While many are clamoring to get in on Colorado’s explosive marijuana industry (which raked in $700 million in medical and recreational sales in 2014), there are those who are looking for a way out. Toni Fox, owner of one of Denver’s most iconic dispensaries, 3-D Denver Discrete Dispensary — the location of the first legal, recreational marijuana purchase — has announced that her iconic business is now for sale.
Fox is currently offering the recreational shop and grow facility for $2 million — a price tag that includes the building, intellectual property rights, and the licenses to grow and sell retail marijuana.
“It’ll be just enough to pay back my remaining creditors and pay off my IRS liability, so I’ll be basically probably walking away even,” Fox told Marijuana Business Daily. “But I’m fine with that. I know more people [in the marijuana industry] that have lost everything than are operating in the black right now.”
Last Month, CNN Money reported that 3D Cannabis Centers (which includes a second store in Salida, Colorado) pulled in $3.6 million in sales, noting that the business had previously been operating in the red for four years when they were only a medical marijuana dispensary. Up until then, 3D’s best year was 2013, when the business earned $400,000.
To drive down Denver’s Brighton Boulevard, it would be easy to miss the 3-D Denver Discrete Dispensary among all the other undecorated warehouse spaces in the neighborhood. The old brick building sports an innocuous sign above their door — though once inside, the enormous space hosts the world’s largest cultivation viewing corridor, a rustic interior style, and the location of Colorado’s first retail cannabis sale on January 1st, 2014.
At seven a.m. that New Years morning, pot enthusiasts from all over the nation were camped out in a long line outside 3D’s door, many of them waiting since the night before despite heavy snowfall. “I talked to the first twelve people in line, and ten of them were from out of state,” Fox told Westword that morning. “I think the majority of our sales will be out-of-state tourists….Today I am converting 100 percent to recreational sales.”
Later that morning Fox conducted a press conference with Marijuana Policy Project’s Mason Tvert and Sensible Colorado’s Brian Vicente — two people who were key to the passage of Colorado’s Amendment 64. This was followed by reporters from all over Europe and most every major US newspaper and TV outlet all crowding around Sean Azzariti — a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — who was there to make the historic first purchase: an eighth of Bubba Kush and a cannabis truffle.
Being the site of this little piece of history has helped 3D stand out during a very competitive and fiscally explosive year. Though that high demand was in part what is driving Fox to sell the shop. “I’ve been working every single day since before my son was even born, and he’s five now,” Fox told Marijuana Business Daily. “It was basically a decision between the industry and my family.”
Though once Fox unloads her Denver business, she wont have to abandon the cannabis industry altogether. Fox still owns 3D Salida, which operates in the same mountain town in central Colorado where her family lives.
Photo Credit: Mark