John Stewart used to run the pharmaceutical company behind the narcotic painkiller OxyContin. Now he is banking on medical marijuana.

Mr Stewart does not know which is more controversial these days, OxyContin or pot.

He guesses the average person would give "a bigger negative" to the powerful and controversial painkiller that has been linked to the opioid overdose and addiction epidemic in the US and Canada.

"There is a lot of anti-opioid sentiment," he says, delicately. "And certainly based on the social disruption that we've seen it's understandable."

To no one’s particular surprise, neither of the initial public offerings (IPOs) scheduled for last week made it out the door. Both are likely to try again in the coming week.

Through the week ending November 25 IPO ETF manager Renaissance Capital reported that 97 IPOs have priced in the U.S. so far this year, down about 42% from a year ago. Total proceeds raised through last week equaled $17.3 billion, down 42% compared with the same period in 2015. Of the 97 IPOs that have gone off this year, 41 have come from the healthcare sector. Last year’s IPO total came in at $30 billion on 170 offerings. Renaissance Capital does not include “best efforts” or blank-check companies in its totals, nor does it include IPOs that raise less than $10 million.

Four more states just legalized marijuana for all adults, and more than half the states now allow pot use by people with a long list of ailments. But don't break out the Goldfish and Cheetos just yet.

That's what the Colorado governor famously said after his state and Washington became the first to legalize recreational pot in 2012.

The joke belies an important truth about the nation's evolving marijuana experiment: It's too soon to say how these experiments will turn out. States wading into legal weed are in direct defiance of federal drug law, so they're on their own when it comes to regulating a drug that had been illegal for almost a century.

A look at the top issues facing states that are moving toward legalization:

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Cannabis stocks ended the week of November 25th on a high note with most companies under Technical420’s coverage in positive territory, and some moving significantly off their weekly lows. 

Although we remain cautiously optimistic, most stocks in the cannabis sector have come down from their pre-election highs. While many cannabis stocks are still attractive investments, recent volatility has caused us to exit several positions in Technical420’s Mock Portfolio.

We want to highlight several cannabis companies that have made significant price movements over the last week and will provide our thoughts on such movements.

In the days following the American presidential election, pharmaceutical stocks soared. The market’s response was more in response to Clinton’s loss than Trump’s victory—while the Democratic nominee was a vocal critic of the pharmaceutical industry, Trump’s position always seemed less clear. Nevertheless, investors have welcomed the unknown: as CNBC reports, the drug industry has gained almost ten percent since election day.

While mainstream insurance carriers such as State Farm Insurance, George Petersen Insurance Agency, and Wells Fargo Insurance Services have yet to touch the cannabis industry, other smaller and independent insurers are willing to take on cannabis clients, according to a North Bay Business Journal report.

John Ford, proprietor of the Eureka, California-based John Ford Insurance Agency, began serving the industry two years ago and since then, his business has grown 62 percent. He estimates that 80 percent of his 130 clients are canna-businesses, including cultivators, distributors, and dispensaries.

Cannabis dispensaries in the US are to join retailers across the country by offering Black Friday deals for their products, as the drug is set to receive mainstream acceptance following several more states voting to legalise it.

Several shops in California, one of four states that voted to legalise recreational use of cannabis in November, have been promoting their deals ahead of Black Friday – the day of discount deals that began in the US every 25 November but has started take hold in Europe and beyond.

As part of an endless flood of post-mortem election analysis, journalists and researchers recently began noticing a striking correlation between high local rates of opioid overdose deaths (and other indicators of despair and poor health) and a shift in swing state voters from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. Which makes it bitterly ironic that these voters may ultimately prove responsible for unleashing the greatest threat to drug policy reform in recent history.

Not all products made from cannabidiol, a chemical compound found in marijuana, are the same—not only does the potency vary from product to product, but so too does its legality in the United States. In large part, where the CBD oil, as it’s called, is derived from makes a big difference.

The revolution to legalize marijuana is marching slowly—but steadily—forward. Half of the states in the United States plus the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana or cannabis for medical use, and more states are legalizing recreational use with each election cycle. In the recent election, California, Nevada, Massachusetts and Maine all passed ballot measures to legalize for recreational use.

Even in states where marijuana is technically illegal, law enforcement tends to look the other way for all but the most egregious offenses. The reality is that there is no common sense argument that allows for cigarettes and alcohol to be legal while marijuana is not. Both cigarettes and alcohol are verifiably more harmful than marijuana.