It's now been six months since Colorado enacted its historic marijuana legalization policy, and two big things have already happened: 

1. Colorado's cash crop is turning out to be even more profitable than the state could have hoped.

Image credit: Tri Vo

In March alone, taxed and legal recreational marijuana sales generated nearly $19 million, up from $14 million in February, Mic's Tom McKay reports. The state has garnered more than $10 million in taxes from retail sales in the first four months, according to the state’s department of revenue — money that will go to public schools and infrastructure, as well as for youth educational campaigns about substance use.

According to his latest budget proposal, Gov. John Hickenlooper expects a healthy $1 billion in marijuana sales over the next fiscal year. That's nearly $134 million in tax revenue, according to reports. Sales from recreational shops are expected to hit $600 million, the Huffington Post reports, which is a more than 50% increase over what was originally expected.

2. Denver crime rates have suddenly fallen.

Image credit: Tri Vo

Marijuana-related arrests, which as USA Today notes make up 50% of all drug-related crimes, have plummeted in Colorado. This has in turn freed up law enforcement to focus on other criminal activity. By removing marijuana penalties, the state is estimated to save somewhere between $12 million and $40 million, according to the Colorado Center on Law and Policy.

According to government data, the Denver city- and county-wide murder rate has dropped 42.1% since recreational marijuana use was legalized in January. This is compared to the same period last year, a time frame encompassing Jan. 1 through May 31. Violent crime in general is down almost 2%, and major property crimes are down 11.5% compared to the same period in 2013.

As the Huffington Post notes, this is a far cry from wild-eyed claims by legalization opponents that legal weed was the devil's work and Colorado would see a surge in crime and drug use.

"Expect more crime, more kids using marijuana and pot for sale everywhere," said Douglas County Sheriff David Weaver in 2012. 

"I think our entire state will pay the price." Gov. Hickenlooper at one point said. "Colorado is known for many great things — marijuana should not be one of them" 

With only a quarter of the year's data to work from, it may be too soon to definitively attribute these changes to marijuana legalization, but the possibility of a correlation is certainly worth reporting.

We are witnessing the fruits of Colorado's legal weed experiment, and those fruits are juicy indeed.

Of course, Gov. Hickenlooper has completely changed his tune, saying, "While the rest of the country's economy is slowly picking back up, we're thriving here in Colorado."

With the fall of prohibition, the marijuana industry has developed rapidly, generating thousands of new jobs. It is estimated by one marijuana industry group that there are currently about 10,000 people directly involved with the blossoming weed industry, with up to 2,000 people having gained employment in the past few months alone.

A policy gamble that anti-marijuana activists warned would turn Denver into a drug-infested hellscape has provided the city and state with numerous benefits, and set the stage for more states and cities to follow suit.

Meanwhile, in Washington: In yet another sign that 2014 is shaping up to be the year of marijuana reform, the Department of Drug Enforcement (DEA) is waving a white flag and surrendering on a crucial policy issue that has kept legalization from gaining traction across the nation. They are now asking the Food and Drug Administration to remove marijuana from its list of the most dangerous and harmful drugs (which includes cocaine and heroin). This could signal a radical shift in the way our government regulates and enforces weed. Marijuana advocates applaud the decision as a necessary policy step towards eventual legalization. This helps remove a critical roadblock that has been a wet blanket on marijuana legalization on both local and federal levels. But it is, of course, the first step of many.

Then there's the city of Washington, D.C., itself. This November, it is all but certain that the District will vote on a marijuana ballot measure and even pass it, setting up a battle with Congress to legalize. This could be the most important battle yet in the marijuana prohibition fight; D.C. is considered a staging ground for many local policies that get enacted throughout the country, and a victory for pot here could open avenues elsewhere.

America agrees: Public opinion has never been more in favor of decriminalizing possession of small amounts of pot. An October 2013 Gallup poll found that 58% of adults favored legalizing marijuana for adult use.

In 2013, 52% thought that marijuana should be legalized, with 45% opposed. According to Pew, this is a 13-point jump from 2010, when 41% thought it should be legalized and 52% opposed. In 2010, Proposition 19 — which would have legalized marijuana in California — was defeated with only a 53% majority. And, this is a dramatic swing from 1969, when nearly 8 of 10 Americans opposed legalization.

Ending prohibition saves money. Since 1970, the government has spent $1.5 trillion on "drug control," though addiction rates remain constant:

Image Credit: Thugs Not Drugs via Mother Jones

If you're staring at these stark numbers and wondering why the government even bothers, you're not alone. 

Six months after marijuana legalization, Colorado has basically proved decades of federal marijuana prohibition policy wrong. The times, they are a-changin'.

Making history can often inspire people to make a change. Jay-Z and LL Cool J’s recent inductions into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame are both historic examples of hip-hop’s expansive cultural reach, and reminders of why hip-hop needs a functioning hall of fame of its own.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s inclusion of hip-hop is relatively new, and has omitted dozens of legends from joining its ranks. There wasn’t a single hip-hop act in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame until March 12, 2007, when hip-hop pioneers Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five were inducted — 25 years after the group’s seminal track “The Message” widened hip-hop’s reach by becoming one of the genre’s first hits on the Billboard charts. It wouldn’t be for another decade until the Rock HOF inducted its first solo hip-hop artist, 2Pac, after inducting legendary groups inducting acts like the N.W.A., Public Enemy, and The Beastie Boys. LL Cool J was essentially the first hip-hop star, and his induction this year comes after being nominated six times since 2010. As of 2021, only nine hip-hop artists have been inducted; a number that disrespectfully misrepresents hip-hop’s influence on popular music for more than 45 years.

Often, conversations around white establishment’s blind spots prompt calls for Black people to build and exalt their own platforms instead. To that point, there is a hip-hop hall of fame — but it’s had obstacles on its road to sustainability. The Hip Hop Hall of Fame (HHHOF) was founded in 1992 by Army veteran James “JT” Thompson, and the first induction ceremony aired on BET in 1996, inducting Run DMC, DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and DJ Red Alert, along with a bevy of other hip-hop luminaries, according to the Hip Hop Hall of Fame Museum website. There wouldn’t be another televised Hip-Hop Hall of Fame induction ceremony until 2014, an 18-year gap which organizers have attributed to the competing popularity of The Source Awards and a decrease in mainstream media attention due to the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., which took place within a year of the first televised induction ceremony.

More than any other factor, hip-hop’s hall of fame is largely forgotten about because there wasn’t a universal hall of fame for hip-hop for years. In 2002, publications touted an event held at New York’s Puck Building as the inaugural Hip-Hop Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Even with hip-hop icons like Slick Rick and Grandmaster Flash in attendance, Thompson claimed in 2010 the event was run by imposters improperly using the HHHOF moniker, which allegedly prompted BET to pull out of televising the event, according to a press release. Along with complications with the award show being co-opted by outside entities, the biggest impediment to the establishment of a hall of fame tradition for hip-hop has been the difficulty in bringing a museum to life.

Artists were getting inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for nine years before the museum’s grand opening in 1995. Thompson sought to use the same business model, and make the HHHOF the primary manner of fundraising for the museum. The hall of fame ceremony is meant to honor the artists but also help create and sustain a museum designed to do the same. Over the last 15 years, Thompson’s efforts to erect a museum have been joined by endeavors from former Bronx City Councilman Larry Seabrook, hip-hop fan Craig Wilson, and co-founder of the ‘80s hip-hop label StrongCity Records Rocky Bucano, with their own plans to build museums of their own. After funding for Seabrook’s museum plans halted following his fraud conviction in 2010, Wilson’s National Hip Hop Museum appears to have been discontinued after its website was taken down and updates have stalled over most of the last decade.

While Thompson had a 23-year head start on Bucano and promises to have the Official Hip Hop Hall of Fame Museum & Hotel Retail Entertainment Complex open in Harlem in 2023, Bucano’s Universal Hip Hop Museum broke ground in the Bronx — hip-hop’s birthplace — earlier this year in May with Nas, LL Cool J, Grandmaster Flash and a group of the most influential hip-hop pioneers in attendance. Neither Thompson nor Bucano have announced any future plans for hall of fame inductions, leaving the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as still the only institution regularly placing hip-hop artists among the pantheon of other great hip-hop artists, even if they’re largely surrounded by rock artists. But, that needs to change soon.

Artists are only eligible for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame 25 years after their first recording. With only a few handfuls of hip-hop artists in the hall, that leaves artists like Nas, The Fugees, Eric B & Rakim, Snoop Dogg, Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, and dozens of other hip-hop artists that shaped the sound of music left out, even though they fit the criteria. Whether it’s a museum, a televised award show, or a combination of both, the most popular music genre of the last four years deserves to have its legends enshrined with each other, and not being fit into a hall of fame that originally never intended to include the genre in the first place.

From the first lines of Adele’s long-anticipated fourth studio album 30, it is clear that she is not fucking around. The opening song “Strangers By Nature” begins, “I’ll be taking flowers to the cemetery of my heart / for all of my lovers in the present and in the dark.” It’s a gothically poetic line that even Adele herself admitted struck her as she wrote it in a recent Apple music interview. As the song unfurls with an orchestral arrangement, and a breathier, more falsetto’d Adele than the power piano ballads she’s known for (but are definitely still in there), she eases us in to the living room of her psyche, inviting us to come have a drink and get to know her again in this new decade of her life. Which is part of what makes 30 so magical — it’s an Adele completely unafraid to embrace the realities of getting older, and celebrate the wisdom that life experience bestows on us. It’s a record for the millennials who’ve been on this journey with her from the beginning, who bare the emotional scars of time just as she does.

In the same interview, she spoke with Zane Lowe about how she’s staying true to herself as an artist — something she’s arguably always done, and almost as an anomaly — but that her team required a bit more insistence this time around. She told Lowe that management had mentioned making some songs on the album geared towards TikTok so that “14-year-olds would know who [she] was.” “They’ve all got mums!” she charmingly quips. “If everyone is making music for the TikTok, who is making music for my generation? Who is making music for my peers? I will do that job, gladly. I’d rather cater to people who are on my level with the time I’ve spent on earth, and all of the things we’ve been through. I don’t want 12-year-olds listening to this record. It’s a bit too deep. But the 30 and 40-year-olds who are committing to themselves and doing therapy — that’s my vibe cause that’s what I was doing. I’m more concerned with how this record can help them.”

Stick it to the TikTok, babes; we love to see it. Adele has never had to court trends, curate aesthetics or morph to what’s popular to achieve the smashing success she’s had since her debut. But for her to take this stance is refreshing in today’s overwhelmingly digitized age, when it’s getting easier for Millennials and Gen X to feel lost in the online chaos of horned up youth and silly oversharing. The insistence on all entertainment marketing to Gen Z as if they are the ultimate barometer of success is exhausting for those of us who know what life was like before the feeding frenzy of the internet. And in true, exhilarating Adele fashion, she’s delivered us an album that refuses to cape to any of those modern pressures. She reminds us on this record that like fine wine, we are only getting better — even if that process can be brutally hard won.

30 is just as soulful as her prior triumphs on 25, 21 and 19, but proves poppier and more sonically dynamic. It feels somewhere between a wine night with an old friend staying up until dawn, and a bloody good therapy session. She delicately slips in soul-crushing voice memos, while taking us on the bumpy journey of exiting your twenties. She assuages the weary, “Cry your heart out; it’ll clean your face / When you’re in doubt, go at your own pace,” on “Cry Your Heart Out.” She laments the ease of artificial escape and self-destruction on “I Drink Wine:” “When I was a child, every single thing could blow my mind / Soaking it all up for fun, but now I only soak up wine.” She speaks to how soul crushing leaving a failed relationship can be on “To Be Loved:” “It’s a sacrifice, but I can’t live a lie / Let it be known, let it be known that I tried.” Adele has always been a universal treasure, but she did something extra special on this record. She symbolically went beyond just critical success — she gave her generation the gift of seeing us, in our awkward aging glory, and letting her journey be not just revelatory on 30, but relatable for a demographic who doesn’t get given cultural gifts like this very often anymore.

On Wednesday, a judge in Los Angeles ruled that Britney Spears’s father, Jamie Spears, will be removed as the conservator of her estate.

Speaking in court, Britney’s attorney Matthew Rosengart accused Jamie of being “cruel, toxic, and abusive,” and said, “this man does not belong in her life for another day.” An accountant chosen by Britney and her lawyer will temporarily take over Jamie’s duties.

Britney has been in the conservatorship since 2008, but had been mostly silent on her feelings about the situation until June of this year when she told a court that she felt the arrangement was “abusive” and that she wanted out. “I just want my life back,” she said at the time.

Like most things in Britney’s life, from Starbucks runs to psychiatric crises, the court hearings related to her conservatorship have become something of a circus. Since 2019, fans have been holding #FreeBritney rallies outside the courthouse whenever the conservatorship is on the docket.

During Wednesday’s hearing, a couple hundred fans and about as many members of the media gathered in the street outside the courthouse. For about five hours, the crowd waited, occasionally marching while chanting slogans about freeing Britney and putting various members of her family and team in prison. The rally was billed as a unity rally, and speakers talked about conservatorships in general, and other people who they feel have been unfairly placed in the system. When the judge’s decision was announced, the crowd was overjoyed. People began cheering and crying in the street.

Another hearing to decide whether the conservatorship should be ended altogether has been scheduled for November 12.