Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Nikki Fried ran on a platform of what she called ‘the three W’s’: weapons, water and weed. Within months of her swearing in, it’s that last W that’s already generating a buzz around the state.

The Florida legislature passed a smokable medical marijuana bill that was signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, and state lawmakers are broadly expected to pass a law that would allow Florida to create an industrial hemp program for the first time.

Fried says the creation of a hemp program will lead to an “industrial revolution” in the state that can help bring relief to struggling farmers by offering access to a new cash crop, and in the process bring younger blood into an aging agricultural sector. She estimates the overall impact of the newly created hemp industry could stand to generate “20 to 30 billion” in annual revenue for the state.

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SAN FRANCISCO — David Dancer is a 48-year-old marketing executive who has worked for big brands like Charles Schwab and Teleflora. A year ago, he got a call from a recruiter for a different kind of company: MedMen, a cannabis retailer that has been called “the Apple Store of weed.” The opening was for a chief marketing officer. He took it.

One of Mr. Dancer’s early projects was a slick two-minute video by the director Spike Jonze that begins with an anecdote about George Washington as a hemp grower, a staple of dorm-room conversation. It concludes with a suburban couple coming home with a bright red bag of legally purchased pot, symbolizing “the new normal” — an ending that, like his own career twist, seemed improbable not long ago.

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That booming paraphernalia market, however, would also prove to be decriminalization’s undoing. By 1978, rates of adolescent marijuana use had skyrocketed, with 1 in 9 high school seniors smoking pot every day and children as young as 13 reporting that the drug was “easy to get.” This angered a growing number of parents, who saw kid-oriented paraphernalia as a “gateway” to drug use. The grassroots parent movement, which began in 1976 and came to its height of influence during the Reagan administration, worked to overturn state decriminalization laws and reaffirm the federal government’s anti-marijuana stance. Once decriminalization was overturned, the paraphernalia companies that had sprouted across the country folded as quickly as they had formed.

This previous experiment with decriminalization shows exactly how shaky the current legalization efforts in the United States might actually be. Despite widespread support for legalization (including from all current 2020 candidates for the presidential Democratic nomination), an unregulated and hyper-commercialized marijuana marketplace was unpopular enough to overturn lenient drug laws 40 years ago, and could potentially do so again today.

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The marijuana market has grown substantially over the course of the past few years. With so much growth and new legislation occurring around North America and in select countries abroad, it seems as though it can be difficult at times to navigate the tricky obstacles of buying and using cannabis. So here is a small beginners guide to the sticky world of cannabis.

The first thing one should note before walking into that tempting dispensary is the different kinds of cannabis available. The three main types are sativa, indica and a hybrid of both. These three types of weed all have varying uses, but they all do serve a solid purpose as cannabis.

Sativa is known widely as the uplifting daytime cannabis. The main characteristics of this type are that it provides a very useable strain selection based in being able to function throughout the day without falling asleep. Indica, on the other hand, does quite the opposite. Strains categorized as Indica have the potential to make the user sleepy and are not suggested for daytime use, but this has been noted as one of the desirable effects of the type.

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