With any Marijuana Business Insurance program, or any commercial insurance program for that matter, a lesson can be learned from the unfortunate fire of Seattle’s first legal marijuana farm, Sea of Green Farms. The lesson to be learned is always apply the ‘Golden Rules of Risk Management’ which are:

A red herring is “something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important issue.” Sad to say the marijuana industry has more than its fair share of red herrings, including the ten that are most prevalent these days:

The House and Senate budget proposals would divert marijuana taxes to the general fund instead of to non-profit community health centers that serve the uninsured.

A key part of Washington state's recreational marijuana initiative I-502 is a tax on legal marijuana. Five percent of that tax was meant to fund the state's cash-strapped community health centers.

But neither the Senate Republicans nor House Democrats have called for that in their budgets, which were revealed at the end of March.

A concerning trend: More calls are coming into the Washington Poison Center about marijuana. But are more people being exposed or are people just more willing to call?

The Washington Poison Center reports more marijuana exposures during the first three months of 2015 than it did in the same period last year.

Through March this year, 72 exposures were reported to the Poison Center compared with 54 during the same period in 2014. Last year, a total of 245 exposures were recorded. Exposures reported include calls from the public as well as healthcare professionals.

Since marijuana was legalized, the number of exposures has grown, according to the center’s data.

It appears the days are numbered for Washington’s sprawling and largely unregulated medical marijuana marketplace.

Both the state House and Senate have now approved measures to roll medical cannabis into Washington’s recreational pot system. That means big changes ahead for marijuana patients.

Today, a medical patient might go to their corner or local dispensary. If the bill goes into effect, that patient would go into a recreational store that is dual licensed. There might also be stand-along medical marijuana specialty clinics, but the sort-of ubiquitous green cross stores basically go away under this system.

A  worker at a Louisville, Colorado, dispensary handles bags of marijuana delivered March 27 by CannaRabbit. Couriers do more than carry pot for the state's network of more than 800 growers, manufacturers, dispensers and laboratories. The industry remains mostly cash only as federally chartered banks have been hesitant to extend loans for trade that U.S. authorities may see as against the law.

At a farm in the foothills of Colorado's Rocky Mountains, Corey Young tucks his client's marijuana into a shoebox-sized container in an unmarked white van and heads out on the road.

"We don't want to be going through a small town and have someone see bins in the back," said Young, a founder of courier service CannaRabbit. "We do not want to stick out at all."

MBank, the small Oregon-based financial institution that has serviced the cannabis industry since last year, told Marijuana Business Daily that it will close all of its accounts with marijuana companies in the next two months.

Jef Baker, the CEO and president of MBank, said the cost and time spent on compliance is too much for the Gresham, Oregon-based community bank to handle. The company – which quickly became one of the largest banks serving the marijuana industry – has about 70 to 75 accounts with cannabis businesses, Baker said. Most of them are in Oregon, though a few are in Washington State.

In 2011, the only place you could buy a pound of pot online was Silk Road, an illegal marketplace labeled by the media as the “Amazon of drugs.”

In 2015, there’s a website run by veteran commodity traders where Colorado growers and retailers can trade cannabis online – legally.

The Denver-based company Amercanex launched its online marketplace last summer, and it has plans to expand outside of Colorado by the end of 2015.

Retired Silicon Valley engineer Angelo Mallol, 56, turned out Sunday for a seminar on how to start a small business – in the pot trade.

He asked questions as instructor Gerry Bedore of the Cannabis Career Institute spoke about emerging opportunities for entrepreneurs wanting to enter California’s medical marijuana market and cash in on a likely 2016 state ballot initiative to legalize recreational pot use.

The Cannabis Career Institute, founded by a Los Angeles marijuana activist and pot deliveryman known as “The Cannabis Warrior,” held a daylong Sacramento program on how to open cannabis businesses, from niche bakeries and organic gardens to marijuana distribution services.

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) - The Washington state House moved forward Friday on an effort to reconcile the state's medical and recreational marijuana markets.

The chamber first passed a Senate measure addressing the medical side before moving on to a House bill dealing with the recreational law. Because the Senate bill was amended in the House, it will head back to the full Senate for a final concurrence vote, while the House bill will go next to a Senate committee for consideration.

Senate Bill 5052 passed on a bipartisan 60-36 vote after a long debate over several amendments, including over whether patients should have to sign up on a registry.