Texas marijuana buyers are fueling a “little Amsterdam” in New Mexico
Sunland Park, along the Rio Grande, has joined the ranks of American cities transformed by state cannabis laws. But the good times may not last forever.
WHY WE ARE HERE
We explore how America defines itself one place at a time. A bedroom community in New Mexico has become a marijuana boomtown thanks to cannabis buyers from Texas.
In a desert valley along New Mexico’s Rio Grande, the town of Sunland Park has generally offered few amenities for its roughly 17,000 residents. Not a big supermarket. Few shops. Little on offer for those not interested in the circuit casino or a hike to the giant Cristo Del Rey cross that looms from a nearby mountaintop.
But for Texans living in El Paso, just across the state line, Sunland Park has become a regular destination of late. The reason: marijuana.
Cars with Texas license plates regularly flock to the many cannabis dispensaries — one with a drive-through, the other with discounts on “Texas Tuesday” — that have sprung up since New Mexico began legal recreational sales in 2022.
Recreational marijuana is still illegal in Texas.
Legalization in New Mexico vaulted Sunland Park, a bedroom community with an aging industrial zone in a landscape of rocks and sand, almost overnight into the top ranks of the nation’s marijuana boom towns, of which there are many originated on the borders of states with vastly different laws. Some locals call it the Dubai of marijuana, the mayor said, because of all the new investment; others describe it as Little Amsterdam.
“It was an explosion,” said Teresa Rios, 58, who has lived in Sunland Park for 20 years and lamented the rapid transformation, including the closure of a place where she used to get her nails done, even as cannabis sellers proliferate. “I would like to see a nice store, a pharmacy and a gas station close to my house. Instead, all we see is cannabis.”
Pharmacies have filled empty stores, abandoned shopping centers and the husks of former warehouses and car dealerships. Signs advertise even more pharmacies “coming soon” to join the 16 already operating there, according to state data. Green balloon figures offering ‘Marijuana’ in large letters dive and dance along the side of the road.
In all of New Mexico, only Albuquerque, a city several times larger, sells more recreational marijuana than Sunland Park, which had nearly $4 million in sales in November alone. But Sunland Park has Texas — and specifically El Paso, a city of nearly 700,000 just across the state line.
“El Paso is bigger than Albuquerque,” said Miguel Martinez, explaining why he and his partners decided to locate their pharmacy, Besos, in Sunland Park and advertise it on a billboard near an El Paso shopping center.
“Of course there’s the problem for Texans: People come in all the time and ask, ‘Is this legal in Texas?’ Absolutely not,” said Mr. Martinez, standing near a display of green cannabis arranged in clear plastic cubes, near screens offering discounts to Texans. Of course, he added, “I can’t control what anyone does outside the store.”
As a city on the border with Mexico, Sunland Park is the kind of place where the policies of far-flung lawmakers are clearly visible — and not just on marijuana.
Recently, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas had his state’s National Guard troops deploy concertina wire along the international border with Mexico in an effort to stop migrants trying to cross illegally; then he extended it to the state line between Texas and New Mexicowhose governor, a Democrat, has expressed concern about both the high number of crossings and sought to protect the rights of migrant children.
The state line also represents a major divide on abortion. Most abortions are illegal in Texas, but billboards in El Paso advertise abortion services available at clinics in Sunland Park and nearby Las Cruces. Adrienne Mansanares, CEO of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, said the disparity became clear to her during a recent visit to the organization’s clinic in Las Cruces. “The waiting room was full of people from Texas,” she said.
Law enforcement in Texas cannot stop women from having abortions in New Mexico. They also haven’t made much of an effort to stem the flow of marijuana coming the other way from Sunland Park, even as an increasing number of young people bringing vape cartridges to El Paso schools has become a concern.
“If we get you, we get you,” said Ryan Urrutia, the patrol commander for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office.
Nicolás Hernández, 43, an El Paso resident who recently helped a friend renovate a property in Sunland Park, said concerns about how Texas police would respond to any Texans bringing marijuana home from New Mexico , had disappeared. “All my friends who have done it were super paranoid the first time,” he said. “And the second or third time they don’t even think about it anymore.”
Similarly-located cities have seen their marijuana economies flourish, including places like Ontario, Oregon., along the state line with Idaho. On the other hand, New Mexico’s legalization puts a damper on the cannabis business in places like Trinidad, Colorado, which previously attracted cross-border customers from New Mexico and Oklahoma.
Boomtown opportunities are narrowing: With Ohio voting last November to implement a program for legal recreational marijuana sales, the majority of Americans will soon live in states where cannabis can be legally purchased.
“These are temporary circumstances,” said Aaron Smith, CEO of the National Cannabis Industry Association.
But with Texas showing no signs of legalization, new dispensaries continue to open in Sunland Park.
At one point, workers were putting the finishing touches on what would become the city’s first legal consumption site — similar to what’s commonly found in real-life Amsterdam, the Netherlands — so Texans could stay and smoke. As it stands, consuming marijuana in public or in cars is illegal in New Mexico.
For now, Texans mostly just turn around and go home. “The recreational-tourism part of it hasn’t really been successful at all,” says Robert Ardovino, the owner of a local restaurant, which also vintage Spartan trailers from the 1950s for overnight stays near the mountains, under the desert stars. He, too, was considering opening a pharmacy and perhaps one day a consumption center.
At the very least, the new boom has generated additional tax revenue – about $1.3 million this fiscal year; The city’s entire budget is approximately $12 million and flows to the city government.
On a recent drive through Sunland Park, Mario Juarez-Infante, the city manager, passed a spot where rocks and dirt had piled up along the road. “We’re redesigning that park; it’s been vacant for 20 years,” he said. He pointed to another spot nearby and said, “City Hall is going there.”
But officials said other factors also played a role in the city’s growth, including a new rail yard north of the city and El Paso’s westward sprawl.
“Cannabis is just a small part of a much bigger vision for us,” said Mayor Javier Perea, a Sunland Park native who still lives in his childhood home.
The city has long been home to an aspect of the drug trade that preceded the legalization of marijuana, officials said: the smuggling of illegal drugs, as well as migrants. Much of that took place in the Anapra neighborhood, a cramped, low-lying area along the Rio Grande with a history of flooding and crime.
“It was bad,” said Blasa Zapata, 36, who grew up in Anapra and is a manager at the Sunland Park branch of Ultra Health, a major chain of marijuana dispensaries. Many of the people she knew growing up had tough lives, she said. “Half of them are dead and half are in jail,” she said.
“We went from smoking and buying Mexican weed to working in a dispensary,” said Jesus Muñoz, a colleague at the dispensary. “I never thought I would be here.”
Now there are signs of development even around the Anapra neighborhood, as investors from El Paso move in. The construction project that Mr. Hernández worked on involved helping his friend Michael Birkelbach transform a dilapidated one-story house into a small distillery for sotol, an alcohol similar to tequila and extracted from a desert plant. “Everyone says, ‘Is it a pharmacy?’” Mr. Birkelbach said. “And I’m like, ‘No, a distillery.'”
But he said he found himself just across the border in Sunland Park for much the same reason marijuana businesses had set up shop there. He said the rules surrounding distributing locally made spirits were more favorable in New Mexico.
And he could still see Texas, just down the street.