Well Maybe The Weed Provider Could Deliver Swine Flu Vaccine

New Smoke Trails May Be More Important This Year At Ski Resorts Than Snowriding Trails

By Robert Weller

For years I wrote a national ski preview, telling snowriders about new trails, great deals, cheap flights, safety rules and the big kahunas, new mountains and high-speed chair lifts.

Aspen alone now offers four marijuana dispensaries. In the past resorts competed over almost anything, even which ones had plastic surgery.

A spokesman for Telluride drew guffaws when he said it was opting out of the beauty battle because the people who venture there are already gorgeous.

This year I can't keep up with the piece de resistance. Legalized marijuana. Better check this one yourself. One important question is whether a "prescription" issued in one state would be honored in another. I have no figures on how many snowboarders and skiers smoke dope, but my nose tells them the number is high. Carrying it across state might be more dangerous than going down a double black diamond.

You aren't likely to find indications that an Interstate town has a dispensary, though someone may come up with an iPhone app showing all dispensaries in the nation or in the neighborhood.

Many ski towns across the country treat skiing while stoned just like skiing while drunk. Pay attention.

It had been legalized in several states for some time but no one sold it legally because of still-existing federal laws banning it. Colorado voters legalized it for pain relief almost a decade ago.

Now its distribution has taken off in Colorado, California, Oregon and elsewhere U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder told federal authorities not to use federal funds to pay for enforcement of anti-marijuana laws in cases in which it was legally dispensed as a medication.

After that, four dispensaries asked permission to open in Aspen, whose law officers have always felt like they had more important things to do than bust people for weed, and no one objected.

Jimmy BuffettJimmy Buffett all along has expressed amazement how much time weed has spent before judges and lawyers since so many of them smoke it. In the gold and silver mining days absinthe, "the green fairy," also illegal based on somewhat exaggerated tales of the "green fairy" in Europe, was popular. Not long ago it was discovered that it was one of the weeds that was cut down in the Vail area.

Colorado health officials apparently don't get it. Or as they would say: it needs more control, almost anyone who claims chronic pain can get it. What if someone was so stoned they fell in abyss or down a tree well of legendary Colorado champagne powder snow and suffocated.

Twice this year Colorado health officials tried to make it harder to get.

This latest failure arose from a judge’s decision. Denver District Judge Larry Naves almost immediately blocked a new restriction this month that would have required legal dispensers to be able to provide other services that their clients might need.

If a law like this was applied to other care givers they might be required to provide services they are not qualified to deliver.

After all, other doctors, usually aren’t required to treat problems outside their specialities. Critics said it was intended to make it more difficult to get the marijuana.

The health department scheduled a meeting Dec. 16 to consider how to react to the judge’s decision, but now it has been indefinitely postponed.

There are an estimated 14,000 marijuana users going to about 100 marijuana dispensers in Colorado. Several more locations, including ski resorts, are considering allowing them to open. Their power to stop them, if they meet the rules, is somewhat limited. Breckenridge just legalized it. So far Vail, owned by the same company, and just across Vail Pass, has decided to hold back until many questions are answered. For example, can prescription cards issued in one state or town be honored in another?

Bruce Mirken, director of California's Marijuana Policy Project, said there are no solid figures for legal California dispensaries. No official figures are available for California users either, although based on an extrapolation from adjacent Oregon it could be 200,000 or more.

Law enforcement officials, meanwhile, believe regulation of the dispensaries is too lax with potential users rarely turned down in Colorado.

Earlier this year the Colorado health department backed off, in the middle of a meeting in Denver, on a proposal to limit marijuana care-givers to no more than five patients, which would have made it a sort of hobby profession.

Still to be considered is a special tax. The state’s attorney general says it would be legal.

Funny that the safety of marijuana is still being debated since it has been around for thousands of years. But it seems that no matter how much voters legalize it or how many judges throw restrictions out, no one knows when it will really be legal. After the war in Afganistan ends? By then opium could be legal.