Alaska cannabis businesses can sell you a hoodie, so long as the transaction is being recorded in high-definition.

The Alaska Marijuana Control Board covered allowable advertising strategies or retail dispensaries, as well as security protocol last week, on the second day of an extra meeting to consider draft regulations.

Board Director Cynthia Franklin argued Montana's greatest mistake was allowing too much advertising for medical marijuana. Montana legalized medicinal marijuana in 2004 only to have a ballot initiative introduced in 2014 to recriminalize it. This followed a ballooning industry that roused the ire of the state legislators and a 36 percent minority of the population who hadn't supported legal medicinal marijuana in the first place.

Cultural icon Tommy Chong’s voice is drifting out over a vast portion of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, uttering these silky words:

“Support MILegalize… I do.”

The message is born on the radio waves of WUPS; the issue is legalization of marijuana; the breakthrough is the acceptance of marijuana issues by mainstream radio stations. The Black Tuna, Robert Platshorn, just announced a similar accomplishment in a few other states where radio spots in support of his The Silver Tour are popping up.

We parked the car at a train tracks. It had been a 25-minute drive from Portland, maybe more. My friend and I got out and stretched our legs. The train was going by and we couldn’t see anything.

“Is this the place?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. He was local but hadn’t been out this way before. “I think there’s water down there. Maybe it’s on a houseboat.”

Several other people joined us at the train tracks, approaching warily and steadily, like deer at dusk.

“Are you here for the pot party?” one of them said, as though they couldn’t believe it was possible that such a thing existed.

Known for its dynamic tech startups, agricultural innovations, and security solutions, Israel could soon add cannabis powerhouse to the list, thanks to domestic efforts to decriminalize the drug… and a push to use it as a medical export.

Israel is already a leading global player in clinical testing and Israeli growers have been leveraging those clinical trials to produce new strains for decades. These growers have developed unique grow-how to deliver a medical grade product.

Colorado has brought in more than $150 million in marijuana tax revenue, according to official state data.

That doesn't make it a budgetary panacea, warn lawmakers. 

"The big lesson we tell other states is you probably shouldn't legalize marijuana if you want to make money – that's not why you do it," said J. Skyler McKinley, deputy director of the governor's Office of Marijuana Coordination, to the Huffington Post. "You do it because you think that a regulated marketplace might be safer than an unregulated marketplace, or you believe that the war on drugs didn't work."

Few issues have garnered more attention from Americans in recent memory than the expansion of marijuana.

Marijuana's tug-of-war

Just a decade ago, based on a poll from Gallup, only around a third of respondents to its survey were in favor of seeing marijuana legalized on a national level. Yet, here were stand in 2015 with three major polls (Gallup, General Social Survey and Pew Research Center) all pointing to a majority of respondents being in favor of marijuana's nationwide legalization, at least by a slim margin. Focus solely on medical marijuana and the responses swing even more strongly into the "favorable" camp.

When crafting a marijuana legalization measure, it is necessary to balance several objectives, including: personal freedom and public safety; tax revenue and responsible use; free speech and advertising restrictions designed to keep marijuana out of the hands of minors; and out-of-state competition vs. protecting in-state mom and pops. When drafting Measure 91, we co-authors carefully considered these various interests and felt that we had developed a sensible law that would stake a moderate middle on these issues and move the state of Oregon forward with a cannabis industry that would follow in the footsteps of our successful microbrewery and winery industries, while most importantly ending the arrest and citation of thousands of people for marijuana offenses.

Every month, Jamie Perino hires a security detail to come to her three recreational marijuana dispensaries. They stop by, collect thousands of dollars in cash and head out to deliver the money to the state, county and city. Perino, the CEO of Euflora dispensaries, said she can't find a bank that will work with her. She pays her employees and her landlord in cash. She can only accept cash from customers. She must even pay her taxes in cash. "I can't bank my money," she said. "It's really frustrating. ... When I go to pay my federal taxes, you get a 10 percent penalty for paying in cash, but we can't have a bank account.

For the week ended Friday, September 4, the spot price index for a pound of cannabis jumped more than $80 from $2,045 in the prior week to $2,128. The price of marijuana has risen by $150 a pound over the past two weeks.

The futures price for December 2015 remained unchanged at $1,385, and the October forward fell about 5% to $1,825. For the month of November, the forward price drops to $1,500 a pound.

About two-thirds of the past week’s transactions occurred in a range of $1,703 to $2,741 per pound, and transaction prices ranged from an average low of $700 in California to a high of $4,000 in Nevada, according to the analysts at Cannabis Benchmarks. The volume-weighted average price in Colorado ticked up from $2,085 on August 28 to $2,090 a pound last week.

Legal marijuana could be the first billion-dollar industry not dominated by men, writes Gogo Lidz.

It seems fitting that a plant called Mary Jane could smash the patriarchy. After all, only female marijuana flowers produce cannabinoids like the potent THC chemical that gets users buzzed. Pot farmers strive to keep all their crops female through flowering female clones of one plant, called the Mother. And women are moving into the pot business so quickly that they could make it the first billion-dollar industry that isn’t dominated by men.