Browsing: Legislation

Advocates pushing to include autism spectrum disorder in Colorado’s list of conditions that qualify for medical marijuana took a small but victorious step forward last night, April 5. But those who supported adding acute pain to the list weren’t as successful.

After over five hours of public testimony and deliberation, a House committee voted in favor of a bill that would add ASD to the state’s list of conditions treatable by medical marijuana. Introduced by Representative Edie Hooton, HB 1263 will now go in front of the entire House for consideration.

Michelle Walker moved her family to Colorado from Texas in 2017 looking for relief for her son, who suffers from severe autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and epileptic seizures — and she found it. Walker says that her ten-year-old boy, Vincent Zuniga, has made astonishing progress since they moved to Colorado in order to get access to medical marijuana. As a result, they’ve been able to visit Rocky Mountain National Park, Coors Field and other public places they wouldn’t have dreamed of going to before Vincent’s new medication.

“We could never do these things without medical cannabis,” Walker explains. “It allows us to live this quality of life the best we can.” Because of his seizures — one of the nine qualifying medical conditions for cannabis in Colorado — Vincent qualified for a medical marijuana card; as a result, Walker is able to give her son high-CBD cannabis medication. According to the Epilepsy Foundation, approximately one-third of those suffering from ASD also have epilepsy.

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.

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.

Today, February 21, as we’ve reported, Denver’s National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws branch is taking part in a lobbying day at the Colorado State Capitol during which lawmakers will get the chance to learn about a major element in the group’s attempt to fix drug-testing laws that put cannabis users at risk of being fired for lawful use. Specifically, they’ll be able to try out Alert Meter, which tests for impairment rather than relying on blood or fluid draws that Denver NORML sees as undependable and unfair.

A few years ago, a bill like HB 1011 would have seemed tantamount to Colorado flirting with greedy corporations hell-bent on squeezing out mom-and-pop cannabis shops while raking in mega-profits from the booming industry. But times have changed, says Representative Dan Pabon. He’s the primary House sponsor of HB 1011, which would ease restrictions on the cannabis industry’s growth potential by making the state more attractive to deep-pocketed domestic and international investors.

A bill introduced in the Colorado Senate would require that a tracking agent be applied to medical and recreational marijuana and industrial hemp plants — even though the technology hasn’t been invented yet. SB 029 calls for “an agent that is applied to a marijuana plant, marijuana product, industrial hemp, or industrial hemp product and then scanned by a device,” in an attempt to improve marijuana tracking and help law enforcement officials distinguish where marijuana products originated. But some activists and businesses think the proposal goes too far.

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