2015 THEME: “UN70 and UN Peacekeeping: Past, Present, and Future".

This year’s International Day of UN Peacekeepers falls during the 70th anniversary of the United Nations, offering a chance to honour the Blue Helmets’ invaluable contribution to the proud history of the Organization and to reaffirm our commitment to make them even more effective in the years ahead.

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.

Marijuana legalization may not be a top priority of Congress or President Obama, but the American public is certainly doing its best to make it apparent that marijuana is an important issue.

We've seen a complete transformation of the American public's opinion of marijuana and even individual state law over the past two decades. What once was an illegal substance in all 50 states is now legal from the aspect of medical purposes in 23 states, and legal from a recreational, adult-use standpoint in four states.

High Times magazine’s New York-rooted editor-in-chief Dan Skye has spent plenty of time in Colorado researching and photographing the state’s medical and recreational systems, but his current, pre-Cannabis Cup trip to the state has been uncommonly eye-opening.

“The Colorado cannabis industry is an economic miracle,” Skye said Monday from a stop in Pueblo, where he’s meeting cannabis business owners and reporting on the state’s first-of-its-kind legalization. “Everyone in the United States is following Colorado’s lead.”

A  worker at a Louisville, Colorado, dispensary handles bags of marijuana delivered March 27 by CannaRabbit. Couriers do more than carry pot for the state's network of more than 800 growers, manufacturers, dispensers and laboratories. The industry remains mostly cash only as federally chartered banks have been hesitant to extend loans for trade that U.S. authorities may see as against the law.

At a farm in the foothills of Colorado's Rocky Mountains, Corey Young tucks his client's marijuana into a shoebox-sized container in an unmarked white van and heads out on the road.

"We don't want to be going through a small town and have someone see bins in the back," said Young, a founder of courier service CannaRabbit. "We do not want to stick out at all."

The popular explanation for medical marijuana dispensaries that have popped up in states from Washington to New York is that marijuana is a wonder drug — treating not just nausea and lack of appetite, but also pain, anxiety, epileptic seizures, and the symptoms of multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia.

The federal government refuses to allow people to use it, proponents say. 

The story, however, isn’t quite so simple.

ORLANDO, FLA. — Hemp ingredients may add protein, magnesium, phytosterols and fiber to products, said Tom Vierhile, innovation insights director for Datamonitor Consumer. Hemp is non-allergenic, and the plants are sustainably grown, he added.

Yet many people may associate hemp with marijuana, and that perception could put a buzz-kill on hemp’s entry into food and beverage product launches.

“Hemp is misunderstood,” Mr. Vierhile said in an April 9 presentation at Ingredient Marketplace in Orlando. “That is really one of the key problems with hemp going forward.”

In “Weed the People,” Bainbridge Island author Bruce Barcott delivers a thorough and entertaining survey of the burgeoning legalization of marijuana in the U.S. Barcott appears April 15 at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Co.

‘Weed the People: The Future of Legal Marijuana in America’ by Bruce Barcott Time, Inc., 400 pp., $22.95

Colorado lawmakers started work Thursday on a proposal to allow people on probation or parole to use medical marijuana.

The state has allowed medical marijuana use for 15 years — but not for people on probation or parole.

A bill facing its first test Thursday in the state House would change that policy by saying that pot use doesn't amount to a probation violation for people with medical clearance to use the drug.

"If it's in the constitution, you should have the right to use it on probation," said Rep. Joe Salazar, D-Thornton and sponsor of the bill.

The change wouldn't apply to probationers whose crime was related to marijuana.

For the second year in a row, federal officials are seeking to increase the supply of cannabis the government makes available for research protocols.

DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart filed paperwork today announcing that the agency is seeking to increase its marijuana production quota for the year 2015 by nearly three-fold.