Romulus, N.Y. -- Town officials here are backing a proposal by a well-known medical marijuana entrepreneur to grow pot at the former Seneca Army Depot midway between Syracuse and Rochester.

Josh Stanley, who helped develop a strain of medical marijuana known as "Charlotte's Web" used to treat epileptic children, wants to build a greenhouse to grow marijuana on a 20-acre site within the 11,000-acre former Army base that closed in 2000.

Stanley told town officials at a meeting Wednesday the project would initially create 20 jobs and eventually 250.

"After the Army left, it left a big hole in our economy," said David M. Kaiser, Romulus town supervisor. "We are really excited about this because we need living wage jobs. A lot of families here are struggling."

It has been linked to deaths across the country and left others critically ill.

Now New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has issued a state health alert that the synthetic marijuana product known as 'Spice' is sweeping the city, and that 160 people have been hospitalized in nine days after using the drug.

Over 120 of those people were admitted to Emergency Rooms in the same week.

The cannabinoid, also commonly called 'K2' or 'Mojo', is predominantly abused by teenagers and typically sold over-the-counter as incense or potpourri. 

State health alert: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said Friday that 'Spice', also known as 'K2' or 'Mojo', is sweeping the city, with 160 people admitted to hospital in the nine days from April 8, 120 of them in one week

Growing up on New York’s Long Island, Jim Hagedorn would watch TV and see reports of marijuana busts. In the background, he’d sometimes spot bags of Miracle-Gro, the garden fertilizer invented by his father, Horace.

That recollection is particularly apt as the younger Hagedorn, now 59, considers plans for the company his father helped found, Scotts Miracle-Gro Co., the world’s largest maker of lawn-care products. This month, Scotts bought a leading supplier of hydroponics, a technology that allows indoor cultivation of everything from tomatoes to pot without soil.

Back in January, ebbu LLC‘s Dooma Wendschuh was embarking on a journey to raise $9 million in venture capital funding. The money will fund research and development into cannabis products that Colorado-based ebbu plans to produce and sell.

Since announcing the opening of the capital raising, Wendschuh has spent much of his time on the road talking to potential investors. The exercise has involved late nights, early mornings, working holidays, more alcohol ingestion than he is used to and revisions to the business plan based on feedback from potential investors.

High cigarette taxes fuel a surging black market in smuggled cigarettes, notes Americans for Tax Reform's Patrick Gleason in the Wall Street Journal. New York smokers are the greatest beneficiaries of that black market, burdened as they are with the most ridiculous cigarette taxes in the country. There's a huge flow of smuggled smokes from relatively low-tax states like Virginia. And some smokers are turning to an alternative to which marijuana fanciers facing legal pressures of their own have resorted for decades: growing their own.

Last year, The Weed Eater column debuted on 4/20 with a promise to take readers on “a cannabis-fueled culinary journey.” Since then, we’ve made a gourmet marijuana meal at Hunter S. Thompson’s house, sampled Melissa Etheridge’s weed-infused wine, brewed up some pot-fueled bulletproof coffee, explored the Joy of Cooking (while really stoned), concocted strain-specific cannabis cocktails, examined the Grateful Dead’s lasting influence on how we eat, and even shared a meal with Nonna Marijuana, the 92-year-old queen of cannabis cuisine. But perhaps, amid all the munchies and merriment, we’ve failed to make clear something vitally important: Marijuana edibles aren’t safe.

Charles Lynch was running a legal medical marijuana dispensary in California — but that didn't stop the feds from raiding his store in 2007, throwing him in jail, and later placing him on home arrest, rendering him unable to find work and, as a result, leading to the loss of his home.

"I have no work and no money," Lynch, 52, told the New York Times's Erik Eckholm, "and I'm depending on others to survive."

NEW YORK (MainStreet) -- Military veterans in North Carolina, especially around Fayetteville, a center of both active military personnel and vets, are now organizing to put marijuana legalization on the state's GOP platform.

Catherine Hiller, author of "Just Say Yes: A Marijuana Memoir," at Prospect Park in Brooklyn, where she believes she first smoked marijuana in the 1960s. April 12, 2015 Side Street By DAVID GONZALEZ

As much as Catherine Hiller refuses to admit it, marijuana is a gateway drug. Seriously, after smoking more or less every day for the past 50 years, there had to be some consequences. Yet, she did not go to jail after a random police stop. She did not end up strung out on heroin, sprawled in an alley. She didn’t even binge-munch herself into obesity.

Her daily puffs led her to write a book, “Just Say Yes: A Marijuana Memoir.”

A few years ago, when Modern Corp.’s Chief Operating Officer Gary E. Smith was recovering from open-heart surgery, he used the company’s 12-acre H2Gro facility to walk and rebuild his strength. Even then, Modern was contemplating a risky investment of converting the structure to a sophisticated, medical marijuana production center.

Now, with the New York State Compassionate Care Act signed into law, formal rules and regulations in place and an application process under way, Smith and Modern are vying to become one of five, licensed growing operations in the state.

Two years from now, the leafy corridors of the greenhouse may no longer house the towering tomato plants, instead nurturing the strong-stalked cannabis and their oil rich, medicinal trichomes.