Dear Stoner: Which presidential candidate would you want to smoke a joint with the most?
Daryl
Browsing: Elections
Dear Stoner: Are a candidate’s opinions on marijuana really that important anymore? You’d think people would care about other, more important things when going to vote.
Keisha
While immigration, health care and gun control continue to divide the country, at least one issue is starting to bring us together: legalizing cannabis.
Amendment X, a ballot measure that takes industrial hemp out of the Colorado Constitution, passed by a narrow margin on Tuesday, November 6. The proposal needed 55 percent approval from voters to succeed, and it currently sits at slightly over 60 percent, with more than 90 percent of the state’s votes counted.
Four weeks from now, voters in Michigan, Missouri, North Dakota and Utah will all be deciding measures that would lift legal restrictions on marijuana — but all in different ways. And Colorado, too, has another marijuana-related issue on the ballot.
To help remedy its well-publicized affordable-housing shortage, Mayor Michael Hancock wants to use a lifeline that mayors of most major cities don’t have: pot. On April 16, the city floated the idea of using $105 million in bonds from the Denver Housing Authority — a quasi-municipal corporation that provides housing for middle- and low-income families and individuals — to help cover a proposed $105 million surge in funding for affordable housing over the next five years.
Four states legalized recreational marijuana in the 2016 election, following in the footsteps of Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Washington, D.C. But in the year since, only Nevada made retail pot sales a reality. While California and Massachusetts are moving forward to enact permanent legislation and issue licenses for pot establishments, the future of weed in Maine, the fourth state where residents voted in favor of legalization, is at a standstill after a veto by the Republican governor.
Momentum for federal cannabis reform may be slowing down under the current presidential administration, but the industry has never had more lobbyists in Washington, D.C., than it does now. And few have been lobbying longer than the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which visited Capitol Hill last week to advocate for a number of pot-friendly bills and amendments.
Prosecutor George Brauchler, who’s running for Colorado governor in 2018, is using Shawn Geerdes’s conviction for murdering Jason Dosa nearly three years ago as an opportunity to criticize legal pot even though the marijuana grow in which the two partnered was illegal.
On Thursday, July 13, cannabis professionals ascended on Denver’s Cultivated Synergy for a quarterly meeting held by the National Cannabis Industry Association. But this wasn’t any ordinary meeting; it was a caucus – a cannabis caucus.