Jacqueline CollinsThe seventh year of recreational marijuana sales in Colorado promises to be an interesting one, with new laws allowing social consumption establishments and weed delivery, as well as new industry rules mandating more product testing while restricting vaping ingredients.
Thomas Mitchell | Toke of the TownAbout six months ago, a Reddit user posted a photo of a sign pretending to peddle fake CBD-infused firewood. The Internet reacted as you’d expect, shaking a collective fist and rabble-rousing over something that was clearly intended as funny commentary concerning exactly what the Reddit readers thought they were mad about: CBD is being used and abused.
Jay VollmarEric Jensen feels trapped. By now, the 43-year-old thought he’d be able to travel from his home in southeastern Colorado to see his son play college ball in the Midwest. But instead, he can’t cross the border into Kansas. He’s stuck hanging around his home town, where most of the residents have turned their backs on him, believing that he’s a hardened drug dealer. Instead, he’s facing criminal charges for something that’s completely legal in Colorado: hemp.
Jacqueline CollinsColorado has somehow managed to survive six years of recreational cannabis sales without burning down. But even so, there were plenty of hot, skunky issues to cover in 2019.
This year, the Colorado Legislature further established this state as an epicenter of cannabis, passing laws that expanded medical marijuana access and legalized social use businesses, such as pot cafes and smoking lounges. The state also continued in its role as a guinea pig of regulation and cannabis culture, dealing with challenges ranging from moldy pot to equitable industry participation.
After trimming our way through the year’s stories, we landed on these as the ten biggest in 2019:
WestwordAs America’s knowledge about the plant grows, the range of subjects our Stoner handles have expanded. While most of the questions we received in previous years asked such things as how to roll a joint or if it’s possible to boof marijuana (it is, but be careful), 2019 queries ventured into slightly more intellectual subjects, such as the recent vaping health crisis, or what the point of useless “indica” and “sativa” designations really is.
Scott LentzRemember 2012? Peyton Manning had started his first season with the Broncos, and none of us knew jack about CBD. Seven years later, most of us still know jack about CBD, but at least we recognize how ignorant we are about that and other cannabis compounds.
Herbert FuegoWe all have weird personal connections to certain words that cause us to hate them. I’m not talking about squirming when you hear “moist,” but about opinions that date from childhood, like my dislike for “hemlock.” Even before I knew the word’s definition, hemlock sounded like some fatal coughing disease from the 1600s, or a foreboding local swamp in which Timmy Flanagan drowned.
Lauren AntonoffBuilding gingerbread houses in elementary school usually involved fastening stale cookies to a milk carton, gluing some gumdrops and mints onto your uneven shack with frosting, and watching Frosty the Snowman for the 23rd time. Wasn’t it the best?
Forgetting the fun, childlike traditions of the holidays is a quick way to become a Grinch. In an effort to preserve the holiday spirit during such tough times, we decided to infuse a gingerbread house with about as much weed as we could.
Jacqueline CollinsThe Coffee Joint, the first establishment to hold a cannabis consumption license in Denver, is now the second pot lounge business to apply for a state social consumption license.
Colorado Springs social lounge Studio A64 successfully applied for a social consumption license at the state Marijuana Enforcement Division office three hours before Coffee Joint owners Rita Tsalyuk and Kirill Merkulov could beat them to it.