Colorado lawmakers considering limiting concentrates in knee-jerk reaction to recent pot scare

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Pot paranoia has been quickly sweeping through the Colorado state legislature, with lawmakers crafting whatever schemes they can to butt in where they aren’t needed in order to combat a non-existent problem.
Case-in-point: last week the Denver coroner made a political statement by including marijuana consumption as a major contributing factor to the suicide-like
death of a 19-year-old college student who had consumed a pot cookie
. As any cannabis consumer can tell you, marijuana doesn’t make you forget the laws of physics nor does it turn people into raging maniacs bent on causing harm to others or themselves.


But the story sure worked to scare the Colorado legislature, which is now considering limiting marijuana concentrates based on an arbitrary amount that they plan to come up with down the line. Colorado state Rep. Jonathan Singer has introduced House Bill 1361 that would establish just how much hash or concentrates is equal to an ounce of dried flowers then impose limits on how much hash or concentrates people could purchase.
“An ounce of concentrate is a significant amount – it’s probably close to about 10 times the amount that you would have in an ounce of the flowers,” Singer told Denver’s CBS news.
So under Singer’s bill, legislators would likely look at how much concentrate can be produced from an ounce. Assuming a 15 percent return on bud using a butane-extraction process, that would mean a little over 4 grams of hash is all anyone could get. Out-of-state visitors limited to a quarter-ounce per transaction would only be able to purchase a little over a gram or so.
Singer apparently has the support of a group of Colorado recreational and medical marijuana representatives, the Medical Marijuana Industry Group. The group, which refuses to divulge their membership or even member numbers, has regularly lobbied for stricter regulations in the name of keeping the federal government appeased.
However, the medical marijuana laws in the Colorado state constitution seems to make it pretty clear for medical patients that they can possess “No more than two ounces of a usable form of marijuana”. It doesn’t specify that it has to be flowers, and concentrates are most certainly a “usable form of marijuana”. Colorado’s recreational laws were based off of that and the state’s recreational constitutional laws likewise include marijuana concentrates in the definition of marijuana, and make no distinction between the two in terms of the one-ounce limit for possession.
But still, Singer thinks it’s his job to interfere with voter-approved measures protect you from yourself. Forget the fact that only a small percentage of people have negative reactions to concentrates, and even then they aren’t life threatening in any way. You fall asleep. He also somehow figures it will help keep people from shipping concentrate out-of-state.
“The best way to have marijuana leave the state if I was a bad actor, if someone’s a bad actor in this, is they wouldn’t take the flowers out, or the bud out, they would take the concentrate out,” he said.
Never mind the fact that people can always go back and purchase more concentrates with more visits to a dispensary and stopping people from transporting marijuana didn’t work back during outright prohibition and it certainly won’t work now.
Colorado lawmakers instead should be focusing on actual problems facing the state, like wildfire protection and fixing the crumbling highway infrastructure.

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