Author Kate Simmons

The February 1 press conference about the arrest of Joshua Cummings in the execution-style killing of RTD security officer Scott Von Lanken took place on an upper level of the Denver Police Department administration building. Afterward, I rode an elevator toward the ground floor with DPD public-information officer Doug Schepman and another man. As we descended, the man asked, “Do the elevators here always smell like weed?”

Schepman laughed. “Some days are worse than others,” he said.

Banking issues have been a major stumbling block for the cannabis industry, with banks refusing to work with marijuana-related companies for fear of coming under scrutiny of federal regulators. So far, attempts to clear up that conflict have gone nowhere in Congress — but now a former federal government employee has come up with a partial solution: Tokken, an app for both customers and dispensaries that was recently named a finalist for the 2017 SXSW Interactive Innovation Award.

A former banker for Merrill Lynch, Lamine Zarrad came to Colorado in 2014 as a regulator with the U.S. Treasury. He soon became the department’s liaison between the cannabis industry and Washington, D.C., helping to address fiscal concerns of both the federal government and Colorado businesses. That led to his working with compliance experts in the financial sector to try to untangle the banking issue.

No pain, no gain: Sunday’s Super Bowl was a bruiser. No doubt plenty of the game’s players are in pain today — pain that might be alleviated with medical marijuana. Here are ten NFL players who have voiced their support for marijuana.

Leah Heise is sitting in a green room behind the stage of the Ellie Caulkins Opera House, by a wide mirror that takes up the entire wall beneath a row of round-bulb makeup lights. Countless performers have prepared for the stage in this room, but now it’s Women Grow’s turn to shine.

Women Grow, founded in Denver in 2014, was created to connect entrepreneurs in cannabis with other thought leaders and empower the next generation of cannabis businesswomen.  The organization is hosting its annual Leadership Summit in Denver right now; women and men from all over the country came to share their stories, network and learn more about what it means to be an entrepreneur in cannabis.

We sat down with Women Grow CEO Heise to learn more about the organization and her plans for 2017.

Advocacy for cannabis at the national level is more important now than ever before, said Aaron Smith, executive director of the National Cannabis Industry Association, as he opened NCIA’s Seed to Sale Show on January 31.

NCIA ensures that cannabis-industry professionals have a voice and a seat at the table in Washington D.C., Smith noted as he explained not only how NCIA represents the cannabis industry in D.C., but how the organization plans to protect cannabis at the national level — and how the industry in Colorado can help.

Mowgli Holmes gave the keynote at the Seed to Sale Show in Denver on January 31, and he taught the crowd a thing or two — or six — about cannabis. Holmes is the co-founder and chief scientific officer at Phylos Bioscience, which has created a web of over a thousand cannabis strains. The web links strains that are in the same family and provide growers and consumers with scientific knowledge about the plant that has never been documented in one place before.

Here are those six things we learned from the keynote: