As homegrown drug operations go, the meth lab is king. Methamphetamine production is known to contaminate houses and spontaneously combust labs, so attempting it requires a scrappy sensibility and serious attention to detail.

The Internal Revenue Service is after cannabis companies in Colorado, sparking uncertainty and unease among cannabis businesses. The newest audits are focusing on Form 8300, which is the form used to report cash transactions of $10,000 or more. The IRS is investigating large cash transactions which have been processed by these businesses for evidence of money laundering and underreporting of business income. While some marijuana-related businesses in Colorado have already been able to settle their Form 8300 audits, other business owners are dealing with audits from the IRS regarding Section 280E.

Colorado and Washington were the first U.S. states to vote for recreational marijuana, but the Centennial State was the first out of the gate.

“Day 1, Colorado definitely was in a great spot because of your regulated medical market,” says Cy Scott, a founder of dispensary review and news site Leafly and founder of startup Headset. “You guys were able to flip a switch, essentially, and start the recreational sales, where Washington took a long time after I-502 passed. And I think it was a bit of a struggle in the beginning.”

Scott, who hails from Washington, joins The Cannabist Show to talk about the differences between the marijuana industries in Colorado and his home state.

“Washington’s catching up,” he says.

The legal weed industry is dominated by men.

Consumers are reaching for cannabis nearly as often as they are for a can of beer, a new report has found.

The typical male customer spends about $647 annually on marijuana products, while female consumers drop about $634 each year on weed, MarketWatch reported. That’s compared to an average of $645 a year on alcohol and $1,000 a year on coffee, according to a survey from Headset, which tracks weed transactions.

Thursday afternoon, officials in the small town of Hugo, Colorado, told residents they’d found THC—yup, that would be the psychoactive ingredient found in marijuana—in local wells. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment discouraged residents from drinking, cooking with, or bathing in the water, but subsequent tests revealed that there was not, in fact, THC in the water supply. Experts are still investigating, but it sounds like this is a case of false positives. 

Four doctors are suing after their medical licenses were suspended for allegedly prescribing too much marijuana to patients. Courthouse News reported that doctors Gentry Dunlop,  Robert Maiocco, Deborah Kaye Parr, and William Tyler Stone filed complaints against the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment saying that there were no limits on the books for how much of the substance doctors can prescribe their patients, and that the Board used a “secret policy” to make their decision.

To a child on the prowl for sweets, that brownie, cookie or bear-shaped candy left on the kitchen counter is just asking to be gobbled up. But in states that have legalized marijuana for recreational use, notably Colorado, that child may end up with more than a sugar high.

A study published on Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics says that in Colorado the rates of marijuana exposure in young children, many of them toddlers, have increased 150 percent since 2014, when recreational marijuana products, like sweets, went on the market legally.

Is a reintroduction in the cards for this contentious crop?

Ryan Loflin bet the farm in 2013 and did what no U.S. producer had done for 70 years.

The Springfield, Colo., farmer ordered hemp seed by mail from Europe and stockpiled his supply bit by precious bit. When the cache climbed to 1,500 lb., Loflin dotted 60 acres of flat ground with hemp seed. Then he waited for Uncle Sam to come knocking.

No cease and desist letter. No phone call from the feds. No Drug Enforcement Agency raid. Loflin became the first U.S. farmer since the 1940s to plant and harvest industrial hemp. 

Particularly in an ag economy with low commodity prices, hemp is beckoning U.S. farmers. Federal prohibition remains in place, but some states are moving forward with legalization. 

The nondescript building in east Boulder is like many other in the city; it is, in fact, identical to several surrounding structures. Passing motorists and pedestrians wouldn’t know that there’s a multi-million dollar manufacturing operation inside. And that’s the way the folks at CW Hemp want it.

Even if someone did manage to peek inside the 18,000-square-foot lab, warehouse and office space, they wouldn’t know that one of the most famous strains of hemp in the world is processed here.

Between 600 and 1,000 units of CW’s product ship from the premises each month, extracted from a strain of the plant called Charlotte’s Web, made famous by the 2013 Sanjay Gupta-hosted CNN documentary “Weed.”

A Colorado farming town on Saturday ended restrictions put on the local water supply this week after it warned residents to avoid drinking the town’s water because THC, the psychoactive agent in marijuana, was found in a feeder well.

The local sheriff said a criminal investigation has been launched to look into possible tampering of the well in Hugo, a town of about 800 people some 90 miles (145 kms) southeast of Denver.

"The Colorado Bureau of Investigation has just reached out to us and advised that samples taken from Well #1 and throughout town are NEGATIVE for THC," the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office said on its Facebook page on Saturday.

The water restrictions were lifted on Saturday morning, Lincoln County Public Health said in a Facebook post.