2025 The Denver Gazette Perspective: From marijuana to mushrooms – Young people are the top users of psychedelics, and most use the drugs simply for fun. The The Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Safety Center also reported that the most widely used psychedelic was psilocybin — the slang term is “magic mushrooms” — and that it was perceived to improve mental health.
State regulators gathered from the governor’s office, the Department of Natural Medicine, the Department of Regulatory Agencies and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to engage in a “listening session.” The listening session focused primarily on the purported benefits of the program. Discussion of the drugs’ unintended physical and mental health consequences, however, was noticeably absent.
2025 Washington Examiner Opinion: Rescheduling Marijuana would be dangerously premature – Rescheduling the plant itself, rather than the amount of active ingredients in the finished products, would dangerously mislead the public. Today’s new and different marijuana products can vary significantly in their chemical composition and should not all be treated the same.
Of particular concern is that many marijuana products today contain extraordinarily high levels of THC with no legitimate medical use. These products have been linked to psychosis, schizophrenia, addiction, violence, suicide, and worsening mental and physical health.
2025 Washington Examiner Opinion: Psychoactive ‘hemp’ is harming our youth – Congress must act – In 2018, Congress legalized industrial hemp with bipartisan enthusiasm. The intent was clear: to unleash the potential of nonintoxicating hemp to benefit agriculture, health, and manufacturing and create jobs. “Rope, not dope,” was how many in Congress described the opportunity at the time.
Elected officials across the nation were surprised to discover that an unintended consequence of that legislation was the emergence of “intoxicating hemp” products.
2024 The Denver Gazette Psychedelics pose grave new threat to Colorado kids – Commercialized psychedelic products are overseen by Colorado’s new “Natural Medicine Division”. Imagine for a moment the marketing messages packed into that division’s name: It’s “natural” a word that, to impressionable teens, may be synonymous with “healthy”. It’s “medicine” — the official state agency says so. That word also implies good health.
Oh, and the psychedelics are offered at “healing centers,” so that must be safe and healthy, right? Yet customers don’t have to have any specific diagnosis or condition to participate at a healing center. Wink, wink.
2024 The Denver Post Letters: What marijuana regulation? – We recently purchased a 5-gram biscotti-flavored vaporizer containing a THC potency of 84.9% that easily fits in a jean pocket. The vaporizer is flavored like a cookie and contains a highly concentrated amount of THC. Where exactly is the overly complex regulation? To the contrary, these are gaping failures of regulation, not the other way around.
2024 Washington Examiner Opinion: Why marijuana rescheduling remains controversial – At the core of concerns is a hazardous lack of clarity on how marijuana is defined. This gap in specificity has led to an anything-goes dynamic in what products can be commercially manufactured, labeled, marketed, and sold as marijuana. Today, this can include lotions with no psychoactive effects to products that pack 10 to 1,000 servings of ultra-psychoactive THC in one vaporizer or kid-friendly edible. These products have little in common except that they are derived from the marijuana plant.
2024 The Denver Gazette Opinion: Protect Colorado kids from marijuana vape products – Among high school students who had used marijuana in the previous 30 days, the data show an increase in vaping concentrated THC, the psychoactive chemical in marijuana. Those in this group who reported that they recently vaped marijuana increased from 39.1% to 46% from 2021 to 2023. In 2015, the rate was 21.8%.
2024 Washington Examiner Opinion: Marijuana banking bill lacks much-needed clarity – Oddly missing is clarity on the products eligible to utilize SAFER’s expansive banking and financial provisions and a directive for baseline safeguards on those eligible products. After all, who doesn’t support product transparency on psychoactive amounts, potencies, contaminants, and other added harmful substances?
2023 Colorado Politics Opinion: A decade of fighting to protect Colorado kids from pot – Even after a decade, the commercialization landscape is unstable and shifting. Colorado kids still face unacceptable risks. Every day is a struggle just to preserve existing protections. As the market goes through a predictable contraction after the initial speculative boom, the THC industry is increasingly pushing back against safeguards, blaming regulations for their industry’s woes.
2023 The Gazette Perspective: A bad trip ahead for Colorado – By now, we know this all-too-familiar story with THC, the high-inducing drug derived from the marijuana plant. But are you ready for the sequel, this time with psychedelics?
Have no doubt that the psilocybin industry knows the tricks that worked in marijuana. They use innocuous-sounding language to get the camel’s nose under the tent and then push and push for more commercialization. Many veteran marijuana industry folks are lobbying and participating in the process to regulate the psychedelic drugs allowed under Proposition 122. Their playbook is the same.
2023 The Colorado Sun Opinion: If we don’t know enough about the effects of high-potency THC, then it shouldn’t be sold– A rational regulatory approach would put the burden of proof on THC concentrate manufacturers to prove their products do not harm consumers before they can market them. Instead, Colorado allowed the mass commercialization of these products first and now is spending years (or maybe decades?) deciding how they may harm consumers.
2023 The Colorado Sun Opinion: The marijuana business is doing just fine without national banking legislation– Those fighting for SAFE Banking claim it’s all about access to traditional banking services and reducing dispensary robberies. Yet the industry right now can get loans, banking services and use electronic payment methods. This includes accepting debit cards with added cash back option, transactions made as easily today in a dispensary as a grocery store. In fact, just in Colorado the marijuana industry has generated over $13.8 billion in product sales without any national banking legislation.
So, if the marijuana industry wants to be transparent, it should acknowledge SAFE Banking is about much more.