PORT ANGELES, Washington — Our neighbours on the Olympic Peninsula will get their first pot shop next weekend.
Sea Change Cannabis will open in Discovery Bay, near Port Townsend. Two other marijuana stores hope to be in business in Jefferson County soon.
Straight across the strait from Victoria, the state liquor board has allocated six more licences to Clallam County, where stores will include Sparket and Mr. Buds in Port Angeles proper and the Hidden Bush and Weed-R-Us on the highway into town.
Meanwhile, local narcotics cops say the legendary flow of B.C. Bud, all those dope-stuffed hockey bags spirited across from Vancouver Island in the moonlight, has become a bit passé. Why smuggle from Canada when it’s legal to grow — with a permit — in Washington?
Holy smokes! We thought it was B.C. that was supposed to have the Harold Hedd stereotype. Yet suddenly the teeter-totter has tilted, to the point that Toke Tourism could become a bit of a thing in Washington, where voters OK’d the recreational use of marijuana in 2012 and the first of 334 licensed cannabis stores opened this month. Passengers getting off the Clipper in Seattle can now hop on a bus offering weed tours of the Emerald City.
Will Victorians pop over to Port Angeles to partake? The notion seems unlikely. This city of 19,000, with its Back to the Future courthouse clock tower and Re-elect Judge Porter campaign signs, looks like quintessential small-town ’Merica, not Amsterdam.
Still…
“The recreational tourist industry was definitely a factor in our decision to open,” says Wendy Buck-Benge. Drawn by Olympic National Park, visitors from all over, including Canada, flood the area each summer.
Buck-Benge, 41, and husband Nick Benge, 42, plan to add a recreational-marijuana store to the building that already houses their Sparket medical-marijuana dispensary.
That’s where they were this week, standing in front of shelves lined with glass jars like those found in an old-style candy shop, except, instead of candy, the jars contain dried marijuana with names like Ace of Spades and Cannatonic. Above a case of edibles — muffins, peanut butter crackers, cookies — was a sign promising 20 per cent off on Sweet Tooth Saturday.
Benge, a one-time yachtmaster who sometimes races in Swiftsure, and Buck-Benge, a former ER trauma nurse, firmly believe in medicinal pot. (“I’m not looking to create customers,” she says. “I’m looking to create wellness.”)
Victorians can’t shop there, though. Medical-marijuana stores — there are half a dozen around Port Angeles, about the same as in Greater Victoria — are for Washington residents only.
The recreational-pot stores, on the other hand, will be open to anyone over the age of 21, regardless of where they’re from.
Can’t smoke on the premises, though, or on the street, or in a car. Can’t take it across the border, unless you’re willing to go to jail and become a bad man’s boyfriend.
Price could be a deterrent, too. State and local taxes could drive the price of Sparket’s recreational pot to $20 to $25 US a gram, four or five times as much as it goes for (albeit illegally) on Vancouver Island.
Still, Malik Atwater, 54, thinks his Mr. Buds store might attract Canadians who have nothing against marijuana but don’t want to buy it at home because they don’t want to break the law. When they come for their legal pot, he plans to greet them with premises that look enticing, just like his Colonel Hudson’s restaurant next door. (It already serves Canadian-friendly poutine and has a model of a Mountie outside.) “I want to do something unique and spectacular,” he says. “It shouldn’t look shady or creepy.”
Mr. Buds will take a month or two to build, though. Likewise, Sparket’s goal of a Labour Day opening for its recreational store might be optimistic. Washington’s nascent pot shops are already faced with a shortage of product. The 100 growers licensed by the liquor board are so far having a hard time meeting demand. “Even if we were ready to go, there’s not enough stuff to sell,” Atwater says.
Perhaps that’s why the yet-to-open pot shops haven’t create much of a buzz (as it were) in the hospitality industry. At the Port Angeles chamber of commerce, executive director Russ Veenema says it hasn’t been an issue one way or another for the tourism sector.
But up at the Quality Inn, general manager Liz Conrad grimaces slightly at the prospect of toking tourists. It’s already hard enough to convince guests not to smoke tobacco in their rooms. And no, the hotel won’t permit pot in its designated smoking area. “We go by federal law,” she says. Federal law says marijuana is illegal.
This is the thing: While libertarian Washingtonians might see smoking marijuana as a personal choice, that doesn’t mean it’s a choice they would make themselves, or want wafting under their doors.
Even Atwater shuns the drug. “We don’t smoke pot. I tell my kids not to smoke pot.”
He puts it in the same category as the booze that he sells in his restaurant (or that takes up four aisles in the local Safeway): “I would never say to someone: ‘I think alcohol is great.’ Same goes for pot.”
Somebody must think it’s great, though, judging by all the B.C. Bud heading south for the past couple of decades. The cross-border boom appears to be waning, though, with B.C. wholesale prices reportedly falling 30 per cent as Americans turn to domestic growers.
“Do I think smuggling has disappeared? Probably not,” says Ron Cameron, who heads the Olympic Peninsula Narcotics Enforcement Team. “But it’s certainly not seen to the degree it was in 2003, 2004.”
The profit equation changed when the Canadian dollar, wallowing around 74 cents US in 2004, moved close to par. Groups that had been bringing in B.C. Bud simply set up in Washington state, growing in leased homes. “They took the smuggling element out of it.”
The advent of medical marijuana in a score of states, plus the legalization of recreational use in Washington and Colorado, meant government-inspected American pot has taken part of the market. Federal authorities might feel differently, but for Cameron’s local unit, marijuana isn’t a focus.
Don’t expect the flow to dry up entirely, though — not with taxes pushing the price of government-regulated pot so high.
“There may be a growing foundation of black market pot coming through, just like in the bootlegging days.”
