2016, the forward price also remained unchanged at $1,665 a pound. The six-month forward price for May 2016 is $2,030 a pound, unchanged from the prior week.