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Colorado has allowed retail marijuana sales for over six years, but pot prices have yet to find their footing. Now, one dispensary chain says that it can guarantee a cheap price point for customers.

The Green Solution, Colorado’s largest dispensary chain, says it has produced a consistently cheap option through its new flower brand, Sunlit Farms. According to TGS, Sunlit Farms eighths start at $13.95, available in “pre-packaged whole bud value flower from both indoor and outdoor grows.”

Hospitalizations from vaping have slowed significantly since the fall, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially linked vitamin E acetate, a vaping additive used to dilute nicotine and marijuana oils, to the vast majority of the illnesses reported. Although most of those cases stemmed from black market products, vaping liquid sold at regulated marijuana dispensaries has also been connected to several illnesses, with some THC vaping oils sold by dispensaries testing positive for vitamin E.

According to one cannabis laboratory, though, vitamin E acetate is a naturally occurring substance in virtually all plant products we use, which is why vaping oil manufacturers that don’t add the substance to their products have seen it show up in their test results. To learn more about naturally occurring vitamin E, we caught up with Frank Taylor, co-founder of cannabis testing facility AgriScience Labs.

The seventh year of recreational marijuana sales in Colorado promises to be an interesting one, with new laws allowing social consumption establishments and weed delivery, as well as new industry rules mandating more product testing while restricting vaping ingredients.

Here are the six biggest rule changes that will take effect on Colorado’s marijuana landscape in 2020.

Colorado has somehow managed to survive six years of recreational cannabis sales without burning down. But even so, there were plenty of hot, skunky issues to cover in 2019.

This year, the Colorado Legislature further established this state as an epicenter of cannabis, passing laws that expanded medical marijuana access and legalized social use businesses, such as pot cafes and smoking lounges. The state also continued in its role as a guinea pig of regulation and cannabis culture, dealing with challenges ranging from moldy pot to equitable industry participation.

After trimming our way through the year’s stories, we landed on these as the ten biggest in 2019:

The Coffee Joint, the first establishment to hold a cannabis consumption license in Denver, is now the second pot lounge business to apply for a state social consumption license.

Colorado Springs social lounge Studio A64 successfully applied for a social consumption license at the state Marijuana Enforcement Division office three hours before Coffee Joint owners Rita Tsalyuk and Kirill Merkulov could beat them to it.

Studio A64 could not be reached for comment, but Tsalyuk and Merkulov say the opportunity to apply for a state license is a big step for all cannabis businesses. “This is bigger than us. It’s just a bigger step in the industry,” Tsalyuk explains. “It opens the door to do something different and plan ahead for the next year.”

Many American farmers were handed seeds of opportunity in October, when the United States Department of Agriculture released its much-anticipated regulations for farming hemp. The new federal rules came nearly a year after Congress legalized hemp farming, and almost half a decade after the Colorado Department of Agriculture established its own program for farming hemp. And this state’s rules don’t exactly line up with the ones just announced by the feds.

Two years after voters approved Amendment 64, legalizing recreational marijuana, Colorado decided to opt into the 2014 Farm Bill, a federal law that allowed states to create pilot programs for hemp licensing. As a result, Colorado is now one of the largest producers of hemp in the country. While every Colorado farmer growing hemp will probably have to change a few things once the federal regulations take hold, those same regulations also bring credibility to an industry essentially stuck in a federal gray area, according to Corey Cox, an attorney with Vicente Sederberg who represents clients in Colorado’s hemp industry.

Colorado dispensaries will almost certainly break another annual sales record for the fifth straight year since recreational weed stores first opened for business on January 1, 2014.

According to data from the state Department of Revenue, Colorado dispensaries accounted for just under $150.5 million in sales in October. Recreational pot sales came in just over $121.2 million, while medical marijuana accounted for approximately $29.2 million.

While that figure is lower than the month before, it reflects what’s become a standard seasonal decline in pot sales. It also all but locks up 2019’s rise past 2018 to tally the most marijuana sales dollars in a calendar year.

As chemists try to attain precise effects, cannabis has been modified into specified chemical structures. Some of these forms of THC, the main compound responsible for marijuana’s intoxicating effects, aren’t even produced naturally in the plant.

THC acetate ester (also known as THC-O-acetate and THC-O) is one of them. THC-O is reportedly much more potent than natural THC, and produces more sedating effects. It was identified by federal authorities decades ago as an illegal form of THC made in a lab; some say it’s still not recognizable through standard drug-identifying procedures.

According to a recent survey published by the Grocery Manufacturers Association, over 75 percent of Americans assume that commercial CBD products are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration — which is not true.

Out of the 2,056 Americans who participated in the survey, 76 percent of respondents assumed that CBD products were already regulated by the FDA, while 16 percent of respondents were unsure of whether CBD products were regulated by the FDA or not — adding up to a 92 percent rate of confusion over CBD production and regulation.

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