When I think about the end of marijuana prohibition in the state of Colorado, I’m instantly drawn back to those zany fourteen years in American history where alcohol was prohibited. Ah yes, the temperance movement. What happened to the head brewers at the country’s major breweries? I think my favorite story must be from the Yuengling Brewery. For the fourteen years of prohibition, the brewery switched to selling their legally ambiguous “Near Beer,” which was a slightly less-shitty version of any alcohol-free beers you see today. During that time, the brewery also survived by opening a dairy, and selling ice cream. Why not? The day after Franklin D. Roosevelt ended alcohol prohibition, Yuengling delivered a crate of full-strength beer straight to the White House. Now, in case you weren’t aware, it takes significantly longer than 24 hours to brew beer. It takes about 504 hours longer, in fact. So, in all that time that they weren’t supposed to be brewing beer, there they were, brewing beer. Think about when Colorado’s Amendment 20 passed back in 2000, which allowed caregivers to cultivate and possess small amounts of marijuana for their patients. Suddenly, these growers who were living in the shadows were able to be a bit more forthcoming with their products. When medical marijuana dispensaries began opening eight years later, even more growers, who had been cultivating cannabis for decades, began showing the world the secrets to their craft. Standing Akimbo, a medical dispensary in Denver, combines old-school growers with new-age technologies, to create a consistently good product. They’ve been a dispensary for a while, but they produce strains like they’ve been doing it for decades.
Standing Akimbo sits in that odd part of town right off of 38th Avenue, which is rapidly entering the Highland’s affluent sphere of influence. The dispensary has its own dedicated parking, but I opted to park off of Jason, where there was plenty of places to park my car. As I was reaching for the door to enter, a middle-aged couple exited, singing a song in unison. “This should be good,” I thought to myself, as Andy, Standing Akimbo’s general manager, showed me to the product room. It was about the time I passed by some Tibetan prayer flags surrounding a statue of Jerry Garcia, that I knew I was in for something different. The product room is straight-forward. A few chairs are pulled up to the long, mahogany bar. The far end of the room has been cut in half from curtains. Apparently, before Standing Akimbo moved in, the place was a restaurant. In fact, for the first few years of the dispensary’s existence, they were mostly known for their edibles and concentrates made on site. However, with new regulations, and some bad publicity about edibles, Standing Akimbo’s days of producing concentrates and edibles are behind them. Fortunately, the flower the dispensary grows is absolutely fabulous.
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