Browsing: Cannabusiness

Add this year’s Girl Scout cookies season to a long list of blown opportunities for me. I walked by more than a dozens stands of Thin Mints, Tagalongs and Do-si-dos outside of grocery stores, breweries and even pot shops, but I kept abstaining, confident there would be another time to buy. Alas, now that time is gone, and my freezer never saw one box of Thin Mints.

Luckily for me, Denver’s dispensary scene is still providing chances to purchase Do-Si-Dos, but this version is getting stuffed into pipe bowls, not dipped in glasses of milk.

When buying cannabis from a dispensary, asking the employees what they think of the product is common practice. But to be able to answer those questions honestly, the employees must sample the product first — and none of those samples are free.

Because of Colorado’s seed-to-sale tracking system for commercial cannabis, which monitors every cannabis product from the moment the seed is planted to the moment it’s sold to the customer, as well as a 2015 ruling from the Marijuana Enforcement Division that prohibits licensed pot businesses from giving away cannabis samples, all of those products must be sold. And because of that, any employee samples must be paid for.

Keith Villa was working at Coors Brewing in 1995 when he created an unfiltered, Belgian-style beer that became the inspiration for the Blue Moon Brewing Company, which got its start as a special division in Golden and soon spread to locations at Coors Field and then RiNo. When the brewmaster retired from what’s now MolsonCoors early this year, he hinted that he had a plan to create a new beverage with “cutting-edge” ingredients.

And now we know what those are: Villa and his wife, Jodi, have partnered with an established Colorado cannabis extraction lab to start Ceria Beverages, a new line of THC-infused drinks with the “same onset time as alcohol,” according to a press release announcing the company’s launch.

Back in February, Cory Gardner and Michael Bennet were among the eighteen senators who urged the Senate Committee on Appropriations to “respect states’ laws regarding the regulation of marijuana.” But this week, those laws didn’t get any respect.

In the wake of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ rescinding the Cole Memorandum and other Obama-era protections, the senators’ goal was to make sure that states that have legalized recreational marijuana, such as Colorado, would be protected from punitive action by the Department of Justice. “It is our hope that the fiscal year 2018 appropriations will alleviate the turbulence the attorney general’s abrupt decision has caused and that the appropriations will help preserve the strong regulatory frameworks the states have created,” they wrote.

When President Donald Trump implemented the sweeping 2018 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, most of America wasn’t concerned with how it’d affect the legal cannabis industry.

But a recent study from New Frontier Data, an analytics firm serving the legal cannabis industry, predicts legal pot would generate $105.6 billion in tax revenue over the next eight years and create 654,000 jobs under Trump’s tax overhaul — if it were legalized nationwide.

Denver accounted for a major portion of the $1.5 billion worth of legal cannabis sold in Colorado in 2017. Over a third of the state’s total sales were made in the Mile High City, according to the Colorado Department of Revenue. The DOR breaks down revenue data monthly for each county; totaling the take from last year, Westword determined that dispensaries located in Denver County sold $577.5 million worth of cannabis and cannabis produces in 2017.

John Lyons was set to retire from four decades of training horses and sell his seventy-acre training facility in Parachute, Colorado. Instead, he started one of the country’s first nutraceutical and medical hemp research and treatment facilities, the Colorado Hemp Institute.

“I was retiring, selling the place, taking the money and running,” Lyons says. “[But] God had a different plan for my life than that.”

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