Earlier this month, Gov. John Hickenlooper joined governors from other states that have legalized cannabis consumption — both for medical use and just for fun — in a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Extending an olive branch, the governors reasonably ask the Trump Cabinet members to “engage with us before embarking on any changes to regulatory and enforcement systems.”

The letter asks for a continuation of the status quo as practiced by the Obama administration, and we completely agree. Overall, as we have argued many times in our pages, the legalization experiment has been a success. Gone are the bad old days of filling jails and prisons with users of a drug that’s shown again and again to be safer than alcohol.

Hickenlooper’s collaboration with his peers should matter to Sessions and Mnuchin, and not simply because he is the governor of the first state to open its doors to legal recreational cannabis sales. The former businessman certainly cannot be called a stooge for the weed industry. Hickenlooper was against the voter-approved Amendment 64 that legalized recreational sales here, and he maintains an arms-length approach to the experiment.

Read more at The Denver Post.