Now that the count is finally completed and Denver voters have approved the social use of marijuana, here’s the question everyone’s asking: What happens next?
The ordinance does not include a timeline that requires the city to start licensing businesses right away. Instead, Denver has a sixty-day window to create the application that a business will use to apply for a social-use permit, according to Dan Rowland, citywide communications advisor for the City and County of Denver. City officials will start drafting that application on Tuesday, November 22.
The owner of Med-West, a San Diego extraction company that was raided by local authorities in January is seeking a return of his frozen assets. $324,000 cash was seized during the raid. No criminal charges have been filed.
Police departments are becoming more tolerant of applicants’ past pot smoking.
Las Vegas police said they would still pursue possession arrests, though the district attorney said they wouldn’t be prosecuted.
With Trump’s election, federal inmates incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses fear their window to win clemency is closing. “Some of these people are bad dudes,” Trump said at an August rally “These are people out walking the streets. Sleep tight, folks.”
CBS tells the story of Harry Anslinger, a leading figure in passing the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which made it illegal.
The New Yorker sent Adrian Chen to the Philippines, where President Rodrigo Duterte is waging a brutal drug war. The article is subtly titled “ When a Populist Demagogue Takes Over.”
In California, police are concerned about home grows.
Vice learns how to make “ the most potent weed oil.”
The Washington Post recommends four books to understand the new weed reality. They include Marijuana: A Short History, by John Hudak, Jesse Ventura’s Marijuana Manifesto, Sacred Bliss: A Spiritual History of Cannabis by Mark S. Ferrara and Cooking with Cannabis by Laurie Goldrich.
The New Yorker published a pot-industry cartoon. It isn’t especially funny.
On the surface, Arizona’s rejection of Proposition 205, the Regulation and Taxation of Marijuana Act, seemed like a clear victory for the various anti-legalization organizations throughout the state. However, a look at the opposition and the contents of the proposition itself show a more complex political situation.
Arizona passed Prop 200 and legalized marijuana for medical use in 1996 — before Colorado did. Even so, Arizona was the only state out of nine with marijuana questions on the ballot to reject a marijuana measure this round. Over one million voters, constituting 52 percent of the result, voted against Prop 205. This despite the fact that Arizona has over 130 medical dispensaries in operation and Prop 205 was polling at 50 percent in October. So what happened?
Carol A. Morrison and May Alice Wells, known as Cush and Cat, respectively, were enjoying the social use of cannabis before social use was cool. The pair operates one of the most unusual venues on Colorado’s cannabis scene: Sacred Smoke Sanctuary, located at 3704 Downing Street.
After moving from New York to Colorado in 2014, they started renovating the 4,000-square-foot space. Since then, it’s been part church, part art studio, part rehearsal space, part theater, part lounge and part residence, and the couple has welcomed all cannabis-loving people into their world. Since the building is a private residence and their landlord has okayed cannabis use, they’ve been able to host events with cannabis on the property since long before Denver voters approved 300, the social-use ordinance — and they can continue to do so.
Yesterday, proponents of Initiated Ordinance 300 declared victory for the measure, which will create a pilot program to allow adults to consume cannabis in permitted private establishments such as bars and restaurants.
But Rachel O’Bryan, who served as campaign manager for Protect Denver’s Atmosphere, the main organization opposing 300, is much less enthusiastic about the proposal’s belated win, which was finally announced a full week after election day. Indeed, she predicts a slew of problems when it comes to implementing the ordinance.
The new REC states have big plans for pot taxes. The Cannabist alerts them to “ five immediate concerns” about the industry.
“There isn’t some megalithic industry that exists today…The notion that there are these gigantic, big-money players running in to take this whole thing over is just a fiction. There’s no Philip Morris, no Anheuser-Busch, no cannabis division at Bank of America. Even the most successful company is still barely in the growth stage.”
September was the third-straight best-month-ever for Colorado dispensaries.
A company called CanPay has what it calls the first “legitimate” debit payment system for dispensaries. The customer pays with a QR code accessed on their phone.
The Post Office has few safeguards for stopping employees who intercept weed sent through the mail.
Employers in California will still be able to fire workers who test positive. The San Jose Mercury News piece mentions that near one drug testing lab in Colorado, workers who arrive with containers of someone else’s clean urine tend to heat it up in a nearby convenience store’s microwave.
Canadian firms appear to be gouging the government healthcare system by signing up veteran MED patients for expensive strains according to a Vice report. Canadian companies could also benefit if there’s a crackdown in the U.S.
The Toronto Stock Exchange halted trading of six surging cannastocks. Some market watchers think it’sstill too early to invest.
Heavy rains in southern Oregon will force growers to torch moldy crops. Some rural Colorado communities derive much needed revenue from pot.
Florida entrepreneurs are excited about MED.
Jamaica’s licensing authority received 89 applications.
“ Could Delaware become a tax-free cannabis haven?” Small-scale Northern California growers areadjusting to legalization.
A study suggests that cannabis use can weaken heart muscles, particularly in young men. Read it here.
The journal Science says that the lower potency of plants from the one federally-sanctioned grow ( the one in Mississippi) undermines studies conducted with those plants.
Scientists are working on a new drug that functions like MED without the psychoactive effect.
Recent studies suggest that cannabis use may have mental health benefits and could have a role in curtailing opiate use.
Viceland uncovers a U.K. network of underground MED providers who give it away to patients.
British Columbia Premier Christy Clark, a Liberal, said police had discovered pot and other drugs laced with the powerful opiate fentanyl. Vancounver police denied it.
Some researchers are starting to take psychedelics seriously, as therapy. Also see this.
Bestowing the right name on a strain has become more important than ever. Although not quite as pun-filled as the craft-beer or food-truck industries, the commercial marijuana business has so many colorful varieties that a boring moniker really stands out among the Alaskan Thunderfucks and Cantaloupe Kushes of the world. Chernobyl is a name that definitely gets noticed, but in a more gruesome fashion than I’d like.
Chernobyl was the Soviet facility that experienced a reactor malfunction in 1984, resulting in one of the worst nuclear-power-plant accidents in history. The nearby town of Pripyat, Ukraine, is still abandoned, and the disaster’s long-term effects are expected to kill up to 60,000 people, largely from thyroid cancer. Chernobyl the strain’s bright-green color has a radiant glow, and its genetics are somewhat ghastly, too, hailing from a blend of Trainwreck, Jack the Ripper and Trinity. Still, I’d rather think of Mr. Burns or the Springfield Isotopes after smoking this citrus delight than death, disease and destruction.
It took nearly a week for the results to be finalized, but it’s official: Denver voters have approved the social cannabis use initiative on the November 8 ballot.
“The voters of Denver have once again spoken and decided to adopt a sensible, new approach to marijuana policy,” says I-300 proponent Mason Tvert.
The industry is worried.
Here’s your daily round-up of pot-news, excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek.
President-elect Donald Trump nominated anti-pot hardliner Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama (R) for Attorney General. At a Senate hearing in April 2016, Sessions said that ‘we need grown-ups in charge in Washington to say marijuana is not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized, it ought not to be minimized, that it’s in fact a very real danger.’
“I think one of [Obama’s] great failures, it’s obvious to me, is his lax treatment in comments on marijuana,” Sessions said at the hearing. “It reverses 20 years almost of hostility to drugs that began really when Nancy Reagan started ‘Just Say No.’ ”
Lawmakers, he said, have to “send that message with clarity that good people don’t smoke marijuana.”
USNews calls Sessions an “ Existential threat” to state-legal cannabis. Industry leaders are very nervous.
Reason points out that Sessions has an “aversion to civil rights” and gay rights. The U.S. Senate failed to confirm him for a federal judgeship in 1986, amid allegations of what late Senator Ted Kennedy called “racial insensitivity” and “lack of commitment to equal justice under the law.” The New York Times editorializes that the nomination is an “ insult to justice.”
What does a Trump presidency mean for the industry? The transition team isn’t talking. NBC speculates.So does CBS.
The Sessions nomination needs to be approved by the Senate. Have a view you want to share? Contact your Senator.
Before the Sessions pick, the Washington Post’s Radley Balko said former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) would also be “ terrifying.”
Before the Sessions pick, anti-legalization activist Kevin Sabet said, “A Trump administration throws everything up in the air… “Is it going to be ‘ states’ rights Trump’ or ‘law-and-order Trump’?”
Marijuana.com’s Tom Angell has launched a petition for Trump to keep his “marijuana pledge” to respect state laws. Even if he doesn’t go after the industry, The Stranger says President Trump will make the industry whiter.
It’s official, Denver will be the first U.S. city to license social use businesses.
After the Massachusetts REC vote, Rhode Island could legalize REC through the legislature. Alaska is setting up a drop box system to collect taxes in cash.
Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery (R), said looser cannabis regulations in Memphis and Nashville can’t stand.
Due to a glitch, it appears that MED in California will be tax-free until the state’s REC program begins in 2018.
Some conservatives don’t like that MED patients can’t buy guns.
Want to design your own high? Pay attention to the newest area of cannabis research: terpenes. These essential oils give each cannabis strain the unique smell, flavor and taste that you’ve come to love (or hate). Terpenes also offer special medicinal and therapeutic benefits that help with everything from insomnia to infections to depression. Here are the top ten things you need to know about terpenes: