“Britta at that point shifted the focus and thought it would be the better story,” says Shapiro, who grew up in Bath, Ohio, and says she still has fond memories of smoking weed (out of an apple, no less) for the very first time in 1994 at a Steve Miller concert at Blossom. “Britta had done a similar documentary in 2008 called Convention. It followed the Rocky Mountain News staff as they reported on the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Having that experience with the newsroom and hearing that The Denver Post had made this decision was the tipping point.”
The film’s camera crew was on the ground with Baca from day one, following him over the course of that year as he built the Post’s website, The Cannabist, from scratch along with a team of journalists. The resulting documentary, Rolling Papers, follows his exploits. It opens on Friday at the Cedar Lee Theatre.
Baca defies the stoner stereotype. A serious reporter committed to his craft even in the wake of mass layoffs and downsizing, he approaches the subject with the scrutiny of an investigative reporter. In one scene, he even exposes an edibles company that’s been lying about the THC content of its products.
“He’s been with the Post for 13 years,” says Shapiro, who also contributes to the Post as a freelancer. “He was the music editor prior to becoming the marijuana editor. He launched Reverb, which was their music site. He translated the work into The Cannabist, which is really impressive especially with it being such a high profile news story. It’s not accepted everywhere as it is in Colorado but he’s able to turn it into what it is today. I’m coincidentally also a writer for The Cannabist. That happened at the same time but not intentionally. Having the opportunity to work with him as my editor and follow him as a filmmaker is a unique experience. I’ve learned so much from him. It’s been a whirlwind of a two-year project.”
Much like the craft beer industry, which has blossomed in the past decade, the weed industry in Colorado has blossomed. With its artfully filmed shots of various strands of marijuana, Rolling Papers captures the way the weed industry has embraced designer strands of pot.
“We had this concrete deadline. We started shooting on January 1 of 2014 and wrapped up one year later on January 1 of 2015,” says Shapiro. Now it’s two years later and the film is coming out. Even in that second year, the business and industry part exploded and new things are happening every day. [The Cannabist] is doing great and since we wrapped a lot has happened as well. They launched a weekly cannabis show. Ricardo is the host they have different guests on every week. Those run through Denver Post TV. There have been some changes with some of the writers, but everyone is still involved in some way or another. It’s still an active and thriving site.”
This article appears in Feb 17-23, 2016.
“Acclaimed”?!? I beg to differ; the only people who could be doing so are its promoters. The Denver Post and its creature, the Cannabist, have consistently falsified the history of efforts against Prohibition in Colorado and disinformed the public; this “Pot [sic] Doc” cannot but be more of the same. The Post would airbrush away all the people and ideas opposing the Establishment’s ongoing felonization of cannabis and failure to regulate cannabis according to Colorado’s Constitution or its own laws. The Bolsheviks were not so intent on wiping out history as the Post/Cannabist. No good has or can come from their incessant lies about cannabis, and many must be in this supposed documentary!
Reality here, for those curious enough to do a little legal research, is reflected in our statutes against cannabis, embodied in C.R.S. 18-18-406. It’s not enjoyable reading, but if you compare the statutes with what Article XVIII, Section 16 (3) “Personal use of marijuana” of our Constitution says, you will find that they conflict — wildly. Unbeknownst to most people who live here or elsewhere, Colorado’s Establishment set with a will on a quiet revolution against Amendment 64 the moment it passed, reflected in a slew of blatantly unconstitutional laws and regulations. Read the statute cited above to discover that sales of cannabis across most of Colorado remain felonious, that cultivating seven plants for personal use is a felony, and that cannabis is up to a level 1 drug felony — arrests, while way down compared to 2012, are again climbing.
Amendment 64 was an initiative of the Marijuana Policy Project and other national groups, not a grassroots initiative of Coloradans. It succeeded not because people who use cannabis voted for it but because people who do not use cannabis did. All possible political support for change is now co-opted by the general misperception that cannabis is legal, with the connivance or obliviousness of our clueless, prohibitionist General Assembly, the so-called “industry”, fake activists sucking up to the political establishment, and, most importantly, the anti-journalists at the Post. To cite a single example of the Post’s misdirection, it has been going on a year since the City of Denver started acting unilaterally against contaminated cannabis without the State agency which has statutory responsibility to keep pesticides off the cannabis it supposedly regulates ever acting; the Post/Cannabist has never once mentioned the Marijuana Enforcement Division (much less questioned its failure to do its job) in connection with contaminated cannabis in about two dozen articles about Denver halting the sale of contaminated cannabis! We have every reason to believe that much or all of the cannabis being sold through State-licensed dispensaries in Colorado is contaminated with pesticides, yet the Post has ignored the implications for the State’s regulation of cannabis that Denver alonse acts against contaminated cannabis being sold here.
Baca was an entertainment hack for the Post; now, he serves up the Cannabist’s weirdly schizophrenic mix of the same prohibitionist propaganda the Post directs at its suburban subscribers together with a few vacuous puff-pieces about cannabis-culture; the notion that he is “a serious journalist” is contemptible! This review abets the Post in its falsification of Colorado’s recent history and substitution of a set of lies for it. Read it with a critical eye and you can see that it is based on nothing but a tissue of self-promotion. Shameful garbage!
“He was the music editor prior to becoming the marijuana editor. ” That was definitely an LOL moment.
Who else could you have as a weed editor, except a former music editor? [snort]
Maybe a food editor???…[smirk]