Lines out the door and fierce winter weather couldn’t keep folks in Colorado from waiting eagerly for their chance to be among the first to legally purchase recreational marijuana on Wednesday.
Post growers in the state sold pounds of the sticky green drug to hordes of eager users and estimate across-the-board sales at $1 million on the first day the law took effect.
Twenty-four pot shops, mostly in Denver, opened in Colorado for the first time on Wednesday and the birth of the first legal marijuana industry managed to go smoothly as the world watched.
While the Netherlands and Amsterdam have long been known as marijuana havens, the drug exists in a legal gray area in the country, having been decriminalized but never legalized as in Colorado.
The South American nation of Uruguay fully legalized pot last year but has yet to implement a production or sales system.
‘Everything’s gone pretty smoothly,’ said Barbara Brohl, Colorado’s top marijuana regulator as head of the Department of Revenue.
The agency sent its new marijuana inspectors to recreational shops to monitor sales and make sure sellers understood the state’s new marijuana-tracking inventory system meant to keep legal pot out of the black market.
