Hurry up, Colorado. There are only a few hours left to make your offer on eBay for this once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity.
The required opening bid: $120,000.
The prize: A medical-marijuana dispensary in Denver's hip River North neighborhood.
"Very exciting opportunity for the right buyer!" the listing proclaims.
As the clock ticks down on a deadline for medical-marijuana businesses to comply with new state laws, things in the industry have gone a little nutty. Sell-your-business-on-eBay nutty. Don't-know-if-you'll-be-open-tomorrow nutty.
"It's crunch day," Matt Brown, executive director of the trade group Coloradans for Medical Marijuana Regulation, said Wednesday. "So everybody's pretty stressed out right now."
Today is the last day dispensaries or makers of marijuana products can apply for licenses through their local governments before a statewide moratorium on new such businesses kicks in, Department of Revenue spokesman Mark Couch said.
Taking a different interpretation of the law, some cities, such as Colorado Springs, closed their application windows Wednesday.
Folks who don't meet the deadline will have to close their doors - or wait to open them - until July 2011.
Denver's Department of Excise and Licenses was humming Wednesday with the nervous energy of last-minute filers. The wait just to get to the counter stretched for hours, those in line said. People sat on the floor for lack of chairs.
"It's just nuts right now," said Deborah Orvan-Rosen, who owns a dispensary called House of Greens.
Orvan-Rosen said confusion over which licenses dispensary owners needed to apply for and when made the process more difficult. But she said she is no stranger to licensing paperwork, also owning a tattoo parlor, a barbershop, a flower store, a bail-bonds business and a crematorium. "They're all the same," she said. "They've all got headaches."
Today also caps a week of furious dealmaking between dispensary owners - who need to prove by Sept. 1 that they grow 70 percent of what they sell - and marijuana growers, who won't be allowed to freelance under the new laws.
Ryan Vincent, owner of the Health Center in Denver, said he went through 20 deals during the week before finding a grower and a growing space.
"Some people were trying to make us give up half of our company," he said. ". . . A lot of dispensary owners are out there trying to wrap up as many growers as possible."
Some dispensary owners just decided to cash out. There are at least three ads on Craigslist for people selling their dispensary.
The owners of the RiNo Supply Co. went to eBay to sell their dispensary, which they said is fully licensed. That auction ends today. As of Wednesday evening, no bids had been submitted.
ebay must have let that go down to the wire. Here it is without bids at around just 2 hours left.
If anyone missed out on this, don't worry you may still get lucky. (I mean, if you're stupid enough to keep visting ebaY and if hackers -or maybe even sleazebay's own insider hackers- don't clean you out due to the long uncorrected security ID Theft flaws rampant now for OVER 11 YEARS! on sleazebay )
CHINA GROVE, N.C. -- A young China Grove girl unwrapped a Bratz doll on Christmas morning and found a surprise Santa certainly didnt plant.
Inside the box, under the dolls head, were three pounds of marijuana.
Rowan County detectives say the drugs landed at the wrong house.
According to investigators, the girls mother bought the doll from an auction on eBay. When it was delivered to her apartment, it looked just like it had come straight from the manufacturing plant, so she wrapped it and put it under the tree.
The mother called 911 on Christmas Day when she realized what was in the box.
Capt. John Sifford of the Rowan County Sheriffs Department said hiding the drugs in merchandise is just another way to move them.
Drugs are sent through the mail, various services, he said. Apparently this mail was meant for someone else.
Authorities said the marijuana is worth more than $7,000 on the street.
Three men attempted to auction 500 pounds of marijuana on eBay Tuesday night until company officials pulled the plug--almost a day after the sale began.
The sale began roughly 8:40 p.m. PT on Tuesday night and ceased sometime 21 hours later, according to a screenshot on AuctionWatch.com, which first reported the story.
A spokesman for eBay confirmed that the auction was live long before company officials were notified. They quickly shut the site down thereafter, according to eBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove.
The three auctioneers, who appeared in a photograph next to numerous plastic bags filled with what looked like marijuana, claimed in a written description that the drugs were "Holland's Best." Seven people had made bids that had reached $10 million by the time the auction was closed, according to AuctionWatch.com.
"We immediately notified the authorities," Pursglove said. "I can tell you that we will cooperate with law enforcement and help them with prosecution."
This latest incident comes at a time when eBay is striving to take an aggressive approach to barring unlawful sales on its site.
Earlier this month, in separate incidents, eBay executives shut down auctions that claimed to be selling a human kidney and an unborn baby. Federal law prohibits the sale of human organs.
Though Pursglove declined to say what law enforcement agency eBay contacted, a spokesperson for the Drug Enforcement Agency said officials there are planning to crack down on drug sales over the Web.
"This is something we would be very interested in," said Jocelyn Barnes, spokeswoman for the San Francisco DEA office. "We would start an investigation. We've heard of things like that coming up on these sites and have started to take a look on how to investigate. We do aggressively pursue those avenues."
ELLIOTT INGBER - guitar. WARREN KLEIN - guitar, sitar, tamboura. MARTIN KIBBEE - bass. RICHARD HAYWARD - drums, vocals. LAWRENCE "STASH" WAGNER - lead vocals, guitar.
F.O.M. is the band that forms the link between Frank Zappa & The Mothers, Lowell George & The Factory, Little Feat, and Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band. In it's short period of existence between these ancestors, relatives, and descendants, the band managed to record two albums, FRATERNITY OF MAN in 1968, and GET IT ON in 1969, before fragmenting. Elliott Ingber had joined the fifth line-up of The Mothers in time to participate in the recording of FREAK OUT in August 1966. According to Zappa, he had to fire Ingber at the end of 1966, and in the course of 1967 the guitarist linked up with Warren Klein, Martin Kibbee, and Richard Hayward, who had been three quarters of The Factory. Along with fourth member Lowell George, The Factory had been recording (with Zappa producing) in the latter half of 1966 and early 1967. The album LOWELL GEORGE & THE FACTORY - LIGHTNING ROD MAN was released. With the inclusion of Lawrence "Stash" Wagner (rather than George) on lead vocals, F.O.M. set about their first album with Tom Wilson in the producer's chair (he also produced FREAK OUT). The album featured a cover of "Oh No I Don't Believe it" by Zappa (which he had yet to release himself), and "Don't Bogart Me" which was subsequently featured in the film EASY RIDER in 1969.