Pubdate: Sat, 16 May 2015
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Copyright: 2015 The Globe and Mail Company
Contact:  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168
Author: Margaret Wente

IN THE WEEDS

With marijuana's legal status looming over the next federal election, 
Margaret Wente visits the Mile-High City for a taste of what the 
future may hold. One outcome: 'I feel like a much nicer person'

Denver is magical at dawn. Along the western horizon, the snow-capped 
mountains are bathed in pink from the glow of the rising sun. The sky 
is turning purest blue. The air is crisp and clear, and you can see 
forever. What a great place to get stoned. Which I intend to do, as 
soon as possible. In Colorado, recreational marijuana was legalized 
on Jan. 1, 2014. Denver now has more pot stores than it has 
Starbucks. Anyone over the age of 21 can walk into a store and choose 
from hundreds of varieties of flowers, nibbles, marijuana-infused 
drinks, oils, ointments and pain patches, as well as a growing array 
of wax and other supercharged hard-core products. There's even a sex 
lube for women, which promises to deliver the most mind-blowing 
experience of your life.

The sky has not fallen. The revenues are flowing in. Most Coloradans 
- - 58 per cent - favour keeping pot legal, according to a recent 
Quinnipiac University poll. Meanwhile, in Canada, prohibition is a 
bust. Pot is available everywhere, and we are among the biggest 
consumers in the world: According to Health Canada's 2012 Canadian 
Alcohol and Drug Use Monitoring Survey, 41.5 per cent of Canadians 15 
years and older have used marijuana at some point during their 
lifetime. Polls say that two-thirds of Canadians favour relaxation of 
the law or outright legalization. Hardly anyone thinks we should 
criminalize people for having a couple of joints. Even Canada's 
police chiefs have voted overwhelmingly for drug-law reform, and want 
the option to issue a tickets or warnings instead of making arrests. 
Prime Minister Stephen Harper agreed with the chiefs that the law 
isn't working.

Is there any reason for us not to do what Colorado has done?

Purple dreams

I know nothing about modern cannabis. My personal experiences with 
weed are around 40 years out of date. I need a quick lesson to get me 
au courant. So the first thing I do is drop in on Jake Browne, the 
amiable pot critic for The Cannabist, an online newspaper that's 
owned by The Denver Post. He says he has sampled just about every 
strain of weed known to humankind. He is the Robert Parker of the 
marijuana world.

Jake, who's 32, works out of his home, a ramshackle place with a yard 
full of crabgrass. His living room is a blast from the past: a 
classic stoner's den, with fifth-hand couches, a skateboard leaning 
up against the wall, and a blinking Christmas tree (this is March) in 
the corner. I feel as though I'm back in 1974. He keeps his stash - 
actually, they are samples waiting for review - in a brown paper bag 
under the debris-strewn coffee table.

In the bag are a dozen or more samples of lovingly tended, 
hand-harvested, carefully cured weed, each with its own distinctive 
properties. Each sample comes in a plastic pharmacy bottle labelled 
with the name of the strain and its provenance. The flowers are plump 
and grayish-green and glistening with THC. They bear no resemblance 
to the seed- and twig-infested ditchweed I remember smoking in my youth.

The first bottle he opens is labelled Godfather OG. "Growers love 
this because it breeds well," he explains. "It's good to use before 
bedtime." He shows me how to analyze the nose. "Give the flower a 
squeeze to release the cannabinoids. This has rubber and pine tree notes."

I give the flower a squeeze. Sure enough, I can smell rubber pine tree.

Next is Purple Dream. The flowers are the size of ping-pong balls, 
with pretty streaks of blue. "This can be a good mid-afternoon to 
happy hour kind of smoke," he says. It smells luscious, like blackberry.

Not every strain is so divine. He pops open something called 
Strawberry Snow. It smells like a stale armpit. "Bad strains can 
smell flat, green, like an old bale of hay," he explains.

Jake takes me through the basics. The two main types of weed are 
indica and sativa. Indica relaxes you and makes you kind of sleepy. 
Sativa energizes you and makes you feel alert. He recommends pairing 
an experience with a strain. "Say it's movie night," he says. 
"There's a strain for that. If you're going to work out or clean the 
house, there's a strain for that. Or maybe you have trouble eating 
because you're going through chemo. There's a strain for that. 
Cannabis is more of a Swiss army knife than a hammer."

I ask Jake what he'd recommend for me: an inexperienced consumer who 
needs to stay awake long enough to take notes. He makes a couple of 
suggestions, and recommends a dispensary called Good Chemistry, where 
the budtenders are knowledgeable. "Whatever you do, stay away from 
the Durban Poison," he warns.

On the way out, he introduces me to his mother, who's visiting for a 
while from Iowa. His line of work doesn't bother her at all. She's 
thrilled that he's a writer.

Prohibition is dead

In the U.S., the landscape is changing rapidly. Washington, Alaska, 
and Washington, D.C., have all legalized, and dozens of other states 
have referendums in the works for 2016. In California, you can get a 
medical prescription just for the asking. Pot remains illegal under 
U.S. federal law, but the will to enforce that will wane if enough 
states legalize it. Legislators are flocking to Colorado from across 
the nation to find out how it's done.

They're high on the smell of money. Last year, Colorado collected 
$76-million in pot taxes, licences and fees; this year it will be more.

Everyone I spoke with believes that widespread legalization is just a 
matter of time.

In Canada, the gap between the law and reality is getting wider every 
day. In Vancouver, anyone can get a medical licence on the spot, 
which allows them to shop in dozens of unregulated dispensaries to 
their heart's content. You can even buy weed from vending machines. 
Law enforcement across the country has become so uneven that whether 
you're arrested for smoking on the street pretty much depends on 
where you live. It also depends on your socio-economic status. 
Middle-class citizens tend to get a pass, while those in bad 
neighbourhoods do not.

Around 60,000 people are arrested every year in Canada for 
possession, according to a report from Toronto's Centre for Addiction 
and Mental Health (CAMH). First-time offenders can get a maximum 
sentence of a $1,000 fine and six months in jail. At least half a 
million Canadians have a criminal record for possession. Enforcing 
the cannabis laws costs more than a billion dollars a year. Yet 
there's no evidence that these penalties act as a deterrent.

In recent years, the case for prohibition has pretty much collapsed. 
Marijuana is not a monster gateway drug. For casual adult users, it's 
simply not a problem.

In Colorado, the referendum campaign turned on a simple, persuasive 
slogan. "Marijuana: No violence, no hangovers, no carbs!" So why not 
just decriminalize the stuff and leave it at that?

Where all the budtenders are cheery

Good Chemistry is located on a semi-seedy street a few blocks from 
the state capitol building. Pot stores are called "dispensaries," a 
holdover from the days when they sold only to medical patients. Most 
of them have a large green cross to indicate how healthful they are. 
The industry is eager to shed its shady past and position its 
products as healing, pure and scientific.

Good Chemistry's slogan is "science, access, dignity, compassion." 
There are security bars on the frosted-glass door, and you have to 
show your ID to prove your age. Dispensaries need security guards to 
protect the inventory, and also the cash. (Because of federal banking 
regulations, the marijuana industry remains a cash-only business.) A 
long marble-top counter separates the customers from the goods, which 
are tidily arrayed in clear glass jars. Everything is clean and 
spare, almost antiseptic. A display of gleaming glass lab beakers 
accentuates the scientific note.

My budtender is Halley, a cheery young woman with a braid. All the 
budtenders are cheery. Halley says she pretty much uses pot all day 
long. She moved to Colorado from Illinois, where, she says, "I was 
constantly being prosecuted." She loves living here. She has turned 
her dad on to marijuana cookies.

Halley takes me through the indicas and sativas, and I settle on an 
eighth of Master Kush ($30, plus 29 per cent tax). I also buy a 
couple of peanut-butter cookies, a pack of Awakening Mints and a vape 
pen. Vape pens don't emit smoke, only vapour, so you can use them 
anywhere, if you're discreet. They are also good for portion control. 
You can take a drag or two from time to time and stay enhanced for 
hours. My vape pen is pink and has a little vial of hash oil that's 
inserted in it. It comes with a battery recharging cord, which plugs 
into your computer.

It's a long way from the days when I tried to roll a doobie and all 
the stuff spilled out on my lap.

I rush back to my hotel room and decide to start with the cookie. I 
want to be super-careful, because marijuana these days is about four 
times stronger than the stuff I used to smoke. Last fall Maureen 
Dowd, the New York Times writer, came to Denver, overdosed on a 
cookie, and wrote a column about it. Everybody here is mad at her. 
They think she did it on purpose.

I wait for the cookie to kick in, but before it does I fall asleep.

'We don't want Wild West legislation here'

Leading policy experts in both Canada and the United States now 
believe that marijuana should be decriminalized. But they also warn 
that rampant commercialization is incompatible with public health 
objectives. They argue that marijuana production, distribution, sales 
and marketing should be tightly controlled - that is, that it should 
not just be decriminalized but made legal, and brought under the 
regulatory authority of governments.

Simple decriminalization does not address the problem of the criminal 
gangs who sell and profit from it. But most of all, ending 
prohibition is crucial for minimizing the harm marijuana is already doing.

For heavy users, marijuana can do a lot of damage: In February, a 
CAMH study reported that 1.3 per cent of Canadians aged 15 and up 
(380,000 people) "could be considered to be dependent on or to misuse 
cannabis" and estimated that "between 76,000 and 95,000 people 
receive treatment each year for cannabis-related problems."

"If we pull this drug from the underworld into the legal realm, we 
will have a chance to regulate, influence its usage, and try to 
prevent a lot of the harms we are concerned about," says Benedikt 
Fischer, senior scientist at CAMH and a professor of psychiatry at 
the University of Toronto. "We don't want Wild West legalization 
here," he adds. "That's not in the interest of public health."

But in some ways we've already started down that road, he points out. 
In Canada, the medical marijuana market is already commercialized. 
Major players are scrambling to gain a toehold because they're 
betting that legalization for recreational use will come next, just 
as it has in Colorado and Washington.

Last fall CAMH, which supports legalization, came up with a set of 
guidelines, advocating for a state monopoly of the market. Products 
would be priced high enough to curb demand, but low enough to 
discourage the black market. Store hours and locations would be 
limited. Product lines would also be restricted, and higher-potency 
pot would be curtailed. Marketing, advertising and sponsorship would 
be prohibited. There would be plenty of public education to 
discourage misuse and cannabis-impaired driving.

"It is critical that legal reform of cannabis control be conducted 
with public health as its primary objective and that the resulting 
regulatory framework be carefully protected from commercial and 
fiscal interests," the report says.

How effective this would be is unknowable.

In Colorado, Wild West legalization is the way things seem to be 
going. Although it operates under heavy marketing restrictions, the 
entire industry is private. Legal marijuana will one day be hugely 
profitable. And people who want to make money - like those running 
the cigarette or booze industries - are not primarily interested in 
public health. They're interested in maximizing profits and building 
market share, inducing as many people as possible to buy their 
products. As with booze and cigarettes, their biggest profits come 
from addicts. Both alcohol and marijuana show similar consumption 
patterns: Around 20 per cent of the users account for 80 per cent of the use.

The branding exercise

As marijuana goes mainstream, its marketing and public relations have 
become increasingly sophisticated. The new pot dealers are people 
like Meg Sanders, chief executive officer of Mindful, a mini-chain of 
dispensaries, who appeared in an upbeat 60 Minutes piece on 
legalization earlier this year. Ms. Sanders is blonde, wears a 
Patagonia jacket, and looks like a soccer mom. Her message is that 
marijuana isn't really about getting high.

"There are so many healthy benefits to this plant," she enthuses. 
"And there are so many opportunities to treat various ailments and 
conditions or potentially prevent them. There are children now using 
this for seizures. I have people who take this because cancer runs in 
their family, and they are using this product hoping not to get that."

The Mindful store is calm and restful. It reminds me of a yoga 
studio. "Our goal is to create a safe and enjoyable experience to 
purchase cannabis," she says. In marketing jargon, her company's goal 
is to occupy the wellness space, and its strategy is to rebrand pot 
as health food.

"I liken this much more to the supplements market than to alcohol or 
tobacco," she tells me. "For some people it allows you to focus. Or 
it enhances your experience on a hike or enhances your yoga 
experience. There's a huge benefit for women in general, especially 
for women in their 40s and 50s when you're not sleeping that well. 
And it's much safer than a lot of the other alternatives out there."

It's so safe, Ms. Sanders tells me, that her mother uses it. In fact, 
according to the industry executives I met, all their mothers use it. 
"My mom takes it for her arthritis," Ms. Sanders says.

She's clearly doing something right: Mindful's dispensaries are 
grossing $18-million a year.

In fact, the health benefits of cannabis are largely unknown.

There's no doubt that it alleviates certain types of pain, and it's 
excellent for relaxation and stress relief. But until there is a lot 
more research, all other health claims - and they are extravagant - 
should be treated with the utmost skepticism.

In the back room

For now, only a minority of users are soccer moms who are interested 
in healthy mindfulness. They are far outnumbered by young men in 
their 20s who are are interested in getting as wasted as humanly 
possible. Some of them are out to set new records for how much THC a 
single human being can consume, and live to boast about it.

My guide to their world is a woman named Susan Squibb, also known as 
the Cannabis Maven.

Ms. Squibb's day job is operations manager for a testing lab which 
analyzes the purity, pesticide content and THC levels of legal 
marijuana. Her other job is to write a column for The Cannabist. 
There she answers readers' questions on anything from law and 
employment issues to the latest products and social trends.

"I'll take you to a place where we can smoke with other people," she 
says. "It will give you some idea of cannabis culture." She gives me 
an address and tells me to bring my kush and my vape pen.

In Colorado, using cannabis in public is illegal. Pot cafes are not 
allowed (yet). But there are pot speakeasies. And this is one, 
located in the back room of a store that sells cannabis 
paraphernalia. I recognize Susan right away because she's dressed 
like a person who has an office job, and is twice as old as everybody else.

A friendly red-haired kid is at the door to greet us. He gives us a 
six-page waiver to sign that absolves the store of all responsibility 
for whatever is about to happen to us. This is our application for 
membership to the "club." A pungent haze fills the back room, which 
has grungy furniture and a blaring sound system. The tables are 
strewn with rigs, ashes, bits of metal equipment. Two dozen guys in 
their 20s are gathered round the tables. They're dressed alike, in 
baseball caps, tattoos and scraggly facial hair, and they're firing 
away with serious-looking blowtorches.

"Most of these guys are dabbing," Susan tells me. When people tell 
you how harmless marijuana is, they don't mention dabbing. Dabbers 
prefer heavy-duty products such as waxes, shatters, nug runs, and all 
manner of high-potency concentrates - to 90 per cent THC - which they 
put in a rig and blast with heat to make it vaporize. Then they 
inhale the fumes. People say it feels like being shot through outer 
space at warp speed.

Dabbing is a thriving subculture, with customs and rituals and 
specialized gear. You can buy elaborate glass pipes - works of art, 
really. One dabber I met showed me a picture of the pipe he craved. 
It was a metre-long glass sculpture shaped like a machine gun, and 
the price was $12,000.

Susan and I make our way through the dabbing room and find a low 
couch and table where we can pull out our stashes. She gives me a 
disposable cardboard pipe to use, and shows me how to shave some 
flower and tamp it down into the little metal bowl. We light up. I 
inhale, and break out into a coughing fit. "What do you think?" I 
choke, with tears in my eyes. She tries it out and agrees that it's a 
little rough.

I inhale again, gingerly. After two or three draws, my cough subsides 
and I feel relaxed and happy. My entire body seems lighter. The 
effect is like three or four glasses of chardonnay, but without the 
heavy, woozy feel. It's nothing like the stoned sensation I remember, 
when all I wanted to do was curl up into a fetal position and eat 
jelly doughnuts.

I ask Susan how she got to be the Cannabis Maven. Before she can 
answer, a guy in a ball cap stumbles by. He seems seriously wasted. 
Susan offers him some weed, and he gratefully accepts. That's one 
nice thing about marijuana culture. They believe in sharing.

My normal mood state is somewhere between wound up and tightly wound 
up. (Ask anyone.) But after a little weed, I feel benign good will 
toward the entire world. My encrusted layers of inhibition and 
anxiety are gently dissolving. I am serene, yet focused. It strikes 
me that this is the state one hopes to achieve through meditation.

"I feel like a much nicer person," I blurt. "Thank you so, so much." 
It's probably the most intimate confession I have ever made to a 
total stranger.

This is your developing brain on pot

Marijuana causes less human wreckage than alcohol. It makes millions 
of people happy and relieves suffering. So what's the downside?

Dr. Paula Riggs is director of the Division of Substance Dependence 
in the department of psychiatry at the University of Colorado School 
of Medicine. She is an expert on the effects of marijuana on the 
developing brain.

Let's start in utero. Most women who use marijuana are of 
childbearing age. Some pregnant women use it to treat nausea.

Bad idea. "Three longitudinal studies show that babies exposed 
regularly to cannabis in utero had problems from infancy," she says. 
"They have irregular sleep cycles, and they're irritable and harder 
to calm. In preschool they have cognitive deficits and reasoning 
problems. By middle school they show problems with abstract 
reasoning, memory, communication, verbal skills and decision making. 
The bottom line is poor academic performance."

In other words, women who are pregnant should not consume this product.

Then there are the kids who get really sick from eating pot-infused 
cookies and candies that adults leave lying around.

But the biggest problem is among adolescents and young adults: 43 per 
cent of Canada's heavy pot users - the ones described by StatsCan as 
dependent or prone to misuse - are males 15 to 24. It's quite clear 
that cannabis is neurotoxic to brain development, which continues 
through adolescence and into your 20s, Dr. Riggs says.

"THC can disrupt development of the prefontal cortex," she explains. 
"Adolescents who start regularly using marijuana before the age of 17 
have neurocognitive deficits that may not be fully reversible with 
abstinence." Several studies also suggest that cannabis use before 
the age of 18 increases the risk of developing schizophrenia.

The trends in adolescent use are mostly bad. More and more kids 
believe that marijuana is safe. Researchers say that one in six 
adolescents who smoke marijuana regularly will progress to 
dependence, meaning daily or near-daily use. (That compares to one in 
11 adults.) "We have 10 to 15 per cent of adolescents who would 
qualify as abusers," Dr. Riggs estimates. Heavy cannabis use has also 
spiked among males in their 20s - the kind of guys who were dabbing 
at the club. The heaviest users of marijuana are not hipster 
professionals who consume it like fine wine; they are men in their 
20s through early 40s who didn't make it to university.

Great expectations

The U.S. beer industry does $100-billion a year in sales. Pot 
entrepreneurs aim to be the new beer industry.

"Billion-dollar brands will be established in this industry," Tripp 
Keber tells me, and he hopes his will be one of them. Mr. Keber is 
the CEO of Dixie Edibles & Elixirs, the company that made my 
peanut-butter cookie. His real goal is not to satisfy your sweet 
tooth. His goal is to come up with new delivery systems for cannabis.

"The future of cannabis is not the smoke-able kind," he says. He 
shows me the prototype of a new container for his line of marijuana 
drinks. "You can buy an ounce of weed everywhere. But in very few 
places can you reach out and grab this 8.5ounce brushed aluminum 
bottle that offers 75 milligrams of active THC."

Edibles are popular because you can consume them anywhere. You don't 
have to inhale. Also, they offer the option of a lower dose. But 
quality control in the edibles field has been erratic. Two identical 
cookies can have vastly different levels of THC. Dixie wants to 
dominate the market by offering the highest standards. "From balms 
and bath soaks to tinctures and truffles, each of our products offers 
premium, consistent and reliable results you can trust," its 
promotional literature promises.

Its latest product, called Toasted Rooster, is a chocolate bar with 
pepita seeds and artisanal chocolate. It's billed as "cannabis for 
the ganja gourmet." It's not on the market yet so I can't tell you 
how it tastes, but it looks scrumptious.

I ask if he's worried that the big guys will come along and eat his 
lunch. "No!" he says. "They are going to absorb my company. Big 
alcohol and big tobacco will be in this space. And every morning I go 
into my office and put a little lipstick on because I want to look 
good for them."

Andy Williams, the CEO of Medicine Man, has mapped a different road 
to riches. First he's going to expand his dispensaries across the 
state. Then, as other states open up, he'll expand across the 
country. "I want to be the Costco of marijuana," he says.

Mr. Williams is an exuberant, bear-like character in raggedy jeans 
and a Medicine Man T-shirt. He's impossible not to like. He says his 
dispensaries are insanely profitable, but he's plowing it all back 
into the business.

"The key is vertical integration," he tells me. Most of his products 
come from his own grow-op, which occupies a 40,000-square-foot 
warehouse near the airport and produces 6,500 tons of pot a year. The 
state tracks every plant. "As soon as we take a cutting, we add an 
audio frequency identification tag that follows the plant through its life."

Medicine Man currently grows 57 strains of weed. One of the more 
unlikely ones is Cat Piss Romulan. It's named after its aroma - and 
an alien race in

Star Trek.

"The genetics are pretty incredible now," he says, as we stick our 
noses into buckets of freshly harvested pot. It occurs to me that if 
market forces really get a grip, Medicine Man will not be the Costco 
of marijuana. Costco will be the Costco of marijuana.

Despite the exotic-sounding strains, cannabis is destined to become a 
commodity business with commodity prices. Currently, a pound of 
wholesale weed goes for around $1,500. Mr. Williams figures he can 
push the cost down to $800 or less. Beau Kilmer, a marijuana policy 
expert with the Rand Corporation, thinks that, when mass 
industrialization takes hold, the cost could go down to $40.

Here's where public policy and capitalism clash again. To minimize 
consumption, you want to keep the price up. But if you're interested 
in profits, you want to keep the price down and grow the market. On 
the other hand, pot is incredibly cheap to produce, so if the price 
is set too high, the black market will flourish.

Don't let anybody tell you marijuana policy is easy.

You can smoke on the bus

On my last day in Denver, I board the Cannabis Express. It is a 
sleek, 50-foot-long black bus with tinted windows. For $99, it will 
take you and 29 fellow stoners on a five-hour tour of two 
dispensaries, a grow-op and a glass shop that sells a boggling array 
of hand-blown artisanal pipes and rigs. You get discounts. Best of 
all, you can smoke on the bus. All you want.

The bus is still sitting in the parking lot, and already people are 
in a merry mood, breaking out their stashes and passing them around. 
A guy wearing a backward baseball cap offers me a joint. I ask him 
why he's here and find out that he's doing research, too. He grows a 
lot of weed and wants to see how the big guys do it. He tells me he 
can detect a hundred different strains just by their smell.

"Don't forget to hydrate!" says our tour guide, a perky young woman 
in her 20s. She gives us paper wristbands so that we won't get lost. 
People tend to wander off sometimes.

It turns out that half the people on the bus want to get into the 
marijuana business. "I almost have my business plan together but I 
can't talk about it yet," confides a man named Traves. He says he 
moved his family here from Texas so that he could get medical 
marijuana for his chronic back pain. He swears that he's completely 
functional when he's high. "I take conference calls. It's not a problem."

Two women are here from Nebraska. They're sisters. I ask why they 
came on the tour. They think the question is unbelievably dumb. 
"Nebraska is boring," says one.

I notice that Traves is ingesting more weed than I thought possible. 
Eventually he slumps in his seat, incoherent. Everyone else is 
beaming with delight. They agree that this is the best tour they've 
ever taken. The bus heads back to the hotel, where they will gather 
for a final celebratory toke on the roof of the parking garage. 
(Legally it's a private space, so that's okay).

I, alas, must head to the airport. I have a bag of stash I can't take 
home. I ask our tour guide for advice. "Sometimes people give it to 
the homeless," she suggests. I end up giving it to Traves.

Marijuana attained mass popularity as a counterculture drug. It was a 
statement against capitalism and the Man. But if capitalism has its 
way, it will become medication for the masses, just the thing to keep 
them relaxed and happy. For many reasons, legalization is the 
least-bad option. And capitalism will probably be the biggest winner.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom