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SANTA ROSA — Amid the euphoria of this weekend’s famed Emerald Cup weed fest, there was this creeping buzzkill: the glacial rollout of legalization.

Right when it seems like “The Great Pot Moment” is upon us, it turns out there are a lot of really tough regulatory issues to resolve first, according to government and industry experts who sketched out all the thorny challenges at the two-day conference, competition and harvest celebration at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds.

And implementation of commercialization could be delayed a year until 2019, said insiders.

Proposition 64, approved by voters in November, promised that, by Jan. 1, 2018, a recreational smoker could stroll into a licensed store to buy a favorite strain of White Widow or OJ Kush. A medical marijuana law, the Medical Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act, is moving along a similar timeline.

For the 23,000 cannabis aficionados at the festival, even that wait seems unreasonably long, considering people have been weaving hemp into loincloths for thousands of years.

What’s the challenge? Just as the prohibition on cannabis was complicated, so is the process of ending it, experts said.

Read the full story here, and go to TheCannifornian.com for the latest on California’s recreational and medicinal cannabis law.