Pubdate: Sat, 07 Nov 2015
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Copyright: 2015 The Denver Post Corp
Contact:  http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Ricardo Baca

POT SYMPOSIUM FINISHES STRONG

A Spokesman Says the City Might Offer an Event About Management Again.

Denver's inaugural foray into cannabis event programming this week 
was deemed such a success that "it's definitely a possibility that 
we'll do it again," said Dan Rowland, spokesman for the city's Office 
of Marijuana Policy.

The city's Marijuana Management Symposium, the first government 
organized cannabis event of its kind, brought 220 paid attendees and 
an additional 110 presenters and staff members to the Colorado 
Convention Center on Thursday and Friday, according to organizers. 
The event targeted "anyone who is or will be responsible for 
implementing marijuana policies and regulations at the local and state levels."

The scene was bustling inside the convention center Friday, with 
attendees hopping between conference sessions on data collection, and 
law enforcement and public safety.

Research consultant Adam Orens said he particularly enjoyed Friday 
morning's State of Marijuana session- an update from Gov. John 
Hickenlooper's director of marijuana coordination, Andrew Freedman, 
and Lewis Koski, director of the Marijuana Enforcement Division.

"I think the city's presentation on data was very good as well," said 
Orens, a managing director with the Marijuana Policy Group and BBC 
Research & Consulting. "It was interesting to see how they're 
tracking public health data, because that's such a story the nation 
wants to know.

"How is this working? Was this right, or was this wrong? And the data 
the city of Denver and Denver Health and the Colorado Department of 
Public Health and Education are starting to collect, in a few years 
it will become a rich data set that you can compare time series trends on."

Other attendees Friday included Boulder County marijuana and liquor 
licensing clerk Christopher Mallory, Colorado Department of 
Agriculture pesticide program manager John Scott and the city of 
Amsterdam's Yvette van Groenigen, who advises Mayor Eberhard van der 
Laan and gave an impromptu, and well- attended, presentation on pot 
policy in the Netherlands.

The CDA's Scott asked van Groenigen after her presentation what the 
Dutch government knows about the pesticides present in the marijuana 
sold in Amsterdam coffee shops. She admitted the government doesn't 
know anything about the content of the cannabis, because of the 
city's unique regulatory structure, which tolerates the sale of small 
amounts of pot but criminalizes the growing side.

The two-day event brought no major surprises, said the city's 
Rowland, but he and his colleagues - including Denver's cannabis 
czar, Ashley Kilroy - were pleased with the amount of conversation 
between the attendees and panels.

"We thought this was a good idea," Rowland said, "but the level of 
engagement was phenomenal. Digging into the details of the fire code 
isn't something that on paper looks super riveting, but we had people 
in the room hanging on every word and asking plenty of questions. And 
that was a nice treat for someone like me, who planned this thing, to 
see that the level of engagement was so high."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom