Marijuana is now legal in more than half the country, but related areas of the law are taking a while to catch up. Women are still being punished for exposing their babies to marijuana; under child-abuse and child-neglect statutes, women can be arrested for child endangerment or have their babies taken away.
Even so, little is known about whether an infant can be harmed if an expectant mother uses marijuana during pregnancy or after birth. Dr. Thomas Hale is working to change that.
On Saturday, March 4, Curious Appetites hosted a cannabis-infused dinner at Cluster Studios that took everyone down the rabbit hole. An “Eat me” sign sat on the edibles table; on the bar was a sign that said, “Drink me,” and on the dab bar, a sign urged guests to “Smoke me.”
Those guests were given an hour to mingle, then invited to sit down at a long, single table, where chef Hosea Rosenberg and his staff from Blackbelly served a four-course meal, paired with four strains of cannabis. Hungry to know more? Here are ten tips for an Alice in Wonderland-themed dinner.
The Trump administration picked an unfortunate hashtag for President Donald Trump’s speech to Congress on February 28: #JointSession. In honor of that joint session, here are some of our favorite joint-session pictures on Instagram this week.
After Attorney General Jeff Sessions told an assembly of the country’s attorneys general that state marijuana laws are in violation of federal law, Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman came out fighting for this state’s rights.
Coffman, a Republican, said that while the Trump administration’s intentions regarding marijuana are unclear, she plans to uphold the Colorado Constitution — including Amendment 64, which legalized the recreational sale and use of marijuana in 2012.
Colorado was the first state in the country to allow the purchase of recreational cannabis. Now it could be the first to allow consumption in “pot clubs.”
Senate Bill 184, titled Private Marijuana Clubs Open and Public Use, would allow local municipalities to authorize privately owned marijuana clubs, and the proposal crossed the first hurdle this week. After a hearing that took more than three hours, the Republican-held state Senate’s Business, Labor and Technology Committee approved the bill in a bipartisan five-to-two vote.
New cannabis consumers are often attracted to edibles but wonder how much is too much. To help both Colorado native newbies and the many tourists who visit Colorado and have questions about edible potency, industry officials and state regulators have worked to educate people on edible consumption limits.
Some cannabis companies have determined that the best way to handle any uncertainty is simply to create edible products with less THC. California companies Kiva and W!NK, for example, have begun developing product lines that will allow people to microdose.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer tied the regulated marijuana industry to opioid addiction last week. At a press briefing, he told reporters: “I think that when you see something like the opioid addiction crisis blossoming in so many states around this country, the last thing that we should be doing is encouraging people…. There’s still a federal law that we need to abide by when it comes to recreational marijuana and other drugs of that nature.”
Opioid addiction is a well-documented epidemic in the United States; 33,000 people died from overdosing on prescription painkillers, heroin and similar drugs in 2015 — a number on par with those killed by firearms and those who died in car accidents in the same year. But opioid use is down in Colorado, the first state to legalize recreational marijuana.
Ever since Donald Trump nominated Senator Jeff Sessions to serve as attorney general, industry advocates have worried that Sessions might use his new position to crack down on marijuana.
At his confirmation hearing last month, Sessions was evasive when asked what he would do as attorney general now that 60 percent of Americans live in a state where marijuana is legal — 28 states in all. He said he would fall in line with the administration’s stance on marijuana; because Trump had made supportive comments about medical marijuana on the campaign trial and did not come out against recreational marijuana, the industry took that to mean that the administration would not pursue legal action against the industry.
After White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said that we should expect “greater enforcement” of marijuana laws, particularly regarding recreational sales, Colorado politicians responded.
Governor John Hickenlooper appeared on MSNBC on February 24 and then on Meet the Press on February 26 when he was in Washington, D.C., for a governors’ conference. During both appearances, he noted that he did not approve of marijuana legalization when it passed in Colorado, adding that he continues to be wary despite the fact that legal marijuana raked in over $1.3 billion in sales last year in this state alone.
This week the Trump administration dropped a bomb on the cannabis industry when press secretary Sean Spicer said the marijuana industry should expect “greater enforcement” from the federal government.
This stance is in direct opposition to statements Trump had made on the campaign trail regarding marijuana, and other signs from the administration since his election. Here’s a roundup of what Trump has said on the issue, coverage of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s comments since his appointment, and follows on Spicer’s comments this week.