Dear Stoner: While driving along Speer Boulevard, I’ve seen ads for Weedmaps on the digital billboards outside the Colorado Convention Center and the Denver Performing Arts Complex. I know recreational marijuana is legal in Denver, but can the city itself accept ads for marijuana?
Bill Bored
Dear BB: We almost crashed our car when we spotted those Weedmaps messages, which were certainly a surprise considering the things you usually see advertised on those billboards: ballets, symphonies, touring Broadway shows. So we reached out to Brian Kitts, director of marketing and communications for Denver Arts &Venues. “Up to 20 percent of the digital LED signage at DPAC and the CCC always has been required for promotion of upcoming events, the Denver Theatre District and resident companies,” he says via e-mail. “The remaining time is available for sale as ad space, Visit Denver conventions, in-house promo for Red Rocks, etc.”
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.
The Trump administration picked an unfortunate hashtag for President Donald Trump’s speech to Congress on February 28: #JointSession. In honor of that joint session, here are some of our favorite joint-session pictures on Instagram this week.
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.
Four months after opening up the application process, the Aurora Marijuana Enforcement Division awarded the city’s 24th and last retail store license to the Green Solution.
“The Green Solution is a professional corporate organization that is focused on security, compliance and interested in being a partner with the City of Aurora and its officials and citizens,” says Robin Peterson, manager of the Aurora Marijuana Enforcement Division, who notified all applicants of the decision via e-mail on February 27.
New cannabis consumers are often attracted to edibles but wonder how much is too much. To help both Colorado native newbies and the many tourists who visit Colorado and have questions about edible potency, industry officials and state regulators have worked to educate people on edible consumption limits.
Some cannabis companies have determined that the best way to handle any uncertainty is simply to create edible products with less THC. California companies Kiva and W!NK, for example, have begun developing product lines that will allow people to microdose.
When you walk into a dispensary and ask a budtender to recommend a strain, you’re basically asking this: “What is your strongest?” Although the recommended strains will vary from shop to shop, many budtenders will pull out their version of the THC titan known as Ghost Train Haze.
Ghost Train Haze is available in a few phenotypes; as with Gorilla Glue, each of them is numbered. Ghost Train Haze #1 is by far the most popular in Denver, and many dispensaries have dropped the “#1” altogether. A true hometown success story, Ghost Train Haze #1 was bred by Denver-based Rare Dankness from Ghost OG and Nevil’s Wreck (another Rare Dankness strain) genetics. The sativa-dominant hybrid won awards at the High Times Cannabis Cup in 2012 and again in 2014, and is a regular on lists of the world’s most potent strains.
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.
In this essay, retired Judge Mary Celeste (bio below) responds to the Trump administration’s comments on marijuana and opioids:
This past week saw two indications that the Trump administration is uneducated and clueless about drugs in this country. Its first irresponsible action is the potential halting of federal drug-control efforts. According to the New York Times, the White House is potentially eliminating the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, which coordinates federal efforts to reduce drug use and drug trafficking. “The ONDCP’s website was ‘wiped clean’ when President Trump took office and it has not been replaced,” the paper reported.