Amid the euphoria of this weekend’s famed Emerald Cup weed fest, there was this creeping buzzkill: the glacial rollout of legalization.

Right when it seems like “The Great Pot Moment” is upon us, it turns out there are a lot of really tough regulatory issues to resolve first, according to government and industry experts who sketched out all the thorny challenges at the two-day conference, competition and harvest celebration at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds.

And implementation of commercialization could be delayed a year until 2019, said insiders.

A group representing a number of quasi-legal pot shops in the city of L.A. will throw its considerable weight behind a City Hall–sponsored effort to make those dispensaries fully legal. The organization, the United Cannabis Business Alliance, is scrapping its own measure, which already had qualified for the March ballot.

Longtime marijuana event producer Tim Blake has sober advice for first-timers partaking of newly legal pot at the Emerald Cup, a cannabis county fair in Santa Rosa expected to draw 30,000 people this weekend.

It may not be much longer before bank branches join video-rental stores and record shops as relics of a bygone era.

Silicon Valley is pressuring banks to change their ways or risk becoming the latest industry overtaken by technology. Hundreds of startups are offering easier and cheaper ways to save, borrow, spend and invest. They are doing it by shifting the battleground to smartphone apps and websites, which function as digital offices that are accessible around the clock with minimal staffing, and by lowering fees.

It’s July 2016. At Los Angeles art gallery Blum and Poe – the same venue that hosted Kanye West’s Famous sculpture – the air tingles with the sweet smoke of cognac-brined hotdogs and marijuana. Reggae plays on the patio, and the sprinkling of guests seems outnumbered by the security guards hulking against the dusk.

Billy Caldwell has spent a large chunk of his life being, in effect, a refugee. Forced to leave home because of a lack of services to effectively treat his condition. At just 11 years old this fighter from Castlederg, Co Tyrone has a severe life threatening form of epilepsy called intractable epilepsy. He is also a status epileptic.

Every driver knows that alcohol-impaired, or "drunk", driving is dangerous and has steep consequences. Drunk driving killed 1,155 people on California roadways in 2014 alone. What individuals may not know, is that they can get a DUI, with all the same consequences, for driving under the influence of drugs, also known as a DUI-D. A new educational campaign from the California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS), "DUI Doesn't Just Mean Booze," is aiming to bring greater awareness of this growing problem.

A brand of medical cannabis products recently launched by television personality Montel Williams will be produced through a new partnership with BAS Research Center, a Berkeley, California-based medical cannabis manufacturing and research group.

“Montel had been looking for a licensed producer to manufacture and help formulate a number of his products,” BAS Research chief operating officer Doug Chloupek told Civilized. 

“After many meetings with Montel and [his] realizing what our abilities are in terms of the formulation and science and research component of BAS Research, he made the decision to utilize our services to manufacture his entire line of products.”

In April 2015, Carrie Tice was despairing over her 80-year-old mother’s advancing Alzheimer’s when a caregiver at her senior center in California recommended giving her a topical dose of marijuana. Many other drugs had failed, but the marijuana made her feel better immediately. She was more alert, more active and looked younger. By October last year, she had moved out of the senior center, and this year she moved in with her daughter in Mill Valley.

“The change in my mom was so remarkable that I wanted to shout it from the mountaintops,” Tice said. “She seemed 10 years younger after 20 minutes, and was happy.”

California Treasurer John Chiang has appealed to President-elect Donald Trump for guidance on how the state’s projected $7-billion marijuana industry can participate in the nation’s banking system while cannabis remains illegal under U.S. law.

California voters last month approved Proposition 64, which legalized the recreational use of marijuana, beginning in 2018. Largely at issue is how the state will collect an estimated $1-billion in annual taxes from legal pot sales and cultivation, when cannabis businesses can face obstacles opening bank accounts, getting loans or obtaining insurance.