See also: "State health officials want new rules for the Medical Marijuana Registry"
Personalized Organic TreatmentsYou can't miss the dispensary due to its signage -- plus, it's the only place around without semi-trucks and diesels parked out front. The door situation up front is a little strange, as you open one door only to be confronted by another grated steel door directly to your right. But someone was paying attention to his or her security cameras on the day I stopped in: The receptionist was waiting to open up door number two for me as I walked up. Bags of herbs hung from a display rack in the waiting room, and it took my eyes a second to adjust and figure out they were actually bags of tea -- and not the kind of "tea" jazz singers were smoking in the 1920s. I'm not sure how popular they are, but the shop apparently also specializes in herbal teas that don't require a medical marijuana card to purchase. The stock included herbal blended teas for everything from blood and liver health to sedative teas for you insomniacs. I'm not a huge tea guy, but I would think that out of the several dozen fruit-blended teas on the shelf, I could have found something I'd like.219 Vallejo Street Denver, CO 80223 303-777-1550 POTreatments.com
Hours: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday, closed Sunday. Raw marijuana price range: $20-$25/eighth-ounce, $150/ounce. Raw marijuana price range (nonmembers): $25-$30/eighth-ounce, $175/ounce. Other types of medicine: BHO, CO2 oil, kief, hash, edibles, tinctures, lotions, drinks. Online menu? Yes. Handicap-accessible? Yes. Recreational sales? No.
But I was more interested in the other kind of herb (as always). After handing my card over to the woman at the receptionist desk, I was led to the back by my budtender, a mellowed-out dude named Alex (at least, I think that's what he said), who ushered me through a third door to the bud bar. The place isn't flashy, but it doesn't have to be. The buds do the talking. Cannabis was kept on display in large, air-tight clear plastic jars in two glass cabinets set up in an L-shape. Sativas seemed to be more on the left and indicas on the right along with hash and concentrates.
Sometimes it's easy to get caught up in shatter oils (the shop's supply was produced by Colorado Concentrates), waxes and highly distilled, high-potency cannabis concentrates and ignore one of cannabis's finest joys: fresh flowers. It seems that POT hasn't forgotten about it, though: The dispensary featured not only various micron levels of in-house bubble hash (which all looked great for $15-$20 a gram), but also newly pulled kief.
I went home with a container full of Golden Goat thanks to my budtender. Sprinked on top of a bowl, the kief half-melted and half-charcoaled and completely added the flavor of Goat to every bowl. Potency was great without being overpowering, and the speedy, euphoric buzz it added seemed to help balance out stoniness when mixed with the two heavy strains I brought home this week. At $10 a gram, it was the perfect way to add potency without breaking the wallet on butane extractions. Of course, you won't really do that at POT, either. Grams of shatter were going for $40 or less, and wax was selling on special for $20 a gram.
Continue for the rest of the review and photos of the meds. Pricing is low and simple. First-timers and patients pay $25 for their first eighth and $20 for everything after. Ounces go for $150. Non-members pay $5 more on the eighth level, and ounces are capped at $175. And what you get for your money is certainly worth it. I went through about a dozen of the eighteen-to-twenty strains on display and would have been content with any of them. The dense little pine cones of Bubba Kush had an almost grapey freshness to the smell, the Jack Flash boasted a wonderful blast of haze amid the brown-sugar sweetness, and the Pineapple Express was a jar of green and gold mind torpedoes wrapped up in a car-air-freshener aroma. Others worth a mention included a peppery Durban Poison and a batch of Golden Goat that even my budtender debated bagging up for himself when he opened it for the first time. I knew the OG 18, a Cannabis Cup-winning strain from Reserva Privada, was coming home with me the instant I put my nose to the top of the jar and inhaled. The overwhelming rush of lemons on top of wet organic soil and tennis balls had me at a stinky hello. The dark-green buds themselves weren't hugely plump and, if anything, looked a little scraggly and leafy in places. But the silver and amber trichome coverage underneath the green foliage was solid under a scope, and the spongy, well-cured flowers had an intense stickiness to them. A little bit more effort in bloom by the growers, and this could be one of the best finds in Denver. Broken up, buds really stank and left my fingers sticky and waxy, like high-CBD strains, and the powerful, Sour Diesel-on-steroids flavor was a real treat out of a dry pipe and bubbler. Very stoney as well, with instant head-to-toe relaxation that lasted for a good two hours after a small bowlful. At $25 an eighth for non-members and $20 an eighth/$150 an ounce for members, the OG 18 from POT was worth every penny. I'll be back for more soon. Another intriguing, somewhat rare strain, the Arctic Fallout had a fruit-punch sweetness on top of a rich, Chemdawg turpentine stink. The plant looked a little stressed, but nothing major, and the potency and flavor weren't really affected by the few burned tips inside. I did find a seed in the bud, but it was the only one, and I didn't see any other evidence of beans in the eighth-ounce sample I brought home. I'll consider it a gift from the ganja genetics gods. The tiny, arrowhead-like buds were built of small, BB-sized calyxes dusted over with a healthy silver-and-gold mix of trichomes. The bud vaped with a sweet-and-sour mix, and bowls of it burned down cleanly to a fine white ash. Arctic Fallout delivered real head-bending heaviness. It left me foggy for a good half-hour before mellowing out to a floating, stress-ending buzz that lasted a good two hours or more. Well done, and another strain I'll probably restock with again soon.After a string of questionable purchases at mediocre dispensaries that I actually meant to find, it was refreshing to walk into Personalized Organic Treatments this past week by mistake and walk out with a quarter-ounce of quality buds for a mere $45.
Read more reviews from Westword's medical marijuana dispensary critic, William Breathes, in our Mile Highs and Lows blog, and keep up with all your Colorado marijuana news over at The Latest Word.
