SEATTLE -- Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes is vowing to crack down on illegal, black market marijuana businesses that he says are undercutting licensed retailers.

The Washington state Liquor and Cannabis Board estimates the black market makes up around 28% of the entire market. Legal retailers feel that estimate is low.

"I'm not free to say all of the enforcement steps that are being engineered now. But Seattle is going to crack down," said Holmes.

Currently, 577 producer/processors and 228 retailers have been licensed by the state. That's produced around $65 million in taxes. Legal retailers say in order for legalization to be successful, the illegal sales must be addressed.

Cannabis has been used by humanity for over 6,000 years, since the earliest dawn of civilization. Coffee was discovered in Ethiopia in the 15th century and spread throughout Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula by the century’s end, and within another hundred years it was drank widely across the Middle East. Though drinking coffee is comparatively new, caffeine is the most commonly used drug worldwide, and coffee is its main delivery method.

Chuck Lorre is ready to add another show to his already impressive résumé.

The creator of The Big Bang Theory, Mom, Mike & Molly and Two and a Half Men is shopping a pot comedy, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.

Co-written by Lorre and David Javerbaum (The Daily Show) the spec script has been sent out to broadcast networks and is set at a legal marijuana dispensary in Colorado. The ensemble revolves around a group of potheads.

Medicinal marijuana customer says it is "like going to the farmers' market"

Lisa Campbell, a 32-year-old medicinal marijuana patient, has used dispensaries for two years to treat pain and nausea.

Here’s what she had to say in a Q & A with the Sun:

How do you access marijuana?

“Mail order is a great way to get cannabis as well but going into the store, seeing your medicine, being able to smell it – it’s like going to a farmers' market and being able to pick out your own fruit.”

Why do you use dispensaries?

The Oregon Department of Agriculture on Friday temporarily removed a popular pesticide from its list of chemicals cannabis growers may use on their crop.

Rodger Voelker, a chemist with OG Analytical, a marijuana testing lab in Eugene, said he recently noticed that abamectin, a common insecticide, had turned up in a handful of cannabis samples submitted by growers who said they grew organically. One mentioned he used only Guardian Mite Spray. Voelker asked for a sample of the mite spray, tested it and detected abamectin, an active ingredient not listed on the product label.

A ban on marijuana bars and social clubs and random marijuana testing for pesticides or other harmful substances at retail stores are among the more contentious elements of Anchorage’s draft cannabis business license regulations released this week.

Anchorage officials have been developing a local license for marijuana businesses as a way to give local government more control over enforcement. But industry leaders have said a local license would be redundant to a state license and overly burdensome, and have promised to fight it in the coming weeks.

When I asked Andy Nulman about the chances of legalized marijuana boosting tourism in Montreal, I had no idea that many years ago he'd written a script for a film called O Cannabis, about Canada legalizing pot and becoming "the new Saudia Arabia."

In the script, "farmers out in the Beauce and Manitoba and Saskatchewan become the new oil sheikhs, and (Canada) becomes this destination for stoners worldwide," Nulman said.

The co-founder of Just For Laughs and chief attention-grabber for 375MTL, the Society for the Celebrations of Montréal's 375th Anniversary, Nulman says he has not touched drugs in 40 years, and he's a vehement non-smoker. However, he has long considered the ripple effects of marijuana legalization.

Synthetic marijuana is an ugly drug. It doesn’t mellow a person out or make them want to listen to jam bands in tie-dye T-shirts. Quite the opposite, actually: Synthetic marijuana can make its users act erratically; it can increase their anxiety, cause hallucinations and, in the case of New England Patriots player Chandler Jones, it allegedly can lead you to run shirtless into a Massachusetts police station like a crazy person and get you checked into the hospital.

Bec Koop, a 30-year-old florist living in Denver, Colorado, has been smoking weed for years. She has endometriosis and severe back pain, and has come to rely on marijuana for pain relief and relaxation. She never thought about combining her love for Mary Jane with her passion for other flowers — until one day, she had an epiphany.

Could pot clubs in Denver be a way to deal with increasing public consumption in the city's parks and on the 16th Street Mall?

Amazingly, that's what Denver Mayor Michael Hancock is asking — a dramatic shift in his stance from only three years ago.

In 2013, as the city was crafting its retail marijuana regulatory framework, Hancock directed the City Council to explicitly ban pot clubs.

"I propose and advocate for the most restrictive regulatory environment for marijuana," Hancock said then. "And I believe that by allowing private clubs, it doesn't speak to that value."

The city fiercely has defended this position over the years.