Sales of cannabis flower, edibles, and concentrates reached $117.4 million in April, up nearly 60% year over year and the highest monthly total recorded since sales of legal recreational marijuana started in 2014. In the first four months of 2016, sales have totaled $387.5 million. In all of 2015 legal sales in Colorado totaled $996.2 million.

Recreational sales alone totaled $76.6 million in April, up more than 80% from $42.4 million in April 2015. Medical marijuana sales totaled$40.8 million, a year-over-year  increase of 28%.

Colorado imposes three taxes on sales of recreational marijuana: the standard 2.9% state sales tax; an additional 10% sales tax; and a 15% excise tax on wholesale transfers that goes into a school construction fund. The state collected $5.5 million in excise taxes on April sales and has collected $16.7 million in excise taxes on recreational marijuana for the first 4 months of the year. Total tax collections on both recreational and medical marijuana amount to nearly $57 million through the first four months of the year.

Here are excerpts from other recent cannabis-related news stories.

High on Image, University of Missouri Says No to Marijuana on T-Shirt
The University of Missouri and a student group are squabbling over marijuana.

Not over the drug itself, but on whether a marijuana leaf can appear on a T-shirt next to the school’s name.

University officials have said no. However, leaders for the campus chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws say it’s about First Amendment rights and fairness.

“The University of Missouri does not want to seem as if they are endorsing our viewpoint,” said Benton Berigan, president of MU NORML. “We just want the rights that are afforded to other university organizations.”

Read more at The Kansas City Star.

25 States Now Call Marijuana “Medicine.” Why Doesn’t the DEA?
John Kasich signed Ohio’s medical marijuana bill into law yesterday [June 8], making it the 25th state (26 counting Washington, D.C.) to allow some form of medical marijuana use.

Ohio’s measure is more restrictive than medical marijuana bills in many other states. It does not allow patients to smoke marijuana — they must ingest it orally via edible products, or use a vaporizer. It doesn’t allow patients to grow their own marijuana, and only a handful of conditions, including epilepsy, chronic pain and cancer, qualify for a medical marijuana recommendation.

Medical marijuana advocates had launched a campaign to put a broader medical marijuana bill before voters this fall. But the bill approved by legislature and signed by Gov. Kasich was intended to stave off more permissive ballot measures. And it appears to have been successful: the group pushing for the ballot initiative recently suspended that campaign, calling the legislature’s bill “imperfect” but saying the bill’s passage represented “a joyous day for the thousands of Ohioans who will finally be able to safely access much-needed medicine.

Read more at The Washington Post.

Here’s How Smoking Marijuana Might Affect Your Life Insurance
If you smoke marijuana and you’re shopping for life insurance, chances are you can find a company that won’t penalize you for your habit, but you may have to weed out several insurers to find the best policy.

Eighty percent of the 148 underwriters who were surveyed by reinsurer Munich Re at the Association of Home Office Underwriters annual conference last year said their company factors marijuana use into its decisions on how to price policies and whether to offer coverage. Yet, of those, 29 percent classify marijuana users as nonsmokers, potentially allowing them to qualify for the best nonsmoker rates.

How often recreational users smoke pot is a key question for life insurers. At Prudential, for example, people can get high as often as three times a week and still qualify for nonsmoking rates. Someone who admits to smoking four to six times per week would have to pay a bit more, while anyone who uses marijuana daily wouldn’t be offered a policy, said Thomas Farrell, vice president of life underwriting at Prudential’s individual life insurance business.

Read more at the PBS Newshour.

Nevada’s Largest Paper Used to Support Marijuana Legalization. Then Sheldon Adelson Bought It.
Last summer, the Las Vegas Review-Journal published an editorial proclaiming that the paper’s editorial page “has long support[ed] the decriminalizing, regulating and taxing the sale of currently illegal drugs,” including marijuana. It was on record as supporting an effort to legalize marijuana in the state that will go before voters this November, and as recently as late last year called for all presidential candidates to champion “removing marijuana from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act.”

But in December, news broke that conservative billionaire Sheldon Adelson and his family purchased the paper. Shortly thereafter, Adelson, a staunch opponent of cannabis who spent more than $5 million to defeat a medical marijuana initiative in Florida in 2014, reportedly urged the paper’s editorial page writers to go on a field trip to a drug treatment center in hopes of getting them to reconsider their pro-marijuana stance.

As Tom Angell of marijuana.com points out, Adelso’’s efforts apparently paid dividends. On Tuesday, Nevada’s largest paper struck a completely different tone about marijuana with an editorial entitled, “Pot legalization a bad bet for Nevada.”

The piece fear-mongers about marijuana by connecting legalization with increased rates of cancer and birth defects, among other negative outcomes.

Read more at Think Progress.

Crowdfunded Financing for Marijuana Software Business Goes Up in Smoke
For Ralf-Rainer von Albedyhll and his start-up, new rules that allow small companies to sell stock through Kickstarter-like online offerings might have been the answer to a question that has dogged him for years: How do you find investors willing to back a company in the medical marijuana business?

He’d tried to convince professional investors, including members of an Oakland marijuana investor network group Arcview Group, but to no avail. So he turned to equity crowdfunding, a newly legal practice that allows start-ups to raise up to $1 million from the general public.

He spent weeks on paperwork. He had his firm’s books reviewed by an accountant. He thought he’d jumped through every hoop. And on May 16, his firm, NextRX, started raising money through Santa Monica’s StartEngine Crowdfunding.

Two days later, the campaign was suspended. Not because NextRX had run afoul of the new crowdfunding rules, but because another institution – an Arizona bank – was concerned about federal drug laws.

Read More at the Los Angeles Times.

Thank you for reading! Have some feedback for us?
Contact the 24/7 Wall St. editorial team.