Marijuana

Marijuana stores in Washington won’t be allowed to sell lollipops, gummy bears or other candies infused with the drug, but will be able to sell properly labeled brownies and cookies, a state agency decided Wednesday. The Liquor Control Board approved rules for marijuana-infused food products, also known as edibles, designed to restrict items that may appeal strongly to children.

During a quarter century-plus of living in Spokane, I regularly had to explain to friends and relatives elsewhere that it was not a suburb of Seattle and thus did not get rain all the time. Now in Olympia, I battle a new misconception, that being the newspaper’s marijuana reporter is not like being its wine critic or beer columnist. It’s interesting on many levels – government policy, changing social standards, complicated chemistry – but there’s no sampling of the subject matter and it has about as many laughs as sitting through a legislative budget hearing.

One of the employment opportunities Spokane’s first legal pot purchaser said he’d lost as a result of his fame has been reinstated, a company official said. Mike Boyer, first in line to buy legal recreational marijuana at a Spokane retailer earlier this week, posted online he’d lost a security job Wednesday and later said he’d also been forced out of his part-time temp employment with LaborReady, a Tacoma-based firm.

The first person to buy recreational pot legally in Spokane says the fame has cost him his job. Mike Boyer, whose enthusiastic purchase Tuesday was broadcast by TV stations and photographed by newspapers, said Wednesday that two of his three part-time employers have since ordered him to report for drug tests that he’s certain he’ll fail.

In a sign that campaign season is truly upon us, last week saw the first debate over debates, the annual exercise in which one candidate dares another to meet on the field of verbal combat, and the person challenged offers a reason not to jump at the chance. Independent candidate Dave Wilson challenged Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers to 10 debates – five before the Aug. 5 primary and five after. This may seem a bit presumptuous on Wilson’s part, considering no independent congressional candidate has made it through the state’s top-two primary, but congressional candidates must be confident above all else.

Spokane will have, at most, three pot stores opening July 8 after the state’s first legal marijuana retailers get their licenses. But that would be three times as many as Seattle.

OLYMPIA -- Spokane will likely have three legal pot stores when Washington's first retail marijuana outlets open in early July. . . which will be three times more than Seattle.

OLYMPIA – Washington’s first recreational marijuana stores are expected to open July 8, a day after the first licenses will be announced, state officials said Tuesday. But those stores likely will not sell “edible” marijuana products when they first open because the state is preparing labeling and packaging rules for those items.

OLYMPIA -- Washington's first recreational marijuana stores are expected to open on July 8, a day after the first licenses will be announced, state officials said today.

As Sam Calvert prepares to open one of the state’s first legal marijuana stores next month, he sometimes thinks of a historic parallel from a previous century. Washington may be about to experience a marijuana “Green Rush” similar to the Alaska Gold Rush at the end of the 19th century, when discovery of gold in the Klondike prompted thousands to seek their fortunes in unfamiliar territory. Only a small percentage of the miners who went into the frozen hills came out with enough gold to get rich, Calvert said. More people got rich by selling them picks, shovels and other supplies before they went in, and food and alcohol when they came out.

WALLA WALLA — Police in Walla Walla say two men were seriously burned Monday in an explosion that’s believed to have resulted from a process used to extract hash oil from marijuana.

SPOKANE — The manager of what aspires to be the first recreational marijuana store in Spokane says it will open July 1, though state officials haven’t confirmed that.