California will spend $20 million on a public awareness campaign about the dangers of vaping nicotine and cannabis products and step up efforts to halt the sale of illicit products amid a rise in vaping-related illnesses.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the actions Monday as part of an executive order.

A dramatic rise of hemp planted this year has been seen around the world and in particular the US, with 46 states having licensed farms since the US Farm Bill was passed in December of 2018. The potential for the US market alone is astronomical ($8.5 billion USD), but there isn't enough processing equipment installed to handle 90% of this year's harvest. The fear is that $7.5 billion dollars of hemp will be rotting in farmer's fields this fall.

The City of Los Angeles recently launched a massive crackdown on black market cannabis businesses, including cultivation operations, extraction labs, and delivery companies across the city. In Los Angeles, a charge of unlicensed commercial cannabis activity within the city carries a potential sentence of six months in jail and $1,000 in fines.

If you use cannabis on your own time in a state where it is legal, should that be grounds for terminating your employment or rejecting your application for a job? Advocates are starting to say no, and demanding action to protest workers’ rights to use cannabis without the fear of the sack and unemployment.

Some states have already made progress in this direction. Yet California, which led the way toward opening legal space for cannabis with the Propositio 215 medical marijuana initiative in 1996, is not among them. Neither 215 nor the Prop 64 adult-use legalization initiative exactly 20 years later provided any such protections.

California’s cannabis regulations are the most business-friendly in the nation, according to an analysis conducted by the legal firm Thompson Coburn LLP.

The firm recently produced a “holistic state-by-state ranking guide that breaks down how favorable each state’s cannabis regulations are to businesses,” that put California at the top of the list of all 50 states plus Washington, D.C., according to a statement released on behalf of the firm.

The wholesale market for legal cannabis is marked by great regional variation, but the oversupply that has sent prices plummeting in Oregon and other Western states has not been able to dampen the general upswing on the national level. 

When it comes to tax money from marijuana sales, California is living with diminished expectations.

The state pulled in $74 million in cannabis excise taxes between April and June, after the administration of Gov. Gavin Newsom sharply scaled back projected tax dollars from the shaky legal market.

Government analysts once projected that California would be flooded with tax money from the legal pot economy — $1 billion annually within a few years of launching the world’s largest market in 2018.

But multiple problems conspired to depress early sales, including a shortage of licensed places to buy it, a wobbly supply chain and the perseverance of a tax-free, illicit marketplace.

The potential tax revenue from the legalization of cannabis has been at the center of the argument between republicans and democrats. Proponents of legalization say states who haven’t legalized cannabis should look at the revenue generated from alcohol and other sin taxes as a window into what could be.