It’s a cold January night and I’m trying to find a cannabis speakeasy in the nation’s capital. It isn’t easy. I’m in the Adams Morgan neighborhood, just north of U Street. I’ve been given an address, but from the outside it looks like an Indian or Thai restaurant. This must be the place. I descend a set of steps to an underground entrance and walk into a dark and hazy room.

In a coming together that once seemed highly unlikely, California state regulators Wednesday greeted a hotel ballroom filled with marijuana growers, promising that a licensing program to bring thousands of pot producers out of the shadows will be operational in the state by Jan. 1, 2018.

It was hard to ignore the landmark nature of the informal meeting between California officials – including the head of the new marijuana regulations bureau – and members of the California Growers Association, a 2-year-old trade group representing marijuana farmers. 

Mayor hopes letter to Health Canada will breathe life back into Vida Cannabis's plan to open plant.

The Town of Stellarton, N.S., is urging Health Canada to quickly approve a proposed medical marijuana production facility in the community, an enterprise the mayor says would bring much-needed jobs to the area.

At a town council meeting this week, a motion was passed to write a letter to Health Canada in support of Vida Cannabis's plan to operate a pot plant at the old Clairtone building on Acadia Street.

"The intent of it was to expedite the process of making 114 Acadia St. as operations for a cannabis production facility," said Stellarton Mayor Danny MacGillivray.

At 4:20 a.m. on a recent day, a group of marijuana activists, passing around the occasional joint, stood in line outside the Russell Senate Office Building for the first day of the confirmation hearings of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), nominated to be attorney general. They wanted the man who once told his colleagues that “good people don’t smoke marijuana” to see them inside — and to smell their pot-stained clothes.

The debate on the legalization of marijuana continues unabated with attorney Henry Shillingford arguing that Dominica could be a “beacon for the world” in the matter.

However, Assistant Superintendent of Police Claude Weekes raised concerns over the health implications of the use of marijuana saying that “there are risks in the abuse of the drug.”

Both men were speaking at a panel discussion held at the Point Michel Community Center on the topic, “Should Marijuana be Legalized?”

Shillingford gave a passionate presentation, saying that Dominica is considered the ‘Nature Island of the Word’ and “we cannot make a plant illegal.”

Director of the Cannabis Licensing Authority (CLA), Delano Seiveright, on Saturday said that the cannabis licensing process, while challenging, is moving faster than what obtains in jurisdictions across the United States and Canada.

Seiveright, who is also a senior advisor in the Ministry of Tourism, was speaking at a packed venue at “Herb Cure”, a symposium featuring a panel of local and international ganja industry experts, which was one of the highlights at last weekend’s Rebel Salute music festival in Priory, St Ann.

The symposium reportedly allowed for access to clear information on developments pertaining to the issuing of licenses for medical, therapeutic and scientific purposes by the Cannabis Licensing Authority.

If Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for drug czar, marijuana advocates might not be as disappointed as they imagine.

True, in 2014 Bondi went all out trying to keep John Morgan's medical marijuana initiative off Florida’s ballot. It didn't work, Floridians voted on the initiative anyway, but it only received 57.6 percent of the vote, falling short of the 60 percent constitutional amendments need to win.

By 2016 Bondi had thought it through. She could have done it again -- hard-charged after the amendment, working to kill it before the ballots were printed. 

Denver is starting work on becoming the first city in the nation to allow marijuana clubs and public pot use in places such as coffee shops, yoga studios and art galleries.

Voters narrowly approved the "social use" measure last November. But the ballot proposal didn't spell out many rules for how the marijuana could be consumed, beyond saying that the drug can't be smoked inside and that patrons must be over 21.

A workgroup made up of Denver business owners, city pot regulators and marijuana opponents starts work Wednesday on suggesting regulations.

The state Liquor Control Board already has decreed that no businesses with a liquor license can allow marijuana use. That leaves it to restaurants that don't serve alcohol and other event spaces.

With a new year and a new presidential administration set to begin, my firm is fielding a lot of questions about what is going to happen and is hearing a lot of claims about the cannabis industry that just aren’t true. In the past, I’ve written about the top 10 industry red flags and the top 10 industry red herrings. In this post, I discuss the following six bogus claims about the marijuana industry:

President-elect Donald Trump and appointee U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions will not impair state-legal marijuana.

The Arkansas House voted Tuesday to delay the launch of the state’s voter-approved medical marijuana program and ease a restriction on doctors who certify a patient is eligible to use the drug.

The bills are among the first of several that lawmakers are expected to take up in the coming weeks as they implement the constitutional amendment that legalizes cannabis for Arkansas residents with certain medical conditions.

The delay proposal, approved on a 91-0 vote, would give state agencies until early May rather than March to finalize the rules. It will also move the state’s deadline to begin accepting applications for dispensaries and cultivation facilities to July 1, rather than June 1.