GREEN ENVY

Old Pot Convictions Can Be Quashed

Retroactive legalization in Colorado.

The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday that the state's legalization law, Amendment 64, can be applied retroactively to minor drug offenses, but only if convicted drug users had already started appealing when the new law came into force. The decision came in a case from 2010 when a woman was convicted of possessing small amounts of pot, which is now legal. “The fact that a court in Colorado, one of the first two states to do this, came to this conclusion will hopefully have some impact on how courts in other places look at this,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. However the ruling will not affect convictions from decades ago.