Colorado is known for majestic mountains, craft breweries and, of course, its wonderful world of weed. However, not everyone knows to take advantage of the state’s most progressive medicinal plant-based resource: cannabidiol, or CBD.
Browsing: Legalize It
The owners of a now-closed “luxury smoke lounge” on Trinidad’s dispensary-clogged Main Street have filed suit against the city’s mayor, police, city council and district attorney, claiming that shifting local policies about pot consumption and weed-related signage doomed their business.
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.
The Massachusetts Supreme Court has ruled that a company acted improperly when it fired medical marijuana patient Cristina Barbuto after she tested positive for pot. The Colorado Supreme Court reached the opposite conclusion in an analogous 2015 case, determining that DISH had the right to dismiss paralyzed MMJ patient Brandon Coats following his own positive test for cannabis. And while the Barbuto finding won’t directly impact the Colorado case, Coats’s lawyer sees a trend toward granting more patient protections here and in other medical marijuana states.
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.
Colorado has collected more than $500 million in tax revenue from the cannabis industry since recreational sales began in 2014, according to a report from VS Strategies based on information from the Colorado Department of Revenue.
On July 20, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved the Energy and Water Development appropriations bill for fiscal year 2018, authorizing $38.4 billion in spending. Wedged into this bill was the Industrial Hemp Water Rights Act, a piece of bipartisan legislation introduced in part by Colorado senators Michael Bennet and Cory Gardner.
Mason Tvert, a key figure in the passage of Amendment 64, the 2012 measure that legalized limited recreational marijuana sales, and the Denver pot-legalization regulation that preceded it, is leaving his post as communications director for the national Marijuana Policy Project in favor of a similar position at VS Strategies, a Denver-based consulting firm that’s become a national powerhouse.
Two new studies on marijuana consumption and acceptance show changing landscapes in public support of states’ rights and a stark admission on workplace use.
One recent study was commissioned by Marijuana Majority, an organization that works to spotlight marijuana as a growing mainstream issue. The survey questioned 1,500 participants about their ideas on marijuana consumer rights, finding 76 percent of participants across the political spectrum (Democrat, Republican and anything in between) believed the federal government should let states implement their own laws regarding marijuana.