Regional
(2010-01-27)
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DENVER, CO
(KUNC) -
When Colorado voters legalized medicinal marijuana in 2000, it meant that Damien LaGoy could stop buying pot from strangers off the street.
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"This is radio, so you can't see how rail thin I am, but a lot of people always ask me if I'm anorexic," he says, while seated at a table in his small apartment in Denver's Capitol Hill neighborhood.
At just 105 pounds, LaGoy jokes that he might blow away. He has AIDS and has been HIV-positive for 25 years. The drugs make him nauseous. He loses his appetite and doesn't eat. The only thing that helps him, he says, is pot.
"But if they make this more difficult on me, I'm either going to be going back out on the street, or just not take any AIDS meds," LaGoy says.
The bill up for debate today would, among other things, require patients like LaGoy to submit to a yearly physical exam. LaGoy figures that would cost him around 500 bucks. A big deal, he says, when you're living on Social Security and your income is 700 a month.
"Every year I have to prove to them, to the state, no they have not cured HIV, no I have not gotten better, no, I still have AIDS," LaGoy adds.
But in the past few months, the state's marijuana license registry has ballooned from a couple thousand patients, LaGoy included, to nearly 30,000. And that has lawmakers crying foul, and some members of the public pressuring them for action.
Senator Chris Romer (D-Denver) has maintained he's not out to shut down all dispensaries, but rather tighten access to ensure that ONLY patients who need pot are getting it. Romer says a few regulations should quell what he says has been a "wild west-style gold rush" of late, whereby pot dispensaries are popping up on almost every street corner and close to schools.
"And that's not acceptable and that's not what people voted for," Romer says.
Lower Downtown Denver's Apothecary of Colorado is one of the more upmarket dispensaries. It's housed in Suite 420 on the fourth floor of a loft that also houses a wind energy company and architecture firm.
"And you don't get the feeling that you're walking into something illegal. It resembles more of a combination of a doctor's office, slash spa," says co-owner Wanda James, during a tour.
At Apothecary, customers can sign up for marijuana cooking classes, and next week, there will even be a Whole Foods-style grocery store, selling things like gourmet cannabis butter and cooking oil.
But James worries the proliferation of dispensaries is giving what she considers legitimate businesses like hers a bad rap.
"They are creating an issue that I don't believe exists yet, that we're going to be like Los Angeles and just have pot stores everywhere," she says.
James, who also owns a Caribbean restaurant down the street, expects most of the dispensaries will go out of business soon anyway, because she says most owners don't have any business experience.
But some in the law enforcement community aren't as optimistic, albeit for different reasons.
"We just are kind of getting a little scared," says Bill Woodward, a former head of the state's Criminal Justice Division, and a current director at CU's Center for the Study of Prevention and Violence.
Woodward is afraid the regulations being proposed in Senate Bill 109 don't go far enough. He says it will still be too easy for at risk kids to get pot, and that can lead to violence.
"And so, as society sort of says this is all okay, we're just really concerned that that's going to have a major impact on younger kids especially. And kids in their teens as well," Woodward says.
Woodward and other supporters of tougher regulations want lawmakers to implement some sort of violence tracking mechanism in any bill that gets passed this session. They also want school prevention programs to be a part of the discussion.
It's possible that ideas like those could get amended into the bill. There are already a handful of amendments to Chris Romer's original bill that could get introduced as early as today. And then there's always the House's version.
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