After a couple of rocky months of falling numbers, Colorado’s legal marijuana industry bounced back in June, according to the Colorado Department of Revenue, racking up over $129.5 million in sales. The 5 percent rise was pushed by another month of strong recreational sales and a rare bump in medical marijuana earnings.
Browsing: Follow that story
Many young cannabis entrepreneurs and companies are nurtured by Colorado’s pot-industry incubators, but nonprofits that focus on the plant haven’t received anywhere near the same attention.
Government reports recently revealed that over 665,000 pounds of legal marijuana were sold in Colorado last year, but that number hardly accounted for every sale in the state. Although market research shows that Colorado’s marijuana black market has become significantly smaller than the rest of the country’s since retail dispensaries showed up in 2014, it hasn’t evaporated altogether.
Not counting the budding behemoth in California, it’s tough to match Colorado’s pot-smoking prowess, which was put on full display in the state’s recent Marijuana Enforcement Division’s 2017 market-demand study.
When Cindy Sovine submitted her application for a social cannabis consumption license to Denver in February, she was confident that her pot-infused spa would be approved. The health-care-turned-cannabis lobbyist had influential friends in the city and had even helped lobby for Initiative 300, the voter-approved measure that created Denver’s social-use licensing program in November 2016.
They weren’t enough.
As of last July, the Colorado Attorney General’s Office Hoppz Cropz prosecution was likely the largest marijuana conspiracy case in the state: thirteen defendants charged with a combined 244 crimes, including racketeering under the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act, for illegally peddling nearly 200 pounds of cannabis.
Although Colorado’s legal cannabis industry has maintained a steady of pace of increasing revenues over the years, a new market report from one of pot’s leading economic-research teams says it could be time to prepare for a plateau.
In May, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued a damning preliminary report about the late-2017 death of forty-year-old Loveland Ski Area employee Adam Lee, who suffered crushing chest injuries while working on the Magic Carpet, a motorized beltway used to teach kids how to ski.
It’s never a good idea to smoke weed in front of a police officer, let alone get behind the wheel right after — but that’s exactly what people were doing with the Adams County Sheriff’s Office on Monday, July 16.
Nearly fifteen months after the 4/20 holiday when founders of the International Church of Cannabis were accused of promoting public cannabis consumption and violating the Colorado Clean Indoor Air Act — two misdemeanors that carry penalties of no more than several hundred dollars in fines — Steve Berke, Briley Hale and Lee Molloy are still awaiting trial.