The Reporter's Notebook, Ep. 13: Cannabis Comes to Town
R. Greenleaf Dispensary customers enter the Las Cruces store just after 12:01 a.m. April 1, 2022, the first day of legal recreational cannabis sales in New Mexico. (Ivan Pierre Aguirre / For the Las Cruces Sun-News)
In this week’s episode, we’re talking all about cannabis. On Friday, April 1st, sales of recreational — or adult-use — cannabis became legal in New Mexico. And Las Cruces was the first city in the state to conduct a legal sale. We’ll get into how that happened…
Doña Ana County, which borders Texas, also enjoyed the benefit of its share of cannabis tourism — border dispensaries in the south county were flooded with Texans, happy that legal weed was now within their reach.
In Las Cruces, it seemed that well-established medical dispensaries that had expanded to recreational sales drew the largest crowds; mom-and-pop upstarts drew a steady stream of customers as well, but usually not the long lines seen elsewhere.
This week, we’re joined by Sun-News reporter Miranda Cyr — who volunteered to cover the midnight opening at R. Greenleaf, a dispensary on Mall Drive in Las Cruces. It was the first to announce that they’d be opening at midnight Friday, and sales would begin at 12:01. The atmosphere, as Miranda describes it, was like a movie premiere or a concert.
Later, we’ll be joined by Sun-News reporters Michael McDevitt and Algernon D’Ammassa, both of whom covered the first day of cannabis sales in Doña Ana County, and talk about what they observed.
This podcast was originally published by the Las Cruces Sun-News.
