January Issue 2013
8
Natures Herbs & Wellness - Altitude Wellness
THE Hash Man
T h i n g s to b e
Legally aware of
Can I grow my own? Yes, you can grow up to six plants in your home, but the pot patch must be enclosed and locked. Can the underage get busted for pot? Yes, it’s illegal to possess and use marijuana if you’re under 21, but the city of Denver this month decriminalized pot for people between ages 18 and 21. The city would keep the fines -- but remove the jail time -- for being caught with an ounce or less. The potential jail time had been up to a year. Youths under age 18 could be sent to a juvenile assessment center, instead of jail. The measure ensures kids “don’t have to live into adulthood with mistakes they might have made when they were 19,” Councilman Albus Brooks said in a Denver Post article. What about DUI? A motorist in Colorado can be ticketed for impaired driving if his or her blood shows more than 5 nanograms of active THC, the active constituent of marijuana, NORML says on its
website. Some users will fall below that level three hours after consuming pot, but “some people will still be well above 5 ng,” NORML says. “Do recognize that the effects of alcohol and marijuana together may be more than the sum of their parts.” Some analysts describe impairment as a guessing game, depending on the person. “Is Colorado’s marijuana DUI rule flawless? Far from it. But as the state’s policymakers have come to realize, the world’s first legal pot rules aren’t going to be perfect. They just have to be good enough. Good enough to keep the feds away, good enough to keep marijuana stakeholders happy, good enough to keep Coloradans from worrying they’ve made a horrible mistake,” University of Denver law professor Sam Kamin and writer Joel Warner wrote in Slate this month. And what about the feds? It’s always been a murky relationship between the feds and those states with laws authorizing medical -- and now recreational -- marijuana. Federal law says the drug’s possession, manufacture, and sale is illegal,
punishable by up to life in prison, and its mass cultivation is a sensitive subject among growers, experts say. But in August, the U.S. Justice Department said it won’t challenge Colorado or other states with laws legalizing recreational marijuana. Instead, federal officials will focus on serious trafficking and keeping the drug away from children.
Can I giggle? Let the jokes and puns begin -- stoned or not. Even Colorado NORML is being cheeky about it, posting online a list of what’s allowable under the new recreational pot law.It’s called “Doobie-DOs.” CNN News and CNN’s Miguel Marquez, Ana Cabrera and Sara Weisfeldt contributed to this report.