Is America turning its back on the great legal weed experiment?

As Sean Azzariti tells it, queueing in the snow outside a cannabis dispensary in Denver was the end of a long road from Iraq.

The former marine had been in charge of base security at al-Qa’im and al-Asad — “constantly mortared, constantly being shot at” — causing post-traumatic stress disorder that a 13-pill cocktail of stimulants, tranquillisers and antidepressants had done little to assuage.

Azzariti, once a leading activist for medical marijuana, became the first person to buy the drug legally in the United States for recreational use. The $60 he spent a decade ago as the world’s press watched at 3D Cannabis Centre, for an eighth of an ounce of “Bubba Kush”, was all he needed, he said.

Today, however, Azzariti, who will forever be associated with a watershed moment in the country’s relationship with drugs, is having doubts.

Disillusioned with the industry in Colorado, now home to empty storefronts and plunging sales, he laments the decline of an industry that was expected to alleviate suffering and bring in hundreds of millions of dollars. “I don’t think it’s gone well,” Azzariti said. “I’ve seen a slow decay over the last several years, especially since we legalised recreational use.”

He even wonders whether the landmark moment may have been a mistake. “From my personal experience, the best days of the cannabis industry in Colorado were when it was medical only,” he said. “It saddens me — I tried to stick through all of it. I was there when it started, I was there through the best and I watched the decline.”

During the heady early days of the so-called green rush, when Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalise recreational cannabis, ambitious entrepreneurs competed for a slice of the booming business. Each year brought leaps in revenue, with customers flocking from across the country.

However, total cannabis sales in Colorado have suffered a serious decline in recent years. In 2021, the industry reached a high point of $2.2 billion in sales. The following year had a drop of $500 million and last year the total fell further, to $1.5 billion.

The downturn has taken a large toll on the state’s tax revenues, while pushing many entrepreneurs out of business. As of July, the number of licences issued by the state was down 14 per cent, year on year, while cannabis jobs fell by 16 per cent last year, according to Vangst, an industry recruitment website.

The decline is partly due to increasing competition from other states. When Colorado legalised marijuana in 2014, the only rival was Washington, hundreds of miles away in the Pacific Northwest. Users drove from across America to pour dollars into Colorado’s economy.

With the sweeping progress of legalisation nationwide — 24 states and Washington DC now allow recreational use — that money has dried up. Marijuana’s illegal status at the federal level is another headache, subjecting the industry to more costs and red tape. While the Colorado industry struggles financially, critics of legalisation argue the damage to society has been far greater than underwhelming tax revenue.

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Kevin Sabet, a former White House drug policy adviser who worked with three presidents, said the impact of legal marijuana had been disastrous. “We expected negative consequences to pile up over a 20 to 30-year time span,” he said. “Now, in ten years, we’re seeing what we thought we were going to see in two or three decades.”

Last year a state report found that 10 per cent of adults were using cannabis daily or near-daily, a “significant increase” from 2014. Heavy use is most common among younger smokers, a cohort of users galvanised by celebrity proponents of the drug, including the rappers Snoop Dogg and Jay-Z, the boxer Mike Tyson and the actor Seth Rogen. Of those aged 18 to 25, 16 per cent reported using cannabis daily or near-daily.

Sabet said: “It shows that if you sanction something and commercialise it and promote it, you’re going to see an explosion of use.”

Campaigners against cannabis also point to studies suggesting that legalisation leads to an increase in accidents on the road due to stoned drivers. Since recreational marijuana was legalised in Colorado, traffic deaths involving drivers who tested positive for marijuana more than doubled, from 55 in 2013 to 131 people killed in 2020, according to the National Library of Medicine.

Critics of cannabis will be heartened by a Gallup poll last month, which found that American attitudes to the drug had hardened in the past two years. A slim majority now say marijuana harms society as a whole (54 per cent) and the people who use it (51 per cent).

Still, there are enduring calls for legalisation at the federal level. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have signalled support for relaxing the laws. Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, backs decriminalisation and has said it was “absurd” that the drug shared the same classification as heroin and LSD. Trump, the Republican nominee, recently suggested he would vote “yes” on a Florida ballot proposal to legalise recreational marijuana.

Yet anti-cannabis activists do not believe the genie is out of the bottle, and are calling for stricter regulations in places where the drug is legal.

Sabet said: “We cannot snap our fingers and go back to 1996, but we can put some guardrails in.”

He believes levels of THC, the psychoactive ingredient of cannabis, should be regulated after rising substantially over recent decades. High-potency marijuana has been linked to a greater risk of psychosis and addiction. In some cases it has been linked to suicide.

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Sabet also says warning labels should be bolstered and that when it comes to advertising, regulators should take inspiration from how restrictions were placed on tobacco.

Not everyone believes Colorado’s legalisation efforts have failed. Some still tout it as a possible model for the federal government to follow.

Greg Gamet owns Dank dispensary in Denver and has been involved in Colorado’s legal marijuana industry since its early days. He does not believe taxes are too onerous and praises Colorado for being “light years” ahead of other states in offering protection against the black market.

He is, however, critical of how liberal the state was in licensing growers. As business costs rose to a punishing degree, overproduction of cannabis meant that prices for the product could not increase, he said. “The thing Colorado did wrong is they just let everybody and their brother apply for a cultivation licence,” he said. “They should have limited stores and limited cultivation licences.”

The drop in sales was to be expected, Gamet said, given the increased competition from nearby states.

“The first year of legalisation, Colorado and Washington were the only ones,” he said. “Now, you have Missouri, Arkansas and Minnesota [among the states to have followed suit]. You don’t need to do a weed vacation any more.”

Despite the turbulence, Gamet sees himself in the Colorado weed game for the long haul.

Azzariti, however, has already called it quits from his job in cannabis lab management. In better days he took home a salary in the six figures. Most workers struggle to make a decent living now, he said.

“There was a moment when the industry was booming — it was incredible,” Azzariti said, lamenting the taxes and regulations he largely blamed for the industry’s troubles. “It’s difficult to really make a lot of money as a business owner in the cannabis industry. I’ve seen three or four massive conglomerates that come through, and they just buy up all the mom-and-pop shops that used to exist here in Colorado.”

Azzariti remains proud of his quirky place in American history; the eighth of Bubba Kush he bought at the 3D Cannabis dispensary on January 1, 2014, still sits in his closet unsmoked, alongside the laminated receipt.

The shop shut in April and sits vacant, windows blocked out and door boarded up. Like that dispensary, he said, “the cannabis industry in Colorado is a shell of what it used to be”.