THC-infused pies, Tupperwares of bud: businesses are making it work in the unregulated gray market
Sitting on a party bus next to his son and a vacant stripper pole, Erik Jorgensen, 62, ran his thumb along a hand-carved pipe and passed it to a woman sitting next to him.
“Trust me,” he said over blaring music. “Every hit you get off this will blow your mind.”
A longtime woodworker, Jorgensen for years carved jewelry boxes and back scratchers. He’d stopped smoking pot when his sons were born, to set a good example. But now the Jorgensen kids are grown and married, and Virginia’s laws have changed.
So on a muggy Friday evening in July, he bounced along the back roads of Chesapeake, Va., on his way to a ‘Cannaversary’ event marking a year since Virginia became the first state in the South to legalize possession. When the bus stopped, he carried his art down the stairs and into a wooded clearing where vendors lined tables with THC-infused pies and Tupperware containers full of bud for sale and show.
“It’s like the wild, wild west,” Jorgensen said.
While having marijuana is legal in Virginia, recreational sales are not, leaving people eager to smoke with few legal options to get their hands on bud and entrepreneurs eager to operate within the law increasingly weary of working in the shadows. For budding cannabis businesses around the state, navigating Virginia’s gray area has required creativity and a brash willingness to push boundaries while they watched lawmakers spar this year over how to best establish the framework for a legal market. [Read More @ The Washington Post]
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