Company sells town it planned to make marijuana mecca
LOS ANGELES — Could plans to turn an old California ghost town into a marijuana mecca be going up in smoke?
Cannabis technology company American Green, which bought Nipton for $5 million last year, has sold it to another company for $7.7 million, acknowledging it struggled to raise the money needed to remake the old desert mining town into a pot paradise.
"Buying and building towns is very cash intensive. Up until now, the cost of attracting capital has been very expensive for our company," Phoenix-based American Green said in a statement issued earlier this month.
That responsibility, the company added, now falls on the new owner, Delta International Oil & Gas, a company that's previously focused on buying properties for exploratory drilling.
However, American Green says the sale includes the provision that it continue with its project to transform the 80acre town on the edge of the Mojave Desert into a cannabis-themed resort.
After purchasing Nipton last year American Green unveiled ambitious plans that included remodeling its modest Old West-style hotel into a "buds and breakfast" inn and bottling and selling cannabis-infused beverages drawn from Nipton's plentiful desert aquifer. There were also plans to attract cultivators and marijuana-theme boutique owners such as glassblowers.
Still other plans called for the company to bring back Nipton's post office and bank and expand its solar farm to serve the entire town's handful of residents, making Nipton green in more ways than one.