If the outdoor farmer is to prosper in a regulated market, now is the time to start educating the public about the benefits of sustainably grown cannabis.

If you have ever walked into a field of sunflowers, then you can imagine the hypnotic beauty of a sun grown cannabis garden. 

The sunlight flickers between the broad leaves as resin sparkles on the flowers, and the sounds of nature are almost in congress with the good energy such a field evokes. Most of these fields are in remote and secret places, amongst the pines in the north, in the swamps further to the south, hidden between the rows of corn in many a farmer’s field, and on the sides of mountainous hills further west.  

Derek Peterson, the CEO of TerraTech, a publicly traded cannabis company with operations in California and Nevada, recently took up what is usually a very boring task: applying for life insurance. However, his application was rejected. On June 13, he received a denial letter from his insurer of choice, Mutual of Omaha, with the following terse explanation:

"We have discontinued the processing of your application for insurance due to company policy. We cannot accept premium[sic] from individuals or entities who are associated with the marijuana industry. We are regulated by agencies of the."

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS, INC. (OTC Grey:PNPL) (“Pineapple Express” or the “Company”), a provider of consulting, technology, property rentals and branding concepts to businesses in the legal cannabis industry, announced today that it has hired Orr Builders to carry out Phase 1 of the Company’s “Pineapple Park” project in the City of Desert Hot Springs, California.

Since its formation in 1994, Orr Builders, the largest general contractor based in California’s Coachella Valley, has successfully completed millions of square feet of industrial, commercial, medical, restaurant and retail space throughout Southern California.

“We are excited to have been selected to be part of the team that will bring this great project to fruition”, said Orr Builders President/CEO Brian Orr.

The California Secretary of State’s office said Tuesday that Californians will decide whether to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in a vote to be held in November. The campaign raised enough funds to battle the initiative’s opponents.

The initiative, which needed 402,000 signatures, reportedly received a whopping 600,000. The proposed Adult Use of Marijuana Act is supported by Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom and former Facebook President Sean Parker among others.

Science is starting to understand what marijuana smokers have known for years: how marijuana helps sleep. Because of this understanding, doctors are now able to legally prescribe marijuana for sleep disorders in seven states.

Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the most active marijuana ingredient that affects sleeping patterns. We’ll look into exactly how marijuana aids sleep, delve into how our brains work, and offer insights on this fascinating subject.

Sleep Disorders and Marijuana

Sleep disorders include:

When KIND Financial began in 2014, it was supposed to be the Wells Fargo for weed growers and dispensaries. 

“I was initially going to be KIND Banking," CEO David Dinenberg says. "I was going to be the marijuana bank.”

You can already read a news article and order a cab from a bot, so it was only a matter of time until you could place a weed order through one.

Over the past couple of months, Canna Freedom—a dispensary located in Monterey, Calif.,—has been experimenting with a chat bot within Flok, a mobile app that works with 50,000 businesses to power their loyalty programs to improve customer service and understand what types of products customers are interested in.

Weed is a growth industry. It's illegal in the United States at the Federal level, and in most countries around the world (with a few notable exceptions), but that hasn't stopped millions of people around the world from using cannabis for ritual, medical, and recreational purposes.

The cannabis industry, however, is in the middle of a historic transition. What was fragmented and informal is increasingly a professionalized, tech-enabled market poised for hyper growth in the United States.

In 2010, the cities of Oakland and Berkeley both started regulating large-scale medical cannabis cultivation, but federal threats and foot-dragging bureaucrats quickly stopped those efforts. More than five years later, both are moving forward again thanks to their adoption of the statewide Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act (MMRSA).

Genius Extraction Technologies and its massive installation of distilling tubes towered over the Cannabis World Congress expo floor. In the video above, co-founder Robert Gaither walks us through how the cannabis oil extraction process works, from its negative pressure and temperature system to cooling and filtration, evaporation, and distillation on an enterprise manufacturing scale.