Organic has become a buzzword, and for many it has become synonymous with safe. In recent years, pesticides used on crops that will be consumed by humans have become a growing concern.

The attitudes towards potentially harmful chemicals puts cannabis into an interesting category when it comes to “organic” growing and pesticide use. While some cannabis is consumed by ingesting, a lot of it is combusted and inhaled in some form. This puts otherwise safe or organic pesticides to a whole different test.

Many products that were once used regularly are being banned as more research is done on cannabis-specific use. Pesticides normally used on crops are not burned and inhaled by a consumer, but when they are used on cannabis can quickly become dangerous.

Proving that the West Coast has the best of everything, a San Diego-based company has just launched a load of cannabis-infused candy floss edibles.

B-Edibles have created cannabis-infused candy floss using 100mg vials of THC.

A far cry from the very chewy, badly baked hash brownies you spend most of your fresher year making, these bad boys are made with organic ingredients and come in a host of fancy flavours.

Snoop Dogg isn't the only rapper that's made a foray into the cannabis industry. In fact, it seems to be a spreading trend that has caught on with other big names in hip-hop, including Wiz Khalifa, Cypress Hill's B-Real and Wu-Tang Clan's Ghostface Killah.

Last year, The Game became the first celebrity to own a marijuana dispensary. This led him to develop branded strains of cannabis flowers and concentrates, which are now sold at the Santa Ana, California location.

There are two major problems casting a shadow over cannabis cultivation as a whole: chemical safety and sustainability. Although these problems are not exclusive to the cannabis industry, their unique impact on both the industrial and cottage markets as well as with home growers alike is noticeable.

When it comes to Cannabis, the industry as a whole is expected to be one the biggest, outperformers of our lifetime. It is the end of marijuana prohibition after-all.

Some stats: 13% of U.S. adults admit to currently smoking pot on a regular basis, while 43% say they have at least tried it, according to a Gallup poll from 2016.

I would put money on these stat figures being largely incorrect, people tend to not like admitting certain things to strangers on the phone. You could probably safely double those numbers, which sounds more realistic to me.

Shops patronized by pot smokers have a long tradition of labeling their pipes and vaporizers “for tobacco use only.” But startups developing smoking and vaping gear are basically asking customers to put their weed in it.

Self-described cannabis product companies are raising capital in droves, while funding for startups in the e-cigarette space has all but, well, vaporized. Not a single company that mentioned tobacco, cigarettes or e-cigarettes in its Crunchbase profile raised a disclosed funding round in the past year. By contrast, at least 45 self-described marijuana and cannabis companies did.

Syndros, a liquid marijuana substitute that contains a synthetic version of the marijuana ingredient that makes users feel high (THC), has been assigned a less restrictive drug category than real weed.

The liquid is developed by Arizona-based pharmaceutical company InSys Therapeutics, the company behind synthetic opioid Fentanyl, which is around 100 times more powerful than morphine.

“Battling the opioid epidemic will require a multi-pronged approach and a good deal of creativity.”

In states that legalized medical marijuana, U.S. hospitals failed to see a predicted influx of pot smokers, but in an unexpected twist, they treated far fewer opioid users, a new study shows.

Hospitalization rates for opioid painkiller dependence and abuse dropped on average 23 percent in states after marijuana was permitted for medicinal purposes, the analysis found. Hospitalization rates for opioid overdoses dropped 13 percent on average.

At the same time, fears that legalization of medical marijuana would lead to an uptick in cannabis-related hospitalizations proved unfounded, according to the report in Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

Just because marijuana is legal in a state doesn’t mean it’s legal at a music festival; Coachella attendees are officially prohibited from bringing drugs on festival grounds, even though obtaining legal marijuana in California is as easy as walking into a store and saying, “Hey, I’d like to buy some legal marijuana.” But WeedMaps, described by Tech Crunch as “the Yelp of marijuana dispensaries,” has a plan: TMZ reports that WeedMaps and marketing firm Talent Resources are partnering up to build an “oasis” for weed smokers, located six miles from the festival.

A region of the Keystone State impoverished by industrial decline and ravaged by opioid addiction sees a future in medical cannabis.

The promise of big profits and job creation continues to draw communities to the legal marijuana industry, particularly in places where the economy has long suffered.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in southwestern Pennsylvania. City leaders in Braddock, located east of Pittsburgh, have submitted an application with the state in hopes to land a license that will allow for a new cannabis cultivation facility. The goal is for legal medical marijuana to bring back jobs lost over the past decades by the decline in the steel industry.