Pubdate: Sun, 13 Jan 2013
Source: Dallas Morning News (TX)
Copyright: 2013 The Seattle Times
Contact: http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/send-a-letter/
Website: http://www.dallasnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/117
Author: Jonathan Martin, The Seattle Times

HIGH SECURITY

Colorado's Tight Rein on Pot Will Be Emulated, Enhanced in Washington State

DENVER - Inside the industrial-scale marijuana farms that dot 
Denver's lowrise warehouse districts, it is perpetual summer - 78 
degrees, moderate humidity and fields of shoulder-high plants with 
fat, sticky buds swaying in the breeze.
Photos by Alan Berner/seattle Times In a former bus barn near Denver, 
marijuana plants are constantly on camera, part of an intense 
seed-to-sale scrutiny of Colorado's medical-marijuana industry. 
Measures include investigating entrepreneurs' finances for links to 
organized crime and monitoring the black market.

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 
that 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 soon 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.

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.

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 joined Washington in 2000 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 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," Romer said.

With a new law in place, a retired liquor regulator and one-time drug 
cop, Matt Cook, was brought in to broker a fivemonth 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 farms 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 hard-copy 
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."

Washington lawmakers tried to replicate the system in 2011, but Gov. 
Chris Gregoire vetoed the bill, citing the remote risk that state 
employees could be charged with violating federal law.

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 grow 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. Kayvan Khalatbari, co-owner of 
Denver Relief, estimates Washington would need1,000 grow sites the 
size of Denver Relief, which is 2,000 plants, 13,000 square feet, 
62,000 watts of power and 2,000 gallons of filtered water a day. 
"Wow, that's a lot of marijuana," he said. 
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom