As the Oct. 1 launch of recreational marijuana sales nears, one labor union is looking to organize cannabis workers in Oregon.

United Food & Commercial Workers Local 555 recently negotiated a three-year contract on behalf of employees at a Portland dispensary and hopes to broker similar deals across the state as the cannabis industry takes off, said Jeff Anderson, Local 555 secretary-treasurer.

This summer, Colorado’s State University’s Archives and Special Collections Department started gathering materials to create the Amendment 64 Collection.

This archival collection will consist of any documents related to the legalization of marijuana in effort to preserve this historical event.

Janet Bishop, the coordinator for Archives and Special Collections at CSU, introduced the idea of finding materials for an archive on this topic.

“I guess it’s fair to say it was my idea, but I did get input,” Bishop said. “I thought this would be good, even though perhaps controversial.”

Take your medicine

Before we go any further with this article about weed, and doctors, and addiction, I want to make it clear that I know very little about weed, even less about being a doctor, and I am completely (and thankfully) ignorant about addiction. The issue of painkiller abuse in the United States is incredibly complex and incredibly sad, and like most incredibly complex and sad things, there are no easy solutions to fix the problem.

But there is definitely a problem:

Running a marijuana business is more than a pipe dream, says Justin Breidenbach: It’s about taxes, banking, liability, supply and demand.

Breidenbach, an associate professor of accounting at Ohio Wesleyan University who has been studying the economics of pot for two years, concludes that there’s potential for big money to be made if Ohio legalizes pot on Nov. 3. But, he says, marijuana entrepreneurs might go through a minefield to get there.

Ray Strack worked as a U.S. Customs special agent on JFK International Airport’s drug squad in New York during his 27-year career. He constantly busted people — two per day on average — who were attempting to smuggle narcotics into the country. But today, the now-retired Strack is working to get drugs legalized.

EUREKA (KPIX) — You can make fast money working on a marijuana farm in California. But with fast money comes risk and, sometimes, death.

Cal Fire’s Kneeland Helitack Base in Humboldt County is pretty close to the middle of nowhere so, when workers from a nearby pot farm showed up, Battalion Chief Kurt Dernedde knew something was amiss.

“To not have some sort of problem like [running] out of gas or anything, to just walk up to the base doesn’t normally happen,” he said.

The workers wanted to use the phone but Dernedde says they wouldn’t say why. The next day one of the men was back. He’d been found bleeding and terrified.

“He was already in rough shape,” said Dernedde.

Ah, 1996. Clinton was in the White House, “Braveheart” won Best Picture — and California was the first state in the nation to pass a medical marijuana ballot initiative.

For some Californians — whether they were yet unborn, or whether their lives would be cut short in the 19 years of the War on Drugs before California’s lawmakers would get their act together and enact a regulatory regime for the medical marijuana marketplace their constituents had loosed upon the state — it was literally a lifetime ago.

Oregon needs members for a new short-term task force on medical marijuana.

Following the passage of Senate Bill 844, Oregon authorities have to organize the group quickly so it can report back to the Legislature by Feb. 1. The Cannabis Research Task Force will produce a report on a range of issues, from the latest research on medical marijuana to legal obstacles to proposing a location for a research grow site in the state. The report will also look at the potential for Oregon to collaborate with other states, consider hurdles faced by labs and review boards when it comes to medical marijuana and figure out ways to fund research.

As marijuana emerges as a mainstream treatment, employers will need to figure out how to deal with the use of medical pot in the workplace.

As far as the law goes, there’s no need for employers to overhaul existing policies — assuming, of course, an employer has already put rules in place that deal with the use of other prescription drugs that might impair mental capacity. From a legal perspective, all that’s really happening is that medical marijuana is taking its place along side pain killers and other powerful drugs doctors have been legally prescribing for years.

If the booming marijuana industry means anything to the majority of people, it means opportunity. We’re talking about opportunities for all-around wellness and progress – and of course the economic advantages are beyond exciting.

In Colorado alone, more than 16,000 jobs have been created within the cannabis industry. And, as the Marijuana Policy Project points out, this number does not include the boost seen in collateral sectors such as real estate, law, accounting, and tourism.

A lot of marijuana jobs include what you might expect, like budtenders, trimmers, and growers. But within that same industry there are other high-skill positions which few of us saw coming.