Welcome to Colorado Springs, where elections aren’t actually decisions, they’re just suggestions. Last November, 54% of voters said yes to recreational cannabis sales. The ongoing battle between the tax payers of Colorado Springs voting YES please on recreational cannabis, and city council basically acting like Tim Robinson from I Think You Should Leave and asking the voters, “YOU SURE ABOUT THAT?!” The city council responded the way every manipulative ex does when they don’t like reality: they gaslit the entire city, claiming voters were confused and clearly didn’t understand what they were doing. Classic toxic relationship move. “Sweetie, you didn’t actually want legal weed. You just thought you did. Let’s try this again when you’re thinking more clearly, how about April 1st?”

Yup, you read that correctly. The City Council is forcing a revote on April 1st. Just a completely normal democratic process happening on the one day known for lies and trickery.

Tom Scudder, a cannabis business owner and President of the Colorado Springs Cannabis Association, Scudder has been in this fight for eight years. At this point, he’s pretty much the William Wallace of weed, standing outside City Hall in blue war paint, yelling, “You can take our tax revenue, but you’ll never take our FREEDOM.” He’s watched the city council twist itself into a bureaucratic pretzel to avoid letting people legally buy something that is already legal ten minutes away.

To even get recreational cannabis on the ballot, 50,000 signatures had to be collected, costing $1.5 million over five years. Apparently, democracy in Colorado Springs comes with a paywall. Even more ridiculous is the way they verify those signatures. Some poor intern is out here manually checking 50,000 names. This is the same country where you can deepfake a politician in 4K, but we’re still verifying elections like it’s 1776 and John Hancock is the only guy with legible handwriting. You can literally fly a drone with your cellphone, but we’re still verifying signatures for policy like we’re authenticating the Declaration of Independence. Nobody finds that just a LITTLE odd?

Manitou Springs, a town so small it could be mistaken for an Airbnb listing, has been reaping the rewards of recreational sales for years. Two dispensaries, Maggie’s Farm and Schwazze, pull in $2.5 to $3 million each monthly. That means that those two shops in Manitou are making nearly as much per year as all 85 medical dispensaries in Colorado Springs combined. The financial impact could be massive, but the council would rather take a “moral stance.”

The real kicker is where that tax revenue would go. According to Scudder, there are three buckets: veterans’ PTSD programs, mental health services, and public safety. The city has been rejecting millions of dollars that could help vets, fund mental health initiatives, and support the police. Manitou, meanwhile, is probably using theirs to commission murals of forest spirits and turn every fire hydrant into an art installation.

This is the part where someone inevitably brings up the military. The excuse that legal weed will somehow jeopardize our military bases is one of the most bizarre arguments in the entire debacle. Apparently, the very presence of a dispensary will send NORAD packing for Nebraska. Never mind the fact that soldiers are already driving to Manitou if they want to, or that military drug policies are set at the federal level and won’t change no matter how many dispensaries open. If legal weed was such a threat to military towns, then why didn’t Fort Carson relocate in 2012 when Colorado legalized it statewide.

Native Roots deserves a BIG kudos in this ongoing saga. They own just four of the 85 dispensaries in town, yet they still threw over a million dollars into making legalization happen. That’s a real investment. Meanwhile, the city council spent its time plotting how to hit the undo button on an election. 

This isn’t just about cannabis. It’s about whether elections actually mean anything or if city leaders can just hit reset until they get the answer they want. If this re-vote works, what’s next? Do we replay every election until the losing side feels better? Do we start flipping coins?

The people voted. They weren’t confused. They knew exactly what they wanted.

The only people confused right now are the ones running this city.