In January, Colorado defied the federal government and stepped with both feet into the world of legal recreational marijuana, where no state had gone before.

For seven months Coloradans have been lawfully smoking joints and inhaling cannabis vapors, chewing marijuana-laced candies and chocolates, drinking, cooking and lotioning with products infused with cannabis oil. They are growing their own weed, making their own hash oil and stocking up at dispensaries marked with green crosses and words like “health,” “wellness” and “natural remedies.” Tourists are joining in — gawking, sampling and tripping in hotel rooms. Business is growing, taxes are flowing, cannabis entrepreneurs are building, investing and cashing in.

Cannabis sales from January through May brought the state about $23.6 million in revenue from taxes, licenses and fees. That is not a huge amount in a $24 billion budget, but it’s a lot more than zero, and it’s money that was not pocketed by the black market.

The criminal justice system is righting itself. Marijuana prosecutions are way down across the state — The Denver Post found a 77 percent drop in January from the year before. Given the immense waste, in dollars and young lives, of unjust marijuana enforcement that far too often targets black men, this may be the most hopeful trend of all.

The striking thing to a visitor is how quickly the marijuana industry has receded into normality — cannabis storefronts are plentiful in Denver, but not obtrusive, certainly not in the way liquor stores often are. Marijuana-growing operations are in unmarked warehouses on the city’s industrial edges.

The ominously predicted harms from legalization — like blight, violence, soaring addiction rates and other ills — remain imaginary worries. Burglaries and robberies in Denver, in fact, are down from a year ago. The surge of investment and of jobs in construction, tourism and other industries, on the other hand, is real.

Legal, Safe and Taxed This is what the people of Colorado voted for overwhelmingly in amending the State Constitution in 2012 “to regulate marijuana like alcohol,” a shrewd frame that placed a major social shift firmly in the no-brainer category. The promise of Amendment 64 is a flood of tax revenue for education, drug abuse prevention and research — with as much as $40 million for school construction every year, and $10 million for studying marijuana’s therapeutic and medical benefits. In a state where medical marijuana has been legal since 2000, doing little evident harm, the move to legalize recreational use was seen by most voters as a sensible next step.

Though Gov. John Hickenlooper opposed Amendment 64, he admits that the debate is over — that this is a good-government issue now, and his administration is trying to making legalization work. The state government began the year well prepared, swiftly erecting a system to regulate the new business and to enforce the web of laws that strictly limit where you can use cannabis, who can buy it and how products are made, marketed and sold. A digital inventory system tracks every plant “from seed to sale.” The law forbids public consumption and selling to those under 21. (Stings by state regulators recently found 100 percent of targeted shops in Denver and Pueblo complying with the underage law.) Police are cracking down on nuisance public-smoking violations but aren’t wasting time chasing otherwise-law-abiding users.

To keep stoned drivers off the roads, the state is expanding to 300 the number of law-enforcement officers trained as “drug-recognition experts.” Combating drugged driving is complicated, because there are no instant roadside tests for marijuana and results might be meaningless anyway; regular users can have blood concentration levels of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, well over Colorado’s legal limit of five nanograms per milliliter and drive perfectly well, and marijuana can be detectable weeks after a high has worn off. Research on the dangers of mixing marijuana and driving is scant, but so is evidence that legal cannabis makes the highways more dangerous. The Colorado State Patrol reported in April that fatal crashes in the first quarter of 2014 were down 25.5 percent from the year before.