A small town in California will soon be known as the pot capital of America. Nipton, California was recently purchased for $5 million by American Green, one of the largest cannabis dispensary brands.
Nipton, California is located 90 minutes outside Las Vegas in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The once thriving mining town is now home to just 16 people. Nipton includes a trading post, a café, hotel, mineral springs and the rest is desert land.
No one in the town knows exactly why American Green chose Nipton as its next project, but resident Jim Eslinger says he came here to get away from people.
“I fell in love with the sunsets with the sereness out here and the quiet and not the hustle and bustle of the big city life, this is the place to get away from it all.”
Eslinger says, the folks in Nipton are just a bunch of "honey badgers" and they really don’t care too much about outside life, especially money.
The town has only experienced change in the last 4 years after a multi-billion-dollar solar plant was built in the town over.
Eslinger says, “Our population went from 11 to 80 and me and Ann almost moved because it was getting over populated.”
Despite more people moving into their town, Eslinger said they stuck around and noticed things going back to normal. However, he understands this time around things could change for good.
“Sometimes change is good, sometime change is not so good but I’m willing to accept the inevitable of what could come.”
American Green plans to invest $2.5 million into Nipton. It hopes to complete its project in the next 18 months. While the company is not sharing many specifics about its vision to make Nipton a marijuana destination, one of the first plans is to bottle cannabis-infused water from the town's mineral springs. The water would not contain the active ingredient in marijuana, so you could not get high from drinking the water.
