According to a recently published study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, youth marijuana use decreased in the nation’s first three states to legalize recreational pot.
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Denver no longer has the distinction of being the only major city with retail marijuana dispensaries, but that hasn’t stopped weed from flying off the shelves here. This city has seen almost $2.4 billion in marijuana sales since the first retail dispensary opened on January 1, 2014, according to our calculations based on Colorado Department of Revenue data.
America was pretty late to the party, but the federals finally figured out (again) that hemp doesn’t get us high. By removing the plant from the Controlled Substances Act via an amendment to the 2018 Farm Bill, Congress cleared a path for American companies interested in using hemp and its extracts and fibers to source those materials domestically. And retailers selling those products in this country can now do so without fear of law enforcement and regulatory interference.
Congress made long-awaited history this week when it put language that would legalize industrial hemp in the 2018 Farm Bill, which President Donald Trump is expected to sign into law.
Shortly after Amendment 64 passed on November 6, 2012, the flood of questions began. How much pot can I buy from a dispensary at one time? How many plants can I grow in my house? Why do I want to eat half my body weight in fried chicken after I smoke? To answer all of these inquiries effectively, Westword created a new position: the Stoner.
Though he doesn’t look like the sharpest tool in the shed, our Stoner has been here for all of your cannabis questions since it was legalized recreationally. Questions have ranged far and wide in the five years since voters spoke up (and toked up); keep reading for links to the the ten most interesting, relevant and ridiculous we’ve received:
Being a cannabis critic isn’t all joints and blow jobs. Some of these strains are hard to understand, especially for an outsider to the industry. Amendment 64 passed five years ago, in November 2012, and Denver now houses over 200 retail pot shops and MMJ dispensaries, with hundreds more around Colorado. How could one person possibly profile everything they stock?
Public opinion of cannabis has shifted rapidly over the past five years; since Coloradans voted to legalize recreational marijuana in November 2012, seven other states and Washington, D.C., have also voted to legalize cannabis for adult use. And the rest of the country apparently approves, according to a new Gallup poll that shows Americans favor legalization at a higher rate than ever before.
Andrew Freedman lost his job in January, but it wasn’t because of poor performance. In fact, the Colorado director of marijuana coordination was let go for just the opposite reason: He’d been hired to implement the state’s framework of rules and industry regulations for recreational marijuana, and he’d done such a good job that the state was eliminating the job entirely.
Editor’s note: The July 25 post “Shawn Geerdes’s Marijuana-Grow Murder Used to Attack Legal Pot” asserted that 18th Judicial District DA and 2018 Colorado gubernatorial candidate George Brauchler had attempted to score political points with anti-cannabis critics by way of post-prosecution statements such as, “Here is yet another violent crime related to marijuana. Whatever benefits there may be from the legalization of marijuana, eradicating violent crime associated with it is not one of them.” Here’s his response.
Kevin Sabet, the president and CEO of Virginia-based Smart Approaches to Marijuana, has become arguably the most influential critic of marijuana legalization in the United States. But in an extended interview on view below, he fights against the perception that he’s a one-dimensional prohibitionist along the lines of U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sabet stresses that he and his organization, shorthanded as SAM, take what he sees as a sensible approach to cannabis by arguing in favor of treatment rather than jail time for users in trouble and advocating for greater study of the substance to determine the best ways to utilize it medically.