By Michael R. Blood, AP

Most Californians with an urge to smoke a joint will enter the state’s legal marijuana marketplace through a single doorway — at a retail shop.

But out of view of those day-to-day sales, the state is ushering in a sprawling, untested system to move pot from place to place that will also serve as a collection point for taxes, a gateway for testing and a packaging center for the plant’s fragrant buds.

The so-called marijuana distributor is a kind of skeleton connecting the state’s emerging industry of growers, sellers and manufacturers. It’s envisioned as a vast back office where the grunt work of keeping track of cannabis and getting it from farms to store shelves will take place.

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