Colorado’s cannabis industry has come a long way since medical marijuana dispensaries started popping up a decade ago. The industry exploded with the start of legal recreational sales on January 1, 2014, and a boom in capital funding soon ushered in a more corporate era. Now more Colorado towns and counties are allowing retail pot sales than ever before, with consumers buying much more than bags of weed at dispensaries.

Reagan Yeomans has seen plenty of changes burn through the industry since she entered the field in 2010. The Colorado State University graduate and her business partner, Tiffany Goldman, haven’t opened a dozen stores, like some of their competitors; instead, they’ve chosen to grow their dispensary chain, The Health Center, at a steadier pace. Today it has two longstanding dispensaries in Denver, a wholesale cultivation brand and a new store in Boulder.

The Marijuana Industry Group has helped the Colorado cannabis business develop into an awesome revenue machine that generates sales measured in the billions. But behind the scenes, MIG is embroiled in dueling Denver District Court lawsuits that pit the organization against Michael Elliott, its former executive director, in a fight that’s witheringly nasty.

Elliot’s complaint maintains that he was fired from his gig in June 2016 due largely to fallout from his rejection of sexual advances from a contract employee with the group. A few months later, he filed discrimination charges against the group with the Colorado Civil Rights Division — a prerequisite to a lawsuit, which was eventually filed in September 2017. But by then, MIG had already sued Elliott, arguing that he’d been sacked for misappropriating funds, among other things, and later retaliated by cooking up a fictional sexual harassment story that he then used in an unsuccessful effort to extort as much as $300,000.

Denver may be a leader in regulating recreational cannabis sales, but it’s hard to say the same about recreational cannabis consumption. Despite allowing medical marijuana dispensaries in town for over a decade and retail pot shops for nearly five years, Denver’s attempts to address social pot use have fallen just a few degrees above flat.

To be fair to Denver, the rest of Colorado isn’t exactly diving in, either, and neither are most of the other states legalizing the plant. Denver was the country’s first city to approve a program for issuing consumption licenses to qualified businesses, and one pot lounge is up and running, with another approved business on the way — but the program has its limitations. Approved by voters in 2016, the social consumption initiative was tweaked during its lengthy implementation process, with disputed location qualifications and restricted revenue streams added, to the dismay of the initiative’s proponents.

I recently heard Ving Rhames say in a radio interview that Quentin Tarantino “loves breakfast cereal.” Rather than go down the rabbit hole of wondering what fucked-up combination of booze and breakfast Tarantino has in the morning, I started craving some breakfast cereal of my own — and you would, too, after hearing Rhames’s gruff, sexy voice over-enunciate those two words.

I’m at a point in my life where cereal is more of a dessert than breakfast; I enjoy Apple Jacks and Cap’n Crunch as sugary delicacies rather than as “part of a well-balanced breakfast,” as their shady commercials suggest. I stay away from Fruity Pebbles, though, because I’ll eat the entire box in one day. Luckily for me, the weed named after Fruity Pebbles will knock me out before I can overindulge.

A Miami man flew to Denver International Airport on a quest to buy a specific BMW, but he didn’t find a car. Instead, a lawsuit alleges, he was extorted for $50 by an Advantage Rent A Car employee and given a rental car with forty pounds of marijuana in the trunk.

The lawsuit, filed in Colorado district court by Woodrow & Peluso LLC on behalf of Nang Thai, is seeking damages as a result of Advantage’s “fraudulent conduct, theft and serious breaches of conduct.” The lawsuit accuses Advantage of violating the Colorado Consumer Protection Act and committing civil theft, false imprisonment, breach of contract, fraudulent concealment and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

The vast possibilities of hemp are emerging as the legal barriers to hemp-based products begin to disappear, and among those possibilities is manufacturing products not for consumers, but for other companies. While many businesses involved with hemp and CBD are eager for the spotlight, others would rather do their work without the attention, in exchange for a manufacturing fee.

To learn more about the cannabis industry’s white-label products — something produced by one company for another to rebrand and sell — we talked with Maruchy Lachance, co-owner of CBD white-label company Boulder Botanical & Bioscience Laboratory.

If cannabis has all this medical value, why do strain breeders continue to label it with names that sound like a disease? I don’t know about you, but I’d never want to come down with a case of Sour Amnesia — which sounds a lot like what most grumpy old men go through on a daily basis. And after a few too many puffs of the sativa-dominant hybrid of the same name, I started to feel like confused old fart myself.

A cross of Amnesia and Sour Diesel, Sour Amnesia is a double shot of espresso that also makes you forget how to put on your pants. The two potent sativas create a delicious yet dangerous strain that will give you all the vigor and intelligence of a golden retriever, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, if you know what you’re getting into.

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