The woman gracing Kush Colorado’s centerfold is long-limbed and lovely, but the new magazine’s real star is the marijuana plant she clutches to her breast.

Billed as the “premier cannabis lifestyle magazine,” the slick glossy debuted in Colorado last month, one more sign of galloping growth in the state’s medical-marijuana business.

The city of Denver has more than 300 medical-marijuana dispensaries, the highest number in the nation outside California.

The pace of growth in the industry prompted the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws to recently name Denver “America’s cannabis capital.” While Los Angeles has more than 1,000 dispensaries, Denver outstrips the City of Angels on a per-capita basis, with more storefronts selling pot than Starbucks shops peddling coffee.

Colorado debut

Kush Colorado was already on the free-magazine racks at local 7-Eleven stores, King Soopers and other retailers when the national organization bestowed the title.

In the first four days it was available, shoppers snapped up 20,000 copies from stands at retail stores and dispensaries around the metro area, Kush publisher Michael Lerner said. Racks are reloaded twice a week.

“It is flying off the shelves,” Lerner said.

Articles in Kush Colorado’s first issue include an interview with comic Tommy Chong — “It’s a magical plant, man. We should see it as the gift that it is” — a guide to shopping while stoned and a description of lighting options for those who want to grow marijuana indoors.

Lerner, a Los Angeleno with back problems, dreamed up the idea for a lifestyle magazine that focuses on marijuana after he started using pot to control pain. Lerner and two other friends launched Kush LA last May.

Though all have credentials to use medical marijuana, they bear little resemblance to the clueless stoners popularized by Chong and partner Richard “Cheech” Marin.

Lerner turned to the drug rather than continue a regimen of pain pills that left him groggy, he said. “This really is not an addictive drug; it truly is a medication. I believe: My body, my choice,” he said.

Growing demand

Lerner, 48, is an entrepreneur whose resume includes forming baseball camps for children and adults and producing the 2007 movie “Three Days to Vegas,” starring Peter Falk and Rip Torn.

The other Kush magazine founders are Bob Selan, 55, a lawyer and co-founder of the baseball camp, and Randy Malinoff, a former Web marketing chief for Universal Studios, who has worked in the recording industry.

Kush Colorado’s 81 pages are dense with ads — many of them full-page and most for medical-marijuana dispensaries — at a time when advertisers are abandoning print in droves.

Colorado is the magazine’s first foray outside Los Angeles, but it won’t be the last.

Kush Michigan and clones in several other cities in California and Oregon are expected to roll off the presses shortly. Each magazine will feature content that is generated locally.

With medical-marijuana laws on the books in 13 states, New Jersey poised to become the 14th and bills that would permit the drug’s use pending in others, Lerner expects the Kush brand to circulate in 34 cities by the end of the year.

Demand is so strong that potential advertisers in Michigan clamored for space before Lerner officially announced his magazine was coming to the state.

“I can’t open the markets fast enough,” Lerner said.

Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com