Marijuana Lounges are About to Become a Thing, Could They Be the Next Big Investment Boom?

Las Vegas has a huge public relations problem and Cannabis Lounges are the obvious answer. If the idea catches on, it could spread to other marijuana friendly cities. Investors are watching close, hoping to get in on the ground floor of a green gold rush.

Cannabis lounges in high demand

One of the reasons tourists flock to Las Vegas, besides a chance to win big at roulette, is the opportunity to buy weed legally. For folks who can’t normally do that at home, but would if they could, it’s an attractive reason to chose Vegas over some other place for vacation.

The only problem is once tourists legally score some pricey dank chronic, they can’t legally smoke it. That’s a bummer but an easily solved one. Cannabis lounges like the coffee shops in Amsterdam would make everybody happy.

Planet 13 calls itself a cannabis “superstore.” It presents 30,000 square feet of retail space to the infamous strip with “a cafe, a bar and a marijuana processing center, all behind a glass wall where customers can see the various contraptions used for making cannabis products.” You can browse and buy to your heart’s content.

It’s a pot smoker’s “nice dream” come true. Then you wake up in hell. As politico notes, in “a city where tourists light up cigarettes on casino floors and stumble out of bars carrying plastic cups filled with booze, public cannabis consumption is conspicuously restricted.” Without lounges, they’re right back to breaking the law. In the whole city of Las Vegas there’s “almost nowhere to smoke it legally — not on the sidewalk and not in their hotel rooms.”

Legislators who aren’t afflicted by reefer madness decided to give safe spaces for cannabis consumption a try. “As regulators grapple with how to oversee the businesses, dispensaries are already making plans to open the first state-sanctioned lounges by mid-2022.”

Colorado and Washington both legalized happy weed back in 2012. In 2019, Alaska adopted a law on cannabis consumption spaces and other states, including Nevada, “have since followed suit.” The one planned for Planet 13 “will have no shortage of Vegas-style excess.”

Nothing like it in the world

According to Planet 13 co-CEO Larry Scheffler, There “will be nothing like it in the world” when they get done. Besides “an 8,500-square-foot consumption lounge,” there will be a “grand staircase” leading up to a 5,000-square-foot balcony.”

It will be the envy of other lounges with a 4-inch-deep splash pool. “You take your shoes off. You dance in the water. You consume cannabis, and there’s 100,000 rooms looking down on you from the Vegas towers.”

Even though Alaska got the ball rolling, they don’t have any lounges open yet. “So far, no major U.S. city in any weed-legal state has emerged as an Amsterdam-like destination where consumers can freely light up in ubiquitous cannabis cafes.”

Now that cannabis is gaining wide acceptance, investors are starting to see green, too. “I’ve been talking about [cannabars] from day one,” said Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom. “It’s such a perfect thing for Las Vegas.”

They might as well do it because nobody is obeying the law preventing toking in hotels. The lounges would solve a corresponding problem hotels in Vegas now have to contend with.

“Rule-flouting guests and other customers who do not enjoy the pungent scent of cannabis.” it’s a simple solution. Giving tourists a legal place to light up could cut down on weed smoking where it’s not allowed.