Roberta Smith, occupational health program manager at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, hasn’t heard of anyone dying in an industrial accident at a Colorado marijuana business. But she says dispensaries, grows and the like present unusual safety risks, including the possibility of fires and explosions from hash-oil extraction, in addition to the sort of everyday dangers that hover over virtually every workplace. That’s why the CDPHE has produced “Guide for Worker Safety and Health in the Marijuana Industry,” which Smith believes is the first-ever document of its kind.

“We wanted to make sure we put something comprehensive together outlining some of the hazards that may exist and give businesses some best practices for how to build a health-and-safety program,” Smith says.

The guide, on view below in its entirety, was put together with “input from the industry itself, epidemiologists, health professionals and a variety of other partners,” Smith reveals. Also involved were state officials who consider the guide a necessity in part because of the way inspections of dispensaries and grow facilities in Colorado are handled.

Would you like fries with that?

Tumbleweed Express is set to open in Parachute in March, and it’s going to have something that no other dispensary in the state does: a drive-thru.

On February 18, the Glenwood Springs Post Independent reported that the Parachute Board of Trustees had approved Tumbleweed’s business license and the idea had cleared the state’s Marijuana Enforcement Division. The dispensary is taking over a building that was once a car wash. This allows cars to drive through a completely covered area, as opposed to a typical fast-food drive-thru.

Kat York, co-owner of Boosted E-Juice, the Colorado-based company that creates vape-juice flavors, is going to Washington, D.C., next week to meet with Colorado representatives and fight for a change in vaping regulations.

The vaping industry could cease to exist by August 2018 if regulations do not change. The FDA’s current standards will ban 99 percent of all vaping products by that date, in accordance with language in the 2009 Tobacco Control Act that requires any product produced after February 15, 2007, to submit equivalence applications. These applications are so expensive, critics say, that they will result in businesses across the industry being forced to close.

Two annual events affect dispensary sales every February: Valentine’s Day and the Super Bowl.

Comparing this year’s dispensary sales during Super Bowl weekend with last year’s, when the Denver Broncos were playing, gives some idea of the general mood of this state’s residents.

Last year, dispensaries saw an increase in sativa sales. But this year, people preferred to mellow out on the couch, judging from an increase in indica purchases. The data was compiled by Baker, an app used by customers throughout Colorado, and a resource that dispensaries an use to track their inventory and message customers about deals.

Colorado has been a pioneer in cannabis legalization, and now the country’s other pioneer is turning to Colorado officials for guidance in implementing a regulated system.

California was the first state to legalize medical cannabis in 1996 (Colorado followed in 2000), but voters in the Golden State didn’t vote to legalize recreational use until last November. And in following Colorado’s lead, it’s looking to Colorado for help.

Programs like D.A.R.E. and the Just Say No campaign might not have kept the nation’s youth from smoking pot, but it’s possible that legalization could.

According to two recent studies, states that have legalized the recreational use of marijuana are seeing a decrease in illegal use by young people. Officials in both Colorado and Washington have reported a decrease in the use of marijuana by underage consumers, and credit increased education about the real effects of the drug, cutting back on the black market, and tight restrictions to enter a regulated dispensary.

The Colorado Department of Revenue just released its final statistics for 2016, the state’s third year of recreational marijuana sales — and MMJ and recreational marijuana sales combined totaled $1.3 billion in sales. In 2015, total sales came close to a billion but didn’t top that number.

Recreational marijuana accounted for $875 million in sales, while medical sales were just under $440 million.

This week, the Colorado Department of Human Services, in conjunction with Governor John Hickenlooper’s office, formally requested that the General Assembly allocate more than $6 million annually from the state’s marijuana-tax cash fund for a new program that would offer help to chronic drug users as opposed to criminalizing them. Art Way, senior director for criminal-justice reform and Colorado director with the national Drug Policy Alliance, which worked closely with state agencies in crafting the proposal (it’s on view below), sees the impact of this approach as potentially revolutionary for those struggling with addictions to heroin and other heavy narcotics.

If approved, Way says, “marijuana tax revenue and marijuana legalization will fund broader drug-policy purposes and drug-policy concerns that have long had more of an impact on society, both from a human perspective and a fiscal perspective. We’re talking about other substances on which users become truly dependent, and people who are on the chaotic end of the use spectrum. So for marijuana legalization to fund this is a game-changer.”