GRAND JUNCTION — Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman is vigorously, if reluctantly, defending Colorado’s legislation regulating marijuana against a lawsuit filed by Nebraska and Oklahoma, stating to Club 20 that a recent indictment of 32 people pretending to be medical marijuana growers shows that Colorado is striving to prevent illegally grown pot from entering other states.

The Supreme Court has not yet agreed to hear the Midwestern states’ complaint, but Attorney General Coffman filed a brief with the court in late March arguing that Nebraska’s and Oklahoma’s objections are better directed toward the federal government, which has relaxed enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act to allow many states to legalize medical and recreational marijuana without extensive federal interference.

“We are figuring it out as we go,” Coffman told a Colorado Mesa University lunchroom full of Western Slope dignitaries on March 28. “They object to our regulatory scheme, that is designed to track marijuana from seed to sale and do our very best to control the flow of marijuana into the gray and black markets.”

Some leakage is inevitable, Coffman said, because “pot tourists” leaving Colorado want to take legal marijuana out of the state into states where it remains illegal. Colorado’s post offices seized quite a lot of outbound marijuana in December that was intended as Christmas gifts, Coffman said.

But, with federal cooperation, multi-million dollar operations like the Denver growers’ warehouse that was shipping 400 pounds of pot per week to Minnesota and other states will be investigated and put out of business, Coffman vowed.

“It is up to the federal agencies that control enforcement to keep marijuana out of their states,” she said.

In fact, Colorado may be forced by the Oklahoma/Nebraska lawsuit to sue the federal government as “necessary parties into the case,” Coffman said.

The interstate lawsuit specifically targets Colorado’s regulatory system for managing medical and recreational marijuana grow operations and dispensary sales, she explained.

“If they would strike down all the laws and regulations that our General Assembly has put in place to administer Amendment 64 to control what is happening with growth and sale of marijuana, we would be left with legalized marijuana in Colorado but no way to regulate it,” Coffman told the mostly conservative but chuckling crowd.

Coffman, a former deputy attorney general, is a Republican who was against Colorado voters’ legalization of marijuana.

She drew laughs when she explained that former Attorney General John Suthers told her, “Good luck with that lawsuit,” not long after her 2014 election.

“It certainly makes for great headlines,” she said, stating that she has been asked to speak about marijuana in many locales. “I don’t think I would have chosen, back when I was going to law school, to be the marijuana queen.”

Because Colorado was one of the first states to have both medical and recreational marijuana, it’s in a unique position to advise the 23 states that have legalized medical marijuana and the other three states — Alaska, Washington and Oregon (as well as the District of Columbia) — that have thus far legalized recreational marijuana, according to Coffman.

“Here in Colorado, we need to share the knowledge and the experience that we have had,” Coffman said. “There are 23 states in the United States that have legalized medical marijuana, and we have told those folks that you are on the precipice now of having legalized, recreational marijuana, because that is the progression.”

Criminal enterprises from other states have invaded Colorado to take advantage of the interstate black market opportunities created by the state’s legalized marijuana market, Coffman said.

“This group of 32 individuals, many of them family members… and several other co-conspirators, were brought into this business of growing and distributing marijuana outside of the state of Colorado,” Coffman said. “Their approach was to legitimize and use as cover the fact that they said they were operators for medical marijuana. They were actually working in a warehouse in Denver, in a warehouse district where there were a lot of grow operations. It was one of their colleagues working around them that noticed something amiss.”

The conspiracy also ran massage parlors and rented out warehouse space to other, legitimate growers of marijuana, Coffman explained. A hash oil-related butane explosion at the warehouse had been previously investigated, she said. Several of the conspirators were pilots with their own airplanes who would fly the marijuana to other states.

“Needless to say, they won’t be flying any more, in airplanes at least,” Coffman said. “We’re looking forward to prosecuting them.”

— Ron Bain is The Colorado Statesman’s Western Slope correspondent