Pubdate: Thu, 05 Feb 2015 Source: Cape Times (South Africa) Copyright: 2015 Cape Times Contact: http://www.capetimes.co.za/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2938 Author: Valerie Hamilton SINCE COLORADO LEGALISED MARIJUANA, CRIME LEVELS THERE HAVE STABILISED A YEAR into Colorado's "great social experiment", legal marijuana is part of the state's mainstream. But Colorado's drug laws are still at odds with its neighbours, and most of the US. Denver's pedestrian mall is the city's busiest shopping district, an all-American high street where crowds bustle between glass-fronted rows of popular retailers. Stores here offer shoppers a high-end array of merchandise, from children's toys to cowboy boots and, since April, legal marijuana, displayed like so many strains of exotic tea in a mood-lit shopfront across from the Sheraton hotel. Euflora Cannabis Dispensary's owner describes its look as "Starbucks meets Apple". The shop has three locations and a Twitter account. Yelp users give it four and a half stars. When Colorado's voters took the historic decision in 2012 to legalise marijuana for recreational use, prognosticators on both sides predicted it would transform the state. Supporters said it would fuel economic development by taxing millions in marijuana sales. Detractors said it would fuel youth consumption, traffic accidents and crime. But more than a year into what Colorado governor John Hickenlooper has called "one of the great social experiments of this century", the state's marijuana business feels like business as usual. "I haven't noticed a difference in the culture," Ashley Kilroy, executive director of marijuana policy for the city of Denver, told dpa. "I think for the people who live and work here... it's not that big of a deal." The smattering of data produced in the first year of legal sales of recreational marijuana is hard to parse. Police have issued fewer citations for marijuana possession, Kilroy says, but more for public consumption. Crime was up slightly in Denver compared to 2013, but traffic fatalities were down. The main problems authorities faced were ones no one had predicted: overdoses of edible marijuana products and home explosions from cannabis extraction accidents. Kilroy said Denver's fire department was now "the expert in the world" on cannabis extraction safety. In October 2014, the state took in more than $60 million (R684m) in taxes on recreational marijuana and fees related to business operations - just more than half of the $100m (R1140m) proponents had projected. Economists differ on where those numbers could go. What's clear is that Colorado's marijuana business is growing into the mainstream. Although consumption in public is illegal, adults over 21 can now buy marijuana at more than 380 shops across the state. In Denver, there are more than four times as many marijuana sellers - 205 - as there are Starbucks coffee outlets. One in four Coloradans uses marijuana, according to a December 2014 poll by the Denver Post, which has a full-time marijuana editor and a website, The Cannabist, with marijuana-related news and lifestyle articles, including recipes for marijuana mayonnaise. But the very normality of Colorado's cannabis sector has a through-the-looking-glass quality, in the context of a country where marijuana remains illegal under federal and most state drug laws. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, a reform advocacy group, 609,423 people were arrested for marijuana possession in the US in 2013, the year Colorado was processing its first retail licences. While federal law gives states wide leeway in setting their own rules, the vast distance between Colorado's legal pot and drug laws elsewhere is uncharted territory. And the neighbouring states of Nebraska and Oklahoma are unhappy about pot illegally crossing over the border and in December 2014 sued Colorado to stop it. The Obama administration has directed federal prosecutors to leave state-legal marijuana alone. But banks have still shied away from marijuana business clients, fearing they could violate money laundering laws. As a result, many marijuana businesses operate entirely in cash, even paying monthly taxes with shopping bags full of bills, Kilroy says. "It's an unstable environment," Michael Elliott, director of the Marijuana Industry Group, a trade organisation, told dpa. "It's creating a bunch of safety, accountability and transparency problems." As the marijuana sector grows, these problems may become more pressing. The legal marijuana business in the US, including recreational and medical marijuana sales, grew 74% in 2014, to $2.7 billion (R30.77bn), according to a new report by ArcView Market Research, a marijuana research and investment group in San Francisco. Recreational marijuana use and sales are legal in Colorado and Washington states. Alaska, Oregon and Washington, DC, passed recreational marijuana laws in 2014. Twenty-eight additional states allow marijuana for medical use, with varying restrictions. A Gallup poll in November 2014 showed that 51% of Americans supported legalising marijuana entirely. But Loretta Lynch, President Barack Obama's nominee to head the Department of Justice, responsible for enforcing federal drug laws, told a Senate confirmation hearing in January that she did not. Asked what advice she would give a state considering marijuana legalisation, she said they should be informed that federal narcotics laws would still be enforced by the Department of Justice. Sapa-dpa - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom