Opinion & Commentary

The first-ever Colorado Cannabis Convention almost ended before it began. That’s because the original promoter, Raymond Springsteel and Boulder Talent Agency, which had booked the Colorado Convention Center for a pot convention this coming weekend, apparently disappeared after collecting — and cashing — a major haul of checks from vendors…

One of the best moves of the year — both literally and figuratively — was the city’s last-second save of the Denver Civic Theatre for Su Teatro, which just opened its first production in the heart of Denver’s historic Santa Fe Drive area. Su Teatro was already in the process…

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment has surrendered to the inevitable. Yesterday morning I wrote about a friend,Elaine Betts, who’d received her medical marijuana card more than five months after she applied for it — and over two months after she died. Soon after, the department announced that…

When I agreed to be grilled by Bill Husted for Bar and Grilled, his interview feature that appears in today’s Denver Post, I had an important question to answer (and no, it wasn’t why I would agree to be grilled in the first place): What bar to choose for the…

Elaine Betts took care of her family and friends, took care of her neighborhood. I know, because she used to live on my block, before she bought a little house a few blocks away and started taking care of that neighborhood. When she was diagnosed with cancer last year, she…

Frank Bonanno, who was named a semifinalist for Outstanding Restaurateur in this year’s James Beard Foundation Awards, didn’t make the cut when the finalists were announced Monday. But he’s already won a string of honors, including Best New Restaurant in Best of Denver 2009 for Bones, the noodle house that…

For months, my e-mail has been deluged with a blizzard of messages from Colorado candidates. And although the City of Denver just announced that it’s opening late today because of the snow, I just received my first generic message from Mayor John Hickenlooper, who announced his run for governor in…

The people gathered in a meeting room at the Blair Caldwell library last summer were getting restless. “You all wasted our time,” proclaimed one community activist. “This was not a waste of your time,” replied Rico Munn, then-director of the Colorado Department of Regulatory Affairs, which includes the Division of…

The last time the House judiciary committee considered HB 1284, which would regulate medical marijuana from seed to sale in this state, the March 4 hearing went on for ten hours, and over 800 people signed up to testify. Today, when the committee again takes up HB 1284, there will…

Despite the lousy economy, 2009 was a great year for new restaurants. Some years, when we set out to pick the Best New Restaurant for the Best of Denver, we’re hard-pressed to come up with one worthy contender. This round, we have more than a dozen restaurants that last year…

Steve Horner, go back to your corner. This week, Westword received a packet that contained copies of a dozen letters sent to Horner, the anti-ladies’ night crusader, from Steven Chavez, director of the Colorado Division of Civil Rights, all dated March 11 and all starting this way: “This letter is…

Leadville has a long, colorful history. Colorful enough even without the latest colorful chapter: the much-publicized arrest in Ireland of Leadville-come-lately resident Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, a 31-year-old blond, single mom whose own mother — also a recent addition to the Leadville lineup — has been all over TV talking about her…

The first sign that something was funny? People kept coming up to Jolt — real name Jeremy Silas Ulibarri — at First Friday, telling the urban artist that they’d seen his work on the History Channel earlier that evening, that his Guerilla Garden logo, a stylized graffiti gorilla, had been…

More than anything, I’m mad at myself,” admits Francisco Gallardo, program director of Denver’s Gang Rescue and Support Project, one of the key players in the Gang Reduction Initiative of Denver and a willing participant in “Mile High Killers” — until he actually saw that episode of Gangland. “Nothing but…

Want to give someone a quick feel for Denver? Walk the seven blocks of Wazee Street from Cherry Creek — where Denver got its start when gold was discovered 150 years ago — up to Coors Field, where the Rockies will start digging for gold in just a few weeks…

“What is the ‘medical’ in medical marijuana?” asks MyColfax.org. “There’s been a lot of talk about dispensaries and medical marijuana as of late. And because there are very strong feelings on all sides of this issue, not all of the information has been accurate or helpful.” And a lot of…

So many St. Patrick’s Day parades, so little time. Gubernatorial candidate John Hickenlooper, decked out in a shamrock-green blazer, had to zoom from Denver’s shamrock celebration to the Pueblo Democratic Party’s St. Patrick Day’s fundraiser. And there, he weighed in on one of Scott McInnis’s pet projects: the proposed expansion…

When he was still a student at the University of Denver back in 2002, Blake Harrison led a statewide campaign to allow liquor-store sales on Sundays. Six years later, Colorado finally removed the prohibition on Sunday sales. Harrison’s been campaigning to get rid of 3.2 beer — that weak holdover…

Plutonium lasts forever, and so do legal cases involving Rocky Flats. Yesterday, 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges Stephen Anderson, Jerome Holmes and Michael Murphy heard arguments in the appeal of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant class-action lawsuit — filed by neighbors of the facility back in 1990,…