From our window, looking left across the street, we can see a squat old cinder-block building that sits diagonally on its corner lot. I remember when it housed a gas station, then a taqueria, and afterward, for at least a decade, an import rug store that was always 'going out of business,' until, contrary to all expectations, it went out of business. The building lay vacant for a year or so, but now it's found a new purpose. It's a medical marijuana "dispensary." (Marijuana, when used for the relief of pain or nausea, is legal in Colorado).
When we're curious, and willing to make the effort, we watch the arrival of the chronically afflicted patients. The are uniformly youthful and they come by car, on foot, on bicycle, on skates or skateboard or scooter. The only vehicle in which they don't arrive is the wheelchair.
In fact, neither "our" dispensary nor any other dispensary bothers to pretend that their product (aka stash) is anything but recreational. GreenLeaf Farmacy, for example, advertises Kief Hash! at $25/gram. Boulder Wellness Center offers "High Quality Medical Marijuana: Tinctures, Vaporizers, Ointments, Teas, and More." TopShelf Alternatives competes at $10/Gram and with "your choice of 34 home grown strains. Edibles include Mile High Ice Cream." DrReefer specializes in "clones." Boulder MM Dispensary is "an upscale establishment with high quality medicine." Colorado Patients First, "where compassion for patients and quality of medicine comes first," offers "Sour Kush, Big Blue, Opium, AK-47, Maui Mist, Jack White, and Pot of Gold." For each painful disease, apparently, its own uniquely targeted variety of ganja. To judge by the exuberance of the clientele, the "medicines" must be alleviating tons of pain.
How did it happen? Some years ago, voters approved an amendment to the state constitution legalizing the medical use of marijuana. The argument was compelling (and I voted for it). Marijuana mitigates chronic pain and also minimizes the nausea that accompanies chemotherapy. Until this year, the state's Department of Public Health had limited individual physicians to five such suffering patients. But then a judge ruled that the constitutional amendment did not impose such limits, and, in the words of John Milton, "all hell broke loose."
There's no zoning (as with liquor outlets), no sin tax (because marijuana is a prescription drug), and no decorum.
"The latest data from the Medical Marijuana Registry maintained by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment shows that as of Dec. 15, 2009, a total of 820 licensed physicians had authorized medical marijuana for 15,800 patients. Of those 820 physicians, just 15 accounted for 73 percent of total patients, and just five have authorized 49 percent of all recommendations." There are now more than eighty marijuana dispensaries in our town. (There are just ten traditional pharmacies.) It makes one wonder about the size of the underground economy.
It's the Wild West -- unregulated, unbridled capitalism! It's a growth industry!
It's also massively hypocritical.
Why don't we just legalize marijuana, and then regulate and tax it the way we do liquor and tobacco? Of course, neither liquor nor tobacco pays its way -- the social cost of both drugs well exceed their revenues -- but that's a topic for another day.
There are bills in the legislature to regulate the marijuana industry and everyone knows that within a year there will be tight new restrictions. But until then, we will much enjoy the scene at the corner store.
[Update March 15, 2023. Pearl Maneli writes: MMJ, as it's often called, is now legal in Colorado, but the store visible from our window no longer sells it; the building has been transformed into an upscale i.e. expensive pizzeria.]
Comments