This is no ordinary farmers market.
For one, you enter it not through a parking lot or city street, but through a concrete tunnel with a low ceiling, designed to simulate the underground chambers through which smugglers bring contraband marijuana from northern Mexico to southern California.
And when you finally emerge, you won’t find heirloom tomatoes, but marijuana.
Welcome to Acres Cannabis, the dispensary that is augmented with a 3,000-square-foot pot-farmers market located in Las Vegas, where weed was recently legalized. The market is said to be the first lawful and permanent one of its kind launched for sales of recreational ganja (a farmers market for medical marijuana, in Seattle, dates back to 2010).
On its April 20 opening night, the market — which features a DJ booth, graffiti wall, nine merchants and Cadillac trunks that cheekily serve as weed display cases — was packed with grass-lovers who went straight to their sources with questions about growing techniques, potency and the combining of various strains.
Acres cofounder and CEO John Mueller hopes the market will help customers figure out what types of pot they like.
“Legal cannabis is so new that people have not yet developed brand loyalty,” he tells The Post. “Usually they come into the dispensary and ask the bud-tender, or server, what they should get. How often does a customer walk into a bar or restaurant and ask the server what to drink or eat?”
On opening night, the breadth of the selection was, well, intoxicating. Items for sale included oils, edibles and riffs on the old-fashioned smokable stuff — including pre-rolled joints coated with hash oil. (“It’ll give you a little more punch than what you get with a standard pre-roll,” says Mueller.)
Mueller invites competing dispensaries that cultivate their own weed to set up booths and sell their product at his market. “We feel like Switzerland,” he says. “This is still a small industry and we are all working together. In marijuana, friendships seem to last longer than they do in other industries.”
