"Let me tell you how the big pharma industry works," said the DEA lawyer, picking up a glass of chardonnay and swirling it around. We were having lunch at Shutters on the Beach, and the wine, which I would pay for, cost $150 a glass. But he had promised to answer some questions from readers of my controversial article entitled "US Gov't Will Legalize Marijuana August 1."

"I'll tell you how this industry works. The big pharma people take the DEA people to dinner to discuss the legalization of Marijuana, how it's going to really work. They say:

Marijuana has expanded like a weed over the past two decades, but 2016 could be its greatest year yet.

In November, residents in up to a dozen states could vote on whether or not to legalize medicinal or recreational marijuana. Five states have secured marijuana initiatives on their ballots, while signature collection and verification continues in the remaining states.

The marijuana industry faces a huge problem: Few banks will touch cannabis cash. 

Even though big bucks are on the line — Colorado is predicted to pull in more than $140 million from taxes on marijuana sales in 2016 alone — marijuana is still classified as a Schedule I drug at a the federal level.

Most banks don't want to deal with that kind of risk, forcing dispensaries to operate on an all-cash basis.

Seasoned leadership from tech giant EMC and Sun Microsystems joins quality control and data analytics company serving legal cannabis industry.

If you asked seasoned tech executives Richard Corley and Doug Wood six months ago if their careers would lead them to the booming legal cannabis industry they would have certainly said, “Not likely!”. 

Enter Orange Photonics founder, Dylan Wilks, an expert in spectroscopy and chromatography. “In order to scale our upcoming cannabis analysis platform, integrate hardware with cloud-based data analytics and expand our potential customer base, we needed individuals with a diverse set of corporate, business and product related skills. The individuals we found have been there and done that, again and again.” 

David Dinenberg’s Kind Financial developed software that helps government agencies track pot production and sales. The unlikely software entrepreneur, with no tech background, has set up a partnership with Microsoft to market the software.

When David Dinenberg decided to get into the marijuana industry, his business plan was based on fear.

In 2014, he founded Kind Financial with the aim of making loans and providing other services to marijuana growers and sellers — customers banks were scared to work with.

Just two years later, though, the company’s main business is about helping navigate bureaucracy, specifically the red tape that comes with legalization. Its marquee product is software that helps government agencies track pot production and sales.

Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap announced June 27 that the initiative to regulate marijuana like alcohol will appear on the state ballot as Question 1. Historically, the first measure on a ballot gets more votes and has a higher chance of passage.

The final wording of the ballot question reads, “Do you want to allow the possession and use of marijuana under state law by persons who are at least 21 years of age, and allow the cultivation, manufacture, distribution, testing, and sale of marijuana and marijuana products subject to state regulation, taxation and local ordinance?”

This Tuesday, the organizers of a ballot initiative to legalize recreational marijuana in California had their petitionscertified, meaning Californians will vote in November on the question. Even though a legalization measure failed at the ballot in 2010, this one is almost sure to succeed (polls have shown support at around 60 percent), adding 39 million Americans to the still-modest number who live in states where pot is legal.

Rumor has it that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) plans to legalize marijuana any day now. Rumor also has it that Barack Obama is secretly a foreign-born Muslim and that the CIA had a hand in the attack that brought down the World Trade Center. Unfortunately, that first claim is about as likely to be true as the other two.

These are the states that have legalized marijuana in some form—and those voting soon.

Colorado’s legal marijuana sales grew more than 40% tonearly $1 billion in 2015, creating $135 in revenue from taxes and fees that the state put toward school construction and other public projects. But, as Fortune reported, an increase in marijuana-related emergency room visits and the persistent black market has dampened some public support for legal pot in Colorado.

It's time to start taking marijuana stocks seriously. That's because they're about to offer incredible profit potential thanks to the rapid growth of the legal pot industry.

According to ArcView Market Research, U.S. companies that sell legal marijuana will rake in $6.7 billion in sales by the end of 2016. That's a 25% increase from $5.36 billion last year.