Marijuana advocates differ on how best to cultivate policy - The Denver Post
Marijuana advocates differ on how best to cultivate policy - The Denver Post Three months ago, Laura Kriho stood before a roomful of fellow medical-marijuana advocates and urged them to get involved with the political process to create regulations for the state's legal-marijuana industry. "I know our standards are way higher than the government's standards," she said then. Now, as the medical-marijuana community prepares for a rally today that it hopes will grab the attention of state lawmakers, Kriho is among a number of cannabis advocates who have soured on what the community can accomplish by working with politicians. Frustrated by what she says are overly harsh regulatory proposals from state and local governments and believing the marijuana community's input has largely been ignored, Kriho said she is increasingly inclined to bypass policymakers altogether and instead use ballot initiatives and the courts to bring legal clarity to the state's medical-marijuana policy. "There's only a few ways you can control your government," Kriho, of the Cannabis Therapy Institute, said Wednesday. "One of them is through the ballot box. One of them is through the jury box." To be sure, not everyone in the medical-marijuana community has given up on politicians. Brian Vicente, executive director of the group Sensible Colorado, said his group is still talking with lawmakers about fighting back a proposal that would effectively outlaw retail marijuana dispensaries and instead introducing a bill the cannabis community could support. "I think there is political will to push sensible regulation," he said. Matt Brown — executive director of Coloradans for Medical Marijuana Regulation, which has hired a team of lobbyists to represent it at the Capitol this session — said he has found lawmakers surprisingly willing to listen to proposals from the cannabis community.
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