What if, instead of getting high before doing your laundry, you could sit at the laundromat and buy and consume cannabis while you watch your clothes bounce around in the spin cycle? Or maybe you’d like to be able to puff a pre-roll grill side at a Benihana-style restaurant with an entire menu of cannabis-infused cocktails to choose from?
There may be countless visions for what a “cannabis consumption lounge” can be, but the goal is clear for Christopher LaPorte.
“I’m here to sell a vibe, something that makes you want to come out and meet people with similar interests.”
LaPorte is the founder and managing partner of RESET Vegas, a cannabis hospitality group based in Sin City. RESET Vegas has partnered with the Nevada retail cannabis chain Thrive Cannabis Marketplace to build a cannabis consumption lounge at the site of Thrive’s newest dispensary next to Resorts World off the Vegas Strip. The cannabis lounge, or as LaPorte prefers, “the social use lounge,” is scheduled to open in 2023.
Nevada lawmakers approved the state’s consumption lounge bill during the 2021 legislative session, and the winners of the state’s first 20 consumption lounge licenses were announced in November. The 20 license awardees include 10 “social equity” applicants.
Currently, there is only one consumption lounge in Las Vegas, at the NuWu cannabis marketplace. Run by the Paiute Native American tribe, the dispensary has operated a cannabis tasting room since 2019.
“Cannabis is a social product"
In today’s legal cannabis world, there is a growing spectrum of customers with various goals for their cannabis consumption. But when building a venue for social, public cannabis consumption, how can companies still appeal to customers who prefer cannabis as a solitary hobby best enjoyed as a personal pre-roll or a bowl on the front porch at the end of the workday?
“For lonely stoners, let’s create a venue for them to feel comfortable, and that’s by celebrating the culture of cannabis and offering something a lot more than that Amsterdam coffee shop experience,” LaPorte explains.
LaPorte likened the concept to video game bars and how they have been successful even though many see gaming as a largely solitary, at-home-by-yourself experience.
He also described social use lounges as a way of bringing “normies” into cannabis culture “while establishing that home for the true cannabis connoisseur.”
This is partly through using these venues not only to showcase cannabis but also great local chefs, DJs, and others from the kaleidoscope of talented entertainers that call Las Vegas home.
Smoke indoors - but no cumulus clouds
But operating a cannabis consumption lounge isn’t without its challenges.
As LaPorte explains, “there are a lot of regulations, and I think one of the most expensive ones to have to get over is the HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) systems.”
He continued, “how do I ensure that when you come to a Las Vegas social use lounge, you’re not walking into a cumulus cloud? If you look at a Las Vegas casino, people are smoking all over. Still, that cigarette smoke is very quickly dissipated because of the technology the casinos use, and we need to look at similar solutions, but they are cost-heavy.”
Employee safety is also ensuring that “someone is working 8 hours and we're putting them in healthy environments.”
Cannatourism is key - but so are the locals
If you’ve visited Las Vegas since the dawn of legal cannabis in Nevada in 2017, you probably noticed the strong aroma of weed smoke wafting down the Strip. But while cannabis is legal in Nevada, there is nowhere to legally consume it in public and smoking is banned from casinos and most hotels.
Cannabis lounges provide a solution to this need, but not only for tourists, as LaPorte states.
“We want to cater to our local community first and create the venue as a platform for something, and now tourists will say I want to go to that place where all the locals are hanging out and catch that show.”
At the same time, tourists who before could legally walk the Strip drinking cocktails and beer but didn’t have a place to smoke cannabis legally will have their discreet spot for weed.
What is your “Third Place”?
LaPorte is a big proponent of a term known as “the Third Place.” Quoted in a Reset Vegas post, urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg described third-place venues as places “that host the regulated, voluntary, informal and happily anticipated gatherings of individualism beyond the realms of only home and work.”
In other words, the place you spend your life when you’re not just at home or work.
Or, much like the intro of Cheers made clear, “you want to go where everyone knows your name, you want to go where people make you feel comfortable, and that drives you out of just smoking alone,” LaPorte states.
It’s a captivating if somewhat delicate concept. You want to be able to celebrate cannabis culture - including for people who spent their formative years experiencing cannabis in the shadows, in the car before heading into the bar, or in the parking lot glancing furtively behind your shoulder. At the same time, this is still Las Vegas.
We’re Las Vegas, and there’s an expectation that if I do something in Vegas, it's a little above and beyond. I’m a big proponent of creating something adult and sexy, and that’s how you grow the market and celebrate what we deserve after all these years of hiding in the shadows and smoking in the parking lot.”
A big part of the challenge is understanding the real potential.
“We still need to understand how big the market is. I’d like to think that we could fill a movie theater every day with cannabis consumers, but there's something to be said for understanding your niche.”
Five years from now, LaPorte pictures that place as potentially being a cannabis social use lounge near you (assuming you live in Las Vegas).
But what happens in Vegas doesn’t need to stay there.
LaPorte believes that lounges can be the perfect venue to give cannabis beverages the lift they need to soar and that “these venues will have developed and adapted to some capacity to really be the gold standard of cannabis hospitality for other states to adopt."
