John Hickenlooper Talks Cannabis, Congress and Maureen Dowd's Infamous Edibles Trip

As governor of Colorado from 2011 to 2019, John Hickenlooper saw cannabis reform quickly snowball into full-blown legalization. Almost three years into his first term as a United States senator, he is getting accustomed to a much slower pace.

Although initially opposed to legalization, Hickenlooper came around while governor — and went on to introduce and sponsor several pieces of cannabis legalization in Congress, including his bill that would create a federal commission to study and issue recommendations about national legalization as well as a longstanding House of Representatives measure that would allow banks and financial institutions to serve the cannabis industry.

According to Hickenlooper, his bill calling for a federal research commission, dubbed the Prepare Act, took inspiration from a similar task force created over ten years ago in Colorado.

"The best ideas are always from Colorado," he says.

Even great ideas can run into bumps along the way, though, and Colorado's first step into legalization hit a huge one in 2014 when New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote of her experiences with a THC candy bar. This was before all recreational edibles were limited to ten ten-milligram servings, and Dowd, new to eating edibles, consumed the whole thing. Hickenlooper, still governor at the time, was supposed to see a Jimmy Buffett show with Dowd that night, but she had to postpone, and the rest is history.

We recently caught up with Hickenlooper to ask about his cannabis work in Congress and what he thought of the recent reschedule announcement. He was nice enough to walk down memory lane for a few minutes, too.

Westword: As someone who's been pushing and supporting cannabis reform in Congress, how did you take the news of the Department of Health and Human Services recommending that cannabis be moved from a Schedule I federally banned substance to Schedule III?

Senator John Hickenlooper: Yeah, it was unbelievable. We heard some rumblings, sort of like hearing thunder in the distance. When it rains, you're not completely surprised. But for the last five or ten years, most of the time you've heard thunder, it doesn't rain. So in the end, it really was kind of a surprise to see them do what the rumors said they'd do.

The Drug Enforcement Administration still has to approve the rescheduling recommendation. Given the DEA's past with cannabis, how confident are you that that will happen?

I think it's going to happen. The HHS sent the letter. Now, the DEA has a certain amount of freedom, but they're all in what I would call one ecosystem. I think once HHS makes the decision to send that down to DEA, even though DEA isn't required to follow the recommendation, there is a pretty high likelihood that it will.

If the DEA does agree to reschedule, how would that impact your Prepare Act, which calls for a federal commission to look into the impact of federal legalization?

I hope it makes the Prepare Act more attractive. We're getting to that point where we're beginning to contemplate or see evidence that more and more states are going to legalize this. That would suggest we're moving toward federal legalization, and if that's the case, we should be ready. We should have the structure in place so that we don't have to rush around at the last minute to decide how to create one.

After the 2020 elections, there seemed to be more optimism about cannabis reform. When you took office in 2021, did you think we'd essentially be at the same place in 2023?

It's obviously taken longer than I would've liked. My preference has always been to deschedule. Rescheduling to Schedule III is good and an improvement, but it's not perfect. It's still going to make all kinds of things more challenging — but it's certainly a dramatic improvement. When you look at different bills around Congress, you're beginning to see more western Republican senators vote with Democrats. The bipartisan SAFE Banking Act is now [sponsored by] Jeff Merkley from Oregon, but also Steve Daines from Montana, who is a pretty conservative senator.

How partisan is cannabis reform nowadays?

I think everybody who's been around the legalization process for cannabis has agreed that it's going to go slow until suddenly there's a tipping point. And when that happens, the change will happen pretty quickly. Not just a state here or there, but all states.

Outside of Safe Banking, which passed a Senate Banking Committee earlier this week for the first time, do you see any other cannabis reform opportunities in Congress?

We'll see. Maybe some of the issues around research, testing and impairment. We had a little amendment in the bipartisan infrastructure bill that would require the Department of Transportation to create a report and make recommendations on how to make impairment research easier. Things like making access to better samples of cannabis easier for research [are important]. We know when eighteen- and twenty-year-olds smoke heavy-duty marijuana, it affects their short-term memory. How long does that last? There's very little testing on this stuff.

If you wouldn't mind walking down memory lane with us: We heard that when Jimmy Buffett — RIP — played a show in Colorado almost ten years ago, you were supposed to go with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, but that was the night she had her infamous experience in Denver with eating weed edibles.

Yeah. We had to put it off until the next night, and then she took me to see Jimmy Buffett.

So you had to postpone seeing the show because of an edibles freakout?

Yeah, I talked to her the night after that. [Senator Bennet] knew her from before, and I'd had dinner with them once during the [Democratic National] Convention. Then she came out to do that story the second time.

Everyone has or knows someone who has an edibles freakout story, no matter what walk of life you're in.

Ha ha, yeah. Well, luckily, hers wasn't too bad. It could have been a lot worse, as they say.

That was a pretty big domino moment, though, right after recreational cannabis sales started. New edibles serving size regulations came around shortly after.

Yes, it was. That article got a lot of attention, that's for sure. But she was also a really good friend of Jimmy Buffett, so the night we had dinner and saw the show, she took me to the back of the Pepsi Center [now Ball Arena]. They were good pals, and she wrote a wonderful opinion piece after he died for the Sunday Times. It's worth reading. She really paints a beautiful picture of him. I only met him that one time, but he was an amazing guy. I had friends who knew him pretty well, and he was just really grounded and knew how lucky he was.