Drug Legalization

But Will the New Denver Post Pot Editor Host Tastings?


Marijuana joint
Torben Hansen

I, for one, welcome the Denver Post's announcement that it will have a new editor covering the marijuana beat full-time. The paper promises "a mix of news, entertainment and culture stories" which sounds like a healthy range of coverage for an intoxicant that is rapidly moving from the counterculture into the mainstream with Eric Holder-defying speed. Not long ago—and still in many places—marijuana was a matter for the police blotter. But can it be long before we see newspapers running reviews and holiday recommendations for the discriminating palate?

Denver Post News Director Kevin Dale writes:

We have written extensively about the research on marijuana, the regulation, the wrangling in the legislature, cooking with marijuana and growing it. The new year will bring all angles together in a way that is challenging and exciting for us. We plan to do what we do with any major story: throw our best muscle, creative minds and ingenuity at the project.

It's not surprising that the news we would be hiring an editor to oversee the project swirled around the journalism and marijuana community. …

We're going to have some fun – with a mix of news, entertainment and culture stories.

Having worked for a daily newspaper, I suspect that the Post will have little trouble finding in-house talent familar with the new beat. Lots of Americans have experience with marijuana (42.4 percent of us, as of 2008, says the World Health Organization)—positive or at least non-scary experience, that puts the lie to the decades-old fearmongering about the stuff eroding our inhibitions and destroying the fabric of American society.

Besides, a little inhibition-eroding ain't so bad.

Such experience has nudged Americans way ahead of institutions like government and old-line media, with full legalization now drawing 58 percent support, according to Gallup. The Department of Justice will need some time to catch up. The Denver Post seems to have arrived. At least, it will have arrived when the paper starts holding marijuana tastings and making suggestions about something special to bring to that…umm…holiday pot luck.


NEXT: White House Restricts Photographers' Access to Control Images


  1. The looming market for pot-related, well, everything, is just colossal. Whether it’s recipes or bongs or roach clips or pot-themed t-shirts or boutique weed or pot-infused vodka or whatever, it’s just huge. If the government would just get at least somewhat out of the way, it will take off like you can’t believe.

    1. Is psychotropic.com available?

      1. It’ “The Leading Psychotropic Site on the Net”.

    2. Was up in the Aspen area over the summer. At one of the art/craft fairs, a woman who sold t-shirts with designs on them had made one with marijuana leaves & a slogan (which I can’t remember right now). She was selling out every day.

  2. Anybody notice that with all this legalization, drugs have gotten a bit…boring? I mean, now newspapers are going to carry regular feature stories about marijuana. What happens if heroin gets legalized? Editors covering the junkie beat?

    1. Legalize Opium and bring back the Opium Den beat!

    2. Yes. Remember when Eliot Spitzer was whore critic for The New York Times? Too early for America, but it showed the future to come.

    3. Designer works in the fashion section.

    4. “Hi, I’m David Peel, marijuana critic for the Denver Post.”

      Seriously, can you imagine? I suspect whoever gets that job should be considered lucky if they don’t have to pay the newspaper.

      1. The thing is, like restaurant critic or wine critic, pot critic would be a paid, awesome job if pot were legal. It just seems crazy because it’s previously been illegal. Just another retarded effect of prohibition.

        1. It’s really no different from being a wine critic. Plenty of opportunity to be a gigantic snob and you get to get high at work.

        2. Well it’s not that it seems crazy, it’s just that people who like to consume a given product almost always think it would be fucking sick to actually get paid to do so (and write about it). So what I’m saying is that BakedPenguin…well, do I really need to say it?

          1. What Nikki didn’t said.

  3. playa manhattan — I saw where you asked in a dead thread where I got a hold of some Heady Toppers, and Tucille’s post reminded me. There was a tasting held over the weekend. I asked one of the retailers if he had any on him after sampling it. Haggled a bit, but I got a price that wasn’t outrageous.

    1. You lucky SOB.

  4. Besides, a little inhibition-eroding ain’t so bad.

    Rod Stewart said it best:

    Don’t say a word my virgin child
    Just let your inhibitions run wild

    1. Pedophile.

    2. Is that before or after he got his stomach pumped?

      1. Jesus, people still talk about that. What, was that 40 years ago?

        1. If I catch one fish, am I a fisherman? No, but suck just ONE dick…

          It was a running joke in college. Everytime he came on MTV my roommate would say, “Hey, did you know they pumped a sperm whale out of his stomach?”

          1. Ok, you had me rolling with that one.

            Yeah, vaguely I remember it was more than one though….


            Quote from the Rod. It’s true that he had to delay a performance in my town for an hour or so after collapsing back stage, it’s said due to a drop in blood sugar, back in ’80. We’ve always thought that may be where the rumor set off from.

  5. Besides, a little inhibition-eroding ain’t so bad.

    Can’t avoid the “Reason is part of the Dope and Hookers wing of libertarianism” can you?

  6. Besides, a little inhibition-eroding ain’t so bad.

    I get no kick from Champagne
    Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all
    So tell me why should it be true
    That I get a kick
    Out of you?
    Some get a kick from cocaine
    I’m sure that if i took even one sniff
    That would bore me terrifically too
    Yet I get a kick out of you

  7. So when will all the anti-Smoking laws be repealed? Society is supposed to be getting more socially tolerant…

  8. Or repealing drunk driving laws?

    1. We should repeal those too. What matters is driving erratically, posing imminent threat to others, not driving above some prescribed BAC limit.

      Speaking of which, the driving limits for MJ/cannibanoid/whatever they use also needs to be repealed since as I understand they’re pretty useless.

  9. I haven’t been back to CO in a while. Is Westword still leading the charge against legalizing victimless transactions between consenting adults?

    1. Hi Hugh! Westword, really? I didn’t think they were like that. But then, heh, I never read them anymore, either….

      1. I guess it was actually the LA Weekly that was stumping for more regulations against the Wild West of medical pot dispensaries.

        But I also seem to recall a H&R post about a story in an AZ or NM alt-weekly that basically boiled down to slut-shaming a sex-worker who was trying to make sex work safer for sex workers.

      2. A fyodor sighting!

        Westword actually already has (or had) a pot reviewer, which has kinda morphed into its “Ask a Stoner” column.

  10. What no coverage of dispensary and grow operation raids by Feds today?


  11. One of my old city editors went to the Denver Post. I wonder they’ll post the job, and take outside applicants.

  12. Hopefully the Post does better than the pot rag I grew up reading: High Lights Magazine. That thing seemed to cover everything for the toking youth but marijuana.

    1. My god, I never understood all the subliminal messages in Highlights were about getting high and solving really stupid puzzles. Why, oh why, was I solving them sober? I mean, I did find my dad’s grocery bags full of home-grown weed next to his porno mags. I could have been high all the time! Oh, why was 13-year-old me so stupid?

      1. 13-year-old you was still reading Highlights? Damn. And sober. Well you can make up for it all now at least.

        1. Well, as you can see from the context of my statement, I was really reading porno mags. The Highlights were in the basement and I only read them when I was chained down there as punishment for masturbating to my dad’s porno mags in the front yard. In hindsight, I realize now that I should have masturbated in the back yard.

          1. . . .to Highlights for Children? It’s been a while, but I don’t remember much pornography in those. Sure you aren’t thinking of Weekly Reader?

          2. Jesus, even my kid bro has been smart enough to use the back yard. Including since he was 13.

            1. Well how else was I going to get noticed and then “discovered” for a glamorous life in porn? You have to show off the goods if you want to make it, nicole. My parents never understood that.

              1. And yet somehow he’s still the one who made it as a nude model. You should really be asking yourself at this point how you failed so badly compared to such a jackass.

                1. Heh. My uncle lived within walking distance had his collection in a trailer he set up near his house for personal space. He kept his collection of both mags and tapes in there so my cousins and I had a key made for when he went out of town on business trips to enjoy the stash, booze, and cigars. Well, less of the later, but we did try them.

          3. Epi, you’re not supposed to actually read the porno mags. The words in them are strictly filler.

            1. What’s funny is that there was a time that Playboy did some great interviews. Like to the extent that it was one of the better interviewing outfits out there.

    2. Goofus wouldn’t have been such an asshole if he would have just mellowed out and smoked some reefer.

  13. I wonder what the military is going to do with their enlistment paperwork?

    Do you use or have you ever used marijuana?

    I suppose they’ll change it to illegal drugs.

    1. As long as it is illegal under federal law, I bet they’ll leave it as is.

      1. So they won’t be taking people from CO or WA?

        1. I have no idea who the military does or doesn’t take. Who knows? I bet they’ll loosen the standards for pot when they run out of qualified applicants who don’t smoke pot.

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