Too High To Fail: Inside Denver's Weed Boom
By Jonathan Ringen, Rolling Stone (June 5, 2013)
Even if you didn't know that Denver has become America's undisputed stoner capital, there are clues. Like the two Jerry Garcia-themed bars. Or the 24-hour-a-day stand-up-comedy radio station. And the too-perfect-to-be-a-coincidence nickname (Mile High City) and NBA franchise (the Nuggets). But even if you didn't pick up on any of that, there's a good chance you'd notice the smell – skunky, green, a little piney – wafting through an open car window as you cruise along I-25 into town.
Follow the scent to the industrial zone of Platte River Valley, where vast, anonymous warehouses hide more than 250 high-octane, connoisseur-grade weed operations. Or as one grower says, "Platte River Valley – highest concentration of marijuana on Earth." If your nose is Snoop Dogg-calibrated to sniff out only majorly primo herb, you just might end up at Gaia Plant-Based Medicine, a booming high-end cannabis enterprise with big-time ambitions. There, in an unmarked 40,000-square-foot warehouse across the street from a police station, 15 or so gardeners tend to an indoor jungle of artisanal weed worthy of a Peter Tosh album cover, which the company sells in its three medical-marijuana dispensaries.
Last year, Colorado voters passed Amendment 64, legalizing recreational marijuana. Starting early next year, anyone over the age of 21 will be able to walk into a weed store in Colorado – the first will be current dispensaries – and buy up to an ounce of stonier, tastier pot than whatever they've been getting from their dealer at home. There will be giddy, effervescent sativa-leaning varieties like Bubbleberry Haze; couch-lock-inducing indica-heavy ones like Purple Urkel; and everything in between. In shops with names like the Clinic and Pink House, you'll find all kinds of pot candies and cookies and cakes and sodas, and stuff you probably haven't even heard of yet, like butane-extracted hash oil, which can top 80 percent THC and get you so ripped you might as well be tripping. If Tolkien-level geeking out about "juniper notes" and "optimal cure times" doesn't sound mind-numbing, this will be the vacation spot of a lifetime, my friend.
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