Is The Weed Business About To Look Like the Coffee Business?
The next gold rush in legalizing cannabis is public consumption. Entrepreneur J.J. Walker is already one step ahead.
Sprawled in a tieless suit and sockless oxfords on a chair just off the lobby of the world’s largest marijuana dispensary, J.J. Walker is swiping at his iPhone, trying to locate a two-month-old video of him enjoying a bong hit here in Las Vegas.
Bong videos are hardly the stuff of riveting entertainment, particularly in Vegas, where pot is legal and plentiful and restraint is in short supply. At whatever moment Walker had been placing lips to bong glass, surely there were a thousand people within two miles of him inhaling and ingesting pot in just about every form imaginable. In addition to the city’s mostly pot-friendly 2 million residents, Vegas pulls in 42 million visitors a year, about a fifth of whom identify as cannabis users, and a substantial portion come from places where recreational pot isn’t yet legal. Weed, in other words, has become part of the Vegas draw, leaving the smell of it wafting reliably at almost all hours outside casinos, hotels, restaurants, and pretty much everywhere in between.
But the video, when Walker finally finds it, proves momentous, even for Vegas standards. For one…
