The Denver Post: A year of legal pot

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2014 • SECTION W

S P E C I A L R E P O R T / A YEAR OF LEGAL POT

ONE YEAR AFTER THE LEAP INTO LEGALIZATION, WORLD’S EYES ON COLORADO

Photo-illustration by Jeff Neumann, The Denver Post; photos: Jupiter Images by Getty

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By John Ingold The Denver Post

ne year after he became, unofficially, the first legal recreational marijuana customer in America, Sean Azzariti sits on a couch in Denver’s 3D Cannabis Center and looks up to see ... himself.

The 4-foot-wide photo hanging over the couch shows Azzariti, an Iraq war veteran chosen for the ceremonial first purchase for his advocacy on post-traumatic stress disorder, cocooned by cameras on Jan. 1. The subsequent year — media requests, speaking gigs, advocacy awards, cannabis celebrity — washed by in what Azzariti calls “waves of awesomeness.”

“So, I have to ask,” a somewhat star-struck young guy says to Azzariti, nodding toward the picture. “Did you

really say, ‘One marijuana, please?’ when you were at the counter?”

Azzariti laughs no. It’s just an urban myth that arose from an artist’s rendering of the first purchase.

“But feel free,” he jokes, “to tell people that I did.”

Only one year in, Colorado’s unprecedented jump into marijuana legalization has become the stuff of legend.

For opponents and supporters, the state comes up repeatedly in the evolving discussion about marijuana.

It is perhaps the most underappreciated consequence of legalization. By becoming the first place in the world to actually legalize commercial sales of marijuana to anyone over 21, Colorado made the worldwide debate over pot more vibrant than it has ever been.

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News: The popularity of edibles

Lobby: Huge industry gives birth

Culture: Year One for the world’s

surprised and confounded the state »4W

to powerful advocates »9W

first marijuana editor »13W

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Health: Marijuana is not harmless for everyone »22W

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Customers wait to enter LoDo Wellness, which by noon Jan. 1 had given out more than 600 entrance tickets on the first day of retail sales of marijuana in Colorado.

AAron Ontiveroz, Denver Post file

Many strains are visible through the glass cases at High Country Healing. Kathryn Scott Osler, Denver Post file

Check out a photo gallery from the opening day of recreational sales last January. »denverpost.com/potanniversary Shane Martin checks out the grow room Jan. 1 after buying recreational marijuana at 3D Cannabis Center in Denver. RJ Sangosti, Denver Post file

ANNIVERSARY «FROM 1W Those in favor of legalization now think of Colorado — and, to a lesser extent, Washington state, which debuted a smaller marijuana market later in the year — as a kind of political homeland. The states’ campaigns and resulting industries were the inspiration for pro-pot successes in two more states this fall and are the blueprints for coming 2016 campaigns in as many as a half-dozen states. They helped foment never-before-seen congressional rebellion against federal enforcement of marijuana laws.

“It would not have become a topic of national debate so immediately if Colorado’s laws hadn’t come online early in the year,” said Aaron Houston, a D.C. lobbyist for the company WeedMaps who has worked on promarijuana issues since 2003. “Colorado’s law was a game-changer because it shifted the debate at the federal level from if to when.”

Those opposed to legalization, though, see Colorado as a cautionary tale — hard evidence of the kinds of dangers that they previously had been able to warn of only in the abstract. In speeches in states and countries considering legalization, marijuana opponents now talk about accidental pot ingestions, lower-than-predicted tax revenue, gaudy industry advertising and even deaths. They cite examples of

each from Colorado’s first year of legalized sales.

“We’re able to say, ‘Here is what legalization looks like in practice, not just in theory,’ ” said Kevin Sabet, one of the nation’s most prominent legalization foes as a cofounder of the group Smart Approaches to Marijuana. “That’s actually very valuable.”

The on-the-ground reality, of course, has been less stark than either side’s version. Marijuana legalization has changed Colorado.

It’s just tough to say exactly how.

Marijuana is more available in Colorado than ever before, but it’s unclear whether marijuana consumption has risen as a result.

Teens are less likely to think that marijuana is harmful, and marijuana arrests at Denver schools are up, but that hasn’t yet translated into measurably increased use. More people may be driving stoned, but traffic fatalities are down.

The smell of pot is more common along Denver’s 16th Street Mall.

Tourism to the state hit record levels this year. But how much of that has to do with marijuana?

After a full year, legal marijuana sales are an experiment still very much in progress.

“People are trying to jump to conclusions much faster than the data allows,” said Andrew Freedman, the man in charge of coordinating Colorado’s policy efforts on marijuana legalization.

The jumps are even bigger because of Colorado’s data-collection

woes. The state lacks systems for quick, accurate measurements of youth use, marijuana-related incidents at schools, stoned driving and many other questions. State officials this year commissioned a 74page report titled “Marijuana Data Discovery and Gap Analysis” just to address the problem. One person in the Department of Public Safety is now in charge of coordinating datacollection efforts for 2015.

“If we can’t measure something,” a frustrated-sounding Barbara Brohl, the executive director of the Department of Revenue, said during an October meeting on marijuana regulations, “we can’t improve on it.”

Even when there are numbers to measure legalization’s impacts, they often tell unexpected tales.

For instance, state tax revenues from recreational marijuana once were predicted to top $100 million in the current fiscal year. They’re on pace for a little more than half that. And, aside from the dollars constitutionally mandated to go to school construction, state officials haven’t seen the revenue as a budgetary windfall. They’ve instead proposed the money all go toward marijuana-related issues.

In 2014, police said marijuana legalization would cost more for them to enforce than marijuana prohibition. Employers tightened their drug-testing policies, even though it was legal for their employees to use marijuana. More people became registered medical marijuana patients, despite the

presence of a less-restrictive recreational market.

“The big assumption here was that human behavior is a light switch,” said Skyler McKinley, Freedman’s deputy, “that you legalize marijuana and everything changes overnight.”

That resiliency of old ways proved a boon to state regulators trying to implement legalization.

Because Colorado already had a robust medical marijuana industry — and because the recreational marijuana industry initially was restricted to people who already owned a dispensary — the transition into legal sales was more of an evolution than a revolution.

Freedman said Colorado’s yearslong struggle to develop effective regulations for medical marijuana ended up being “pre-turbulence” for the roll-out of the recreational industry. Washington state, which didn’t have a well-defined medical marijuana industry, has seen a much bumpier start to recreational sales.

But Colorado had its notable problems in 2014 — issues over the packaging and potency of edible marijuana products were especially unforeseen. But for supporters of legalization, the lack of drama locally over the opening of new marijuana businesses is Colorado’s greatest success.

“We can’t say the state has gone to hell in a handbasket,” said Brian Vicente, one of the leaders of the legalization campaign in Colorado.

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NEWS / A YEAR OF LEGAL POT Marijuana is in jars for customers to inspect at 3D Cannabis Center in Denver. RJ Sangosti, Denver Post file

Max Montrose cheers the new year during the “Prohibition is Over!” party at Casselman’s Bar and Venue by The Hemp Connoisseur & Mahatma Extreme Concentrates. Joe Amon, Denver Post file

Master Gardner Matthew Lopez trims off small limbs from a mother plant as he clones a strain of cannabis called Qush at Northern Lights grow facility. Seth McConnell, Denver Post file

Garrett Sellars, 21, shows an edible to Ashly Carius, 21, both of Oklahoma City, at the shop at LoDo Wellness Center. AAron Ontiveroz, Denver Post file

ANNIVERSARY «FROM 2W “The number of I-told-you-sos that I have had to do,” said Mason Tvert, another legalization leader, “has been remarkable.”

That is not to say that things haven’t changed.

Toni Savage, the owner of 3D Cannabis Center, said the most she ever grossed in a single year operating a medical marijuana dispensary was $400,000.

This year, she’s on track to top $3.5 million in sales — with more than half of those coming from outof-state tourists.

But bigger sales means bigger tax bills. Not only is she paying nearly $100,000 a month in state and local taxes, she also expects to have a $500,000 federal tax bill because she can’t deduct business expenses in the same way that stores that aren’t illegal under federal law can.

“I made a ton of money,” she said, “but I owe more than I have.”

The situation could get even tougher in 2015 because the state has started to allow newcomers into the recreational marijuana business.

Savage said stores fear a glut of marijuana, which could drive down prices that have budged only slightly since the beginning of 2014.

“If you’re in the business, it’s going to get really ugly,” she said.

It’s the change in the amount of attention Colorado has received

from outside the state that defines the first year of legal marijuana sales.

This was the year a New York Times columnist got stoned in a Denver hotel room, hallucinated that she had died, then wrote about the whole experience. Snoop Dogg recorded a theme song for a Colorado gubernatorial candidate, and Bill O’Reilly, upset over legalization, mused about running for the same office.

It was a sign of things to come

that, on opening day, one of the first people in line behind Azzariti at 3D Cannabis Center was a documentary filmmaker.

Azzariti said the interest has given him opportunities around the country to talk about using marijuana to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

But, befitting the transition the nation finds itself in over marijuana, he’s also discovered the attention goes only so far.

It turns out, Azzariti never smoked what he bought on Jan. 1.

Instead, he’s hoping he can donate it to a museum.

“I even called the Smithsonian,” he said. “But I don’t think they thought I was serious. They were like, ‘Yeaaah, we’ll get back to you.’ ” John Ingold: 303-954-1068, jingold@denverpost.com or twitter.com/johningold

POT BY THE NUMBERS

130.3 metric tons

7 percent

9 percent

$60.1 million

Colorado’s annual demand for marijuana

The amount of Colorado’s annual pot demand purchased by out-of-state tourists

The price drop on an eighth of marijuana flower at a dozen prominent Colorado pot shops from January ($53.88) to December 2014 ($48.95)

The amount Colorado brought in via taxes, licenses and fees on recreational and medical marijuana, January-October

485,000

23 percent

Adults who are 21 and older using marijuana regularly (at least once a month), or 9 percent of the state’s population

The amount of Colorado’s user population that consumes cannabis almost daily

90 percent

103,918

Out-of-state tourists account for most recreational pot sales in mountain resort communities

The number of medical marijuana patients reporting “severe pain” as their condition for a license, or 93 percent of the state’s patients

$326,716,273.59 Medical marijuana sales, January-October

$246,810,599.03 Recreational marijuana sales, January-October

Sources: “Market Size and Demand for Marijuana in Colorado,” a study by the Marijuana Policy Group for the Colorado Department of Revenue, National Survey on Drug Use and Health, marillow.com, weedmaps.com. leafly.com, individual store websites, Colorado Department of Revenue

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Dixie Elixirs & Edibles employees Jaymie Giordano, left, and Zak Mishaw carefully cut the marijuana-infused Colorado Bars produced at the Denver company. Each bar contains 100 milligrams of THC, the psychoactive chemical in marijuana, or 10 times the recommended amount. Photos by Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post

Pot edibles a big, risky surprise in first year of recreational sales

By Jordan Steffen The Denver Post

As one of the people charged with implementing marijuana legalization in Colorado, Ron Kammerzell thought he had considered everything.

And then inexperienced users bit off more than they could chew, and reports of people consuming too much edible pot at once started to add up.

“That really wasn’t on anyone’s radar,” Kammerzell said.

The proliferation of marijuanainfused edibles stunned state and industry leaders, making it one of the biggest surprises during the first year of legal recreational marijuana sales. Potent cookies, candies and drinks — once considered a niche market — now account for roughly 45 percent of the legal marijuana marketplace and led to the most high-profile marijuana controversies in 2014.

The variety of edibles available became a “point of fascination” for consumers, said Joe Hodas, chief marketing officer for Dixie Elixirs & Edibles, one of Colorado’s largest producers of infused products.

“We knew that there would be consumer interest in edibles, but I think we did underestimate that the demand would exceed our expectations,” Hodas said.

Neither Kammerzell, enforcement director for the Department of Revenue, which regulates marijuana businesses, nor Hodas predicted the overwhelming popularity of edibles or the problems stemming from overconsumption.

During the rollout of medical marijuana sales, there were no serious reports of overconsumption, Kammerzell said.

But when recreational marijuana sales became legal Jan. 1, the makeup of legal marijuana consumers changed overnight — from experienced users with higher tolerances to floods of novice consumers, many of whom were unaware that one candy or cookie can contain 10 times the recommended amount of 10 milligrams of THC, the psychoactive chemical in marijuana.

During the first month of recreational sales, Dixie Elixirs saw a fivefold increase in the number of orders it received compared with two months before, Hodas said. For many inexperienced users, the idea of discreetly nibbling on a chocolate truffle was more appealing than smoking pot.

“That image of sitting with a big joint, that’s not something these new users are really interested in,” Hodas said.

But as the popularity of edibles grew, so did concerns about overconsumption.

In March, the same month state lawmakers started working on legislation requiring regulators to create additional rules for labeling edibles, Wyoming college student Levy Thamba, 19, became agitated after eating a marijuana-infused cookie and leapt to his death from a Denver hotel balcony.

Weeks later, Richard Kirk allegedly shot and killed his wife after nibbling on a marijuana-infused caramel chew. A low level of THC was found in Kirk’s blood that

The proliferation of marijuana-infused edibles stunned state and industry leaders, making it one of the biggest surprises during the first year of legal recreational marijuana sales.

Potent cookies, candies and drinks – once considered a niche market – now account for roughly 45 percent of the legal marijuana marketplace and led to the most high-profile marijuana controversies in 2014.

These are single-serving, marijunana-infused, white-peppermint chocolate bars produced by Dixie Elixirs & Edibles. Each bar contains 10 milligrams of THC.

night, but prosecutors argue Kirk acted deliberately and the effects of the drug were not enough to affect his grasp on reality.

Those two events spurred a frenzied conversation on the potential risks of edibles. A working group was formed, and state officials and industry leaders teamed up to improve education for consumers.

Bud tenders, who before had been making recommendations of how much to eat based on their own experiences, worked to give consumers consistent instructions, Hodas said. Using the slogan “Start low and go slow,” they advised inexperienced users to eat a small portion of an edible and wait.

Even as improvements were made in education, hospitals continued to see an increase in the number of children and adults coming into emergency rooms after having consumed too much of an edible.

“The increase from a medical standpoint has been dramatic,” said Dr. Christopher Colwell, chief of emergency medicine at Denver Health Medical Center.

Colwell estimated there was a fivefold to tenfold increase in the number of patients — including a sharp rise in the number of adolescents and teenagers — arriving at the hospital after consuming part or all of a marijuana edible.

Colwell said he expected an in-

crease in the number of marijuana cases. But he said he was surprised and concerned with the higher potency of THC in the edibles and the more severe symptoms it can cause.

State regulators started incentive programs for producers to create products with lower or single servings of THC, Kammerzell said.

Most have already started shifting toward single-serving products.

But Dr. Larry Wolk, executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, said few of his concerns surrounding edibles were addressed this year. In October, the health department proposed a ban on the sales of nearly all forms of edibles but quickly dropped the idea after an industry outcry.

Wolk said even after changes in packaging and decreasing the amount of THC in edibles, he is still concerned that as long as edibles come in the form of cookies, candies and other foods enticing to children, they will continue to be dangerous for children.

“There’s the potential that we, the health department, could be viewed as the bad guy,” Wolk said. “We’ve learned after the fact that something more needs to be done to protect the public and especially our kids.”

Jordan Steffen: 303-954-1794 or jsteffen@denverpost.com

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Oscar, a Colorado-based former black market marijuana grower who spoke to The Denver Post on condition of anonymity, shows off his original grow kit and accessories at his home. Oscar now has a family and is working in the financial industry. He said medical dispensaries and eventually recreational shops provided an influx of cheap grass to his market, which led to his ultimate decision to retire. Photos by AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

How legalization forced one grower out of his illegal business

By Ricardo Baca The Denver Post

Growing illegal marijuana in rented houses across Colorado’s front range and illicitly selling it throughout the state isn’t for everyone, but it was once a way of life for Oscar.

And the 36-year-old loved everything about his job, from the $80,000 income to his work schedule that left time for snowboarding to his simple daily regimen amid the awkwardly towering pot plants occupying his various living rooms and basements.

“The heyday on a really good ounce was $350 in 2003 to 2008,” said Oscar, whose real name isn’t Oscar, but he was speaking to The Denver Post under conditions of anonymity. “But then the scale started to tip. (The ounces) went down to $300 — and this was really good weed.

“I felt that price dip, hard.”

That decline came in 2009, Oscar said, when Colorado’s medical marijuana dispensary system started to flourish under state-governed regulations. The market suddenly was flooded with legal cannabis, making Oscar’s pot less valuable.

Marijuana prices in Colorado continued to drop during the next few years, Oscar said. And then the bottom fell out just a few short months after Gov. John Hickenlooper signed Amendment 64 into

law in December 2012, legalizing recreational pot.

“In early 2013, it was down to people wanting ounces for $175, so it was half of what it had been,” said Oscar, working his way through a vanilla latte at a coffeehouse in the Art District on Santa Fe. “Only the things you had to buy to grow it weren’t getting cheaper. Dirt wasn’t going down in price. In fact, it was going up in price. Pot was legal, and they only had 50 pounds of dirt to sell, and so their dirt prices almost doubled.”

Oscar illegally grew cannabis in Colorado and sold it in bulk here and elsewhere for 10 years. He never had a massive grow, but his 20 or so plants provided more than enough yield. Business was brisk and friendly and all among close friends, which lessened his risk.

Once local prices started to drop, Oscar focused on selling pounds to buyers who could still pay full rate; his friend in Texas would drive up to get the product, and friends on the East Coast would receive Oscar’s overnight packages and send him money in return. Oscar eventually married, and he and his wife lived comfortably, even if it meant paying stinky cash on every trip to Target or the grocery store.

Forced out While a few black market growers and dealers have bragged anonymously to national media organi-

“The heyday on a really good ounce was $350 in 2003 to 2008.

But then the scale started to tip. (The ounces) went down to $300 — and this was really good weed. I felt that price dip, hard.” Oscar, who spoke to The Denver Post on condition of anonymity zations about how Colorado’s legalization of marijuana has been a boon to their underground business — given the high taxes on legal pot — Oscar’s experience has been quite the opposite. When low prices forced him from the underground career he loved, he went back to school and landed an entrylevel job in the finance sector.

“I just couldn’t make the money I needed to make,” Oscar said.

Some of Oscar’s former colleagues also gave up growing, while others transitioned into the legal market — often taking a pay cut. He still has a friend or two who grow underground pot, sometimes from seeds and clones from Oscar’s original 2003 plants (including a New York City Diesel that Oscar still buys), but they’re not making the profit they once did in pre-legalization Colorado.

The timing of Oscar’s forced career change makes sense to Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California Los Angeles who often writes on legal marijuana. And Kleiman doubts Oscar was alone in moving on from illegal marijuana as more and more U.S. states rewrite their pot laws.

“That’s what I would have expected,” Kleiman said after he was told about Oscar’s experience. “I don’t see how you can have an illicit market in the face of the Colorado medical market.”

A grower’s life

Oscar shows off recent buds from a former growing partner.

Oscar remembers the first time he ever got high. He was a sixthgrader, and it was schwag weed out of a refashioned soda-can pipe while riding bikes in a Michigan nature preserve near where he grew up. It was the beginning of 15 to 17 years of “smoking without missing a day,” he said.

He later moved to Colorado after falling in love with the Rocky Mountains during a 26-day Outward Bound program spent in the Chicago Basin between Durango and Silverton, a gift from his parents. It wasn’t long before he made friends with a grower who offered to teach him the trade. And shortly afterward, Oscar had the first of two grows in the high-elevation Placer Valley, which sits between

Breckenridge and Fairplay.

Oscar skipped all over the state with his rudimentary setup of grow lights and buckets. After growing in two Placer Valley homes, he moved to Boulder, Louisville, Thornton, Morrison and finally Denver.

“I still have a bottle of cloning gel in the fridge,” Oscar said on a brisk December night, sitting in his north Denver living room with his pretty, whip-smart wife. “It’s Olivia’s (brand), I think. You know, I always used the same nutrients that whole time I grew? There was always the next big thing, but why mess with what worked?”

As Oscar reminisced, his wife told a story that shared some of the conflict marijuana has introduced to their lives, especially given the most recent addition to their home.

“I had a C-section with her,” said Oscar’s wife, nodding down to the bouncing baby girl in her arms. “It was planned, and my parents were out here for (her birth). The nurse was putting in an IV and said, ‘I have to ask you some questions. Have you ever smoked cigarettes?’ I said, ‘Yes, but I quit seven years ago, and I haven’t had any since then.’

“Then the nurse asked, ‘Have you ever smoked marijuana?’ And I just looked at her with big eyes. And there’s my mom and dad looking at me, waiting for a big answer. And then the nurse moved on. My parents are fairly liberal for Midwesterners, but, no, they would not be down with any of this. I couldn’t tell them about what (Oscar) used to do, absolutely not.”

So did the arrival of their first child have anything to do with Oscar’s career shift?

“I was a little concerned once we were going to start having a family,” his wife said. “I wouldn’t want her going down and getting into something that might make her sick.”

Added Oscar: “My wife never pushed me or led me into it, but she knew I was stressed about the prices. And once I said something, she said, ‘I think that’s a good idea.’ ”

A new leaf Oscar’s life in late-2014 couldn’t be more different than it was a year ago. Back then he and his wife regularly would enjoy the dried and DEALER » 6W

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A cloud of pot smoke covers the crowd at 4:20 p.m. at the 2012 Denver 420 rally in Civic Center. Hyoung Chang, Denver Post file

Focusing on a new kind of black market between states

By Ricardo Baca The Denver Post

The black market for marijuana in Colorado isn’t what it used to be.

Nine or 10 years ago, the narrative of illicit cannabis in the state focused on illegally grown product filtering in from Mexico, California and elsewhere. Now it seems officials and experts are more concerned about Colorado-grown marijuana infiltrating other states, a trend that is seeing a significant upward trajectory, according to data obtained by The Denver Post.

“In a lot of ways, our legal industry has become the black market for other states,” said Tom Gorman, director of the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area.

Although some facets of Colorado pot are simple to quantify — taxes, sales, demand — the black and gray markets are by definition

difficult to track, especially in the first year of legal recreational sales.

It doesn’t help that the underground market is a complex, multiheaded beast.

“There are four black markets,” said Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California Los Angeles. “There’s people growing it in Colorado to sell in Colorado. People bringing stuff up from Mexico to sell in Colorado. People with medical cards reselling their marijuana in state and out of state, including sales to minors. And there may be some diversion from the commercial market: People buying it retail in Denver and selling it in Chicago or somewhere else.”

For example: The black market is straight up illegal. The gray market represents gray areas of the law among unlicensed, unregulated caregivers.

So what do the local black and

But with the pot leaving Colorado, a sticking point for the U.S. Justice Department is that it must prevent “the diversion of marijuana from states where it is legal ... to other states.” The situation is getting worse. There is substantial data pointing toward an increase in the amount of legal and illegal pot being seized on its way out of Colorado to other states.

DEALER «FROM 5W cured spoils of his crops as well as the added income they brought in.

While his wife always held down professional jobs, Oscar often would spend his days on the slopes.

“I (mainly grew pot) for the freedom,” he said. “I could go snowboarding and go to concerts when I wanted to. I never had any responsibility to be here or do that, and I never did anything I didn’t want to do.”

Oscar uses words like “important” and “special” when discussing that time — in part because of the fun he had on his own and the time it allowed him with members of his family.

“It’s relaxing and gets me into this zone where I feel like I’m

floating down the mountain,” he said. “When you’re on the hill, seeing the big blue sky, breathing in that air that makes you feel like the inside of your nose is going to break open and start bleeding, that’s what gets me going.

“But that time was also very personal to me, because I still had my sibling for much of that time,” said Oscar, who struggled after an unexpected loss in the family in the mid2000s. “And my dog was around the entire time, too. I became myself in that period of time, and those decisions led me to where I am today.”

Now Oscar and his wife have a baby, and he’s working 70 hours a week and pulling an entry-level salary of $45,000 — but they seem content with their new life.

“We had more money then,” his wife said matter-of-factly. She’s not as melancholic or romantic

gray markets for marijuana look like almost a year after recreational sales started on Jan. 1?

“We say this with regard to everything on these societal impact-type questions: It’s too early to tell,” said Ashley Kilroy, the city of Denver’s executive director of marijuana policy.

Some industry experts agree with Kilroy on that point.

“It’s absurd that a system that has grown over 80 years would end in a week or a year,” said Mason Tvert, communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project and a director on Colorado’s pot-legalizing “Yes on 64” campaign. “This is an issue that cannot be addressed in a year.”

Ripple effect With the pot coming into Colorado, the situation looks to be improving. Some Mexican marijuana growers have abandoned the crop entirely because stateside legalization has cut wholesale costs in half. “I wish the Americans would stop with this legalization,” 50year-old lifelong pot farmer Rodrigo Silla told The Washington Post in April. Another Mexican farmer, identified only as Nabor, told NPR in November: “If the U.S. continues to legalize pot, they’ll run us into the ground.”

But with the pot leaving Colorado, a sticking point for the U.S. Justice Department is that it must prevent “the diversion of marijuana from states where it is legal ... to other states.” The situation is getting worse. There is substantial data pointing toward an increase in the amount of legal and illegal pot

about the old family business as Oscar can be.

The irony of Oscar’s evolved financial state isn’t lost on him: The jump from paying for groceries with drug money to opening his first 401(k) and Roth IRA as he studied for a major financial exam was a quick one.

“I never thought about saving money, but I also never had a kid,” he said. “I was only taking care of myself and my dogs, and so I just needed to get us through the month. ... Now I only have 10 vacation days — which is a foreign concept to the me of five years ago.”

Oscar has friends who transitioned their black market experience into high-profile jobs (and sometimes ownership stakes) in legal cannabis businesses.

“I’m happy for them,” he said.

“They get to do all that on a much

being seized on its way out of Colorado to other states.

The number of Postal Servicemailed packages containing pot intercepted in Colorado increased by 1,280 percent from 2010, when there were 15 seizures, to 2013, when there were 207, according to HIDTA, a federally-funded drug task force. (The data did not include FedEx, UPS or other carriers.) The agency said the pounds of marijuana in those packages increased by 762 percent in the same time period, from 57.2 pounds in 2010 to 493 pounds in 2013.

“Some of the pot is out of dispensaries,” said Gorman, who spent 30 years with California’s Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement. “Some is out of retail stores, some is out of home grows, some is from co-ops, some is from patients and caregivers — you take that whole segment, and that to me is what the black market looks like now in Colorado.”

HIDTA’s August report also shows a 397 percent rise in highway interdiction seizures of Colorado marijuana bound for other states from 2008, when there were 58, to 2013, when there were 288. When the organization informally polled 100 law officers on how much of the pot leaving Colorado actually is being seized, they estimated less than 10 percent, Gorman said.

“Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma — it’s Colorado dope going into those states,” Gorman said. “It’s very high-quality, very desirable pot, and you can get twice the amount of money for it in Iowa or Missouri.”

The amount of illegal marijuana BLACK MARKET » 7W

larger scale. So if that was appealing to them, great. I never wanted to keep getting bigger and bigger. I grew really good pot, and people enjoyed it. It wasn’t transactionary for me.”

And while Oscar has shopped for legal weed only twice — “It was the worst weed I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said — he would consider work in the aboveground pot market if the opportunity presented itself. He has a friend who is contemplating a lucrative, fly-in, $10,000-a-month consulting gig in Florida cultivation centers.

He liked the sound of that.

“But I’d only do it legal now,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to get in trouble because I have the kid.”

Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394, rbaca@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bruvs

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BLACK MARKET «FROM 6W seized by the Denver Police Department increased 959 percent from the first quarter of 2013, when it took in 275 pounds of pot, to the first quarter of 2014, which it seized 2,912 pounds of cannabis — a result of the department’s marijuana team, which “focuses on these bigger operations, the illegal marijuana grows,” said Kilroy.

Meanwhile Kilroy also points to a recent report from public policy research organization the Cato Institute that says legalization hasn’t brought on any significant changes to how much taxpayers are spending on state costs involving police, courts and jails.

“The overall impact on our criminal justice system ... the current statewide data shows no meaningful change in criminal justice activity costs,” Kilroy said.

Marijuana policy While some pot activists point at recreational marijuana’s higherthan-average taxes as a reason for an illegal grower-rooted black market, there are bigger factors to some of the issues plaguing Colorado, according to Jeffrey Miron, a senior lecturer on economics and director of undergraduate studies at Harvard University.

“Compared to the rate of taxation for alcohol and cigarettes in many states and countries, (Colorado’s) marijuana taxes are not excessive,” said Miron, who is also the director of economic studies at the Cato Institute, which published his “Marijuana Policy in Colorado” working paper in October. “The magnitude of taxation for marijuana in Colorado isn’t enough to create a black market.

But I think if it were fully legal under federal law we would see the vast majority of the market become legal if not gray.”

One of the next major milestones for black markets in Colorado, Washington and beyond: the 2016 election, when at least five U.S.

states will vote on recreational pot within their borders and the whole country will elect a new president.

“Will he or she continue this hands-off, benign approach to marijuana?” asked Miron of the next U.S. president. “Then I think we’ve hit the tipping point. Without knowing the results of that, we can’t quite know.

“Federal policy can be changed with the stroke of a pen. The new president can say to his or her attorney general: ‘We should enforce the marijuana laws in all of the states.’

That would be perfectly legal under the existing paradigm of federal law trumping state law, even in states like Colorado and others.

“The federal government in 1920 enforced alcohol prohibition in a whole bunch of states that had not criminalized alcohol.”

Miron’s working paper used data predating the 2000 introduction of Colorado’s medical marijuana system to determine that “neither judicial and legal employment nor corrections employment shows any meaningful change after a marijuana policy change.”

The finding discredits activists’ theories that legalization would severely increase or reduce expenditures on criminal justice activities.

The Denver Police Department, however, is spending more money on marijuana enforcement in 2014 than before. But its additionally budgeted $410,005 is being used primarily for new hires (a sergeant, detective and crime lab scientist) and is funded by the 3.5 percent special sales tax on recreational pot — and not taxpayers as a whole, according to Kilroy’s office, which also added that an additional $175,000 has been appropriated for 2015 to hire more park rangers to enforce public consumption laws.

Merits of legal purchase Tvert points toward one number when he discusses the old school black market of customers buying from illegal growers and dealers: More than $550 million has been spent on legal medical and recreational pot in Colorado from January to October 2014, according to

Malia Knapp of Denver celebrates the Denver 420 Rally with her friends at Civic Center in April 2012, when black market marijuana fueled consumption. After legalization, officials are now worried about Colorado pot ending up elsewhere.

Hyoung Chang, Denver Post file

Department of Revenue data.

“The fact remains that hundreds of millions of dollars in marijuana sales are taking place in licensed businesses instead of the underground market,” Tvert said. “It cannot be argued that the underground market is anywhere near where it was previously. In fact, it’s probably a fraction of what it was.”

Tvert attributes the success of Colorado’s legal market to four factors: convenience, variety, safety and cost.

“And for the most part, all of those things will be found in a regu-

lated market,” Tvert said. “You’d be hard-pressed to find adults who would rather call around to people to find out who has illegal marijuana and hope it’s the kind they want and hope that the person is able to meet them and hope that the whole transaction goes according to plan — as opposed to stopping at the store on the way home.

“If you think about how real life works, it’s not a reasonable notion.”

Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394, rbaca@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bruvs

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6

P O L I T I C S / A Y EAR OF LEGAL POT

Hickenlooper is reluctant manager of new marijuana law

By John Frank The Denver Post

Gov. John Hickenlooper emerged as Colorado’s reluctant supervisor in the first year of legal recreational marijuana, tasked with administering a law he didn’t support as the state set a model for the nation.

The Democrat’s difficult stance created frequent awkward moments, even as it helped set the tone for the state’s cautious approach to legal pot after voters approved the 2012 ballot initiative.

The most notable came at a campaign forum in October when Hickenlooper made national headlines for saying Colorado voters were “reckless” to legalize marijuana, forcing him to walk it back and call it “risky” instead.

But now, outside the campaign spotlight and with a year of lessons learned, Hickenlooper said his stance on the issue is evolving.

“If I had a magic wand that I could have waved and reversed the decision of the voters ... the day after the election, I would have waved my wand,” he said in a recent interview.

“Now, I’m not so sure,” he said crediting his team with a smooth implementation. “It’s not impossible to see that we could create a regulatory framework that works.”

Hickenlooper pointed to reports from the left-leaning Brookings Institution that called the rollout “largely successful” and the rightleaning Cato Institute that found the law “had minimal impact on marijuana use and the outcomes sometimes associated with use.”

Days after recreational pot became legal Jan. 1, Hickenlooper used his State of the State address to highlight the challenge faced by him and other lawmakers who opposed the law.

“This will be one of the great social experiments of this century. And while not all of us chose it, being first means we all share a responsibility to do it properly,” he said.

At a National Governors Association meeting a month later, Hickenlooper said at least a half-dozen governors approached him with questions about Colorado’s new law.

He urged caution — a line he still repeats when asked. “What I say is you should wait a couple years,” Hickenlooper told CNN after the

“If I had a magic wand that I could have waved and reversed the decision of the voters ... the day after the election, I would have waved my wand,” Gov. John Hickenlooper said recently. “Now, I’m not so sure.” Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post

November election. “I don’t think any state should do it just for tax revenues or that kind of revenue decision.

Let’s see what the unintended conflicts are and whether they can really diminish to a point where this new system makes sense for everyone.”

A poll months into the new law’s tenure showed more than half of Coloradans approved of the way Hickenlooper was directing marijuana policy, a figure that broke down along mostly partisan lines just like marijuana legalization. A new Denver Post poll shows respondents mostly approve of the state’s administration of marijuana legalization.

“I think he’s done what many of us did,” said state Sen. Cheri Jahn, a Wheat Ridge Democrat who served on a task force studying marijuana regulations. “It really doesn’t matter what you think of it — the voters voted for it.”

State Rep. Tim Dore, an Elizabeth Republican who served on a marijuana committee, said he wanted to see

“This will be one of the great social experiments of this century. And while not all of us chose it, being first means we all share a responsibility to do it properly.” Gov. John Hickenlooper

Hickenlooper take a stronger stance against the ballot measure, as well as take a more definitive position on how to implement the regulations. “I am a little disappointed the governor’s office didn’t provide more leadership on issues like this,” he said.

Even though Hickenlooper isn’t a fan, the marijuana industry doesn’t consider him an opponent. They even held a fundraiser for his reelection campaign.

“We don’t need true believers,” said Michael Elliott, the director of the Marijuana Industry Group, a Denver-based lobbying organization for dispensaries. “We need people who are going to make this program work. That’s been the governor. He’s done a really good job of making this program work.”

Still, the pitfalls remain.

The issue of how to label edibles and keep them from children ensnared Hickenlooper in controversy in October when the state Department of Public Health and Environment recommended a ban on the sales of nearly all marijuana edibles, only to have the governor distance himself. The health department had to issue a statement saying the proposal was intended for discussion and it wasn’t reviewed by the governor’s office.

Not all efforts met with acceptance. An advertising firm hired by the governor’s office to help convince kids not to use marijuana was panned. The “Don’t Be a Lab Rat” effort that featured oversized rat cages and strongly worded messages came under harsh criticism when it debuted in August, and at least one school district rejected the campaign. Colorado health officials, however, believe the conversation around the effort helped make it a success.

In an interview, Hickenlooper said one of his biggest concerns about marijuana is the unknowns about the potential health effects and “negative unintended consequences,” particularly for children.

“The costs are dramatic once a kid slides off the tracks,” he said.

“They stop going to school, and they start hanging out in their parents’ basement. They eventually run away. The cost of getting those kids reconnected to constructive lives is very, very significant.”

Here’s the message Hickenlooper says he doesn’t want children to take away from Colorado’s move: “They think it’s safe for them because it’s been legalized by adults.”

Staff writer Joey Bunch contributed to this report.

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the denver post B denverpost.com • sunday, december 28, 2014

«9W

P O L I T I C S / A Y EAR OF LEGAL POT

Colorado pot lobby gains clout on key issues as lawmakers listen

By Joey Bunch The Denver Post

Colorado’s Department of Public Health and Environment surprised the marijuana industry in October by proposing a ban on candy, brownies and other edibles and drinks infused with cannabis.

Edibles accounted for a surprising 45 percent of marijuana sales and a majority of the regulatory headaches in the state’s first year of legal recreational pot. Within hours, the growing rapid-response marijuana lobby swooped in and beat back the proposed ban.

“For the year 2014, edibles has been the most difficult issue for the industry,” said Michael Elliott, executive director of the powerful Colorado lobbying outfit Marijuana Industry Group. “And largely we’ve solved it.”

With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, it’s not surprising that the cannabis lobbying industry is growing almost as fast as the plants.

Nine years ago, it wasn’t that way, although Colorado voters had passed medical marijuana in 2000.

Back then Brian Vicente of Sensible Colorado and Mason Tvert of Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recreation were the most distinct voices on the issue to legalize and regulate marijuana.

“For the first few years in Colorado, people would refer to me as ‘The Marijuana Guy,’ ” said Tvert, now spokesman for the national Marijuana Policy Project, which advocates for legalization and fair regulation in other states. “And now you go to a meeting and there are dozens of marijuana guys and gals.”

Tvert’s initial campaign was to show marijuana was safer than alcohol and shouldn’t be held to a higher standard of regulation or prosecution. In the Colorado Capitol, lobbyists for pot now match those for the much older, better-financed alcohol industry.

The pot industry directly employed 26 lobbyists who were collectively paid about $331,000 during the past legislative session, according to state reports.

An additional 34 lobbyists were employed by groups that had a stake in the issue, such as local governments, law enforcement, drug treatment facilities and schools.

By comparison, in the last session, a failed bill would have allowed local governments to extend closing times for alcohol sales beyond 2 a.m. There were 57 lobbyists supporting, opposing or monitoring the bill, according to state records.

In 2013, when a bill proposed allowing grocery stores to sell fullstrength beer, there were 40 lobbyists working on the issue, which eventually failed.

Spending on alcohol lobbying is difficult to calculate in Colorado, because it overlaps with many other issues a lobbyist might be paid for, according to the secretary of state’s office. But nationally in 2014, the beer, wine and liquor industry spent at least $18.3 million on 231 lobbyists, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The public-interest site doesn’t calculate the pot industry’s overall lobbying efforts but notes that the Marijuana Policy Project spent more than $1 million on lobbying nationwide in 2013, and the pro-pot Drug Policy Alliance spent an additional $520,000.

Creating pot credit union Addressing edibles is far from the only regulatory tangle for the growing industry. In November, the state issued a charter to the first credit union to serve marijuana businesses, the governor’s office said the state had gone to “the end of the line” in what it could do to provide banking for a booming new industry.

Lobbyists for the state’s pot industry helped push through a bill to

The pot industry directly employed 26 lobbyists who were collectively paid about $331,000 during the past legislative session.

“For the year 2014, edibles has been the most difficult issue for the industry,” says Michael Elliott, executive director of the Marijuana Industry Group.

Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post

create a state credit union for their clients during just seven days at the end of the last legislative session.

Big banks won’t do business with pot growers, sellers and buyers, because marijuana still violates federal law.

Because the credit union still needs the blessing of federal regulators, backers can only hope to have the political muscle in Washington they enjoy in Colorado.

“I think the good players, the people who are concerned about the state and seeing a big industry run the right way, who have a sincere concern about public safety, we’ve certainly found that at the end of the day people are listening,” said Josh Hanfling, a proposed board member for the credit union and a well-connected lobbyist for marijuana seller Invita Wellness.

Sen. Pat Steadman, D-Denver, said the pro-pot lobby hasn’t gotten everything it wants, but it’s taken advantage of the opportunity to provide valuable information about how the industry works and the affects and costs of proposed rules.

“I think we’re doing it right,” Steadman said. “I think the industry has the right amount of voice, and the legislature is taking a thoughtful approach to what’s in the best interest of the industry and what’s in the best interest of the state.”

Colorado voters passed a constitutional amendment in 2012 to legalize recreational marijuana. In the 2013 legislative session there were 21 bills.

After sales began Jan. 1, lawmakers considered 30 separate pieces of pot-related legislation, tackling issues from banking to regulating edibles to limiting civil liability in marijuana agritourism and using pot revenue to fix flood-damaged schools.

Lawmakers will wrangle with just as many issues in this session, including whether medical marijuana licenses should be taxed or regulated differently, how many plants caregivers can grow, fire safety procedures where pot is grown under lamps indoors and various attempts to snag a share of tax revenue.

Elliott said the amount of legislation reflects the aspects of the industry that either didn’t exist before or weren’t regulated in Colorado.

Elliott’s organization was formed by dispensaries in 2010 to help guide the rules that govern them.

“Before you had law enforcement controlling the discussions, and their only goal was to the do away with the industry,” he said. “No industry can survive like that.”

The dispensaries stepped up after the federal government said it wouldn’t crack down on them if they could demonstrate they were following all state laws. At the time, hardly any state laws existed, which could have proven problematic for the dispensaries, Elliott said.

As a result, the state excluded felons from gaining pot business licenses and required background checks and financial disclosures, among other measures.

Most bills have gotten bipartisan support. While it’s perceived that

Democrats favor the industry and Republicans resist, Elliott said plenty of Republicans want to see the industry operated the right way.

“The principles of the Republican Party are very much in line with this movement,” Elliott said.

“When you hear the Republicans talk, it’s ‘Get the federal government out of our way, states rights, individual freedom, small business.’ Those are the purported principles of the Republican Party, and all that is right in line with what we’re doing here.”

A Pew Research poll last year indicated 49 percent of Democrats nationwide support marijuana le-

galization, compared with 32 percent of Republicans.

Diverse lobby The pot lobby might represent a broader diversity of interests and backgrounds than any another other industry in the Capitol.

Hanfling, for example, is one of Colorado’s best-connected lobbyists. When Hickenlooper was Denver’s mayor, Hanfling was his director of legislative services and liaison to the City Council.

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P O L I T I C S / A Y EAR OF LEGAL POT

LOBBYISTS «FROM 9W the Colorado Outdoor Advertising Association.

“They come from everywhere,” said Amanda Reiman, manager of marijuana law and policy for the national Drug Policy Alliance.

“Some come from backgrounds working on the environment, medicinal, social justice, ACLU and criminal justice.

“Then you have a set who are interested in being a part of a burgeoning issue, just like the people who got into the tech boom.”

Reiman holds the influential position of identifying and forming strategy around policies on pot that are argued in political circles across the country. She has a background in social work.

The dissertation for her doctorate from the University of California dealt with how medical marijuana dispensaries provide health services. “I thought if I did the research and proved the question, policy would follow,” she said. “I was naive.”

The experience sparked her into advocacy around data.

“The key role of lobbyists in the marijuana industry is as educators, (or) translators,” she said. “It’s a new thing in a lot of places, and there’s definitely a need for translation.

“It’s not always about getting what you want, but it’s about helping people understand what’s at stake and broader implications.”

Gina Carbone, a former Washington, D.C., lobbyist and a founding member of Smart Colorado, said her group doesn’t take a stand for or against legalization but works on issues related to the health and safety of youths in light of legal marijuana. Smart Colorado has pushed the issue of making edibles more distinct to prevent accidental ingestion.

Smart Colorado’s proponents often are parents and community leaders who take time off from work to go to the statehouse to face off against experienced, well-paid advocates on the other side, she said.

“They’re powerful, and they can put in a lot of money. We’re seeing that,” Carbone said of the professional pot lobbyists she faces.

“Does that stand up to parents concerned about pot shops going in in their neighborhood?”

Future fights Sam Kamin, a law professor and director of the Constitutional Rights and Remedies Program at the University of Denver, isn’t at all surprised by the manpower and lobbying around pot.

Big industries with a lot of money to gain or lose always field lobbyists. With Colorado as one of the first states to wade into regulating marijuana, those interested in the outcome come from outside the state’s borders, as well.

Other states that legalize marijuana will look to Colorado for their regulatory boilerplate, Kamin said.

“The stakes are high, and Colorado is the first place in the country figuring out how to do this,” he said. “Being on the forefront nationally has a lot of the focus here.”

In the session that begins Jan. 7, legislators will decide how to use the revenue that’s flowing in. Lawmakers will have to decide whether to refund an estimated $30 million to taxpayers, as would be required by the state’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or invest it in programs or construction.

A working group made up of industry officials and those concerned about marijuana edibles adjourned last month without any consensus about potential regulations to make them distinguishable from candy, cookies or drinks that aren’t laced with pot.

That political football is punted back to the legislature now.

Steadman and lobbyists also expect changes to requirements for medical marijuana licenses, because the original rules have a sunset Hanfling said the stigma of marijuana has fallen away in Colorado in the past few years.

“People are finding out that the people who are running the shops and working in the grow operations are their neighbors, who, like people in any business, want to see it succeed,” he said. “Some of the nonprofits I work with, a year ago, they would have never wanted to get pot money. That’s changing.

“I hope five years from now we’re talking about pot just like we’d talk about any other business.”

Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com

Colorado cities and towns take diverging paths on recreational marijuana

Denver Fire Department Lt. Tom Pastorius inspects a Denver marijuana grow operation in early December. Local government officials from Denver to smaller cities and rural hamlets say the pivotal first-year rollout for recreational marijuana went smoothly in most cases. RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post

By Jon Murray and John Aguilar The Denver Post

A

year ago, as Colorado cities and towns were preparing for the first recreational marijuana stores to open, most were optimistic they were prepared. Still, many officials held their breath.

Local government leaders from Denver to smaller cities and rural hamlets say the pivotal first-year rollout went smoothly, and in some cases it has proved quite profitable for local coffers.

“To be able to pull that off in that short amount of time, and to one year later have a pretty good understanding of what the rules of the road are, it’s a pretty monumental achievement,” Kevin Bommer said.

As deputy director of the Colorado Municipal League, he has tracked the experiences of cities and towns across the state.

Still, while 53 of them have chosen to permit retail marijuana — with 27 levying special taxes — more did not. The group counts 165 cities and towns that decided against taking the leap. An additional 16 municipalities have moratoriums on the idea of legalized recreational marijuana.

And looking at unincorporated areas, 23 of Colorado’s 64 counties have opted to allow retail marijuana sales or cultivation or both.

“I think the local option is one of the best aspects of Amendment 64,” said industry spokesman Mike Elliott, executive director of the Marijuana Industry Group. “If communities don’t want this, it shouldn’t be forced down their throats. At the same time, those who want it shouldn’t be stopped.”

Pueblo County officials recently

told The Denver Post that its plans to become the leading pot-growing county are all about economic development.

“This was obviously foisted upon us by will of the people, and everyone had to react fairly quickly,” Bommer said. But he credits state policymakers and lawmakers for setting the right tone for sober implementation of 2012’s Amendment 64.

Here is a look at the experiences of cities and towns that have allowed retail marijuana, often following on a track record of medical pot shops, and some that have rejected it emphatically.

Denver Colorado’s capital and largest city attracted international attention when its recreational pot shops opened Jan. 1 with long lines out the door. It hasn’t let up.

“We just met with France and Germany last week,” Ashley Kilroy, the city’s executive director on marijuana policy, said in November about the many requests for briefings she’s gotten from government officials.

Often, they have come from states that just legalized marijuana in some way or were considering it.

Denver, with about 100 retail marijuana licenses granted thus far, has had few hiccups in its rollout.

And it’s reaped a good chunk of new local sales tax revenue — $7.6 million through September, about half of that from a special 3.5 percent tax approved by voters. It’s also gotten a share of a state marijuana tax.

The city in June tapped $3.4 million of the expected proceeds to beef up its inspection and regulatory staffs, expand public safety efforts and pay for a public education campaign.

And the newfound money got the city’s parks department out of a

Master grower Tucker Eldridge looks at final trimmed buds in the drying racks at Nature’s Herb and Wellness in Garden City. The town is allowing recreational sales. Neighbors, including Greeley, have placed bans on marijuana sales. Joe Amon, The Denver Post

tough spot, with more than $3 million helping cover cost increases in the Central Denver Recreation Center project.

Given Amendment 64’s nearly 10-point margin among Denver voters, “we wanted to ensure that we adopted and implemented the will of the voters,” Kilroy said, “while, at the same time, balancing that with public health and safety and enforcing the regulations around it.”

City officials also have adapted to new challenges by adopting new rules restricting amateur hash-oil production and monitoring unregulated, small marijuana growing co-ops.

A remaining point of tension: the stringency of Denver’s ban on public pot consumption. It’s frustrated marijuana tourists as well as enthusiasts who want to celebrate their new freedom in public gatherings, including the massive 4/20 festival at Civic Center.

Lakewood In November, voters in Lakewood decided against allowing retail marijuana stores in the city by a ratio of 54 percent to 46 percent.

Mayor Bob Murphy said the issue was important enough that city leaders felt it should go to a vote of the people rather than being decided by the City Council.

Dan Cohrs, chief financial officer for Colorado Christian University in Lakewood, campaigned against Ballot Question 2A last fall. Even though Lakewood residents resoundingly passed Amendment 64 two years ago, Cohrs said, they didn’t envision pot stores on every corner.

“When people voted for Amendment 64, they thought they voted for decriminalization of marijuana,” he said. “What they got were these superstores selling gummy bears, lollipops and THC-laced candies.

That’s a far cry from decriminalization.

“What they are seeing on South Broadway and in some parts of Denver, they didn’t want here.”

But Shaun Gindi, owner of Compassionate Pain Management in Lakewood, said the city “is giving up on a lot” in terms of potential sales tax revenue by disallowing retail marijuana businesses. CPM is one of a dozen medical marijuana dispensaries in Lakewood.

“The same amount of marijuana is going to get consumed in Lakewood, whether it’s legal or not to buy here,” Gindi said. “The difference is people are going to drive out of the city and go to Denver and to Edgewater to get it.”

CITIES » 11W

6

the denver post B denverpost.com • sunday, december 28, 2014

«11W

P O L I T I C S / A Y EAR OF LEGAL POT

The state of legal recreational marijuana Colorado cities and counties have been split on whether to welcome recreational marijuana businesses. State associations count 53 cities that have opted to permit recreational marijuana, with 165 rejecting it. In unincorporated areas, 23 of Colorado’s 64 counties have decided to allow recreational marijuana sales, cultivation or both.

COUNTIES THAT PERMIT RECREATIONAL MARIJUANA

SEDGWICK

Allows sales, cultivation, product manufacturing and testing

LOGAN

LARIMER

JACKSON

MOFFAT

MORG BROOMFIELD BOULDER

GRAND

YUMA

RIO BLANCO

Allows cultivation, product manufacturing and testing

GILPIN

Allows sales and cultivation only

NV

CLEAR CREEK

EAGLE

GARFIELD

SUMMIT

Allows cultivation

ARAPAHOE J FFERS ELBERT

DOUGLAS

PITKIN

prohibit

WASHINGTON

ADAMS

KIT CARSON

LAKE PARK

MESA

Recreational ban or moratoria in effect

have additional tax moratoria in effect

12%

6%

ELLER

DELTA

CHEYENNE

EL PASO

LINCOLN

CHAFFEE

GUNNISON MONTROSE

KIOWA

FREMONT CROWLEY

allow

23%

OURAY SAN MIGUEL

PUEBLO

CUSTER

SAGUACHE

HINSDALE

OTERO

colorado

SAN JUAN

DOLORES

THROUGH NOV. 2014

PROWERS

BENT

MINERAL HUERFANO ALAMOSA

RIO GRANDE MONTEZUMA LA PLATA

71%

BACA

LAS ANIMAS

COSTILLA

CONEJOS

ARCHULETA

ban

CITIES THAT PERMIT RECREATIONAL Alma Aspen Aurora Basalt Black Hawk Boulder Breckenridge Carbondale Central City Cortez Crested Butte De Beque Denver Dillon Durango Eagle Edgewater Empire

271

Medical dispensaries

Fort Collins 152,205 Fraser 1,148 Frisco 2,753 Garden City 240 Georgetown 1,006 Glendale 4,377 Glenwood Springs 9,849 Gunnison 5,863 Idaho Springs 1,702 La Veta 763 Lafayette 26,685 Leadville 2,580 Log Lane Village 873 Louisville 19,469 Lyons 2,102 Mancos 1,361 Manitou Springs* 5,289 Mountain View 521

6,712 344,637 3,847 120 102,760 4,763 6,514 683 8,551 1,516 502 648,937 200 129 914 17,689 6,505 5,281 283

Nederland 1,486 Northglenn 37,371 Oak Creek 877 Pueblo 107,913 Red Cliff 265 Rico 259 Ridgway 926 Rifle 9,279 Salida 5,411 143 Sedgwick Silt 2,988 Silver Plume 169 Silverthorne 4,010 Silverton 626 Steamboat Springs 11,974 Telluride 2,416 Trinidad 8,393 Wheat Ridge 30,950

*Manitou Springs voted as a city to permit recreational marijuana; however, El Paso County voted as a whole to reject recreational marijuana.

Note: Dispensary and shop numbers include licenses granted by the Marijuana Enforcement Division; some shops may not be open yet. Population estimates as of July 2013.

STATE TAX REVENUE TOTALS JAN. medical total

$1.4

FEB.

retail total

$2.1

$1.8 $2.3

medical

MARCH

$1.8

$3.2

2.9% tax APRIL

$1.5

$3.7

Fees and licenses MAY

$1.8

$3.9

recreational

JUNE

$1.9

$4.7

STATE LICENSE TOTALS

BOLD TOWNS LEVY SPECIAL TAXES

Recreational shops

2.9% tax

JULY

10% tax AUG.

SEPT.

$6.0

$5.7 $1.7

15% excise tax

$1.8

MEDICAL STORES

501

MEDICAL GROWS

739

RECREATIONAL STORES

301

RECREATIONAL GROWS

375

Note: State totals include individual cities and unincorporated areas that have granted licenses for recreational and/or medical marijuana.

Fees and licenses OCT.

2014 TOTALS

$6.2

$5.5 $1.7

$43.3

$1.4 $16.8

total $3.5M

$4.1M

$5.0M

$5.3M

$5.7M

$6.5M

$7.4M

$7.7M

$7.2M

$7.6M

Note: Figures have been rounded.

Sources: Colorado Department of Local Affairs; Denver Post reports; Colorado Municipal League; Colorado Counties Inc., Colorado Department of Revenue

CITIES «FROM 10W Aurora The marijuana industry is just getting started in the metro area’s largest suburban city, which had the distinction of launching retail pot sales this fall with no medical marijuana experience.

As in Denver, elected officials felt pressure to respect Aurora voters’ support for Amendment 64.

But a special City Council committee set up to write Aurora’s rules also had an eye on making its pot shops competitive. They can stay open until 10 p.m., three hours later than in Denver.

So far, the city of nearly 350,000 has just a handful of dispensaries open, with 23 licenses granted of a maximum 24.

“Everything I understand is that it’s going very well,” said Councilman Bob Roth, who led the marijuana committee.

He said among its best decisions was to start with tough minimum requirements for applicants.

“We wanted to make sure that we had operators that not only were good business people,” Roth said, “but also had a clear understanding of this particular business.”

With the industry launching recently in Aurora, the revenue question still is open. City voters in November authorized a special 5 percent excise tax and a 2 percent sales tax on marijuana, with combined proceeds estimated at up to $2.4 million next year. Aurora’s regular sales tax is expected to raise $2.8 million more from marijuana sales.

Palisade Voters in this tiny Western Slope town just east of Grand Junction also said no to recreational pot

stores in November, but the margin was just six votes out of more than 1,000 ballots counted.

The election means Jesse Loughman, co-owner of medical marijuana dispensary Colorado Alternative Health Care in Palisade, won’t be able to expand his business into the world of recreational sales. Besides curtailing his own growth plans, Loughman said the town of 2,600 — famous for its vineyards and peach orchards — is forfeiting a potentially lucrative stream of revenue.

According to the town, Palisade stood to collect $200,000 annually in sales taxes from recreational marijuana operations.

“Two hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money for a town the size of Palisade,” Loughman said.

Pot stores, he said, would have fit in well with — and given an economic boost to — a town that boasts more than a dozen wineries, a brewery and a distillery.

But those who fought against Palisade’s recreational marijuana measure, like Diane Cox of the citizens group Safe and Healthy Mesa County, said the voters’ decision in November tells her that people are beginning to recognize the lessthan-innocuous effects of marijuana, especially on young people.

“I think people are becoming a lot more alarmed,” Cox said. “Effects of marijuana on young people’s brains are devastating.”

The decision of voters in Palisade means that De Beque stands as the only town in Mesa County to permit recreational sales of cannabis. Its first store is expected to open this month.

Garden City The tiny town of Garden City didn’t hesitate to capitalize on recreational marijuana.

Situated between Greeley and Evans in Weld County, the town of 300 or so residents and 60 businesses previously had embraced medical

FAIL

PHILLIPS

WELD

ROUTT

Prohibits new establishments, allows existing medical marijuana shops to migrate to recreational

PERCENT WHO VOTED YES IN 2012 ELECTION, BY COUNTY

marijuana. And after the end of Prohibition, it incorporated and welcomed bars and liquor stores a full three decades before Greeley followed suit.

“I think the surrounding communities would rather we didn’t” allow marijuana dispensaries, said Cheryl Campbell, the town administrator.

“They’re pretty vocal about it. We see stuff in the paper.”

But the town board, reflecting the town’s independent spirit, voted 7-0 to approve the expansion to retail marijuana. All four medical cannabis dispensaries have jumped on board.

Retail marijuana is among the factors driving a surge in sales tax revenue, which Campbell says the town doesn’t break down by source. It didn’t create a special marijuana tax.

In November, the town collected $105,356 from all businesses, she said, up 81 percent over the same month last year. Sales tax receipts for the year through November were about $924,000, versus $668,000 for all of last year.

“Last year, at this time, I would never have speculated more than $1 million in sales taxes,” Campbell said.

The excess cash has enabled the town to earmark $300,000 for a “major face-lift” of its three-block main street next year, with a revitalization plan still being formulated.

Colorado Springs Colorado’s second-largest city put in place its recreational sales ban without going to the ballot box — the City Council voted 5-4 in summer 2013 to prohibit recreational marijuana sales. In September, the council voted against putting the issue on the ballot for voters to decide in April.

City Council president Keith King said “there weren’t enough rules and regulations” ready for a

$60.1M

0

25

PASS 50

75

100%

STATEWIDE ADAMS ALAMOSA ARAPAHOE ARCHULETA BACA BENT BOULDER BROOMFIELD CHAFFEE CHEYENNE CLEAR CREEK CONEJOS COSTILLA CROWLEY CUSTER DELTA DENVER DOLORES DOUGLAS EAGLE EL PASO ELBERT FREMONT GARFIELD GILPIN GRAND GUNNISON HINSDALE HUERFANO JACKSON JEFFERSON KIOWA KIT CARSON LA PLATA LAKE LARIMER LAS ANIMAS LINCOLN LOGAN MESA MINERAL MOFFAT MONTEZUMA MONTROSE MORGAN OTERO OURAY PARK PHILLIPS PITKIN PROWERS PUEBLO RIO BLANCO RIO GRANDE ROUTT SAGAUCHE SAN JUAN SAN MIGUEL SEDGWICK SUMMIT TELLER WASHINGTON WELD YUMA Michelle Doe, The Denver Post

potential recreational cannabis sector in the city for the majority of the council to feel comfortable seeking a vote of the electorate.

King specifically wanted a 10 percent city tax on retail pot sales in the city.

“Unless it is highly regulated or highly taxed, it’s not worth doing,” he said.

But Councilwoman Jill Gaebler said Colorado Springs is essentially putting its head in the sand on the issue. With a popular and highly trafficked recreational marijuana store in nearby Manitou Springs, Gaebler said Colorado Springs is getting hit with the social impacts of legal pot without realizing any of the revenue benefits from sales tax collections.

Voters in the city narrowly passed Amendment 64 in 2012.

City officials estimate that recreational cannabis businesses would generate $500,000 to $900,000 a year based on a 1 percent sales tax levy. Through the first 10 months of 2014, Colorado Springs collected more than $1.1 million in sales tax revenues from the medical marijuana dispensaries that operate in the city.

Elliott, the Marijuana Industry Group director, said Colorado Springs and other communities like it are doing little to keep marijuana out of their midst by prohibiting its legal sale.

“Colorado Springs is leaving it to the black market,” he said. “Marijuana is being bought and sold in all of these communities. And by banning it, they have decided to let the drug cartels sell it instead of regulated and taxed businesses.”

Jon Murray: 303-954-1405, jmurray@denverpost.com or twitter.com/JonMurray.

John Aguilar: 303-954-1695, jaguilar@denverpost.com or twitter.com/abuvthefold

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P O L I T I C S / A Y EAR OF LEGAL POT

Tourists account for 90 percent of marijuana sales in mountain towns

By Jason Blevins The Denver Post

Mountain towns dependent on tourists are reaping the rewards of legal marijuana. As the towns swell with visitors — skiers in February and March, summer vacationers in July and August — so do their sales-tax coffers.

“Most of our sales seem to be to our visitors,” said John Warner, a dentist and the mayor of Breckenridge, which is tracking toward $8.8 million in marijuana sales in 2014. “Some people might think of it as a sin tax, and a lot of people don’t like sin taxes. But it’s certainly helpful to our community.”

Like a lodging tax that doesn’t burden locals, taxes on marijuana in the high country largely are paid by tourists. A midsummer report by the state Department of Revenue estimated that visitors in highly trafficked mountain communities accounted for 90 percent of marijuana sales.

With little history for revenue projections, most town leaders estimated marijuana tax income conservatively. They relished their early Christmas presents, with revenues climbing well beyond early predictions.

Breckenridge’s revenue is about 30 percent higher than Warner and his team expected. The town council recently decided to direct extra marijuana income toward preschool and child care programs, with the rest of the excise tax going toward law enforcement and local

With a steady snow falling on Jan. 1, a line forms outside the Cannabis Club on Main Street in downtown Breckenridge before the store opens at 8 a.m. Kathryn Scott Osler, Denver Post file

mental health programs.

The town is projecting about $8.3 million in 2015 marijuana sales, but that figure may have to be revised downward, Warner said. Voters this month in Breckenridge de-

cided to ban recreational marijuana shops on Main Street, which will push out the town’s marijuana workhorse, Cannabis Club.

“They are the prime generator of these big revenues, and they may

Recreational pot sales fill mountain-town co−ers Recreational marijuana sales in Colorado mountain towns swell with the season, booming during peak ski and festival months.

TOTAL STATE TAX REVENUE

$3.77

$4.0 million

$3.33

$3.5 $3.0 $2.5

$2.18

$2.0

$1.61

$1.65

JAN.

FEB.

$1.5

MARCH

$2.43

$3.40

$3.65

$2.79

$2.05

APRIL

MAY

JUNE

JULY

AUG.

SEPT.

OCT.

BY COUNTY*

(IN THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS)

summit

san miguel pitkin garfield gunnison eagle

$19,000 - $44,399 $44,400 - $69,799 $69,800 - $95,199 $95,200 - $120,599 $120,600 - $146,000

*Not all mountain counties had recreational outlets when marijuana sales became legal on Jan. 1. The state Department of Revenue breaks out pot sales by county only when revenues reach a certain level.

Source: Colorado Department of Revenue The Denver Post

not see as large sales figures next year in a new location,” Warner said.

Aspen’s five medical and recreational marijuana dispensaries also are fueling a surge in the city’s tax revenues. The city merges marijuana tax with liquor taxes, but the combined revenue is up 24 percent through October compared with the same span last year.

Liquor and marijuana sales through October in Aspen are $10.8 million, compared with $7.2 million in 2013, $6.9 million in 2012 and $6.6 million in 2011.

In Telluride, which joined Breckenridge as the only high country hamlet with open stores Jan. 1, tax revenues from three dispensaries are helping pay down the town’s $20 million debt on a developmentblocking conservation easement on the beloved valley floor.

While Telluride will post a record sales tax harvest in 2014, marijuana taxes account for only 4.5 percent of all sales tax revenues. Steep declines in marijuana sales from March to the slow-season April and September to festival-free October in Telluride jibe with the statewide trend that most high-country sales are to visitors.

“Really, we are experiencing the benefits of having a balanced economy,” Telluride Mayor Stu Fraser said. “Where we have been able to expand into the shoulder seasons and have grown the winter and summer as well. If I had to point to reason for our growth, it wouldn’t be marijuana.”

Tax issues push marijuana back on 2015 ballot

By Jennifer Brown The Denver Post

Coloradans made it clear when they approved recreational marijuana sales that they’re OK with taxing pot and using the money for schools.

Except now the state might have to give that revenue back to taxpayers, unless a new plan in the works by one of the legislature’s top budget brains prevails.

Sen. Pat Steadman, a Denver Democrat and member of the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee, is working on a bill to put yet another pot measure on the ballot, asking voters in November for permission to spend marijuana taxes on schools and other state expenses.

He finds the question redundant but says it’s the only way to fix a trigger invoked by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, a 1992 constitutional amendment that mandates refunds to taxpayers when revenue exceeds expectations. If voters don’t allow the state to keep the extra funds, Colorado must offer rebates.

Current projections show Colorado will collect about $30.5 million in excess taxes on medical and recreational marijuana this year. Those pot dollars are on top of biggerthan-expected tax revenues for the state, big enough they triggered the rules of TABOR. “I think the voters have been very clear,” said Steadman, who thinks pot tax money should go toward state expenses including programs to keep marijuana away from kids.

The ballot measure would be a one-time fix, clearing up language so the bill of rights would not kick in again regarding future pot revenues.

The bill appears an easy sell, considering the ranking Republican lawmaker on the budget committee approves at least the idea of it.

“There is logic that this really was the intent of the voters,” said Sen. Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs. “My guess is we are going to support that.”

A third ballot measure on marijuana is “inconvenient” but would have minimal cost and is needed to

protect Colorado from lawsuits if the state kept money it was required by the constitution to rebate.

“We don’t want to violate the letter of the law,” Lambert said.

The problem exists because prior ballot questions did not take TABOR into account, something Lambert said he wishes had been caught by legislative council staffers. Activist groups wrote the ballot measures.

The law does not specify that businesses that paid the taxes — in this case marijuana shop owners — would receive the rebate. It only says taxpayers in general.

State sales tax on medical marijuana is 2.9 percent. In addition, recreational pot has a 15 percent excise tax and a 10 percent state sales tax. Current estimates show the state bringing in a combined $30.5 million on recreational and medicinal marijuana this year.

There were rumblings among lawmakers during the summer about lowering the recreational tax rate out of concern that it was driving customers to the black market.

But a special legislative committee formed to study pot taxes did not make that recommendation.

The committee only suggested clarifying language that counties and cities are authorized to collect their own sales taxes on recreational pot stores, as well as authorizing cities to tax the sale of unprocessed marijuana from grow operations.

Lambert said it’s too early to say whether the tax rates are too high or not high enough. “We don’t have enough data,” he said.

Jennifer Brown: 303-954-1593, jenbrown@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jbrowndpost

Current projections show Colorado will collect about $30.5 million in excess taxes on medical and recreational marijuana this year.

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A S P E C I A L R E P O R T / A YEAR OF LEGAL POT

A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF THE WORLD’S FIRST MARIJUANA EDITOR

By Ricardo Baca The Denver Post

T

hat harried, Friday-evening moment when you’re switching gears from work brain to party mode, gathering what you’ll need for a fun night out — keys, phone, bottle of wine for the dinner party you’re attending — has changed quite a bit in post-legalization Colorado.

Some are adding a vape pen or infused tincture to their date-night clutches. Others will pre-pack a bowl or one-hitter before heading out — or they’ll chew on a 10-milligram edible on their way to the party. And those running low on supplies can swing by the pot shop on their way to the dinner and maybe grab a pre-rolled joint as a gift to the evening’s hosts.

Think this sounds exaggerated or made up, some amplified version of what’s actually happening on Friday nights all around Colorado? Think again.

A year in the life of the world’s first marijuana editor — that was the working headline when I first started this essay a few weeks back. Every story needs a beginning, and this one started 13 months ago when The Post appointed me the paper’s marijuana editor.

Has my life been all buds and flowers ever since? In a way, yes; I think and write and talk about marijuana daily as I edit The Post’s culture-of-weed site, The Cannabist. In other ways, no; I’ll snack on an edible to relax after a long day at the office or before a night out at a rock show, but it’s hardly a daily occurrence for me.

All that said, I have learned and witnessed a lot in the past 12 months, as we all have since recreational sales started in January. And our stories of the past year are the historic record of Colorado’s first-of-its-kind legalization.

But taking a quick step back: Remember that Friday night, the dinner party? That was real. My fiancée and I were running late for her friend Alissa’s birthday party.

“We need to bring something — do we have enough wine to bring a couple of bottles,” I reminded Melana as she came downstairs. She shot me a knowing look as she opened the kitchen cabinet where we keep our stash.

“I think she’ll appreciate this more than wine,” Melana said, holding a store-bought, still-in-its-wrapper joint between the tips of her fingers. An hour later when we handed Alissa the weedy gift, she threw her head back and laughed and hugged us both, holding up the joint to the rest of the party and said: “This is the best! And you’re not even the first people tonight to give me weed for my birthday!”

Surely some of you are questioning the integrity of this story or assuming it took place in some gritty neighborhood. But I assure you every word is true, and this party was in the lush backyard of a beauti-

ful Cherry Hills home.

Alissa Joblon is our friend who was celebrating her very fun birthday that night. “Oh, my god, that was the best,” she told me when I called her in December. “At least 10 people brought me a joint or edibles that night. …

I have one friend whose sister owns a dispensary, and she gave me five joints and a big thing of Cheeba Chews and some other edibles.”

Could that moment have happened in 2013 Colorado, or even 2010? Absolutely. But for Joblon, it didn’t happen until the year Colorado started recreational pot sales.

“It was the first birthday that that happened, people bringing me weed,” Joblon said. “Now everyone can go get a joint on their way to the party instead of stopping at the liquor store. People were bringing my sister booze, and everybody was bringing me weed.

“And that’s the perfect gift for me.”

For Denver resident Lucas Dean Fiser, this year’s legal sales have opened up a special door between him and his mother, Donna. When he drives north to Fort Collins to visit his family, he’ll often get a sweet note from his mom: “Hey, I’m low on tincture. Can you grab me some?”

“The person I get high with the most is still my mother,” said Fiser, who used to freelance for The Cannabist. “I had gotten high with my mom before legalization, maybe twice. But now that it’s legal, this is our very own ritual.

“On Thanksgiving we ate turkey, and then we drank some tincture and played (card game) Apples to Apples.

In the summertime we’d always go out and sit by my dad’s firepit in the backyard. It’s our special time together.”

When Fiser first started writing for The Cannabist, his mom asked him about the tincture he kept referring to in his pieces.

“So I introduced her to it,” he said. “She wanted to know what I was writing about in the column, ‘What is that tincture?’ I told her how it’s good for your nerves and muscles, and she wanted to try it. We don’t like smoking as much, and edibles often kick too hard. But we do like tincture — we live by it. The tincture’s so easy to monitor.”

There are hundreds more anecdotes of the surprisingly substantial social changes seen in Colorado in 2014, some from my own dining room.

We’ve always loved to entertain, to have friends old and new over to our 110-year-old Victorian home for dinner parties and happy hours. Sometimes we’ll host two or three dinners a week; it’s the height of quality time, sharing food and drink in an unhurried and unpretentious environment.

Of the hundreds of dinners we’ve hosted, marijuana started to come into play in 2014. Sure, maybe a EDITOR » 14W

Photo-illustration by Jeff Neumann, The Denver Post; photos: Jupiter Images by Getty

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C ULT U R E / A YEAR OF LEGAL POT

Jennifer DeFalco, co-owner of Denver’s Cannabrand advertising firm, came under fire this year after criticizing what she considered to be stereotypical stoner culture as marketers worked to give marijuana a respectable shine and reach potential new consumers. Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post

Attitudes, images of marijuana users evolve along with marketing messages

By John Wenzel The Denver Post

Melissa Vitale had never considered a career in marijuana when she moved her family to Colorado from Austin, Texas, a little over a year ago.

An accountant and former fifthgrade teacher, she long thought marijuana should be legalized but had no designs on working in the industry.

“When you’re a mom, it’s not the easiest thing to manage in your life,” the 41-year-old said of her occasional cannabis use. “I do not and would not smoke in front of my children.”

It wasn’t until she met Amy Dannemiller, another mom at South Denver’s Slavens Elementary School, that working in marijuana even seemed like an option.

“I would see her at school and went to a couple parties at her house. And the more we got to talking, the more I started expressing interest.”

Now Vitale does the books for Dannemiller — better known in the industry as Jane West — and her company Edible Events, which produces marijuana-centric parties. She also works for the Preferred Organic Therapy dispensary and is a member of Dannemiller’s cannabis networking group Women Grow.

“I come from a really conservative background, but my attitude’s definitely evolved a lot since we moved here,” Vitale said.

Changing the way people think about and use marijuana has not simply been a side effect of legal-

EDITOR «FROM 13W

ization in Colorado, which went into effect Jan. 1 after the passage of Amendment 64.

It’s an evolution that has played out on the streets and in living rooms across the state.

“I smoke just as much as I ever have, and I still get it from the black market because it’s cheaper,” said Elliott Woolsey, 32, a Denver standup comedian and regular at Comedy Works. “For me the difference is that people have become more brazen, smoking on patios at bars and things like that. Nobody’s afraid of the cops anymore.”

People also feel more comfortable admitting their cannabis use to those in their inner circles.

“I typically vape daily,” said Lauren Gibbs, a social media trainer and founder of Rise Above Social Strategies. “As a result, my migraines are more controlled than they have been in the eight years since my diagnosis of chronic migraine,” a condition for which she has been hospitalized twice and formerly took 17 pills a day to treat.

Gibbs, 34, moved to Colorado a little more than two years ago from Washington, D.C., but only in the past few months has she “come out” to her parents as a marijuana user.

“It’s become a pretty significant part of my business now, and I felt like there was no reason to hide it,” said Gibbs, also a member of Women Grow.

“My parents being OK with it is something I couldn’t have imagined

liberal since recreational sales started this year.

“Legalization, it’s 100 percent of why I’m smoking weed every single day now,” said Armstrong, who is friend would ask if they could hit (full disclosure) working on an indetheir pipe in the backyard. But people pendent documentary on The Post’s actively bringing pot as a gift or a coverage of marijuana called “Rolling to-be-shared aperitif? That’s pretty Papers.” “I went from smoking whatspecific to the first year of legal sales. ever pot my girlfriend’s brother-inA colleague brought over a package law had once in 2013 to smoking pot of joints rolled with G6, one of his every single day in 2014. I am Mr. favorite pot strains. A friend showed Normalization.” up with a bottle of wine and a 100Armstrong struggled with reconmilligram infused chocolate bar, ciling his new connection to mariwhich was split up and sent around juana. “I don’t know why it is,” he the table. Another friend, Zack, said. “I break the law all the time, brought over a couple grams of his so it wasn’t that.” favorite strain, Bubble Gum, which Without knowing it, he then comwas shared around our outdoor patio pared the pot-shopping experience table on a temperate fall evening. to the advantages of visiting a re“Ah, that was such an awesome cord store. “There’s a lighter vibe night,” my friend Zack Armstrong around the whole thing now,” he said. He had picked up the Bubble said. “And now there’s so much Gum at Denver shop L’Eagle before information out there. You can go having dinner at my house in to a pot store and talk with someDecember. body. You get there, and everyone’s Armstrong, who hails from Colora- talking about the different strains. do Springs, says he got high only ‘Oh, you get paranoid? Why don’t once in 2013, but he’s been a bit more you try this.’ It’s cool!”

a year ago. But it’s like gay marriage: having a personal connection to someone who’s gay changes more peoples’ minds than any amount of legislation or public opinion polls.

And it’s the same with marijuana.”

Different factions also fought for the soul of cannabis culture this year, as marketing firms tried to give marijuana a respectable shine and, in turn, reach out to potential new consumers by changing the drug’s stigma.

It didn’t always go as planned.

“Those were terrible quotes. I don’t even know where they came from,” said Jennifer DeFalco, 25, co-owner of the Denver-based advertising company Cannabrand. “I don’t think it really reflected what we were trying to say.”

Nonetheless, DeFalco’s words — which were included in an October New York Times story and which compared some Colorado dispensaries to “underground abortion

clinics” — exposed a deep divide in marijuana culture over how the industry should present itself.

Cannabrand lost at least one client, the dispensary group Mindful, after the article was published, as well as alienating marijuana activists.

However, DeFalco said her business, which she co-owns with Olivia Mannix, has rebounded to include a half-dozen clients. Next year, Cannabrand will launch the national marketing campaign “Destigmatize to Legalize,” which seeks to change skeptics’ minds about the value of marijuana and show that business professionals and parents can be pot users, too.

“There’s a whole range of casual consumers,” DeFalco said. “There isn’t one single cannabis culture.

And baby boomers, women and moms are changing their minds because they’re experimenting with it on their own and realizing CULTURE » 15W

“My parents being OK with it is something I couldn’t have imagined a year ago. But it’s like gay marriage: having a personal connection to someone who’s gay changes more peoples’ minds than any amount of legislation or public opinion polls. And it’s the same with marijuana.” Lauren Gibbs, a social media trainer and founder of Rise Above Social Strategies

Yet another sign of our ever-changing relationship with weed in Colorado? Those quotes above. Joblon, Fiser and Armstrong are all friends of mine, sure, but they’re still talking about their love of marijuana under their given names in a major metropolitan daily newspaper — something they might not have felt comfortable about in years past.

(Trust a marijuana editor on this one: Getting people to talk pot on the record isn’t always a simple process.)

Perhaps one of the most unexpected outcomes of the normalization of cannabis in Colorado is the elitism and undervaluing of our new freedoms.

Is marijuana becoming uncool to teens who hear their parents talk about their “rad, new vape pen”? Are we all losing historical perspective on how huge this whole thing is?

Have adults become so accustomed to having immediate, almostthoughtless access to pot that they’ve forgotten that it’s still illegal in more than 99 percent of the world?

“People are, myself included, a little too advantageous (of canna-

bis) sometimes,” Kayvan Khalatbari, who co-owns pot shop Denver Relief and runs stand-up collective Sexpot Comedy, said while sitting at Rooster & Moon coffeehouse in Denver. “It’s amazing how much public perception is shifting but also how people act.”

Less than a year after recreational sales started, we already are taking legal pot for granted. And it’s only natural, especially when you pass multiple pot shops every day on your commute and vape pens often seem as common as cigarettes.

Sometimes we need our friends and colleagues in other states and countries to set us straight, something they’re often quick to do. “Remember, it’s still not legal where I live,” is a familiar sentiment seen on social media.

And we do remember that — well, most of the time. And “remembering things most of the time,” my friends, is simply part of a marijuana editor’s job.

Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com

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B U S IN E S S / A YEAR OF LEGAL POT

CULTURE «FROM 14W it’s not as harmful as the stigma has portrayed it to be for so long.”

The Colorado Symphony Orchestra also challenged the image of a stereotypical stoner — lazy, sloppy, usually male — with its “Classically Cannabis” events in the summer.

The three private fundraisers and one public concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre on Sept. 13 drew sponsors from in and outside the weed world, raising a total of $150,000 for the cash-strapped nonprofit.

“We lost a few donors over it, but it was less than 1 percent,” said Jerry Kern, executive director of the CSO, who also noted the international press the orchestra received.

“There was no huge pushback because everybody understood it was a legitimate business in this state, and we were an organization that needed the support of everyone.”

The CSO’s first event, May 23 at Santa Fe Drive’s Space Gallery, mostly resembled a quiet chamber music show — minus the fact that more than a dozen attendees slipped onto the private patio to toke from joints, glass pipes and vaporizers.

“Look around; this is not stoner town,” Evan Lasky, executive vice president of the CSO, told The Denver Post at the time. “We have to build new audiences because the old people are dying off. We have to fight this perception of elitism.”

Older women in elegant evening gowns and jewels mingled with younger patrons who, despite their piercings and tattoos, still dressed the formal part.

This was a marked contrast to the image many detractors had of marijuana users, who have been variously (and derisively) labeled as freeloaders, hippies and thugs.

Stereotypical “stoner” events that pander to existing pot culture were not difficult to find in Colorado this year. The Gypsy Jane Krunkyard Jubilee, an October music festival at the Denver Mart, sold itself with “hot cars and hot women,” hip-hop from Snoop Dogg, Warren G and Tyga, and a considerable slate of quirky sideshow entertainment — all tied together with a blinged-out logo and omnipresent pot-leaf imagery.

Despite being legal statewide, pot’s image problem extends beyond the Front Range. High country towns such as Breckenridge and Granby have voted to minimize or ban pot shops and medical dispensaries altogether.

“Whether you’re pro-marijuana or against marijuana, you have to be concerned about how tourists react to seeing it,” Breckenridge retiree Bob Gordman, who voted to move the town’s lone dispensary off main street, told The Associated Press.

A recent state-produced report showed out-of-state visitors make 90 percent of recreational marijuana purchases in mountain towns.

Leaders in the Eastern Plains town of Brush also voted down a proposal to turn a former prison there into a marijuana grow operation, which would have added 31 jobs and $500,000 in tax revenue, according to Nicholas Erker, who bought the facility.

“I am disappointed in some of the council members for not taking the time to educate themselves for the betterment of the community,” Erker told 7News in August.

Some Colorado businesses are less concerned with image and more with the bottom line. A survey released in March from Mountain States Employers Council, which represents nearly 3,000 businesses in 11 Western states, found that employers were taking a tougher stance against workers’ drug use in the wake of Amendment 64.

Eight months later that stance is eroding.

“In non-safety-sensitive occupations, we’ve seen a bit of a shift,” said Curtis Graves, a staff attorney with the employers group. “In fact, just last week a national company asked us to review their drug policy because they’re going to try to suppress the results of marijuana tests for a year and see what happens.”

Graves declined to name the company but said it was a matter of practicality.

“It’s in an industry where they’ve got to hire a large number of people and they probably tend to be on the young side,” he said. “They know that if they rule out everybody who tests positive for marijuana, they’ll have a staffing issue. And they’re not the only ones.”

Ryan Loflin of Colorado Hemp looks through his hemp plants. Loflin is likely to become the first farmer to grow large quantities of hemp in the United States in 60 years. Photos by AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

Upstart Colorado hemp industry launches, but still constrained

By Steve Raabe The Denver Post

Ask farmers where they procured hemp seeds to plant last spring, and you may get an answer like this one from Bill Billings: “I got them from Mother Nature and God. That’s all I can say.”

Don’t-ask, don’t-tell characterizes Colorado’s newest cash crop. Like its genetic cousin marijuana, hemp is legal under state law. But conflicts with federal law leave the future uncertain for the state’s hemp industry.

The plant looks like marijuana but has little or no THC, the psychoactive ingredient that makes pot smokers high.

The federal government’s prohibition on hemp was partially eased in the Farm Bill passed by Congress this year. Still, Colorado growers have no legal means to buy starter seed from out of state, nor to sell their harvested raw seed outside of Colorado.

Some growers are using Colorado’s hemp laws to cultivate ultralow-THC cannabis for use in medical marijuana extracts, only adding to the confusion.

Legal hurdles aside, advocates are passionate about hemp’s commercial potential. The most common

uses are food products and cosmetics derived from seeds and seed oil.

Fiber from the stalks of hemp plants are used in clothing and industrial applications, including as a strengthening agent in concrete.

2014 marked the first year of state-authorized hemp cultivation in Colorado. About 30 growers filed applications to plant a total of 1,811 acres. But because state law does not yet require detailed reporting, no statistics exist on how much actually was planted and subsequently harvested.

Several farmers are planning to save seed from this year’s harvest to sow the 2015 crop.

On a former alfalfa field near Sterling, Billings, his daughter Danielle and business partner Jim Brammer planted 2 acres of hemp.

Their harvest brought in nearly a ton of seed and flowers.

“It came up just amazing,” Billings said. “We irrigated three times, compared to six or seven times for (nearby) corn crops.”

Billings said he’s planning to make his own lines of hemp oils, lotions and mints, and he’s talking with retailers including Walmart and Whole Foods to carry the products.

But the same federal legal constraints that make it hard to buy seed also inhibit the creation of a

Colorado’s Higher Authority.

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John Wenzel: 303-954-1642, jwenzel@denverpost.com or twitter.com/johnwenzel

thecannabist.co

Ryan Loflin handles a batch of a particular hemp seed that produces vast amounts of hemp oil. large-scale Colorado hemp industry with interstate trade. Like marijuana entrepreneurs, hemp growers have limited or no access to banking services, said Lynda Parker, vice president of the Rocky Mountain Hemp Association.

“To have a real industry with manufacturing and processing of hemp products, you can’t do that unless there’s a steady market for hemp,” Parker said. “And that can’t happen until we can access the banking system.”

Steve Raabe: 303-954-1948, sraabe@denverpost.com or twitter.com/steveraabedp

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B USI N E SS / A YEAR OF LEGAL POT

Mike Goldstein of New York photographs himself with plants at a grow facility. Photos by Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post

A tour member purchases marijuana at La Conte’s Clone Bar & Dispensary during a tour hosted by My 420 Tours.

Beth Bice of Charlotte, N.C., smokes a joint on the bus during a marijuana tour hosted by My 420 Tours in Denver. During the day tourists visited La Conte’s Clone Bar & Dispensary, La Conte’s grow facility, Native Roots dispensary and Illuzions Glass Gallery.

Pot tourism grows in Colorado despite lack of o∞cial endorsement

By Steve Raabe The Denver Post

Look all you want, and you’ll find nary a marijuana tourism brochure at kiosks operated by Colorado’s official travel bureaus.

Yet that institutional prohibition hasn’t stopped thousands of cannabis tourists from visiting Colorado to experience the phenomenon of legal marijuana.

“This is just awesome,” said Mike Goldstein of Staten Island, N.Y., who visited Denver with three friends in early December. “I think it should be legal everywhere. You raise taxes, and you take it out of the hands of organized crime.”

Goldstein said the reason for his visit was “49 percent weed and 51 percent Broncos,” as his group prepared to go to the Denver vs. Buffalo Bills game.

The day before the game, the Goldstein contingent met at a downtown Denver hotel for an organized bus tour of marijuana dispensaries and cultivation facilities.

“It’s been quite a year,” said JJ Walker, CEO of Denver-based My 420 Tours, which claims to be North America’s first cannabis tour company.

“We get the 60-year-old business executive who comes here to do something different, and we get the 28-year-old who just wants to have fun,” Walker said.

Video: My 420 Tours takes

tourists around town to dispensaries and grow operations. »denverpost.com/ potanniversary

Government-sponsored tourism agencies such as the Colorado Tourism Office and Visit Denver are agnostic toward the concept.

They neither criticize nor endorse the industry.

As such, no reliable statistics are compiled to show the depth and economic impact of the market.

However, Walker said his firm has provided tours to between 4,000 and 5,000 customers since recreational cannabis sales began Jan. 1.

The company’s main offering is a $99, five-hour bus tour that includes stops at two dispensaries, a grow and a head shop. Smoking pot on the private luxury bus is allowed — and encouraged.

At least 18 companies market similar versions of marijuana touring and transportation.

Tourists also can purchase multiday packages that include stays at cannabis-friendly hotels. Walker said he uses three unnamed hotels — two in Denver and one in Vail — that allow in-room use of cannabis vaporizers and have private out-

door areas for smoking.

In central Denver, The Adagio Bed and Breakfast at 1430 Race St. now bills itself as a “bud and breakfast” that caters to marijuana-oriented travelers. The lodge offers a morning “wake and bake” and an afternoon happy hour — starting at 4:20 p.m. — with beverages, snacks and three varieties of cannabis.

Rates start at $249 per night.

Colorado and Denver tourism officials say they have no interest in promoting pot tourism.

“We will not use the legalization of marijuana to market the state of Colorado,” said Al White, director of the Colorado Tourism Office.

White said that engaging in promotions could put Colorado at risk of violating federal and state laws.

Besides, he said, it makes little sense to endorse legal marijuana for tourists when Colorado’s regulations give them few options for

places to legally smoke it.

White questions the potential depth of the market.

“If you’ve been smoking pot all your adult life in Columbus, Ohio, and you buy it from the guy on the corner, I really don’t think you’re going to feel a need to go and buy it in Colorado,” he said.

Richard Scharf, president and CEO of Visit Denver, the city’s convention and visitors bureau, said the market for marijuana tourism is tiny compared to Colorado’s overall stature as a travel destination.

“We just don’t have any research at all that says (marijuana) is driving demand,” he said. “When you have 14 million annual visitors, we just don’t see pot as a significant driver in that market.”

Steve Raabe: 303-954-1948, sraabe@denverpost.com or twitter.com/steveraabedp

“It’s been quite a year. We get the 60-year-old business executive who comes here to do something different, and we get the 28-year-old who just wants to have fun.” JJ Walker, CEO of Denver-based My 420 Tours, which claims to be North America’s first cannabis tour company

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Cannabis firms spread the green around town

By Aldo Svaldi The Denver Post

Legalizing recreational marijuana has spawned a surge of activity in some unexpected places and pumped formerly “dark” money into the larger economy.

Estimates are that cannabis sales nationally this year will total about $2.6 billion, with Colorado claiming about a third of that or $840 million, according to rough estimates from ArcView Group.

Some of that money is funneling down to accountants, software developers, trademark lawyers, lighting vendors, general contractors and a long list of others supporting the new industry.

“It is very difficult to estimate,” said Patrick Rea, co-founder and managing director of CanopyBoulder, a business accelerator for cannabis companies focused on ancillary products and services.

ArcView helps investors prospect for cannabis-related startups and is a partner in CanopyBoulder.

Rea is helping ArcView calculate economic impacts along the industry’s supply chain, an exercise he previously undertook for the natural foods industry.

Current estimates suggest another $350 million to $650 million is spent nationally on goods and services related to bringing cannabis products to market, Rea said. Assuming it is $500 million, and that Colorado again accounts for about a third, vendors here could receive around $161 million this year.

At Thrive Workplace Solutions in posh Cherry Creek North, far from the warehouse districts where cannabis is grown, two entrepreneurs are looking for a big payday providing technology to an industry moving away from paper-and-pencil.

“We don’t ever touch the product, but we help the guys that do,” said Rob Rusher, CEO of GrowBuddy, which is developing an application to log environmental conditions and boost yields and reduce costs.

Rusher is giving away the app, which digitizes what are known in

Rob Rusher, left, CEO of GrowBuddy, and Greg Eisenbeis of Grow Remote, offer services that not only benefit marijuana growers, but potentially could help grow any kind of plant in a controlled setting indoors. Joe Amon, The Denver Post

the industry as grow journals. The trade-off is gaining access to “big data,” he said.

“Data is power regardless of the industry,” said Rusher, who also is developing an online grower supply marketplace within the app.

GrowBuddy is working closely with Grow Remote, a startup founded by Greg Eisenbeis, a process engineer who is tapping his expertise in automation and control systems to monitor and automate cannabis cultivation.

Automation, in theory, should cut labor costs, improve energy efficiency and boost plant yields. And the technologies GrowBuddy and Grow Remote are developing should transfer to growing any kind of plant in a controlled setting indoors.

“We are coming to the game with

Automation, in theory, should cut labor costs, improve energy efficiency and boost plant yields. And the technologies GrowBuddy and Grow Remote are developing should transfer to growing any kind of plant in a controlled setting indoors.

experience on what is a really great way to control all of this,” he said.

An often-repeated phrase is that legalization has created the equivalent of a gold rush, minting wealth not only for those who strike gold but also for those selling the picks and shovels.

“This is a substantial growth opportunity with a substantial risk.

That combination brings a very specific type of personality,” said Denver attorney Steven Weigler, founder of EmergeCounsel. “There are a lot of speculators.”

Weigler launched his business this year, intending to work with a variety of startups. But given his timing, about 40 percent of his work is linked to cannabis.

Those supporting the industry face a different kind of payoff than those opening a dispensary or raising crops, ArcView CEO Troy Dayton said.

Their reward is more uncertain and takes longer to achieve. But it could prove much larger as more states legalize.

“Colorado is one of the key places for innovation in this space, and you will see more and more companies coming out of Colorado on the ancillary side,” Dayton predicts.

Some entrepreneurs start out try-

ing to get a dispensary license and turn to playing a supporting role when they fail. Others have never touched the stuff but chase what they see as a growth opportunity.

And there are a few, like Nathan Mendel, owner of Your Green Contractor, who stumble into the field and never look back.

An architect friend asked in 2011 if he wanted to work on a dispensary. “It sounded like a retail project. I didn’t think about it either way,” he said.

That job led to one referral and then another. Your Green Contractor now is sought out nationally, and Mendel is considered an expert in converting old buildings into growing facilities.

Trying to grasp how big the cannabis support industry is in Colorado is difficult. The industry is so new — not to mention still illegal on the federal level — that the specific codes tracking employment and business formations aren’t in place yet.

But here is one clue: A Denver Post analysis of business registrations with the Colorado secretary of state that included the word “cannabis” in the name went from only 17 between 2000 and 2008, to more than 575 since 2009, including about 275 the past two years.

Conventions view legal developments as useful topic for panel discussions

By Steve Raabe The Denver Post

Delegates to national conventions in Colorado are well aware of legal retail marijuana, and not just because they might have slipped in a visit to a dispensary.

Some conventions have used Colorado’s cannabis laws to incorporate working panels on the ways legal pot can affect their business sectors.

“The legality of marijuana certainly impacts our industry,” said Stuart Ruff, director of meetings and events for the Risk and Insurance Management Society, which brought 9,700 attendees to Denver in April. “There are a lot of misperceptions about the (Colorado) law, and we want our members to be educated.”

After recreational cannabis sales became legal Jan. 1, RIMS decided to hold a convention session entitled, “How Will the Legalization of Marijuana Affect Your Employment Policies?”

“From my perspective, I look at it as an opportunity,” said Fred Droz, a meeting planner who is coordinating the Communications

Leadership Exchange convention in Denver in April. “The group prides itself in addressing topics that deal with strategic thinking, so we will have a panel that will give different perspectives on legal marijuana.”

Convention locations typically are selected far in advance of the events themselves, sometimes as long as 10 years earlier. That means almost all major meetings taking place in Colorado for the next few years were planned well before Amendment 64 was approved by Colorado voters in November 2012.

Visit Denver, the city’s convention and visitors bureau, logged 429,210 convention delegates through the end of December, compared with 385,292 in 2013. Bookings for 2015 and 2016 are on pace to continue the same trend, bureau spokesman Rich Grant said.

For future bookings, fallout from legal marijuana has been a complete non-factor, Visit Denver CEO Richard Scharf said.

“People are more inclined to joke about it anymore than to express any concerns,” he said. “It’s been pretty immaterial from either a

Convention tra³c growing Visit Denver says the legalization of recreational marijuana has had no impact on Colorado Convention Center bookings, which increased 11.4 percent in 2014.

The center logged a record number of convention attendees in October, with the addition of one large show and the Great American Beer Festival.

ATTENDANCE BY YEAR ’08 ’09

ATTENDANCE BY MONTH 2013

2014

80,000 PEOPLE

378,863

70,000

313,540

60,000

’10

371,003

50,000

’11

369,059

40,000

’12

377,115

30,000

’13

385,292

’14

429,210

20,000

J

F

M

Source: Visit Denver

positive or negative standpoint.”

Scharf said officials of Visit Denver, the city government and organizations such as the Downtown Denver Partnership have worked hard to educate visitors and convention delegates on the terms of Colorado’s cannabis laws, including where it can and cannot be consumed.

A M

J

J

A

S

O

N

D

10,000

The Denver Post

Ruff of RIMS said the shock value and comedic aspects have dissipated.

The group’s convention delegates “are all college-educated people,” he said. “They lived in dorms once.”

Steve Raabe: 303-954-1948, sraabe@denverpost.com or twitter.com/steveraabedp

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Growers in the shadows seek U.S. patent protection

Holmes uses THC to calibrate a gas chromatograph before conducting tests at his Centennial Seeds lab in Lafayette. Photos by Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post

By Jason Blevins The Denver Post

B

en Holmes gently lowers the turntable needle onto the album, and Traffic’s “Medicated Goo,” begins to play.

Steve Winwood’s wistful tenor sweeps through the Centennial Seeds laboratory: “My own homegrown recipe’ll see you through.”

“Everyone stole from Stevie Winwood,” Holmes says, his foot tapping as he injects a syringe of dark, syrupy liquid into his gas chromatograph.

No one is stealing from Holmes, a self-taught scientist, engineer, farmer and cannabis seed geek who next month will take a rare step to apply for a patent on a laboriously created cannabis superstrain.

If it is awarded, the U.S. patent on Holmes’ medical-grade Otto II strain will be the first to protect a cannabis plant and a first step in establishing plant-breeder rights for growers who only a few years ago were considered criminals.

“This industry came up in stealth, born in basements and crawl spaces,” Holmes said. “But now, with companies forming and making larger investments, the desire to protect intellectual property is becoming paramount. Bleeding-edge stuff, right here.”

Indeed. Gone are the days when pie-eyed longhairs haphazardly hurled pollen into jungles of pot plants, hoping to meld two strains.

Today’s top breeders are geneticists, taking years to weed through carefully engineered generations of cannabis to elevate the most desired traits.

Some of these new superstrains are high in cannabidiol, or CBD, one of several dozen cannabinoid chemical compounds in cannabis and the plant’s major non-psychoactive ingredient. CBD has been credited with relieving some epileptic seizures, prompting widespread calls for additional research.

Other more utilitarian superstrains are resistant to mites or the crop-killing powder mildew that plagues grow operations across Colorado.

Some superstrains are simply super stony, with sky-high levels of

tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the psychoactive compound in cannabis.

The gas chromatograph is Holmes’ key tool in shaping Otto II, a high-CBD, low-THC strain he hopes can fuel medical therapies.

The 50-year-old gizmo separates molecules and converts them into an electrical impulse. A green line tracking across a screen reveals the level of THC in the substance. That line will be the baseline for a measurement of Otto II. Holmes produces a well-worn legal tablet laden with acronyms and millivolt values from the gas chromatograph. Those figures reveal his painstaking progress toward breeding the THC out of, and the CBD into, his treasured varietal.

It is, in many ways, the result of a lifelong career dedicated to breeding, growing, cloning, engineering and charting the most useful cannabis plants.

As Winwood sings the oft-covered “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” Holmes shares his plans to protect Otto II, which ranks among the most valuable of his collection of 400 varieties of cannabis and hemp seeds, most of which are stored in an industrial freezer in his Lafayette lab. In addition to the patent, he hopes to be the first cannabis breeder to secure protection under the Plant Variety Protection Act, the seminal plant breeders’ rights legislation from 1970.

“The value of that seed, longterm, could be very, very valuable — an annuity,” said Holmes, a father of two who serves on the state’s Industrial Hemp Advisory Committee and is collaborating on the University of Colorado’s groundbreaking Cannabis Genomic Research Initiative.

“Everyone who does this wants to produce something with durability,” he said. “A seed with good utility that produces well can have longevity for generations.”

Holmes is a sort of modern-day Luther Burbank, the pioneering American botanist and horticulturist who developed more than 800 varieties and strains of plants in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Burbank faced intellectual property challenges in his career, as he created still-heralded peaches, plums, dai-

Some of the unclassifiable hybrids that seed developer Holmes is growing in his lab.

sies and the world-dominant Burbank russet potato.

Holmes follows Burbank’s lead, offering a few types of seeds to a single, large distributor who can flood the market in the first year, before anyone can take it as their own by cloning the young seedlings.

By the time the copycats have cloned Holmes’ strains, he already has made his money. He also licenses the use of his heirloom seeds, but not the extra-special seeds he doesn’t want copied.

“Really the focus, minus any patent protection, is on licensing and careful selection of distributors,” Holmes said.

State trademark protection can safeguard the name of an innovation within a state’s borders. But protecting intellectual property through state laws is a bandage.

Patents are exclusively federal.

Marijuana is illegal under federal law.

And federal law trumps state law.

Federal inaction The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected cannabis-relat-

ed patents consistently, arguing that the invention is “immoral and scandalous” because marijuana is illegal or that the invention has no useful purpose because its use violates federal drug law.

And there is little indication the federal government is ready to begin awarding patents for marijuana strains, even though the government granted 17,591 plant patents between 1989 and 2013.

But then the federal government appears reticent to do anything regarding marijuana, despite voters in 23 states approving some form of decriminalization or medicinal use and an 11 more this year approving CBD oils for seizure treatment.

“They are still trying to pretend that this industry does not exist,” said Taylor West, deputy director of the National Cannabis Industry Association. “These patent questions and this whole intellectual property issue, this is one of those areas that is so new and still falls in that stagnant area between state and federal law.”

Video: Seed developer Ben Holmes talks about his work to map genetic codes of cannabis. »denverpost.com/potanniversary

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Seed developer Holmes grows Otto II, a high-cannabidiol strain, and unclassifiable hybrids at his Centennial Seeds lab in Lafayette.

Photos by Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post

If the federal government ever drops its prohibition, or begins granting patents, industry watchers expect cannabis to be suddenly interesting to such mega-corporations as Monsanto, Philip Morris’ parent Altria Group, Pfizer, Walgreens and Anheuser-Busch InBev.

Seed developer Ben Holmes displays Carmagnola hemp seeds at his Centennial Seeds lab.

STRAINS «FROM 18W West said the feds recently seem to be accepting the medical value of CBD while continuing to abhor THC-dominant strains. While 11 unlikely states — Alabama, Kentucky, Utah and Mississippi among them — legalized the use of CBDrich extracts and oils for seizure treatment, West said a focus on just CBD is myopic.

“When you start to look at the medical possibilities of cannabis, you have to look at research that shows an entourage effect, which means essentially that the whole of the compounds is greater than the sum of its parts,” West said.

The other cannabinoids Nolan Kane agrees.

Kane, an assistant professor in the University of Colorado’s department of ecology who is leading the Cannabis Genomic Research Initiative, rattles off acronyms like CBN, CBA, CBG, THCA, THCB and other cannabinoids for which potential therapeutic values are unknown.

Like any good professor, Kane says more research is needed. And it starts with things like mapping DNA sequences of marijuana and hemp and identifying the genomes that deliver certain characteristics to particular strains.

The $1 trillion farm bill passed this year allowed universities in states that permit hemp cultivation, including Colorado, to research the plant without threatening the flow of federal funding.

The work is creating a genomic blueprint similar to those that have enabled tinkering botanists to create — and protect — thousands of varieties of major crops such as wheat, corn, soy and rice.

With that genetic map, breeders can speed production of cannabis strains that yield favored characteristics, Kane said. The research may highlight many new agents that

could play a role in evolving medical treatments or, like hemp, illuminate industrial uses for things like biomass energy or hempcrete.

“The high-CBD materials have a lot of advantages in the legal environment combined with a lot of exciting potential for medical applications,” he said. “But the story is not just CBD. We hope we can come up with varieties that are high in other different compounds.”

Kane is focused on the agricultural side of cannabis, so it will be up to other researchers to discover any potential therapeutic or industrial applications for varieties he maps.

Those researchers likely will come from companies seeking to capitalize on the new strains — such as GW Pharmaceuticals and Denver’s United Cannabis Corp.

United Kingdom-based GW last year secured a U.S. patent for the use of a CBD-THC blend to treat brain tumors.

Publicly traded United Cannabis in October filed for draft patents on ratios of cannabinoids — say a concoction that is 90 percent CBD and 10 percent THC — to treat cancer and nervous- and immune-system disorders. The patents would give the company 12 months to prove its combinations of cannabinoids deliver a medical benefit.

“We have to go out and do our robust safety trials and our rodent trials and really come out with the science behind the concept we have,” United Cannabis’ chief operating officer, Chad Ruby, said.

United Cannabis licenses its trademarks but is pushing for broader patent protection.

“We don’t want to waste a bunch of time and a bunch of money and a bunch of effort only to have someone take all our work,” he said. “Everyone in this industry is sitting and waiting on the federal level to see what they will allow.”

Despite the waiting, there is a sense of urgency.

If the federal government ever drops its prohibition, or begins granting patents, industry watchers

expect cannabis to be suddenly interesting to such mega-corporations as Monsanto, Philip Morris’ parent Altria Group, Pfizer, Walgreens and Anheuser-Busch InBev. (The Internet throbs with conjecture that Monsanto has long schemed a genetically modified marijuana. It’s important to note, breeders say, that engineering marijuana strains through selective breeding is not the same as genetically modifying the plant’s DNA.) Even without the corporate players, the cannabis business is booming. The National Marijuana Business Conference in Las Vegas last month saw 3,000 attendees, up from 600 last year.

The patent game And the business problems are growing too, as companies begin to invest heavily in innovative products.

Rohan Marley, son of reggae musician Bob Marley, announced last month he would begin distributing Jamaican cannabis strains and hemp-infused products under what the Marley family describes as the world’s first global cannabis brand, Marley Natural.

But Steven Fagen, a Montserrat tobacco exporter, registered four Marley trademarks — the words “Natural Marley Spirit Marijuana” with a lion and cannabis leaf, as well as Natural Marley Spirit Cigarettes — in Colorado last month.

His trademark filings illustrate the need for protection. Fagen has no connection with Marley Natural.

Fagen “is blatantly trading upon the Marley name, and steps are being taken to stop their infringement,” said Zach Hutson, with Seat-

tle-based Privateer Holdings, the equity firm that has partnered with the Marley family in the Marleybranded marijuana.

Fagen did not return messages asking for comment.

The firm is filing for trademark protection with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

(The Colorado secretary of state’s website lists more than 130 companies registering trademarks including the words “cannabis,” “marijuana” and “hemp.”)

Ean Seeb fields a regular stream of calls from attorneys seeking to help his Denver Relief dispensary — the city’s oldest — protect its intellectual property.

His team is deep into a multiyear effort to create a high-CBD strain and strain of potent marijuana that resists powder mildew, but Seeb remains wary of investing in intellectual property protection.

There are too many uncertainties, said Seeb, who serves as chairman of the 800-member National Cannabis Industry Association.

Will someone be able to patent timeless strains like Durban Poison, Bubba Kush or Skunk #1? If they do, how will that patent-owner collect from growers and sellers of that ubiquitous strain? How will the patents be awarded and enforced?

“This whole patent game is going to be very interesting,” Seeb said.

“This started as a hippy industry, but it certainly is getting more corporate.

We are certainly getting away from the free-love mentality. Patents is a pure money play, right?”

Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374

Holmes painstakingly has bred the THC out of and the CBD into his prized Otto II strain. CBD has been credited with relieving some epileptic seizures, prompting widespread calls for additional research.

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B USI N E SS / A YEAR OF LEGAL POT

Pete Williams, chief operating officer of Medicine Man, makes a phone call in the marijuana dispensary. Hyoung Chang, Denver Post file

Marijuana business owners have no dock to bank cash

By David Migoya The Denver Post

The year began with one of the nation’s biggest ATM sponsors refusing to allow its machines to be in businesses with ties to the marijuana trade, and it ends with the first credit union of its kind at the precipice of opening its doors.

For the recreational marijuana trade, the roads into and out of 2014 are a study in contrasts, where the initial lockdown against access to banking services appears to be cracking, even as the drug remains illegal under federal law.

The industry’s biggest hinderance to calling the first year of legal sales in Colorado a huge financial success — more than $300 million in sales in recreational sales alone — has been the absence of a place to put all that cash.

A lack of banking — from deposits to the simple act of writing a check to pay an employee — was the biggest challenge for every pot business.

“It was apparent that a cashheavy marijuana industry would be an invitation to corruption and criminal activity, so one of our priorities in implementing Amendment 64 was securing traditional banking and financial services for legitimate marijuana businesses,” Gov. John Hickenlooper said in a statement to The Denver Post.

A common industry frustration was that while banks refused marijuana-derived deposits, they happily accepted those same dollars as deposits from state agencies that collected taxes from those businesses.

“One of the main things we are

happiest to spend marijuana money on is solving the banking issue,” said Mike Elliott, executive director of the Marijuana Industry Group.

“Not all of them have been credible solutions. And the roadblocks have been many.”

Then, Pueblo Bank & Trust, one of the biggest sponsors of privately owned ATMs, told providers it would not allow them to place machines near or in marijuana-selling businesses.

Suddenly customers of the cashonly businesses had no ready access to cash.

“While there has been a slew of issues, problems and purported solutions to the challenge of providing banking services to marijuana businesses in Colorado, little has changed,” the Colorado Bankers Association said in a statement issued to The Post. “Dealing with the proceeds from the sale of marijuana remains federally illegal.”

Efforts began for a way to pull banks and pot together without having to worry about federal regulators looming with new rules to stymie the relationship.

Directives from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network division of the Department of the Treasury issued on Valentine’s Day were seen by some as a green light to banking. Bankers, however, saw it as a very dim yellow one, and most balked at rules requiring even more paperwork to identify marijuana-tainted money.

“Before the Valentine’s Day memo, many of the businesses had bank accounts in a don’t-ask-don’ttell, unstable environment,” Elliott said. “Then it changed. Suddenly, they saw banks that had been will-

In late November, word emerged of a new credit union forming, the result of an overlooked section of state law that allowed it to operate pending federal approvals for insurance.

With a state charter in hand, and a virtual guarantee on obtaining insurance coverage — whether by a federal agency or privately — The Fourth Corner Credit Union appears headed to a grand opening in January. It awaits approval of a master account with the Federal Reserve System.

fully blind were suddenly auditing themselves, unable to pretend anymore. In one moment, things went from bad to worse.”

Colorado bankers became even warier.

“It is all but impossible for any institution to comply with the ‘Know your customer’s customer’ burden outlined in the FinCEN and Department of Justice memos issued in February, which include ensuring marijuana isn’t used on public land, resold, transported outside of Colorado, provided to minors or other factors,” the bankers association said in its statement.

Then, in May, Colorado legislators came up with House Bill 1398, an 11th-hour proposal to create local financial-service cooperatives — the business equivalent of a credit union — for legal marijuana shops. Although not a solution, it offered a ray of hope.

Put simply, it would allow shop owners to band together to form a business that would handle the critical financial services they needed to operate. It offered a place to put all that cash that no one but the government seemed to want to handle. More importantly, it was a way to pay their bills in a manner that wasn’t a suitcase stuffed with twenties.

The hitch, though, was a requirement that the Federal Reserve System approve any co-op’s access to the nation’s banking system. Without it, the idea would have no chance of success.

“No financial institution can transact business unless they have access to the Federal Reserve System,” said Chris Myklebust, the state’s commissioner of financial services onto whose lap the co-op rule-making and oversight landed.

“While it is a viable option, all depositors in Colorado deserve nothing less than the safety and confidence that federal deposit insurance provides.”

That idea slowed, too, with no takers on filing applications.

Problems acquiring bank accounts soon spread to those merely associated to the industry. Landowners who leased property to marijuana businesses had mortgages canceled, and others found no offers for refinancing.

Then, pot businesses were being penalized by the Internal Revenue Service for paying withholding taxes in cash when rules dictated they be negotiated electronically.

Without a bank account, the businesses were hostage.

In late November, word emerged of a new credit union forming, the result of an overlooked section of state law that allowed it to operate pending federal approvals for insurance.

With a state charter in hand, and a virtual guarantee on obtaining insurance coverage — whether by a federal agency or privately — The Fourth Corner Credit Union appears headed to a grand opening in January. It awaits approval of a master account with the Federal Reserve.

“I can’t look back on this year without getting excited about the future. We’re going to get a solution. Marijuana will be banked,” Myklebust said. “The industry ultimately will be served by existing institutions or by something new.”

The banking-and-marijuana idea appears to be spreading to the mainstream, although bankers remain guarded about talking publicly. Most won’t, citing federal regulators who prefer a closeted, quieter optimism.

“We’ve seen more incremental progress in terms of individual institutions beginning to open up their doors to cannabis businesses, if still very quietly, as well as statelevel efforts to find workable solutions in lieu of federal action,” said Taylor West, deputy director of the National Cannabis Industry Association in Washington, D.C. “What we haven’t yet seen is a full-scale, sustainable solution from Congress to end this crisis once and for all.”

Congress has made attempts, with most efforts to open up the banking logjam failing to move farther than a committee docket.

“We’ve done a lot to get marijuana businesses the banking services they need, but in the long run, to ensure the continued strength and safety of our regulatory system, we hope Congress will act to allow for traditional banks to provide traditional services to marijuana businesses without fear of legal action,” Hickenlooper said.

Outwardly, bankers aren’t as optimistic. “Recent reports of a marijuana credit union are inciting hope in the marijuana industry, but we are unsure if it will actually take root,” the bankers association said.

“Access to the payment system is a key challenge among many other issues. We are not convinced this will occur soon.”

David Migoya: 303-954-1506 or dmigoya@denverpost.com

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Pot unsafe for teen and young adult brains “under construction”

By Electa Draper The Denver Post

Even moderate marijuana use among teens and young people was shown in a study this year to cause abnormalities in the developing brain. Yet as Colorado and other states legalize recreational pot use, the public perception is that it is generally safe.

A nationwide NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in March found that most people thought that alcohol, tobacco and sugar are more harmful to a person’s health than smoking pot. The survey echoed results finding more teens think it’s safe to use marijuana — although so far, it hasn’t shown up in rising usage in Colorado.

That gap has health professionals worried.

“If there is an increasing perception it’s harmless — cognitively, physically and socially — use is eventually going to track with that,” said Ashley Brooks-Russell, assistant professor with the Colorado School of Public Health at University of Colorado Denver.

“What’s been cemented for me this past year is that we really do need to protect our vulnerable populations, like youth,” said Dr. Larry Wolk, a pediatrician and the director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

“On the good-news side, we haven’t yet seen an uptick in youth marijuana use,” Wolk said. “The bad-news side is that more teens are perceiving marijuana as not dangerous or a low risk.”

Years of studies have found diminished memory and cognition in tests of heavy users of pot, or cannabis, with their poorer performances in planning, abstract thinking, understanding rules and impulse control.

Duke University researchers concluded in 2012 that persistent marijuana use begun in the teen years and continued through adulthood can lead to a drop of eight IQ points by a person’s late 30s.

A study released this year took that science a step farther.

A Harvard Medical School and

A homeless teen with the street name of Blaze, right, smokes marijuana from a glass pipe as Dusty Taylor, 20, fiddles with his lighter at the intersection of 21st Avenue and Stout Street in downtown Denver in July.

Andy Cross, Denver Post file

Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine study published in the Journal of Neuroscience in April used three types of brain scans on 40 young adults, ages 18-25, who smoked pot moderately, which is up to four times a week on average.

Researchers wanted to look at any brain changes.

They found changes in the volume, shape and density of two regions of the brain — those responsible for decision-making, judgment, motivation and emotional behavior — in all the moderate users, even in the seven young adults who smoked one joint a week. But the more they smoked, the greater the abnormalities.

Even moderate use during this critical period of brain development, which extends well beyond the teen years, appears to come with alarming lifelong consequences, research-

Jury is still out on

legalization’s e≠ect on marijuana smoking among kids

By Tom McGhee The Denver Post

One year after retail marijuana joined medical pot as a legal product, the number of marijuana-related arrests in Denver public schools has grown by 6 percent.

Opponents predicted that legalizing the drug would encourage more teens to use it. But statistical data showing what change, if any, there has been in the number of teenagers using pot are so far spotty, at best.

“Ultimately, we should be looking at rates of use, not rates of enforcement,” Mason Tvert, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, said of the arrest data provided by Denver police.

Police made 273 arrests for marijuana in Denver schools from Aug. 1, 2012, to July 31, 2013. During the same period of the following school year, arrests rose to 289.

Tvert said heightened awareness could be leading to more arrests.

“There has obviously been a lot of scrutiny surrounding this issue, and maybe more school officials are trained to identify users,” he said.

Supporters of legalized marijuana point to the 2013 Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment Healthy Kids survey that found use among teens fell from 22 percent in 2011 to 20 percent in 2013, findings that would bolster their contention that legalization hasn’t attracted more kids to pot.

The Centers for Disease Control

and Prevention also said the rate of marijuana use among U.S. high school students remained virtually unchanged from 2011 to 2013.

Neither measured use after retail marijuana went on sale Jan. 1.

Colorado passed its first law allowing medical marijuana use in 2000.

But legal sales of the drug began to escalate in 2010, when a dual licensing scheme that regulates medical marijuana businesses at the state and local level was created.

Gina Carbone of Smart Colorado, a group concerned about legalization’s impact on kids, said the Healthy Kids survey is misleading because it counts use among children in areas where there has been little or no commercialization.

Many rural areas have barred the sale of recreational marijuana, leaving many pot shops in Denver and other population centers.

“We have a very diverse state, and some rural areas are very conservative. But where the pot shops are, where we have full-on legal commercialization. That is where the highest use is,” Carbone said.

Thirty-two percent of 720 expelled students in Colorado were thrown out for marijuana-related offenses last year, according to the state Department of Education.

However, it was the first year in which schools officials separated marijuana from other drugs in statistics of violations leading to expulsion.

The education department plans to release data on pot and expul-

ers concluded.

Adolescents who use marijuana at least 20 days a month are two to four times more likely to develop psychosis than adolescents who do not, according to Dr. Paula Riggs, professor and director of the Division of Substance Dependence in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

It could be that children already at risk for mental illness are more likely to abuse pot. Yet, the brains of people between the ages of 10 and the late 20s are “under construction,” Riggs said, and the psychoactive ingredient in pot, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, is very disruptive.

Although fewer than 10 percent of adult pot smokers become addicted to pot — compared with 15 percent for alcohol and 32 percent for tobac-

co — the odds are worse for young users. One of every six adolescents who try it will become a chronic user, Riggs said.

The National Institutes of Health’s 2013 “Monitoring the Future” Survey measures drug use and opinions among U.S. eighth-, 10th- and 12thgraders. The number of high schoolers who think marijuana is dangerous has continued to drop in the past decade. In 2013, about 60 percent of seniors thought pot was harmless.

More than half of all teens already say pot is “sort of or very easy” to get, Brooks-Russell said, and it’s getting progressively easier as youths move through ninth to 12th grades.

Next year, Colorado researchers will look in depth at the question of where adolescents get their pot.

sions in the present school year in an annual legislative report due in mid-January.

Mesa County Valley School District 51 has been tracking disciplinary action attached to marijuana, and its schools have seen a definite increase in expulsions, said Dan Dougherty, a district spokesman.

Thirty-six of 41 expulsions for drug use in the 2012-13 school year were for marijuana, Dougherty said.

This year, the district expelled 59 students for drug use, 55 of them for marijuana.

With 2,200 students in the Mesa County school system, the increase is small, Dougherty said. “If you look at the number and growth in expulsions it is easy to say, ‘Oh, wow, there is an increase,’ but what is important is the number of expulsions divided by the number of students.”

Denver schools saw drug-related expulsions and suspensions fall from 191 in the first quarter of the 2012-13 school year to 162 in the same period of the following year.

The number climbed to 203 in the first quarter of this school year, according to Denver schools spokesman Doug Schepman.

Aurora has not tracked pot’s use in the student population, said Aurora Schools spokeswoman Patty Moon. “Anecdotally, we have heard there may be increases,” she said.

For the first time this year, Jefferson County Schools officials are separating data on discipline for marijuana offenses, but that won’t be available until the end of the year or early next year, said spokeswoman Melissa Reeves.

“We haven’t seen an increase, and we are not expecting an increase,” Reeves said.

In a study by the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, 89 of 100 school resource officers reported an increase in marijuana use among students in their schools since legalization. Eleven said they had seen no change.

The study found that most kids caught using pot got it from friends

who can obtain it legally — 38 percent — and parents, at 23 percent.

“My guess is that parents are not handing it to them,” said Christine R. Harms, director of the Colorado School Safety Resource Center.

Instead, the parents aren’t storing the drug safely, she said.

Hospitals are treating more children for marijuana overdoses than they did before legalization brought a variety of candies and other pot edibles to market.

Children’s Hospital Colorado treated 14 children through October of this year, compared with eight last year, said Dr. G. Sam Wang, assistant professor of pediatrics at Children’s.

Since 2009, the number of toddlers coming to Denver Health Medical Center’s emergency room after ingesting marijuana has grown steadily, said Genie Roosevelt, director of the Denver Emergency Center for Children at Denver Health.

Prior to that, Roosevelt said, “we never saw ingestion in that age group.” Today, Denver Health treats about one or two toddlers a month, Roosevelt said.

The number of marijuana overdoses is small, however, when compared with a count of emergency department visits to metro Denver hospitals for unintentional, non-pot poisonings among children 14 and below.

According to the Colorado Hospital Association, there were 1,317 visits to emergency departments by children for accidental poisoning in 2013.

Those treated ingested dangerous substances from over-the-counter and prescription drugs to household cleaners.

A couple of times a week, Roosevelt said, she sees an adolescent who has been exposed to synthetic marijuana or has eaten a legal marijuana edible and comes to the ER. “There is a steady increase, but the numbers are not large,” Roosevelt said.

Electa Draper: 303-954-1276

Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com

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Rocco Mastriona, 18, was treated for drug addiction twice in the Arapahoe House adolescent residential treatment program. “It wasn’t fun, but it saved my life.” Photos by Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post

No joke: About 9 percent of marijuana users risk addiction

By Claire Martin The Denver Post

Tom Rael’s first epiphany came two years ago when he looked up from his drink and caught his reflection in the bar mirror.

His eyes were red and dull because he was perpetually stoned, toking every hour or so to maintain a constant high. His face was slack and prematurely lined. He looked too old for someone barely 30.

“What have you become?” he asked himself.

He stopped drinking, but he kept smoking. Cannabis was natural, he figured, so it was harmless, right?

But two years later, he went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and listened to someone describe a dry drunk, resentful and constantly simmering with anger and frustration.

Rael felt a jolt of recognition.

“It hit me that I had the exact same symptoms, but from weed,” he said.

“I realized that I had a real problem and that I couldn’t say it was ‘just pot’ anymore. Smoking wasn’t about being with friends no more. It meant sneaking around, worried that people at church would notice, that people at work would notice. Yet I couldn’t stop, and I couldn’t function. I would call that addiction.”

Now 33 years old and a client at Step 13, a residential program that trains recovering addicts through education and work, Rael knows that many people reading this story might be rolling their eyes.

Addicted to cannabis? Is that even physically possible for anyone who’s not in the cast of the 1936 propaganda movie “Reefer Madness”?

“I thought marijuana addiction was a joke,” said Rocco Mastriona, 18, who is in his second residential program for substance abuse at Arapahoe House. It’s where he spent his 17th and 18th birthdays.

“My primary drug was heroin, but marijuana played a big role in my relapse after the first time I left Arapahoe House. I thought if I stayed away from pills and heroin and just smoked weed, I’d be OK.” But Rael and Mastriona and roughly 9 percent of those who use cannabis risk becoming addicted, just as about 15 percent of the people who use alcohol are at risk for becoming alcoholic.

“We know that most of the people who use marijuana recreationally are not addicted, ” said Patrick Fehling, an addiction therapist at the Center for Dependency Addiction and Rehabilitation at the University of Colorado Hospital.

“But of all the people who use marijuana, about 9 percent, or one out of 11, is at risk for addiction.”

Fehling said people become addicted when their tolerance level rises; there are withdrawal symptoms when use is discontinued; they feel a loss of control when

Treatment options Substance-abuse treatment programs focus on helping addicts recover control of their lives through accountability and re-education. Here’s a look at a couple of local treatment programs, both of which have room for additional participants.

Step 13

Tom Rael, 33, sits in the chapel at Step 13 in Denver, where he is recovering from his addiction to marijuana. He attributes his success in recovery to his faith. “When you start doing things right, God’s going to hook you up,” he says. “I wasn’t looking for this. He did that.” they can’t get high; and they continue to use despite negative consequences, valuing getting high over obligations to work, family, friends, relationships and finances.

“Marijuana advocates will say it’s not as addictive as tobacco, and they’re correct,” Fehling said.

“The numbers change with other substances. Alcohol, I believe, is just above the 10 percent range, so of all the people you see who drink, one in 10 have a problem where they lose control or it hurts their lives. The vast majority of people who use recreational marijuana are not addicted.”

But for those at risk for addiction, especially people diagnosed with chronic mental health disorders including mania, depression, anxiety and schizophrenia, marijuana dependance can be ruinous.

Marijuana continues to be among the top drugs abused in Colorado, based on treatment admissions and other data from the National Survey for Drug Use and Health and law enforcement drug testing.

In 2012, the most recent year for which statistics are available, clients with marijuana addiction accounted for slightly more than 19 percent of Colorado’s residential rehabilitation programs.

The Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center reported that calls concerning marijuana ranked second to alcohol for 2011 and 2012.

Rehabilitation counselors say marijuana closely follows alcohol, opiates and sedatives as the four most-abused substances.“We’re seeing more and more patients who heavily smoke marijuana and who also have mental health problems,” Fehling said.

“Which came first? The addiction or the mental health disorder? We don’t know. I don’t think anyone believes that marijuana can cause

schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

“People who do have significant mental illness have a harder time sticking with rehab. They go off their meds. Even for people without mental illness, addiction is a chronic disease.”

Rael, who grew up in a conservative Christian home and avoided alcohol, drugs and sex when he was an adolescent, was 21 when he took his first hit.

It was at a New Year’s Eve party with his cousins. Rael was reeling after being rejected by the Marine Corps. After he enlisted, a physical revealed that he had a torn ligament in this knee.

“For me, being a Marine was something I wanted all my life,” Rael said. “That was my future.

Suddenly, there was nothing.”

So when someone passed a bong at the New Year’s party, he sucked up some smoke and liked how it felt. His cousins cheered: Straitlaced Tom was finally getting high!

“I felt like one of the guys,” Rael said, looking back. “Part of the group, not the square who won’t smoke or drink. I smoked the next day. And from then on, weed was a regular thing.”

Rael spent most of his waking hours high.

“I’d wake up at 4:20, and say, ‘Well, it’s 4:20,’ and smoke a joint and go back to sleep,” he said, referring to the long-standing stoner code for getting high.

“I smoked when I got up. I smoked before work. I’d cut lunch to get high. I’d get high after work and before I went to bed. My car needed brakes, but I needed to spend my money on weed. I’d shift from gear to gear to stop. People at work liked me, but I’d tell myself that they wouldn’t if they knew what I was really like.”

B For men only. Its principle tenets are sobriety, work and accountability.

B Up to 151 residents pay fees of $10 a day (or $260 a month) and stay an average of nine months. Punctuality is expected from the beginning. “When I filled out the application to come to Step 13, they told me to come back at 3 p.m. — right at 3 p.m., not one minute before and not one minute after,” said Tom Rael, a Step 13 resident.

B Residents are required to take Antabuse, an anti-alcohol drug, and blow a Breathalyzer every time they return from an off-site appointment. They are subject to random urine analysis tests, along with mandatory attendance at sobriety support meetings.

B Participants work, either in-house at Step 13 or through the organization’s partnership with Goodwill Industries and Ready Temporary Services.

B To remain in the program, residents must get up and make their beds at 6 a.m. and work from 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. They’re responsible for buying their own food and cooking their own meals and taking classes on budgeting and finance.

Over time, residents earn privileges, such as moving from the dormitory bedroom to a private room or apartment. About 32 percent of the men accepted at Step 13 successfully transition to sobriety and independence.

Arapahoe House

B Thirteen facilities statewide treat adolescents and adults, with gender-segregated dormitories. The cost is determined by a sliding-scale fee based on income.

B The 20 adolescent residents, ages 12 to 18, remain on campus throughout their stay, with a regimented schedule that includes school classes, behavior modification workshops, activities, recovery support meetings and job training.

B Residents are drug-tested whenever they return from going off-campus with a pass for a meeting with a physician, court or family member. They’re also subject to random drug tests.

Claire Martin, The Denver Post

Mastriona knew exactly how his family felt about his drug use. They could tell when he was high. When he left for his second try at rehab nine months ago, his little sister, age 7, told him that she didn’t want him to come home because “you’ll just leave again, like you always do.”

“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about where I came from,” Mastriona said.

Claire Martin: 303-954-1477, cmartin@denverpost.com or twitter.com/byclairemartin

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Medical marijuana patient Teri Robnett, right, uses a vape pen to inhale cannabinoids and manage her chronic fibromyalgia. Her husband, Greg Duran, grinds marijuana to use in a larger vaporizer for Teri, who medicates throughout the day. Photos by Andy Cross, The Denver Post

Low on studies, high on anecdotal evidence: State will aid research

By Electa Draper The Denver Post

After Coloradans decreed in 2000 that the cannabis plant had medical value, scientific evidence has had to play catch-up with the anecdotal cases.

The list of claims of healing powers of marijuana is long, while the list of full-scale U.S. studies on medicinal benefits is short, largely because pot use is still against federal law and doesn’t get many federal research dollars.

Colorado voters approved themedical use of pot in 2000 and recreational use in 2012.

Now Colorado is leading the nation in state spending on studies of medical marijuana.

The state’s Medical Marijuana Scientific Advisory Council considered Dec. 17 how to spend $9 million set aside by the state legislature for two- to three-year studies on marijuana treatment for chronic pain, post-traumatic stress disorder, Parkinson’s disease tremors, pediatric epilepsy, inflammatory bowel disease and palliative care for pediatric brain tumors.

“You can’t ignore the anecdotal evidence. It’s compelling,” said Dr. Larry Wolk, director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. “I wouldn’t want to deprive families’ hope or treatment. But medical effectiveness still needs to be verified. With these studies, we could have some answers within the next year.”

There were 116,287 people holding medical marijuana cards in Colorado at the end of September — about 3,400 more than at the end of last year before recreational pot became legal — and 816 physicians with medical pot patients. About 66 percent are male, the average age is 42

and 427 patients are under age 18.

Most patients, 93 percent, are using medical marijuana to treat severe pain. Muscle spasms are the reason given by 15 percent of card holders. Some patients have listed both as a reason.

Conditions recognized for medical cannabis use in Colorado are cachexia (or wasting syndrome), cancer, chronic pain, chronic nervous system disorders, epilepsy and other seizure disorders, glaucoma, HIV or AIDS, multiple sclerosis and other muscle spasticity disorders and nausea.

“It’s unlikely that marijuana is effective for the wide range of health problems approved under Colorado law,” said the University of Colorado’s Dr. Andrew Monte, who co-wrote a viewpoint piece on legalizing marijuana published Dec. 8 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Yet hope and desperation can be stronger than scientific evidence.

Colorado has become a beacon for those seeking a marijuana cure for their illnesses and suffering.

Boulder County medical marijuana caregiver Jason Cranford said he and others are flooded with requests from around the country to treat cancer, seizure disorders and countless other conditions in children and adults.

Teri Robnett, with the Cannabis Patients Alliance, was the only nonscientist, non-medical person named to the Medical Marijuana Scientific Advisory Council.

Robnett has suffered 27 years with fibromyalgia, a disorder characterized by widespread musculoskeletal pain and fatigue and sleep, memory, mood and digestive issues. In 2009 she began experimenting with cannabis.

“It completely changed my life,”

Most patients, 93 percent, are using medical marijuana to treat severe pain. Muscle spasms are the reason given by 15 percent of card holders. Some patients have listed both as a reason.

In December at her home, Robnett uses an Herbalizer to fill a bag with cannabinoid vapor to manage chronic fibromyalgia.

Robnett said. It’s the only thing that’s alleviated her symptoms without serious side effects, she said.

She discerns a recent shift in the medical community’s attitudes toward marijuana. Scientists are less interested in questioning whether it has value as medicine, she said, and more interested in determining just how effective it is and how patients should be dosed.

Studies going back 40 years showed marijuana can be used to treat and prevent glaucoma, an eye disease that increases pressure in the eyeball, damaging the optic nerve and causing loss of vision.

More recent research has found that chemicals in marijuana can lessen the incidence of epileptic and Dravet’s syndrome seizures, alleviate the chronic pain of cancer, arthritis and nerve pain — and may be safer than opioids. It lessens the nausea of chemotherapy and is an appetite stimulant.

Marijuana likely has anti-inflammatory effects and appears to benefit some patients with inflammatory bowel disease, other studies show.

Claims that cannabis limits tumor growth, slows the progression of Alzheimer’s disease or eases muscles spasms, alleviating symptoms of multiple sclerosis or the tremors of Parkinson’s, among other conditions, are not substantiated by research, said Monte, who works in CU’s emergency medicine de-

partment and with the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center.

Medical professionals point out that smoking or ingesting a plant is not “pharmacological” and that it’s impossible to administer a consistent dose and predict a consistent result.

“Something given in a known and consistent dose, that’s medicine,” Wolk also said. “I’m uncomfortable with a plant as a medical model.”

Medical marijuana generally means the whole unprocessed marijuana plant or crude extracts, which are not approved as medicine by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The National Institutes of Health has funded some investigations into therapeutic uses of plant constituents, THC, CBD and other active chemicals called cannabinoid.

Studies have led to the development of two FDA-approved medications, dronabinol (brand name Marinol), which contains THC, and nabilone (brand name Cesamet), which has a synthetic form of THC. They are used to treat the nausea caused by chemotherapy and the weight loss and muscle atrophy caused by AIDS. A CBD-based drug called Epidolex has been created to treat certain forms of childhood epilepsy, and clinical trials are underway.

Electa Draper: 303-954-1276