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In a desert valley along the Rio Grande in New Mexico, the city of Sunland Park has generally offered few amenities for its roughly 17,000 residents. No large grocery store. Few shops. Little to offer those uninterested in the racetrack casino or a hike to the gigantic cross of Cristo Del Rey that looms from a nearby mountaintop.
But for Texans who live in El Paso, just over the state line, Sunland Park has lately become a regular destination. The reason: marijuana.
Cars with Texas plates flock regularly to the many cannabis dispensaries — one with a drive-through, another offering discounts on “Texas Tuesday” — that have sprung up since New Mexico began legal recreational sales in 2022.
In Texas, recreational marijuana is still illegal.
Legalization in New Mexico vaulted Sunland Park, a bedroom community with an aging industrial zone in a landscape of rock and sand, almost overnight into the top ranks of the nation’s marijuana boom towns, many of which have emerged on the borders of states with sharply different laws. Some locals have started calling it the Dubai of marijuana, the mayor said, because of all the new investment; others describe it as Little Amsterdam.
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