The push for legalization—particularly farming—is being hampered by in a number of ways.

I finally escaped Washington, D.C., last month, arriving by car with my girlfriend as new residents of Seattle early this month.

I've welcomed most of the changes I've seen here—apart from the Lenin Statue near our apartment. The traffic is lighter. The food is better. The people are nicer. The neighborhoods are more walkable. The mountains are beautiful. Most politicians and bureaucrats are further away.

Oregon lawmakers are fighting to prevent companies from firing employees who get stoned after hours.

A piece of legislation (Senate Bill 301) has been introduced to the state’s legislative forces that would make it illegal for an employer to terminate a worker simply for using marijuana. The measure takes the issue a step further by stopping businesses from rejecting job applicants simply based on a positive test result for the THC compound.

Recreational marijuana sales in Oregon produced $60.2 million in state tax ­revenue in 2016, the first year of state-taxed pot sales.

For much of the year, ­marijuana sellers collected a 25 percent sales tax. 

To produce the $60.2 million in tax revenue reported by the state Department of Revenue on Friday, total retail sales of marijuana and ­pot-laced products last year would have had to equal about $241 million. 

Marijuana tax revenues ­exceeded projections, said Mazen ­Malik, senior economist for the Oregon Legislative Revenue Office. He had estimated ­marijuana sales would ­produce $44 million during the year, $16 million less than what came in.

An Oregon company wants to build a pot-friendly RV park.
 
A company that supplies warehouse space for marijuana growers is eyeing property near Lake Selmac in Josephine County.
 
The park will be called Smoke on the Water, Grow Condos Chief Executive Officer Wayne Zallen said.
 
If the project moves forward, the company hopes to expand with campgrounds in other marijuana-friendly states. The RV parks would include tent camping and a pot dispensary, he said.
 
The company already has a 15,000-square-foot facility in Eagle Point, Oregon, where it offers for lease or sale indoor grow spaces, which are all occupied. The company is also working toward building a 48,000-square-foot commercial marijuana processing facility in Eugene.

The program that is integrated into the company’s dosing methods is the “the first of its kind for the edibles industry,” according to Americanna’s co-founder, Frank Falconer.

The distillation process takes food grade decarboxylated cannabis oil and removes impurities – ingredients like lipids and decomposing terpenes, Falconer explained.

Tripling the size of the distillation equipment

Falconer said the traditional methods of extracting edibles concentrate by using CO2 or hydrocarbon do not change, because the distillation process happens only after the cannabis oil is decarboxylated and activated for edible consumption.

“CO2 oil and hydrocarbon oil can both be distilled,” he said.

Hi is a cannabis brand. Its logo — “hi” in white letters inside an orange circle — can be found above the front door of a Portland, Ore., marijuana shop and on a handful of cannabis products, including massage oil and Hi Releaf pain-relief balm.

But you wouldn’t guess any of that from Hi’s trademark filings. In 2015, the brand’s parent company, Cannabis Sativa Inc., filed a trademark application — not for any of Hi’s core products, but for hats, T-shirts and a wide array of other apparel.

If the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office signs off on the application, Cannabis Sativa would be able to stop other companies from using the Hi brand on clothing, but it might not be able to stop rivals from setting up Hi-brand marijuana shops or selling knockoff Hi-brand products.

With recreational marijuana use on the verge of becoming legal in Maine, real estate brokers are seeing a jump in demand for industrial spaces that could become indoor marijuana farms in the not-too-distant future.

Marijuana is scheduled to become legal to use and possess Jan. 30, but the scramble for suitable warehouse space for commercial growing has begun, helping to push lease rates to nearly twice what they were six years ago in Greater Portland.