Colorado regulators tour grow facility — AP/Kristen Wyatt

❝ Three years, billions of dollars, and thousands of new jobs into Colorado’s legal marijuana experiment, we’re still nowhere near the economic ceiling of retail cannabis.

New monthly revenue figures indicate the state is on track to exceed last year’s massive sales totals for medical and recreational weed. Retail stores sold more than $125 million in product statewide in April, The Cannabist calculates based on state revenue numbers.

❝ Through the first four months of 2017, the state has collected over $76 million in taxes and fees on almost half a billion dollars in sales.

The figures project out to a wild increase over the previous year’s sales and revenue numbers. Raw-dollar sales totals are up about 27 percent despite falling prices, according to The Cannabist’s metrics.

State revenue collections from taxes and licensing fees are almost 50 percent above where they stood at the same point a year earlier. Colorado ended up netting about $199 million in public revenue from cannabis that year…

❝ Colorado’s own industry won’t keep lapping itself like this perpetually, of course. At some point — when enough other states have legalized, and when Coloradans have fully abandoned the black and “gray” markets for weed in favor of the fully sanctioned marketplace — the growth rates will soften.

The real story of the 2017 growth, Marijuana Policy Group research associate Clinton Saloga told ThinkProgress, is that legalization is still moving pot activity out of back alleys and into the light…“The continued rise in sales is due more to people leaving the black market and starting to shop in the regulated market, as opposed to a huge surge in total use,” said Saloga…

❝ Opponents of softer marijuana laws have often argued that decriminalization or legalization will increase usage. That’s not what MPG’s numbers show in Colorado, Saloga said…When masses of smokers, brownie aficionados, and chronic pain sufferers shift their dollars from illicit sources to official ones, they aren’t just providing a “peace dividend” to public spending for schools and other services. They’re depriving the organized drug networks and cartels of a major revenue stream.

Living in New Mexico – a state with a pretty straightforward medical marijuana protocol and with one ailment I recently learned responds well to cannabis treatment – sooner or later I figure I’ll check out the brownie cure. I quit smoking cigarettes 59 years ago. I don’t see myself starting, again, as treatment.

Still, getting our chickenshit politicians over the hump with the example of Colorado just next-door is sort of amazing. Not the Republicans. They’re mostly of the bible-thumping, Tea Party, Earth is 6000 years old variety. Nope, many of our Democrats have a great tradition of understanding class loyalty, supporting essential needs for the mass of low-income families in our state. They just need to get beyond their fear of [1] condemnation by the Catholic Church and [2] doing something newer than the government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Should be, progressives – who helped drag the Roundhouse, our state legislature, back from a couple years of doing even less for the working class than our do-nothing-for-anyone-who-doesn’t-drill-for-gas-or-oil Republican governor – will succeed in including this issue more pointedly in electoral campaigns over the next few years. Overdue.