Subject: Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment

• Department of Health Reality TV Campaign a Disaster

  July 24, 2007

• Media Complicit in Hyping Story of Potential Leadville Flood

  February 25, 2008

• Nabbing Colorado's worst polluters through RapidScreen

  October 22, 2008

• Breaking: Paramedic at Denver Health forged certification, boss covered up

  November 7, 2008

• The Cigarette is dead, and the ads are illegal

  The nifty ads are hard not to notice, boldly proclaiming: The Cigarette is Dead. They've popped up alongside buildings, buses and billboards, directing people to www.QuitDoingIt.com, where smokers can find tools to help them quit. Commissioned by the State Tobacco Education & Prevention Partnership (STEPP), a division of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, and created by the Cactus ad agency, the messages have also appeared on the ground, stenciled in chalk in LoDo and on

  December 29, 2008

• Follow That Story

  January 8, 2004

• The Beatdown

  February 3, 2005

• Medical marijuana has become a growth industry in Colorado

  February 5, 2009

• A Denver Health paramedic fakes his license, and his boss keeps it under wraps

  November 13, 2008

• Funky Town

  Even though the EPA says Denver's air is getting cleaner, the odor lingers on.

  January 10, 2002

• Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown Knows Disaster

  The former FEMA head revisits his worst mistake and talks about the disaster that is the What If? Colorado campaign.

  September 13, 2007

• Risky Business

  August 30, 2007

• What the If?

  This state campaign seems headed for disaster.

  July 26, 2007

• Let the Buyer Beware

  Little meth house on the prairie.

  September 21, 2006

• Switch Hitter

  Attorney Jay Reinan made his name defending nursing homes. Now he's out to expose them.

  May 25, 2006

• Soiled

  Did a story about contaminated waste play dirty?

  October 27, 2005

• Carbon Loading

  Xcel’s solution to rising energy prices includes a lot of coal. Is that a bad thing?

  October 27, 2005

• A Grim Prognosis

  HIV infection is soaring in the Latino population. Can El Futuro slow it down?

  November 18, 2004

• Sing, You Sinners!

  The sounds of silence at CU.

  April 15, 2004

• Best Free Service for Smokers

  Colorado Quitline/Colorado QuitNet

  March 25, 2004

• Off Limits

  Blame Canada

  January 8, 2004

• Search Party

  Commander Chainsaw leads his troops into the depths of an abandoned Titan 1 Missile silo.

  November 20, 2003

• New Life

  It may be the thought that counts, but only donations will keep the Colorado AIDS Project out of trouble.

  December 20, 2001

• This Place Is a Dump!

  Rocky Flats was designed to produce plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs. But what it really produced was waste -- lots of hazardous waste.

  July 27, 2000

• Something in the Air

  Lookout Mountain is a hot spot in the battle over broadcast emissions.

  April 6, 2000

• A Bad Case of Gas

  Montclair residents want Lowry to clean up a mess before it becomes a household problem.

  October 14, 1999

• Going With the Flow

  Glendale gets a lesson in the politics of pollution.

  June 10, 1999

• Mad All Over

  This family of killer diseases hits close to home. Too close.

  November 12, 1998

• The Talks Heat Up

  The state's global-warming forums are canceled after foes show up en masse.

  November 20, 1997

• Shot in the Arm

  Colorado starts mandatory hepatitis B vaccinations for schoolkids.

  January 16, 1997

• HARD TO SWALLOW

  TEN YEARS AFTER QUESTIONS WERE FIRST RAISED ABOUT THE DRINKING WATER IN FRIENDLY HILLS, SCIENTISTS SAY THE STATE IS DROWNING OUT CRUCIAL RESEARCH.

  August 31, 1994

• POLLUTION ABSOLUTION

  A BILL WOULD TELL POLLUTERS THAT ALL IS FORGIVEN.

  April 20, 1994

• THE SLUDGE HITS THE FAN

  KIOWA COUNTY WON'T TAKE IT ANYMORE FROM NEW YORK CITY.

  February 16, 1994

• As swine flu numbers build (a little), sneezing in public now a crime

  A Flickr photo"Ah-choo!" My wife has a cold -- a regular, standard, garden-variety cold. No fever. No blinding headaches. No agonizing joint pain. A cold. The kind that causes sneezing. And this Saturday, as we watched two very long baseball games starring our nephew in conditions that ranged from chilly and drizzly to cold and rainy, she did -- sneeze, that is. She let 'er rip in the advised manner, covering her nose and mouth with the inside of her elbow. But that didn't stop people around us

  May 4, 2009

• Will Monday be judgment day for Colorado's medical marijuana industry?

  It's hard to understate the explosive rise of Colorado's medical marijuana industry. When Westword took an in-depth look at issue in the February 2009 article "Medical marijuana Has Become a Growth Industry in Colorado," just over 5,000 patients had been approved by the state to use marijuana -- which was legalized in the state for medicinal purposes when voters passed Amendment 20 in 2000. And, with roughly two-dozen marijuana dispensaries statewide, experts at the time were saying Colorado's

  July 16, 2009

• The state will need a pot of money to maintain the medical marijuana registry

  July 30, 2009

• Colorado's marijuana growing pains continue

  ​In July, at the end of a marathon twelve-plus hour hearing attended by hundreds, the state health board rejected contentious new restrictions on medical marijuana dispensaries, including one that may have limited them to five patients each. But that doesn't mean questions and controversies surrounding the state's booming medical marijuana industry have come to an end. Last week, for example, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment released new medical marijuana registry

  August 4, 2009

• Medical marijuana isn't just for big cities anymore

  A photo of Shaun Hadley and a friend, from Hadley's MySpace page.​The lack of state regulation and oversight of medical marijuana dispensaries, which spurred a raucous Colorado Department of Health hearing last month, has Durango Police Chief David Felice worried. He tells the Durango Herald News that he and his colleagues across Colorado are e-mailing each other frequently with ideas about how to handle what they anticipate to be a sudden explosion of clinics in their jurisdictions. He th

  August 19, 2009

• L.A. fires: A look at why your mouth tastes like an ashtray this morning

  As I mentioned in a blog yesterday about Ken Levine, host of the Dodger Talk radio show, who treated Denver like a joke in a recent post, I lived in Los Angeles for five years -- so I'm accustomed to days when the air available for inhaling looks practically indistinguishable from exhaust from a diesel bus. Still, the current atmospheric situation in the City of Angels is much more extreme than usual thanks to a series of SoCal fires whose smoke recently arrived in Denver for a prolonged visit.

  September 2, 2009

• Jane Norton for Senate: The next great GOP hope

  Jane Norton.​Last month, the National Republican Senatorial Committee registered a couple of domain names on behalf of former Colorado Lieutenant Governor Jane Norton -- and today, Norton's using one of them, JaneNortonForColorado.com. Up-front: A news item that declares, "Jane Norton officially filed the Jane Norton for Colorado campaign committee with the Federal Election Commission. The committee will allow Norton the opportunity to explore a bid for the United States Senate in 2010." A

  September 9, 2009

• Ganjapreneurs are cashing in on Colorado's booming medical pot business

  September 10, 2009

• Healthcare pro says "no" to swine-flu vaccine

  The virus at work.​In a Tuesday blog, the Colorado Department of Health's Margaret Huffman reassured the public that the H1N1/swine-flu vaccine was safe and said concerns about it weren't dominating calls received on the state's CoHELP info line. If so, that flies in the face of a new Associated Press poll in which more than a third of those questioned called the odds of them giving the okay for their kids to be vaccinated at school "unlikely." Their reasons? Worries about side effects, as

  October 8, 2009

• Can municipalities get away with regulating medical marijuana?

  ​With the Justice Department's announcement last week that it won't be prosecuting medical marijuana cases in states where the practice is legal, the feds loudly and officially passed the buck on the subject. That leaves it up to medical-marijuana states and their municipalities to determine just how to handle all that weed. And there's no other place in the country where the issue's more pressing than Colorado, where vague medical marijuana laws entombed in the constitution have led to a

  October 26, 2009

• How medical marijuana regulations could turn the wild West into the mild, mild West

  October 29, 2009

• Sensible Colorado tries to draw a crowd to Board of Health's medical-marijuana hearing

  ​As Patricia Calhoun points out in this morning's Wake-Up Call, the Colorado Board of Health is holding an "Emergency Rulemaking Hearing" at 10:30 a.m. this morning; it takes place in Building A at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment headquarters, 4300 Cherry Creek Drive South. The spur: A Colorado Court of Appeals judgment last week that went against Stacey Clendenin, whose 44 pot plants seized in a 2006 bust were intended to supply medical-marijuana patients, some of

  November 3, 2009

• Update: The Board of Health meeting on medical-marijuana

  Inside the Board of Health meeting.​Update, 11:44 a.m. It's all over, but not without a fight. The meeting began at 11:30 a.m., when board of health members began discussing a wording change, says Westword staffer Joel Warner, who was inside the hearing. Then they voted unanimously to do so. But when they announced that they wouldn't be taking public comment, the meeting quickly devolved into a shouting match between attorney and medical marijuana advocate Rob Corry and Glenn Schlabs, th

  November 3, 2009

• Transcript of last week's Board of Health pot hearing reaches new heights of unintentional hilarity

  "Shut up about your fucking mango!"​What happens when the state Board of Health decides to hold a last-minute meeting on a controversial topic like medical marijuana, and then tries to hold it via conference call using technology that apparently no one knows how to work? Comic genius. Hat tip to marijuana activist Robert Chase for alerting us to the teleconference's official transcript -- which reveals that the chaos and confusion among those who managed to attend the packed meeting at th

  November 9, 2009

• Brian Vicente on victory in hearing to void Board of Health's medical-marijuana ruling

  Brian Vicente helped make the Board of Health back down, at least temporarily -- and he'll get paid for doing so.​As reported in our live blog about a Denver District Court hearing this morning, Judge Larry Naves ruled in favor of medical-marijuana advocates, who argued against a controversial action by the state's Board of Health. The board's move echoed a Court of Appeals ruling that said a caregiver had to do more than simply provide marijuana to a patient -- but Naves nullified it, con

  November 10, 2009

• State health officials fighting swine flu with sarcasm

  The number of swine flu cases reported in Colorado last week fell for the third week in a row, as can be seen on this handy-dandy chart courtesy of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. But a decline in H1N1 didn't stop the department from making a handy-dandy PSA, which attempts to fight the swine flu with sarcasm, raised eyebrows and rhyming words. See above. Their effort pales in comparison to the PSAs made by the U.S. guv-ment in 1976, when the swine flu-related death

  November 11, 2009

• Dude, where's my medical-marijuana ID?

  Timothy Dalton got his special license -- where's mine?​As part of a September feature on the state's growing medical marijuana scene, I went through the process of obtaining a state medical-marijuana ID. On August 26, after scoring the needed doctor's recommendation, I sent my application and a $90 application fee to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE), which oversees the state's registry of medical-marijuana patients and issues state medical-marijuana cards.

  November 13, 2009