Now I know why our local paper yesterday had a 8-page special section on pot entitled “420!” Pot is big down here in Oil Patch City - 25+ “dispensaries” in our small city and fifth in sales in the entire state. Why someone might ask? Because we are just 4 miles from the Texas border (we also have a casino and horse racing, neither available in west Texas). A local contractor is building small business strip malls (5 or 6 stores), but every one of them has a pot shop as the key business.
At some point they will become oversaturated but until then each one tries to impress buyers with ads about local grown weed or different types of candies or brownies. Of course, though pot might have some beneficial medical uses, there is a user segment that chases after more potent drugs that always leads to both an influx of drug dealers and petty crime as users need cash to buy the illegal drugs.
Boom and bust. I think the same thing happened in Washington or Oregon. The pot shops kept having to lower their prices until they were crying they weren't making any money. I believe the illegal Chinese pot farms were a big part of the reason too.
Piqued my curiosity since I lived in the South East New Mexico in my youth. Which have gone to pot? Hobbs? Eunice? Jal? Tatum?