Featured guests: Kayvan Khalatbari, lead proponent for the Neighborhood-Supported Cannabis Consumption Pilot Program, and Cannabist general manager Brad Bogus.
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LOTS TO TALK ABOUT
• Denver marijuana laws: Get details on the marijuana consumption initiative that will be on the city ballot in November.
• From the Texas gray market to the Colorado open market.
• What an even more 420-friendly Centennial State could look like.
TOP MARIJUANA NEWS
Federal court upholds ban on gun sales to medical marijuana card holders: A federal government ban on the sale of guns to medical marijuana card holders does not violate the Second Amendment, a federal appeals court has decided. The 3-0 ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals applies to the nine Western states that fall under the court’s jurisdiction, including California, Washington and Oregon. It came in a lawsuit filed by S. Rowan Wilson, a Nevada woman who said she tried to buy a firearm for self-defense in 2011 after obtaining a medical marijuana card. The gun store refused, citing the federal rule banning the sale of firearms to illegal drug users. Marijuana remains illegal under federal law, and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has told gun sellers they can assume a person with a medical marijuana card uses the drug. –Report by The Associated Press’s Sudhin Thanawala
CDC: More people are using marijuana, but fewer are abusing it: Marijuana abuse and dependency are becoming less common, even as states roll back restrictions on the use of the drug, according to a new federal report. In 2014, the number of Americans aged 12 and over meeting diagnostic criteria for marijuana abuse or dependency stood at 1.6 percent, a decline from 1.8 percent in 2002, according to a report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. –Report by The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham
‘Weed tornado’? Watch this pot plant get sucked from the soil, thrown into the air: Michael Johnson was cooking his kids dinner when he got an unexpected phone call from work. “One of our new employees came to report that he witnessed a mini-tornado come through (our outdoor cannabis cultivation), rip out a huge marijuana plant, and throw it 50 feet from our medical garden, over an eight-foot fence and into our recreational facility,” wrote Johnson, chief of operations at Siskiyou Sungrown, a licensed medical and recreational marijuana producer in Oregon. –Report by The Cannabist’s Ricardo Baca
POT QUIZ
Test your current-events knowledge about legalization in the southern hemisphere, a state Supreme Court rejecting a legal challenge to recreational marijuana, medical dispensaries closing and more.
