On the first day of the special legislative session, Washington House members took up a bill that would change the way the state taxes recreational marijuana.

Washington lawmakers are back in Olympia this week after failing to pass a two-year operating budget during the regular legislative session. Now, lawmakers have 30 days to address the operating budget, a transportation package and satisfy a court mandate to adequately fund the state's public school system.

Also on their to-do list is cracking down on the illicit marijuana market by addressing the current tax structure.

With Oregon's recreational market about to come online, the bill could have particular implications for border counties such as Clark County.

Now that legalized recreational marijuana is spreading across the United States and medicinal marijuana is present in 23 states and Washington, D.C, youth marijuana education is a large concern. Now that the stigma for the drug is starting to subside, should youth education reflect this and lean toward informing with logic and not employing scare tactics?

Washington state’s marijuana legalization bill, Initiative 502, had a number of specific clauses written that were geared towards education, information and studies regarding marijuana use. Namely, 60 percent of new revenue would be dedicated to substance-abuse prevention, research, education and health care.

Two months from now, on July 1, Oregon will become the fourth state to allow residents to legally purchase marijuana for recreational use. In anticipation of legalization, the governing body that will oversee marijuana licensing and sales is preparing for something unexpected: A huge influx of cold, hard cash.

Legal marijuana in states like Colorado and Washington have surpassed revenue expectations in their first few years. But when marijuana businesses try to pay their taxes, the federal law that makes marijuana illegal limits their access to financial institutions.

I completely failed to see this one coming.

A brief history lesson:

Washington State has had a medical marijuana law since 1998. In 2011, the legislature passed a bill allowing the creation of “collective gardens” (aka stores) to grow cannabis for patients registered with the state, and regulating those outlets in various ways: all members of the collectives would have had to register with the state. The governor used her line-item veto to take out major provisions of that bill, including the part that would have created the patient registry.

It’s no secret that the tech industry likes marijuana. On HBO’s true-to-life comedy “Silicon Valley,” Erlich Bachman, the blowhard entrepreneur, has a marijuana home-grow in his garage, a bong in the dining room and “get kush” on his to-do list.

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — Nearly two decades after voters passed a medical marijuana law that often left police, prosecutors and even patients confused about what was allowed, Gov. Jay Inslee signed a bill Friday attempting to clean up that largely unregulated system and harmonize it with Washington's new market for recreational pot.

Among the law's many provisions, it creates a voluntary registry of patients and, beginning next year, eliminates what have become in some cases large, legally dubious "collective gardens" providing cannabis to thousands of people.

When Washington state legalized recreational marijuana use last July, Seattle’s tourism industry saw a new opportunity. Could Seattle become a hub for pot tourism, with eager visitors piling into local hotels and Airbnbs for an opportunity to try some of that famous Pacific Northwest weed? The answer, in a word: yes. But not without a struggle.

Before Seattle could become another Amsterdam, local businesspeople and tourism agencies had to (and still do) deal with some unexpected issues. Building a marijuana tourism mecca, it turns out, isn’t as simple as sparking up a spliff.

So How Does This Legal Recreational Marijuana Thing Work, Anyway?

SAN FRANCISCO - Lawyers and pot dealers have long intersected in criminal court, but as marijuana goes mainstream, attorneys have been working to keep sellers and growers legit.

Marijuana divisions are popping up at law firms to advise pot shops on where they can locate, what their websites can say and how to vet new clients.

"It's definitely something that established firms are dipping a toe into, though they are being very cautious, and rightly so," said Sam Kamin, a professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law who teaches a class about representing the marijuana industry.

The price of legal recreational marijuana is down to an average of $12 per gram in Washington state lately. Last summer, it was as high as $30 per gram.

One justification for making recreational marijuana legal in Colorado, Washington, and perhaps elsewhere soon is the hope that it will help put an end to the black market, which is unregulated and untaxed and has been known to involve gangs, drug cartels, and crime far beyond the low-level dealing of weed. But it’ll be all but impossible to stop the black market if its prices are substantially cheaper than rates on the up-and-up.

Marijuana prices have plummeted since stores opened last summer, and the average gram of marijuana in the state’s system now goes for about $12, according to the state Liquor Control Board (LCB).

When prices peaked last summer, a gram was fetching about $30 on average, according to data from the LCB.

The aggregated data doesn’t consider the quality of the bud or the effect of bulk pricing, but shows a clear downward trend since the state launched its regulated marijuana market.

Brian Smith, a spokesman for the LCB, said the agency was pleased with the trend.