As part of an effort to engage the Gardiner, Maine, community and clean up the town of roughly 5,000, a nearby marijuana dispensary is rolling out an innovative new program. Essentially, citizens who bring in a bag of collected trash can exchange it for some weed.

Dennis Meehan, owner of Summit Medical Marijuana, offered the marijuana as a gift to adults over the age of 21. Citizens would meet Meehan at the park and get two trash bags to explore the city and collect any garbage they found.

If residents collected a full bag of trash from around the city they could bring it back and pick up their gifted weed. The exchange rate was one full trash bag for one gram of marijuana. Gifting weed to others became legal in Maine after recreational marijuana was legalized in January. Across municipalities with legalized weed, gifting weed has become a common method to circumvent rules against selling the product on the street.

For more information on the status of legalization in Maine check out our “State of Weed” map here. 

He was inspired to put the event together by a similar weed exchange community event he heard about in Colorado. “[I heard of it in] Colorado – there was a town that did this,” Meehan told the local NBC affiliate. “They had a great response to this. So I was hoping to do the same thing in Maine.”

Meehan advertised the event on the dispensary’s Facebook page. After seeing its success, Meehan hopes to expand the program and make it statewide. While there are certainly some business interests at play here, Meehan also said that he wants to promote the “life-changing” aspects of marijuana, according to the Associated Press.

The nascent marijuana industry has been, so far, considered a success. One important aspect is the massive tax influxes that states that have legalized it have seen. For example, Colorado pulled in $200 million in just tax revenue in 2016, according to MarketWatch. Meehan’s actions prove that there are even more interactive ways for the marijuana industry to engage with the community.

For an industry that faces plenty of criticism, working with local communities could have a huge impact on public perception and how quickly critics shift their views. Now, it’s time to see if other marijuana businesses engage their communities in a similar way to Meehan and his Colorado inspiration.

Josh Schmidt

Josh Schmidt is an editorial intern and is a native of the Washington D.C Metropolitan area. He is working towards a degree in multi-platform journalism with a minor in history at nearby University of Maryland. Contact Josh at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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When Mark Smith realized that the residents of Parachute, Colorado craved a late-night marijuana fix, after his dispensary had closed for the day, he had an idea. Smith, 58, decided to re-brand the Valley Car Wash across the street from his dispensary as Tumbleweed Express, the nation’s first marijuana drive-thru business. The drive-thru’s grand opening coincides with the unofficial–yet widely celebrated, especially on college campuses–holiday of “4/20,” a spirited celebration of pot and paraphernalia.

Smith, a lifetime entrepreneur who once owned 23 pawn shops, explained to a local Fox affiliate his rationale for opening Tumbleweed Express: “I’ve been driving by the car wash building a lot. I talked to the realtor here in town and it was for sale. So, it seemed like the perfect fit,” he said.

Ribbon cutting at Tumbleweed Express at 1pm today. pic.twitter.com/Y41yUJAFjL

— Parachute Colorado (@VisitParachute) April 20, 2017

Parachute once seemed like an unlikely place for the nation’s–and the world’s, according to Smith–first pot drive-thru. Though the town of 1,100 is in the first state in the nation to legalize recreational marijuana, it had a freeze on marijuana sales until June 2015. But as the town’s economic engine, its natural gas reserves, sputtered, town officials decided to lift the marijuana ban, which proved a boon to Parachute’s economy. In 2016, according to the Post Independent, 30 percent of the town’s tax receipts were from marijuana sales.

Smith has taken full advantage of Parachute’s marijuana renaissance. He opened a dispensary in Parachute last February, expanded to a few more towns, and on Thursday will become America’s first steward of a marijuana drive-thru. It was when he realized that customers craved a late-night cannabis fixing, with no local dispensary open late enough to scratch that itch, that Smith decided to pursue his latest venture.

“I didn’t set out thinking this would be national news,” Smith told the Post Independent. “I didn’t have some big epiphany. I just saw a need for our customers.” According to Robert Goulding, a spokesman for Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Division, “the same laws apply to the drive-thru as do the main dispensary.” The rules include: customers must be 21 years old or up, there must be security and surveillance at the point of sale, and no pot can be visible outside the drive-thru premises.

Alec Siegel

Alec Siegel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. When he’s not working at Law Street he’s either cooking a mediocre tofu dish or enjoying a run in the woods. His passions include: gooey chocolate chips, black coffee, mountains, the Animal Kingdom in general, and John Lennon. Baklava is his achilles heel. Contact Alec at ASiegel@LawStreetMedia.com.

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