The controversial vote last year to allow the recreational use of Marijuana in Colorado is continuing to have repercussions.
Almost all of the state’s ski areas ban the use of marijuana on their slopes (in line with zero tolerance of all forms of intoxication) and many have blocked the setting up of now legal shops to sell the drug in adjacent resort towns. Highly publicised reports of skiers and boarders being removed from the slopes and their tickets confiscated when seen to be smoking marijuana on the slopes have also been widely circulated.
However the newly legalised drug use has not harmed the state’s ski business, which saw a 13% leap in skier days this past winter (although that could in part be due to terrible conditions for much of the winter in California). Some reports have also suggested that ‘marijuana tourism’ could ultimately be bigger for Colorado than the currently dominant winter sports business.
A new plan put forward by ‘leaders in the marijuana industry’ to grade the drug with the same colour coding system used to rate ski run steepness and challenge (in the US – green circles, blue squares and black diamonds) has been taken as a step to far by the state’s ski industry however,
“The ski industry has a strong opposition to the appropriation of ski resort symbols for marijuana use,” Jenn Rudolf from Colorado Ski Country USA told local media.
A doctor interviewed by CBS Denver, while not directly endorsing the idea of using ski area gradings for drugs, said he did support the idea of grading drugs so that people had a better idea of the volume and strength of the substance they were buying and were able to compare it with other offers on a like-for-like basis.
