The Senate Appropriations Committee earlier this summer passed legislation allowing banks to provide financial services to marijuana dispensaries in states where the federally prohibited drug is legal, but it’s very unlikely any major bank will take on such business until the government changes the classification of marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, said one executive of a marijuana-based business.

TORONTO -- Medical marijuana producers are bracing for the possibility that Canadians could elect a new government this fall -- a change that could accelerate the already breakneck pace of growth in the burgeoning industry and usher in new players such as tobacco companies and pharmacy chains.

"This whole election's very interesting," said Bruce Linton, the CEO and chairman of Tweed Marijuana Inc. (TSXV:TWD). "When you have a business that has the potential to see quite a lot of acceleration because of outcomes, you watch it more carefully."

Marijuana became a hot-button issue in the election campaign on Thursday, when Joy Davies, a Liberal candidate in British Columbia, pulled out of the race because of posts she had made on Facebook about marijuana.

The greenhouse business isn’t what it used to be for Larry Gude.

To meet changing demands, the owner of Gude Brothers Greenhouse in Middletown has switched from selling ornamental plants to lettuce. Now, he’s eyeing a less conventional plant — medical cannabis, or medical marijuana.

In upper Northwest Washington, marijuana buds the size of zucchinis hang drying in a room once reserved for yoga. In the Shaw neighborhood, pot grown in a converted closet sits meticulously trimmed, weighed and sealed in jars. Elsewhere, from Georgetown to Capitol Hill to Congress Heights, seven-leafed weeds are flowering in bedrooms, back yards and window boxes.

Welcome to the first crop of legal pot in the nation’s capital — where residents may grow and possess marijuana but are still forbidden to sell it.

Vancouver’s police chief says the VPD has better things to do than clamp down on the city’s marijuana dispensaries.

He made those comments Friday following the furor over Health Canada sending “cease and desist letters” to several pot shops.

Chief Constable Adam Palmer says the VPD has acted on 11 search warrants between 2014 and August 2015, and would only act on those dispensaries suspected of selling to youth, or connected with a criminal enterprise.

“We will continue to do search warrants on those, but I’m not retooling all 13,00 officers to be going after marijuana dispensaries, there’s much more important work to do,” Palmer says.

Palmer says as far as the VPD’s response to marijuana dispensaries goes they “just aren’t a priority.”

BOSTON - When Cristina Barbuto of Brewster took a job with a marketing firm, she told the company that she used medical marijuana to treat symptoms of Crohn's disease.

Barbuto says she worked for only one day for Advantage Sales and Marketing, promoting products in a supermarket, and then the company fired her. The reason they gave was that Barbuto failed a required drug test by testing positive for marijuana.

When she complained, she said a human resources representative told Barbuto that the company, which has offices nationwide and in Massachusetts, follows federal, not state law.

Barbuto's claims were laid out in a complaint she filed in Suffolk County Superior Court accusing Advantage Sales and Marketing of discrimination and invasion of privacy.

Marijuana continues to be a highly polarizing issue for the United States. Despite growing momentum for the marijuana industry, highlighted by nearly two dozen states passing medical marijuana legalization laws and four states also allowing for marijuana to be sold legally for recreational purposes, marijuana is facing a veritable mountain of hurdles.

The current state of medical marijuana dispensaries in Michigan reminds me a lot of how things were in Oregon before the Oregon Legislature passed medical marijuana dispensary regulations in 2013. Medical marijuana dispensaries have existed for quite awhile now in Michigan, just as they did in Oregon well before 2013. Medical marijuana dispensaries are here to stay in Michigan, which is something that city leaders in Detroit seem to be recognizing because it sounds like they are drafting rules to regulate such establishments. Per Marijuana Business Daily:

More than a thousand of California’s elite cannabis growers and aficionados gather in rural Northern California this weekend for the second annual Golden Tarp Awards — celebrating one likely future for the plant’s farming.

September 11, 2015 – U.S. Cannabis Spot Index up fractionally to $2,133.  The national price may be at—or close to—its seasonal high.