AUKEGAN, Ill. — A judge in Lake County has dismissed a lawsuit that claimed a Denver consultant was highly involved in too many Illinois medical marijuana growing facilities.

Judge Mitchell L. Hoffman last week ordered the complaint against Kayvan Khalatbari (KAY’-vohn Kahl-aht-BAR’-ee) dismissed “with prejudice,” a legal term that generally means the plaintiff can’t file the same complaint again.

Khalatbari is a co-founder of Denver Relief, which has retail and cultivation operations in Colorado and offers consulting services in other states.

The state of Washington has projected that it will collect $1 billion in sales tax revenue over the next four years as a result of legal marijuana sales. In the first year of legal sales, the state collected $67.5 million, and that total is forecast to rise to $154.6 million this year.

In 2017 the state is looking to collect $267 million, while the projections for 2018 and 2019 rise to $333 million and $369 million, respectively. That comes to $1.12 billion. State revenues for the four years are projected at $79.1 billion, of which legal marijuana sales will account for about 1.4% of the four-year total. Not exactly the end of the rainbow, but a welcome addition to the state’s general fund and its health services budget.

TORONTO - Friendlier laws on medical marijuana use in Canada are already drawing American investment north or the border, and the trend is likely to further ignite if the federal Liberals make good on their promise to allow recreational use of the drug.

Poseidon Asset Management, a San Francisco-based hedge fund focused squarely on the cannabis space, says it is considering boosting its Canadian holdings following Justin Trudeau's election win.

"We have one core holding up there currently but we would love to expand that," says Morgan Paxhia, the hedge fund's founding partner and chief investor.

Colorado’s marijuana businesses are having a hard time creating a bank. The Federal Reserve said that because the substance is federally banned they don’t want to work with the money involved with it. Now a hopeful Colorado credit union stands as a vacant building while the reefer industry shakes its head.  Andrew Freedman, director of marijuana coordination for Colorado was feeling very frustrated saying:   

“We tried to do the most with the building blocks of instructions they sent us, set up the most rigorous solution. And we still are left with confusion.”

The marijuana entrepreneurs of Colorado will not have a special bank to call their own — unless a federal judge intervenes on their side.

The designated guardians of the U.S. banking system — the Federal Reserve — has declined to accept so much as a red cent that can be traced back to weed, because according to federal law, marijuana is a Schedule 1 narcotic.

Weirdly, the Treasury Department seems less concerned about that part. The Fourth Corner Credit Union (the bank that suffered a denial in Colorado) was designed using rules issued by the Treasury last year for how banks can accept drug money from states where those drugs are legal. Fourth Corner was chartered specifically to service the state’s $700 million a year industry and create a safe place to bank for it.

Reporting from a 5 day fact finding mission in the Netherlands exploring the medical cannabis program and the players in the industry, together with Saul Kaye, our CEO and Jason Ryker, our CFO/COO.

Since we announced our partnership with Israel’s Cannabis Medical Unit and our subsequent postponement of the CannaTech Summit until March, we find ourselves with the time opportunity to investigate interesting markets and build new international relationships.

The song “Cat’s in the Cradle” plays softly in the background as a white-bearded Eric Zeid unscrews the lid of a glass jar filled with marijuana.

Zeid is sitting behind his desk at his medical dispensary Swinging Bridges in Alger. He’s giving a consultation to disabled Navy veteran Jamie Bussiere.

“How are you today, my friend?” Zeid asks Bussiere.

Bussiere suffers from neck pain and arthritis. He smokes marijuana to ease the pain and prefers it to prescription drugs.

Medical marijuana has been legal in the state since 1998. Unlike recreational marijuana, which was legalized in 2012, medical marijuana is unregulated.

That’s about to change.

Many legitimate marijuana businesses are still locked out of the financial system.

Marijuana-related businesses in Colorado are so profitable that the government doesn't know what to do with all of the tax revenue they're generating. But business owners face a more immediate problem: Where to stash their own profits when banks won't take it.

Kristian Rouz – The US state of Washington is anticipating to extract significant fiscal benefits from legal marijuana sales as the market has been booming since legalizing the licensed use of medical and recreational weed.

However, Olympia’s bright fiscal outlook might be undermined, as the marijuana industry in the neighboring state of Oregon is starting to distract customers from the Evergreen State.

The ‘weed craze’ in Portland has offered more often than not more attractive prices since the legalization bill was adopted in July, thus impairing the commercial performance of pot shops in the Seattle-Vancouver border region.

Nicole Gonzalez spent her teenage summers working in the Dominican Republic and Central America where her grandfather owned tobacco fields. Cigar-making was a male-dominated industry but her strong-willed mother always told Nicole, “You better be big in this world.” That motivation propelled Nicole and her husband Ata, both in their twenties at the time and without college degrees but both entrepreneurs, to move from Florida to California to join the budding marijuana industry in 2009.