There’s often no place to smoke legal marijuana
Las Vegas’ reputation as a place where you can indulge your vices and have a good time helps it lure some 43 million visitors a year. But tourists heading to Sin City hoping to consume newly legal cannabis have a problem: There are few places in town, other than private homes, where someone can legally light up a joint.
In Nevada and the seven other states that allow people to consume marijuana for fun, it’s typically illegal to smoke or ingest the drug in dispensaries, bars, restaurants, city parks and public streets. Hotels and landlords often ban people from using the drug on their property.
“The next frontier is: Where do people use it?” said Nevada state Sen. Tick Segerblom, a Democrat who advocated for marijuana legalization. He said that creating lounges where people can legally consume the cannabis products they buy is the logical solution.
Although lawmakers have tried, no state legislature has yet carved out rules for cannabis lounges, cafes or tasting rooms.
Policymakers in Colorado, Washington and Oregon have struggled to reconcile proposed rules with other state laws such as indoor smoking bans. Lawmakers also fear that marijuana lounges could create public health and safety problems — such as increasing drugged driving — and trigger a federal crackdown.
Some cities, including Denver and Colorado Springs, have created temporary rules for lounges. But cities run into the same legal issues as states.
Entrepreneurs are opening up marijuana lounges anyway, creating problems for law enforcement. It’s typically legal for people to get together to form a private club that permits marijuana consumption. But it can be difficult to determine what is truly a private club, and many of the pot clubs advertised online in states such as Colorado aren’t private, but are open to the public.
The four states where ballot initiatives legalized recreational marijuana last year may have the best chance of finding a solution. Nevada allows smoking inside many bars and clubs, for instance, so pot lounge proposals raise fewer concerns about indoor air quality.
And the ballot initiatives approved in California and Maine last year open the door to legal lounges. California’s initiative says cities and counties can choose to allow smoking, vaporizing and ingesting marijuana at some retail stores and other businesses. Maine’s initiative included rules for licensed marijuana clubs.
Clean air rules, unanswered health and safety questions, and political divisions have all stalled progress on legalizing social consumption, said Andrew Freedman, a consultant who formerly served as Colorado’s director of marijuana coordination.
“It’s just a very divisive area,” he said. Even industry leaders are split on whether such lounges should be allowed.
In Oregon, the state’s ban on smoking cigarettes, e-cigarettes and other inhalants in workplaces has been a sticking point for lawmakers. A bill proposed this year to legalize pot lounges didn’t make it out of committee, derailed by concerns that it would weaken air quality rules and set a bad example. Similar criticism felled a Colorado bill that would have allowed consumption clubs to sell marijuana products and exempted them from clean indoor air requirements.
Alaska law permits people to consume marijuana at a dispensary. But for a year and a half, policymakers there have struggled to come up with rules for marijuana tasting rooms, dogged by questions about air quality, how to measure cannabis intoxication, and other issues such as whether to set purchase limits or ban happy hours.
In theory, it shouldn’t be this hard to come up with a policy solution. “The same questions that have been asked regarding public use of alcohol or smoking are the same kinds of questions that get presented when talking about cannabis,” said Colorado state Rep. Dan Pabon, a Democrat who represents part of Denver.