Since Colorado became the first state to legalize recreational cannabis in 2012 — with the first legal sales on January 1, 2014 — lawmakers have been fine-tuning its systems, taking on residential plant counts, marijuana delivery services, hemp water rights and more in 2017’s legislative season.
Heroin deaths in Denver are up 933 percent over fourteen years, and the heroin fatality numbers for Colorado as a whole are nearly as shocking, with a 756 percent rise since 2001 and a recent rate of increase that outpaces the one in the Mile High City. But considerably more people in Denver and Colorado are dying each year from other opioids, including methadone and prescription drugs such as Oxycontin and Fentanyl, than perish because of heroin use. And while the upticks in fatalities aren’t as sharp as the ones related to heroin, they’re still substantial. In Colorado, deaths from opioids other than heroin are up 128 percent from fifteen years ago, while Denver’s fatality total has risen by 372 percent.
While smoking cannabis and writing may have been kept in the shadows for the majority of literature’s history, classes like this one are forcing stoned poets into the light.
The Denver Zoo is laughing off a Saturday Night Live skit about the facility, even though the focus of the routine was a fictional “animal pornographer” whose seemingly benign responses to a reporter played by host Scarlett Johansson were graphically depicted as describing acts of bestiality.
Two things are happening this week: one, a House committee will debate HB17-1226, which is a bipartisan attempt to normalize the clocks in Colorado and stay on Daylight Saving Time permanently. And two, having just suffered through another spring forward weekend, everyone is going to be pretty damn cranky.
Today, basketball fans across the country are gearing up for the start of the annual NCAA basketball tournament popularly known as March Madness. But according to a new survey, Mile High hoops fans are at an enormous disadvantage when it comes to experiencing and enjoying this annual sports ritual. According to the WalletHub report, Denver is the fourth worst large city for March Madness and ranks at 276 out of 291 total communities analyzed, barely ahead of Kennesaw, Georgia, Poughkeepsie, New York and Colorado Springs, which finished at 280.
Rich Wyatt, the star of American Guns, a once-popular Discovery Channel program that showcased him, his telegenic family, including wife Renee and kids Paige and Kurt, and his business, Wheat Ridge’s Gunsmoke Guns, has been found guilty of conspiring to deal firearms without a license and multiple tax charges.
California-born Andrew Garcia, a member of the U.S. Army stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, is the tenth person to die following an accident at a Colorado ski area during the 2016-2017 season. He passed away several days after a crash while snowboarding at Buttermilk, an Aspen Skiing Company resort.
Dinos, RiNos and Kitty’s, oh, my!
Since 2014, a group of fitness enthusiasts have come together to incorporate marijuana into their workouts, with a goal of getting fit for 4/20. This year, Diiullo is in charge of the group’s Facebook account and is posting daily fitness inspiration on her Instagram, @highly.fit. In honor of the first…
Cory Gardner didn’t show up to a town hall meeting planned in his honor, but Representative Jared Polis will have two in the Second Congressional District on Sunday. If that’s not enough political action, you can sit through an entire day of the Colorado Democratic Party Reorganization meeting, or party with GENeration Frontlines, a benefit for the Youth of Standing Rock. Keep reading for details of these events, and more.
Much of Denver’s fourth social consumption advisory committee meeting on March 11 was spent discussing the proposal to allow marijuana clubs, which is currently before the Colorado Legislature.
The Denver protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline started over six month ago. And although most of the campers have left the banks of the river, the protests aren’t about to stop. On March 10, Native Americans and their allies will rally in Denver.
This week, homeless advocacy group ASAP took to Facebook to announce plans for a tiny-home village to be located within the RiNo Arts District, at 38th and Walnut streets. Called “Beloved Community Village,” the tiny home village is being proposed as a 180-day pilot project, with a supporting crowd-funding campaign…
Boulder’s Becky Ann Lee is a self-proclaimed psychic. But she apparently wasn’t able to foresee what would happen to her after she bilked a heiress to the LaCoste clothing fortune out of more than $232,000.
After hours of testimony on Wednesday, March 8, a Colorado House committee approved Senate Bill 17-17, which would make people suffering from PTSD and other stress disorders eligible for medical marijuana, in an 8-1 vote. It now moves on to a full vote of the House.
Of the nine deaths related to accidents at Colorado ski resorts during the current season, four are tied to Breckenridge. This represents an unfortunate trend: Four skiers also died at Breckenridge last season, out of nine across the entire state, with all of the incidents at Breck taking place during last March or afterward. That adds up to eight Breckenridge-related deaths in approximately one year and nearly half the current official total of eighteen fatalities during the past two seasons combined. No other Colorado resort, and there are over two-dozen of them, appears to have suffered more than one casualty. Yet after multiple contacts from Westword in recent weeks about the rising number of recent tragedies, Breckenridge’s only response has been a statement that essentially blames the victims for their own deaths.
A not-safe-for-work Tumblr page featuring images such as a Pokémon named Squirtle having sex with a naked woman mistakenly wound up linked on the website for Colorado state senator Kevin Priola, a conservative Republican who prides himself on his family values platform.
The Stoner answers questions about why Colorado dispensaries scan IDs.
Tess Smith, a fifteen-year-old from Wichita, Kansas, broke her leg while skiing at Breckenridge on March 3. Afterward, she became unresponsive and died on March 6. An autopsy performed yesterday was intended to explain her inexplicable decline, but Lawrence Smith, Tess’s father, corresponding via e-mail, notes that the mystery has not yet been solved.
I picked up newly acquainted lovers from a raucous house party at four in the morning and chuckled as they tried to learn more about each other in the backseat.
After an absence of more than eight years, former Channel 2 anchor Ernie Bjorkman is returning to the station, where he’ll take over as co-host of the morning program Daybreak from Tom Green, who announced that he was stepping away from the gig earlier this year. And the path Bjorkman has taken to get back to the CW affiliate is flat-out bizarre, encompassing gigs as a veterinary technician, a member of the Peace Corps who served in Ethiopia and a male model, among other things.
