Sunland Park, New Mexico, a town with a population of UNDER 20,000, has overtaken much larger cities to take the #2 spot in the state for marijuana sales.

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Sunland Park is second to only Albuquerque, a city with a metropolitan population of nearly one million.

The Albuquerque Journal reports that dispensaries in Sunland Park took in more than two million dollars in cannabis sales in the month of January. That puts them ahead of much larger cities like Las Cruces (population 111,385) and Santa Fe (population 87,505).

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The high (pun intended) sales of cannabis in Sunland Park don’t mean that the people who live there are necessarily smoking weed at enormously outsized rates. It has a lot more to do with who their next-door neighbor is. It’s us!

The proximity to El Paso, Texas (metro population of over a million) and the ease with which Texans can purchase recreational cannabis is the REAL secret of Sunland Park’s impressive sales numbers. I can’t imagine that other Sun City adjacent burghs like Anthony and Chaparral, New Mexico will be trailing too far behind, at least not for long.

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Total sales for January in Sunland Park tallied slightly over $2 million. The total for the same month for Albuquerque was around $8 million. But, again, that’s a city with a population nearly SIXTY times larger than Sunland Park.

Sunland Park outsold other more populous New Mexico cities like Roswell (48,000), Hobbs (40,000), and Clovis/Portales (combined population of over 50,000).

Jan Zwartheod via Unsplash
Jan Zwartheod via Unsplash
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The data for cannabis sales comes from the New Mexico Cannabis Control Division.

Demand from Texas really seems to be the main driver behind those inflated numbers for little Sunland Park. Excluding Texas, New Mexico is bordered exclusively by states that already have some form of legalized or decriminalized marijuana: Arizona, Colorado, and Oklahoma.

Bringing marijuana into Texas, even if legally purchased elsewhere, remains very, very illegal.

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