Overcast with some hazy sunshine this afternoon on California’s north coast, but the light is fading, maybe indicating rain a-coming.

Our pot and our pets; today via Quartz:

With marijuana flourishing into a big business in the US, a new segment of the market catering to aging and ailing pets has been growing under the radar. The legal weed market raked in $2.7 billion in revenue in 2014, and one estimate by the ArcView Group, a network that connects investors with cannabis startups, projects the industry to top $10 billion in sales by 2018.

(Illustration found here).

A crying, near-pure shame, the way positive benefits from marijuana have been cloaked in ugly dark for so long, and only now, as pot legalization makes social/political strides, a shitload of health remedies have come to the forefront, from treating Alzheimer’s, to preventing epileptic seizures, to aiding pain for multiple sclerosis to…you get the point.
And now our beloved old dogs (and cats) — more from Quartz:

Unlike its edibles for humans, Treatibles products, which are sold in dispensaries, aren’t made from marijuana but from hemp—the stem of the cannabis plant that’s low in the psychoactive component tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which produces that feeling of getting high.
Hemp, however, does contain cannabidiol, or CBD, a chemical compound that alleviates pain.
The US government also defines hemp as cannabis — not necessarily the stem — that measures less than 0.3 percent in THC, a threshold that allows its movement across state lines.
Most companies making cannabis-derived pet products choose to use hemp because the federal government still classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 substance, defined as “drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”
Currently, 23 states and the District of Columbia have medical marijuana laws.
But as it stands, veterinarians aren’t empowered to prescribe cannabis to pets.
That could change soon.
Nevada is currently debating a bill that would allow people to obtain medical marijuana for their pets with a vet’s approval.
…
Because the cannabis market for pets is so new, others are treading lightly.
“The potential issues around politics and legislation are always a concern in the cannabis space,” says Emily Paxhia, a partner at Poseidon Asset Management, an investment firm in the marijuana industry.
Still, she can’t deny the “massive market potential” since it sits at the intersection of two billion-dollar industries: pot and pets.
In total, investors, including Poseidon, have injected $800,000 into Auntie Dolores so far.

Animals in any domesticated environment needs a toke or two, every-now-and-then.

Also in pot news, a couple of positive examples of marijuana. Both examine the near-80-year-old bad-negative stigma that has been attached to marijuana and how such shit can effect reality — the first, this piece at Time magazine from last week, an excerpt from, “Weed the People: The Future of Legal Marijuana in America,” by science journalist Bruce Barcott, and the aftermath of Washington state’s recent legalization of weed.
In actual practice, all good. And despite fantasy-hype from a self-called “non-stoner,” Barcott found pot being legal a positive watershed event:

Here’s what I found.
Legal, well-regulated marijuana has had an overwhelmingly positive change for my state, my community — and yes, my family.
That’s not the answer I expected.
…
The upside?
We no longer arrest 12,000 people every year for possessing marijuana in Washington state.
Those are 12,000 people who kept their jobs, went to college, supported their kids, and enjoyed happy and productive lives.
State-licensed pot farmers have driven illegal growers out of the state.
Mexican cartel pot has no market here.
Thousands of new jobs have been created.
We’ve seen no pot-inspired crime wave, no mass conversion of citizens into stoners.
Parents know more about pot than we did two years ago; when we talk to our kids about avoiding it, we come from a place of knowledge, not fear.
My family is safer and healthier because marijuana is regulated and legal.
Other states and municipalities are about to reap those same benefits.
In Washington D.C., which implemented pot legalization last month, police made more than 5,700 arrests for marijuana in 2011.
The racial disparity in those arrests is shocking. D.C.’s black residents are eight times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than their white neighbors.
This despite the fact that use rates are virtually identical.
In D.C., as in so many other American cities, marijuana laws have become nets that harvest young black men into the industrial prison system.
In Seattle and Denver, those nets no longer exist.
Earlier this year they disappeared from Washington, D.C.
That’s what the rest of America stands to lose.
If you want to experience the gains, visit us out here in safe, sane, and regulated Washington State.
Come see how we’re thriving. And see what the rest of America has to lose.

And the other article on marijuana books came yesterday from the New York Times, in the form of an interview with Catherine Hiller of Park Slope, Brooklyn, author of, “Just Say Yes: A Marijuana Memoir,” which supposedly covers 50s years of pot smoking — and she says she turned out A-okay, too:

“I wanted to show people that smoking marijuana did not make me hit rock bottom,” Ms. Hiller, 68, said.
“My story is the story of so many people who use each day.
“And so what? What’s the issue?
“What will it lead to?”
…
She has experienced the disparities of race and class when it comes to how law enforcement looks at smokers.
In her book, she recounts how after she and her first husband lit up in their car, a policeman flashed a spotlight on them, told them to put out the joint and then waved them off.
After an essay adapted from her book was published in The New York Times, someone accused her of living in a cocoon of white privilege.
“Maybe I won’t get stopped,” she said.
“But I wrote this not because of my privilege, but because I think it’s absurd that anyone would get stopped for this.
“Whatever I can do to legalize it, I will.”

Slowly, but surely the bowl burns…