Marijuana doesn't cause cancer, heart disease, brain damage, liver disease or emphysema, and its addictive potential is about on par with coffee. The DEA is 100% misinformed when it calls marijuana "extremely harmful".
The marijuana prohibition empowers the drug dealers and cartels and makes our children LESS safe! We parents have been patient long enough, we must speak up and demand that marijuana be legally sold to adults in gas stations and supermarkets just as beer and wine are today!!
The debate over medicinal marijuana has been intensifying across the nation in recent months, notably in California, where the taboo topic was pushed into the forefront by a ballot measure in November.
The measure to legalize marijuana in California may have been defeated but the issue is far from dead as the acceptance of medical marijuana in the state is becoming more mainstream. Consider the growth that related businesses are experiencing. Case in point: a news release issued today by General Cannabis Inc., the parent company for WeedMaps.com.
For those unfamiliar, WeedMaps.com is a mobile phone app that places an overlay of medical marijuana dispensaries on top of the Google Maps app - offering visitors the mapping basics as well as customer reviews and so on. In its release, it announced that it “had improved revenue consistently for the 14th straight month” and said it has plans to grow even more.
In January, it launched weedfreebies.com, a site that allows patients the opportunities to win prizes. And on the horizon is a daily coupon app, expected to launch in April, that will offer patients savings at the dispensaries. And the company also finalized its purchase of Revyy, LLC, which included the cannibascenters.com site. Work is underway to revamp that site into a nationwide online portal that connects physicians with medical marijuana patients. The site is expected to go live in April.
The company also owns General Merchant Services, which provides credit card merchant processing services for medical cannibas-related businesses but is also growing into non-cannibas industries, including restaurants, automotive services and health care. The piece of the business produced more than $1.2 million in merchant processing volume in January, up from $700,000 in December.
The topic of medical marijuana is clearly still a touchy one in some parts of the country. But that hasn’t stopped entrepreneurs from seeing the money-making potential of a legalized industry and moving now to position themselves to be in a leadership position down the road. And, certainly, an online presence - including Web sites, mobile apps, Facebook fan pages and Twitter profiles - is a key part of that growth plan, both short-term and long-term.
