First Marijuana Drive-Thru to Open on 4/20

Finally, and not a moment too soon, the country’s first ever drive-thru weed dispensary will open tomorrow—on 4/20.

So if you’re in Parachute, Colorado, drop in!

The windows slide open at 4 p.m., and servers, shall we call them, will be filling orders until midnight on the weekends.

The Tumbleweed Express Drive-Thru has to follow the same laws as any other dispensary, so don’t take the kids or friends under 21, when you zip in to order your weed. Not even in the backseat.

So, how did this happen and why aren’t there more?

“I didn’t set out thinking this would be national news,” Mark Smith, founder and CEO of the Tumbleweed Drive-Thru, told the Post Independent.

Late one night, when Smith was working alone in his original dispensary in Parachute, called the Tumbleweed, people kept coming by and knocking on the shop windows to see if he was open. It occurred to him that his business would certainly benefit from late-night service.

Of course, fate also had a hand.

That same week a for-sale sign went up at the car wash across the street.

Smith rented the car wash and created the first-ever recreational weed shop to allow cars to actually pull into the building, thereby complying with state marijuana laws.

Hence, a drive-thru.

Little did he know that his idea would become a first in the booming weed industry.

“I didn’t have some big epiphany,” Smith said. “I just saw a need for our customers.”

And Parachute needs the Tumbleweed as much as the dispensary needs the town.

Parachute is a small community with a population of just over a 1,100 people, many who were left without decent jobs after natural gas development bottomed out, losing almost a third of the town’s sales tax revenue.

Thanks to legal weed, between 2015 and 2017, Parachute’s sales tax intake grew by as much as 70 percent, which town manager Stuart McArthur attributes primarily to legal marijuana.

Indeed, in 2016 nearly 30 percent of the town’s tax receipts were from weed sales.

McArthur told the Post Independent that marijuana revenue has provided Parachute with resources to fund projects that would otherwise not have been feasible.

“Tumbleweed has been a good neighbor and has made large investments into town,” McArthur said. “We’re excited to have Tumbleweed here and get on the map with something that is totally unique.”