DrugSense

DrugSense

The Gazette, 14 May 2013 – The Colorado Springs City Council will host public hearings this summer to talk about pot. The council must decide whether the city will allow retail marijuana sales or ban them. And there is much to consider in the meantime, said Kyle Sauer of the city attorney’s office.

Summit Daily News, 14 May 2013 – Thank God that’s over. The state Legislature won’t meet again for another 239 days, so productive Coloradans can breathe a little easier; no further confiscations of our hard-earned gains for political purposes can be undertaken at present. How it happened doesn’t matter. Whether it was the country-club attitude of Colorado’s Republican establishment, who don’t realize that politics is a barroom brawl, not a polite conversation; the bottomless bucket of funding from gay activists; the clouds of cannabis smoke obscuring serious issues; the media’s mindless prattle about cowboy boots and quixotic quests to describe zygotes as persons; or a tragicomic combination of all of these, Colorado’s 2012 election results will produce poisonous fruit for years.

Summit Daily News, 14 May 2013 – Lawmakers in Denver approved a historic and hard-won package of bills May 8 implementing a legal framework for the recreational consumption and sale of marijuana, and they’re giving medical cannabis retailers a head start to the gate of the budding industry. In Breckenridge, the owners of at least one dispensary plan to take advantage of it.

DrugSense

DrugSense

The Steamboat Today, 11 May 2013 – Just in the nick of time last week, Colorado lawmakers came together to pass legislation establishing the regulatory framework for retail marijuana business in the state. While much remains in the air – including, for example, whether Colorado voters will approve this fall marijuana excise and sales taxes that will raise money for school construction and pot industry oversight, respectively – there are some fundamental positives about the bills approved Wednesday. Significantly for Steamboat Springs, Routt County and other municipalities, the laws provide at least a regulatory foundation on which they can build. Last November’s passage of Amendment 64 very clearly legalized the possession and use of small amounts of cannabis for adults 21 and older, but the constitutional amendment left it up to the state to work out regulations for the operation of recreational marijuana businesses. The state was up against a July 1 deadline to create such regulations.

Daily Camera, 12 May 2013 – The May 6 Daily Camera article on the risks marijuana poses to young people, completely omitted other important information on youth risk behaviors. We know that nicotine is a substance more addicting than marijuana; more addicting, even, than some "hard" drugs. We know that alcohol and its metabolite, acetaldehyde, are carcinogenic, brain-destroying and liver-destroying. I have relatives and friends who have lost their health or lives to tobacco and/or alcohol.

Boulder Weekly, 09 May 2013 – Blood-Level THC Tests No Answer to Driving Safety HB 1325, which determines driving impairment through a blood-level THC test, was passed by the Colorado legislature on May 7. The bill says anyone caught driving with more than five nanograms of THC per milliliter of blood is considered impaired, with the caveat that one could argue that you weren’t impaired in court afterwards. Earlier versions – this is the sixth – made it an automatic conviction. Gov. John Hickenlooper is expected to sign the bill into law.