Female leaders of the cannabis industry in the Bay Area shared their secrets of success with up-and-coming women who want to stake a claim in the business during a gathering Thursday night hosted by Women Grow.

The networking event featured presentations by female leaders of the cannabis industry, including Lynnette Shaw, the “godmother” of medical marijuana dispensaries; Sherry Glaser, operator of a Mendocino County medical dispensary and “bed, bud and breakfast” inn; and Jazmin Hupp, co-founder and chief executive officer of Women Grow, the nation’s largest cannabis professional networking organization.

Every summer, tens of thousands of migrant workers swarm a remote area of Northern California — the marijuana-growing capital of the US — to find work as "trimmers" after the weed has been harvested.

Their job is to prune the fluffy, green buds with small pairs of scissors to clear them of leaves before they wind up on dispensary shelves or in dealers' pockets.

The work is arduous and pays between $100 and $300 a day for 10 to 15 hours of labor on the black market, which generated 87% of pot sales in North America in 2016.

Gov. Jerry Brown has made his wishes clear: He wants the conflicts between California's medical and recreational cannabis laws resolved by the end of the year.

On Tuesday night his office published a 92-page document offering up recommendations for how to settle key differences in laws regulating both segments of the industry, with the governor choosing sides on everything from how many licenses marijuana business owners can hold to how weed should be distributed statewide.

The proposals were included in a trailer bill to Brown's 2017-18 budget. The Legislature will vote on whether those proposals become law, before they ultimately head back to Brown for final approval.

Somatik is seeking funding for its cannabis-infused beverage business; the company has already partnered with Ritual, a San Francisco coffee business.

With recreational marijuana legal in eight states and medicinal use approved in 20 more, investors are seeing the potential to produce a different kind of green.

Growth industry: The cannabis economy is seen as the fastest growing big business in America, increasing 30 percent last year to $6.7 billion, according to ArcView. 

While the tension between state and federal laws has created a difficult situation for cannabis users, there’s another factor that is complicating the changing attitude towards weed: hospitals. Though it isn’t legally mandated, many hospitals won’t allow people who use weed to be placed on organ transplant waiting lists.

The Scratch & Sniff Book of Weed teaches readers about the benefits of cannabis use, as well as social issues such as the discriminatory nature of the drug policy enforcement.

During a week when two of the biggest movies out are Power Rangers and CHiPs, it’s easy to succumb to the belief that there’s truly nothing new under the sun.

Then along comes The Scratch & Sniff Book of Weed.

It looks like a children’s book, with a bright yellow cover, hand-drawn illustrations and those thick cardboard pages that little hands can easily flip. But the content is decidedly adult, with tiny chapters on everything from “The Botany of Buzz” to the legalization movement to weed in the bedroom.

Will Kleidon, a loquacious 27-year-old, and I were sitting in a restaurant called Food Harmonics here on Ojai’s main drag the other day, sipping $5 mushroom coffee with shots of CBD elixir.

It was delicious, if slightly expensive.

If you have been paying attention to what’s going on in the cannabis “space” (a perfect word for this industry, really), you have probably heard of CBD — cannabidiol — or wondered what it is.

CBD is one of two important compounds in cannabis.

In the race to meet California's demand for newly legalized recreational marijuana, the Coachella Valley is blooming fast as the industry's new farming hub. Trouble is, the region also suffers severe groundwater depletion, a problem that could be worsened by the popular crop.

California voters approved Proposition 64 in November 2016, allowing the retail sale of marijuana to adults for recreational purposes from Jan. 1, 2018. Since then, several cities in the Coachella Valley have moved to embrace industrial-scale marijuana growing.

The results make a compelling case for legalization.

As opioid abuse continues to be a national discussion, a new study has revealed less people are hospitalized for opioid abuse in states where medical marijuana is legalized.