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The first week of January was a scramble for the 30 plus dispensaries holding recreational licenses. Gehring’s stores had enough marijuana, grown for medical purposes then transferred, in a one-off move allowed by regulators, to the recreational system. But her dispensaries began running short of other products.

“The main thing we found wasn’t so much that you couldn’t get product, it’s that you couldn’t get product cheap,” said Dave Cuesta, now the chief compliance officer for Native Roots, the largest dispensary chain in Colorado. At the time, in 2014, he was working as an investigator for the Marijuana Enforcement Division. “You could walk into a store that sold both med and rec, and you were paying $30, $35 for an eighth on the med side, and it was $60 or $70 on the rec side. People were just adjusting their pricing (to manage supply).”

It took nearly a year for prices to stabilize, said Cuesta. Even with five or so dispensaries opening each week across the state, the real price correction didn’t begin until October, when non-vertically integrated companies were allowed to apply for independent growing and retailing licenses.

By December 2014, there were more than 300 recreational stores open, and monthly sales were topping US$35 million, up from US$14.7 million in January, according to the Denver Post. Taxes and fees collected by the state on cannabis sales in December alone equalled US$6.9 million.

Photo by AP Photo/Ed Andrieski

Meanwhile, lawmakers and regulators were busy working out kinks in the legal framework. After an increase in the number of children hospitalized for marijuana poisoning after accidentally eating edibles — and the death of young man who leapt from a window after consuming them — lawmakers brought in tighter controls around packaging and dosing. In August, the government introduced an emergency rule that edibles had to be divisible into smaller servings containing no more than 10 milligrams of THC each.