By ballot initiative known as Amendment 64, Colorado began legal sales of marijuana on Jan. 1, 2014. As a result, the dispensary and its emblematic green cross is now refuge for the suffering where traditional pharmacological medicines could not palpitate.
From thousands of miles away, people came to escape the harsh and repressive state legislatures of their origin. The science of marijuana, once confined to wall-less jails and quarantined with dangerous Schedule 1 drugs, has been freed. But no economic measure, being that of revenue or tax, could greater sum the aggregate of persons now able to live functional lives with medical marijuana.
The state, with recent passage of HB19-1230, grants the privilege now to consume marijuana in the most common of places: The places where people freely exercise their most fundamental constitutional rights with each other. The places of hotels, restaurants, coffee shops and leisure and the places providing medical and psychiatric care.
The common nexus of all these places is a sense of belonging and affirmation that life’s adversities need not be taken alone. Vulnerabilities we all share are best absorbed by an exercise of human mutuality and that expression must not deny legal and safe consumption of marijuana in the commonality of others and in the commonality of places, without judgment, without prosecution and without stigmatization.
The virtue is merciful, the right is freedom and the protection above all else is equal.
Jaime McMillanDurango
