It’s a high new world in Denver. A city bill passed on Nov. 8 that allows people to consume marijuana in bars and restaurants with special permits from the city. You can’t smoke inside, and the place can’t sell the weed. Vapes and edibles, however, as well as designated outdoor smoking areas, are fair game.
The bill, Proposition 300, is the first law in the country that allows people to get high inside a bar or restaurant. Denver residents lit up the polls for Prop 300 on the same day that California, Nevada, and Massachusetts voted to legalize recreational marijuana.
“This is about personal responsibility and respecting adults who want to have a place to enjoy cannabis,” Emmett Reistroffer, a Denver marijuana consultant and campaign manager for Prop 300, tells Fortune.
In addition to where patrons can and cannot consume, a business has to show it has neighborhood support. The restrictions are due to a Colorado state law that bans selling pot in the same location where food or alcohol is served. Non-service establishments, though, have a lot more leniency and can hold events where weed is sold alongside food and drink. Imagine: The next Denver sound bath you go to could start with a group smoke sesh outside before everyone gets blanketed with the sound of gongs, then at the mid-bath break, each person can drink up a refreshing gin and tonic and eat a special blueberry muffin before falling once again into pure bliss.
Locations that get a permit will have to train their staff on how to handle people who get a little too high, and it’s pretty clear why. Edibles present a much different experience than smoking or vaping. Dan Pashman, host of The Sporkful podcast, and Jad Abumrad, from Radiolab, made a podcast about edibles that went through both the highs and lows. Everything was good for awhile as a New York City pastry chef served up a four-course spread of THC-infused food, but then the episode took a dark turn as everyone realized they’d eaten far too much.
“Every time I blinked I literally would forget where I was,” Abumrad says. “The continuity that is the thread of life was gone and it stayed gone for a whole day and a half.”
Prop 300 expires in 2020 if city officials don’t renew it or if it doesn’t get voted for again. It might not even last that long, though, due to the fact the new administration in the White House includes Jeff Sessions as attorney general. “Sessions said he believed the Ku Klux Klan was OK until he learned its members smoked marijuana,” former assistant U.S. attorney Thomas Figures said in sworn testimony.
Regardless, at least for a short amount of time, the people of Denver can wine and dine with their vapes.