Dear Stoner: What happened to in-house weed? I went to a dispensary for the first time in a while, and all the budtender wanted to show me were these branded jars. He said most stores don't grow their own anymore.
Gervis
Dear Gervis: I'd estimate that more dispensaries grow their own than don't, and most wholesale weed is still sold deli style. However, the way we get our flower has certainly changed. State laws in the early days of recreational pot used to force dispensaries to grow the majority of cannabis they sold. Those rules ended years ago, but it has taken a while for old habits to change. Without those vertical integration rules today, though, we're seeing more businesses do what they excel at: Growers can be growers, and retailers can be retailers.
The more modern way of doing this saves us from shit-tier dispensary cultivations (though there are plenty of those left) while also enabling more underground growers to transition into the legal market. Finding dispensaries around Denver with great house weed isn't hard — there's Higher Grade, KrystaLeaves, L'Eagle and Verde Natural, to name a few — but the two lanes are more separated than ever before.
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