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Marijuana News Roundup: Colorado Votes 'Yes;' State Rules 'No' on Public Pot Use

Paul Ausick

Published: November 20, 2016 8:31 am

Last Updated: January 12, 2020 5:36 pm

Initiatives supporting legalization of marijuana for medical or recreational use took center stage during the last election. That doesn’t mean that nothing else was happening.

Colorado voters approved Initiative 300, a measure to create a four-year pilot program to allow businesses to get a permit allowing cannabis consumption on the premises, providing the users supplied their own marijuana. There are a lot of hoops for a business to jump through, neighborhood support likely being one of the toughest.

The logical places for public consumption of cannabis are bars and restaurants. But on Friday the Colorado Department of Revenue issued a new rule prohibiting bars and many restaurants from applying for the permits.

According to a report at The Denver Post, the new rule takes effect January 1, 2017, clarifying that liquor licensees cannot permit marijuana consumption in their establishments. Cannabis dispensaries and other licensed marijuana businesses are already prohibited from allowing on-site consumption.

Initiative 300 was approved by 53.5% of voters. Denver city officials have just begun trying to figure out how to implement it.

Marijuana May Be Legal in California, but It Can Still Get You Fired
Here’s a rule one Denver convenience store never expected to enforce: Microwaves cannot be used to heat pee.

The store is next to ARCpoint Labs of East Denver, which conducts drug testing for businesses who screen prospective workers before hiring them.

In Colorado, recreational marijuana has been legal since 2012, but it’s still forbidden by many employers.

That apparent conflict means lab owner Kelly Kirwan sees people regularly attempting to rig their drug tests. Some try to use someone else’s urine (requiring them to reheat the pee for authenticity; sparking the microwave rule at the nearby convenience store), while others try to mix in powders they buy via Internet in the hope of masking pot-positive results.

These schemes unfold because even though marijuana is legal for personal use, workers can still get fired – or not hired or sent to rehab – for having the drug in their system.

“A lot of employees got into trouble,” Kirwan said of the early days of Colorado’s law. “They thought, ‘It’s legal, let’s go smoke Saturday night!’ They didn’t understand that the employer policy still remains intact.”

The same is now true in California.

Read more at The San Jose Mercury News.

Buzz Kill: Pot Industry Worried Trump, Sessions Will Erase Gains
Oakland marijuana businesswoman Debby Goldsberry — a pot activist for decades whom High Times once named “Freedom Fighter of the Year” — had planned an election night filled with joy.

But as President-elect Donald Trump surged in battleground states, her mood turned, even though California was in the midst of legalizing cannabis. And now, a week and a half after voters’ passage of Proposition 64, Goldsberry said she has “not had one iota of joy about this whole situation.”

“I’m so scared. It’s awful,” she said. “We’re just concerned the (Drug Enforcement Administration) is going to be sent back into California to start busting heads again.”

America’s multibillion-dollar cannabis industry is balancing massive uncertainty about the policies of a Trump administration with cautious optimism the president-elect will keep his promises to allow the state-level medical and recreational pot trades to exist. That optimism, though, faded Friday when Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, a marijuana opponent, emerged as Trump’s nominee for attorney general.

“Sessions would be, as far as I can tell, a nightmare on marijuana and all other drug policy,” said Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Drug Policy Alliance, the nation’s leading drug-law reform group.

Read more at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Marijuana Appears to Benefit Mental Health

Legal access to marijuana, medicinal or otherwise, is growing. In 2016, four states approved recreational use of the drug and four states passed laws related to medical-cannabis access, bringing the total number of states that allow some form of legal marijuana use to 28.

Scientists know that marijuana contains more than 100 compounds, called cannabinoids, that have biological effects on the body. Medically, cannabis can be prescribed for physical ailments like arthritis and cancer symptoms as well as mental health issues like PTSD, depression and anxiety. Still, the role marijuana can play in medicine remains murky. The dearth of research is in large part due to the fact that most studies have focused on illicit use of marijuana rather than its therapeutic potential, and because it’s classified as a schedule 1 drug, making it nearly impossible to study.

Looking for answers about marijuana’s potential mental health benefits, a team of researchers in Canada and the U.S. recently conducted a review of the science. In their report, published in the journal Clinical Psychology Review, researchers found evidence that cannabis can likely benefit people dealing with depression, social anxiety and PTSD, though it may not be ideal for people with bipolar disorder, for instance, for which there appears to be more negative side effects than positive ones. “This is a substance that has potential use for mental health,” says Zach Walsh, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. “We should be looking at it in the same way [as other drugs] and be holding it up to the same standard.”

Read more at Time.

Marijuana Gold Rush? Walmart of Weed? Not So Fast
“Big Pot” is not coming to Massachusetts.

Though voters approved recreational marijuana last week, don’t expect a land rush to Massachusetts by out-of-state corporate profiteers who can quickly throw up a weed store on every corner.

Instead, cannabis companies anticipate the retail market for legal marijuana here will be slow to develop and fragmented among numerous small firms, most of them homegrown startups or locally-owned partnerships with boutique pot companies from states such as Colorado.

“There isn’t some megalithic industry that exists today,” said Kris Krane, the Boston-based president of marijuana investment and consulting firm 4Front Ventures. “The notion that there are these gigantic, big-money players running in to take this whole thing over is just a fiction. There’s no Philip Morris, no Anheuser-Busch, no cannabis division at Bank of America. Even the most successful company is still barely in the growth stage.”

Read more at The Boston Globe.