Marijuana is about to join gambling and alcohol on the list of vices legally available 24 hours a day in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Located a stone’s throw from the Stratosphere and historic Las Vegas Strip, Oasis Cannabis is slated to become Sin City’s first around-the-clock pot shop after local lawmakers unanimously voted Wednesday to let it expand its business hours from 21 to 24 hours a day.
City code typically requires marijuana dispensaries to close between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. each day, but the ordinance also allows local lawmakers to amend business hours on a case-by-case basis, The Las Vegas Sun reported.
Indeed, Oasis Cannabis successfully convinced the Las Vegas City Council to let it constantly stay open in lieu of locking its doors for three hours every morning and now plans to be open around-the-clock starting this Friday, Sept. 22.
“We have people lined up at our door at 6 a.m., and (we) are rushing people out at 3 a.m.,” Benjamin Sillitoe, the shop’s CEO and co-founder, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
“There are 24-hour businesses all around us,” he said to The Sun. “It makes sense operationally.”
Oasis Cannabis is one of 10 dispensaries located within Las Vegas, and others pot shops are likely to similarly seek permission from the city to extend their hours, The Sun reported.
“We suspect now that one dispensary has (received approval), others will come forward,” Mary McElhone, business licensing manager for the city, told the newspaper.
Nevadans voted last November to legalize recreational marijuana, and dispensaries licensed by the state began selling retail weed July 1. Legal marijuana netted the state roughly $500,000 in tax revenue during the first four days of legal sales, and state officials previously said they expect to collect $60 million in taxes by 2019.
The adjacent city of North Las Vegas already allows its four recreational dispensaries to open around the clock, and the Clark County Commission is expected to decide next month whether pot shops throughout the region can operate 24 hours per day.
Recreational marijuana is currently legal in eight states and the nation’s capital, notwithstanding the federal government’s longtime prohibition on pot. Only five states currently allow retail sales, however: Nevada, Colorado, Oregon, Alaska and Washington state. California, Maine and Massachusetts are expected to follow suit in 2018.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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