In July 2014, New York State did what few thought possible at the time: Its legislature passed Assembly Bill 6357 (better known as the Compassionate Care Act of 2014), which effectively legalized medical cannabis; a bill Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law.
Less than a week after he did so, Leafly, a cannabis information database, made headlines of its own by running an advertisement in The New York Times' -- the first of its kind in the venerable newspaper's 163-year history.
Cannabis, both as an industry and as a subculture, is quickly coming out of the shadows and entering the mainstream. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the meteoric rise of Leafly, the world's largest online marijuana database.