What would the Garden State be like with legal weed in its gardens?
It’s no longer an abstract question. Two bills legalizing recreational marijuana are filtering through the Legislature, and Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy campaigned on signing them into law.
But how would that work, exactly? Could adult New Jerseyans really go to a drive-thru and buy a joint as easily as a Big Mac?
Actually, yes.
New Jersey’s lawmakers are patterning much of their legislation on Colorado’s, where marijuana has been legal for adult recreational use since 2014. And it’s a state where buying weed is now so easy, you literally don’t even have to get out of your car to do so.
NJ Advance Media traveled out to the Rockies to take a look for ourselves. For a full week last December, we toured towns large and small to see how cannabis legalization has drastically changed Colorado.
One such small town was Parachute, Colorado, which initially spurned marijuana sales, then fell on tough times and became home to the state’s first drive-thru weed dispensary, Tumbleweed Express.
It’s the brainchild of Mark Smith, a former pawn shop magnate (Smith once owned 23 of them before selling out to EZ Pawn) and who today owns a passel of weed dispensaries.
Smith’s Tumbleweed Express will celebrate its first anniversary this April, and it may just become a model for New Jersey.
Of course, in order to comply with Colorado state law, all marijuana retailers there must conduct their sales inside an existing dispensary. That means you can’t really “drive-thru” so much as “drive in” to Tumbleweed Express.If this seems like a process that more aptly resembles a car wash than a Mickey D’s, you’re more right than you realize: Tumbleweed is, fittingly, housed in a former car wash in rural Parachute, Colorado.
As for the likelihood of drive-thru weed in New Jersey, consider this: Last September, Smith joined other investors in Cannabis Acquistion Stategies Group, which hopes to find new markets to invest in legal cannabis around the world.
By December, Smith’s Cannabis Acquisition Corp closed its initial public offering and finished its final prospectus to raise $125,000,000 on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
“We’re very much interested in — and looking closely at — New Jersey,” Smith told NJ Advance Media in late December during a visit to New York.
We’ll address how Tumbleweed Express helped save Parachute from financial ruin in the weeks to come, but in the meantime, take a tour of the store in our video, above. It might just be the future of marijuana in New Jersey.
credit:420intel.com