{"id":56086,"date":"2022-07-23T07:41:05","date_gmt":"2022-07-23T15:41:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2022\/07\/23\/cannabis-big-impact-on-border-towns\/"},"modified":"2022-07-23T08:45:20","modified_gmt":"2022-07-23T16:45:20","slug":"cannabis-big-impact-on-border-towns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2022\/07\/23\/cannabis-big-impact-on-border-towns\/","title":{"rendered":"Cannabis\u2019 Big Impact on Border Towns"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

Since its founding in 1862, the town of Trinidad, CO has regularly cycled through identities, and economic\u00a0raisons<\/em>\u00a0d\u2019etre<\/em>. The discovery of rich coal deposits in the rugged mountains along the Santa Fe trail between Denver and New Mexico meant the frontier village started as a mining town (and the way mining conglomerates worked meant Trinidad was also a company town). After the mines slowed and closed, between the 1960s and 2010, a single surgeon\u2019s successful (and controversial)\u00a0practice earned\u00a0Trinidad the unofficial title of \u201csex-change capital of the US.\u201d In the cannabis legalization era, another boom-and-bust cycle has come and gone in Trinidad: a cannabis \u201cborder town\u201d that is no longer.<\/p>\n

Boom\u2026<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Home\u00a0to about 8300 people<\/a>, Trinidad saw dozens of cannabis shops open for business after adult-use cannabis sales began in Colorado in 2014. Along with businesses on the town\u2019s main street, an entrepreneur from Denver sold local authorities on permitting the world\u2019s first\u00a0\u201cmarijuana mini mall.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0There was so much weed for sale in Trinidad that the community boasted \u201cone pot shop for every 300 people,\u201d according to\u00a0Amanda Korth, the board president of the Trinidad-Las Animas County Chamber of Commerce.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This had nothing to do with Trinidad itself\u2014they don\u2019t smoke more weed there than they do in Pueblo\u2014but everything to do with geography. About three hours\u2019 drive from Santa Fe, Trinidad is the closest city in Colorado to New Mexico along Interstate-25. That meant Trinidad was an obvious destination for anyone in New Mexico wanting to buy legal weed\u2014and anyone heading south wanting to make a final pit stop before entering dry country.<\/p>\n

In Trinidad, the cannabis border-town boom lasted more than eight years. On April 1, legal cannabis sales\u00a0began<\/a>\u00a0in New Mexico, with the full backing of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham,\u00a0who encouraged<\/a>\u00a0New Mexico cannabis entrepreneurs to \u201cknock the socks off of this industry\u201d and\u2014somehow\u2014sell more cannabis per year than even Colorado, a more populous state. Cannabis isn\u2019t as heavily taxed in New Mexico as it is in Colorado, and customers can purchase up to two ounces per day\u2014twice Colorado\u2019s one-ounce limit. And unlike California and Colorado, localities can\u2019t opt-out of sales.<\/p>\n

\u2026And Bust<\/strong><\/h4>\n

As NPR reported, from the beginning, cannabis dispensaries sprung up throughout the southern and eastern parts of the state, in small towns such as Clovis, in classic truck-stop cities such as Las Cruces\u2014anywhere within driving distance of Texas, where cannabis is still illegal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Las Cruces location of\u00a0R. Greenleaf,<\/a>\u00a0a dispensary chain owned by Colorado-based Schwazze, is now the company\u2019s \u201chighest grossing store,\u201d with visitors from Texas comprising about half of the customer base, said Justin Dye, Schwazze\u2019s CEO, in a recent telephone interview.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not there just for the border,\u201d he added, but as\u00a0data from the first half of the year published by BDS Analytics showed<\/a>, sales have slowed and plateaued in Colorado overall as they boom in New Mexico. This spells trouble for border towns along the Colorado-New Mexico line\u2014and the beginning of the end for Trinidad\u2019s latest boom.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou wouldn\u2019t want to buy a store in Trinidad right now,\u201d Dye said. \u201cYou wouldn\u2019t want to be an operator there. It\u2019s contracted substantially.\u201d For now, Schwazze and Dye don\u2019t have to worry: Most of their Colorado dispensaries are located in the Denver metro area. Sales are slowing there, too, but at least there\u2019s no concern about out-of-state competition\u2014or a tectonic shift in geography that, such as a factory closing or oil-well going dry, threatens a settlements\u2019 economic vitality.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t to say that there\u2019s now nothing doing well in Trinidad\u2014just that the \u201cmarijuana mini-mall\u201d and the concentration of dispensaries may have outlived their moment.<\/p>\n

Life in the New American West<\/strong><\/h4>\n

For Korth, the Trinidad Chamber of Commerce president, this is just another cycle, along with mining, sex changes, and now cannabis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThose industries left, and so it was boom or bust, feast or famine,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen the marijuana shops came in, it was a great big boom.\u201d But, she added, offering a counterpoint to the boosterism from New Mexico\u2019s Gov. Lujan Grisham, \u201cthey said a lot about the taxes and what the taxes would do for schools and roads, etc. And I haven\u2019t really seen a lot of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for how long the border bet will last elsewhere, it\u2019s a matter of time and politics\u2014and the bizarre situation of rooting against the march of legalization in red states including Texas and Utah, the latter of which is within a short drive from Dinosaur, CO, on that state\u2019s western edge. There are 183 people in Dinosaur, according to Census figures\u2014and there are three dispensaries, an even higher ratio than Trinidad\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Dye thinks Texas will remain dry for a while. \u201cI don\u2019t see Texas having a major program for some time,\u201d he said, a situation owing to the Lone Star State\u2019s deep-red conservatism. \u201cI think this is going to be something for a long time around border towns.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

But there are rumblings to the contrary. Sid Miller, Texas\u2019s ten-gallon-hat-wearing, Trump-supporting agriculture commissioner,\u00a0recently became<\/a>\u00a0the state\u2019s highest-ranking Republican to call for medical-cannabis legalization. If Texas moves even half as quickly as New Mexico, border towns in that state could find their time in the sun shorter even than Trinidad\u2019s \u2014 but still part of the same predictable rhythm in the new American west.<\/p>\n

The post Cannabis\u2019 Big Impact on Border Towns<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n


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Since its founding in 1862, the town of Trinidad, CO has regularly cycled through identities, and economic\u00a0raisons\u00a0d\u2019etre. The discovery of rich coal deposits in the rugged mountains along the Santa Fe trail between Denver and New Mexico meant the frontier village started as a mining town (and the way miningContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16351,50,21,80,170,124,13556,726],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56086"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56086"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56086\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56087,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56086\/revisions\/56087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}