News Nuggets (Colorado)

Campaign seeks to make cannabis a presidential issue

Activists for a drug-policy reform group have launched a statewide campaign aimed at making marijuana an issue President Obama and his Republican challengers can’t ignore this election season.

Sensible Colorado unveiled the Patient Voter Project at a rally last month near Obama’s Lakewood campaign office. The effort will include urging voters to cast their November ballots for the presidential candidate who would best represent the interests of the medical cannabis community.

Brian Vicente, executive director of Sensible Colorado, told reporters the project is in response to the ongoing federal challenge to the state’s cannabis industry.

Cannabis industry banking bill dies

Colorado’s medical cannabis industry will continue to go without a means to bank revenue after a bill that would have allowed stakeholders to form a financial exchange died in the state legislature.

Senate Bill 75 would have set up a kind of credit union for dispensary owners and other cannabis-related operators to process their revenue. Currently, not a single bank in the state will allow industry businesses to open accounts, a state of affairs Sen. Pat Steadman, a Democrat from Denver, had hoped to amend.

The bill was voted down in the Senate Finance Committee by a 5-2 vote, according to a Colorado Statesman report.

Dispensary first in Denver to unionize

A controversial effort by the state’s largest commercial labor unions to expand into the medical cannabis industry has netted its first Denver fruit.

Employees of the Budding Health medical center in February became the first cannabis outlet in the city to join the United Food and Commercial Workers International Local 7. The workers join more than 25,000 other UFCW members in Colorado, which represents labor in the food, retail and healthcare industries.

Unionization is a volatile topic among the nation’s many cannabis industry groups. In October, the Denver-based Cannabis Business Alliance, which bills itself as the “chamber of commerce” for the state’s marijuana interests, said it was too soon to organize the industry.