Payment processing powerhouse Mastercard this week revealed the company is taking steps to prevent PIN-based debit card transactions for marijuana purchases, dealing a blow to a regulated cannabis industry already struggling with limited payment options for consumers. On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that Mastercard, the world’s second-largest payment solutions provider, had informed financial institutions and other
In his 15 seasons in the NBA, Kevin Durant has collected two championships and a most valuable player award, all while establishing himself as one of the greatest scorers to ever play the game. But it turns out one of his most significant contributions to the league came off the court. And when he was
An engrossing new story published on Tuesday sheds light on the impact of Peru’s exploding cocaine trade on the country’s Indigenous people. The story, published by Al Jazeera, opens with Fernando Aroni, a 41-year-old leader of a village of Amahuaca people, one of the Indigenous tribes in the Amazon Basin of Peru, arriving by canoe
A campaign to legalize recreational marijuana in Ohio fell short of the number of verified signatures needed to qualify a proposed ballot measure for the ballot, missing its goal by less than 700 signatures. The effort is not dead, however, as activists have been given 10 more days to make up the signature deficit. On
Some CBD products may not be all they seem, according to newly published analysis. Researchers from the United Kingdom assessed a variety of CBD-based liquid products –– tinctures, oils, e-liquids and beverages –– that are sold online in Britain. “Cannabidiol (CBD)-containing products are sold widely in consumer stores, but concerns have been raised regarding their quality,
A Florida beach was the site of some mysterious, lost treasure over the weekend. Police in Neptune Beach, a town in the northeastern corner of the state near Jacksonville, said on Saturday that officers “responded to a large amount of marijuana which washed ashore” earlier that morning. “It appears a large quantity likely broke open
Minnesota legalized cannabis, and as a result, some dogs are out of a job. Canine officers such as Jango, a 9-year-old German shepherd, and Cobra, a 10-year-old Belgian Malinois, are set to retire soon after the law goes into effect on August 1, Capt. Ryan Mangan said, according to USA Today. These pups are the
A fund created by Massachusetts state lawmakers last year to subsidize equity-owned cannabis businesses there remains empty, according to a report. Boston Business Journal reports that a “bill passed by the Massachusetts legislature last August created a new fund that promised millions of dollars to equity-owned cannabis businesses,” but that “nearly a year later, not
An employee of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) pleaded guilty to using COVID relief designed for small businesses to fund an illegal cannabis operation. A NASA-Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) employee agreed to plead guilty to defrauding a government loan program developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. He admitted that he used part of the
Slightly more than 14% of workers recovering from an on-the-job injury used cannabis to help them recover, according to the results of a recent study conducted in Canada, where marijuana has been legalized for both medical and recreational purposes. To complete the study, which was published this month by BMJ Open Journals, researchers affiliated with