Business

At some point next year, medical marijuana will finally be available to qualifying patients in the District. The problem? It might be too expensive for anyone to grow it or sell it, much less for anyone to actually afford to buy it.

Only those with medical marijuana authorization forms gained entrance to an event billed as the state’s first cannabis farmers market. “These are farmers growing agricultural medicine, so it seemed like a no-brainer,” said Jeremy Miller, organizer and owner of Sacred Plant Medicine. “It’s a place where people can network with other patients in similar situations.”

As organized labor faces declining membership, one of the United States' most storied unions is looking to a new growth industry: marijuana.

T-Mobile "did not approve" of a company called EZ Texting, which does business with a website, WeedMaps.com, that provides information on the location of legal medical marijuana dispensaries in California. Today, EZ Texting sued T-Mobile in the U.S. District Court in New York City. EZ Texting says that on Sept. 10th, T-Mobile began "unlawful blocking" of its 313131 text service, which it offers to business and non-profits to help get their message to the public.

Mexico became a manufacturing mecca thanks, in part, to its inexpensive labor and proximity to the massive U.S. market. But there is a new reality on the ground in that country these days: a surge in violence tied to the prohibition-based war on drug traffickers that Mexico's President Felipe Calderon mounted after his election in 2006. The result has been a wave of kidnappings, extortion and murder that is threatening the country's economic health and causing multinationals to examine closely how they operate and invest in Mexico.

The meandering network of pipes, wells and tankers belonging to the gigantic state oil company Pemex has long been an easy target of crooks and drug traffickers who siphon off natural gas, gasoline and even crude, robbing the Mexican treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Now the prohibition-created drug traffickers have taken sabotage to a new level: They've hobbled key operations in parts of the Burgos Basin, home to Mexico's biggest natural-gas fields.

The head of an association of border factory owners said the sector is in crisis mode as unrelenting drug prohibition violence in northern Mexico has spooked investors into curtailing operations at some plants and rethinking expansion at others.

Oakland is about to become the first city to authorize large scale marijuana cultivation. The move could generate millions of dollars in taxes and create hundreds of new jobs. While the measure has yet to pass, current medical marijuana growers fear the move will drive many of them out of business.

If California's Proposition 19 passes this Novemeber, plenty of moneymakers will want in.