Lucky for me St.Louis sits right on the Missouri/Illinois border! I didn't believe I would ever live to see the day weed would become recreational. So weeks before January 1st, 2020 I was day dreaming about getting off work and going to the store on a friday, I would walk right in and peruse the many products, strains etc. This is the part where you hear the needle scratch the record and my dream gets interrupted with something along the lines of a true buzzkill and reality sets in.
Only one store received a recreational license on the Illinois side of the St.Louis Metro Area. Opening Day January 2, 2020 despite freezing temperatures crowds already lined up the day before and camped out for that historic day. The wait time that day was around 6 hours, the Weed dispensary opened at 9am, and they ran out of products by 4pm having to close 5 hours early. Well that put the hammer on my glory moment and I waited a full month before I braved the experience.
Dressed like a polar bear I was ready, most people had to park almost a mile away me included. The line to get in the dispensary started outside and snaked around like you were in line for a grand opening of a new roller coaster at Disney. It took 3 hours my first time. When you finally get to the point where you made it inside the building you were still in line on the other side of the lobbies security door. You placed your order in line in the lobby, The menu is very small and limits you to only one flower strain. There is no real choice to speak of. The store does have vape cartridges and edibles, and is almost always sold out of concentrate. Simply put your entire experience is spent in a line.
The dispensary now has a shuttle service where you park at a parking lot in the vicinity and take a shuttle bus back and forth. The day I started writing this blog piece I showed up in the parking lot shuttle at 3pm on a Friday. My heart sank when it dropped me off at the dispensary. With the amount of people in line it looked like easily 3 hours or more. The awesome news was I was walking out with my purchase an hour and a half later. The dispensary ramped up the staff to handle the Friday after work onslaught with thousands of people buying some form of Legal Weed for state sponsored recreation!
The mechanics of shopping for recreational weed is very dry and anticlimactic. You are literally in a line for hours all the way to the cash register. You place your order in line. Not much in that way of experience. Thank God for smart phones.
So here are the deeper details of the whole experience.
The people in line didn't even look like weed smokers, they were all ages, lots of women, you could never have guessed the demographic. The people in line never complain. People are standing outside in the freezing cold for hours and nobody is having a negative experience. Complete strangers having conversations with their line buddy for an hour or two. Their is almost a real happy festive atmosphere and the long wait times are just a fact not a deterrent. Even weather never slowed down the long lines. The taxes are high, though the product is superior! Especially the vape cartridges. My only real complaint is it does cost to play. What you pay on the street is half the cost, but the quality makes it worthwhile. Dispensary grade products really takes it up a level in experience.
Overall it's fantastic Illinois went recreational. With only one store for a whole metro area the staff do an excellent job and it's always a positive experience shopping there.
This is a Patriot Uprising Production
By: Nate Powers
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