Pahrump waits as Clark County’s marijuana dispensary readies to open

As Clark County's first legal medical marijuana dispensary is set to open Monday, Nye County is still awaiting word on the planned facility to open in Pahrump.

The Grove, the only medical marijuana dispensary approved in Nye County, is shooting for a fall opening on Basin Avenue.

With product yet to be produced for the facility, the targeted opening date can and likely will change.

"We're still trying to work out the timeline for that, we hoped for October but I'm sure it might be pushed back a little further," said Brian Hyun, The Grove's Cheif Operations Officer. "It's up in the air. We're looking at from the fall to the wintertime to opening. We're just trying to get the products available.

"Our timeline is kind of fluid."

Getting that product is tougher than it sounds, as it takes several months to grow the amount of marijuana to adequately stock the dispensary and that's on top of waiting for the production facility to be built.

"The cultivation takes longer to build than the dispensary, it just takes time to build a cultivation facility," Hyun said. "Then once you build it, you gotta plant the plants, which take three to four months to grow to have saleable product. So it's just a longer timeframe than building a dispensary."

In May, The Grove held a community education day to get the news out about the facility and to spread awareness about medicinal marijuana.

In Las Vegas, Euphoria Wellness got final state and county approvals this week, a spokesman said.

For its first two days, Euphoria will sell only to invited customers who pre-registered. On Wednesday, it will open to anyone with a state-issued medical marijuana card. The dispensary is at 7780 S. Jones Blvd.

Waiting for commercial growers' crops to be ready caused unexpected delays for the dispensary, leading to frustration for patients and advocates. There are 9,542 patient cardholders in Nevada, more than 6,700 of them in Clark County.

Euphoria's owners long wanted it to be the first dispensary in the state to open. They once planned to begin sales as early as February or March.

Since commercial growers' crops were not yet available, they planned to open using marijuana bought from home growers. That's allowed under state law, but Euphoria soon ran into a problem.

Clark County officials first told the dispensary it could buy only 2½ ounces from each home grower. They cited a provision in state law saying a patient can only possess that much "usable marijuana" at one time.

Such small amounts would make marijuana prohibitively expensive to test and would've made it virtually impossible for the dispensary to gather enough to open for business.

State Sen. Tick Segerblom, D-Las Vegas, who sponsored the bill to allow dispensaries, said that kind of limit on patient sales was never intended by the Legislature.

Euphoria considered suing the county, but ultimately nixed its plan to use home-grown marijuana and will open next week with commercially-grown crops.

A dispensary in northern Nevada, Silver State Relief in Sparks, beat Euphoria to the punch. It became the first legal dispensary in the state on July 31.