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“Rescheduling to Schedule III is good…but it’s not perfect.”
As governor of Colorado from 2011 to 2019, John Hickenlooper saw cannabis reform quickly snowball into full-blown legalization. Almost three years into his first term as a United States senator, he is getting accustomed to a much slower pace.
Although initially opposed to legalization, Hickenlooper came around while governor — and went on to introduce and sponsor several pieces of cannabis legalization in Congress, including his bill that would create a federal commission to study and issue recommendations about national legalization as well as a longstanding House of Representatives measure that would allow banks and financial institutions to serve the cannabis industry.
According to Hickenlooper, his bill calling for a federal research commission, dubbed the Prepare Act, took inspiration from a similar task force created over ten years ago in Colorado.
“The best ideas are always from Colorado,” he says.
Even great ideas can run into bumps along the way, though, and Colorado’s first step into legalization hit a huge one in 2014 when New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote of her experiences with a THC candy bar. This was before all recreational edibles were limited to ten ten-milligram servings, and Dowd, new to eating edibles, consumed the whole thing. Hickenlooper, still governor at the time, was supposed to see a Jimmy Buffett show with Dowd that night, but she had to postpone, and the rest is history.
We recently caught up with Hickenlooper to ask about his cannabis work in Congress and what he thought of the recent reschedule announcement. He was nice enough to walk down memory lane for a few minutes, too.
[Read More @ Westword]
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