Ask a Stoner: What's Stopping a Pot Lounge at the Denver Airport?

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Dear Stoner: Besides simply not wanting to, what is stopping the airport from having a cannabis bar or lounge?
Air Traveler

Dear Air Traveler: As if there weren't enough conspiracy theories about the airport already, let's add weed to the mix. That will make the lizard people and apocalypse bunkers go away.

Jokes aside, Denver International Airport is owned by the City of Denver. While that doesn't make opening a cannabis bar impossible, the chances that we'll see a pot-smoking area there within the next decade are very small. For starters, Denver has been slow to embrace cannabis hospitality, with just one operating cannabis lounge in the entire city. If there's only one lounge in Denver right now, can we really expect the airport to play along?

click to enlarge

iStock/smileitsmccheeze

The airport's attitudes toward both cannabis and smoking in general are big factors here. Tobacco smoking areas were removed from the property a few years ago. DIA has also blocked any cannabis-related memorabilia from being sold at airport shops, and forced SweetWater Brewing Company's tap house at the airport to remove a 4/20 reference from the name of its extra pale ale. When cannabis is federally legal and we have younger government leadership, we may finally get a pot-smoking lounge, but this is one bureaucratic battle that nobody wants to take on right now.

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