Marijuana buyers fuel a ‘Little Amsterdam’ in N.M.
Texans drive up sales in cannabis across state lines
SUNLAND PARK, N.M. — In a desert valley along the Rio Grande in New Mexico, the city of Sunland Park has generally offered few amenities for its roughly 17,000 residents. No large grocery store. Few shops. Little to offer those uninterested in the racetrack casino or a hike to the gigantic cross of Cristo Del Rey that looms from a nearby mountaintop.
But for Texans who live in El Paso, just over the state line, Sunland Park has lately become a regular destination. The reason: marijuana.
Cars with Texas plates flock regularly to the many cannabis dispensaries — one with a drivethrough, another offering discounts on “Texas Tuesday” — that have sprung up since New Mexico began legal recreational sales in 2022.
In Texas, recreational marijuana is illegal.
Legalization in New Mexico vaulted Sunland Park, a bedroom community with an aging industrial zone in a landscape of rock and sand, almost overnight into the top ranks of the nation’s marijuana boomtowns, many of which have emerged on the borders of states with sharply different laws. Some locals have started calling it the Dubai of marijuana, the mayor said, because of all the new investment; others describe it as Little Amsterdam.
“It has been an explosion,” said Teresa Rios, 58, who has lived in Sunland Park for two decades and lamented the rapid transformation, including the closure of a place where she used to get her nails done, even as cannabis sellers proliferate. “I’d like to see a nice store, a pharmacy, a gas station that’s close to my home. Instead, all we see is cannabis.”
Dispensaries have filled empty stores, vacant strip malls, and the husks of former warehouses and car dealerships. Signs advertise yet more dispensaries that are “coming soon” to join the 16 already active there, according to state records.
Across New Mexico, only Albuquerque, a city many, many times larger, sells more recreational marijuana than Sunland Park, which had nearly $4 million in sales in November alone. But Sunland Park has Texas — and in particular El Paso, a city of nearly 700,000, just over the state line.
“El Paso is bigger than Albuquerque,” said Miguel Martinez, explaining why he and his partners decided to locate their dispensary, Besos, in Sunland Park.
“Of course there’s the issue for Texans — people come in all the time and ask, ‘Is this legal in Texas?’ Absolutely not,” Martinez said, standing by a display of green cannabis arranged in clear plastic cubes, near screens offering discounts for Texans. Of course, he added, “I can’t control what anybody does outside of the store.”
As a town on the border with Mexico, Sunland Park is the kind of place where policies set by faraway lawmakers are readily apparent — and not just the ones on marijuana.
Recently, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas had his state’s National Guard troops place concertina wire along part of the international border with Mexico, an effort to hold back migrants; then he extended it to the state line between Texas and New Mexico, whose governor, a Democrat, has both expressed concern about the high number of crossings and sought to protect the rights of migrant children.