Depending on who you ask on the streets of Denver, sales of cannabis are now king in Colorado, at least to alcohol.

The problem is it is an all cash business because the feds consider marijuana money bad news.

Nicole Surina said she loves almost everything about Colorado's legal marijuana marketplace.

"Being able to do it in your own home and not having to worry about it is a great feeling," she said.

What's not a great feeling is trying to use a credit card to pay for pot and then being denied.

"It's an issue. So we have an all cash business," Andy Williams said.
Williams runs Medicine Man, the retail pot shop where Surina used cash to buy a product Colorado considers legal.

One marijuana business hosts an annual golf tournament in Denver to raise money for multiple sclerosis research. Another Colorado pot company donates to a gay-rights advocacy group and is a sponsor of an AIDS walk.

As marijuana legalization matures, businesses are becoming more ingrained in their communities by donating cash and time to charities — a sign that the stigma of selling a drug that remains illegal under federal law may be fading.

“It’s not all about making money and about profiting,” said Ean Seeb, co-owner of Denver Relief, a dispensary whose monetary and volunteering donations include Ekar Farm and Garden, which grows vegetables for food banks.

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is going to look into the possibility of legalizing cannabis for medical, industrial and recreational uses.  Tribal Council passed Resolution No. 40 unanimously during Annual Council on Thursday, Oct. 29 which calls for a feasibility study to be performed to look into the “issues and impacts associated with legalization of cannabis”.

The Resolution was submitted by three EBCI tribal members whom are part of a group known as Common Sense Cannabis including Joseph Owle, Aaron Hogner, and Yona Wade.

“Cannabis is a plant,” said Owle.  “As Cherokee people, we know that plants are medicine.”

One marijuana business hosts an annual golf tournament in Denver to raise money for multiple sclerosis research. Another Colorado pot company donates to a gay-rights advocacy group and is a sponsor of an AIDS walk.

As marijuana legalization matures, businesses are becoming more ingrained in their communities by donating cash and time to charities — a sign that the stigma of selling a drug that remains illegal under federal law may be fading.

“Big Mike” Straumietis, founder and CEO of Advanced Nutrients, has a life story that sounds like it’s been pulled from the pages of a crime thriller – a paperback copy with bits of shake stuck inside from rolling joints. Standing at 6’7”, Straumietis towers over most people much like his personal legend towers over the company he runs.

His 37 years as a cultivator saw him flying planes to scout grow locations, using police scanners and night vision goggles to harvest his crops, living under seven different assumed identities in the states and Canada and squaring off with a biker gang bent on cutting into his profits, to name just a few highlights.

Two candidates nodded to liberalizing standards about marijuana in the United States on Wednesday—one expected, one a little more surprising. In the latter case, Senator Ted Cruz offered, during the GOP debate, to buy CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla “some famous Colorado brownies.”

Thousands of cannabis plants are sprouting — and they have been since July — inside a nondescript warehouse off Andalusia Road in Rock Island.

Green Thumb Industries, or GTI, a Chicago-based medical pot company, won rights to operate a Rock Island cultivation center in February. It became the first facility this summer to earn the state’s OK to grow the plant.

“We got through all the inspections and requirements and now we’re ready to go,” Ben Kovler, GTI's CEO, said. “It’s been a long journey, but our wait pales in comparison to the wait patients have had to endure.”

But that wait may soon be over, as well.

State officials said Thursday that Illinois will begin its first medical marijuana sales within the next two weeks.

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) --

A San Francisco dentist is accused of an interstate pot operation.

Jerome Weitz, D.D.S., runs a dental practice in the city's Mission District. Prosecutors say he was trafficking marijuana from San Francisco all the way to New York.

No one, including the dentists who work at the office, told ABC7 News they had any idea the man who cuts their checks is behind bars. They also didn't know their boss' son got arrested for illegally selling medical marijuana earlier this year. Prosecutors are saying this is a case of like father, like son.

On his YouTube page Jerome Weitz is the friendly dentist his patients have known for 30 years at his Mission Street business.

The doors were locked at the Saskatchewan Compassion Club and four people were arrested after a police investigation into Saskatoon's first medical marijuana dispensary.

Two Saskatoon men - ages 24 and 36 - along with two Saskatoon women - ages 23 and 39 - were arrested as part of what police dubbed Project Fextern. Search warrants were executed Thursday around 10:30 a.m. at a home in the 400 block of 109th Street West and the dispensary in the 200 block of Second Avenue North.

According to Insp. Dave Haye, the investigation dates back to September.

"It has nothing to do with any politics," Haye said at a Thursday press conference.

Haye maintained that while the club was acting as a legitimate business, it was acting illegally.