After hours of testimony on Wednesday, March 8, a Colorado House committee approved Senate Bill 17-17, which would make people suffering from PTSD and other stress disorders eligible for medical marijuana, in an 8-1 vote. It now moves on to a full vote of the House.

“We’re in the final stretch, and the momentum has really kicked in,” says Cindy Sovine-Miller, a lobbyist working with the Hoban Law Group to help shepherd the proposal through the Colorado Legislature. “There were two and a half hours of testimony of people who were opposed to this bill — testimony from very credible people. The testimony from the people who are actually impacted by this really won the day.”

The Colorado Legislature is loaded up with marijuana measures this week, including proposals to establish pot clubs and to add PTSD to the list of patient ailments that can be treated with medical marijuana. And on March 8, the Senate Business, Labor and Technology committee approved Senator Tim Neville‘s bill to allow medical marijuana delivery systems for patients and businesses.

Senate Bill 17-192 calls for a state licensing authority to create an endorsement for existing medical marijuana licenses, permitting them to make deliveries to patients in need in areas where medical marijuana is currently sold.

In a 34 to 1 vote, the Colorado Senate passed the Post-Traumatic Stress Bill; today, March 8, it’s scheduled for a public hearing before the House State Affairs Committee.

Adam Foster, lead attorney on the case, says it’s time for Colorado to join the 21 states with medicinal cannabis laws that have approved PTSD as a qualifying condition.

“Colorado has been the leader in so many different regards with regard to the cannabis plant, but we are very much behind the curve as far as using medical cannabis to treat PTSD,” he says. “Every other state that has considered the issue has approved medical cannabis for the treatment of PTSD, and Colorado is really an outlier in that regard.”

For the first time in recent years, all three Colorado chapters of NORML came together to lobby for cannabis on the state level. Denver NORML, Southern Colorado NORML and Colorado NORML joined forces on Tuesday, March 7, to educate state lawmakers on some key cannabis measures, including SB17-184, the Private Marijuana Clubs Open and Public Use bill.

“It was a first,” says Jordan Person, executive director of Denver NORML, who also notes that for the first time, women are running each of the three chapters.

Marijuana is now legal in more than half the country, but related areas of the law are taking a while to catch up. Women are still being punished for exposing their babies to marijuana; under child-abuse and child-neglect statutes, women can be arrested for child endangerment or have their babies taken away.

Even so, little is known about whether an infant can be harmed if an expectant mother uses marijuana during pregnancy or after birth. Dr. Thomas Hale is working to change that.

On Saturday, March 4, Curious Appetites hosted a cannabis-infused dinner at Cluster Studios that took everyone down the rabbit hole. An “Eat me” sign sat on the edibles table; on the bar was a sign that said, “Drink me,” and on the dab bar, a sign urged guests to “Smoke me.”

Those guests were given an hour to mingle, then invited to sit down at a long, single table, where chef Hosea Rosenberg and his staff from Blackbelly served a four-course meal, paired with four strains of cannabis. Hungry to know more? Here are ten tips for an Alice in Wonderland-themed dinner.

After Attorney General Jeff Sessions told an assembly of the country’s attorneys general that state marijuana laws are in violation of federal law, Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman came out fighting for this state’s rights.

Coffman, a Republican, said that while the Trump administration’s intentions regarding marijuana are unclear, she plans to uphold the Colorado Constitution — including Amendment 64, which legalized the recreational sale and use of marijuana in 2012.

Colorado was the first state in the country to allow the purchase of recreational cannabis. Now it could be the first to allow consumption in “pot clubs.”

Senate Bill 184, titled Private Marijuana Clubs Open and Public Use, would allow local municipalities to authorize privately owned marijuana clubs, and the proposal crossed the first hurdle this week. After a hearing that took more than three hours, the Republican-held state Senate’s Business, Labor and Technology Committee approved the bill in a bipartisan five-to-two vote.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer tied the regulated marijuana industry to opioid addiction last week. At a press briefing, he told reporters: “I think that when you see something like the opioid addiction crisis blossoming in so many states around this country, the last thing that we should be doing is encouraging people…. There’s still a federal law that we need to abide by when it comes to recreational marijuana and other drugs of that nature.”

Opioid addiction is a well-documented epidemic in the United States; 33,000 people died from overdosing on prescription painkillers, heroin and similar drugs in 2015 — a number on par with those killed by firearms and those who died in car accidents in the same year. But opioid use is down in Colorado, the first state to legalize recreational marijuana.