Legal marijuana business interests have had more than a year to imagine the riches it will bring and get in position to compete for them, once New Jersey gets around to carrying out the commercialization of the drug it authorized last year.
Perhaps with so much time waiting for the reality of legal sales of a drug that’s long been readily available illegally, flights of fancy about that cannabis future should be expected.
Stockton University’s Lloyd D. Levenson Institute of Gaming, Hospitality and Tourism invited views of that future as it relates to tourism in a recent virtual panel discussion. Partners in the event were the Greater Atlantic City Chamber and Stockton’s cannabis studies program.
Some suggested cannabis tourism might be much like wine tourism, with people visiting marijuana growers instead of vineyards, tasting varieties of the drug and purchasing some. A member of a Canadian social studies and humanities council said Canada, which legalized marijuana in 2018, allows that.
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Others suggested restaurants might serve cannabis-infused food to get a meal and get high at the same time. Among participants was the operator of a Seattle company making cannabis edibles.
Another possibility for the visitor market will be marijuana lounges for buying and consuming. Licensed cannabis sellers may have such a lounge with municipal approval, but only nine of the state’s more than 500 municipalities have agreed so far, including Atlantic City. Also suggested were events and concerts to entertain users of the mild hallucinogen.
Some of these pipe dreams already face hurdles under the existing law. For example, it strictly limits the sale of cannabis edibles and prohibits consumption in public. Both of those probably will be eased after sales begin.
The expected business from New York visitors already looks unrealistic, since that state too has legalized cannabis and is like this one in the process of working out the commercialization details. Unlicensed marijuana dispensaries have already spread across New York City despite warnings from state regulators.
On our way to a Vermont vacation we checked out a marijuana store in western Massachusetts, the nearest legal state. We didn’t want the drug, just to see the reality of commercial marijuana.
The cannabis vendor was like a small pharmacy with just one product segment. Getting through the locked door required scanning and validating the customer’s photo identification. Multiple sales clerks were ready to provide cannabis consumer information.
The array of mind-altering products included leaves and buds for smoking, candies and baked goods, tinctures and other distillations for ingesting with drinks or food or vaping.
A clerk said users need to be aware of how much THC — marijuana’s active ingredient — they’re consuming. That requires multiplying the amount of THC per milligram or milliliter by the changing amount of product consumed.
The clerk stressed that as with many drugs, users can build a tolerance to cannabis and require ever higher doses to achieve the same effect. He said a manager of the store had gotten to consuming $350 worth of the drug per week.
The store didn’t take credit cards, only cash or debit cards. In the city of about 150,000 we passed through, there seemed to be a dozen recreational cannabis stores.
A participant in the Stockton panel said early legalizer California is working on establishing name brands for varieties of marijuana. More helpful would be food-store-like consumer information, telling the price per milligram of THC.
The concert tie-in could work, but probably only if the state allows an event license so existing shows and concerts can also offer cannabis as they would alcoholic beverages.
There is a half-century history of people using marijuana in private, with friends and at parties and such. Since the drug doesn’t reduce inhibition the way alcohol does, using it with strangers in a lounge may not be very popular.
New markets often attract too many sellers, and then there is a sorting out of stores based on price and service. That seems likely in commercial marijuana.
And with marijuana already legal in many states and more to come, there may not be as much travel to get or use cannabis as entrepreneurs imagine.
Legalizing the drug also means normalizing it, making it more routine, even boring. Only then will the downsides of it become more apparent.
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