The Route 66 Wellness Center, the only medical marijuana dispensary in the Route 66 town of Williams, Ariz., plans to move to a bigger facility behind its current building, according to the Williams-Grand Canyon News.
Now the dispensary’s owners hope to move to a site behind its existing building, to 324 E. Railroad Ave.
“The main reason they want to move is because they need an approved kitchen to make infusion foods, or put this medical marijuana into foods,” said Tim Pettit, the city’s chief building inspector.
The potential new place was previously Hop Sings restaurant, which Pettit said has a kitchen that would meet county and state health department standards.
According to Google Maps, that would be at Lewis and Grand Canyon Avenue., which is the westbound part of Route 66 in town. The dispensary’s current location is in the eastbound lanes of 66. A Google Maps image of the old Hop Sings Chinese restaurant is here:
According to the city’s chief building inspector, no complaints have arrived about the marijuana dispensary since it opened about a year ago.
You simply can’t walk into the Williams dispensary and buy weed. One must be a medical marijuana cardholder, limited to buying no more than 2 1/2 ounces every two weeks.
Route 66 Wellness Center was the first such dispensary to open on Route 66 in Arizona. Since then, according to this map, other dispensaries have opened the Route 66 towns of Flagstaff and Kingman. And just across the border are medical marijuana businesses in Needles, Calif.
Arizona voters in 2010 approved the use of marijuana for medical purposes. More states have moved to decriminalize marijuana since then, including Colorado this month.
And I strongly suspect a sizable majority of states will partly or fully decriminalize marijuana within a decade. The effort by law enforcement to stamp it out has become a longstanding failure, and marijuana’s health and societal risks are indisputably fewer than alcohol and many prescription drugs.
(Image of a wild marijuana plant by Dey via Flickr)