DENVER Inside the industrial scale marijuana farms that dot Denver's low rise warehouse districts, it is perpetual summer 78 degrees, with moderate humidity and fields of shoulder-high plants with fat, sticky buds swaying in the breeze.
These unmarked THC factories are easy to miss from the street, except for the casino-style security cameras perched on each corner. But inside the world's only fully regulated, for-profit marijuana market, there are few secrets.
Colorado has approved 739 of these indoor farms over the past two-plus years after vetting their owners' finances and requiring the buds be tracked on high-definition video and bar-coded every moment from seed to sale. Local building inspectors have signed off, and cops city, state and federal can drop in at any time.
This out-in-the-open marijuana is the best glimpse of the strange new reality coming next to Washington state.
If Washington, as expected, follows Colorado's experiment, its state regulators will be investigating entrepreneurs' finances for links to organized crime and keeping steady watch over leakage to the black market even as they allow warehouses of weed.
The challenges are immense. Washington's new marijuana law, approved by voters in November, creates a market for social use vastly bigger than the medical-marijuana market regulated in Colorado. There is nothing like it anywhere.
In Colorado, regulators had to broker a shotgun marriage between law enforcement and marijuana dealers. Anxious state regulators wrote more rules than they could enforce. The state is now thinning its thick rule book, even as drug cops say Colorado-regulated marijuana has popped up across the Midwest.
Capitalism unleashed, medical marijuana suddenly became a $200 million industry, with retail prices averaging about $7.50 a gram among the cheapest in the country.
The federal government despite its ban on marijuana has largely been hands-off. Not a single big growing operation has been raided. It's unclear how the Justice Department will react to the massive, voter-approved expansion last fall of social-use markets in Washington and Colorado.
Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, the grandson of a bootlegger, said regulations need to address teen use while acknowledging consumers' "huge appetite" for an increasingly potent drug.
"This is not your father's marijuana," he said.
Colorado's one-of-a-kind system arose through necessity.
In 2000, it joined Washington in allowing medical marijuana, but it wasn't until 2009 that Denver, like Seattle, began seeing wildcat marijuana dispensaries popping up across the city.
Then-state Sen. Chris Romer, son of a former governor, in 2010 pushed through medical marijuana regulations envisioned to be "as strict, if not twice as strict, as alcohol."
Five-figure licensing and application fees plus security and requirements that dispensaries grow most of their own product added up to $500,000 or more. That was intentional, Romer said.
"If you raise the bar high enough, they won't risk their $500,000 or million-dollar investment to sell to youngsters," he said.
With a new law in place, a retired liquor regulator and onetime drug cop, Matt Cook, was brought in to broker a five-month negotiation that "had drug dealers on one side, law enforcement on the other, and my staff in the middle," he said.
Cook had one primary goal: no "diversion" of marijuana spilling from regulated grows onto street corners.
The result was a blizzard of rules: 24-7 video surveillance in farms and dispensaries accessible to enforcement officers via the Internet; bar codes on each plant; criminal background checks; and manifests faxed to Cook's staff each time a pound of pot was moved.
"The process works," said Cook, who retired and is now a consultant to the medical marijuana industry. "It sort of set the example for the rest of the nation. This commodity won't go away. And it can be regulated."
Colorado's 2.9 percent state sales tax last year generated $5.3 million from medical marijuana sales. Cities, which can impose huge licensing fees and extra sales taxes, have reaped far more. Dispensary owners say they pay federal income tax, often at high rates because their businesses do not qualify for many deductions.
With all the marijuana and money out in the open, theories abound about why federal authorities haven't intervened. Most cite Colorado's role as a swing state in presidential elections and the fact its own regulators not federal drug cops are called to handle problem dispensaries.
Denver Relief's growing site, in a nondescript warehouse in northeast Denver, is a midsize operation by local standards: 2,000 plants, 13,000 square feet, 62,000 watts of power and 2,000 gallons of filtered water a day. Building costs were $500,000, including the site's own transformer.
Up close, flowering marijuana plants look like Frankenflowers, genetically filtered into strains such as Romulan or Red Headed Stranger to produce plum-sized buds dangling from spindly stalks. The dispensary was one of the first amid the Colorado medical marijuana land rush of 2010. More than 1,800 budding entrepreneurs, some pushing shopping carts full of documents, lined up at Cook's office, dreaming of getting a state license to grow or sell pot.
To get one, applicants had to waive their Fourth Amendment right to limitations on search and seizure: regardless of state law, the business is illegal under federal law. They also had to disclose years of bank statements.
"I think a lot of the info they required weeded out a lot of people who would have been bad for the industry," said Kayvan Khalatbari, co-owner of Denver Relief.
It is a tightly competitive market, with more than 520 dispensaries and 150 processors of cannabis-infused food statewide. The industry leases an estimated 1 million square feet in the Denver area, with some growing sites having as many as 10,000 plants.
Still, all this would be dwarfed by Washington's new marijuana market. The state predicts 363,000 consumers will go through 187,000 pounds of dry marijuana a year in Washington.
By Khalatbari's calculations, Washington would need about 1,000 growing sites the size of Denver Relief. "Wow, that's a lot of marijuana," he said.
It is "naive" to think that any rules Washington may create will keep that much bud from leaking into the black market, said Colorado Attorney General John Suthers, a Republican ex-federal prosecutor.
He and other opponents say Colorado has become a bulk exporter: a recent report documented cases of state-regulated marijuana finding its way to 23 other states.
Recreational use will only make it worse, Suthers fears, and sends a "terrible" message to teenagers.
"We're in a cultural collapse, in my opinion. But I'm an old fogey," Suthers said. "The industry would call me a drug-war dinosaur."
In theory, Colorado's Medical Marijuana Enforcement Division was to have dozens of regulators so vigilant that every plant could be tracked, in person and on camera, from seed to sale.
But that ambition gave way to financial reality. The agency overspent, then had to cut staff; now there are 10 regulators for a $200 million industry. Shipping manifests, spit from a state fax machine, have gone unread, and more than 860 license applications still need to be vetted.
"Sometimes it feels like the division bit off more than it could chew, truly looking over the shoulder of the licensee at every step of the way," said Laura Harris, who took over the enforcement division a year ago.
Her agency is now simplifying rules with input from industry leaders such as Norton Arbelaez, an attorney who runs River Rock, one of the largest dispensaries in the state. He said his company pays $1 million in taxes, with top-end growers earning $100,000.
"The free market has done a good thing," said Arbelaez. "Isn't that better than operating in the shadows? Isn't it better for the city of Denver that revenue from medical marijuana funds the parks?"
Colorado, like Washington, is just starting work on the social-use market. Both states plan to open retail stores in about a year.
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"Forty million Americans smoked marijuana; the only ones who didn't like it were Judge Ginsberg, Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton."
- Jay Leno quote on Marijuana
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Under the current FDA laws in the united States, it is illegal to make any medical claims for any health supplement or any other natural product. Remember cultivation of Marijuana, use of Medical Marijuana, importation of marijuana seeds with the intention of growing Marijuana or using it is illegal in some countries and many states. While Marijuana seeds, and other items associated with the use of Marijuana, are sold as souvenirs and shipped to any country in the world, your importation of the seeds could be considered a criminal offense for which there could be severe criminal consequences. Check laws within your own country.
Medical Marijuana has been legal in numerous states within the united States for many years and recreational use of Marijuana is now legal in Washington and Colorado, since winning by initiative November 6, 2012. The federal government of the united States still considers Marijuana a controlled substance and illegal in all states. Laws change continuously and our intention is to stay abreast of all appropriate laws and provide a compilation of information for novelty purposes only, we do not intend to persuade, induce, intimate or condone anyone breaking any laws, nor does this information pertain to any other substance than Marijuana.
All information is for educational purposes only and is not intended to make any legal or medical claims, diagnose, treat, cure, prevent or mitigate any physical or mental condition, nor to prescribe any substance. This site provides helpful information and is supported by compensation from quality advertisers and affiliate relationships. This website is for educational purposes only, scientific or medical research and fun. Cannabis is legal in about 30 countries.
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