On Nov. 20, Alaska's Marijuana Control Board voted to allow consumption of cannabis at licensed retail dispensaries. Alaska was the fourth state to legalize cannabis, and if signed into law, it would become the first to allow consumption outside of residential homes and private property. The vote was close (3-2), and it needs the signature of Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott, but if it holds, the law would go in effect early next year. And it would really up the ante for other legal states, Colorado included, to figure out ways to provide places for people, especially tourists, to use cannabis anywhere other than their own or friends' homes. [continues 647 words]
A new medical marijuana dispensary aimed at seniors just jumped through another hoop in its bid for acceptance in Berkeley, California. Hopeful proprietor Sue Taylor says her business, if approved, would provide services for seniors with compatible medical strains and remedies alongside health and information classes aimed at the fast-growing retirement crowd. It would be the first, she says, in the nation. It's not like everybody will immediately start inhaling the day after they stop working, but the baby boom generation is still the pig in the python of American demographics. About 10,000 Americans turn 65 today, and about 10,000 more will be crossing that river every day for the next 19 years. That's an enormous potential market. [continues 672 words]
Marijuana is all the rage these days. Everybody is saying it's going to be a major campaign issue in 2016, as citizens in many states contemplate initiatives and begin to collect signatures to legalize medical and/or recreational cannabis. Every presidential candidate is being grilled about it, and each has a different take. On the Republican side Rand Paul supports medical marijuana, access to banking services and the right for states to make their own choices. Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson and Lindsey Graham would be open to legalizing medical but not recreational marijuana. Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Rick Santorum oppose legalization of any kind, while Carly Fiorina stops at anything beyond decriminalization. [continues 653 words]
What a long, strange trip it's become, even though it's just been a little more than a month. Boulder City Council decided to take a look at its cannabis regulations, and the first of three readings took place Sept. 30. For the most part, municipalities and counties in Colorado that allow cannabis sales adopted the state regulations written after the passage of Amendment 64. For whatever reasons, the City of Boulder came up with its own complex set of rules, which often differ from the state's. Confusion over the differences was at least one reason to prompt the reconsideration. [continues 738 words]
Among the reasons I supported Amendment 64 was the provision that the first $40 million of tax revenues each year would go toward school construction projects. There are schools in our state that need it, and I liked the tie-in to education. What I and many others who voted yes didn't count on was a mechanism in the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights that might keep those funds from getting anywhere close to an institution of learning. In 2013 voters approved Amendment AA, which allowed the state to collect sales and excise taxes on cannabis. Under TABOR, the state has to provide an estimate of how much revenue any new tax will bring in the first year. The state was pretty close in its estimation of the first year's cannabis numbers, but it was off on its guesstimate for the overall state budget, as it turns out, by about the amount of revenue the marijuana tax brought in. [continues 659 words]
Boulder City Council is considering broad changes to its marijuana rules and regulations. The first reading was Sept. 30, with a second reading scheduled for later this month or early November. And this time around, it appears that Council wants to help rather than hinder cannabis businesses. The reconsideration began at the urging of Councilman Macon Cowles, who listed at least 40 "stress points" for cannabis businesses in a Hotline memo last month. He asked city staff to scrap Boulder's current rules, conform to state regulations for operations and compliance and limit the City's involvement to processing of applications and inspections. He also asked staff to provide a schedule of fines and an administrative review process for challenges to fines and citations. The reasoning is that Boulder voted overwhelmingly for legal cannabis, and though the City took a hard approach at the outset, it needs to let these mom-and-pop businesses succeed by making regulations strict, clearly understood and fair. [continues 635 words]
A week ago Friday, lawyers for Richard Kirk, a Denver man who is charged with the murder of his wife after eating a cannabis edible during a domestic disturbance in April 2014, changed his original plea from not guilty to not guilty by reason of insanity. The pot made him do it. Had he not ingested a marijuana edible, he wouldn't have murdered his wife, Kristine, who was on the phone with 911 when she was shot. It's a horrible story. Police reports indicate that the incident took place at home while their three sons were present. According to a police affidavit for a search warrant, Richard Kirk bought a Bubba Kush joint and a 100-milligram piece of Karma Kandy Orange Ginger taffy at a store on South Colorado Boulevard. He apparently ate some or all of the candy, came home, began arguing with his wife and acting irrationally, cutting his legs on broken glass, before unlocking the gun safe and shooting his wife in the head. [continues 602 words]
Last week Larry Wilmore did a skit on The Nightly Show that showed how Fox News can take a falsehood (in the sketch, it's a poll that shows 58 percent of Americans believe that cop killings are on the rise, when statistics actually show they are falling), give it a title (the "war on police"), repeat the meme over and over, have a couple of talking heads connect it to something else (the Black Lives Matter movement), and finally show Ted Cruz and Scott Walker blaming the rise in violence against cops on President Barack Obama. [continues 672 words]
The state of Ohio announced recently that enough voters had been certified to put Marijuana Legalization Initiative Issue 3 on the 2015 ballot. If passed, it would allow citizens over 21 to buy recreational and medical marijuana much as we do here. Proposed by a group called ResponsibleOhio, it is fairly consistent with legalization measures in other states. Ohio currently does not allow medical marijuana, so the state would be the first to create medical and recreational rules and regulations simultaneously. Medical marijuana facilities would be not-for-profit, and more than 1,000 outlets will sell retail marijuana around the state. Backers tout $120 million in law-enforcement savings and a ton of revenue for state and local municipalities. If it passes, the group plans a "Fresh Start Act" on the 2016 ballot that would end convictions for cannabis offenders in prison for criminal acts that would now be legal. [continues 660 words]
One of the things that has fascinated me over the years is why so many people are so intent on not allowing me or millions of other Americans to use marijuana. Think about it. Since the days when Richard Nixon was president and the Controlled Substances Act became law, the United States government has been trying desperately to stop me and lots of other people from doing something they find enjoyable and that seems pretty benign, especially when measured against the alternatives. So pleasurable, in fact, that millions are willing to continue to break the law to do it. [continues 744 words]
As more states and countries begin to engage in the issues associated with marijuana prohibition, it's important that lawmakers and citizens alike have the best possible information to be able to make wise decisions in public policy and in our everyday lives. We don't know everything about cannabis yet. After decades of inactivity in the U.S., it needs serious, objective study. That said, it's pretty frustrating to see some of the often-repeated crap being produced on the subject today. In too many cases, it appears that the difference between "causality" and "link between" aren't part of the journalistic pallet anymore. If there's a link, there is cause. [continues 691 words]
When first experimenting in the 1970s, I immediately began reading everything I could on the subject of marijuana. And right from the beginning, what I was finding, especially the material coming from the newly minted Drug Enforcement Agency, was not in sync with what I was experiencing with the product. My favorite from that period is the old saw about marijuana robbing you of incentive. While it might have been a familiar stereotype back in the "be sure to hide the roaches" days, it didn't correspond to anything that was happening to me. If anything, I was toking up and getting really motivated. Once you got past the "I got stoned, and I missed it" cliches and Cheech and Chong routines, cannabis was no hindrance to motivation, and I found it laughable - still do - that it was even part of the conversation. If a person wasn't naturally motivated, pot might not work positively, but it wasn't the drug's fault. As an artist told Sanjay Gupta on one of his "Weed" specials, "It's my favorite way to work." [continues 581 words]
One of the conundrums surrounding the implementation of Amendment 64 is that while you can buy marijuana in Colorado, there aren't many places where you can legally use it in a social setting. Citizens are pretty much limited to their homes or a friend's house or backyard. For a tourist, it's even more vexing: you're often stuck with using it in your hotel room, not the most attractive place to enjoy the benefits of either cannabis or Colorado. [continues 677 words]
The City of Boulder released its latest sales and use tax revenue report in July. It compares tax revenues from January to May of 2014 to the same period this year. The numbers show that Boulder is booming. Total sales tax revenue is up an impressive 6 percent from the first five months of last year, with computer-related businesses up 31 percent; Gunbarrel commercial by 20 percent; food stores and downtown Boulder by almost 11 percent each. But when it comes to marijuana, the percentage leaps are more spectacular. Together, medical and recreational marijuana make up 2.21 percent of the sales tax revenue collected by the city. That's a total for this year through May of $1,932,108. [continues 693 words]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its report on a 19-yearold male student who leapt to his death from a Denver hotel window after ingesting a marijuana cookie in March 2014. The report, "Notes from the Field: Death Following Ingestion of an Edible Marijuana Product - Colorado, March 2014," took 16 months to complete, but it seems more perfunctory than revelatory. And it leaves too many questions unanswered. (Read the full report at 1.usa.gov/1MJNbDP.) The incident, not surprisingly, received immense press attention since it happened less than three months after the state began selling recreational cannabis. Despite the exposure, real information about what happened that night has been sketchy. I was really looking forward to a more complete explanation. [continues 683 words]
In part one of my interview with Rep. Jonathan Singer last week, he talked about changes the Colorado legislature made to Amendment 64 during the 2015 session. He figures lawmakers will be revising cannabis laws for a long time to come. "These are some of the million tweaks we will be making because we are a growing society," said Singer, the representative for House District 11. "I ran three liquor bills this year. We've had legal liquor in the state for almost a century, and we're still perfecting it." [continues 687 words]
When I interviewed Rep. Jonathan Singer last October, he was gearing up for the 2015 legislative session. It adjourned in May, and I decided to check in and find out more about what happened this time around. "It's fascinating how marijuana has threaded its way through Colorado's legislative tapestry, and it's an interesting thread," Singer, who represents House District 11, said last week at a local coffee shop. A non-user, Singer was one of only two legislators who supported Amendment 64 before its passage and has become a proponent and advocate of making legal cannabis work in Colorado. [continues 700 words]
Having lived here nearly half my life, I frequent local businesses and want them to succeed and thrive. I'm proud to support companies that call Boulder home, too, - shops and stores that are part of the fabric of the community and who call me by my first name. Chain stores serve their function, but we all know a viable city needs to be built around a strong homegrown business community. Cannabis stores have now been open for a year and a half, and as a consumer, I'm especially eager to see local businesses thrive, especially the ones that came onboard at the beginning and took the chance to operate a legitimate business for a substance illegal under federal law beneath a confusing labyrinth of uncertain legal, financial and existential challenges. I'm just not that excited to see marijuana business, especially in Boulder, become just another string of corporate stores. In this case, smaller and local is better. [continues 667 words]
A recent survey from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment found that 13.6 percent of Coloradans admitted to using marijuana in the last month, about twice the 7.4 percent of Americans who acknowledge using cannabis on national surveys. As anyone who reads this column knows, I'm not a big fan of surveys. Yes, they do provide some kind of snapshot, but since cannabis is illegal for most Americans, just how honest do you think they are going to be on a survey? Since it's now legal in Colorado, more people are probably willing to admit that they use cannabis than might have a few years ago. So let's take all these data with a grain of hemp. [continues 701 words]
The Colorado Supreme Court Monday dealt the final legal blow to a Colorado man's plea to keep his job after failing a random drug test administered by his employer in 2010. Brandon Coats, a quadriplegic who has a medical marijuana card and uses cannabis at home to help control leg spasms, had been a customer service representative of DISH Network until the drug test, for which he tested positive for THC. Coats admitted that he was a medical marijuana patient and would continue to use the drug, so he was fired. [continues 725 words]
