Customers lineup to buy recreational marijuana at 3D Cannabis Center in Denver on Jan. 1, 2014. (RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)

“I bought this pot with my boss’ money:” Reporter buys, destroys a $27 gram (video)

We’re fans of Trevor Hughes, the Coloradoan reporter who made the above video for the Fort Collins newspaper’s website.

Hughes’ idea was solid: This is a video of him buying pot for the very first time ever. This wasn’t Hughes’ first legal recreational pot purchase; It was his first actual pot purchase. As he candidly, sweetly says:

“I never have done pot. I’ve never bought it. I’ve never used it. I’ve never even smoked a cigarette — kind of a square, probably a little bit of a fuddy-duddy.”

As many now know, the process of purchasing legal recreational weed is similar to buying a six-pack of beer. It’s a straightforward, no-frills experience that passed easily as a normal day in the life for Hughes.

“It turns out that buying legal marijuana in Colorado is anticlimactic,” he says in the video.

(Side note: It was hardly anticlimactic for longtime pot aficionados. For an alternate view of a first legal recreational purchase, see Denver Post and Cannabist scribe John Wenzel’s piece for Rolling Stone here, where he says, “I stood in line for four hours to see Barack Obama during Denver’s Democratic National Convention in 2008. I’ve stood in lines nearly that long at airports and music festivals. But the line outside of the Dank Colorado dispensary in Northeast Denver on New Year’s Day was giddy and downright familial — despite being just as long and uncomfortable.”)

But back to newbie Hughes, who bought a $27 gram of Blue Dream for a “euphoric high,” according to the budtender at Medicine Man. He marveled at the price: “Vendors are allowed to charge whatever they want for this marijuana.” And then he drove directly from Denver to Fort Collins where he dropped the marijuana off with the Larimer County Sheriff to have it destroyed.

“I bought this pot with my boss’ money,” Hughes said. “She agreed to pay for this only if I destroy it at the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office.”

Given pot’s tricky history in the U.S. over the last 80 years, this was an especially wacky trajectory for the drug — to be bought legally, then given to the police to be destroyed. So even as stoners shed a collective tear over that specific gram’s fate, kudos to Hughes for sharing his experience with us.