A Washington DC-based anti-marijuana group has teamed up with two Colorado business owners to sue the state over its recent legalisation of cannabis.
On Thursday the pressure group, Safe Streets, filed two federal lawsuits, one jointly with a hotels group and the other with a couple who own a horse ranch in Pueblo County.
The suits are designed to “close down the illegal marijuana industry”, according to a release on the group’s website.
In one of the suits, plaintiffs Michael Reilly and Phillis Windy Hope Reilly name Colorado governor John Hickenlooper as a defendant, as well as the Pueblo County commission and liquor and marijuana board.
The New Vision Hotels Two suit claims: “Marijuana businesses make bad neighbours. They drive away legitimate businesses’ customers, emit pungent, foul odors, attract undesirable visitors, increase criminal activity, increase traffic, and reduce property values”.
It goes on to say that New Vision’s injuries are “especially acute because many of its guests are youth ski teams and families with children”.
Both suits also target local cannabis businesses and those running them; the New Vision Hotels group targets a company called Medical Marijuana of the Rockies, while the Reillys target a company called Alternative Holistic Healing as well as the development company that apparently built its facility.
The Reillys are upset not just at the supposed illegality of what is going on, but also that the construction work involved in the cannabis farm mars the view from their “105 acres of beautiful rolling pasture”, which the suit eventually makes clear they “often visit on weekends”.
Colorado’s laws governing the sale of marijuana, which legalised the drug for limited recreational use, came into force on 1 January 2014.
“Despite the contrary laws of some states, the production and sale of marijuana remains a serious crime under federal law,” read a statement from Safe Streets Alliance. “Safe Streets is asking the federal courts to do what the executive branch should have asked them to do all along: uphold the rule of law and close down the illegal marijuana industry.”
In a statement, Cynthia Coffman, Colorado’s attorney general, said she would “defend the state’s marijuana laws”.
David Thompson, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, could not be reached for comment, but he told the Associated Press it was “a bedrock principle of the United States constitution that federal law is the supreme law of the land”.
“The people of Colorado are free to advocate for a change [to federal drug law], but they must do so through their elected representatives in Congress.”
