CANNABIS CONVENTION AIMS TO BOGART ITSELF A PLACE IN HISTORY

Inside the Colorado Convention Center, a woman in a faded ball cap
picks up a glass pipe -- with its swirling shades of blue and elegant
design curves -- as if she were an archaeologist beholding a great
treasure. Think Indiana Jones, but with marijuana paraphernalia.

"This is freaking sick!" she exclaims. "I think I'm in love. Like,
seriously."

Behind the counter, Noah Holland grins. Asked earlier whether anyone
ever thought his creations -- hand-blown items that cost as little as
$20 or as much as $1,200 -- are too pretty to light, he shrugged off
the suggestion.

"It's something," said Holland, the owner of a shop called Head Space
in Kansas City, that "you're going to look at every day, right?"

Welcome to the first ever Colorado Cannabis Convention, a sprawling
expanse of 300-plus canna-business booths competing for the attention
of thousands of customers strolling by -- the sick, the stoned and the
merely curious.

There are dispensaries and cannabis-themed magazines, security
companies and insurance firms. There are cooking displays, marijuana
growing services and hemp fashion shows. Businesses with catchy names
- -- The Dead Shed, the Mad Batter Baking Company -- and others with,
er, catchy visuals: seductive pitchwomen wearing tall boots, low tops
and as little as possible in between.

In short, it's marijuana Disneyland.

"Did you ever think you'd see the day," event organizer Michael
Lerner, a marijuana media magnate from California, shouted into a
microphone, "when there would be a huge cannabis convention at the
Colorado Convention Center?"

Indeed, convention organizers have touted the event as a seminal
moment in pot history. The event's 200,000 square feet of exhibition
space makes it the largest such convention in the nation's history,
they say. And they are hoping it will attract more than 100,000 people
by the time it closes at 10 tonight, a total that would more than
double the annual turnout at such popular local expos as the Great
American Beer Festival.

"It's good to see," said medical-marijuana patient Ken
Rosenblum.

Cannabis entrepreneurs said they hoped the convention would raise
awareness and spread information about medical marijuana, both to the
converted and the uninitiated. None of the booths have any marijuana
on hand, and some attendees Friday night brought their children along.

A few blocks away, a different kind of festival took place. Raymond
Springsteel -- a Boulder promoter who originally conceived of the idea
for the convention before being forced out in a nasty legal fight --
held a small gathering at The Farmacy, a Lower Downtown dispensary. He
played music with buddies, brought in a few local bands and enjoyed
the company of friends.

He vowed to keep fighting to clear his name.

"I feel like my art has been ripped away from me," he said. "But if
the cause is served and the community is served by the convention,
then it's worth it."