Author Kate Simmons

On Thursday, January 19, GMC LLC, or Green Man Cannabis, issued a voluntary recall of its bud and other marijuana products, “due to the presence of potentially unsafe pesticide residues.”

There have been no reports of illnesses, and only products at two Green Man Cannabis stores were affected: at 1355 Santa Fe Drive and 7289 East Hampden Avenue, both in Denver.

Check your purchases for the label listing any of these OPC License numbers: 403-00738, 403-00361 or 403R-00201, which are subject to the recall and should be disposed of or returned to the store at which they were purchased.

When Toby Ripson’s dad developed colon cancer and then fought the disease for fourteen years, nothing helped ease his pain better than cannabis — certainly not any pharmaceutical drug. After his dad died, his mother supported Ripson’s using his father’s life-insurance money to build a company that could supply high-quality marijuana to others.

Ripson moved from Idaho to Denver and partnered with Mike Leibowitz to start Veritas Cannabis, the first licensed stand-alone grow operation in Colorado. The team has handcrafted each part of the grow process. It takes longer and is more expensive, but by controlling the environment and paying close attention to each part of the production process, Veritas growers can assure customers that they’ll get the same experience each time they smoke the bud, no matter where they buy it.

On Wednesday, January 18, twenty people gathered on the fourth floor of the Wellington Webb Municipal Building to begin a conversation that no other municipality in the United States has had — about regulating the social use of recreational cannabis.

For two and a half hours at this first meeting of Denver’s Social Use Advisory Committee, the members — all appointed by the city to represent different constituencies — discussed proximity restrictions for social-use establishments. The first hour was spent discussing restrictions on locations that would be allowed to apply for a social-use permit; much of the rest of the conversation focused on ensuring that children would not be exposed.

Lighthouse Cannabis Project launched last June as an initiative of CID Entertainment, with a goal of hosting sightseeing tours. But now it has a new project: music sessions in grows.

“We wanted to bring cannabis and music together in the most literal way possible and actually have musicians play in the grow,” says CID’s Kobi Waldfogel, who has a passion for music and event production. “It’s something we’d been kicking around since we started developing partnerships in the cannabis industry.”

Waldfogel is the city’s event-planning member on the Social Consumption Advisory Council, and he’s leveraging his entertainment contacts to bring them into cannabis spaces, starting with Reed Mathis & Electric Beethoven at Terrapin Care Station.

Playing a Lighthouse session at Terrapin is similar to performing at a radio station, Waldfogel says; the musicians come to the grow and play a set. But the audience is different: A 1962 study by Dr. T.C. Singh found that music, especially classical music, could stimulate plant growth. And while stimulating plants is not the project’s primary goal, Waldfogel says that it can’t hurt to expose the plants to live music.

It’s been a long road for Initiative 300. Last summer, some people doubted that Denver’s social-use provision would pass — and the vote tally wasn’t official until a week after the November 8 election. But now, under the city’s schedule, businesses will have to wait until this summer before they can submit applications for permits. On January 18, Denver’s social-use advisory committee will hold its first meeting, and begin crafting other rules for implementation. To help you catch up, here are links to some of our stories on the action thus far:

Laura Harris directed the Colorado Marijuana Enforcement Division when all the state knew was the medical market. Now she’s joining the Colorado Cannabis Chamber of Commerce (C4) to help businesses work with legislators and understand the laws put in place.

C4 is a nonprofit chamber of cannabis businesses that focuses on policies at the state and local levels of government. It works with companies to help understand cannabis policies and compliance, and provides a forum where industry leaders can meet and be exposed to the goods and services that others in the field are providing.

For the first time, hemp paper is being produced in Colorado from seed to sheet. Loveland’s Tree Free Hemp has been producing hemp paper since 2013, but until this year, it’s been getting the fiber from other countries. Now the entire process is local.

“It’s grown in Colorado, it’s processed in Colorado, it’s manufactured in Colorado, it’s printed in Colorado. It’s truly homegrown,” says Morris Beegle, a former concert promoter now focused on promoting hemp through the Colorado Hemp Company, which he founded in 2012, and the NoCo Hemp Expo.

And so it begins. Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for the country’s next attorney general, took center stage on January 10 at his confirmation hearing. Marijuana supporters had been quick to voice their concern over Sessions’s nomination because of his stance on marijuana, as well as his positions on other social issues.

Sessions’s most recent statements on marijuana were made during a Senate hearing last April, when he said that “good people don’t smoke marijuana,” that “we need grownups in Washington to say marijuana is not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized” and that “it is in fact a very real danger.”