Colorado's two U.S. Senators are leading a new bipartisan effort to provide banking for marijuana businesses.

Democrat Michael Bennet and Republican Cory Gardner are co-sponsors of the legislation.

“The lack of access to banking services for marijuana businesses is a key issue in Colorado,” Bennet said.

“It raises significant public safety concerns for both employees and customers of these businesses and creates compliance and oversight challenges. This common-sense bill would address those issues by allowing our banking system to serve marijuana businesses that are in compliance with state laws.”

There's no doubt marijuana businesses are a target for criminals. In the past 18 months, L'Eagle Cannabis Gallery in Denver has been burglarized three times.

For years, parents of children with Dravet Syndrome, a rare form of epilepsy, have been advocating for the use of non-psychoactive medical marijuana to treat their kids. Now, a new study shows that cannabis helped dramatically reduce the number of seizures suffered by these children.  

These findings are from the world’s biggest drug survey GDS2017 (including 69,000 cannabis users).

The Good

Congratulations, America. Don’t worry about your leader, fake news or the endless incredulous headlines that will no doubt follow in the coming months: it’s time to celebrate your position as the world’s most enlightened and healthy users of cannabis.

What pairs nicely with a fine Oregon Pinot Noir? I have no idea, but now that recreational marijuana is legal in that state — and will soon be in neighboring California, as well — vineyard owners are taking advantage of the burgeoning market by adding pot plants to their fields.

A few winemakers have been delving into pot farming lately, either removing fields of grapes and planting the marijuana themselves, or leasing out parts of their land to weed growers, reports The Associated Press.

The border guard’s question surprised Jessica Goldstein: “Have you ever used drugs?”

It was 2013, and Goldstein, a 30-year-old Canadian from the Vancouver area, was on her way to a Dave Matthews concert in Washington State, passing through the Peace Arch border crossing between the United States and Canada. She’d done this countless times before and had never been asked about her narcotics history. The inquiry seemed especially odd considering the setting: With its picnic tables and grassy fields, the Peace Arch port of entry looks more like a park than a high-security border crossing.

While President Trump continues to lean on traditional industry to bring jobs back to the United States — vowing to create somewhere in the vicinity of 25 million new jobs within the next 10 years — he has failed to consider how a nationwide cannabis industry could help accomplish his objective and bring some much need financial recovery back to a wounded blue collar workers.

In California, seniors are getting together to sample weed-laced lip balms, topical ointments, and tinctures in Mary Kay-style parties at their retirement communities.

Baby boomers make up one of the fastest growing age groups to embrace marijuana. One study found a 71% increase in marijuana use among adults aged 50 and older in the last decade.

A San Francisco-based startup is capturing their interest with direct-sales events inspired by the cosmetics companies that have done the same for decades.

The opioid epidemic in Europe and North America should be old news.

Even the U.S. government is starting to pay attention and act on the flood of overdose deaths brought on by over-prescription of the highly addictive painkillers – synthetic drugs similar to morphine such as OxyContin, Vicodin, Percocet and Suboxone – and more deadly black market substitutes.

It is not particularly reassuring, however, that the Trump administration supports new healthcare legislation that would remove the requirement that all insurers cover drug addiction treatments.

More Drugs

A medicine made from marijuana, without the stuff that gives a high, cut seizures in kids with a severe form of epilepsy in a study that strengthens the case for more research into pot's possible health benefits.

"This is the first solid, rigorously obtained scientific data" that a marijuana compound is safe and effective for this problem, said one study leader, Dr. Orrin Devinsky of NYU Langone Medical Center.

He said research into promising medical uses has been hampered by requiring scientists to get special licenses, plus legal constraints and false notions of how risky marijuana is.

Sadly, we probably won't see 100 percent THC nugs the size of watermelons anytime soon.

The future of the legal marijuana industry in the United States is as indeterminable as today’s weed is intoxicatingly potent.  With legal marijuana laws springing up in states across the country, speculation of an eventual corporate presence in the cannabis industry is taking hold. And some think that when Big Agriculture enters the picture, with it will come strains of genetically modified marijuana.