Amid the casinos and the shows, the bars and the pools, Las Vegas now welcomes to the Strip a medical marijuana dispensary.

Sandwiched between the SLS Las Vegas and Stratosphere hotel-casino resorts, the Essence Cannabis Dispensary, which opens Wednesday, is the first such facility on Las Vegas Boulevard.

Toni Richard, the mother of a 15-year-old who has autism and epilepsy, allows her son to combat the 3,000 seizures a day he was once afflicted with by using an unconventional method: medical marijuana.

"In 13 years, my son had slept 50 nights, so the night we started medical marijuana, he slept through the night, and now he pretty much sleeps almost every night," Richard told KRNV. "I am not a drug dealer. I am just a mom trying to keep my child alive. It's not a gateway drug — we're just trying to keep our children alive."

Her son went 375 days without a seizure since first using medical marijuana as a treatment, according to Richard. He was taking between 20 to 25 pills a day for the seizures. 

Federal cannabis prohibition is a buzzkill on many levels, but for cannabusinesses in legal states, it’s an especially frustrating hurdle to expansion. When a brand outgrows its home turf, it can’t just start shipping packages of product to the next state over. 

Despite the difficulty, a number of companies have managed to cross state lines. Colorado’s Dixie Elixirs has products in Washington, California, and Oregon. They recently launched in Nevada, and Chief Marketing Officer Joe Hodas says the brand is close to inking a deal in Arizona. 

The Las Vegas Paiute Indian Tribe is moving ahead with plans to build one of the largest medical marijuana facilities in Nevada.

The plans include at least two dispensaries and three huge greenhouses needed to grow the marijuana.

Once built, their facilities, which will include greenhouses larger than a couple of football fields. They will be bigger than any medical marijuana facility in Nevada, Arizona or Colorado.

Calling it an economic development plan, the Paiute plan to open two medical marijuana dispensaries. One will be near their existing Las Vegas smoke shop on Main Street.

DigiPath Inc. (OTCQB: DIGP), a provider of reliable testing, education, training, and news coverage to the cannabis industry, was recently featured in a Bank of America investment report titled Medical Cannabis Has High POTential: A Joint Biotech & Tools Primer.

In the report, Bank of America analysts single out cannabis testing as an area likely to experience enormous growth within the industry. The report suggests that cannabis testing could reach $800 to $900 million in size by 2020 as the $2.9 billion medical cannabis industry appears poised to at least double. Cannabis testing services and lab equipment should experience heightened demand as the industry matures.

Next Developmental Milestone in Aggressive National Expansion Strategy to Deliver Dixie Elixirs & Edibles Products Across the Country

Las Vegas, NV/Denver, CO (PRWEB) February 24, 2016

Dixie Elixirs & Edibles, a Dixie Brands, Inc. company and creator of the world-famous Dixie Elixir, has formed a joint venture agreement with Nevada’s Silver State Wellness, LLC. Today’s announcement marks Dixie’s fifth market expansion in the last nine months, with plans to bring a line of eight different edible, vapable and topical cannabis products to the Nevada medical marijuana market by late May, 2016.

While it's still controversial, medical marijuana is edging toward normality. Forty states (and the District of Columbia) now have some form of law on the books that allow the drug to be used for a variety of ailments, and sales are soaring— reaching $5.4 billion in 2015.

That doesn't mean it's widely available in all of those states, of course. Some, like Alabama and South Carolina, have extremely strict circumstances under which cannabidiol products can be prescribed, and still forbid the production and distribution of the drug. And even in states where it's easier to come by, there are differences in how it's handled.

Dave Kallas spent over two decades busting drug dealers on the streets of Las Vegas.

On Saturday, he became a dealer himself — a legal one — when his medical marijuana dispensary The Apothecarium, 7885 W. Sahara Ave., officially opened for business.

Kallas, 60, and his business partner, Ryan Hudson — who runs/owns the original Apothecarium in San Francisco — both see the business as an opportunity to help people who might benefit from the medicinal benefits of marijuana by giving them a legal means of getting their hands on it.

Hudson called it a "harm reduction program," noting people won't have to head into a sketchy neighborhood to buy marijuana from a shady dealer.

"We have a lawful way for you to obtain the relief you're looking for," Kallas said.

HANOVER - A prominent Morris County physical therapist and entrepreneur is banking his future on the growth of the medical-cannabis testing industry. But rest assured, David Cunic has not gone from fixing joints to smoking them for a living.

"Most people say 'Oh, if you need a tester, I'll test a joint for you,' " said Cunic, a native of Denville and graduate of the Delbarton School, where he played varsity basketball with future NBA star Troy Murphy. "And I say, 'No, it's not that type of testing.' "

Cunic and his publicly-traded corporation, Pazoo Inc., are instead taking a scientific approach to testing medical cannabis in laboratories for potentially harmful impurities before the product is sold at legal dispensaries in states where medical marijuana is approved.

NEVADA COUNTY, CA (KTRK) --

Eight-year-old Silas Hurd has his good days and his bad days.

Video of Hurd is hard to watch as he suffers from debilitating seizures.

His father, Forrest Hurd, took video of his son as he lay disabled so people can see why he says the boy needs medicinal marijuana.

"The county has banned any production," Forrest Hurd says.

Silas has a rare type of epilepsy resistant to many medications, but after many tries, his family found a compound of cannabis, a medicinal oil, that kept his seizures in check.

"Before we found the strain, we didn't think Silas was going to make it through the year," Forrest says. "He was having 50 seizures a day, and nothing was helping."