For new cannabis users, the urge to push the limit may seem like a fun idea until things start going haywire. It’s important to have some sort of clue about what direction to go in when heading into unfamiliar territory, whether it’s first timers getting their kicks in Washington or Colorado or folks who haven’t had the opportunity to indulge in their favorite plant for quite awhile.

Growing pot is really easy, and it will make you filthy rich, rich beyond your wildest dreams! In fact, you should quit your job, move to California or Colorado and fill your house with lights! What could go wrong?

Does this sound a little naïve to you? It should, but unfortunately that has been the mentality of so many pot entrepreneurs since the Ogden Memo de facto “legalized” medical marijuana in 2009. The problem is that in order to live off of growing or selling pot you absolutely have to treat growing and selling pot, well, like an actual job. 

CARBONDALE — Four people face charges after a Carbondale marijuana shop was robbed at gunpoint as it was opening Monday morning.

Carbondale Police Chief Gene Schilling said two robbers walked through the front door of Sweet Leaf Pioneer marijuana shop on Village Road at about 10 a.m. and one showed a gun to employees. No customers were in the shop at the time, the chief said.

The pair fled in a red Ford Mustang with “an undisclosed amount of cash,” according to a press release from Carbondale police.

Authorities alerted law enforcement agencies to be on the lookout for a stolen red Mustang.

Schilling said the robbers also took items besides cash, but he wouldn’t disclose what they were.

Preliminary studies reveal harmful effects of highly potent cannabis, but causal links remain unclear

On the street it’s called skunk for its intense, pungent odor. But the smell isn’t the only thing that’s strong about this type of marijuana. These increasingly popular strains contain high levels of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive substance in cannabis that causes its euphoric effects. Several new studies have noted the rapid rise in marijuana potency and raised questions about the risks it poses to users.

By Ricardo Baca

The marijuana industry has a pesticide problem.

DENVER, Dec. 7, 2015/ Weed Wire/– Canna Security America (CSA) (OTCBB: CSAX) the leading extensive security solutions company catering to companies in the certified marijuana industry, is delighted to announce that it has actually finished its merger and begun to trade as a public company.

Images from the Police Foundation report entitled "Colorado Legalizatino of Marijuana and teh Impact on Public Safety: A Practical Guide for Law Enforcement." Additional images and more below.

Is Colorado's experiment with marijuana legalization a success story or an abject failure? Depends on who you ask.

A new joint-study between the University of Colorado and the University of Louisville has been making waves in the medical cannabis community. That study boldly titled, “Daily Marijuana Use Is Not Associated with Brain Morphometric Measures in Adolescents or Adults”, makes a compelling case based on three different physical analyses of the brain in daily cannabis users vs. non-users. Taken alone, there’s nothing particularly advanced about the study from a technological standpoint; the real significance of the study is that it flies in the face of a larger body of evidence that seems to indicate that cannabis *can* cause structural changes. …So who’s right? Does cannabis cause structural damage or not?

San Diego rapper MC Flow appears poised to assume a higher profile, thanks to her new cheery new holiday video, “Pot in the Latkes.”

A four-time San Diego Music Award winner, Flow may be the first hip-hop artist to combine Hannukah and marijuana in a song. Or, at least, the first white female feminist hip-hop artist to combine Hannukah and marijuana in a song that begins with a musical quote from “Hava-Nagila.”.

With a reasonably straight face, she delivers a series of wining lines. They include: “I rap the truth so I got a witness, sometimes it’s hard to be a Jew at Christmas”; “I was stuck in a latke cannabis trance”; “I was straight up trippin’ on the Hanukah miracle, I was so damn high I felt practically biblical”; and “I guess you could call them Pot-kes...”

As more states legalize marijuana in the US, pot cultivation is sucking up an ever-growing amount of energy from the grid.

Since most of the legal weed is grown indoors, the pot industry burns through large quantities of electricity used to power lamps, ventilation systems, and air conditioning. A square foot of planting requires some 200 watts of electricity (pdf, p. 20), about the same as a data center, according to a report this year in the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law.

The paper notes that marijuana plantations soak up at least 1% of the country’s electricity at a cost of $6 billion a year.