NEW YORK: Marijuana-infused wine is the latest craze in wine-making, and it also adds flavor and structure to wines.

Carl Ruck of Boston University has said that fortifying herbal additives to wine has been documented by archaeological evidence.

Ruck explained that there were a few Bronx agers who were thought to have used pot-wine as a shortcut to fun, Vinepair reported. 

He said that cannabis would be one of the less dangerous additives entries in the wine fortification market, and added that evidence for the additives came from folkloric traditions and the practice was apparently often employed in the making of home brews.

Marijuana wine is available and legal in America, and probably will become increasingly so in the years to come.

Alaska’s forthcoming cannabis regulations might stop homegrown bud businesses from seeing a dime from the hot-ticket marijuana investment scene developing in the Lower 48.

Outside investment raises both industry and regulatory hackles in the Alaska cannabis scene, either as the surefire road to a federal crackdown or the harbinger of boutique-killing Big Marijuana, depending on who is asked.

Due to federal law, Alaska banks and credit unions refuse to handle cannabis-related accounts or loans. Cannabis businesses without their own startup capital have few options for funding beyond bootstrapping or borrowing from private lenders.

COTOPAXI, Colo. -

The US Department of Justice says that a federal drug raid on eight properties in Cotopaxi and Westcliffe netted more than 1,000 marijuana plants and 20 indictments.

Six of the raided properties had Cotopaxi addresses in Fremont County, and two had Westcliffe addresses in Custer County.

An affidavit obtained by KRDO NewsChannel 13 says the raid was part of an ongoing investigation by the Colorado Springs Office of the Drug Enforcement Agency that began last year.

Eight search warrants that were obtained as part of that investigation were executed on September 1, 2015.

The execution of those warrants resulted in the recovery of 1,002 marijuana plants, 50 pounds of dried marijuana, 28 firearms and over $25,000 cash.

Colorado and Washington, the first two states to legalize marijuana for recreational use in the U.S., have brought in about $200 million in tax revenue, collectively. And the revenue is already benefiting the states and their residents.

“Our philosophy has been that marijuana pays its own way,” said J. Skyler McKinley, deputy director of the Office of Marijuana Coordination in Colorado. “Every dime we bring in from legalization is dedicated to the cost of legalization. That’s regulatory framework first, then public education campaigns about safe and responsible use and then prevention and treatment programs.”

The task of categorizing and cataloguing the billions of plant species that have existed on our planet since the dawn of life is a huge and vastly complex one. Prior to our development of genetic testing, classification on the basis of perceived similarity was the only way to assign a plant to its correct taxon. Now that we have developed the study of phylogenetics (evolutionary relationships between groups of organisms), we have some basis for classifying plants according to their genetic similarities, but that does not provide a problem-free approach to such a complex task.

This is the first of what I hope will be many posts for The Weed Blog. I am going to be writing about the business end of cannabis. The business end of business really, because that is what I know the most about. But first…

Emerging Clinical Applications For Cannabis & Cannabinoids
A Review of the Recent Scientific Literature, 2000 — 2015

A Review of the Recent Scientific Literature, 2000 — 2015

Florence Childs hopes to sell her Spokane-area Washington Pot Shop. Photo by Max Lathrop

While many retirees spend time in their gardens, 82-year-old Florence Childs has chosen to work with another kind of plant. In 2014 she won the license for, and created the Top Shelf recreational cannabis store near Spokane Washington. Small and tidy, friendly and well-stocked, the store attracts tourists, locals and a handful of regulars who stop in everyday to “pick up a cookie or something,” said Childs. Yep, grandma built a pot shop.

DENVER — Whether bought from a downtown shop or cadged from a friend’s basement greenhouse, legal marijuana is easy to find in Colorado. Places to smoke it, not so much.

In less than three weeks, High Valley Farms will learn whether it will remain in business. 

The fate of the marijuana greenhouses, however, isn’t about rent spikes, plummeting revenue or dying business. Instead, this high-stakes battle, which has played out in a series of Pitkin County commissioners meetings over the year, concerns the skunk-like pot odors the greenhouses have been generating since they began operating in March.