Denver, Colorado. The Mile High City. Call it America’s Amsterdam. Ground zero for cannabis legalisation and home to a budding tech sector in what could be called the Silicon Valley of Weed.

In High Country, Motherboard heads West to see about the new green rush. We’ll visit some of the key players working to scale up tomorrow’s smart, low-footprint grow and extraction technologies, inadvertently crash a harvest of cartoonishly dank medicinal AK-47, check the pulse on a fast-growing dab scene and crack open the promising, if scant science of weed, a knowledge base that’s expanding amid ongoing federal prohibition as casual citizen botanists/stoners crowdsource what they know about what they’re picking up. Which is all to say there’s simply no arguing that America’s No. 1 cash crop – to say nothing of a budding weed-support industry, or the millions of people who use herb today as medicine or for recreation (or both) – is being taken to sophisticated and dizzying new heights.