In November, more than seven in ten Floridians at the polls checked yes on Amendment 2, which legalized medical marijuana in the Sunshine State. Considering Floridians would probably split 50-50 if asked whether they’d like a free delicious cupcake, that’s an amazing result.
In this industry, removing a question mark can mean a great deal — especially when it’s removed from a government website. Earlier this week, the National Institute on Drug Abuse switched the title of its website page from “Is Marijuana Medicine?” to “Marijuana as Medicine.” And that wasn’t the only change.
Nearly every section of the site, which was last revised in July 2015, has minor changes.These revisions may seem inconsequential, but for the cannabis industry and patients who use marijuana for medicinal purposes, they appear significant.
Marijuana companies are accustomed to dealing with strict governmental regulations. They follow them diligently, because one misstep could cost an operating license, and potentially the entire business.
What happened with Grow Depot and the Environmental Protection Agency is a cautionary tale, then. Because after an inspection went awry, the family-owned business had to pay a penalty of $27,500 — simply because ninety bottles of pesticides were unlabeled.
For decades, cannabis has been portrayed as an illicit substance associated with burnouts and addicts, one that clouds mental performance and drains ambition. However, long-standing opinions are beginning to change as more research continues to demonstrate the medical benefits of THC and CBD oil with regard to such debilitating conditions as Alzheimer’s. Senior citizens, who lived during the time of marijuana’s demonizing prohibition, ironically may be the fastest-growing demographic that can benefit the most from its medicinal properties.
Seizing the opportunity to serve this underrepresented group, Etain, one of the five registered medical marijuana suppliers in New York State, is seeking to target nursing homes and elderly patients. According to Etain’s homepage, this family-run, women-owned business is “committed to manufacturing clean, safe, and consistent medical marijuana products for patients in New York State.”
The Colorado Springs Police Department has released data revealing the number of local homicides linked by a so-called “marijuana nexus” during the past three years, with the 2016 numbers showing that weed was a factor in more than a third of the killings. However, a spokesperson for the CSPD insists that the release of these figures doesn’t represent a departmental position on the issue, and says the numbers were released following a barrage of requests from news organizations apparently looking for bombshell evidence that marijuana has played a big role in boosting the Springs murder rate.
Even before Coloradans voted in favor of legalizing limited recreational marijuana sales in November 2012, the debate over the alleged connection between cannabis and crime has raged across the state. Some studies have undermined this theory, while others have been less conclusive — and non-scientific reports from the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a law enforcement group, have regularly suggested that the sky is falling.
Against this backdrop, the CSPD compiled information about “Colorado Springs homicide case characteristics involving a marijuana nexus for 2015, 2016 and 2017.”
Dear Stoner: I want to send some marijuana for a friend in need who lives in a non-MMJ state. What do you recommend?
TJ
Dear TJ: For shipping, repackage the MMJ products (foil for candy bars, baggies for brownies, vials for tinctures, vitamin bottles for pills, etc.). Put stuff like clothes, chips or any random trinket on top of the pot to make it look like a care package. If you’re really paranoid, you can shave off or melt the green “THC” stamps most edibles have now, but you’re probably wasting your time: I ship with USPS without a return address and pay with cash, and usually use a fake name for the receiver. The Post Office doesn’t require an ID check from the sender or receiver, and you’ll still get a tracking number.
Charles Smith grew up in a tough part of Los Angeles, and by the time he was fourteen, he was already involved in dealing marijuana for one of the city’s most prominent gangs: the Inglewood Family Gangster Bloods. To keep him from getting in deeper, when he was fifteen his mother sent him to live with his father, an Army vet, in Colorado.
But that didn’t keep him out of trouble. At the age of seventeen, Smith was arrested in Denver for possession and distribution of marijuana. A year after he was released from prison, at the age of 23, he was arrested again, this time for armed robbery. Sentenced to 64 years in prison, he was sent to Colorado State Penitentiary in 1998. Five years later, he was moved to Fremont Correctional Facility.
A Denver City Council committee met on March 13 to consider a presentation by the Marijuana Industry Group, which made a case for extending the hours of operation for dispensaries in the city. If approved, dispensaries would be able to stay open until midnight instead of 7 p.m.
Every municipality in Colorado that allows recreational marijuana sales has later hours than Denver, according to Kristi Kelly, MIG’s executive director, who also serves on Denver’s Social Consumption Advisory Committee. Dispensaries in Boulder and Aurora are open until 10 p.m., and dispensaries in neighboring Edgewater and Glendale are open until midnight.
As more states around the country hop aboard the legal-marijuana train, Colorado’s lawmakers continue to gather steam. Since it became the first state to legalize recreational cannabis in 2012 — with the first legal sales on January 1, 2014 — Colorado is now fine-tuning its systems, taking on residential plant counts (the House just placed a proposed limit of sixteen), marijuana delivery services, hemp water rights and more in 2017’s legislative season. And the people are paying attention: Currently the most accessed bill on the Colorado Legislature website is about marijuana.
“Be a crazy, dumb saint of the mind…,” proclaims Daniel Landes, standing in a third-floor attic space in south Denver that feels nice, warm and present.
At first glance, this class may look like your average creative-writing workshop, with pens sprinkled across two tables in the center of the room, alongside desk lamps and composition notebooks. But Lit on Lit is a new kind of creative-writing class, one that puts something different on those tables: a bowl of cannabis and rolling papers to help spark creativity.