Reviewing a year of recreational marijuana sales in Colorado

The Denver Post has a notable series of articles taking stock of the experiences and perceptions of Colorado through the year-long experience with legalization recreational sales in the state.   This main article, headlined “Colorado’s cannabis experiment puts it into a global spotlight,” includes these excerpts:

Only one year in, Colorado’s unprecedented jump into marijuana legalization has become the stuff of legend.  For opponents and supporters, the state comes up repeatedly in the evolving discussion about marijuana.  It is perhaps the most underappreciated consequence of legalization.  By becoming the first place in the world to actually legalize commercial sales of marijuana to anyone over 21, Colorado made the worldwide debate over pot more vibrant than it has ever been.

Those in favor of legalization now think of Colorado — and, to a lesser extent, Washington state, which debuted a smaller marijuana market later in the year — as a kind of political homeland.  The states’ campaigns and resulting industries were the inspiration for pro-pot successes in two more states this fall and are the blueprints for coming 2016 campaigns in as many as a half-dozen states.  They helped foment never-before-seen congressional rebellion against federal enforcement of marijuana laws….

Those opposed to legalization, though, see Colorado as a cautionary tale — hard evidence of the kinds of dangers that they previously had been able to warn of only in the abstract.  In speeches in states and countries considering legalization, marijuana opponents now talk about accidental pot ingestions, lower-than-predicted tax revenue, gaudy industry advertising and even deaths. They cite examples of each from Colorado’s first year of legalized sales….

The on-the-ground reality, of course, has been less stark than either side’s version. Marijuana legalization has changed Colorado.  It’s just tough to say exactly how.

Marijuana is more available in Colorado than ever before, but it’s unclear whether marijuana consumption has risen as a result.  Teens are less likely to think that marijuana is harmful, and marijuana arrests at Denver schools are up, but that hasn’t yet translated into measurably increased use.  More people may be driving stoned, but traffic fatalities are down….

Tourism to the state hit record levels this year. But how much of that has to do with marijuana?

 After a full year, legal marijuana sales are an experiment still very much in progress. “People are trying to jump to conclusions much faster than the data allows,” said Andrew Freedman, the man in charge of coordinating Colorado’s policy efforts on marijuana legalization.

The jumps are even bigger because of Colorado’s data-collection woes.  The state lacks systems for quick, accurate measurements of youth use, marijuana-related incidents at schools, stoned driving and many other questions.  State officials this year commissioned a 74-page report titled “Marijuana Data Discovery and Gap Analysis” just to address the problem.  One person in the Department of Public Safety is now in charge of coordinating data-collection efforts for 2015….

Even when there are numbers to measure legalization’s impacts, they often tell unexpected tales. For instance, state tax revenues from recreational marijuana once were predicted to top $100 million in the current fiscal year. They’re on pace for a little more than half that. And, aside from the dollars constitutionally mandated to go to school construction, state officials haven’t seen the revenue as a budgetary windfall. They’ve instead proposed the money all go toward marijuana-related issues.

In 2014, police said marijuana legalization would cost more for them to enforce than marijuana prohibition. Employers tightened their drug-testing policies, even though it was legal for their employees to use marijuana. More people became registered medical marijuana patients, despite the presence of a less-restrictive recreational market. “The big assumption here was that human behavior is a light switch,” said Skyler McKinley, Freedman’s deputy, “that you legalize marijuana and everything changes overnight.”

That resiliency of old ways proved a boon to state regulators trying to implement legalization. Because Colorado already had a robust medical marijuana industry — and because the recreational marijuana industry initially was restricted to people who already owned a dispensary — the transition into legal sales was more of an evolution than a revolution….

Toni Savage, the owner of 3D Cannabis Center, said the most she ever grossed in a single year operating a medical marijuana dispensary was $400,000. This year, she’s on track to top $3.5 million in sales — with more than half of those coming from out-of-state tourists.

But bigger sales means bigger tax bills. Not only is she paying nearly $100,000 a month in state and local taxes, she also expects to have a $500,000 federal tax bill because she can’t deduct business expenses in the same way that stores that aren’t illegal under federal law can. “I made a ton of money,” she said, “but I owe more than I have.”

The situation could get even tougher in 2015 because the state has started to allow newcomers into the recreational marijuana business. Savage said stores fear a glut of marijuana, which could drive down prices that have budged only slightly since the beginning of 2014. “If you’re in the business, it’s going to get really ugly,” she said.

It’s the change in the amount of attention Colorado has received from outside the state that defines the first year of legal marijuana sales. This was the year a New York Times columnist got stoned in a Denver hotel room, hallucinated that she had died, then wrote about the whole experience. Snoop Dogg recorded a theme song for a Colorado gubernatorial candidate, and Bill O’Reilly, upset over legalization, mused about running for the same office.