The Mile Excessive Metropolis has a repute. Stroll by any Denver neighborhood, and also you’ll cross at the very least one dispensary, step over at the very least one trampled Zig Zag wrapper, and should catch a faint skunky scent coming from someplace close by.
This pervasive presence isn’t any accident: 2025 marks 13 years since Modification 64 formally legalized leisure hashish use in Colorado, with medical marijuana courting again even additional, 25 years to the 2000 election. So, sure, whereas “Mile High” refers back to the metropolis’s elevation above sea stage, the moniker has turn into an equally apt nickname for a foundational metropolis in American hashish historical past.
However what started as a grassroots motion for freedom and therapeutic has remodeled into one thing far much less idealistic. Beneath the entrance of a booming business, the hashish market in Colorado is exhibiting indicators of deep structural pressure. Intense competitors and shifting financial pressures have pushed down costs, resulting in precarious enterprise fashions, questionable labor practices, and requirements of manufacturing which can be inconsistent, if not outright problematic.
This previous April, the Mile Excessive 4/20 Pageant — as soon as an open-air demonstration of unapologetic advocacy — charged its attendees an entry price for the primary time, a stark image of how far Denver’s hashish scene has strayed from its founding ideas.
This transformation is inextricably linked to the underground story of one of many metropolis’s most foundational figures: Ken Gorman. Lengthy earlier than the gleaming dispensaries and commercialized festivals, Gorman was the relentless, unapologetic pressure behind Colorado’s hashish activism, famously organizing the very first 4/20 “smoke-ins” that laid the groundwork for all the pieces that adopted.
But, because the business he helped start expands and thrives, the chilling thriller of his unsolved homicide—a criminal offense that unfolded amidst his unwavering advocacy—casts a long-ignored shadow over Denver’s celebrated “green rush.”
Affected person-First Activism Price Ken Gorman His Life
A Denver native and Vietnam veteran, Gorman’s life took a defining flip after he was fired from his air site visitors controller job by Ronald Reagan in 1981. This expertise, coupled along with his discovery of Jack Herer’s “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” in 1992, ignited a lifelong dedication to revealing the reality about hashish.
However he didn’t simply advocate: he demonstrated. Gorman grew to become infamous for brazenly promoting marijuana on the again web page of foundational Denver publication Westword with audacious advertisements like “MARIJUANA – FREE DELIVERY – NO COPS – NO JOKE.” He additionally spearheaded the annual 4/20 “smoke-ins” on the State Capitol garden, remodeling them from small gatherings into a robust image of civil disobedience, laying the groundwork for Denver’s present Mile Excessive Pageant, the world’s largest open-air 4/20 celebration.
In 1999, Gorman knowingly offered three kilos of marijuana to a police informant who claimed to be shopping for it for medicinal functions. Consequently – and a press release towards prohibition – Gorman served over three years in jail and an extra two years carrying a monitoring ankle bracelet.
After Colorado voters handed medical marijuana in 2000, Gorman, a caregiver himself, grew to become instrumental in pioneering the system. He tirelessly signed up sufferers and different caregivers to extend entry to medical-grade hashish, with out shedding sight of the imaginative and prescient of full legalization for everybody. (He even ran for Colorado governor twice, incomes the affectionate nickname, “Governor Pothead.”)
In 2006, Gorman’s activism took a lethal flip when he agreed to satisfy with a 19-year-old who had contacted him by an nameless web discussion board. Unbeknownst to Gorman, {the teenager}, J. David McSwane, was working undercover for Channel 4 Information. McSwane had hidden a recording system in his day planner and captured Gorman sharing how the “nebulous language” of Modification 20 could possibly be leveraged to grant Colorado residents entry to hashish. Sharing that he was orchestrating a community of “dozens of caregivers and over a hundred patients,” Gorman doubled down on his imaginative and prescient that hashish needs to be accessible to everybody – whatever the letter of the regulation.
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“Everyone has a qualifying condition,” Gorman informed McSwane. “It’s only a matter of discovering it.
Leaving this assembly, Gorman was confronted by a Channel 4 digital camera crew. And simply six days after the information outlet’s esposé aired, Ken Gorman was shot and killed in his house.
Even past the eerie timing, the circumstances of his loss of life have been chilling. His lately bought shotgun was simply out of attain. Intruders entered beneath the guise of theft however left behind stacks of money and baggage of hashish. And even 18 years later, the Denver Police Division has made no arrests and has revealed little in regards to the investigation, leaving lingering questions on motive.
Is Denver Dropping Contact With Gorman’s Legacy?
Gorman’s tireless struggle, usually waged on the damaging fringes of legality and finally price him his life. But, whereas Gorman at all times aimed to “Take the Greed Out of Weed,” Denver’s hashish panorama has shifted dramatically within the years since his loss of life, now embodying the very company greed he opposed. The “green rush” has cultivated a mirage of progress, the place revenue often overshadows integrity and affected person welfare.
This insidious transformation is starkly evident within the commercialized 4/20 competition itself. What started as Ken Gorman’s defiant “smoke-ins” — a pure act of political rally — has morphed right into a ticketed spectacle, stripped of its protest coronary heart. Whereas the town celebrates tax revenues and pre-rolls on each nook, the fee is obvious: the profit-first mannequin is starting to corrode the business’s moral core.
READ: Creswell Mansion Closure Reveals Rising Pains in CO Hashish Business
Intense market stress results in unsafe labor practices and compromised product high quality, with even moldy or pest-infested crops generally transformed into concentrates moderately than discarded. This relentless drive for return on funding creates high-stress environments all through the availability chain.
Furthermore, the promise of accessibility and affected person care has been undermined. The state lately doubled the price of a medical card utility, creating a brand new barrier for sufferers. Concurrently, foundational medical dispensaries are struggling, unable to compete in an business that prioritizes quantity and advertising and marketing over real care.
Miguel Lopez, Gorman’s mentee who labored to maintain the origins of the 4/20 fest alive earlier than shedding his allow, has noticed this shift firsthand. As initially reported by Westword, the “nouveau riche” have turned hashish right into a “commodity,” forgetting the battles fought: “Capitalism has taken it to a level where it isn’t something that he taught us.”
A Cautionary Story For Authorized Hashish
Twenty-five years after the state legalized medical hashish, Colorado’s hashish story stays complicated. The success of authorized hashish within the Mile Excessive Metropolis continues to be beneath the shadow of what’s been misplaced. Gorman, who sacrificed his freedom and finally his life to “Free the Weed,” stays a permanent image of the motion’s radical, patient-first origins.
And but, his unsolved homicide stands as a chilling testomony to the hazards confronted by those that paved the way in which, a reminder that some foundational questions on Denver’s hashish historical past stay disturbingly unanswered – and possibly, contemplating the profit-focused shift in Colorado hashish, deliberately so.
Because the business continues its relentless pursuit of revenue, the challenges confronted by sufferers, the questionable integrity of merchandise, and the commercialization of traditions like 4/20 stand as signs of a deep disconnect from the very values that made Denver a secure scene within the first place. Denver’s journey into hashish legalization affords an important, cautionary story: with no acutely aware effort to recollect its roots and honor the U.S. historical past of persecution and discrimination towards hashish and its customers, the true spirit of the inexperienced motion dangers being misplaced.. The query now for Denver, and for the broader hashish world, is whether or not the business can lastly acknowledge its unsettled previous, reckon with its current compromises, and forge a future the place the earnings don’t overshadow the ideas.
