Denver, Colorado. The Mile High City. Call it America's Amsterdam. Ground zero for cannabis legalization, and home to a budding tech sector in what could be called the Silicon Valley of Weed.
In High Country, Motherboard heads west to see about the new green rush. We'll visit some of the key players working to scale up tomorrow's smart, low-footprint grow and extraction technologies, inadvertently crash a harvest of cartoonishly dank medicinal AK-47, check the pulse on a fast-growing dab scene, and crack open the promising, if scant science of weed–a knowledge base that's expanding amid ongoing federal prohibition as casual citizen botanists/stoners crowdsource what they know about what they're picking up. Which is all to say there's simply no arguing that America's No. 1 cash crop--to say nothing of a budding weed-support industry, or the millions of people who use herb today as medicine or for recreation (or both)--is being taken to sophisticated and dizzying new heights.
But more questions than answers are cropping up as American pot goes pro. With the world's eyes on Colorado and Washington State, which also recently legalized small amounts of cannabis for recreational use, what'll be the fate of all the money, power, stigmas and, of course, new (and sometimes sketchy) canna-highs caught up in Weed 2.0?
Catch the full piece on Motherboard beginning June 3 to find out.
Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson
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