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As states sweepingly legalize recreational marijuana, the so-called “Green Rush” of legal weed continues to, well, grow!
Colorado and Washington were among the first to legalize recreational marijuana use and laid the proverbial groundwork for other states to follow suit; 18 total states have legalized it thus far.
A new list of the “Best Weed Cities in the U.S.” has created a hierarchy for where weed-lovers can best enjoy their vice. The list was complied by Real Estate Witch and has ranked each city on a few weighted factors, including legality, price (in accordance with average annual income), dispensaries were capita, and (this is not a joke) the number of Taco Bell restaurants in the area.
The Mile High City of Denver has claimed the top spot, coming as no surprise to many. “Although there are many popular places to smoke weed in Colorado, none is better than the state’s capital,” wrote Real Estate Witch. “Weed is easily accessible in Denver, with seven times the number of dispensaries (9.8 per 100,000 residents) and nearly three times the number of head shops (2.2 per 100,000 residents) as the average city.” Additionally, Denver ranked high in terms of cannabis affordability, coming in behind only Sacramento, California and Portland, Oregon.
Real Estate Witch’s rankings of the top 10 “weed cities” is as follows:
1. Denver, CO
2. Portland, OR
3. Sacramento, CA
4. Las Vegas, NV
5. San Jose, CA
6. Seattle, WA
7. San Francisco, CA
8. San Diego, CA
9. Los Angeles, CA
10. Phoenix, AZ
A complete ranking of all 50 cities in the study can be found on the Real Estate Witch website. Data from 2022 was used to determine which cities were the most weed-friendly, including but not limited to “publicly available data” from the Census Bureau, Google Trends, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Yelp.