Portland’s Cannabis Cafe Hopes to Create Long-Lasting Buzz

Our America! With everyday, it's becoming a vacuum of sliding morals! A veritable trash heap of dead dreams, soiled ambitions, and lost hope. Of easy escapes and paused progress. I mean, first, that much-ballyhooed topless coffee shop in gay-hating Maine re-opened. And now some rowdy folks in Portland (in Oregon, not Maine) have set up America's first-ever pot cafe. No, it's not a cafe where you eat your meals by scooping food out of large pots with your hands. It's a proper marijuana cafe. The horror! The horror! Anyway, considering the cafe's long-term goals, "cafe" may be a misnomer. It's also not exactly open to the general public. It's open to any Oregon residents who hold an official medical marijuana card who are also standing members of the pot non-profit outfit NORML. But it only gets more mired from there!

Members pay $25/month in order to use the pot, which they receive, OTC, from workers who cutely dub themselves “budtenders.” Besides the useful employment of puns, another functional feature at the cafe includes the availability of food. Allowing the Cannabis Cafe a veneer of credibility is also it’s lack of liquor license. Otherwise the cafe approaches the façade of a pitiful recessionomic rent party.

The cafe is housed in a building that was a speak-easy and an erotic hot-spot in its previous lives. On the cafe’s opening night however, a $60 cover scared away potential patrons—the cost of a yearlong membership in NORML, first month’s membership at the cafe, plus an entry fee. The space will hold such events as marijuana-themed weddings, open mic nights, film festivals, and dance-offs. The executive director of NORML also hopes to hold seminars and even a Cannabis Community College, in order to promote the non-mind-altering benefits of growing marijuana. This opening comes only a month after Obama’s easing up on arrests of medical marijuana users.

From The Oregonian, below is footage from the cafe’s opening.