Denver authorities begin permitting process for cannabis consumption venues

by Free Speech Radio News

Last November, voters in Denver narrowly decided to allow public use of marijuana in private establishments with permits. Permit applications just became available and FSRN’s Hannah Leigh Myers visited an information cafe in downtown Denver that’s ready to apply.

In 2000, Colorado became one of the first states to legalize medical marijuana. Then in 2012 recreational pot was legalized. And now business owners in Denver, like Jim Norris of Mutiny Information Cafe, are starting to apply for permits that for the first time in history will allow marijuana consumption in public places.

“I want do a once a month night here, Saturday night. We’ll have comedy, a dance party, DJ’s, that kind of stuff,” Norris says. “It’ll be laid back and cool, 21 and over, I’ll have security. I’ll follow whatever the rules are that the city wants us to do.”

Initiative 300, passed by Denver voters in 2016, could make Norris’ plans a reality by late this year when the city begins issuing permits.

In the meantime, a diverse committee will craft strict permit rules. One of the toughest requirements already written into the initiative makes it necessary for permit holders to get approval from surrounding neighborhood groups.

“Under Initiative 300, adults would be able to vaporize or be able to use other non-smokable forms of marijuana inside and they would be able to smoke marijuana in places where smoking is already currently allowed, but only if it’s not viewable to the public,” explains Mason Tvert, Director of Communications for the Marijuana Policy Project.

Tvert played a significant role in the passage Amendment 64 that legalized recreational marijuana in Colorado. He also backed I 300 saying the initiative will bring Colorado one step closer to realizing Amendment 64’s ultimate goal.

“When voters approved Amendment 64 in 2012, they said ‘we want marijuana to be treated similarly to alcohol’ and that has not happened yet when it comes to places where adults can consume,” says Tvert.

Although I 300 will give the public a place to consume cannabis similar to a bar, patrons will need to bring their own marijuana. And it will be illegal to consume alcohol and pot at the same establishment.

Back at Mutiny, co-owner Jim Norris says he’s glad the rules are strict and that the city plans to take it’s time formulating even more rigorous standards for the public marijuana consumption permits.

“I think it should be really involved,” Norris says. “You know, we’re starting something really big here – really, really big. This is democracy in action. We voted for it, the city and state have to come up with a way to make it happen.”

Norris is confident Mutiny Information Cafe will rapidly meet permit requirements. What is less certain is if the federal government will continue to take a hands-off approach in cities and states where marijuana rules passed through ballot initiatives clash with federal drug laws.

Race is on for marijuana permits in York County

Brett Sholtis

Companies have contacted area townships looking to open medical marijuana-related businesses.

Companies hoping to cash in on Pennsylvania's budding medical marijuana industry have set their sights on York County.

At least six groups have called Springettsbury Township in the past month to ask about zoning for medical marijuana-related properties, said Jessica Fieldhouse, the township's director of community development. Other townships have reported similar interest.

The timing is no accident: Two weeks ago Pennsylvania published its application for those who hope to grow and distribute medical marijuana. The state will accept applications from Feb. 20 to March 20. It expects about 900 applicants to compete for a total of 12 marijuana processing facility permits and 27 primary dispensing facilities.

York is part of a 13-county region that is eligible for two "grower/ processor" permits and four primary dispensary permits. Adams, Franklin, Fulton, Lebanon, Dauphin and Perry are among the other counties in this region.

With so few permits available, aspiring growers are rushing to secure "interim leases" that will help to give them an edge over competitors, said Robin Zellers, who has been working with several interested groups.

"It's advantageous for the applicants to have secured a site, whether they have purchased that site or whether they have a lease available," Zellers said.

Zellers — the president of a Dauphin County-based real estate firm called NAI-CIR — said his clients are scouring the state for ideal locations.

Some of those clients, which Zellers declined to name, come from as far away as Colorado and California.

"There's a lot of activity from strong operators that are functioning now in other states," Zellers said.

At least one startup, Viridis Medicine, has York County ties, with a group of investors that includes former Wolf Organization chairman George Hodges. Viridis has applied for a permit to grow marijuana in Hellam Township.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf cheers after signing the Medical Marijuana Act into law Sunday, April 17, 2016, in the Pennsylvania State Capitol Rotunda in Harrisburg. Medical marijuana advocates gathered to celebrate as Pennsylvania became the 24th state in the country to legalize marijuana for medical use. The law takes effect in 30 days.  Chris Dunn, York Daily Record.

VIridis is also one of several companies that looked at Springettsbury Township for a dispensary location, Fieldhouse said.

The township hasn't granted any permits yet, and still has to decide how to classify the unprecedented business.

"From a land-use approvals process, there's no clear guidance," Fieldhouse said. The dispensaries would be zoned as retail. However, the facilities will both grow marijuana and convert the plant material into products such as oils and pills.

York city has received about six inquiries as well, said Shilvosky Buffaloe, the city's interim director of economic & community development. The city had received no official applications as of Tuesday. If it does, the city plans to treat medical marijuana businesses "as any other business."

"We've treated it pretty benignly," Buffaloe said. "I'm agnostic about it. I'd treat it the same as if it were a stationery store."

West Manchester Township has received calls from three companies, including Viridis, said township zoning officer Monica Love. There, the township has determined that any proposed medical marijuana business would have to apply with the zoning hearing board.

"We would have some concerns, but I don't think it's insurmountable," Love said.Viridis Medicine hopes to build a medical marijuana manufacturing center at 6287 Lincoln Highway, Hellam Township. The company would subdivide the property and construct a 50,000 square-foot building where it would grow and process marijuana. (Photo: Sean Heisey, York Daily Record)

Ensuring security and a stable business environment are some concerns companies should have in Pennsylvania, said Marc Harvill, senior consultant at a Denver-based cannabis industry consulting group called Medicine Man Technologies.

"There's going to be a lot of unknowns," said Harvill, who has done consulting work for about 12 Pennsylvania-based startups. "A lot will depend on the patient registry program and the protections for doctors who write the prescriptions."

The steep cost to apply for a permit signals that Pennsylvania hopes to strongly regulate the industry, Harvill said.

"They're sending a message that they don't want those little basement or garage growers coming up," Harvill said. "They want significant players with significant capital."

Just how much? Applicants must pay a $10,000 nonrefundable fee, provide a $200,000 check that the state will cash if it approves the application, and must show that they have at least $2 million in capital, including $500,000 in liquid assets, the state has said.

From there it's hard to say what will happen once the state grants the permits, Harvill said. Culturally, the eastern U.S. has been more "conservative and careful' with its approach to marijuana than the West Coast or Colorado. "They want to make sure they have all their controls in place."

Donald Trump Supreme Court Nominee Neil Gorsuch on Marijuana

Anthony Johnson 

Donald Trump’s unorthodox and erratic governing style has many anxious with every move that he makes, justifiably. The cannabis community certainly reads the tea leaves on each and every political maneuver that may impact marijuana law reforms across the country. The nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the United States Supreme Court is no different, as he could be the deciding vote in important cases that impact the cannabis community, including whether state legalization and medical laws are protected from various lawsuits and the constitutional rights of medical cardholders.

Gorsuch, a federal 10th Circuit Court judge, is considered to be in the mold of the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

During the campaign, we were heartened by Trump’s statements affirming his support for medical cannabis, while his tepid support for states’ rights regarding adult use could be read both positively and negatively. Jeff Sessions as attorney general has been panned by most legalization advocates, while others have taken a wait-and-see approach, hoping that the Alabama Senators’ states’ rights positions, and his willingness to follow Trump’s directive, wins the day. Jim O’Neill, one of the frontrunners to lead the FDA, on the other hand, has been welcomed by Drug War reformers.

The best way to predict out how Neil Gorsuch would rule on marijuana issues is to look at his past cases. The New York Daily News covered how Gorsuch ruled on an early cannabis industry tax case:

A Colorado dispensary was made by the IRS to pay taxes on “business expenses” that they took off, and said that they should not have to disclose the nature of their business to authorities for fear of self-incriminating, according to Courthouse News.

Gorsuch and fellow judges denied the dispensary’s motion in 2015, though the judge was sympathetic.

His opinion focused on the Obama administration as a center of the problems, saying confusion stemmed from the Justice Department saying it would not prosecute.

Hyasynth wants to harness the therapeutic benefits of cannabis, without marijuana

By Lauren Jane Heller

The question is no longer if cannabis contains chemical compounds that can be used therapeutically, but how these compounds can be extracted or produced on an industrial scale, and how many different diseases it can treat. As this new field opens wider with the highly-anticipated changes in marijuana legislation in Canada and elsewhere in the world, there are some companies who have abandoned the plant for the source material.

BetaKit spoke with Kevin Chen, CEO and co-founder of Hyasynth Bio, a Montreal-based startup that genetically engineers yeast to create a range of cannabinoids for therapeutic purposes.

Can you explain exactly what it is that Hyasynth Bio does?

We make cannabinoids. Cannabinoids are the active compounds from cannabis, more broadly defined as compounds that affect the endocannabinoid system. [This system] is what connects you smoking weed to you getting hungry, among other things. If you think about how smoking makes you feel happy, for instance, that becomes really interesting in terms of treatment for depression. There are a lot of things that are connected with this system, but not much has been targeted and defined as a therapeutic.

But you’re not actually working with marijuana plants. Can you explain what it is that you actually do to produce those cannabinoids?

We don’t do anything with plants at all whatsoever, which is probably one of the interesting things about this technology. The DNA we work with comes from the DNA sequence; this is information that’s available online. We treat DNA like it’s information and use that information to give yeast instructions to produce cannabinoids. Then the yeast can be grown at a thousand or a million litres in scale, and produce a global supply of any cannabinoid that we know about and also ones that we don’t know about yet.

How do you see your company changing the current use of medical marijuana?

We’re looking at an industry that’s in early stages but is developing quickly, so we don’t yet know what the benefits could be or will be. We’re entering it as a supply-chain so instead of people buying acres and acres of land and spending a lot of money on grow lighting or worrying about crop yield and waiting three or four months to grow plants, we have a process that would take about ten times less space to produce a lot more, and then instead of three months to grow a plant, it takes a week to grow a culture.

Our team sees DNA as an inspiration for technology where we can take it, rewrite it and add other parts in, and optimize different aspects of the yeast genome so that it grows quickly and makes the parts that we want it to. Since yeast has an industrial fermentation process that’s been around for a century or more, it makes it very amenable to large-scale industrial production.

Is there more openness to what you’re doing because you’re taking the illegality out of it?

We’re looking at an industry that’s in early stages but is developing quickly, so we don’t yet know what the benefits could be or will be. – Kevin Chen, CEO and co-founder of Hyasynth Bio

There are still a few questions for us to address when it comes to how we are legislated and also how the plants are legislated. We are definitely not in a grey area at all. We keep up to date with all the regulators in Canada. In the US, we’re less active but it’s a very different situation — it’s a lot more grey, as it is in Europe. We’re taking the approach of being proactive and making sure that Health Canada knows what we’re doing. Their response has been very positive and it’s been great so far working with them. If you consider this as a medicine, then we want to have better medicine for everyone.

Are you focused entirely on therapeutic versus recreational?

The solution we’re developing can do a lot more than the actual plant would be capable of. We’re looking at creating custom products that work to target specific conditions and we’re more interested in heading in that direction than making any recreational use product.

Can you manipulate the DNA to have certain characteristics?

We can make anything that people would need or want to have in the end product. That might involve us engineering a specific strain of yeast that’s going to produce that end product. Or there’s different ways of manufacturing pure THC… basically we can make any formation that someone is looking for to make medicine.

Is part of your goal to make these products more easily accessible and less expensive?

It’s a pretty cost-effective process. It compares in that it’s ten times cheaper than growing plants.

It also depends on which compounds you’re looking for. There are some valuable compounds that are found in the plants in very small quantities. You’d need about a thousand tons of plants to get a relevant amount of the compound out, but it has a lot of potential for medicine. Those are compounds that we can target specifically and use a yeast process to make the compound, and that would be the only process that actually exists to make these in large quantities.

So what are your long term goals?

Using yeast to manufacture products is becoming more popular as a concept. So there are a lot of other products that are natural and aren’t necessarily controlled substances. Scorpion venom is one, or we were chatting as a joke about the specific compound in bullet ants that causes massive amounts of pain. That could be tweaked and turned into a pain treatment, potentially. These are the kinds of biological products that interest us, and we’ll always be in that area — using biotechnology to solve problems and make interesting things. For now, the cannabinoids have a lot of potential and we’re going to keep exploring that.

New report summarizes marijuana health impacts

Reporter

Since the legalization of marijuana in Washington, there has been renewed interest in the scientific evidence related to marijuana and health.

Now, thanks to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (aka The Academies), a new report details what is known and what isn’t.

Importantly, the Academies’ report rates how strong the evidence for each health impact is, according to a blog about the study from Public Health – Seattle & King County:
Report highlights
Some of the conclusions in the nearly 400-page report include:
• Long-term marijuana smoking is associated with respiratory symptoms and more frequent chronic bronchitis episodes
• There is substantial evidence suggesting an association between marijuana use and increased risk of Fix motor vehicle crashes
• Smoking marijuana during pregnancy is associated with lower birth weights
• Marijuana use is associated with the development of schizophrenia or other psychoses, especially among frequent users
• Strong evidence supports the conclusion that marijuana is associated with helpful therapeutic effects for some medical conditions, including chronic pain in adults and nausea from chemotherapy
You can learn more about these conclusions and others in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report.

Public Health – Seattle & King County’s contributions
Public Health – Seattle & King County is working to answer some of the questions health experts still have about marijuana and health. Through a partnership on a National Institute on Drug Abuse research grant, Public Health – Seattle & King County is researching whether local marijuana policies have an effect on health and other outcomes in our state.

For example, if a local city or county restricts marijuana sales to specific business zones or bans sales from near parks or youth-heavy areas, does that have any correlation with youth marijuana use or crime?

Dr. Julia Dilley, the study’s principal investigator in a partnership with the Multnomah County Health Department stated, “Public Health – Seattle & King County team members bring unique public health legal expertise to our study. This expertise, coupled with their experience in building a policy surveillance system to track policies over time, is critical to understanding the role that local governments can play in keeping their communities healthy. As a result, our study will help to specifically identify “best practices” for policies that regulate marijuana to protect youth and public safety.”

The results of this grant and the information provided in The Academies’ report may inform future public health policies related to marijuana.

Argentine Mothers Grow Marijuana to Help Their Children

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Valeria Salech says her son Emiliano has responded well to cannabis oil. He is now able to smile and interact with her.

Medical marijuana is legal in parts of the United States and several countries in South America. Argentina is not one of them.

But that has not stopped a group of Argentine mothers from growing cannabis illegally at home. They want to help their children who suffer from diseases such as epilepsy and autism.

Valeria Salech’s son, Emiliano, has epilepsy. Traditional drugs stopped the epileptic seizures, but left him unable to smile or socialize. Salech decided to give her 10-year-old son some cannabis oil in December 2015.

“All the mothers remember that first day when we gave the oil to our children,” she told VOA.

She said that within a few hours, her son went from looking at nothing and having no reaction to looking at her and smiling. Salech said she had waited for that moment for 10 years.

“And you just cannot believe it,” she said.

Protesters in Argentina push for legalization of medical marijuana.

She is now president of a group called Mamà Cultiva Argentina, or Mom Cultivates. The group shares knowledge of growing cannabis and pushes for the legalization of medical marijuana.

She is so confident about its effectiveness that she describes her group as a “public health network.”
“We did what the state cannot do for us – that is to cultivate a lot [of cannabis] to have enough for all of us all the time,” she said.

But there is limited scientific research so far on the medical benefits of cannabis oil. There is also concern about potential psychedelic effects that marijuana may have on children.

Carlos Magdalena is a neurologist for children. He said, as a natural therapy, a small amount of cannabis oil does not have bad side effects. And, Magdalena added, the side effects are less severe than those of legal prescription drugs.

Countries like Uruguay and Chile have already legalized the use of medical marijuana. As the Argentine government is studying its use, Valeria Salech hopes her country will follow next year.

Salech said the government would “find out everything that [she] already know[s]” and that she will continue to grow cannabis for her son.

I’m Alice Bryant.


Faith Lapidus reported this story for VOAnews.com. Alice Bryant adapted the report for VOA Learning English. Hai Do was the editor.

Words in This Story
cannabis - n. the hemp plant (which produces marijuana and cannabis oil)
epilepsy - n. a disorder of the nervous system that can cause people to suddenly become unconscious and to have violent, uncontrolled movements of the body
autism - n. a condition or disorder that begins in childhood and that causes problems in communicating with other people
seizure - n. an abnormal state in which you become unconscious and your body moves in an uncontrolled and violent way
network - n. a group of people or organizations that are closely connected and that work with each other
psychedelic - adj. used to describe a drug (such as LSD) that affects your thinking and causes you to see things that are not real
adverse - adj. bad or unfavorable; not good

Your marijuana questions answered

Jessica Gagne, WCSH  

(NEWS CENTER) -- By now you know the basics: it is legal for adults 21 or older to possess up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana and up to 6 mature plants. But what if you want to buy it, or grow it? How does the law pertain to work or gun ownership?

You sent us your questions online, and we went out to get answers. We spoke with Tammie Snow, an attorney in Portland who represents clients in the marijuana business.

Question from Scott Breton: Now that it's legal to possess marijuana, but it still can't be sold legally, does that mean it's legal to possess illegally purchased pot?

 

Answer: This is a complicated one, since yes, it is currently illegal to buy or sell recreational marijuana in this state. But according to attorney Tammie Snow, you can legally get it from someone if they give it to you. Snow also said that now that it is legal, the police can't do much if you have the legal amount in your possession unless they have some evidence of you buying or obtaining it illegally. Snow said you cannot get it from someone who is growing or is a medical marijuana patient even if they give it to you, they are only allowed to provide it to other patients or caregivers.

 

Question from Crissy Dyer: If you apply for a job and they drug test, are you allowed to have cannabis in your system?

 

Answer: The short answer is no. Snow says we're an employment at will state, which means an employer can fire you for any reason. And an employer can put in their own policies that say that we are going to drug test, and you can be fired for using it. Now again on this one, medical marijuana is different. Snow says there are some protections from employees who use medical marijuana under the medical marijuana law.

 

Question from Kimberly Ann: what about gun ownership and marijuana use?
Answer: Snow says under federal law, marijuana users cannot own a gun, even if they are medical marijuana users. The bureau of alcohol, tobacco and firearms asks if you are an unlawful user of marijuana when you buy a gun, and they just recently added a warning to the form that reminds people that marijuana is still unlawful under federal law even if it has been legalized in your state. Snow says there could be some gray areas at the state level, and police are already having those kind of discussions.