Katelyn Baker
Well-Known Member
"Most people are surprised. They say, 'Wow, you really know your stuff.'"
Geneva Shaunette and her colleague, Laura Idema, are smiling. They can see I'm a tad taken aback at their self-possession, sophistication even: These young women could be straight off a Wesleyan or Colorado College campus (with a little mountain hipster thrown in for good measure). We're in the main office — corporate headquarters, if you will — of local cannabis dispensary Alpine Wellness and its sister company, Alpine Infusions, a sleek space with wood floors, Mac computers and, from a wide window, a commanding view of the Telluride Gondola. The mountain conveyance has inspired a company bestseller: the confection Ganjala (say it out loud, and you get the double entendre), a "hand-crafted, home-style" hemp-butter-infused caramel in flavors of black cherry and strawberry lemonade.
Alpine Infusion's THC-laden treats are the work of local pastry chef Elena Levin, who specializes in sweet and savory "small bites" and recently served a non-high-inducing, but decidedly high-end, dessert to guests at the Sheridan Opera House during Telluride's Art & Architecture Weekend. Alpine Infusions' website calls the Ganjala "the perfect edible for the on-the-go lifestyle." Laura Idema, the company's director of outreach and development, has been taking Ganjala on the go herself, to pot shops around the state. In Wall Street parlance, Alpine Infusions could be considered a high-performing spin-off company: 30 dispensaries (and counting) carry Ganjala.
I shouldn't have been surprised by the drive and determination I witnessed at Alpine. Just last week at the Democratic National Convention, the Denver Post reported, teams of marijuana industry leaders "were busy doing the kind of work one would expect from the beer or pharmaceutical industry: holding receptions, talking to politicians and discussing regulations. In other words, the boring stuff." Cannabis has come of age, and is a rapidly maturing industry now — "An industry with real business ethics," said Lanae Clark, a manager at Rocky Mountain Cannabis in Ridgway. Or as Alpine's Geneva Shaunette put it, "This is the new face of 'Stoner.'"
It's been almost four years since citizens voted 54.8% to 45.1% on Amendment 64 to make Colorado the first state in the U.S. where so-called "recreational" marijuana is legal to anyone over aged 21 (medical marijuana, available with a doctor's prescription, has been on sale since 2009). Montrose County residents voted "no" on recreational weed by a margin of 57% to 42.9%. Ouray County and San Miguel county voters, though, approved it by margins of 61.5% to 38.4% and 79.1% to 20.8%, respectively, and it has been available in both Ridgway and Telluride since Jan. 1, 2014 — the first legal day-of-sale.
Total (recreational and medicinal) marijuana sales fell off modestly last year compared to the heady period when recreational marijuana was first available, according to Town of Telluride Finance Director Lynne Beck, and are on track to be roughly the same this year as they were in 2015. Last year, Telluride took in a total of $233,426 in tax revenue from recreational and medical marijuana compared to $297,251 in 2014. (Most of the money came from the sale of recreational, as opposed to medicinal, cannabis.) Town Clerk Pam Kraft reports that Ridgway received a total of $152,296 from sales taxes on marijuana and reimbursement from the state last year (figures for 2014 are unavailable). Both towns applied the monies to their general funds, to be used for administrative and other costs.
Sales may be slightly down this past year compared to 2014, at least in Telluride, but customer enthusiasm for marijuana remains high. Retiree Robert Bohannon, a visitor to this region from Oregon, patronized both the Acme Healing Company and Rocky Mountain Cannabis in Ridgway this past weekend. No complaints, said Bohannon, who bought recreational bud: "I'm just grateful these shops are here."
"I think marijuana is a wonderful thing," said Ridgway resident and pot-shop patron Benjamon Gaude, who was swinging by Rocky Mountain Cannabis to pick up some salve. "I don't imbibe much of anything, but I do have chronic back pain. I've found substances with CBD" — cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive component of marijuana that has shown promise in minimizing pain and seizures — "to be extremely relieving. It helps me sleep." Rocky Mountain Cannabis doesn't grow its own marijuana, but instead specializes in "cherry picking" the best products from across the state. Though it is not a medicinal store, "We do have medical-grade products," said manager Lanae Clark. In fact, "About 60% to 80% of our customers come in with a medical issue," she added.
Clark is a healer — a massage therapist. "What gives me chills is the stories people tell us about how cannabis has helped them get relief" from everything from Parkinson's Disease to depression and anxiety, she said.
Local pot shops do a particularly brisk business in summer — "I'd say 75% of my customers right now are visitors from out of state," said Mike Davis, owner of the Telluride Bud Company. Davis, a grower who has facilities in Telluride and Fairplay, also has a store in Durango. There, more customers are locals who purchase bud, he said. In Telluride, edibles — from fruit-flavored gummies and hard candy to cookies, brownie bites and flavored drinks — are especially popular. "People find buying them more amusing and fun" than bud, he said. It is an uplifting business, after all. "We get whole families, from grandparents to young adults, who come in," said Geneva Shaunette. There, in the hush of the dispensary, long-held secrets are revealed: "The kids are like, 'Grandma, I didn't know you get high, too!'" Jacob Strength, the owner of Fiddler's Green, a dispensary in Ridgway, said Sativa strains are most popular with visitors: "It's more giddy, laugh-y, happy."
Each shop has its own specialty. In Ridgway, RMC prides itself on its extensive, carefully chosen selection of treats and bud; Fiddler's Green offers attentive customer service, a relaxing atmosphere and top-notch weed (this according to reviews on Leafly.com), and the Acme Healing Center has the plum location, on Highway 550 just before Sherman Street.
In Telluride, said Andrew Dolese, who runs Telluride Green Tours — a historic stroll around town that includes stops at all four dispensaries — Alpine Wellness is well-known for its infused edibles, while the Green Room "is a very good retailer, and has the largest selection." Local dispensaries are like bars, Dolese said. "Each has a definite, distinct personality and customers. It's amazing: at the end of each tour, I ask which place is everyone's favorite, and everyone mentions something different."
Most people who take Dolese's tours are middle-aged; 95% "are people over age 55 from New York, California and Texas who haven't smoked pot in 20 years." Turns out these are precisely the people most likely to turn up at the Telluride Medical Center from ingesting too much, said Dr. Diana Koelliker, the center's director of emergency services. "I call them 'marijuana naïve."
When weed first became available for retail sale in 2014, ingesting too much too soon was common, and the number of visitors to the Telluride's emergency room spiked. The culprit was high-dose edible products. There were two problems with them, said Dr. Koelliker: They could take up to two hours to be metabolized, and the dosages weren't appropriately marked, so it was difficult to know how much you were getting. A cookie could contain, for example, 50 milligrams' worth of THC. "And the problem became, how do you divide something round like that into five equal parts?" recalled Geneva Shaunette. Also, people often didn't give that brownie or cookie or whatever-it-was they swallowed long enough to take effect, and would end up eating even more. As a result, anxiety levels soared; hearts raced; and people ended up in Telluride's emergency room convinced they were about to perish (nobody did). Shortly after recreational weed became legal, a friend of mine ate a single piece of THC-laced chocolate he understood to have the potency of a single beer. The drug took more than two hours to hit, and when it did it was way too strong: I ended up walking him back and forth for an hour that seemed like forever ("What time is it now?" he asked every two or three minutes).
My compatriot's misadventure was not unusual. Around that same time, a Wyoming college student threw himself off a hotel balcony in Denver after eating a 65-milligram pot cookie, and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd ingested a candy bar with the equivalent of 16 (unmarked) servings of THC and wrote that she "became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me." Last year, Colorado began requiring recreational edibles to be standardized: individually wrapped or marked in easy-to-read dosages of 10 milligrams (considered a single serving), in childproof packaging. Before the law changed, local dispensaries were instrumental in helping get the word out about how to use marijuana safely, Dr. Koelliker said. "No one wants their customer ending up in the emergency room — you want them to have a good experience and come back again," she added. Local dispensaries "were terrific to work with." Geneva Shaunette summed up the problem precisely. "If you go to a bar, you order a cocktail, not a pint of whiskey all at once," she said. "We were learning along with our customers."
Those scary days seem all but over. Today, Koelliker said, admission rates to the medical center have dropped dramatically. Indeed, perhaps the most remarkable thing about marijuana on the Western Slope is how mainstream the drug's become in just a little over two years.
"I think cannabis is just another amenity that the state has made available," said Michael Martelon, CEO of the Telluride Tourism Board. "It happened, and we're going with it." Indeed, he pointed out, counter to expectations it doesn't even bring in all that much money: the tax amount the Town of Telluride took in from marijuana sales last year is roughly equal to 3% of the town's budget. "That's not very much," agreed Finance Director Beck.
Shaunette, of Alpine Wellness, begged to differ. Officials are "reluctant to give the pot industry credit," she said. "Sure, people aren't going to spend $8,000 in our store. But while they're here, they'll put gas in their car, and ask us where to stay and have dinner, and that income is real."
"People come through here hiking or biking or skiing or four-wheeling," said owner Jacob Strength of Fiddler's Green in Ridgway, "and this is one of their stops." Strength describes himself as a go-getter. "I'm happy with the way it's going," he says of business. "It's been great."
You get the feeling he and other local pot professionals aren't in it solely for the money: For these New Age entrepreneurs, the biggest buzz doesn't come from weed but from building a business. "We're taking the guesswork out of something that used to be so taboo," Shaunette observed. "If you wanted to start a restaurant, you could go to the library and get a book on how to do it. There's no book yet on what we're doing. We're trying to write the book. Our version."
Though the marijuana industry's growth has gone relatively smoothly in this region since 2014 (when recreational weed was approved), there have been a couple of hiccups. San Miguel County Sheriff Bill Masters, who calls Colorado's pioneering legalization efforts "the retail experiment," said, "We're not arresting a tremendously greater number" of people for THC intoxication compared to before. And, he added, "We do not see them detoxing in our jail — 99% of those cases are from alcohol."
In Ouray County, the situation is different. There, Sheriff Dominic Mattivi reports the number of arrests for driving under the influence of THC accounts for 5-10% of the traffic stops his officers make in Ouray County. Such arrests can take up to three hours, once you factor in how long it takes to pull someone over, test them for THC blood-levels, drive them to Montrose and book them into jail, Mattivi said.
He has a small staff, and the time each officer spends off the road attending to a marijuana-related traffic stop "takes away somebody who could be available to assist with other emergencies," Mattivi pointed out.
"The real number one problem," however, according to Sheriff Masters, relates not to traffic but trafficking. Under state law, Colorado citizens are allowed to grow six plants, three "immature" or small plants, and three more modestly-sized. Physicians may prescribe more plants to medical-marijuana patients, who need greater quantities to treat an illness.
"Crooked doctors" take advantage of this law, Masters said, by writing prescriptions for dozens of plants, "more than any one patient could possibly use," and "crooked medical marijuana growers" exploit it by growing outsized plants that they ship out of state.
"Some of these plants are like trees," Masters marveled. "They absolutely tower over people. The growers are harvesting hundreds of pounds. They package it up, put it in a Suburban overnight, take it to Rhode Island and sell it."
Masters believes there are "more than a few dozen" illegal grow operations in San Miguel County alone. It is difficult to prosecute such cases. A district attorney in Mesa County — which leans more conservative than the Telluride area — "tells me juries are often split between liberals, who think pot is perfectly okay, and conservatives, who think these sorts of cases are a waste of the state's resources when they could be going after crimes with real victims," Masters said. His team no longer confiscates hulking illegal plants, "because if we lose in court, we have to replace them," and plants that size are worth as much as $5,000 a piece. Meanwhile, the cycle of cultivate, then smuggle-out-of-state continues.
The risk, Masters said, is that eventually enough illegal Colorado weed will start turning up all over the country that the federal government will begin to wonder whether marijuana ought to be legal in Colorado at all - and could attempt to shut sales down. "It's a con," Masters said. "These growers have hijacked Amendment 64. It's making Colorado into a new cartel. They're taking advantage of our local growers, who are trying to follow the law and do everything right. This black market is undercutting legit growers' prices, and the crooked element will cause the retail experiment to fail if we don't get a handle on it. And we're trying to."
News Moderator: Katelyn Baker 420 MAGAZINE ®
Full Article: Cannabis Comes Of Age - Recreational Pot Industry Shows Few Growing Pains
Author: Leslie Vreeland
Contact: (970) 728-9788
Photo Credit: Rob Schumacher
Website: Telluride Daily Planet
Geneva Shaunette and her colleague, Laura Idema, are smiling. They can see I'm a tad taken aback at their self-possession, sophistication even: These young women could be straight off a Wesleyan or Colorado College campus (with a little mountain hipster thrown in for good measure). We're in the main office — corporate headquarters, if you will — of local cannabis dispensary Alpine Wellness and its sister company, Alpine Infusions, a sleek space with wood floors, Mac computers and, from a wide window, a commanding view of the Telluride Gondola. The mountain conveyance has inspired a company bestseller: the confection Ganjala (say it out loud, and you get the double entendre), a "hand-crafted, home-style" hemp-butter-infused caramel in flavors of black cherry and strawberry lemonade.
Alpine Infusion's THC-laden treats are the work of local pastry chef Elena Levin, who specializes in sweet and savory "small bites" and recently served a non-high-inducing, but decidedly high-end, dessert to guests at the Sheridan Opera House during Telluride's Art & Architecture Weekend. Alpine Infusions' website calls the Ganjala "the perfect edible for the on-the-go lifestyle." Laura Idema, the company's director of outreach and development, has been taking Ganjala on the go herself, to pot shops around the state. In Wall Street parlance, Alpine Infusions could be considered a high-performing spin-off company: 30 dispensaries (and counting) carry Ganjala.
I shouldn't have been surprised by the drive and determination I witnessed at Alpine. Just last week at the Democratic National Convention, the Denver Post reported, teams of marijuana industry leaders "were busy doing the kind of work one would expect from the beer or pharmaceutical industry: holding receptions, talking to politicians and discussing regulations. In other words, the boring stuff." Cannabis has come of age, and is a rapidly maturing industry now — "An industry with real business ethics," said Lanae Clark, a manager at Rocky Mountain Cannabis in Ridgway. Or as Alpine's Geneva Shaunette put it, "This is the new face of 'Stoner.'"
It's been almost four years since citizens voted 54.8% to 45.1% on Amendment 64 to make Colorado the first state in the U.S. where so-called "recreational" marijuana is legal to anyone over aged 21 (medical marijuana, available with a doctor's prescription, has been on sale since 2009). Montrose County residents voted "no" on recreational weed by a margin of 57% to 42.9%. Ouray County and San Miguel county voters, though, approved it by margins of 61.5% to 38.4% and 79.1% to 20.8%, respectively, and it has been available in both Ridgway and Telluride since Jan. 1, 2014 — the first legal day-of-sale.
Total (recreational and medicinal) marijuana sales fell off modestly last year compared to the heady period when recreational marijuana was first available, according to Town of Telluride Finance Director Lynne Beck, and are on track to be roughly the same this year as they were in 2015. Last year, Telluride took in a total of $233,426 in tax revenue from recreational and medical marijuana compared to $297,251 in 2014. (Most of the money came from the sale of recreational, as opposed to medicinal, cannabis.) Town Clerk Pam Kraft reports that Ridgway received a total of $152,296 from sales taxes on marijuana and reimbursement from the state last year (figures for 2014 are unavailable). Both towns applied the monies to their general funds, to be used for administrative and other costs.
Sales may be slightly down this past year compared to 2014, at least in Telluride, but customer enthusiasm for marijuana remains high. Retiree Robert Bohannon, a visitor to this region from Oregon, patronized both the Acme Healing Company and Rocky Mountain Cannabis in Ridgway this past weekend. No complaints, said Bohannon, who bought recreational bud: "I'm just grateful these shops are here."
"I think marijuana is a wonderful thing," said Ridgway resident and pot-shop patron Benjamon Gaude, who was swinging by Rocky Mountain Cannabis to pick up some salve. "I don't imbibe much of anything, but I do have chronic back pain. I've found substances with CBD" — cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive component of marijuana that has shown promise in minimizing pain and seizures — "to be extremely relieving. It helps me sleep." Rocky Mountain Cannabis doesn't grow its own marijuana, but instead specializes in "cherry picking" the best products from across the state. Though it is not a medicinal store, "We do have medical-grade products," said manager Lanae Clark. In fact, "About 60% to 80% of our customers come in with a medical issue," she added.
Clark is a healer — a massage therapist. "What gives me chills is the stories people tell us about how cannabis has helped them get relief" from everything from Parkinson's Disease to depression and anxiety, she said.
Local pot shops do a particularly brisk business in summer — "I'd say 75% of my customers right now are visitors from out of state," said Mike Davis, owner of the Telluride Bud Company. Davis, a grower who has facilities in Telluride and Fairplay, also has a store in Durango. There, more customers are locals who purchase bud, he said. In Telluride, edibles — from fruit-flavored gummies and hard candy to cookies, brownie bites and flavored drinks — are especially popular. "People find buying them more amusing and fun" than bud, he said. It is an uplifting business, after all. "We get whole families, from grandparents to young adults, who come in," said Geneva Shaunette. There, in the hush of the dispensary, long-held secrets are revealed: "The kids are like, 'Grandma, I didn't know you get high, too!'" Jacob Strength, the owner of Fiddler's Green, a dispensary in Ridgway, said Sativa strains are most popular with visitors: "It's more giddy, laugh-y, happy."
Each shop has its own specialty. In Ridgway, RMC prides itself on its extensive, carefully chosen selection of treats and bud; Fiddler's Green offers attentive customer service, a relaxing atmosphere and top-notch weed (this according to reviews on Leafly.com), and the Acme Healing Center has the plum location, on Highway 550 just before Sherman Street.
In Telluride, said Andrew Dolese, who runs Telluride Green Tours — a historic stroll around town that includes stops at all four dispensaries — Alpine Wellness is well-known for its infused edibles, while the Green Room "is a very good retailer, and has the largest selection." Local dispensaries are like bars, Dolese said. "Each has a definite, distinct personality and customers. It's amazing: at the end of each tour, I ask which place is everyone's favorite, and everyone mentions something different."
Most people who take Dolese's tours are middle-aged; 95% "are people over age 55 from New York, California and Texas who haven't smoked pot in 20 years." Turns out these are precisely the people most likely to turn up at the Telluride Medical Center from ingesting too much, said Dr. Diana Koelliker, the center's director of emergency services. "I call them 'marijuana naïve."
When weed first became available for retail sale in 2014, ingesting too much too soon was common, and the number of visitors to the Telluride's emergency room spiked. The culprit was high-dose edible products. There were two problems with them, said Dr. Koelliker: They could take up to two hours to be metabolized, and the dosages weren't appropriately marked, so it was difficult to know how much you were getting. A cookie could contain, for example, 50 milligrams' worth of THC. "And the problem became, how do you divide something round like that into five equal parts?" recalled Geneva Shaunette. Also, people often didn't give that brownie or cookie or whatever-it-was they swallowed long enough to take effect, and would end up eating even more. As a result, anxiety levels soared; hearts raced; and people ended up in Telluride's emergency room convinced they were about to perish (nobody did). Shortly after recreational weed became legal, a friend of mine ate a single piece of THC-laced chocolate he understood to have the potency of a single beer. The drug took more than two hours to hit, and when it did it was way too strong: I ended up walking him back and forth for an hour that seemed like forever ("What time is it now?" he asked every two or three minutes).
My compatriot's misadventure was not unusual. Around that same time, a Wyoming college student threw himself off a hotel balcony in Denver after eating a 65-milligram pot cookie, and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd ingested a candy bar with the equivalent of 16 (unmarked) servings of THC and wrote that she "became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me." Last year, Colorado began requiring recreational edibles to be standardized: individually wrapped or marked in easy-to-read dosages of 10 milligrams (considered a single serving), in childproof packaging. Before the law changed, local dispensaries were instrumental in helping get the word out about how to use marijuana safely, Dr. Koelliker said. "No one wants their customer ending up in the emergency room — you want them to have a good experience and come back again," she added. Local dispensaries "were terrific to work with." Geneva Shaunette summed up the problem precisely. "If you go to a bar, you order a cocktail, not a pint of whiskey all at once," she said. "We were learning along with our customers."
Those scary days seem all but over. Today, Koelliker said, admission rates to the medical center have dropped dramatically. Indeed, perhaps the most remarkable thing about marijuana on the Western Slope is how mainstream the drug's become in just a little over two years.
"I think cannabis is just another amenity that the state has made available," said Michael Martelon, CEO of the Telluride Tourism Board. "It happened, and we're going with it." Indeed, he pointed out, counter to expectations it doesn't even bring in all that much money: the tax amount the Town of Telluride took in from marijuana sales last year is roughly equal to 3% of the town's budget. "That's not very much," agreed Finance Director Beck.
Shaunette, of Alpine Wellness, begged to differ. Officials are "reluctant to give the pot industry credit," she said. "Sure, people aren't going to spend $8,000 in our store. But while they're here, they'll put gas in their car, and ask us where to stay and have dinner, and that income is real."
"People come through here hiking or biking or skiing or four-wheeling," said owner Jacob Strength of Fiddler's Green in Ridgway, "and this is one of their stops." Strength describes himself as a go-getter. "I'm happy with the way it's going," he says of business. "It's been great."
You get the feeling he and other local pot professionals aren't in it solely for the money: For these New Age entrepreneurs, the biggest buzz doesn't come from weed but from building a business. "We're taking the guesswork out of something that used to be so taboo," Shaunette observed. "If you wanted to start a restaurant, you could go to the library and get a book on how to do it. There's no book yet on what we're doing. We're trying to write the book. Our version."
Though the marijuana industry's growth has gone relatively smoothly in this region since 2014 (when recreational weed was approved), there have been a couple of hiccups. San Miguel County Sheriff Bill Masters, who calls Colorado's pioneering legalization efforts "the retail experiment," said, "We're not arresting a tremendously greater number" of people for THC intoxication compared to before. And, he added, "We do not see them detoxing in our jail — 99% of those cases are from alcohol."
In Ouray County, the situation is different. There, Sheriff Dominic Mattivi reports the number of arrests for driving under the influence of THC accounts for 5-10% of the traffic stops his officers make in Ouray County. Such arrests can take up to three hours, once you factor in how long it takes to pull someone over, test them for THC blood-levels, drive them to Montrose and book them into jail, Mattivi said.
He has a small staff, and the time each officer spends off the road attending to a marijuana-related traffic stop "takes away somebody who could be available to assist with other emergencies," Mattivi pointed out.
"The real number one problem," however, according to Sheriff Masters, relates not to traffic but trafficking. Under state law, Colorado citizens are allowed to grow six plants, three "immature" or small plants, and three more modestly-sized. Physicians may prescribe more plants to medical-marijuana patients, who need greater quantities to treat an illness.
"Crooked doctors" take advantage of this law, Masters said, by writing prescriptions for dozens of plants, "more than any one patient could possibly use," and "crooked medical marijuana growers" exploit it by growing outsized plants that they ship out of state.
"Some of these plants are like trees," Masters marveled. "They absolutely tower over people. The growers are harvesting hundreds of pounds. They package it up, put it in a Suburban overnight, take it to Rhode Island and sell it."
Masters believes there are "more than a few dozen" illegal grow operations in San Miguel County alone. It is difficult to prosecute such cases. A district attorney in Mesa County — which leans more conservative than the Telluride area — "tells me juries are often split between liberals, who think pot is perfectly okay, and conservatives, who think these sorts of cases are a waste of the state's resources when they could be going after crimes with real victims," Masters said. His team no longer confiscates hulking illegal plants, "because if we lose in court, we have to replace them," and plants that size are worth as much as $5,000 a piece. Meanwhile, the cycle of cultivate, then smuggle-out-of-state continues.
The risk, Masters said, is that eventually enough illegal Colorado weed will start turning up all over the country that the federal government will begin to wonder whether marijuana ought to be legal in Colorado at all - and could attempt to shut sales down. "It's a con," Masters said. "These growers have hijacked Amendment 64. It's making Colorado into a new cartel. They're taking advantage of our local growers, who are trying to follow the law and do everything right. This black market is undercutting legit growers' prices, and the crooked element will cause the retail experiment to fail if we don't get a handle on it. And we're trying to."
News Moderator: Katelyn Baker 420 MAGAZINE ®
Full Article: Cannabis Comes Of Age - Recreational Pot Industry Shows Few Growing Pains
Author: Leslie Vreeland
Contact: (970) 728-9788
Photo Credit: Rob Schumacher
Website: Telluride Daily Planet
