The ordinance that allows commercial cultivation of medical marijuana in Adelanto requires growers to make every effort to hire at least half of their workers in the city.

Adelanto needs all the jobs it can get. Its unemployment rate soared to 22 percent during the recession, and it's still 9.7 percent, compared with a statewide rate of 5.8 percent.

Freddy Sayegh, a Los Angeles lawyer who represents three cultivation projects, estimates the new industry will generate 3,000 jobs for the town. His three facilities might account for 500, he said, with workers tending and trimming the plants and providing security, sales and research.

Weed has gone legit. Gone are the days of seedy back-alley deals and surreptitious deliveries. (Unless -- do you know a guy?) As legalization expands, clandestine dealers are being replaced by respectable mom-and-pop shops, glossy grow-ops, and tourist-friendly "weederies." To solidify its position, the industry is looking to hire a crop of new young professionals. But it will make those hires on just one condition: They have to take this job -- deep breath now -- actually quite seriously.

In most corporate settings, it's standard for employees to file into meetings with a cup of coffee in hand before sitting down to strategize on how best to move the business forward. But at least one Denver-based company has taken a different approach by allowing its staff to use another stimulant of sorts to get the creative juices flowing.

"When we have a company brainstorm session, we usually go to the rooftop or Red Rocks Park, and if people want to consume cannabis, they can smoke," said Isaac Dietrich, the co-founder of MassRoots, a tech startup social platform for cannabis users, about their Friday-afternoon meetings.

BARRE — Vermont police dogs are no longer trained to recognize the smell of marijuana, a decision made in preparation for possible marijuana legalization.

“The class that is going through right now is not being trained to alert on marijuana odor,” said Robert Ryan, Vermont’s head K-9 training coordinator.

This year marks the first Vermont Police Academy K-9 class in which marijuana is left out of the training.

“We started talking about it last year and we made the decision for this class to not do marijuana,” said Ryan.

The reason according to Ryan, is the assumption that Vermont will legalize marijuana. “And if for some reason it doesn’t become legalized, it’s an odor that (dogs) can be trained to alert on later.”

Marijuana growers usually work in secret, even in legal marijuana states. But then we begin to wonder… is there a way for me to find legal weed jobs?

Yeah, that’s the ticket… a job just like a regular job, except it involves marijuana!

A job that gives me a paycheck and health insurance.

Legal weed jobs in which I don’t have to worry about getting busted.

Now that legal marijuana is a big-money success, especially in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, many of us who grow marijuana or just love to use marijuana are wondering if we can come out of the underground and grow marijuana in legal weed jobs.

This Spring, the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Vermont’s College of Medicine will be launching what is believed to be a first: A college-level course dedicated entirely to medical cannabis.

Despite the drug being illegal to possess and/or distribute, and being notoriously difficult to research due to strict Federal scheduling, two of the University’s professors are determined to make medical cannabis a part of the curriculum. Karen Lounsbury, PhD, and Wolfgang Dustmann, PhD, hope to strip away the stigma surrounding cannabis in order to teach students the facts, without the fear.

“I never lie to my son,” insists Diane Fornbacher. And for the long-time cannabis activist and mother living in the town of Collingswood, New Jersey, that means telling the truth about the world’s most versatile plant, to her children as well as the world.

Thus, Fornbacher’s son, now 10-years-old, saw everything.

“He sees that I have legal hemp products in my house,” says the devoted mother.

Greenhouse Ventures is a Philadelphia-based startup accelerator program that seeks to bring new ancillary businesses to fruition.

There are a few business accelerator programs that currently exist in the cannabis space, but Greenhouse Ventures (GHV), based in downtown Philadelphia, seeks to fill a gap in helping ancillary businesses get off the ground. Through a ten-week, 90-hour curriculum, program, Greenhouse Ventures assists startups by increasing their business model sophistication.