Advocating for cannabis reform is energy consuming business.  I’m tired and I’m not alone.

When I became involved in late 2010, I fed off the intense enthusiasm and passion of the cannabis community.  There was a huge push to get an medical marijuana bill passed and via a miracle, SB5073 passed both the House and Senate in April 2011 and went to the Governor’s office where it was gutted and we have been fighting to regain ground ever since.

High Times magazine’s New York-rooted editor-in-chief Dan Skye has spent plenty of time in Colorado researching and photographing the state’s medical and recreational systems, but his current, pre-Cannabis Cup trip to the state has been uncommonly eye-opening.

“The Colorado cannabis industry is an economic miracle,” Skye said Monday from a stop in Pueblo, where he’s meeting cannabis business owners and reporting on the state’s first-of-its-kind legalization. “Everyone in the United States is following Colorado’s lead.”

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A  worker at a Louisville, Colorado, dispensary handles bags of marijuana delivered March 27 by CannaRabbit. Couriers do more than carry pot for the state's network of more than 800 growers, manufacturers, dispensers and laboratories. The industry remains mostly cash only as federally chartered banks have been hesitant to extend loans for trade that U.S. authorities may see as against the law.

At a farm in the foothills of Colorado's Rocky Mountains, Corey Young tucks his client's marijuana into a shoebox-sized container in an unmarked white van and heads out on the road.

"We don't want to be going through a small town and have someone see bins in the back," said Young, a founder of courier service CannaRabbit. "We do not want to stick out at all."

Medical marijuana shops popping up all over Metro Vancouver are giving parents and their children the wrong impression about weed, says an addictions specialist.

“Using the term ‘medical’ is giving a false impression to people — parents and kids,” says Dr. Siavash Jafari, who works out of several Vancouver Coastal Health clinics in Vancouver and also the Burnaby Centre for Mental Health and Addiction.

“To say ‘medical’ means it is supported by the medical community. It is not. That’s a misconception among the public.” he says.

“Parents feel that it’s not dangerous so they don’t talk to their kids about it.”

In 2011, the only place you could buy a pound of pot online was Silk Road, an illegal marketplace labeled by the media as the “Amazon of drugs.”

In 2015, there’s a website run by veteran commodity traders where Colorado growers and retailers can trade cannabis online – legally.

The Denver-based company Amercanex launched its online marketplace last summer, and it has plans to expand outside of Colorado by the end of 2015.

Retired Silicon Valley engineer Angelo Mallol, 56, turned out Sunday for a seminar on how to start a small business – in the pot trade.

He asked questions as instructor Gerry Bedore of the Cannabis Career Institute spoke about emerging opportunities for entrepreneurs wanting to enter California’s medical marijuana market and cash in on a likely 2016 state ballot initiative to legalize recreational pot use.

The Cannabis Career Institute, founded by a Los Angeles marijuana activist and pot deliveryman known as “The Cannabis Warrior,” held a daylong Sacramento program on how to open cannabis businesses, from niche bakeries and organic gardens to marijuana distribution services.

The French Quarter in New Orleans could be buzzing with more than jazz and joie de vivre if a Baton Rouge lawmaker gets his way.
(Photo courtesy of the Louisiana Office of Tourism)

A year of debate, a slew of labeling regulations and multiple educational campaigns have not been effective in answering a critical question surrounding marijuana-infused edible products: How do you stop a consumer from eating too much?

Smaller industrial buildings that are home to warehouses and distribution centers might lack gee-whiz architectural appeal, and they're often in nondescript parts of town where restaurants and other amenities are few and far between.

But they're perfect for the medical marijuana industry, whose appetite for smaller industrial buildings has made them a hot commodity.

Unlike Denver and Pueblo, Colorado Springs and El Paso County have banned recreational marijuana grow operations and sales, but they allow medical marijuana sales, cultivation and manufacturing.