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You don’t need to smoke a joint or play hooky to celebrate 4/20 anymore. Just hit up a certain Carl’s Jr. in Denver that is testing CBD-infused burgers all day on Saturday, April 20.

Available only on 4/20 at the Carl’s Jr. located at 4050 Colorado Boulevard, the Rocky Mountain High CheeseBurger Delight will come topped with a mayonnaise-based Santa Fe Sauce infused with 5 milligrams of CBD. The CBD oil, derived from hemp, is provided by Colorado company BlueBird Botanicals.

Senators Cory Gardner and Elizabeth Warren just reintroduced their States Act today, April 4, in hopes of guaranteeing states the right to choose their own marijuana policy. The two may seem an odd pairing, but Democrat Warren represents Massachusetts, where recreational cannabis is now legal, and Republican Gardner has pushed the feds before to observe Colorado’s laws regarding marijuana.

Representatives Earl Blumenauer and David Joyce have introduced the bill concurrently in the House, and the measure is expected to be heard by a House committee within weeks, according to House Rules Committee chairman Jim McGovern, who’s bullish on its chances.

A bill that would allow social cannabis consumption in Colorado dispensaries, hotels, cafes and other businesses passed its first test on Wednesday, March 27, when it moved out of a House committee on a 7-4 vote.

Recreational cannabis use has been legal in Colorado since late 2012, but it’s only allowed in private dwellings and establishments, with “open and public” pot consumption banned by the state constitution, despite Amendment 64 being billed as a measure to “treat marijuana like alcohol.” Past legislative efforts to create a licensing system for social consumption businesses have failed, but sponsors of House Bill 1230 are confident of their chances this year.

For the past three years, Mason Hembree has been working on a difficult balancing act. He’s a craft beer brewer who feels more at home in the cannabis industry, a Libertarian iconoclast who is nevertheless trying to work within the system, and the owner of a tiny company who wants to play ball with the big boys.

Now, Hembree, who co-founded Dad & Dudes Breweria in Aurora in 2010, may have finally found the perfect nexus of those things. In late February, Hembree and his father, Thomas, sold their brewery to San Diego-based Cannabiniers, a company with big plans for growth.

Colorado’s marijuana industry could open its doors much wider to corporations and underrepresented demographics in ownership if two legislative measures pass this year.

A bill that would allow publicly traded companies to own Colorado marijuana business licenses and lessen investment restrictions passed its first committee hearing in the state legislature Monday, March 4, while State Representative Leslie Herod is expected to push another bill later this year addressing social equity in the pot industry.

When House Bill 1286 passed last year, advocates thought it would mark the beginning of a new era for children who use medical marijuana. So far, though, they’re still waiting.

The bill expanded on a 2016 law that allowed child patients to take their MMJ medication at school. That law required that the medication be administered by a child’s MMJ caregiver, usually the parents. The newer measure — known as Quintin’s amendment, in honor of nine-year-old epilepsy patient Quintin Lovato in Eagle County — allows school personnel to also administer medication, to help patients faster and ease the burden on parents. The proposal passed through the state legislature by relatively wide margins.

However, of the 178 school districts in Colorado, we found just one district that has implemented the policy so far, and it allows school personnel to administer only CBD medication. That district is Eagle County Schools, the district Lovato attends.

Denver no longer has the distinction of being the only major city with retail marijuana dispensaries, but that hasn’t stopped weed from flying off the shelves here. This city has seen almost $2.4 billion in marijuana sales since the first retail dispensary opened on January 1, 2014, according to our calculations based on Colorado Department of Revenue data.

It came down to the last month of the year, but 2018’s dispensary sales ultimately edged out the previous year’s total for Colorado. According to the state Department of Revenue, Colorado pot shops have sold over $6 billion worth of legal marijuana since retail sales began on January 1, 2014.

For the fifth year in a row, annual dispensary sales reached a new record.

Neal Levine, a longtime member of the Colorado marijuana industry who’s now the CEO of the national Cannabis Trade Federation, sees the case for THC potency limits on marijuana concentrates recently made in this space as a Trojan horse for gutting the industry.

“When you start talking about potency and it’s not based on science, it sounds like reefer madness, the next generation,” Levine says.

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