For the week ended Friday, July 31st, the spot price index for a pound of cannabis rose from $1,736 in the prior week to $1,791, a jump of slightly more than 3%. The futures price for December 2015 remained unchanged at $1,350.

About two-thirds of the past week’s transactions fell in a range of $1,550 to $2,032 per pound and transaction prices ranged from a low of $1,500 in California and Oregon to a high of $2,500 in Michigan and Alaska according to the analysts at Cannabis Benchmarks. The volume-weighted average price in Colorado rose by about 6% from $1,667 on July 24th to $1,770 a pound last week.

DENVER (CBS4) – Hundreds of Colorado veterans waited in a long line in Denver on Saturday for free cannabis products.

The free handouts were set up as a sign of protest to a decision by the state’s health board not to allow post-traumatic-stress disorder as a treatable condition for medical marijuana.

The cannabis giveaway was set up by Grow4Vets founder Roger Martin and Todd Mitchem, CEO of a company called High There! — a sort of social networking tool for pot users.

The influence of cannabis on creativity has been discussed in detail on our Sensi Seeds blog. The relationship of the two is well-known, but also very complex.

There are creative people out there that use cannabis,  and there are those that don’t. Today, we have collected 10 quotes of musicians, authors, entrepreneurs and philosophers that value cannabis for its creativity producing or rather creativity enhancing properties. Take a look for yourself.

Republicans, as everyone knows, are advocates of "states' rights," the theory being that power residing in the hands of the federal government is inherently suspect, while power spread out among 50 smaller governments is inherently virtuous — or at least more so. After all, aren't states "laboratories of democracy," where all kinds of interesting experimentation can take place and the best ideas can then bubble up to the rest of the country?

Each meal is curated and cooked by Carroll, a freelance chef who trained at the San Francisco Cooking School, worked at 4505 Meats and now does in-home private cooking, catering, and dinner pop-ups. Menus change with each dinner, but her past menus at the Cannaisseur series have included house-cured gravlax with walnut mustard sauce, house-cured moulard duck leg confit with brussels sprouts and panna cotta with ginger and rhubarb.

Prominent health organizations acknowledge the benefits and lack of side effects of using medical cannabis for controlling chronic pain

Chronic pain is widely accepted by the medical community to signify disease itself, which can be made much worse by environmental and psychological factors. Chronic pain persists over a long period of time and is resistant to most medical treatments. Chronic pain causes severe problems for patients, especially when you have two or more co-existing chronic pain conditions like:

Positive attitudes toward e-cigarettes from friends and family were associated with their use among teens, according a small survey of Southern California high school students.

In the survey of more than 2,000 students, there was a greater risk of vaping by teens associated with a greater number of their friends using e-cigarettes, and a more favorable reaction to e-cigarettes by their best friends (P<0.05), reported Jessica L. Barrington-Trimis, PhD, of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and colleagues.

Quality of life takes a hit in healthiest cancer patients, researchers say.

Chemotherapy near death failed to improve quality of life (QOL) for patients with cancer, even those who otherwise were in good health, a review of end-of-life care showed.

Quality of life near death (QOD) deteriorated in patients who had good performance status when they started chemotherapy. Palliative chemotherapy had no impact on QOL among sicker patients, Holly Prigerson, PhD, of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, and colleagues reported online in JAMA Oncology.

Like a number of companies making good in the growing national marijuana industry, Ohio-based Apeks Supercritical is getting in on the “green rush” by marketing and selling its botanical oil extraction systems to buyers in the legal cannabis industry, Director of Sales Shawn E. Litterini said in an interview.

The C02 extraction systems are cleaner than other extraction solvents, which leave more chemical residue, and can be used to make any number of oil extracts such as vanilla and saffron extract, Litterini said.

With the legalization of marijuana in four states and Washington, D.C., the marijuana tourism industry is starting to bud — and go upscale. Think “Napa Valley,” with weed.

By Spencer Peterson, Travel+ Leisure.

Four states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana for recreational use, but only Colorado and Washington have licensed dispensaries that can legally sell recreational cannabis. Since legalization and sale came to those communities, the budding pot industry in these two states has tried to shape a future of vineyard-esque tours of marijuana farms, and fatty-friendly salons reminiscent of Amsterdam’s cafes. (The phrase “Napa Valley of weed” gets tossed around a fair bit.)