Massachusetts Just Opened the First Legal Weed Shops on the East Coast
It has been a banner year for cannabis. In the midterms, Michigan voted to legalize recreational marijuana while Utah and Missouri approved initiatives on medicinal use. Canada legalized the stuff throughout the Great White North, and innovations in cannabis products like weed beer are following quickly behind. And today, Massachusetts opened its very first legal weed shops, welcoming recreational use to the East Coast for the first time ever. That wind off the Atlantic feels good, doesn't it?
NBC News reports that two legal cannabis shops are now open in Massachusetts, two years after the state voted to legalize it in 2016. (It takes time to set up regulations for retail stores.) Both sites are medical marijuana facilities; Massachusetts legalized that back in 2012. By 8 a.m. folks were already lining up, thousands of them according to reports. At the New England Treatment Access in Northhampton, the first in line to buy his cannabis was their mayor David Narkewicz, an Air Force veteran who made a "symbolic" purchase of a THC chocolate bar.
"My plan actually will be to preserve it and display it, because it will be a historic purchase here in the city," he said at a press conference the day before. Send it to the damn Smithsonian.
At Cultivate Holdings in Leicester, Army veteran Stephen Mandile, who served in Iraq and advocates for medical marijuana, made the first purchase. He said cannabis has helped him handle PTSD and anxiety.
"I probably dreamed about it back in high school that this day would happen sometime, but to be actually able to do it today is amazing," he told NBC Boston. "To have veterans be recognized, not just myself, but to bring other veterans with me and to have it focused around that, it's super special to me."
In Massachusetts, you have to be 21 or older to purchase pot, and only one ounce of marijuana or five grams of a concentrate can be bought at a licensed store.
Out here on the East Coast, recreational weed has also been legalized in Maine and Vermont, but dispensaries there are not yet allowed to open to the public. Washington, D.C., has legal weed laws in the books too, but the framework for getting it is convoluted and does not actually allow for the actual purchase yet. Slowly (very slowly) but surely, we're getting there.
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