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COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO. -- The governor's TASk force on marijuana regulations submitted 14 suggestions Thursday, and local cannabis business advocates have some things to say.

Their suggestions included:
-Create an excise tax of 15 percent paid by marijuana stores at wholesale level
-Create a special marijuana sales tax paid by consumers
-Allow employers to fire employees for off-the-job marijuana use
-Allow marijuana sales to out-of-state residents visiting Colorado
-Restrict where and how marijuana stores can advertise
-Require marijuana to be sold in child-proof packaging
-Clarify that marijuana given away in exchange for a donation is illegal
-Include marijuana in smoking ban at bar and restaurants, effectively barring cannabis clubs
-Require marijuana grown at home to be in a room with walls and a ceiling. No outdoor marijuana growing.
-Require state and local approval for marijuana stores
-Create a seed-to-sale regulatory system for recreational marijuana businesses similar to medical-marijuana dispensaries.
-Require marijuana products to have labels of potency
-Restrict access to the drug by minors.
-Provide law enforcement officers with new training to catch impaired drivers.

Those suggestions are now with the legislature, which must pass them into law before the end of session in May.
But Colorado Springs City Council still needs to decide.

Mark Slaugh and KC Stark, local marijuana business owners and advocates are spending their spare time educating city council candidates and citizens.
They're calling it a "green revolution" saying it's all about upholding our rights.

"Freedom of speech, and the freedom to redress our government for greivences," Slaugh explained, "and Amendment 64 has done that. The grievence being that prohibition doesn't work."

"Colorado Springs is the Silicon Valley of marijuana," Stark added, "Cannabis research, extraction principles, vaporization technology, cures for cancer, cures for Leukemia. I mean, it's happening right here in Colorado Springs, this is not about getting high anymore. This is about raising our economy, raising our awareness."

Stark owns a private cannabis club called "Studio A64". He said some of the suggestions are scary for business owners, especially restricting advertising which he called "succumbing to fear."
"If the Westboro Baptist Church can go outside my friends and families' funerals and call them bigots, bastards and going to hell, then damn you if you try to stop me from advertising. Damn you if you try to take away free speech," he declared.

They are determined to protect and defend the business ventures they say will support our community with tax money instead of encouraging black-market buys and using tax dollars to "put people in jail because of a plant." That's why they're spending days and nights pushing politicians to support what 55 percent of Colorado supported in November's vote.

"The voters have spoken in Colorado and now it's time to look for an innovative new way forward rather than continue to look at the past and wish that it was something else," Slaugh said.