Roll up, roll up: US desert town turns ‘cannabis friendly’ resort
ONE of the largest marijuana companies in the US has bought a Californian desert town, promising to turn it into a “cannabis-friendly” resort.
American Green Inc said it was buying all 80 acres of Nipton, which includes its Wild West-style hotel, houses, caravan park and coffee shop.
Roxanne Lang, the town’s owner, said the sale had yet to go through, but confirmed American Green was the buyer. She declined to reveal the price before the sale closes, but noted she and Gerald Freeman, her late husband, listed it at $5 million (£3.8 million) when they put it up for sale last year.
Asked what her husband would have said, she laughed. “I think he would find a lot of humour in that,” she said, adding that as a libertarian Freeman had no problem with people using marijuana, and as a proponent of green power he would be in favour of energy independence. Over the years he had installed a solar farm that provides much of the tiny town’s electricity.
American Green says it plans to expand the farm and also bottle and sell cannabis-infused water from Nipton’s plentiful aquifer, joint moves that would make the town green in more ways than one. The buyers are also reaching out to edibles manufacturers and other pot-industry businesses, hoping they will be interested in relocating to Nipton.
The town’s current residents number fewer than two dozen and one of its major sources of revenue is the California Lottery tickets the general store sells to people who cross the state line from Nevada, where they are unavailable.
“We are excited to lead the charge for a true Green Rush,” David Gwyther, American Green’s president and chief executive, said. “The cannabis revolution that’s going on here in the US has the power to completely revitalise communities in the same way gold did during the 19th century.”
Indeed, it was a gold rush that created Nipton in the early 1900s.
‘The cannabis revolution that’s going on here has the power to completely revitalise communities’