Health committee  It's a pleasure to be here, and I have to say it's an incredible honour to be able to present to you, so thank you for the time. I was indeed the director of marijuana coordination for the state of Colorado, which was a title that raised quite a few eyebrows when it first came

Health committee  Very briefly, motivation is hard when it's a vote of the people. I mean, there are 50 reasons why people chose to legalize. I would say that Governor Hickenlooper's number one priority was to make sure that we did not see an increase in youth use at the rollout and that over the

Health committee  Thank you. I would say that education is one of eight or nine levers that go a long way towards seeing a decline in use. An important lesson that we learned from tobacco was that, for a very long time, almost a decade, for kids the perception of risk was very high for tobacco be

Health committee  Thank you, because it's a very important distinction. It is important to note that in Colorado it's pretty easy to get to 99 plants. It was, by the way; we cleaned up the legislation to 12 plants. It's hard for me to say, but I would say there's a lot less evidence that something

Health committee  In Colorado, seed-to-sale tracking is a radio frequency identifier tag on every marijuana plant in the regulated market once it's over six inches tall, the primary purpose being that it gives regulators a way to ensure you're not shipping it out of state. That's why it exists. It

Health committee  It's hard to say because we don't always see the product in the black market, but we have instituted pretty rigorous pesticide controls and homogeneity controls on edibles, and contaminant testing, which have, over time, really increased the quality and consistency of what's insi

Health committee  I'm not sure I have much to add over Dr. Sabet's analysis. Honestly, I don't have expertise on what criminalization with regard to 12- to 17-year-olds would do to consumption patterns. I just don't have that much to add, expertise-wise.

Health committee  In Colorado, we don't bar vertical integration on either the medical or recreational side. In fact, on the medical side we require vertical integration. Most often, the thing I hear about why you want to bar vertical integration is to prevent a monopoly situation and the growth o

Health committee  It certainly makes sense. What they're going to argue is that the more players in the market, the more people who are likely to not be in compliance with the laws. Dealing with fewer actors who have more capital to be compliant will create better actors. Certainly there is a tra

Health committee  I can't agree more with Ms. Weeks. It's also one of the easier lessons learned on this. There are a few things. People want marijuana to pay its own way. That's an easy enough solution. There have been times when we've taken a loan out against our general fund that we then repay

Health committee  No, they are not. On the state level, they have to at least mirror alcohol, which I believe means they have to close at 10 p.m., but cities have decided to change those hours to.... That's the ceiling. They can go to 8 p.m., 6 p.m., and so on. In Denver, for a long time it was 6

Health committee  Yes, I think the economics of this are such that, barring extreme taxation or a regulation that makes a normal consumer feel like they are missing out on a variety that they prefer—especially over time and as people create different behaviour patterns—we've seen very quickly that

Health committee  Thank you. I think public health survey data is lacking in types of marijuana used, frequency of use, potency of use, and times of use. We get back good youth data every two years, but we should be getting that back in a much more timely fashion. The public health data is simply

Health committee  Absolutely, it would be my pleasure.

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, for having me appear before the committee. For those who don't know, I was the director of marijuana coordination under Governor Hickenlooper in Colorado for the rollout of what we referred to as medical and recreational marijuana. I have since started a f