Pot Sommelier Pitches Marijuna Sales In East Hampton Village

A marijuana blogger made a pitch to the East Hampton Village Board not to bar the opening of a marijuana dispensary in the village, as the new state law legalizing the sale of pot would allow them to do.

Nina Fern, who has been called “a sommelier of pot” for her assessments of various marijuana varieties on her blog “The Highly,” told village lawmakers on Thursday that the village should allow a marijuana dispensary to open somewhere in its boundaries to service the thousands of visitors who will be coming to the village each summer and will either be brining pot with them or will be in search of it when they arrive.

Doing so will be safer and facilitate more education about responsible use of the newly legal weed smoking.

“We’re allowed to possess it, we’re allowed to grow it, but there’s no place to buy it,” Ms. Fern said. “This is a huge problem. We have to meet the world where they are. A dispensary in town is responsible for education, it’s responsible for putting out a product that is sound. With the right approach, the people who are walking in to buy pot are the same people who are walking in and out of every store on Newtown Lane.”

The legalization of marijuana possession, but no localized expansion of where it can be purchased legally, will simply drive even more people to purchase from unregulated “drug dealers,” she said, increasing the chances of residents purchasing pot that could be “laced” with other narcotics, like ecstasy and fentanyl.

Village officials met the pitch with a mix of openness and hesitancy.

“There’s a lot of education that needs to go on — certainly for me,” Trustee Arthur Graham said. “My experiences with weed go back a long, long time and there has been a long, long time since I imbibed, or whatever the word is, and I understand things are a lot different now.”

When the state legislature decriminalized the possession and use of marijuana earlier this year, it allowed local municipalities until the end of the year to decide whether they will allow businesses that revolve around the sale or consumption of pot to open in their boundaries.

None of the local municipalities have made any official declarations yet — and Mayor Jerry Larsen, the former chief of the East Hampton Village Police Department, said he does not expect East Hampton to be at the vanguard.

“We’ll take a look at this and see what the agencies around us do,” he told Ms. Fern. “Some of the concerns I’ve heard is that if we legalize it we’re going to have more intoxicated drivers on the road. I’m a former police chief … and the ability of police to even test for this is difficult.”

Ms. Fern, who is an East Hampton resident, proposed that the sale and consumption of pot should be treated exactly as the village treats the sale and consumption of alcohol: it should be sold in designated, regulated spaces, consumed responsibly, and not brought behind the wheel of a car.

She said that state’s where pot has been legalized see an average of 25 percent fewer deaths from opioid use.

“There should be signs everywhere: if you are high, taken an Uber,” Ms. Fern said. “It’s in everybody’s lives already. Even if it is not sold here, it’s going to be here. There should be ordinances. It all spins into education and the responsibility of the person consuming it. Educating them, as opposed to demonizing the plant, which is an innocent medication from Mother Nature.”