Recently released stats from Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Division for the first six months of 2016 reflect what we already knew: cannabis cultivation and sales are on the rise.

At the second meeting of Denver’s social consumption advisory council, on February 8, members addressed multiple issues, including a few carried over from last month and others that will come up again at the next meeting. Here’s a rundown of the top ten topics.

Shortly after the passage of Initiative 300, Colorado’s Liquor Enforcement Division adopted a new rule that prohibits any business with a liquor license from also applying for a social-consumption license. On February 3, five plaintiffs filed suit against the state over that rule.

In states like Colorado, where the recreational use of cannabis is legal, the population is divided into two categories: those who use marijuana, and everyone else. LucidMood is hoping to bridge that gap with a product it bills a “cannabis for the rest of us.”

Banking issues have been a major stumbling block for the cannabis industry, with banks refusing to work with marijuana-related companies for fear of coming under scrutiny of federal regulators. So far, attempts to clear up that conflict have gone nowhere in Congress — but now a former federal government employee has come up with a partial solution: Tokken, an app for both customers and dispensaries that was recently named a finalist for the 2017 SXSW Interactive Innovation Award.

As we wind down from Sunday’s Super bowl, here are ten NFL players who have voiced support for marijuana.

Three years ago, a group of women came together in Denver to form their own cannabis community and they called it Women Grow. Now, the organization has more than 1,500 members in 35 states and each group gets together the first Thursday of every month.

Women Grow, founded in Denver in 2014, was created to connect entrepreneurs in cannabis with other thought leaders and empower the next generation of cannabis businesswomen.  The organization is hosting its annual Leadership Summit in Denver right now; women and men from all over the country came to share their stories, network and learn more about what it means to be an entrepreneur in cannabis. We sat down Women Grow CEO Leah Heise to learn more about the organization and her plans for 2017.

Advocacy for cannabis at the national level is more important now than ever before, said Aaron Smith, executive director of the National Cannabis Industry Association, as he opened NCIA’s Seed to Sale show on January 31. NCIA ensures that cannabis-industry professionals have a voice and a seat at the table in Washington D.C., Smith noted as he explained not only how NCIA represents the cannabis industry in D.C., but how the organization plans to protect cannabis at the national level — and how the industry in Colorado can help.

Mowgli Holmes gave the keynote at the Seed to Sale Show in Denver on February 1, and he taught the crowd a thing or two — or six — about cannabis. Holmes is the co-founder and chief scientific officer at Phylos Bioscience, which has created a web of over a thousand cannabis strains. The web links strains that are in the same family and provide growers and consumers with scientific knowledge about the plant that has never been documented in one place before.

Since it founded a medicinal grow in 2009, Colorado Harvest Company has had a commitment to clean cannabis, adding a recreational operation in 2014 and always improving on a well-oiled system. That system has earned Colorado Harvest Company a growing reputation for quality.As more and more states legalize marijuana, Colorado Harvest hosts many out-of-state visitors who want to observe grow operations.

A specialized spectrum of invisible light that will kill all the pesticides in your grow: that’s what SpectrumGro promises.
The light emanates from rods about an inch and a half thick and 48 inches long. They’re installed two feet from the crop, either above it, under it, or to the side, and once they’re turned on in the grow, they get to work eliminating pesticides in the plants and in the soil. The light eliminates mold, bacteria, fungi, powdery mildew, and most kinds of yeast.

This month, we’ve been sharing our favorite Instagram photos from dispensaries, growers, and protests of Trump’s inaguration. Now, we’ve rounded up our favorite posts from you. Enjoy!

TDA_Boulder has no problems with its employees getting high — for the sake of creativity. The advertising agency partnered with grower Colorado Kind to create three specific strains of weed for “The Fifty,” the 2017 theme for the Denver Ad Club’s annual awards show. Each strain was tailored to aid different personality types in the advertising profession.

Emmett Reistroffer was one of the authors of Initiative 300 and worked on the campaign to get the social-use ordinance passed last November. Now the event planner serves on the city’s social consumption advisory committee. We sat down with Reistroffer to chat about social use, the first committee meeting, and what he thinks about how the process is going.

For the last four years, anytime police seized cannabis in a criminal investigation, they’ve been required to care for it — either by keeping the plants alive or by returning the marijuana in a usable form to the owner. That’s no longer the case.

Thirty percent of marijuana businesses are audited each year by the IRS; cannabis companies are always dealing with new regulations. Wurk is trying to work out solutions for these challenges.

On the first morning of the Trump presidency, we’re giving you a rundown of the best marijuana posts on Instagram saying goodbye to Obama and ushering in a new administration. From naming strains in honor of our departing president to protesting in Washington D.C., the cannabis community was vocal about…

The world hasn’t come to an end. U.S. Representative Ed Perlmutter was told it would when Colorado voters legalized recreational marijuana use in November 2012 and he started introducing legislation in Congress that would aid the industry as businesses began to struggle with banking problems, among other issues. Now, as President Donald Trump takes the oath of office, Perlmutter says he’s not finished fighting for marijuana legalization at the federal level.

On Thursday, January 19, GMC LLC, or Green Man Cannabis, issued a voluntary recall of its bud and other marijuana products, “due to the presence of potentially unsafe pesticide residues.” There has been no reports of illnesses and only products at two Green Man Cannabis stores were affected: 1355 Santa…

Toby Ripson moved from Idaho to Denver and partnered with Mike Leibowitz to start Veritas Cannabis, the first licensed stand-alone grow operation in Colorado. The team has hand-crafted each part of the grow process. It takes longer and is more expensive, but by controlling the environment and paying close attention to each part of the production process, Veritas growers can assure customers that they’ll get the same experience each time they smoke the bud, no matter where they buy it.