As Colorado becomes the latest state to concede a half-assed acceptance of the inevitability of time and tide and begins the slow process toward the legalization of cannabis possession, two Denver entrepreneurs have jumped the gun with America’s first marijuana tours.
There appears to be no effort to hide the obvious gimmick — the company is called Four-Twenty Tours after the achingly uncool seventies urban slang for “somehow related to marijuana” and, although the term finds its origins in the after-school hour ripe for smoking up, the first tour will be on April 20th (4.20). April 20th 2013, that is, fully eight months before anyone without a medical marijuana prescription will be able to buy product any more legally in Colorado than they could in any of its less progressive neighboring states.
Which means that those experienced with similar tours to, say, Amsterdam, may need to modify their expectations or break the law or, perhaps more safely and efficiently, go back to Amsterdam, because this tour includes a stay at a “pot-friendly” hotel (so, a lot of perfectly sober people hanging around the lobby asking each other if they have glaucoma), a hash-making demonstration, visits to dispensaries and legal grow-houses, and tickets to cannabis-themed events, and no dope. In short, a school field trip just with marijuana instead of maple syrup.
Four-Twenty Tours is proceeding without, unsurprisingly, the endorsement of the Colorado tourist office, which prefers to keep the focus on the traditional family-friendly activities for which Colorado is already a destination for visitors who spend nearly $10 billion a year in The Centennial State. Colorado’s reputation for quality conventions, tours and camping could be undermined, they feel, by an influx of a new breed of tourist who find their hands hilarious.
Having spewed all that, it should be pointed out that Four-Twenty Tours is probably only slightly before its time and there’s a good chance that the currently unclear implementation of the state’s new consensus on legalization could be dedicated marijuana specialty shops with a legal mandate to sell to tourists, and this could happen as early as 4.20.14.