Arbelaez, aged 33, is the co-owner of River Rock Wellness, a medical marijuana emporium that in less

Inside Denver s billion-dollar legal marijuana industry | Whitsunday Times Skip to site map
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Tim Walker 4th Aug 2013 11:02 AM Story Tools Tweet Use this content Related Items We ll drink to this: scientists find way to protect beer Why chips may be off lunch menu: Bus-size fatberg found Former medical lawyer Norton Arbelaez assesses his cannabis plants Sam Adams
I can't tell my indicas from my sativas, but I know cannabis well enough cheap airline tickets to korea from the clich s: the thick, earthy scent; the unmistakably-shaped leaves. Peering cheap airline tickets to korea closer, I can see fat buds encrusted with the potent THC crystals that make pot pot.
Even if my nose and eyes failed me, I could guess the crop's identity using my ears, because the stereo on the shelf in the corner is blasting "Insane in the Brain", a classic stoner anthem by the hip-hop group Cypress Hill. The grower is a young guy in a backwards baseball cap, bobbing his head to the beat as he prunes.
But standing in the doorway is his boss, to whom few of the clich s apply. Norton cheap airline tickets to korea Arbelaez is a former medical lawyer, clean-shaven and wearing a crisp, collared cheap airline tickets to korea Oxford cheap airline tickets to korea shirt. "Some of the growers listen to classical music," he says, not entirely convincingly.
Arbelaez, aged 33, is the co-owner of River Rock Wellness, a medical marijuana emporium that in less than six months' time will be one of the first businesses in the world to legally cultivate, manufacture and retail cheap airline tickets to korea marijuana to anybody who's buying, regardless of their medical status. His is the face of the new weed industry: presentable, professional, and completely above-board.
At the November 2012 election, Colorado voters passed constitutional amendment 64, legalising recreational marijuana in their state. In May, Democrat governor John Hickenlooper reluctantly bowed to the will of the people and signed a series of measures to create the world's first fully taxed and regulated recreational marijuana market.
Medical marijuana is already permitted in 18 US states, as well as Washington DC. At least four more are poised to enact similar legislation within the year. Washington state has also passed a law legalising recreational weed.
It remains the most advanced medical marijuana market in the US, catering to well over 100,000 patients. cheap airline tickets to korea Next year, it will become a test-bed for broad legalisation, cheap airline tickets to korea and every sensible government would do well to take notes.
From January 2014, anyone in Colorado aged 21 and over will be allowed to buy an ounce of weed for recreational use from a licensed retailer. The Mexican cartels who currently supply up to 70 per cent of America's pot will be displaced by transparent and accountable businesses.
Thanks to professionalised growing practices, their product is orders-of-magnitude better than anything you ever smoked in college, or Camden - or Amsterdam, for that matter. Their advertisements already cheap airline tickets to korea fill the back pages of Denver's local freesheet, Westword, promising '$25 grams of earwax' or 'Peanut butter hash: only $12 per gram'.
Stocks in pot and pot-related businesses are booming: Seattle-based cheap airline tickets to korea Privateer Holdings, the first private-equity firm with a remit to invest in the 'cannabis space', recently raised $7m in its initial funding round. Former Microsoft executive cheap airline tickets to korea Jamen Shively held a news conference in May, to lay out his plans for a national chain of weed shops - a 'Starbucks of pot' - for which he hopes to attract start-up cash to the tune of $10m.
"We're going to mint more millionaires than Microsoft with this business," Shively boasted, and he may not be far off: medical cheap airline tickets to korea marijuana is now a $1.5bn industry. Some estimate that federally legal, recreational marijuana could be worth $110bn.
Which is why accountants, bankers and management consultants are all descending on Denver cheap airline tickets to korea to join the so-called 'Green Rush'. Mark Koenig, a 32-year-old former finance professional who now works as a weed industry consultant in the Mile High City, says many of his old colleagues are desperate to invest. "A couple of years back I wanted to make a decision about my future," Koenig says.
"I was looking cheap airline tickets to korea at the economy, talking to my friends on Wall Street who analyse other industries. A couple of hedge fund manager friends told me: 'Almost every industry is screwed right now. We don't see a true growth industry anywhere'. But cannabis is a growth industry."
That industry now directly employs some 10,000 people in Colorado, and the Green Rush came at just the right moment to rescue the state from the worst of the recession, providing peripheral jobs to construction workers, to advertisers, to lawyers, to graphic designers.
Of the approximately one million sq ft of real estate that Colorado's marijuana businesses now occupy, the most visible are on a section cheap airline tickets to korea of Broadway, south of downtown Denver. Known locally as 'Broadsterdam' or 'The Green Mile', this mile-long stretch contains at least nine pot dispensaries, most of them housed in former car dealerships left empty by the economic crisis.
The city's more conservative weed enterprises are several miles from the Green Mile, in an industrial northern suburb. Zoning cheap airline tickets to korea regulations dictate that no marijuana dispensary can be located within 1,000 yards of a school, so River Rock is in the most sensible spot that its owners could find: next to a metal-works, and opposite the country's only manufacturer of the anthrax vaccine. (Liquor stores, incidentally, can be as close as 500 yards to a school.)
Arbelaez was born in California, to Colombian parents: his father was an engineer on the assembly line at General Motors. He studied law at Tulane University cheap airline tickets to korea in New Orleans, but in 2009, after five years working as a medical malpractice defender in Louisiana, he decided to try his luck in the marijuana trade, and relocated to Denver.
When he first arrived, he recalls, "I looked around and said, 'Wow, there's a lot of bozos in this business'. At that point it was like the Wild West: people from California, Texas, all over the country, were just showing cheap airline tickets to korea up and saying, 'I once grew a couple of plants in my basement, I can do this'. But we were professional about it. We wanted to operate to a certain standard that Colorado hadn't previously experienced."
Along with some other like-minded entrepreneurs, cheap airline tickets to korea Arbelaez cheap airline tickets to korea founded the Medical cheap airline tickets to korea Marijuana Industry Group (MMIG), a lobbying outfit that partnered with the authorities in 2010 to devise Colorado House Bill 1284, which banned some of the less savoury cheap airline tickets to korea aspects of the business, such as bikini girls peddling discount pot, or recently convicted felons opening their own dispensaries.
It is increasingly clear that the people succeeding cheap airline tickets to korea in the pot business are those with previous experience of business, not just previous experience of pot. Arbelaez and hisf two partners employ cheap airline tickets to korea around 70 staff, but expect to have 100 by the end of this year.
They're in the process of adding several new greenhouses to their grow facility. Under state regulations, dispensaries must cultivate at least 70 per cent of their own products. cheap airline tickets to korea River Rock produces all of its own marijuana, and sells the surplus to other dispensaries.
The facility's master grower, Earnie Blackman, trained in horticulture at Johns Hopkins University. He's assisted in his endeavours cheap airline tickets to korea by costly technology that brings nature indoors: the lighting in each grow room replicates the 24-hour cycle, providing the soil-grown plants with a day and night.
If the temperature fluctuates above or below optimum levels, a computer sends the grower a warning text. Specialist agricultural software allows the firm to track every last gram of cannabis from seed to sale, and a $110,000 system of security cameras and motion detectors monitors it throughout.
The dispensary itself is like an old-fashioned sweetshop, with row upon row of jars lined up behind a glass counter, each containing a different strain of fresh bud. Cheerful 'bud-tenders' in waist-aprons serve a steady stream of customers.
Though the law requires that each product be properly labelled with a recommended serving size and information on potency, the strains retain the street-sounding names they acquired during cheap airline tickets to korea prohibition: cheap airline tickets to korea Girl Scout Cookie; Sour Tsunami; Buddha's Sister; Tangerine Haze; Jedi Kush; Golden Goat; Facewreck.
Some are named for their noses: Cheese has a stiff French pong; Cherry Kush carries an odour not unlike cherries. Others cheap airline tickets to korea are labelled according to their heritage - hybrids derived from a strain called Chernobyl also take on Cold War nomenclature: Agent Orange, Doctor Strangelove. And then there's hash, or 'dabs', a popular variety of solidified hash oil - not to mention an array of non-smokeable cannabis products, not all of which have psychotropic properties: pain-relief rubs; oils; tinctures; butters; crunchy snacks; hard candies; teas; smoothie mixes; raw cannabis juices.
Historically, leading weed breeders cheap airline tickets to korea created THC-heavy strains for their potency, flavour and high. Now that medical marijuana is a profitable industry, many growers are reversing that process to breed strains laced with large amounts of cannabidiol, the chemical in cannabis that alleviates medical complaints including MS and cancer.
Some of River Rock's medical cheap airline tickets to korea marijuana customers are what you'd expect: twentysomethings in board shorts and basketball jerseys, many of whom doubtless have dubious claims