Vancouver medical marijuana businesses that are operating without a licence must close by Friday.

The city says inspectors will start enforcing regulations on compassion clubs and retail stores that have not complied with the rules but were allowed to remain open past a six-month grace period.

Regulation began last year when the shops started popping up across Vancouver, but the city refused to grant permits to 140 dispensaries because they didn’t comply with rules such as being too close to schools or community centres.

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Is The Farm, with its earnest salespeople and eager shoppers, a vision of pot's future here?

Just 10 minutes before its 9 a.m. opening time, a dozen mellow shoppers have already lined up outside The Farm Saturday in Boulder, Colorado.

Curious, I join the line and ask about the commercial commotion.

A middle-class dude replied that The Farm was offering a 20-per-cent discount on cannabis products in honour of the late Prince that morning.

It was a "Purple Haze" sale, he said.

Others in line volunteered that the state's new marijuana stores were "awesome" and the marijuana trade thriving.

The Dutch supreme court has ordered a retrial of the owner of what was the country’s biggest cannabis cafe, saying a lower court ruling clearing him of criminal charges was not properly motivated.

Meddie W was found not guilty of most of the charges against him by Amsterdam’s appeal court in 2014, when judges said he was not a member of a criminal organisation, and did not have to pay a fine.

The café in Terneuzen was closed by the town’s mayor in 2007 because it broke government rules on soft drug sales. At its height, the Checkpoint cafe was said to be serving up to 3,000 clients and processing 10 kg of marijuana a day.

4/20 is like smoke -- it’s elusive, mysterious and ceremonial. The story of exactly how the exalted stoner holiday blazed into existence is the stuff of skunky legend.

Whether late Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia invented it, or whether it’s meant to commemorate Bob Marley’s birthday, there’s no doubt that April 20 is the day that pot smokers of the world unite to toke up and party.

A Vancouver pot shop entrepreneur says he’s in a real dilemma, as one of his locations is in the final stages of approval, while the other is facing closure.

Chuck Varabioff, owner of the BC Pain Society, says his Commercial Drive location was rejected because it’s within 300m of a school, but he’s vowing to stay open come Friday.

“If the city wants to come in, they want to come with a fine, I will be standing at the door with a post-dated cheque to pay my fines for an entire month if that’s what they want.”

“I’m not happy to pay the fines but I will pay the fines while I’m fighting and appealing for your right as well as my right as well as 15,000 other people’s rights who are members.”

Normally, when a company based in one state wants to sell products in another state, it starts calling truckers. For Strainz, a Las Vegas marijuana company, it was more complicated.

By early 2015, Strainz’s owners knew they wanted to expand to Colorado and Washington, the states with the most normalized marijuana markets. Despite state laws that allow the sale of marijuana, it remains a federal criminal offense to ship it across state lines. And as Nevada residents, the ­husband-and-wife co-founders weren’t eligible to apply for business licenses in either state.

The United States’ cannabis industry is rapidly expanding, but without federal legalization, large companies that do business across state lines can’t enter the market. We asked small business CEO’s and others in the industry to describe some of the trends that spurred their businesses.

 1. Cannabis-Friendly Social Media

'It’s clear society has evolved,' says the CEO of OrganiGram, who predicts $200 million per year in annual production.

Denis Arsenault hosted an important visitor the other day at his Moncton offices, a moment that revealed much about his company’s grand ambitions.

Arsenault is CEO of OrganiGram, producer of Canada’s only organic medical marijuana, and the only licensed grower east of Ontario.

His visitor was Brian Gallant, the boyish, 33-year-old premier of New Brunswick, who came to offer wage subsidies to help the company expand.

Arsenault, whose company aims to get a running start on a legalized recreational marijuana market, did not miss the irony of Gallant’s visit.

At times, it’s still hard for me to believe that the words ‘cannabis’ and ‘industry’ are regularly paired in the same sentence. For decades, marijuana as a plant has been engulfed in stigma and misinformation, making it difficult for legislators to accept its clear advantages as a medical aid and an opportunity for investment. Despite the great misconceptions that have plagued cannabis, the plant is now legal for medical use in almost half of all US states, and can be legally consumed by all adults 21 and over in four states.

WeedMD Rx Inc is pleased to announce that Health Canada has officially licenced the company to cultivate medical cannabis for patients across Canada. The approval is in accordance with the Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations (MMPR), a set of regulations enacted by parliament in July 2013 concerning the production, distribution and use of medical cannabis in Canada and also pursuant to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act of Canada.

The license will allow the Company to immediately begin cultivation of medical marihuana in its fully expandable 25,000 square foot facility located at the former Imperial Tobacco plant in Aylmer, Ontario.