Last week, the state Cannabis Regulatory Commission began the process of licensing marijuana consumption lounges, places where you can legally smoke the pot that you can now legally buy.
Good luck with that. New Jersey’s laws regarding the consumption of various euphoriants are hopelessly convoluted.
Perhaps the most nonsensical of them all is the rule that brewpubs can’t sell food or even coffee with your beer.
I guess the state wants to make sure you drink on an empty stomach.
We’re seeing the state take a similarly nonsensical position on the lounges now under consideration by the state Cannabis Regulatory Commission.
Again the sale of food is prohibited. Also banned are alcoholic beverages, even BYOB.
So basically the state wants you and your fellow potheads to sit and stare at each other as you get stoned.
That’s not much of a business model says Jennifer Cabrera, a lawyer with multi-state law firm Vicente Sederberg.
“You can’t buy a water there,” said Cabrera when I called her last week.”You can’t even buy a Snickers bar.”
The CRC can’t do anything about that ban, Cabrera said, because it is written into the legislation that legalized marijuana in 2021.
“I don’t know who was behind it,” she said. “My assumption is that someone in the hospitality industry thought it would be harmful to them.”
I’d make the same assumption. In other states, businesses that face competition have to compete. Here they go to State Street in Trenton and seek to have the Legislature eliminate the competition.
At the other end of State Street, there’s a business that has prospered despite the Legislature. That’s Weedman’s Joint, which even before legalization was selling marijuana on what I call the free market and what the state calls the black market.
Ed “NJ Weedman” Forchion has gone over to the legal side. He has received his conditional license to sell marijuana and he has started paying taxes, he told me.
There’s a lot of tax revenue to be generated. The Joynt has a restaurant in front, a dispensary in the middle and an open space out back where the potheads can smoke pot.
Forchion describes his business model in a sentence:
“I want people to smoke weed, get the munchies and buy food from me.”
Sounds like a winning formula.
Across the street in Trenton City Hall, Mayor Reed Gusciora told me he wants a lot more dispensaries to open up in the capital city.
“There’s about seven entities that have applied for licensure in Trenton,” Gusciora told me. “We welcome them because we get two percent of the revenue.”
Gusciora has long been a champion of another smoking venue, the cigar bar. When the ban on smoking in bars and restaurants was enacted in 2006, there was an exception made for existing cigar bars, including the one in Princeton frequented by Gusciora. But there were only about a dozen such cigar bars and no new ones are permitted.
Gusciora, who was then a state assemblyman, put in a bill that would permit new cigar bars. It passed the lower house but died in the Senate after opponents complained it would expose workers in cigar bars to secondhand smoke.
There are few such workers, if my visits to cigar bars are any indication. Often the proprietor is the only staffer.
Meanwhile down in Atlantic City a whole lot of workers are being exposed to secondhand smoke against their will. Yet efforts to ban smoking in casinos keep getting stalled in the same Legislature that won’t permit cigar bars.
That doesn’t stop cigar bars from opening up, said Gusciora.
“There are illegal cigar bars cropping up all over the state,” the mayor told me.
I can see why. You can bring your own booze to a cigar bar. Pair a fine single-malt Scotch with a choice Nicaraguan cigar and you have the perfect atmosphere for convivial conversation.
But when it comes to the sterile cannabis lounges envisioned by the state, I can’t see the point. It can take half an hour to smoke a fat cigar. But the weed these days is so strong that one hit will get you stoned. Then what?
More important, what’s in it for the operator? He makes the same profit whether you smoke the pot on the spot or take it home.
Meanwhile there is a cigar bar in Philadelphia where “More than 450 whiskeys occupy a menu of over 600 top-shelf spirits from shelves that tower behind a curvaceous Carrara marble bar top,” according to its website.
I have no idea what a Carrara marble top is, but it sounds like something smokers would like to see both in cigar bars and cannabis lounges here in Jersey.
I would suggest our legislators take a trip across the Delaware to check it out for themselves.
More: Recent Paul Mulshine columns.
Paul Mulshine may be reached at pmulshine@starledger.com.
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