The City of Denver’s marijuana conviction expungement program is online and ready to roll, according to the mayor’s office as well as the district and city attorneys, who collectively announced the news today, January 9.

Dubbed “Turn Over a New Leaf,” the campaign took a year and multiple city departments to implement and aims to dismiss and expunge thousands of convictions for marijuana crimes that are no longer illegal as of 2012, when Coloradans approved recreational marijuana.

America was pretty late to the party, but the federals finally figured out (again) that hemp doesn’t get us high. By removing the plant from the Controlled Substances Act via an amendment to the 2018 Farm Bill, Congress cleared a path for American companies interested in using hemp and its extracts and fibers to source those materials domestically. And retailers selling those products in this country can now do so without fear of law enforcement and regulatory interference.

Some pundits view industrial hemp as a bigger cash crop than marijuana, with its seeds, stalks, fibers and cannabinoids all used to make a long list of products. Here are seven things we eat, wear and use every day that will be impacted by hemp legalization.

The strain name game is a fun, complicated mess of cannabis genetics, nomenclature and overzealous salespeople. You can find strains named after celebrities, candy, presidents, mountain ranges and everything in between.

Since they’re dealing with a psychoactive substance, it’s not surprising that strain breeders and pot dealers have named a few strains after other drugs that give off similar effects — luckily for tokers, not that similar. From Acid to Opium, here are eight strains named after drugs of much more serious consequence.

A Denver burger company is about to help you get a dose of cannabis with your lunch.

West Coast Ventures Group Corp., the parent company of Illegal Burger, which has two Denver locations (as well as outposts in Evergreen, Glendale and Arvada), has teamed up with a California company named Biolog, Inc., to test out a method of infusing cannabinoids directly into food.

The product they’ll be using is called CannaStix, a solid spice pack containing cannabis extracts that can be inserted into food — ground beef, for example — before cooking. The CannaStix pack liquefies and spreads its goodness into the food being cooked, giving it what the company describes as “a very accurate dose of fast onset, highly bioavailable cannabinoids.”

Hemp is where it’s at right now, especially in Colorado. Legal cannabis is cool and all — and we welcome Michigan and Vermont to the recreational party in 2019 — but that’s so 2015 in this state.

More about substance than style, industrial hemp’s many uses were finally recognized by the federal government in December, when President Donald Trump officially legalized it by signing the 2018 Farm Bill. Now that the plant is out from under the shadow of the Controlled Substances Act, it’s regulated by the Department of Agriculture and legal to farm in all fifty states.

A collective effort by several marijuana business groups could help bring social pot use to Colorado dispensaries, hotels, music venues and dozens of other types of businesses — if the concept makes it through the state legislature.

Marijuana industry lobbyists, tourism companies, lounge owners and dispensary representatives are planning to submit a marijuana hospitality bill to lawmakers that will propose creating two new business licenses that would allow social marijuana use in a manner similar to alcohol use.

I can’t be the only person who instantly thinks of Family Matters the minute Purple Urkle makes an appearance on a dispensary shelf. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m in the majority.

The history behind the fruity, tranquilizing indica’s name is cloudy. The prevailing theory is that Purple Urkle was named for the strain’s potent high, which often leads to bumping into walls, irritating behavior and falling and not being able to get up — all hallmarks of everyone’s favorite nerdy annoyance in the ’90s, Steve Urkel.

If we got a dollar for every time we’ve been asked a sane question about cannabis, we’d be one broke outfit. But crazy and interesting tend to go together, as is the case for most of our Ask a Stoner readers, who never fail to bring up queries that stray into interesting issues, such as whether you can use a dishwasher to clean a bong, if you should call off work on 4/20, or whether there is any truth to conspiracy theories about CBD oil and dick cancer.

Here are ten of our weirdest questions from 2018 (click on the link to read our answer). May next year’s crop be even weirder.

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