{"id":62375,"date":"2017-08-13T15:14:52","date_gmt":"2017-08-13T19:14:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=62375"},"modified":"2017-08-14T12:07:32","modified_gmt":"2017-08-14T16:07:32","slug":"guardian-holy-smoke-the-church-of-cannabis-in-denver-colorado","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=62375","title":{"rendered":"(Guardian) Holy smoke! The church of cannabis in Denver, Colorado"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>t started, naturally, with a group of friends smoking a joint. Steve Berke, a graduate of Yale University, was temporarily living in an old church in Denver,\u00a0<a class=\"u-underline\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/colorado\" data-link-name=\"auto-linked-tag\" data-component=\"auto-linked-tag\">Colorado<\/a>. His estate agent parents had bought the 113-year-old building with the plan to turn it into flats. He and Lee Molloy, as well as a few friends, had just moved from Miami to capitalise on Colorado\u2019s lucrative marijuana market. But then, in the words of Lee: \u201cWe started having these stupid, fantastical conversations. What if we kept it as a church?\u201d So Steve convinced his parents to give him the building and, nine months later, on 20 April 2016 \u2013 4\/20, as it\u2019s known in the United States, the unofficial pothead\u2019s holiday (because it\u2019s 4.20pm somewhere, right?) \u2013 the International Church of Cannabis opened its doors with its own chapel, theology and video game arcade.<\/p>\n<p>From the outside all appears normal: red-brick towers, blocky turrets, a classic city church in an otherwise leafy suburb of Denver. But there are giveaways. The three front doors and arched window facade have been spray-painted with silver galaxies and bright, happy-face planets. The work of legendary painter and graphic artist\u00a0<a class=\"u-underline\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/artanddesign\/2016\/dec\/08\/legal-marijuana-rebranding-artists-richard-prince\" data-link-name=\"in body link\">Kenny Scharf<\/a>, who has exhibited in the Whitney and New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art, it looks more like the backdrop for an illegal 90s rave than your typical parish church. But it\u2019s indicative of the coup that\u00a0<a class=\"u-underline\" href=\"https:\/\/www.elevationists.org\/\" data-link-name=\"in body link\">Elevation Ministries<\/a>, the non-profit company that Steve and Lee co-founded to set up the Church of Cannabis, has managed to pull off.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat mural would probably buy you next door\u2019s house,\u201d Lee says, letting me in. But they got it for the price of an air ticket for Scharf, a few days\u2019 skiing and the loan of a jacket. People love fantastical ideas.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/global\/2017\/aug\/13\/church-of-cannabis-denver-colorado?CMP=share_btn_tw\">Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>t started, naturally, with a group of friends smoking a joint. Steve Berke, a graduate of Yale University, was temporarily living in an old church in Denver,\u00a0Colorado. His estate agent parents had bought the 113-year-old building with the plan to<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=62375\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[209,99,108],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-americau-s-a","category-drugsdrug-addiction","category-religion-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62375"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62405,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62375\/revisions\/62405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}