Steamboat Springs - Armed with a stack of photos, research, statistics and zoning maps, the operators of a local marijuana business on Tuesday will try to convince at least one more Steamboat Springs City Council member to let them move into a more visible spot between a restaurant and a liquor store.

The hearing on Natural Choice's proposal to move to Curve Plaza in west Steamboat is a do-over for council.

Whatever the council decides is poised to be controversial.

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The fines levied against marijuana businesses through the county's enforcement division are helping homeless people who have become stranded in Pueblo.

In an effort to help homeless get back to their places of origin, the Pueblo County commissioners voted Wednesday to give the Pueblo Area Law Enforcement Chaplains Corp. a $25,000 grant that would be used to help benefit homeless individuals without support in Pueblo County.

Commissioner Sal Pace said the money for the grant comes from funding that the county has set aside from marijuana fine money to address homelessness and youth drug prevention.

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Home groan

Clint and Rebecca Lockwood rushed to City Hall when they heard Colorado Springs City Council was about to limit home grows to 12 plants, but Council had already adopted the ordinance. So they went home worried sick about their son, Calvin, who's severely autistic and relies on homemade CBD oil to keep his aggression under control.

Without it, their home is hell. The Lockwoods say that, unmedicated, Calvin won't sleep, sweats, shakes, eats furniture, attacks his younger brother and bashes his head into the wall until he bleeds.

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Colorado pot smokers are helping send 25 students to college, the first scholarships in the U.S. funded with taxes on legal marijuana.

The awards offered by Pueblo County, in southern Colorado, are the latest windfall from legal Colorado marijuana sales that are also helping build schools and aid the homeless - and in one county, providing 8% raises to municipal workers.

Pueblo County is granting $1,000 each to the students; recipients will be announced later this month.

"It's incredible," said Beverly Duran, the executive director of the Pueblo Hispanic Education Foundation, which is overseeing the scholarships. "Every year we get a nice pool of students ... but we can always only award to a small percentage. This for us expands that to extraordinary lengths."

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John Hickenlooper, Once a Leading Critic, Now Says the Industry Looks 'Like It Might Work.' Here's Why.

DENVER - When Colorado voted to legalize recreational marijuana four years ago, one of the move's chief critics was Gov. John Hickenlooper.

The moderate Democrat said that if he could "wave a magic wand" to reverse the decision, he would. Then he called voters "reckless" for approving it in the first place, a remark he later downgraded to "risky."

"Colorado is known for many great things," Hickenlooper said. "Marijuana should not be one of them."

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State's High- Grade Marijuana Is in Big Demand on Black Market

DENVER - If you can dream up a way to smuggle marijuana out of Colorado, chances are someone else has already tried it: Cars and trucks. Potato chip bags and jars of peanut butter. The U. S. mail.

Not even the sky is the limit: A pilot last year confessed he used his skydiving planes to deliver nearly a ton of pot to buyers in Texas and Minnesota, court records show.

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Colorado's top prosecutors and police officials want a two-year moratorium on new marijuana laws to give officers time to catch up.

In a letter dated last week and sent to lawmakers, leaders of the state's three main groups of law enforcement officials said local police "cannot keep up with the quantity and speed of constantly changing marijuana law."

There have been 81 marijuana-related bills introduced in the Colorado legislature in just the past four years, according to the letter.

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A school district board in El Paso County approved Thursday a policy to allow therapeutic marijuana products at its schools.

The District 49 Board of Education, in Peyton, unanimously, in a five-to-zero vote, approved the "Compassionate Administration of Therapeutic Cannabinoid Products on District Property" policy, the district announced in a media release.

The policy, known as "Jaxs' policy," was approved as part of a regularly scheduled monthly meeting and is the first of its kind in the state, according to the district.

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The three sons of a woman shot to death in 2014 have filed what appears to be the country's first wrongful-death lawsuit against the recreational marijuana industry.

The lawsuit claims that the company that made the marijuana edible and the store that sold the candy to Richard Kirk recklessly and purposefully failed to warn him about the bite-sized candy's potency and possible side effects - including hallucinations and other psychotic behaviors.

Hours after Kirk purchased the marijuana candy April 14, 2014, Kristine Kirk, 44, called 911 terrified of her husband, who was ranting about the end of the world and jumping in and out of windows. All three of the couple's young sons heard the gunshot that killed their mother. Their youngest son, who was 7 at the time, watched his mother die, according to an amended complaint filed Monday night.

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In the first three months of 2016, Colorado pot shops sold more than $270 million of cannabis and related products, according to new figures from the state Department of Revenue.

The state's latest data show that its marijuana shops sold nearly $90 million of cannabis in March.

The licensed stores sold more than $55 million of recreational marijuana and more than $33 million of medical cannabis in March, the latest month for which the department has released tax data for the industry. Totals for retail and medical marijuana dipped slightly in March after a bustling February, which was the state's fifth-most-lucrative month for sales since they began in January 2014, according to the Cannabist's calculations and state data.

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In the week leading up to the end of the Second Regular Session of the State Legislature, two major pieces of marijuana legislation met their fates.

In the first week of May, a proposal to certify organic marijuana at the state level was rejected in a Senate committee by a vote of 4-3, while Jack's Law, a bill requiring Colorado schools to accommodate the use of non-smokeable medical marijuana by students, passed both the House and Senate.

These bills are small, but significant pieces of legislation. They were necessitated by conflicts between state and federal laws concerning the rights of cannabis patients and consumers.

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Dear Stoner: I have a metal pipe that I can unscrew and clean, and the other day I had a great idea: What if I put a nug in there to get nice and sticky after smoking a few bowls? Will it be more potent?

JustBlaze

Dear Blaze: Now I know why natives get so annoyed with transplants, because no one who grew up here would ever think of doing such a stupid thing. No offense. Yes, sticking a nug in a pipe while you smoke can be a jailhouse way of coaxing it to get you a little higher, but it comes at the cost of your tastebuds, lungs and brain cells. That black stuff that covers the inside of your pipe is basically tar with some THC in it. Smoking it gets you high, but it's not worth the damage it does to your lungs or brain cells while you're coughing for five minutes - and it tastes like Bigfoot's dick.

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"The moratorium will not be extended" reads a line in the ordinance that the Colorado Springs City Council passed in late November, establishing a six-month moratorium on marijuana business licensing. Now, with that moratorium due to expire on May 25, Council is considering putting a new one in place - this time for a full year.

"I hear what you're saying, 'It's not an extension; it's a whole new ordinance.' I got you," Speakeasy Vape Lounge owner and City Council hopeful Jaymen Johnson said to Council at its April 26 meeting. "It seems you guys have figured out the loophole thing just as well as the clubs did, so congratulations. Glad we could show you how it's done."

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We are presenting this information in regard to the recent article that stated "Pueblo relies on our industry."

Toward the end of the article, Dr. Richard Rivera stated, "Nothing shows that cannabis is a gateway drug." Most importantly, Dr. Rivera stated the following, "I believe from a health point of view, there are no health issues connected to cannabis use whatsoever."

As health professionals concerned about the people of Pueblo, it is our responsibility to fully educate on risks associated with all drugs and in this case, marijuana. Is marijuana a gateway drug? A national study conducted by Robert Secades-Villa and his colleagues and published in the International Journal of Drug Policy revealed 44.7 percent of individuals with lifetime cannabis use progressed to other illicit drug use.

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I find it interesting that Posada and some other nonprofits continue to try and connect homelessness with the cannabis industry.

It's not far-fetched to see that Posada and these other nonprofits are the enablers of homelessness. You can go to Posada on any given day and Ann Stateleman will give you a handout.

If that doesn't work go see Rose Mertz at the Salvation Army for a handout, but if your still unsuccessful, then try Care and Share, the Soup Kitchen, Wayside Mission, commodities,social services and the list goes on.

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Ten people control nearly 20 percent of the 1,046 marijuana business licenses in Denver, and those owners have built their empires largely through acquisitions of smaller operations. With new industry caps on grow-facility and store locations in Denver, consolidation by the big players is likely to intensify. Some independent owners say tax and regulatory burdens make it difficult for smaller pot businesses to survive.

Vail's largest commercial developer. An owner of a car-detail shop. A former nonprofit event planner. A businessman who made a fortune in child car seats. A one-time Subway franchisee bankrupted by real estate losses.

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I am, unfortunately, glad to see all the coverage of the heroin epidemic in The Pueblo Chieftain and on Channels 5 and 13. We do need to keep this front and center. I do have a few minor corrections to the story in Sunday's (May 1's) paper.

I am a retired ER doctor, not an addiction specialist. And, I think Access Point Pueblo is serving well under half of the people who inject drugs in Pueblo. I base this on conversations I have every week with people who are accessing the exchange and who tell me they know a lot of people who still cannot bring themselves to take a chance on us and who tell us they are obtaining syringes for a lot of others who are afraid to come. And those are just the needle users.

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I read with some dismay that the Legislature and a list of honorable patrons are going to spend $900,000 of taxpayer dollars for cannabis research at Colorado State University-Pueblo. And The Pueblo Chieftain is so pleased.

How about that money going to the Pueblo County Sheriff's Office to offset the costs of all the pot busts that are going on in Pueblo West and the county. Why doesn't the Chieftain go to CSU-Pueblo on a Saturday night and do its own study (free)?

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Dear Stoner: Why doesn't Colorado have Amsterdam-style cafes? I remember reading about pot clubs trying to come to Denver.

Cole

Dear Cole: Colorado doesn't have cafes like the cannabis coffee shops in Amsterdam because of this state's stance on public consumption. Although it's legal to smoke pot in private areas in Colorado, public spots and businesses are still off limits. And while technically it's also illegal to consume marijuana in public in Amsterdam, Dutch law enforcement looks the other way when it comes to designated coffee shops. Sadly, our local cops aren't as cool: There are a few pot clubs in the Denver metro area that operate as private establishments and only allow members in to consume, but they still face regular harassment by law enforcement and other officials. Rigs 4 Us, a Denver smoke shop located in a private residence, was shut down on 4/20 when it tried to give out free dabs, and multiple pot clubs in Denver were shut down in 2015.

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Sued in Pueblo

A Pueblo resident is suing to roll back a ballot initiative that's trying to roll back retail pot in the county. That initiative, pushed by a group called Citizens for a Healthy Pueblo, is unconstitutional according to the complaint filed this week in district court asking for injunctive relief.

Local attorney Dan Oldenburg and tree-services company owner Kenny Gierhart filed for a petition on April 8. Pueblo County Clerk and Recorder Gilbert "Bo" Ortiz certified it a few days later, saying they'd need signatures from 5 percent of registered county voters to make it onto the ballot. The question asks voters if they want to ban retail marijuana facilities, including cultivation, infused-product manufacturing, testing and stores.

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