Anticipation high as California rolls out retail pot sales
Dozens of sellers are given licenses
LOS ANGELES — About 90 marijuana retailers have been licensed to start selling recreational pot in California as Golden State residents get ready to awaken on New Year’s Day to a stronger-than-normal whiff of marijuana.
America’s cannabis king will be lighting up to celebrate the state’s first legal retail pot sales.
The start of legal retail cannabis sales Monday comes more than two decades after California paved the way for legal weed by passing the first medical marijuana law in the U.S., though other states were quicker to allow recreational use of the drug.
Alex Traverso, a spokesman for the state’s Bureau of Cannabis Control, said Sunday the agency has been working through the weekend to process as many licenses as possible. He said licenses will also be issued on New Year’s Day.
But finding legal pot may be a challenge in the first days of recreational sales in California.
The BCC so far has issued more than 300 licenses statewide for marijuana distributors, retailers and cultivators.
Shops are expected to be open from the hamlet of Shasta Lake south of Oregon to San Diego to customers who previously needed a medical reason or a dope dealer to score pot.
In Sacramento, the state’s capital, at least four shops have received licenses to being selling recreational, adult-use marijuana starting Monday morning.
In November 2016, California voters legalized recreational marijuana for adults 21 and older, making it legal to grow six plants and possess an ounce of pot. The state was given a year to set retail market regulations that are still being formalized and will be phased in over the next 12 months.
“We’re thrilled,” said Khalil Moutawakkil, founder of Kind Peoples, which grows, manufactures and sells weed in Santa Cruz. “We can talk about the good, the bad and the ugly of the specific regulations, but at the end of the day it’s a giant step forward, and we’ll have to work out the kinks as we go.”
The long, strange trip to get here has been a frustrating one for advocates of a drug that in the federal government’s eyes remains illegal and in a class with heroin.
In 1996, California voters approved marijuana for medicinal purposes.
Today, 28 other states have adopted similar laws. In 2012, Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational marijuana. California is one of five states, plus Washington, D.C., that followed suit. Retail sales are scheduled to begin in Massachusetts in July.
With wider acceptance, the aroma of marijuana smoke has become more pervasive in parts of California, and use accelerated after the legalization vote.