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A community curbs pain pill abuse, but heroin addiction grows
In December 2014, as snow clung to the San Luis Valley in southwestern Colorado, nurses in the community helped deliver four babies that tested positive for opiates, a drug that had been passed down to...
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The Colorado Independent 2016 Candidate Questionnaire
This year, for the first time ever, The Colorado Independent sent out a questionnaire to all the candidates running in Colorado’s House and Senate races. The 17-question survey asks our incumbent and...
View ArticleWithout medical aid-in-dying, some patients choose to die violently. Sheryl...
There was a stark difference between who Sheryl Randall was most of her life and who she had become when she tied a rope around her neck last year. Randall, 67, was a financial planner in Evergreen....
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How a Colorado valley became the center of the Milky Way
Just after sunset in the tiny town of Westcliffe, 147 miles south and west of Denver, two dozen people begin gathering in the Bluff, a park on the edge of town. The hilly Bluff overlooks the Wet...
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Griego: Gone to Market
This past spring, I received a marketing postcard from my former real estate agent in Denver. The card was one of those oversized, glossy types advertising a listing for a Northside brick bungalow. My...
View ArticleAmendment 71, aka “Raise the Bar,” explained
Amendment 71, or “Raise the Bar,” is a rare beast— a ballot initiative about ballot initiatives. The measure, which seeks to make it harder to change Colorado’s Constitution, has fervent support and...
View ArticleGriego: The unseen reach of an affordable housing crisis
Around 3 p.m. on Sept. 23, Patrick Hale – once married, once living in a lovely Victorian home in north Denver, once driving a BMW – signed onto the Denver Housing Authority website from a computer at...
View ArticleHard-to-trace ‘gray money’ raises the stakes in big Colorado races
With the election only a month away and mail ballots due out in less than two weeks, “gray money” groups are pouring millions of dollars into Colorado’s most contentious state House and Senate races....
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Mysterious dark-money fliers target highly contested Colorado House and...
Anonymous fliers are targeting candidates in the suburban battlegrounds of hotly contested Colorado House and Senate races — a tactic political observers say is a new and troubling development in state...
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FRACTURED, Part IV: Why it took years to shut down Texas Tea
Cover image: Photos of a Texas Tea well in Brighton from 2012 and 2016 show that no action was taken by Texas Tea to clean up its mess. As of today, no one has cleaned up the site, which is still...
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Editor’s view: BAD FAITH
The retrial of Clarence Moses-EL for a 1987 sex assault starts Nov. 7th in Denver District Court. Moses-EL, 60, served 28 years in prison before a judge threw out his convictions last December. Newly...
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Battle for the Capitol: What’s at stake if Colorado’s Legislature flips?
WALSENBURG, CO — On a recent Wednesday in the back of the Alpine Rose Cafe, an old-school diner with cracked green vinyl booths in this rural town in Spanish Peaks country, a mail-in ballot belonging...
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Griego: The dignified life of Carrie Ann Lucas
The most vocal critic of a proposed ballot measure that would let dying people take prescribed life-ending drugs is a 44-year-old lawyer and disability rights activist named Carrie Ann Lucas. It is...
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FRACTURED, Part V: Trouble in Triple Creek
Over the past decade, Colorado has grappled with how to balance the enormous economic value of oil and gas production, including tax revenues and jobs, with its unwanted impacts on residential...
View ArticleHomestretch: All our coverage of medical aid-in-dying
As ballot initiatives go, Prop. 106 lends itself to some especially intriguing stories. On the pro-side, there are people dying, in pain, desperate for some control over their last days, for peace of...
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GREENE: A new trial in Clarence Moses-EL’s very old case
This is the story of an August night in 1987. It’s about a brutal rape, the gauzy lines between dreams and memory, and the web of distortions Denver law enforcement has been willing to weave in the...
View ArticleGREENE: There’s nothing sweeter than an exoneration. And also nothing sadder.
Twenty-nine years, two months, and 28 days. That’s how long it took Clarence Moses-EL to disentangle himself from a rape he didn’t commit, a 48-year prison sentence for a wrongful conviction, and the...
View ArticlePresident Trump and the future of Colorado’s public lands
On Jan. 21, 2016, nearly one year to the day before he will be sworn in as president of the United States, Donald Trump gave an interview to Field & Stream magazine on the issue of public lands....
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Forced pooling is not mandatory swim practice
A slightly different version of this story first appeared in the Boulder Weekly. When James Sines shopped for homes in 2007, he thought he knew how to pick a neighborhood that would never be drilled...
View ArticleAid-in-dying is legal in Colorado. What happens next?
Hospitals and doctors across Colorado are preparing for a new law that will soon allow qualified, terminally ill patients to obtain a lethal dose of barbiturates to voluntarily end their lives. Medical...
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