Colorado Is Straight-Up Stoned All the Time, And Everything Is Awesome

So the weed has been legal in Colorado for, like, a year now, which affords us the opportunity to analyze how much of it Coloradans -- or at least, those who can access legal weed, since only 67 of the state’s 321 jurisdictions permit it, but OK, all the important ones do -- are smoking and eating and otherwise using to enter Maureen Dowd-style cannabis-induced psychoses in their hotel rooms.

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The answer, we learned this week, is all of it. Colorado is fucking smoking all the weed. God, we need to move there.

 Per a weirdly fair and balanced report from a publication called The Cannabist  :

Nearly 5 million marijuana-infused edibles and almost 150,000 pounds of cannabis flower were purchased in legal Colorado stores and dispensaries in 2014, yet only 67 of Colorado’s 321 total jurisdictions allow the sale of medical and recreational pot, according to an encompassing new report the state released on Friday.

Technically, the report continues, Colorado isn’t really smoking all the weed. In actuality, Colorado is eating all the weed.

Edibles were certainly one of 2014′s biggest stories, and for good reason, as 4,815,650 units were sold in the first year of recreational pot sales — 1,964,917 units on the medical side and 2,850,733 recreationally. […] It’s fascinating insight, the report’s authors say, knowing that recreational edibles dominate the infused product space — yet recreational cannabis flower only makes up roughly one-quarter of that area.

“The data reported into the system clearly illustrates a strong demand for edibles in general, but especially for retail marijuana edibles,” the report reads. “The edible trend suggests that retail marijuana products are a viable product for retail consumers.

Let us remark for a moment on how cool it is that Colorado, the greatest of our 57 states, has an “infused product space,” and how cool it is that marijuana, scourge of Nancy Reagan and 1930s propaganda reels, is now being commoditized and corporatized like every other goddamn thing in this world. OK, that last part isn’t so cool, but hitting up the local dispensary is so very much better than trying to track down your dealer in his trailer park (not that we have ever done such a thing).

Coloradans, who are to a man all stoned as fuck, at least in our imagination, seem to like this state of affairs.

A new poll released on Feb. 24 found that 58 percent of respondents in Colorado said they support the pot-legalizing Amendment 64 while 38 percent said they oppose it.

You know who else loves the dope? The Kids ! Even the Republican ones, who are all Rand Paul this and freedom that.

Nearly two-thirds of Millennials who identify as Republican support legalizing marijuana, while almost half of older GOP Gen-Xers do, according to a recently released Pew survey that could be an indicator of where the debate is heading.

While the Pew Research Center survey published on Friday shows a 14 percentage point gap between Republicans and Democrats under the age of 34, six-in-10 GOP-leaning Millennials still said they favor legalizing cannabis. Seventy-seven percent of surveyed Democrats in the same age group held that view.

Which means that, assuming Millennials don’t mess this up (they will), in a few years we’ll have legal marijuana everywhere, and maybe we won’t have to move to Denver, though we hear it is beautiful there, but it is also like negative a billion degrees there and fuck that noise. We will be patient.

You know what helps us be patient?

You know what helps us be patient.

[ The Cannabist / NPR ]