Where there’s weed smoke, there’s fire. In Leadville last month, this was literally the case, as a pot shop incinerated along with its mind-altering wares. The acrid smoke was so harmful to residents that homes were evacuated. The local public health agency told people to stay indoors or wear masks for a half-mile around town.

This is yet another underreported harm of allowing mass commercialized weed dealing in our state. It should be uncontroversial to acknowledge it, even for industry folks. 

Or so one would think. 

High Times, one of the marijuana industry’s largest national propaganda outlets, couldn’t bring itself to admit the obvious. On Jan. 12, it published a bizarre piece running cover for the industry on the Leadville pot shop fire. And even though the town is more than 10,000 feet in elevation, you’d have to be even higher than that to buy what High Times is selling here.

The magazine took serious issue with the way the story was reported locally, as well as with how people talked about it online. It headlined its glaze-job: “A Dispensary Burned. If This Was a Pharmacy Fire, Nobody Would Be Joking.” 

“(L)anguage matters,” it argued. “When the headline centers the marijuana instead of the fire, it invites a different reading. The building fades into the background. The emergency response becomes secondary. Cannabis becomes the subject, and the smoke becomes a wink.”

When we legalized marijuana back in 2012, nobody had in mind the multibillion-dollar machine we would create. Additionally — and critically here — we didn’t realize the industry would follow in the footsteps of Big Tobacco, one of its largest investors, by setting up a media propaganda machine to scold local reporters for daring to speak about the harms of their products.

In a way, we should be grateful: High Times is blowing away all the smoke and saying the quiet part out loud here. For them, it’s not about the people, families and communities hurt by the industry. It’s about making sure no one talking about the harm — an actual fire in this case — makes “cannabis” the “subject,” to put it in their words. For this addiction industry, good optics take precedence over the personal, social and environmental damage it does — at any cost.

This move from the “Ministry of Truth” of pot should not surprise anyone paying attention. Even as the endless drumbeat of studies about the dangers of marijuana gets ever louder, the industry by and large still pretends marijuana isn’t a heart-damaging, brain-changing psychotropic but an all-natural good time and wonder drug. Indeed, High Times Chief Executive Josh Kesselman just put out a video mocking people worried about cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, suggesting the concern is “ludicrous.” This is a well-documented condition (also known as “scromiting,” short for scream-vomiting), which is caused by using marijuana and sends sufferers to the hospital in paroxysms of pain. CHS incidence rates rose more than 400% between 2016 and 2022, per a widely shared recent study. CHS is so serious the World Health Organization just gave the disease its own diagnostic code.

Crying foul when people object to a flaming, toxic health hazard is part of that sick posture. Whatever harm weed does, the industry can be trusted for one thing: to deny, deny, deny. Even when Main Street Coloradans have to all but call in the hazmat teams to deal with marijuana-industry fallout. 

Luke Niforatos, of Lone Tree, is executive vice president of Smart Approaches to Marijuana and the Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions.