Do you need a medical card to buy from a dispensary in Nevada?
Nevada has been pretty far ahead of many of the other states in terms of marijuana legalization. Since the ballot initiative in 2000 Nevada has been home to legal medicinal marijuana users, and for the next decade and half the medicinal market in Nevada flourished. In 2016 a ballot initiative made recreational marijuana use in Nevada completely legal, that ballot initiative became law as of Jan. 1 2017.
Since January 2017 recreational marijuana use and sales has been legal throughout Nevada.
Recreational cannabis purchases in Nevada do not require a medical card or recommendation!
There are however some benefits to having or maintaining your medicinal recommendation or marijuana card if you already have one. The most obvious one is the tax difference. In Nevada there are additional taxes that are applied to recreational marijuana purchases. This tax equates to roughly a 10% increase in over all price, if you already have a recommendation or marijuana card this is certainly a 10% worth saving… however if you are just visiting, it is unlikely that a 10% savings will make it worthwhile to spend the time or money necessary to obtain a medicinal recommendation.
The cannabis products sold to medicinal customers, flowers, vapes, and such are the same products that are sold to recreational customers. There is no difference in quality, it is all the same items and the only difference is the customer using it for recreational use or medicinal.
In the state of Nevada there is no age limit for medicinal cannabis patients or customers. This is not true for recreational users who must be at least 21 years of age. If you are a recreational user be prepared to have a government issued ID that can help in verifying your age.
Some dispensaries offer different lines for recreational and medicinal customers… this is at best a case by case scenario and seemed to me to serve no benefit to anyone. The lines were typically the same length or offered roughly the same wait time. This is a practice that seems to be dying out and wildly unnecessary.
The legalization of recreational marijuana in Nevada has opened the doors to some of the largest and well stocked dispensaries in the country. Serving both local and out of state customers and serving both recreational and medicinal cannabis, these dispensaries have found themselves in the middle of a marijuana renaissance and have responded by stepping up the entire industry.
Many dispensaries cultivate their at least some of their products from seed to final sell. Meaning that an individual dispensary will take a plant from seed, providing it the best care possible, then harvest, cure and extract, all while maintaining a level of care that is almost unknown in any other industry.
That is not to say that the products that are offered by dispensaries, but not produced in house are of a lesser quality. On the contrary many of them are equal in terms of quality and some can even be found to be superior. All of the cannabis products sold in Nevada are produced in Nevada, and some of the local farms are just doing phenomenal work.
