On the first day the state of Colorado allowed the sale of recreational marijuana, Chris Elkins waited two hours in the freezing cold to buy weed.

“The line was down the stairwells, down the sidewalks, around the buildings, down the street,” Elkins, who had traveled to Colorado from Arkansas for a long-planned ski trip, recalled about that New Year’s Day in 2014.

New Frontier, the cannabis Big Data and analytics authority, in partnership with ArcView Market Research, the leading publisher of cannabis market projections and information, has released the 4th edition of the State of Legal Marijuana Markets, which shows that the legal cannabis industry is one of the fastest growing industries in America with a compound annual growth rate of 31%. The official 2015 ArcView market estimate is $5.7 billion, up from $4.6 billion in 2014.

Colorado has witnessed tremendous growth with a 93% increase in sales between 2014 and 2015. By the end of 2016, the market is expected to grow another $500 million to over $1.5 billion.

Two years after Colorado fully legalised the sale of marijuana, most banks in Denver still don’t offer services to the businesses involved.

Financial institutions are caught between state law that has legalised marijuana and federal law that bans it. Banks’ federal regulators don’t fully recognise such businesses and impose onerous reporting requirements on banks that deal with them.

Without bank accounts, the state’s burgeoning pot sector — 2500 licensed businesses with revenue of $US1 billion ($1.3bn) a year, paying $US130 million in taxes — can’t accept credit or debit cards from customers, Colorado officials say.

Those behind the THC-limiting proposals say they're smart, cautious moves; Opponents say they'll hurt the pot industry.

A proposed ballot initiative and an amendment to a bill in the state House would cap the THC potency of recreational cannabis and marijuana products at a percentage below most of those products’ current averages.

The initiative would limit the potency of “marijuana and marijuana products” to 15 percent or 16 percent THC.

The average potency of Colorado pot products is already higher — 17.1 percent for cannabis flower and 62.1 percent for marijuana extracts, according to a state study.

A cannabis club in Colorado Springs is handing out free marijuana to military veterans, hoping to give them relief from issues like post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic pain they suffer from after returning home from deployment in war zones.

Over the weekend, the Veteran Farmers Alliance group handed out more than half a pound of pot and marijuana edibles – worth about $1,400 – to veterans in Colorado Springs. The group’s founder, Steve Defino, said other groups should also be doing the same thing and that marijuana was essential for him to deal with his PTSD, which he has fought for a decade.

The cannabis industry made $5.4 billion in 2015. Legally. That's $5.4 billion worth of businesses growing and cultivating plants, processing and shipping products, and selling marijuana, cannabis oil, and all manner of edibles at dispensaries. That figure is forecast to hit $22.8 billion by 2020 according to the latest State of Legal Marijuana Markets Report from ArcView Market Research and cannabis-focused data analysis firm, New Frontier.

By many accounts, Monday was a banner day for the marijuana movement in the courts. In the nation’s capital, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up a lawsuit filed by Nebraska and Oklahoma to overturn Colorado’s legalized marijuana program, meaning that if the two states’ attorneys general want to continue to pursue the matter, they will have to do so in federal district court.

Does your state make the list?

Which are the marijuana-friendliest states in the nation? Where would a pot person want to buy a home and settle down?

The online national real estate search site Estately has taken a crack at answering those burning questions. The site's blog's Ultimate Lists cranks out all sorts of creative comparative data—cities with the most romantic homes for sale, states with the most pizza—and now it's done the same with weed. 

Yesterday we witnessed the release of Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, a highly anticipated movie depicting an unstoppable force and the proverbial immovable object. But what many people might overlook is that we've been witnessing a real-life battle for years beyond the confines of the movie theater between a seemingly unstoppable force known as marijuana, and the federal government which has maintained its position as the immovable object.

County also rejects a license request for pot-infused product manufacturing business

Pitkin County commissioners on Wednesday approved one license for the county’s first outdoor grow operation, and denied another for a marijuana-infused product manufacturing enterprise.

The Stash marijuana dispensary, which operates an existing cannabis growing operation in the Roaring Fork Valley, is looking to expand to an outdoor operation for 250 plants on its mid-valley property.

The applicants, Garrett and Shawna Patrick, went before the county commissioners on Wednesday requesting approval for a fenced-in, secure outdoor grow site on their 60-acre property to help augment their operation.