Colorado: Where you can buy all the weed you want and have nowhere to smoke
DENVER — Dispensaries sell a dizzying array of dried bud, potent extracts and colourful edibles. Licensed grow-ops are filled with hundreds of fragrant plants. Head shops sit packed with elaborate pipes and vaporizers.
The number of Denver businesses that produce and sell marijuana, or supply pot paraphernalia, seems limitless. But the number of places where you can legally smoke it? Next to none.
“Personally, I think it’s embarrassing,” said Ricardo Baca, a Daily Beast columnist who founded The Denver Post’s The Cannabist website. “Here we are, more than four years after legalization was signed into the state constitution, and very few people in this state have figured this out.”
When Colorado voters passed an amendment to legalize marijuana in 2012, they lifted the ban on personal and private use, but not open and public consumption. Combine that with the state’s Clean Indoor Air Act, which bans smoking indoors with a few exceptions, and using marijuana is illegal practically everywhere other than a private residence.