The Denver-based marijuana advocacy groupSafer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation(SAFER) will pack the Denver Grand Hyatt on Saturday evening. The event will feature a keynote speech from former two-term New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson.

Five short years ago SAFER set out to change the way Coloradans view the recreational use of marijuana.

Having already technically legalized medical marijuana use, the state was ripe for an explosion in marijuana advocacy.

Enter Mason Tvert, the organizations’ executive director, who came to Colorado from Washington, DC’s Marijuana Policy Project in 2005. He immediately moved to label liquor-based recreation as a more dangerous vice than the habitual smoking of marijuana.

Tvert started with a shot at Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper (now a gubernatorial candidate), calling the former owner of several Denver bars a “drug dealer” on a Denver morning show.

He followed that stunt by challenging Senate candidate/beer baron Pete Coors to a drug-imbibing contest to see who would drop first; the beer drinker or the pot smoker.

Needless to say, Coors did not take up the challenge. However, five years of “reform with an attitude” has generated some major victories for Tvert and SAFER.

In 2006, SAFER successfully passed a citizen-driven initiative to decriminalize marijuana possession under 1 ounce. The campaign generated support across the state and throughout the country. While state and federal law still apply to Denver tokers, plenty of municipalities have followed suit, including Nederland & Breckinridge in Colorado.

That initiative was just the tip of the iceberg, though, as SAFER will use their gala event at the Grand Hyatt to launch their pursuit of a statewide initiative decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana.

While the target date for a petition-driven state initiative is not yet set, 2010 will already feature the Colorado State Legislature’s overhaul of medical marijuana policy. With pot all over the news, SAFER may decide to take the fight for legal recreational marijuana use to the next level with this November’s ballot.

Tvert's most recent push for marijuana decriminalization came at the Colorado State House on Thursday where he handed out "Marijuana is Safer: So why are we driving people to drink?" to female Colorado state lawmakers after a news conference to launch the Women's Marijuana Movement, calling them Mother's Day gifts.